● 04.01.17

● Links 1/4/2017: Kubecon Coverage, OpenShot 2.3

Posted in News Roundup at 6:25 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• When Tesla started pushing its 8.1 software update to its fleet this week, it was really light on UI improvements and instead focused almost entirely on Autopilot 2.0 updates.

• Several of the changes that CEO Elon Musk previously associated with the upcoming 8.1 update have been pushed another ~6 weeks.

• We are talking about the expected internet browser update, Linux kernel update, and several bug fixes – especially having to do with Tesla’s media app.

• Did you know you can run remote Linux GUI programs in a browser with HTML5 support? It’s even secure because you can use SSH tunneling and that little trick means you don’t even need to open additional ports. If this sounds like gibberish, read on, it’s actually pretty easy to get up and running.

• I recently was a guest on a Houston-based podcast, and the hosts asked me if the best thing about writing for Hackaday was getting to work with the other Hackaday staff. I told them that was really good, but what I like best was interacting with people (well, most people) in the comments. That sometimes you’d post an article and someone would bring a topic up in comments that would really knock your socks off. This is how I wound up with this nearly ideal remote access solution, that requires nothing on the remote side but a web browser.

Server

• Docker containers turned four years old this month. If you were paying attention to Docker in its early days, you know that the Docker ecosystem today looks nothing like it did then. Here’s how the Docker world has evolved since Docker’s launch in 2013.

• When containerization was young, one of its early principles was the ideal of immutable infrastructure, the ability to build a support structure for a container that was flexible enough to meet the container’s needs during its lifespan, which may be short, but remained a fixed asset throughout that duration.

• At the CloudNative/Kubecon EU event in Berlin on March 29, the big news was that Docker contributed its containerd runtime, while CoreOS contributed its rkt (pronounced rocket) runtime to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The containerd and rkt projects are rival container runtimes that aim to implement specifications that are being formally defined by the Open Container Initiative (OCI) project.

• Joe Beda is in a better position than most to understand what’s wrong with Kubernetes. Beda helped to start the Kubernetes project while he was at Google; he now runs a startup called Heptio that is aiming to help further enable Kubernetes.

• At the Kubecon / CloudNative EU conference in Berlin, Beda delivered a keynote address on what needs to change in Kubernetes to bring in more users.

• The open-source Kubernetes container management and orchestration system isn’t just for hyper-scale data center operators, it can also benefit consumer electronics vendors. Speaking at the Kubecon / Cloud Native con even in Berlin this week, Mark Van Straten, Senior Developer at development firm Q42, detailed how Philips embraced Kubernetes to help enable the next generation of the Philips Hue smart light bulb product.

Kernel Space

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.10.8 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…

• With the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel release there is better support for Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 after originally it didn’t look like this feature would be available for Linux. Under Linux 4.11, my Core i7 6800K + MSI X99A WORKSTATION box is now working with “ITMT” enabled, so here are some quick benchmarks.

Graphics Stack

• With the big Radeon/AMDGPU pull request having been accepted into DRM-Next, here are some early tests of this new AMDGPU DRM code to premiere in Linux 4.12.

• The Khronos Group is ending out March by releasing Vulkan 1.0.46.

• I’ve stabilized the kernel lease implementation so that leases now work reliably, and don’t require a reboot before running the demo app a second time.

Benchmarks

• It’s been fun benchmarking Vulkan vs. OpenGL with Mad Max, Feral’s first Linux game port featuring a beta Vulkan renderer. With the Radeon benchmarks and many NVIDIA Pascal tests yesterday an Intel Core i7 Kabylake CPU was used while for this article is a Mad Max run with AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X.

• Earlier this week I posted some Ryzen 7 1800X DDR4 memory scaling Linux tests now that MSI pushed out an updated BIOS for that X370 motherboard that allows running the system at higher — but still rather limited — DDR4 memory frequencies. Here are some similar tests with my Ryzen 7 1700 and a B350 motherboard.

• In an effort to make things as clear as possible, I decided to do some additional testing with Mad Max [Steam, Feral Store]. More specifically, in OpenGL for Mad Max at release vs the beta.

• This is important, since our previous benchmarks (and every other website and person who ran benchmarks) will be affected by this.

Applications

• Video editors have historically been a source of difficulty for Linux users. But, my oh my, has that changed in a big way lately.

• I’ve personally been using Kdenlive—a video editor produced by the KDE project—with great success over the last year. I had absolutely no reason or need to look elsewhere for my video production needs.

• But then along came OpenShot 2.3. And—holy guacamole, Batman—if it isn’t absolutely amazing.

• Open source video editor OpenShot has just hit version 2.3 in what the developer calls “one of the biggest updates ever.”

• A new version of OpenShot video editor is available to download. OpenShot 2.3 adds a transform tool, improves timeline zoom, and a whole lot more.

• It’s been nearly 6 months since we last heard from Museeks, a stylish cross-platform desktop music player.

• For my job, I must use InDesign. For freelance work, I use InDesign, Scribus, GIMP, and Photoshop, depending on whether I am creating the artwork or starting with someone else’s work.

• [...]

• Before I started looking for a solution to my PDF question, I had never considered using open source solutions to customize Adobe InDesign. After this exploration, I have expanded my knowledge of open source capabilities and just how valuable and useful open source solutions are, even when working in conjunction with a closed source application.

• Messaging app Telegram is rolling out encrypted voice calls to its mobile apps, but has confirmed that Telegram desktop will also get the feature.

• As you may know, Sigil is an open-source, multi-platform, lightweight, EPUB reader. Most important features: support for UTF-16, regular expression find and replace support, support for importing EPUB and HTML files, WYSIWYG editing feature in Book View, control over editing EPUB syntax in Code View, table of contents generator, spell checking with either default or user configured dictionaries.

