● 03.31.17

● Links 31/3/2017: Qt Creator 4.3 Beta, Linux Lite 3.2

Posted in News Roundup at 4:55 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Dell revealed a tiny “Wyse 3040” thin client that runs ThinOS or a hardened new ThinLinux on a quad-core Intel SoC, and supports Citrix, MS, and VMware.

• Dell has launched its “lightest, smallest and most power-efficient thin client” yet, with a 101.6 x 101.6 x 27.9mm Wyse 3040 system that weighs 0.24kg and runs on under 5 Watts. The device is powered by a quad-core, 1.44GHz Intel Atom x5-Z8350 “Cherry Trail” SoC, giving it 30 percent better performance than “previous generations,” says Dell, presumably referring to the single-core Wyse 3010 and the dual-core 3020 and 3030. The power-efficient (2W SDP) SoC also runs on the UP board and UP Core SBCs.

Desktop

• Let’s face it, Linux users have often been portrayed in the media as being a little…er…different than macOS or Windows users. But now a writer at Network World is convinced that the days of Linux users being viewed as eccentric are finally coming to an end.

Server

• Every release of the open-source Kubernetes container management and orchestration system has been led by a Google employee, until the release of the latest version, Kubernetes 1.6, which was led by CoreOS software engineer, Dan Gillespie.

• Kubernetes 1.6 officially became available on March 28, providing users of the open-source container system with a new release focused on stability and scaleability. Gillespie joined CoreOS as part of the October acquisition of Redspread, which is a company he co-founded.

Kernel Space

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.10.7 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…

• AT&T’s commitment to open source follows news of the company’s contribution of several million lines of ECOMP code to The Linux Foundation. Additionally, Chris Rice, senior vice president of AT&T Labs, joined The Linux Foundation Board of Directors and was also recently selected as the ONAP chairman.

• The NTFS-3G open-source driver providing that lets Linux, macOS, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, QNX, and other UNIX-like operating systems accessing storage drives formatted with the NTFS file system was updated recently with many changes.

• The NTFS-3G project gets a new stable update once a year, around the end of March, and this year’s release adds a bunch of goodies, such as the ability to allow kernel caching by lowntfs-3g when Posix ACLs aren’t used, as well as to enable read-only mount fallback when the drive enters hibernate state.

• CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi announced today the general availability of new stable kernel updates for the CloudLinux 7 and CloudLinux 6 operating system series.

• CloudLinux is a commercial operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which means that it always backports the latest security fixes. The new CloudLinux 7 kernel (version 3.10.0-427.36.1.lve1.4.43) and CloudLinux 6 and Hybrid kernel (version 2.6.32-673.26.1.lve1.4.24) is here to fix the CVE-2017-2647 security flaw.

• Immediately after releasing the Linux 4.10.7 kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today the availability of the nineteenth maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 4.9 kernel series.

• Just like Linux kernel 4.10.7, the Linux kernel 4.9.19 LTS release comes, surprisingly, only three days after the release of the previous maintenance update, in this case, Linux kernel 4.9.18 LTS. According to the appended shortlog, this is also a major patch that changes a total 98 files, with 812 insertions and 403 deletions. As expected, most of the patch are updated drivers.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today the release and immediate availability of the seventh maintenance update to the Linux 4.10 kernel series, along with Linux kernel 4.9.19 LTS and Linux kernel 4.4.59 LTS.

• Surprisingly, Linux kernel 4.10.7 comes only three days after the Linux 4.10.6 kernel release, and, according to the appended shortlog, it’s quite a big patch that changes a total of 128 files, 1470 insertions and 845 deletions. The biggest part of the patch are, as expected, updated drivers, but we can also see a few architecture and filesystem improvements, as well as updated networking and sound stack.

Graphics Stack

• For Linux GPU driver junkies, here are some fresh NVIDIA vs. RadeonSI test results using Linux 4.11 and Mesa 17.1-dev as of this week.

• Not much information to share until the embargo expires, but here are some interesting NVIDIA vs. RadeonSI results on Ubuntu Linux.

• Andres Gomez of Igalia has stepped up to the plate to manage Mesa 17.0.3 as the newest Mesa stable update. The plan is to release it officially by the end of week while today the release candidate is available.

• Over Mesa 17.0.2, the 17.0.3 update currently has 32 patches queued but potentially more may still make it into this next release. The fixes include problems with the GLSL compiler, the Intel OpenGL and Vulkan drivers, Nouveau performance improvements, RADV fixes, and various other fixes.

• Intel has published a series of patches today adding FPGA device drivers to their Linux kernel for their selection of FPGA hardware.

• Developer Wu Hao explained, “The Intel FPGA driver provides interfaces for userspace applications to configure, enumerate, open, and access FPGA accelerators on platforms equipped with Intel(R) FPGA solutions and enables system level management functions such as FPGA partial reconfiguration, power management and virtualization.”

Benchmarks

• Feral Interactive today released their first Linux ported game into public beta that features a Vulkan renderer. Mad Max on Linux now supports Vulkan and OpenGL, making for some fun driver/GPU benchmarking. Up first are some Radeon RX 480 and R9 Fury Vulkan vs. OpenGL benchmarks for Mad Max when using Mesa 17.1-dev Git.

Applications

• If you read around these parts with any frequency you’ll know that I love using emoji.

• Often I need to quickly find and enter emoji in a desktop app a moments notice.

• Be it a well timed cheeky grin or a totally inappropriate aubergine glyph, emoji rely on context, and in real-time conversations context changes fast.

• I don’t like to write about things I am not confident or experienced in using. This is why don’t see listicles about Vim, op-ed’s about DevOps, and so on.