• As you already know, Wireshark is an open-source protocol analyzer software, very used for monitoring the network traffic.

• As you may know Audacity is an open-source, multi-platform audio editor and recorder, running on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

• As you know, GScan2PDF is an app for scanning pages and exporting them to PDFs. The user can export scans one by one, in separate PDF files, or export scans all together, in one PDF.

• The latest version available is Gscan2PDF 1.7.3, which has been recently released, coming with a bunch of changes.

Proprietary

• As the press prepares to cover the release of Ubuntu 17.04, it should be clear in the tech industry just how big of a player Ubuntu is to the ecosystem. While a good bit of reviews will focus on what’s new in the release and what’s headed down the pipeline, I’d like to comment on what’s still missing and better yet, what can be done about it.

• What’s missing is a graphics suite and there’s really no excuse for not having one. Yes, we have graphics applications, but there are advantages to having a suite, not just a one-off application that can do something in 12 steps when its competitor can do it in three. The industry leader in this market is Adobe, whose Creative Cloud suite is leaps and bounds away from its competitors in terms of market share.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 2.5 is now available.

• Wine 2.5 is now available as the newest bi-weekly development release of Wine.

• The latest development release of Wine (2.5) is available with 30 bugs fixed and some various improvements.

Games

• For those enjoying the Total War games on Linux, Total War: WARHAMMER II was announced today and it looks like it will receive Linux support.

• While I usually don’t like pre-orders, Paradox is certainly a developer worthy of it. Since we know this will have no problems with Linux support. Stellaris: Utopia [Official Site] is a massive expansion too, I can’t wait!

• Virtual Programming have release their latest Linux port with ‘Putty Squad’. It’s a remake of the 1994 platformer that shares the same name, but the updated release has crispier high resolution visuals. VP provided me a copy last night, so here’s some thoughts.

• This keeps happening to me, I keep writing about something and a day later it’s here! Hollow Knight [Official Site] now has a Linux beta build available on Steam.

• You need to select “beta-linux-” from the Betas list on the properties of the game to access it. Fantastic to see it arrive on Linux! Read more in their announcement.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In Qt 5.9 is now possible to render Qt Quick applications with OpenVG when using hardware that supports it. This is made possible by a new scene graph adaptation that uses EGL and OpenVG to render Qt Quick scenes. When using Qt for Device Creation, it means that it now be possible to run with graphics hardware acceleration on some devices where today only software rendering is available.

• One of the many new features for the upcoming Qt 5.9 is an OpenVG renderer for hardware acceleration on some embedded platforms that lack OpenGL capabilities.

• OpenVG for the uninitiated is a 2D vector graphics API backed by The Khronos Group. It hasn’t been updated in almost one decade with OpenGL ES largely taking over on the mobile/embedded front, but there still is some embedded hardware out there with still having OpenVG v1.1 drivers. There used to be an OpenVG state tracker in Mesa’s Gallium3D, but that’s long been dead.

• Ever since the port to QT5/KF5 in 2015, Kdenlive has seen an increasing momentum to developing its full potential in being a stable and reliable video editing tool which the FLOSS community can use to create content and democratize communication. In 2016 the project saw a redesign of its visual identity (logo, website), the reintroduction of some much requested tools like rotoscoping and a Windows port. During these couple of years we’ve seen a boom in the size of the community.

• The Kdenlive video editor project in the KDE camp has published a new status update concerning the health of the project.

• Kdenlive developers continue seeing momentum building around their video editor since reviving it with the transition to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5. Over the past year they have added many tools, a Windows port, and other efforts to make Kdenlive pro-capable.

• This is a neat little trick that’s been making the rounds, and after seeing success with several people on Reddit I thought it was worth posting somewhere more visible. This will look at removing screen tearing (often entirely) when using Nvidia Proprietary graphics on the Plasma Desktop.

• We’re working like crazy on the next versions of Krita — 3.1.3 and 4.0. Krita 3.1.3 will be a stable bugfix release, 4.0 will have the vector work and the python scripting. This week we’ve prepared the first 3.1.3 alpha builds for testing! The final release of 3.1.3 is planned for end of April.

• We’re still working on fixing more bugs for the final 3.1.3 release, so please test these builds, and if you find an issue, check whether it’s already in the bug tracker, and if not, report it!

• It’s Thursday! And you know what that means… It’s Linux Day on the Lunduke Hour! In today’s episode Matt Hartley and I take a boat load of questions from the viewers on BtrFS, KDE, Internet Privacy, the ending of the Linux Action Show, Linux Marketing issues, and the weirdness (or lack of weirdness) of Linux.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Today is day 3 of the GNOME+Rust hackfest in Mexico City at the beautiful new Red Hat office. We’ve been working on all sorts of stuff since we were graced with the presence of a few Rust hackers from Mozilla Research.

• Initially I was going to do a more elaborate workflow tutorial, but time flies when you’re having fun on 3.24. With the release out, I’d rather publish this than let it rot. Maybe the next one!

• Screencasts are surprisingly easy to do, at least under Linux. The GNOME desktop has a built-in screencast function, to capture a video of the computer’s screen.

• I’ve just released GTK+ 3.90, as a milestone on our way towards GTK+ 4. This post should explain not just what is or isn’t in that release, but also where we are on the journey towards GTK+ 4, and what changes are still in the pipeline.

• The reason for doing a 3.90 release now and not just another 3.89.x milestone is that we want to encourage experimental ports of some GTK+ 3 applications at this point, to gather feedback.

Distributions

• Nailing the perfect software design is tricky. It is all too easy to confuse simplicity of aesthetics with simplicity of functionality. A piece of software can be deceptively plain looking – Google search for instance, but it can do a hell of a lot. On the other hand, you may have something with a huge amount of buttons and toggles and whatnot, but in essence, it does very little.

• The quest for the ultimate GUI package manager in Linux continues. We’ve had dozens of tools come and go over the past decade or so, each trying to offer that fine mix of intuitive search, useful information and great looks. KDE has also seen a range of programs appear and vanish, but so far, the elusive goal remains. The latest Plasma incarnation is Discover, a tool I’ve found wanting in all my previous reviews. Come KDE neon 5.9.3, I’ve given it a fresh spin. Let’s see what it does.

New Releases

• NixOS 17.03 “Gorilla” will be the next release scheduled to be released on March 30, 2017. Time to party on March 31, 2017!

• Meet other fellow Nix/NixOS users & developers and the 17.03 release manager for some drinks.

• We will provide beer, Tschunks and non-alcoholic beverages on our rooftop terrace.

• Netrunner 17.03 “Cyclotron” ships with an upgraded stack of KDE Software plus its usual selection of applications like Libreoffice, KDEnlive, Gimp, Audacious, Steam, Skype, Transmission, Virtualbox, Krita, Inkscape and many more.

• When you choose a Linux-based operating system, you also choose a desktop environment. For many users, the DE sort of is the operating system. In other words, for some, they will really only interact with the user interface — especially if they avoid the command line. A good operating system will get out of the user’s way, allowing them to focus on the apps and tools they need.

• If you are moving from Windows to Linux, KDE can be a great desktop environment. It is very reminiscent of the traditional Windows 95 to Windows 7 experience. Unfortunately, KDE can be a bit tedious to set up. Sure, it works fine “out of the box,” but customizing it can be daunting. Luckily, there is a Debian-based operating system that is configured beautifully — especially for those leaving Microsoft’s OS. Called “Netrunner Desktop,” it comes pre-loaded with many useful programs, making it an absolute joy to use. Today, it reaches version 17.03, code-named “Cyclotron.”

Red Hat Family

• New York, March 31 (IANS) Leading open source solutions provider Red Hat has felicitated Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) with ‘US partner of the year’ recognition in the commercial category.

• Scientific Linux 5 has reached its End of Life.

• After March 31 2017 Scientific Linux 5 will not receive further updates and the files will be archived.

• The existing files will be moved into http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/obsolete/ for archival purposes after March 31 2017.

• This will break existing yum repos and kickstarts using the official distribution servers.

Finance

• Red Hat’s CEO and a top executive at PRA Health Sciences have sold some of their shares, netting $1 million and $4.7 million each.

Fedora

• On Tuesday, March 14th, the Fedora Nicaragua community and the CS50x.ni staff, with the support from Fundación UNO and the Fedora Project, we had the opportunity to meet to see a series of lectures in which the speakers shared their experience using Free Software, the importance and benefits of the different software tools used in the CS50x.ni course. The lectures were aimed for anyone who is taking the CS50x.ni course currently, or who wants to take it in the future or people interested in learning more about free software and more specifically about the Fedora Project.

Debian Family

• Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most software is distributed pre-compiled to end users.

• The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to permit verification that no flaws have been introduced — either maliciously or accidentally — during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• Ever since I’ve provided Ubuntu ISOs I’ve always been interested in knowing what gets downloaded the most verses the least in order to focus my work on where the interest is. Unfortunately because Google Drive doesn’t offer file specific download statistics as a workaround I started using Google URL Shortener for each ISO’s download link as it provides a counter.

Devices/Embedded

• Technologic’s “TS-7970” SBC runs Linux on an i.MX6, and offers wide power and temp ranges, dual GbE, WiFi, BT, CAN, Modbus, an FPGA, and full schematics.

• Technologic Systems’ Linux-driven TS-7970 SBC was a long time coming, having been originally announced in June, 2015, but that’s not so surprising for such a complex, feature-rich SBC. The 122 x 112mm TS-7970 offers extended temperature support in fanless systems running at about 3 watts, and is aimed at mainstream embedded products including “smart devices, auto entertainment systems, medical systems, enterprise class intelligent control, and plant automation.” Other recent i.MX6 based SBCs include Fedevel’s OpenRex.

• The open spec Orange Pi 2G-IoT single board Linux computer is now available. Apart from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, this tiny PC also features cellular connectivity. Orange Pi 2G-IoT is powered by 1GHz ARM Cortex-A5 32-bit processor and 256MB RAM. You can buy this board on Aliexpress (link given ahead).

• Mender’s open source, Yocto-optimized OTA updater for embedded Linux devices features a dual A/B rootfs partition layout with automatic rollback support.

• After a two-year develop cycle, Mender has released the first production-ready version of its eponymous over-the-air (OTA) updating software for embedded Linux devices. The software is promoted as being the only OTA product that offers open source licensing for both the client installed on the device and the management server.

• This update sheds some light on the complexities of this entire project, summarises the status of the main portions of the project, and announces our travel plans.

• The latest release of NextCloudPi is out!

• The most noticeable change for users is remote updates.

• As new versions come out, we will have the option to upgrade our private cloud directly from the internet.

• This means that from now on it will be easier for users to get the latest goodies without having to start from scratch.

Phones

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Ittiam Systems, the leading provider of advanced video and visual analytics solutions and an early member of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), has announced completion of a project to enhance the encoding speed of the open-source VP9 encoder. The performance-optimized version, developed in close collaboration with Google and Netflix, is now publicly available as part of libvpx, the royalty-free, open-source distribution of VP9 software.

• Brian Behlendorf is the executive director of Hyperledger, the open source blockchain consortium powering much of the trade finance industry’s experimentations on the technology to date.

• Hyperledger Fabric is the platform on which HSBC and Bank of America Merrill Lynch piloted a scheme in 2016 showing that letters of credit can be executed on the blockchain. Also in 2016, India’s Yes Bank launched a solution on Hyperledger Fabric, allowing vendors of a retail chain invoice discounts for advance payments.