• But writing about a desktop application should be within my abilities¹ — but I’ve been finding it difficult to know how to cover an app called Pext.

• New open source software tomviz—short for tomographic visualization—enables researchers to interactively understand large 3D datasets. More specifically, the software analyzes 3D tomographic data similar to a medical CT-scan but at the nanoscale.

• “When you can take a nanoparticle or biomolecule and spin it around, slice it, look inside it, and quantitatively analyze it, you get a complete picture from all angles,” says Yi Jiang, a physics Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University.

• The developers of the Avidemux open-source video editor software for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems announced the availability of Avidemux 2.6.19, a new maintenance update that adds various improvements.

• If you’re wondering, there was no Avidemux 2.6.18 update released, and it looks like Avidemux 2.6.19 comes almost three months after the small 2.6.17 bugfix update that only allowed E-AC3 for MP4/MP4v2 streams and fixed a handful of bugs for the Preview component.

• SpiderOak is an encrypted cloud storage service that gives access to your data while making use of its integrated group chat and secure file sharing features. Compared to Dropbox, however, it offers only 2 GB to free users and 100 GB to pro.

• Shotcut is an open-source, free and cross-platform video editing software for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Dan Dennedy, started Shotcut project in 2011 and it is developed on the MLT Multimedia Framework. Video editing has been never easy but Shotcut is an user-friendly and simple video editor that gives you tons of functions and features to edit/manage your videos with just mouse clicks, but do not under estimate this product because it has complex functions too that many paid product offers. Supports wide variety of audio, video, and image formats via FFmpeg and screen, webcam, and audio capture. It uses a timeline for non-linear video editing of multiple tracks that may be composed of various file formats. You can easily analyze the video frame by frame, adjust every aspect of the video, and mix match frames resolution. Scrubbing and transport control are assisted by OpenGL GPU-based processing and a number of video and audio filters are available.

Proprietary

• The days of Linux being a barren plug-in desert may at last be over. And if you’re a developer, there are some other nice things happening to VST development on all platforms.

• Steinberg has quietly rolled out the 3.6.7 version of their plug-in SDK for Windows, Mac, iOS, and now Linux. Actually, your plug-ins may be using their SDK even if you’re unaware – because many plug-ins that appear as “AU” use a wrapper from VST to Apple’s Audio Unit. (One is included in the SDK.)

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• I don’t have any contacts with the developer and previous messages went unanswered, so sadly it’s not one I will personally be covering in any detail.

• Glittermitten Grove [Steam], a game I had never heard of until today has launched on Linux. Oh, it also apparently contains Frog Fractions 2.

• The advanced flight simulator X-Plane 11 [Steam, Official Site] is now available and the developers put out day-1 Linux support.

• Hours ago I posted some RADV vs. RadeonSI results on Mad Max which showed much progress for this first Feral Interactive Vulkan Linux game while the NVIDIA results do show much more impressive performance capabilities with this new graphics API. Here are some of my initial NVIDIA GeForce results for OpenGL vs. Vulkan with Mad Max on Linux while additional tests are on the way. It was just today that Linux game porter Feral Interactive rolled out a public beta of a Vulkan renderer for this originally DX11 Windows game.

• Feral Interactive has pushed a Vulkan renderer for their recent Mad Max Linux port into public beta.

• Mad Max [Feral Store, Steam] from Feral Interactive has been updated with a public beta as the Linux version is now able to use Vulkan and it brings some mighty performance changes.

• For those wishing to relive a past fond moment for Linux gaming or weren’t reading Phoronix five years ago, today marks five years since receiving an interesting message from GabeN.

• I was pointed towards Mantis Burn Racing [Steam, Official Site] as the developers are considering a Linux port of their fantastic looking top-down racer. They may do it with enough requests.

• I’ve been sent in details about ‘Lil Tanks’ [Steam, Official Site], which is an action-packed side-scroller with some really great retro visuals.

• I’ve been told it will release on Tuesday, April 4th and it will have day-1 Linux support at release. It will release with a 20% off sale too for a whole week.

• We certainly aren’t short on action platformers, but Nongünz [Official Site] looks like it could easily stand out with the unique visual style.

• I absolutely love the visuals. I think it looks fantastic mixing black and white with a gentle touch of sepia for things like fire. Not many games go for a black and white style, so it’s interesting to see more developers try it out.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Qt Quick Designer now integrates a QML code editor. This allows you to use views like the Properties editor and the Navigator also for text based editing. When you use the split view, you directly see the effects of what you are doing. The graphical editor got support for adding items and tab bar to stacked containers like StackedLayout and SwipeView, a tool bar with common actions, and support for HiDPI displays.

• The Qt Company, through Eike Ziller, announced today the availability of the Beta release of the upcoming Qt Creator 4.3 open-source and cross-platform IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for Qt application developers.

• Qt Creator 4.3 promises to be a major release adding some very exciting changes, starting with the integration of a QML code editor into the Qt Quick Designer component to allow developers to use the Properties editor or the Navigator views, among many others, also for text-based editing.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME 3.26 release date is set for September 13, 2017.

• That’s the date listed in the full GNOME 3.26 release schedule, though is still subject to change (bugs don’t adhere to deadlines, after all).

• Over the coming 6 months GNOME developers will work on honing, improving and revising the hugely popular open-source desktop environment.

• Thanks to the support of Fedora LATAM and the GNOME Foundation, we did share step by step the installation of Fedora 25 and GNOME 3.22; and thanks to Butterfly, we are going to be able to organize all our Linux events through the LinuXatUNI Website. I did also announced the GNOME 3.24 and shared more about the Free Software philosophy.

• Now a days it is bit hard to find perfect icon theme for your Linux desktop but there are some which can be considered as complete icon sets, I am not going to list all of them here instead we leave on you to find other icons from our ‘Theme & Icons’ page, if you are interested. Here comes two new themes called ‘Just Colors’ and ‘Colors’, uses various icons from other icon themes as well including: Vibrancy-Colors, Faenza and Numix icons themes. As its name shows off to you, there are many color variations in this theme (Blue, Green, Orange, Purple, Yellow and Default Version), you can choose which fits your GTK theme and desktop.

Distributions

Reviews

• Zephyr Linux is a newcomer to the Linux scene, and it is still morphing from developmental releases. However, it takes an interesting approach to removing desktop clutter and default software bloat.

• Zephyr is a collaboration between Leonard Ashley and other developers. Ashley built this infant distro on Devuan 1.0 beta 2 stable (Jessie) Linux. Devuan is a fork of Debian Linux.

• Note: Do not confuse Zephyr Linux with the Linux Foundation’s Zephyr Project — a lightweight Linux OS for the Internet of Things.

• Ashley gives the concept of minimalist design a fresh twist in Zephyr Linux, which is stripped down so you can remake it your way.

• Zephyr Linux version 1.0 beta 2 stable, released late last year, is available in a separate ISO file for each of three non-intimidating desktops — Fluxbox, JWN and Openbox — which are fully customizable window managers that are light on resources, fast and stable. Each one gives you a similar full-featured desktop experience.

New Releases

• Linux Lite 3.2 Final is now available for download. The overall theme of this release is a focus on Security. Linux Lite will now download and install the latest Linux kernel security updates when they become available via Install Updates. In this release we introduce for the first time the Lite Desktop Widget. This features basic system information as well as Updates status to emphasize the importance of keeping your computer up to date. Also in this release we’ve included several theme enhancements, lots of updates to our Lite packages, as well as the usual fixes from the 3.2 Beta.

• The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.8.8

Red Hat Family

• Just because one can make money from OpenStack doesn’t mean one should. Red Hat, on its recent earnings call, gladly assumed the title of “Red Hat of OpenStack,” meaning the “vendor that does certification and confidently allow[s] both hardware and software vendors to participate in the ecosystem.” In a similar vein, I’ve called OpenStack Red Hat’s “Linux moment,” a chance to productize the growing cloud movement.

• This is the third article in our “Open Leadership Development” series. In part 1, I shared how we got started with building a leadership development system for our open organization. In part 2, I walked through four stages of leadership development in an open organization. Now, I’d like to share some leadership tools we’ve created for our open organization and published on GitHub under a Creative Commons license.

• That’s $2.4 billion dollars, from pure open source projects. There is not a single strand of proprietary code in Red Hat’s products. So while some say open source is hard to monetize, here we have a company that continues to set the example for others to follow.

• However, I recall an earlier interview with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst where he said, “If open source was a proprietary technology and we had been the large share player of Linux as we are with RHEL, we would be generating 20 billion dollars of revenue instead of two billion in total for the company.”

Fedora

• The Fedora Ambassadors distributed DVDs and swag items during SCaLE’s four-day expo and held a Fedora Day activity consisting of two presentations and a general meet up. Furthermore, we held a mini-memorial in honor of our Fedora Ambassador Matthew Williams.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• It’s almost the fourth month of the year. You know what that means. A new Ubuntu release is upon us. This time around, the release number is 17.04 and the name is Zesty Zapus. For those that don’t know, a zapus is a genus of North American jumping mice and the only extant mammal with a total of 18 teeth.

• Which means the zapus is quite unique. Does that translate over to the upcoming release of one of the most popular Linux distributions on the planet (currently listed as fourth on Distrowatch)? Let’s find out.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint 18.2 may ship with LightDM and Unity Greeter by default, replacing the current MDM login screen.

• Developers behind the popular Ubuntu-derivative say they’ve ‘been testing [LightDM] as an alternative to Mint Display Manager [MDM] and adding support where it was missing and the results are promising.’

• Clement Lefebvre published today the March 2017 edition of the Linux Mint monthly newsletter to inform users of the Ubuntu-based operating system about the latest and upcoming developments.

• In the newsletter, the developer reveals the fact that the Xreader PDF and document viewer is undergoing a revamp to its user interface that should improve both the toolbar and the sidebar, add support for dark themes and symbolic icons, implement new buttons in the toolbar for fast switching between multiple view modes, as well as to make it work on touch screens.

• Many thanks to all the people who donate to us and support our project. We received almost $8,000 in February from 412 people. Many thanks to my fellow developers also and to our partners, it’s a real pleasure to be working with you all.

Devices/Embedded

• Eltechs released v2.0 of its ExaGear Desktop VM for running x86 apps on ARM/Linux devices. It adds OpenGL hardware graphics acceleration for the Pi 2 and 3.

• Recently, Raspbian developers led by Eric Anholt ported the OpenGL driver to Raspbian, thereby making the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 the first hacker SBCs to do so. Russia-based Eltechs, which offers the ExaGear Desktop virtual machine application for running x86 apps on ARM-based Linux computers, quickly adapted the new OpenGL driver and baked it into version 2.0 of ExaGear Desktop.

• The new driver implemented in ExaGear Desktop 2.0 fully supports 3D graphics acceleration of Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 applications. As a result, you can now run modern, 3D graphics games such as OpenArena (Quake 3) and Minecraft, some of the few such games that have been ported to the Pi. Most 3D accelerated x86 games simply won’t run or run very slowly, says Eltechs.

• The $10 “Orange Pi 2G-IOT” SBC runs Ubuntu or Android on an RDA Cortex-A5 SoC, and features RPi 40-pin I/O compatibility, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GSM.