• As I was searching for open source projects that help learners with disabilities, such as blindness or dyslexia, I came across Bookshare. That led me to Bookshare’s parent company, Benetech, a technology nonprofit based in Palo Alto, CA which focuses on empowering communities in need.

• [...]

• Benetech Labs has started to address these interoperability roadblocks. In conjunction with the Open Referral Initiative, Bui and her team are working with social service referral providers in the U.S. to optimize their collection and maintenance of accurate and up-to-date human-services data through an open data infrastructure. Once that infrastructure is in place, Benetech and other organizations can develop tools on top of it to better connect people to services. Bui expects to run pilot programs this year with a focus on specific service areas, such as legal aid services and local and regional government-provided health and human services.

• Cloudera, the data management and machine learning company, has filed for an initial public offering on the NYSE.

• While the company has lost more than $130 million per year since 2015, the future risks faced by Cloudera could cause alarm for potential investors or anyone looking at open-source software as a viable business model.

• Now it’s possible for anyone to see and share 3-D nanoscale imagery with a new open-source software platform developed by researchers at the University of Michigan, Cornell University and open-source software company Kitware Inc.

• Tomviz 1.0 is the first open-source tool that enables researchers to easily create 3-D images from electron tomography data, then share and manipulate those images in a single platform.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• We talked about the upcoming Firefox interface design change, codename Photon, before here on Ghacks, and even revealed a mockup showing some of its interface elements last week.

• Turned out later that the mockup was not by the Photon team, but by another Firefox team that used tidbits of Photon in the screenshot.

Databases

• SQLite 3.18 is now available as the newest feature release to this open-source embedded database library.

• A prominent addition to SQLite 3.18 is the PRAGMA optimize command. This will attempt to optimize the database and should be called prior to closing the connection to the database. In the future, they plan to add other automated maintenance tasks with this optimize command.

• Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) are the configuration standards for United States Department of Defense (DoD) Information Assurance (IA) and IA-enabled devices/systems published by the United States Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). Since 1998, DISA has played a critical role enhancing the security posture of DoD’s security systems by providing the STIGs. The STIGs contain technical guidance to “lock down” information systems/software that might otherwise be vulnerable to a malicious computer attack.

• Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 3.0.2 — the second point release in the Firebird 3.0 series.

CMS

• One of the things I’ve always liked about the Drupal community is its openness to diversity. The tech world in general has a well-documented problem with diversity and Drupal is by no means immune to that, but the Drupal community at least makes a strong effort to buck that trend, very much to its credit and benefit.

• There are gays and lesbians in Drupal, many of whom are open and out about it. There are transgender people involved in Drupal. If event attendance is a guide the community is about 20% women, far lower than most would like but far higher than is typical for Open Source projects. There are people who are polyamorous and people who are asexual. There are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Atheists, Agnostics, and probably a few others I’ve not met personally yet. While the community as a whole definitely skews liberal, I know there are plenty of people far to the right of me politically on various topics, as well as far to the left.

• That eclectic background of our community is an asset. Every study shows that teams of mixed backgrounds, along many axes, do better. Even if that mixed environment makes people a bit uncomfortable at times, that’s a benefit. There’s even a session on the topic at DrupalCon Baltimore (that you should all go to).

• A prominent contributor to the open source Drupal content management system has been asked to distance himself from project because “his belief system is inconsistent with [the] project’s goals.”

• The beliefs at issue involve participation in the BDSM and Gorean (NSFW) communities, the latter involving people interested in recreating the culture of male dominance and female sexual servitude depicted in John Norman’s poorly regarded Gor sci-fi novels.

• But because the conflict appears to be a matter of ideas rather than deeds – there are no public allegations of wrongdoing or harm – the Drupal project’s leadership has come under fire for intolerance.

Healthcare

• The government of Slovenia will make available online healthcare manuals intended to ease communication between medical staff and patients who do not speak Slovenian. The documentation uses pictograms accompanied by texts in seven languages. The material will be used as training material for healthcare professionals in the country.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• While the networking community is getting ready for Open Networking Summit 2017, we spoke to Bill Ren, Vice President of Huawei Network, Industry & Ecosystem Development, to discuss the role of openness in what Huawei calls the “All-Cloud Network.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Music written and created entirely using the FOSS apps Lilypond and Linux Multimedia Studio. Nothing else could be so beautiful, we think.

Public Services/Government

• France has extended its reference list of free software (SILL – Socle Interministériel de logiciel libre), including Cloud Computing, virtualisation and new development tools.

Licensing/Legal

• the pain and confusion of common open licenses, roughly quantified

• [...]

• Pain: Inconvenience in incorporating or using software in company products or services. Mostly from compliance with license conditions requiring attribution, identification of changes, provision of source code, and copyleft license terms requirements.

• Confusion: Unfamiliarity with a license’s terms and uncertainty in interpreting what those terms mean. A reflection of license popularity, how long the form has been used, and quality of license drafting.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• Birmingham spent £188.8 million to promote open access to knowledge with the Library of Birmingham so the city was a fitting setting for those trying to retain and regain these rights that we are quickly losing. Sadly our libraries are now closing and copyright is gaining a tighter strangle-hold on our culture but Pirates know it doesn’t have to be like that.

Programming/Development

• As shown in the profile, the Speedometer benchmark is already a lot closer to what actual web page profiles look like, yet it’s still not perfect — it doesn’t take into account parse time for the score, and it creates 100 todos within a few milliseconds, which is not how a user interacts with a webpage, usually. V8’s strategy for measuring performance improvements and identifying bottlenecks thus changed from using mostly traditional JavaScript benchmark methods toward using browser benchmarks like Speedometer and also tracking the real-world performance of web pages.

• Microsoft announced today that CodePlex, the company’s open source project-hosting service, will be closed down.

• Started in 2006, the service offered an alternative to SourceForge. It was based initially on Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server source control and later added options to use Subversion, Mercurial, and git.

Standards/Consortia

• The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has announced the schedule of events for World Standards Week (WSW) 2017, which will be held October 16–20 in Washington, DC. WSW is an annual event where members of the standards and conformity assessment community come together in the spirit of cooperation and collaboration.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Bernie Sanders doesn’t just want to play defense on health care — he’s introducing a bill that would expand the Medicare program to everybody in America, creating a single-payer health care system.

• Such a system would wipe out inefficiencies in our current, private insurance-run system, and polls very well — yet it is opposed by the health care industry and the Democratic and Republican establishments that relies on them for campaign cash.

• But creating a “Medicare-for-all,” single-payer health insurance system for all Americans would be fulfilling the dream of those who created the Medicare system in the first place in 1965.

• We are going to court to prevent Kentucky from shutting down the last abortion clinic without any medical justification.

• This is not a drill. Kentucky is on the verge of closing the last abortion clinic in the state.

• While attention is focused on the threat to women’s health at the federal level — everything from the Supreme Court nominee’s position on reproductive rights and “defunding” of Planned Parenthood — states are quietly passing abortion restrictions and targeting abortion providers to try to shut them down. We can’t fall for this head fake. The states are running amok, and Kentucky is the most drastic recent example. Come Monday, unless a federal court intervenes, Kentucky will close the last abortion clinic.

• After two deaths of teenage residents in less than four years, AdvoServ has quietly taken a new name that makes it harder to follow the trail of media coverage, including ours.

• The French Ministry of Social Affairs and Health announced today that the ministry has negotiated with pharmaceutical company Gilead to bring down the prices of hepatitis C medicines.

Security

• The emails had .gz (gzipped) attachments that contained Word documents with malicious macro code attached. The file uses PowerShell commands to download and execute payloads.

• How are security vulnerability disclosures handled in the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration and management system? That’s the question that was answered at length in a standing-room only session at the Kubecon/CloudNative EU conference in Berlin. Though the session had the somewhat whimsical title,’ Dance Madly on the Lip of a Volcano with Security Release Processes’ there is particular meaning behind the title.

• “As an instrument for selecting at random, I have found nothing superior to dice,” wrote statistician Francis Galton in an 1890 issue of Nature. “When they are shaken and tossed in a basket, they hurtle so variously against one another and against the ribs of the basket-work that they tumble wildly about, and their positions at the outset afford no perceptible clue to what they will be even after a single good shake and toss.”

• With IT security breaches becoming a staple in daily news reports, organizations big and small alike need to ramp up their defense. More than 95% of all IT breaches happen when a user credential or server gets hacked. While the YubiKey protects user accounts from remote hijacking, millions of servers storing sensitive data still lack physical security.

• Hardware security modules (HSMs) offer the physical protection of servers, but are historically limited by its cost, size, and performance. The YubiHSM 2 breaks that mold with its extensive range of use cases. Applications include protecting data centers, cloud server infrastructures, manufacturing and industrial products and services, and many more.

• Just when we’d learned the importance of HTTPS in address bars, spammers and malicious hackers have figured out how to game the system.

• Let’s Encrypt is an automated service that lets people turn their old unencrypted URLs into safely encrypted HTTPS addresses with a type of file called a certificate. It’s terrific, especially because certificates are expensive (overpriced, actually) and many people can’t afford them. So it’s easy to argue that the Let’s Encrypt service has done more than we may ever realize to strengthen the security of the internet and users everywhere.

Defence/Aggression

• Two journalists are suing President Trump and other top U.S. officials, claiming that they are on the government’s “kill list” of individuals targeted for drone strikes, Politico reported Thursday.

• The journalists, former Al Jazeera Islamabad bureau chief Ahmad Zaidan and freelance journalist Bilal Kareem, say in the lawsuit that they were placed on the “kill list” by the Obama administration, a decision maintained by the Trump White House.

• Kareem claims he has nearly died in five separate airstrikes over the year, while Zaidan, who has reported extensively on al Qaeda and interviewed the terrorist group’s now-deceased leader, Osama bin Laden, multiple times, says he is on the “kill list” because he was improperly designated as a member of the group, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood.

• Indonesia is accused by the Movement of waging slow-motion genocide in Papua.

• The West Papuan representative group cites evidence of simmering armed conflict, unrest, extra-judicial killings and jailings of Papuans, and marginalisation of their culture.

• President Trump is following the same path as his predecessor, bowing to the Saudi royal family and helping in their brutal war against Yemen, as Gareth Porter described to Dennis J Bernstein.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Pamela Anderson has talked of her “love” for Julian Assange, calling him “the most famous refugee of our time”.

• The former Baywatch star wrote about the Wikileaks founder on her blog.

• She said that her relationship with Mr Assange, 45, was “no secret” and that he was “one of my favourite people”.

• The post comes five months after Ms Anderson, 49, was seen delivering lunch to him at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where Mr Assange has lived for almost five years.

• He claimed asylum there in 2012, in order to avoid extradition to Sweden.

• Mr Assange is wanted for questioning in Sweden over a sex allegation, which he denies.

• Sweden must feels a tremendous responsibility to America - to give him up? Which is a shame.

• Julian is a human being who is extremely empathetic and cares deeply about the world. And - because of his work . He has made some powerful enemies in a few countries- America especially by exposing them.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Authorities are concerned four missing people may have fallen victim to floodwaters brought on by ex-cyclone Debbie in Queensland.