• Shenzhen Xunlong quickly followed up on its recent launch of the quad-core Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 and Zero Plus 2 H5 SBCs with its first Orange Pi to stray from the Allwinner SoC family. The 2G-enabled, $9.90 Orange Pi 2G-IOT targets low-power IoT applications with a single-core Cortex-A5 based RDA8810PL SoC from RDA Microelectronics.

• Wind River, the Intel-owned specialist in IoT (Internet of Things) software, has announced a platform that will allow ageing control systems, not originally designed to support the IoT, to link into IoT networks.

• Axiomtek’s CAPA318 adds to the growing dog-pile of 3.5-inch SBCs that tap Intel’s latest Apollo Lake Atom, Celeron, and Pentium processors (see farther below). Axiomtek, which previously released a Bay Trail-based CAPA840 SBC in the same form factor, is here focusing on the dual-core Celeron N3350 and quad-core Pentium N4200. No OS support was listed for the board, which should easily run Linux or Windows.

Phones

Tizen

• Today, the Samsung Z2 smartphone has received a firmware/software update in India, taking it to version BQC1. The main point of Interest for this small 13.9MB update is that it brings the platform version to Tizen 2.4.0.7 and KNOX 1.1.0.

Android

• Google’s been talking about Android Wear 2.0 for a long time — it was first announced almost a year ago, at the I/O 2016 developer event. But it was delayed from a planned fall launch until early 2017. And while a few watches have been released that include the new software (most notably the LG Watch Style and Sport), the release for older Android Wear devices has continued to be delayed. And you’ll have to keep on waiting — Google confirmed today that an unspecified bug was found during final testing that will push back the release again.

• The Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus are the successors to the S7 and S7 Edge, coming in strong after last fall’s horrific Note 7 fiasco. Just like Apple, Samsung is sure to sell millions of its new Galaxy smartphones, but that doesn’t mean they are the best for everyone.

• LG came out swinging with its LG G6, erasing the G5 from our minds. I’ve been using one now for more than a month and as I assemble my biannual ten best smartphones post, it is a candidate for the top spot.

• You know the smartphone has supplanted every other consumer technology when all anyone really wants in a car now is a “smartphone on wheels.” In a world where most smartphone users have Android-based models, Google is aiming to reach the next billion users coming online — with Android as the nexus of activity.

• Whether it’s as a Google Home oracle/assistant, Android Auto smart car integration, TensorFlow machine learning or DayDream virtual reality, the Internet search behemoth now aims to become the search engine for your life. Add to that a serious focus on developer tooling and solutions such as Firebase and Android Studio 2.3, and it’s clear that Google is ramping its current ubiquity up to a whole new level. Here are 11 reasons why Android isn’t just for phones anymore.

Free Software/Open Source

• Google has launched a new site that centralizes information on all of the company’s various open source projects and gives developers details on how it uses, releases and supports open source software.

• The world’s most popular offline enterprise globe software is now available to all as management of the code transitions to the Open Source Community with Thermopylae Sciences & Technology leading the charge as the firm celebrates its 10th anniversary.

• Coin Sciences Ltd has added a whopping fourteen companies to the MultiChain Platform Partner Program, a new collaboration with Seal Software, and the first beta release of MultiChain 1.0.

• New members of the Platform Partner Program include three multinational consulting companies: Boston Consulting Group, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and Worldline. Eleven other smaller companies have also joined: Auxesis Group, Crossword Cybersecurity, Cryptologic, Enuke Software, Enuma Technologies, InfoCorp Technologies, Kunstmaan, Minddeft Technologies, Primechain Technologies, RecordsKeeper and Satoshi Citadel Industries. This brings the total number of program members to 27, which includes founding partners Accenture, D+H and Mphasis. A full list is now available here.

Events

• The popular big data program Apache’s Hadoop is difficult to use. Indeed, Datanami, an important big data publication, recently found that “the Hadoop dream of unifying data and compute in a distributed manner has all but failed in a smoking heap of cost and complexity”. One reason? “It’s just a very complicated stack to build on.”

• It’s been a while since last having any Phoronix meet-ups due to not really traveling in the past few years due to various constraints, but next month on business will be available for a Russian Phoronix reader meet-up.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• In the U.S., Congress voted to overturn rules that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) created to protect the privacy of broadband customers. Mozilla supported the creation and enactment of these rules because strong rules are necessary to promote transparency, respect user privacy and support user control.

• The Federal Trade Commission has authority over the online industry in general, but these rules were crafted to create a clear policy framework for broadband services where the FTC’s policies don’t apply. They require internet service providers (ISPs) to notify us and get permission from us before any of our information would be collected or shared. ISPs know a lot about us, and this information (which includes your web browsing history) can potentially be shared with third-parties.

SaaS/Back End

• Have you ever bought a piece of furniture at IKEA? The price is right, though it comes with a hefty instruction manual, and you have to assemble it yourself.

• The idea is, of course, that you don’t need to be a handyman to have that cabinet full of books by Sunday evening. Anyone with a screwdriver and hammer can build it. Isn’t that right?

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• After years of lobbying by computer science luminaries, Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent (both owned by Nokia) have relented and will allow non-commercial study of the source code for Unix Research Editions 8, 9, and 10.

• It might sound like merely a historical artifact, but it’s more than that. Unix source is an important computer science teaching tool, and has been ever since its earliest days.

• The joint statement by Alcatel-Lucent USA and Nokia Bell Laboratories makes it clear this isn’t “open-sourcing the source code.” Rather, it’s a promise not to assert “copyright rights with respect to any non-commercial copying, distribution, performance, display or creation of derivative works of Research Unix Editions 8, 9, and 10.”

BSD

• TrueOS is a rolling-release, desktop-oriented operating system built upon the FreeBSD-CURRENT branch. Its aim is to add desktop-usability, speed and grace to an elephant. It is more a FreeBSD tuning than a fork of it, anyway.