• Queensland State Disaster coordinator deputy commissioner Stephen Gollschewski said desperate searches were underway in the state’s southeast corner.

• Two women have died in flood waters in northern New South Wales.

• “We currently have four people missing about whom we have serious concerns and have deployed significant resources of emergency services to search for those persons,” Gollschewski said.

• Trump may have just signed a death warrant for our planet (at least, for a planet that is liveable for humans). And the lies he told to justify it have real consequences for real Americans, here and now.

• Blair should rather take a lesson from Ghana, which is celebrating its sixtieth year of existence and has never invaded another country. Doubtless, beneath his hypocritical witterings, he is as always sniffing around for money and trying to leverage himself into Ghana’s oil, gold or bauxite sectors.

Finance

• Victoria Bateman insisted that women have as much right as men to earn money from their bodies, arguing that economists were “inconsistent” in their treatment of the “largely female profession” compared with male-dominated occupations such as “soldiering and boxing”.

• EU leaders have said there will be no talks on Britain’s future relationship with the bloc until the UK government makes “sufficient progress” on the Brexit divorce, including settling its bills and citizens’ rights.

• The result in recent months has been a high-stakes race to the bottom between Walmart and Amazon that seems great for shoppers, but has consumer packaged goods brands feeling the pressure.

• Concerns continue to grow among civil society about provisions in a major trade agreement in the Asian region. Of specific worry is the intellectual property chapter containing in particular a data exclusivity clause, and the linkage between the investment chapter and the IP chapter.

• On Friday, one dollar equaled about 18.70 pesos. On Nov. 8, it was worth 18.50 pesos.

• But at one point after Trump’s win, a dollar equaled nearly 22 pesos — a major swing for a currency. The day after the election the peso plummeted 11%.

• Why has the peso enjoyed such a massive rebound? Investors believe the most severe of Trump’s trade threats may not come to fruition. And Mexico’s central bank has taken steps to buoy the battered currency.

• Corporate rule is not only disenfranchising people worldwide, it is fueling climate change, destroying cultural and biological diversity, and replacing community with consumerism. These are undoubtedly scary times. Yet the very fact that the crises we face are linked can be the source of genuine empowerment. Once we understand the systemic nature of our problems, the path towards solving them – simultaneously – becomes clear.

• [...]

• Around the world, from the USA to India, from China to Australia, people are reweaving the social and economic fabric at the local level and are beginning to feel the profound environmental, economic, social and even spiritual benefits. Local business alliances, local finance initiatives, locally-based education and energy schemes, and, most importantly, local food movements are springing up at an exponential rate.

• The report reinforces many other studies documenting the devastating impact of nearly three decades of deindustrialization (read NAFTA) and automation on Americans with high school education or less. According to Dr. Case: “This doesn’t seem to be just about income. This is about accumulating despair for these people.” The numbers are hard to credit: “In 1999 white men and women aged 50-54 with a high school education had a mortality rate 30 per cent lower than black Americans. In 2015 it was 30 per cent higher.” (There was no indication that the situation for Blacks and Hispanics actually improved.) The numbers are similar for all age groups from 25 – 64.

• The gravity of the changes are unique to the US where deindustrialization has been most dramatic and where slack labour standards, low unionization rates, a tattered social safety net and expensive health insurance make less educated workers extremely vulnerable. According to the two researchers Canada along with Britain, the UK, Australia and Germany are still seeing declining death rates.

• On copyright, the letter promises to “seek commitments from the NAFTA countries to strengthen their laws and procedures on enforcement of intellectual property rights, such as by ensuring that their authorities have authority to seize and destroy pirated and counterfeit goods, equipment used to make such goods, and documentary evidence.” On e-commerce, it commits to tackling “measures that impede digital trade in goods and services, restrict cross-border data flows, or require local storage or processing of data, including with respect to financial services”.

• Both of these are consistent with the wholesale transfer of TPP obligations into NAFTA, although they are annoyingly vague about what specific rules the U.S. will be including, other than the examples given. However it is worth noting that in at least one respect—the extension of the data localization ban to the financial industry—the letter proposes going beyond what was contained in the TPP. Exclusion of the financial services industry from those rules was one of the main sticking points with the TPP for Republicans while Obama was promoting it.

• The USTR letter also indicates that the administration intends to maintain the controversial Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions of NAFTA, which allowed pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly to sue Canada for the country’s decision not to grant two drug patents. Although Canada recently won that case, the ability for foreign companies to challenge legislation and court decisions that go against their financial interests was one of the TPP’s most controversial provisions, and will remain divisive as the NAFTA renegotiation goes forward.

• In one of his first tweets as president, here’s how Donald Trump promised to spend taxpayer dollars:

• “We will follow two simple rules: BUY AMERICAN & HIRE AMERICAN!” he tweeted 55 minutes after taking the oath of office on Inauguration Day.

• In the first big test of that pledge, here’s the reality: The Trump administration has opened the doors for firms from Mexico, El Salvador and other free-trade treaty countries to supply big-ticket items for the wall, the barrier along the United States’ southern border that Trump made a centerpiece of his campaign.

• [...]

• Allowing the wall to be built with non-American materials is no oversight — it’s what is required under U.S. trade law.

• “If we’re going to comply with our trade agreements, you can’t say we’re only going to buy American,” said Jean Heilman Grier, the U.S. representative who negotiated procurement issues with the World Trade Organization and other international trade treaty partners.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Things about America we’ve learned since November.

• Our nation, the republic, democracy, our very system of government is more fragile than at any other time in American history. So fragile that everything has, or is in near-immediate danger of, collapsing, after only a two month jog from near-perfect to the edge of dystopia.

• The cause of this is Vladimir Putin, who is an evil genius, spymaster, mastermind, brilliant, super criminal, chessmaster, but also a thug and dictator.