• TrueOS is formerly known as PC-BSD; project changed its name, became rolling and mostly dropped pbi’s in late 2016.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Industrial arm robots have been around for years, but similar technology is only just starting to trickle down to the consumer market.

• Open source is an ideology important to much of the 3D printing community; the ethos is at the foundation of many companies involved in the scene from the beginning, and it can be a polarizing topic. For some, like Aleph Objects with its open source LulzBot 3D printers and the community built up around the technology, and the RepRap community, sharing is caring. Other entities jealously guard their intellectual property; what’s theirs is theirs, and start to finish the system is proprietary. MakerBot drew some serious flack a few years ago when they changed direction from open source roots and became part of the closed source Stratasys family. For its part, HP’s entry to the 3D printing industry blew some minds when the company, infamous for requiring use of proprietary ink in their gargantuan 2D printing operations, chose an open platform approach to their materials in additive manufacturing.

Programming/Development

• These “you should switch language” remarks are strangely enough from the backseat drivers of the Internet. Those who can tell us with confidence how to run our project but who don’t actually show us any code.

• Get-girls-to-code initiatives aim to fix tech’s gender imbalance – but they may help reinforce it

• Technology has a gender problem, as everyone knows.

• The underrepresentation of women in technical fields has spawned legions of TED talks, panels, and women-friendly coding boot camps. I’ve participated in some of these get-women-to-code workshops myself, and I sometimes encourage my students to get involved. Recently, though, I’ve noticed something strange: the women who are so assiduously learning to code seem to be devaluing certain tech roles simply by occupying them.

• Conventional wisdom says that the key to reducing gendered inequality in tech is giving women the skills they need to enter particular roles. But in practice, when more women enter a role, its value seems to go down more.

Leftovers

• There was some consternation last year as rumors swirled that Twitter was set to drop its long-standing 140-character limit. The company ended up keeping the limit, but it’s been working to make sure you can actually use all 140-characters. For example, Twitter decreed a while back that photos and videos no longer count against the limit. Now, it’s doing the same for usernames. Finally.

Health/Nutrition

• A partnership of government agencies and organisations in the United States and United Kingdom have announced an investment of up to US$48 million into the development of new antibiotics and products to fight antibiotic resistant bacteria, with the aim of having two new antibiotics in human trials in the next five years.

• CARB-X, the Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator, is a partnership between public and private organisations in the US and UK.

• A range of civil society organisations today issued a letter to European Union leadership urging support for a World Health Organization resolution that mandates a feasibility study on a fund for cancer research and development that delinks R&D costs from the price of health technologies.

• The letter from 17 organisations to EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini is available here [pdf].

• The groups said the resolution “would provide the Organization a mandate to conduct a feasibility study of creating a multi-country push and pull fund for cancer R&D predicated upon the principle of the delinkage of the costs of R&D from the price of health technologies.”

• On Mondays, Magda and Amilcar Galindo take their daughter Eva to self-defense class. Eva is 12 but her trusting smile and arching pigtails make her look younger. Diagnosed with autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, Eva doesn’t learn or behave like the typical 12-year-old. She struggles to make change, and she needs help with reading and social situations. Eva’s classmates are sometimes unkind to her, and Magda worries for her daughter’s feelings and her safety. So once a week, after they drive her from her middle school in Modesto, California, to her tutor in nearby Riverbank, the Galindos rush off to the gym where they cheer Eva on as she wrestles with a heavy bag and punches the air with her skinny arms.

Security

• Once you’ve chosen a Linux distro that meets all the security guidelines set out in our last article, you’ll need to install the distro on your workstation.

• When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange disclosed earlier this month that his anti-secrecy group had obtained CIA tools for hacking into technology products made by U.S. companies, security engineers at Cisco Systems (CSCO.O) swung into action.

• The Wikileaks documents described how the Central Intelligence Agency had learned more than a year ago how to exploit flaws in Cisco’s widely used Internet switches, which direct electronic traffic, to enable eavesdropping.

• Senior Cisco managers immediately reassigned staff from other projects to figure out how the CIA hacking tricks worked, so they could help customers patch their systems and prevent criminal hackers or spies from using the same methods, three employees told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

• Network time synchronization—aligning your computer’s clock to the same Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) that everyone else is using—is both necessary and a hard problem. Many internet protocols rely on being able to exchange UTC timestamps accurate to small tolerances, but the clock crystal in your computer drifts (its frequency varies by temperature), so it needs occasional adjustments.

• That’s where life gets complicated. Sure, you can get another computer to tell you what time it thinks it is, but if you don’t know how long that packet took to get to you, the report isn’t very useful. On top of that, its clock might be broken—or lying.

• To get anywhere, you need to exchange packets with several computers that allow you to compare your notion of UTC with theirs, estimate network delays, apply statistical cluster analysis to the resulting inputs to get a plausible approximation of real UTC, and then adjust your local clock to it. Generally speaking, you can get sustained accuracy to on the close order of 10 milliseconds this way, although asymmetrical routing delays can make it much worse if you’re in a bad neighborhood of the internet.

• I assume that every permutation of scams will eventually be tried; it is interesting that the initial ones preyed on people’s avarice and dishonesty: “I will transfer millions to your bank account, then you share with me” – with subsequent scams appealing to another demographic: “I want to donate a large sum to your religious charity” – to perhaps capture a more virtuous but still credulous lot. Where will it end ?

• For the past few months, developers who publish their code on GitHub have been targeted in an attack campaign that uses a little-known but potent cyberespionage malware.

• The attacks started in January and consisted of malicious emails specifically crafted to attract the attention of developers, such as requests for help with development projects and offers of payment for custom programming jobs.