• The White House press corps has not exactly been a haven for inspirational adversarial journalism over the years. Made up almost exclusively of corporate media outlets, it is largely known for a ridiculous correspondents dinner and its failure to hold presidents to account (FAIR.org, 5/4/13). But however timid these reporters have been over the years, it is clear the Trump administration is going to great lengths to marginalize them.

Censorship/Free Speech

• I do not care for censorship in any sort of art form, no matter what it is. I fully believe that artists should have final say in what they pour their heart and soul into. Whether or not the consumer wishes to experience whatever the artist has created should be left up to said consumer. If someone does not want to listen to an explicit song, they should listen to the clean version. If someone does not want naked breasts in their film, they should stay away from movies that are rated R for frontal nudity.

• [...]

• The threat of censorship is typically enough to get a developer to change their game’s tune. Some development teams flaunt such accusations of course (nearly the entire marketing campaign for Saints Row IV was based around their Australian censorship) but most shy away from being labeled as negatively controversial. Better to censor the content or change it to something less inflammatory prior to release then face negative press and a possible loss of sale upon release.

• The influential social media site Reddit.com, which has hundreds of millions of users, came under fresh fire today for allegedly discriminating against users of the pro-Trump section of the site called /r/The_Donald. Critics accused Reddit of under-reporting how many “subscribers” the section has while telling advertisers that the section has a much higher number of users.

• If we want a culture of free speech on campus, academics need to lead the way in showing students how to challenge, not shut down, viewpoints they disagree with. University students are paying for education, not daycare, and that means having freedom of speech, not freedom from speech.

• Open-records activist Carl Malamud bought a hard copy, and it cost him $1,207.02 after shipping and taxes. A copy on CD was $1,259.41. The “good” news for Georgia residents is that they’ll only have to pay $385.94 to buy a printed set from LexisNexis.

• The Central European University – a Hungarian-US accredited private institution based in Budapest and a recognized contributor to Hungarian and international research, has been the target of an increasingly hostile attitude from the Hungarian authorities over the past months.

• As Prime Minister Viktor Orban tightened his grip on power, acquiring broad control over the media, a concerted, gradual attack on financier turned philanthropist George Soros – CEU’s founder and endowment provider, has been launched, culminating this week with a legislative proposal that would essentially strong-arm the University into leaving Budapest.

• Among other requirements under the new law, CEU would have to operate under a binding bilateral agreement between Hungary and the U.S. and open a fully functional campus in the State of New York. In a public response to the proposal, CEU substantiated its allegations that the legislative project is overtly discriminatory and punitive, meant to affect CEU alone, despite the government’s claim that it applies to all foreign universities operating in Hungary.

Privacy/Surveillance

• White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the repeal ensures Internet service providers are treated the same as online businesses like Facebook (FB, Tech30) and Google (GOOGL, Tech30), which are not required to receive permission from users.

• I’m happy if this issue raises the general level of public awareness about privacy and the need for Internet users everywhere to take a more active role in preserving it. And VPNs can be a useful tool for protecting one’s privacy online. However, it’s important to understand the limitations of this technology, and to take the time to research providers before entrusting them with virtually all your browsing data — and possibly even compounding your privacy woes in the process.

• Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute wants to know why device searches at the border have skyrocketed since the beginning of this year. As was reported earlier this month, the number of devices searched in February 2017 equals the total searched in all of 2015. Even last year’s jump from 5,000 to 25,000 searches looks miniscule in comparison. Border device searches are on track to more than double last year’s numbers. (h/t The Intercept)

• The Knight First Amendment Institute filed FOIA requests with the DHS, ICE, and CBP for “statistical, policy, and assessment records” related to the steep increase in device searches. It’s also looking for any legal interpretations the agencies might have on hand that explain their take on the Supreme Court’s Riley decision, which instituted a warrant requirement for cell phone searches.

• The House Oversight Committee finally took on the FBI’s Facial Recognition Program and discovered what critics have been saying about it for years: it’s broken, filled with innocent Americans, and completely out of control.

• As far as finding Comey’s Twitter goes, the only hint he offered was the fact that he has “to be on Twitter now,” meaning that the account would likely be relatively new. Regarding his Instagram identity, though, Comey gave us quite a bit more to work with [...]

• For a few years now, our intelligence overseers have been insisting that we shouldn’t be too concerned about surveillance programs that collect “just metadata” because that doesn’t really reveal too much. But, of course, we’ve shown how “just metadata” can ruin a career diplomat’s life, and former NSA/CIA boss Michael Hayden has admitted that the US kills people based on metadata.

• Either way, I find it fascinating that reporter Ashley Feinberg needed just a few small bits of innocent metadata from FBI Director James Comey to track down his secret Twitter account. It took her all of four hours or so. Just last night, Comey admitted that he was on Twitter, leading lots of people to go searching for the account since there is no official one. I won’t describe all of how Feinberg tracked it down (it involves some pretty excellent sleuthing and is worth reading) but suffice it to say, it’s metadata that gives Comey away.

• Last week, the UK’s Home Secretary Amber Rudd said that WhatsApp risked becoming a “place for terrorists to hide.” Then, like many others that have used this tired old trope, she went on to call for the development of some magic unicorn key to unlock all encrypted communications, one that was somehow available only to those on the side of truth, beauty, law and order, and not to the other lot. In doing so, her cluelessness was particularly evident, as her invocation of the “necessary hashtags” emphasized, but she’s not alone in that. Despite the chorus of experts pointing out for the thousandth time why it’s not possible, the EU Justice Commissioner has just said that the EU must have magic unicorn keys, too.

• The government of Romania should shore up its eID data protection rules, says the Association for Technology and Internet (Asociația pentru Tehnologie și Internet, APTI), following its analysis of the latest government proposals. “The documents raise more questions than answers”, the NGO writes.