• The emails had .gz attachments that contained Word documents with malicious macro code attached. If allowed to execute, the macro code executed a PowerShell script that reached out to a remote server and downloaded a malware program known as Dimnie.

Defence/Aggression

• A non-profit organisation that tracks civilian casualties caused by airstrikes in the Middle East said it has shifted nearly all of its resources to track a surge of claims regarding US-led strikes in Syria and Iraq.

• The group, called Airwars.org, had been tracking deaths caused by both Russian and US airstrikes but said in a statement Friday that it was suspending its work on “alleged Russian actions in Syria — so as best to focus our limited resources on continuing to properly monitor and assess reported casualties from the US and its allies.

• If you read the headlines of major corporate media outlets, you’d think hundreds of Iraqi civilians coincidentally died in the same location that just so happened to be hit by a US airstrike.

• A March 17 US attack in the city of Mosul resulted in a massacre of civilians. The monitoring group Airwars estimated that between 130 and 230 Iraqis were killed in the incident. Iraqi media reported similar figures.

• Civilian victims of the US-led bombing campaign to oust ISIS from the major northern Iraqi city, which has been terrorized by the extremist group for three years, have received little media coverage.

• President Trump is becoming the third post-9/11 president to prosecute bloody conflicts in the Mideast and impose mass surveillance at home, with no end in sight, observes retired Col. Ann Wright.

• At the United Nations headquarters in New York City, negotiations began this week on a treaty banning the possession, development and use of nuclear weapons. The agreement to negotiate such a ban was passed late last year by a wide margin in the most significant development in nuclear disarmament since the end of the Cold War.

• The ad hoc attempts focused on the prison system, a key incubator for many would-be jihadis, and programs that tried to target those already on the path to extremism. {sic}

• They did not go as hoped.

• Before he planted his bullets in the heads of his victims, somebody planted ideas more dangerous than the bullets in his head.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• European officials issued rebukes and officials around Asia said they would continue their drive toward cleaner fuels after President Donald Trump laid the groundwork to reverse his predecessor’s climate-change policies.

• Mr. Trump, citing the need to revive the U.S. coal industry and ease the regulatory burden, began on Tuesday​to repeal the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan of stricter carbon-dioxide limits on utilities.

• The change leaves an opening for China and other countries to seize leadership in the global effort to curb the rise in temperatures, as set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement, which went into force in November.

• The U.S. move raised questions about what steps, if any, the Trump administration would take to comply with the Paris commitments.

• In case you needed reminding, it’s a bad time to be a scientist in the US. If you work for a federal research group, you’ve been muzzled, had your funding cut to historically low levels, and been told by a committee of anti-intellectual parrots that you’re constantly lying.

• Earlier this month, the word “science” was removed from the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) mission statement under the auspices of a man who doesn’t think carbon dioxide warms the planet. Now, it seems that the Department of Energy’s (DoE) climate change research office has banned the use of the phrase “climate change”.

• The Center for Biological Diversity filed four Freedom of Information Act requests today with the Trump administration’s Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration demanding records of communication censoring agency staff from using words or phrases related to climate change.

Finance

• The online giant has invited Mondelez, General Mills and others to its headquarters to persuade them it’s time to sell directly to online shoppers.

• If you talk to anyone involved in education, particularly those working in schools, the conversation will rapidly turn to budgets, which for many are approaching crisis point.

• It comes to something when parents are being asked for voluntary contributions to help keep their children’s schools running. This is as well as reports of subjects being cut and the length of the day being shortened.

• Yet again, the problem is mainly the corporate sovereignty chapter, which is emerging as a real trade deal killer (hint to governments: why not drop it?). But it’s not just Wallonia that might stymie CETA. According to a post from the Council of Canadians, the final ratification of CETA also faces challenges in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy and Bulgaria.

• The place to focus our attention is on the working class. This is not for abstract, doctrinaire reasons, but because that is where the power lies. It is there that numbers and proximity to production combine to yield a force capable of challenging the 1% for control.

• Control of what exactly? The whole works, including which class should be running the country.

• When working people finally decide to stop hating their friends and loving their enemies (Malcolm X), the pent up rage and fire from centuries of deceit and exploitation at the hands of corporate elites will be turned toward forging a new normal. People will insist on painting outside the lines, refusing to be bound by convention as they search for effective answers.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• “For all his grandstanding and bluster, Trump failed to put forth a plan to renegotiate NAFTA in the American people’s interest. As a candidate and now in office, Trump promised a serious renegotiation that would put American workers first and end corporate giveaways, but this plan fails to keep that promise and instead looks an awful lot like the TPP deal defeated by a movement of millions and decried by Trump himself. The American people deserve a real renegotiated NAFTA that will protect our workers, our communities, and our environment, not the same broken deal with Trump’s logo printed on it.”

• Cunha’s conviction led to one of the stiffest penalties handed down to such a senior politician since the end of the dictatorship era in 1985, but public satisfaction with the judgment will be mixed with concern that he could yet win an appeal and that many other powerful figures accused of similar crimes remain unpunished.

• Sergio Moro, a Curitiba lower court judge, found Cunha – a rightwing evangelical Christian – guilty of corruption, money laundering and currency law evasion in connection with a $1.6m bribe he received from a deal by the state-run oil firm Petrobras to buy exploration rights in Benin. The judgment also noted a pending case in Switzerland related to $2.3m stashed in a secret bank account in the European country.

• Ivanka Trump is taking on a more formal White House role — with a title but not a paycheck — a move intended to quell ethics concerns raised about her status in her father’s administration.

• In a statement, the White House noted that the president’s elder daughter already had an “unprecedented role” in the administration different from that of previous presidential children.

• She now will take the title of special advisor to the president, and therefore assume the same responsibility to abide by ethics standards that other federal employees have, the statement said. The decision demonstrates the administration’s “commitment to ethics, transparency and compliance,” the administration said.

• During an appearance on Fox & Friends, Host Bill O’Reilly claimed he had difficulty focusing on a speech being given by Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) because of her “James Brown wig.”

• The overtly sexist and racist comment wasn’t an anomaly, but a continued trend in Bill O’Reilly’s ideology and personal politics making an off-script appearance. He apologized for the comment, but only in response to the backlash and criticism to the comment, as Fox News Host Ainsely Earnhardt defended Waters and told O’Reilly he shouldn’t attack a woman based on her appearance.

• [...]

• Perhaps at first, O’Reilly was merely defending his friend and boss and truly believed there was no merit to the case. But by denying he ever challenged Carlson’s accusations — and thereby supported an alleged sexual predator — he’s sending a message to the public that what Ailes was accused of doing is just fine.”

• Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday sat down with investigative journalist Jane Mayer to discuss the threat that secretive and undisclosed campaign financing—exemplified by the outsized influence of powerful billionaires like Charles and David Koch—continues to have on U.S. democracy and what should be done to push back.

• Mayer—author of the 2016 best-seller Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right—recently wrote a feature for The New Yorker in which she detailed the significant role the deep pockets, and bizarre far-right politics, of billionaire Robert Mercer played in President Donald Trump’s campaign run.

• Top presidential adviser Steve Bannon may have violated a White House ethics pledge by communicating about official matters with employees of his former media company, the rightwing site Breitbart News, according to a Washington, D.C., watchdog group.

• Since joining the White House, Bannon, who serves as President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor, has spoken to two of the top editors at the outlet he used to chair, the group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) said in a complaint filed Thursday.

• The White House confirmed this week that it had not waived portions of the ethics pledge for Bannon.

• What would you say about the appearance of a political party that opposed assimilation and advocated what, in essence, is the creation of a nation within a nation?

• A University of Washington professor started studying social networks to help people respond to disasters. But she got dragged down a rabbit hole of twitter-boosted conspiracy theories, and ended up mapping our political moment.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Of course, I turned down the offer and respectfully submitted that I did not believe in censorship. There were others who took up the offer who, in all probability, also supported my view that an oppressive 1936 law that targeted creative output had no place in modern society.

• In fact, I know of at least one Board, led then by Josanne Leonard, who to its credit moved the process away from the practice of gratuitous film cuts and edits in order to eliminate what some might consider to be “offensive” content.

• Does Russia have censorship of the arts? Ask any singer, film-maker or actor, and the answers are bound to be long-winded and contradictory. While many hear the phrase “authoritarian regime” and think of a caricature – barbed wire, barking police dogs, and artists singing hymns to the dear leader, their terror almost visible beneath their stage makeup – Vladimir Putin’s government contains more contradictions than this vision would allow for.

• The Russian state’s paradoxical nature becomes especially apparent when considering the country’s thriving arts scene. It is these contradictions of governance, and their peculiar influence on the Russian art world, that aid and abet Putin’s rule, and ultimately, help generate support for the Russian president.

• It is not the first time Mr Trump has suggested a potential change in libel laws, having done so on the campaign trail early last year. But doing so would be difficult, but technically not impossible. Libel is currently a matter of state law – limited by the First Amendment – with a president unable to change state law.

• Over the years, there have been plenty of debates about whether bloggers should be considered journalists and, specifically about if they should qualify to be protected by journalist shield laws. Court rulings on this have been something of a mixed bag with some courts saying that bloggers don’t qualify for state shield laws, but over in Pennsylvania there’s a recent ruling that went the other way.

• The case, filed in Beaver County Pennsylvania, and heard in the local state court, found that the blogger who runs BeaverCountian need not respond to a subpoena demanding IP addresses or other identifying info on various commenters. The lawsuit was brought by Connie Javens and Renee Javens Zuk against a bunch of John Does who they accused of posting defamatory comments on BeaverCountian.

• The court carefully reviewed Pennsylvania’s journalist shield law and found that the operator of Beaver Countian is pretty clearly covered. It first notes there’s no requirement that the publication be a print publication and further highlights that the operator of the site, John Paul Vranesevich, clearly does journalism with his posts to the site.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Similarly, Google learns from the searches its users make. It saves all their search history, and when they do a new search, Google tries to infer what they are looking for. The results of this inference prioritize contents which have a greater probability of affinity with the preferences of each user. If we try to find content as we normally do, and then we do the same anonymously, we will see that the results of our search are quite different from one another.

• In 2014, traces of an unusual survey, connected to Facebook, began appearing on internet message boards. The boards were frequented by remote freelance workers who bid on “human intelligence tasks” in an online marketplace, called Mechanical Turk, controlled by Amazon. The “turkers,” as they’re known, tend to perform work that is rote and repetitive, like flagging pornographic images or digging through search engine results for email addresses. Most jobs pay between 1 and 15 cents. “Turking makes us our rent money and helps pay off debt,” one turker told The Intercept. Another turker has called the work “voluntary slave labor.”

• The task posted by “Global Science Research” appeared ordinary, at least on the surface. The company offered turkers $1 or $2 to complete an online survey. But there were a couple of additional requirements as well. First, Global Science Research was only interested in American turkers. Second, the turkers had to download a Facebook app before they could collect payment. Global Science Research said the app would “download some information about you and your network … basic demographics and likes of categories, places, famous people, etc. from you and your friends.”

• If you’ve ever wondered whether the National Security Agency (NSA) is monitoring your internet activity at any given moment, there’s now an app for that.

• A Canadian project by Internet Exchange Maps, called IXmaps, tracks the internet exchange points your information passes through. These “points” are buildings where your information passes along a wire and can be collected by the NSA.

• FBI Director James Comey is still pitching encryption backdoors, despite there being almost no one — from the Intelligence Community to legislators around the world — interested in what he’s selling. Comey claims to be sitting on a pile of encrypted devices the FBI can’t get into, even with help from outside contractors.

• ISP lobbying and policy groups were, unsurprisingly, quick to mindlessly applaud this week’s decision by Congress to kill consumer broadband privacy rules. Actual consumers, however, are far from pleased about Congress’ decision to take campaign contributions in exchange for selling consumer privacy rights down river. With cable providers nabbing a growing broadband monopoly, ISPs increasingly merging with giant broadcasters, and neither competition nor regulatory oversight providing much of anything in the way of checks and balances, most people realize we’re in for an…interesting ride over the next few years.

• The new F.C.C. rules would have given consumers stronger privacy protections — without such restrictions, internet providers may decide to become more aggressive with data collection and retention. Expect more targeted advertising to come your way.

• ‘We shouldn’t have to buy trust as an add-on service’

• With the repeal, Internet providers won’t be required to notify customers they collect data about or ask permission before collecting, sharing and selling data about what they do online, beyond the initial Terms of Service agreement. Information collected could include websites visited, apps used and physical location.

• “Your entire clickstream, basically your life online, has the potentially to become one giant profile,” said Stamper.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The minorities in Pakistan in the past have been accusing Muslim clerics of forcibly converting them to Islam but it is for the first time that a state functionary used conversion as an incentive to dodge legal proceeding.

• “The words in the pages that I ripped up are actually contain things like pedophilia, kill the Jews, stuff like that. That we just don’t want around kids to begin with.”

• The DOJ’s Inspector General has just released its latest report [PDF] on federal civil asset forfeiture. It’s not pretty and it confirms many of the criticisms of the program. Law enforcement agencies — including the DEA, which is responsible for nearly 80% of the $28 billion of forfeited assets over the past decade — claim the program is key in the dismantling of criminal organizations.

• Singaporean teen blogger Amos Yee remains in custody in Chicago despite being granted political asylum in the United States last week, his lawyers said yesterday.

• The 18-year-old has been detained since December and Grossman Law LLC, representing Yee, said they learned that Yee could be detained further pending a “potential, but not yet filed” appeal by the Department of Homeland Security.

• A teenage blogger from Singapore who was granted US asylum remains detained in a Wisconsin facility with few clues when he’ll be released.

• The judge ruled there was evidence showing Yee suffered persecution in Singapore and had a “well-founded fear” of being persecuted upon return.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• As cloud computing has become an integral part of the lives of students at public schools, it has increased the importance of a place generations of students have turned to for much more analog learning needs—the library.

• So we’ve noted how new FCC boss Ajit Pai has breathlessly claimed that closing the digital divide will be the top priority for his commission. But we’ve also noted how his actions as FCC boss have run in stark, dramatic contrast to that stated goal. Whether it’s making it easier for prison phone monopolies to rip off inmate families, his decision to kill a plan to bring much-needed competition to the cable box, or his attacks on net neutrality, so far Pai has made it painfully clear that protecting AT&T, Comcast and Verizon is actually where his priorities lie.

• In the last week Pai took his “love for the poor” to soaring new heights by falsely taking credit for year-old job plans at Charter Communications, and cheering as Congress dismantled consumer privacy protections at large ISP behest. But Pai also took what most analysts believe will be the opening salvo in a war against subsidized broadband service for the poor.

• For a few years now, we’ve written about various local governments and their pointless wars against Airbnb, which are often driven by lobbying from the big hotels. Different governments take different approaches, but Miami apparently has an incredibly restrictive regulation that effectively bars short term rentals entirely. Even worse, the mayor has been pushing to make things even worse. Since the current law only is enforced in response to complaints, mayor Tomas Regalado is pushing a plan to more proactively hunt down homeowners who offer short term rentals on Airbnb.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Overall, this analysis shows that about a third of all publicly funded grants administered by the NIH generate research that is cited by commercial patent applications. This number is three times larger than the one produced by the traditional metric we’ve been using. This finding strongly suggests that the overall impact of public funding on the advancement of commercial science is widely underappreciated.

Trademarks

• Readers here will hear the name “Monster Energy Corporation”, makers of the Monster Energy beverage, and likely immediately roll their collective eyes. Monster Energy has truly been a monster when it comes to trademark bullying over some of the most frivolous claims imaginable. From threats against breweries over location-based puns, to threats against beverage review sites it doesn’t like, and even threats against an actor that featured in a monster movie over a photo he tweeted holding a Monster Energy drink, the company is something of a joke in trademark circles.

• Thunder Beast, a small DC root beer company, is fighting trademark violation allegations from California-based Monster Energy Corporation. About a year ago, Thunder Beast, which operates out of the TasteLab food incubator in Northeast, received a cease-and-desist letter from Monster over the use of the word “beast” in the company name.

• In its letter, Monster argued customers might accidentally buy one of Thunder Beast’s bison-emblazoned beverages when they intended to buy an energy drink. Monster claims Thunder Beast infringes on its brand, which includes trademarked slogans such as “PUMP UP THE BEAST” and “UNLEASH THE ULTRA BEAST,” its petition for cancellation reads.

Copyrights

• The sixteen failing hard drives containing Megaupload data at hosting provider Cogent can be restored and preserved. The court has granted the MPAA and RIAA’s version of the preservation order, meaning that no person will be able to access the data without permission. Megaupload is disappointed that it’s still unable to freely access the evidence and fears that it won’t get a fair trial.

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