• Appflash’s privacy policy confirms that the app collects “your mobile number, device identifiers, device type and operating system, and information about the AppFlash features and services you use and your interactions with them…[and] information about the list of apps you have on your device” — and that data is used by “non-Verizon sites, services and devices.”

• Who’d have thought that just days after the house rolled back privacy protections for internet users, ISPs would take advantage? The EFF did, pointing out that Verizon has already announced that it will install spyware, in the form of the launcher AppFlash, across its users’ Android devices in the coming weeks. AppFlash, as TechCrunch reports, will embed itself to the left of your home screen, offering details on local restaurants, movies or apps that you can download.

• Lawyers at EFF, the ACLU, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers released a report today outlining strategies for challenging law enforcement hacking, a technique of secretly and remotely spying on computer users to gather evidence. Federal agents are increasingly using this surveillance technique, and the report will help those targeted by government malware—and importantly their attorneys—fight to keep illegally-obtained evidence out of court.

• A recent change in little-known federal criminal court procedures, which was quietly pushed by the Justice Department, has enabled federal agents to use a single warrant to remotely search hundreds or thousands of computers without having to specify whose information is being captured or where they are. We expect these changes to result in much greater use of the technique, and the guide will arm attorneys with information necessary to defend their clients and ensure that law enforcement hacking complies with the Constitution and other laws.

• In a statement, WikiLeaks said Marble was used by the spy agency to “hamper forensic investigators and anti-virus companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to the CIA”.

• Now we have Marble to look at. A collection of 676 source code files, the Marble cache reveals details of the CIA’s Marble Framework tool, used to hide the true source of CIA malware, and sometimes going as far as appearing to originate from countries other than the US.

• Today, March 31st 2017, WikiLeaks releases Vault 7 “Marble” — 676 source code files for the CIA’s secret anti-forensic Marble Framework. Marble is used to hamper forensic investigators and anti-virus companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to the CIA.

• Marble does this by hiding (“obfuscating”) text fragments used in CIA malware from visual inspection. This is the digital equivallent of a specalized CIA tool to place covers over the english language text on U.S. produced weapons systems before giving them to insurgents secretly backed by the CIA.

• The Uzbekistani government is conducting unlawful surveillance of its citizens and fostering a climate of fear and uncertainty for Uzbekistani people in Europe, said Amnesty International in a new report launched today.

• ‘We Will Find You, Anywhere’ looks at the impact of unlawful government surveillance on the lives of seven Uzbekistani people, living within and outside the country.

• The group found close links between the dark web and surface web. More than 20 per cent of the 1.5 million dark web pages they analysed imported resources like pictures, documents and Javascript files from surface websites.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Here is my question to MP Khalid, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Ahmed Hussen, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:

• Am I indulging in “Islamophobia” if I publicly choose to dissociate myself from the following two verses of the Qur’an?

• An all too familiar story. Via Radio Farda [in Persian]: According to a number of pro-human rights websites, the Iranian Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of Sina Dehghan, 21 year old prisoner in the city of Arak, for insulting the Prophet Muhammad. He used to insult the prophet in social networks. When he was arrested, he was only 19.

• The seven Muslim councillors of the House had walked out on Tuesday when other members started singing the national song.

• The oil-rich Gulf state is home to more than 600,000 domestic helpers, a majority of them Asians, many of whom complain of abuse, mistreatment and non-payment of wages.

• Amos Yee’s dream of being free to shit on all religions without legal consequences came true last week when he was granted political asylum in the United States.

• Below is an update published by Singaporean blogger Amos Yee’s attorney, Sandra Grossman from Grossman Law, LLC

• Respect asylum claim judgement and release Amos Yee from extended detention

• Singapore tries to spin out of its embarrassment over the United States court decision to grant asylum to Amos Yee by presenting it as an endorsement of “hate speech”. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) called it “the prerogative of the US to take in such people who engage in hate speech”, and went on to warn that “many more such people… who deliberately engage in hate speech” would be applying for asylum in the US.

• LIKE many teenage boys, Amos Yee, a Singaporean blogger, is crude, insensitive and confrontational. In 2015, just days after the death of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founder and long-time leader, Mr Yee posted a profanity-laced video to his YouTube channel calling Lee “a horrible person”, an “awful leader” and a “dictator”. For a small part of that video (around 30 of its 519 seconds), he also mocked Christianity. He challenged Lee Hsien Loong, Lee’s son and Singapore’s current prime minister, to “come at me, motherfucker”.

• It’s been almost a week since an immigration judge in Chicago ruled that an 18-year-old from Singapore should be granted asylum here, but the teenager has yet to be released from federal custody.

• Last Friday, after the immigration judge in Chicago ruled in favor of Amos Yee, his pro bono attorney Sandra Grossman thought he’d be freed from detention by Monday.

• Amos Yee has been detained by federal immigration authorities since December when he was taken into custody at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Attorneys said the 18-year-old could be released from a Wisconsin detention center as early as Monday.

• There is an emerging national debate about school policing. It is not about whether school police should be armed but about how best to improve school environments and ensure student success while minimizing unnecessary student arrests. Emerging best practices aim to reduce police involvement in routine disciplinary school matters, ensure fairness in disciplinary processes, and increase the ratio of counselors and student support services to cops.

• Sadly, while many communities explore how to improve school climates by building trusting relationships between adults and students, Pittsburgh debates the arming of school police.

• A recent Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial and a resolution adopted by the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers’ executive board both put forth troubling arguments that are at odds with what we know about school policing.

• Gov. Cuomo has just one day left to pass a budget that adequately funds New York’s public defense system.

• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo calls his state “the progressive capital of the nation,” but when it comes to public defense, New York is anything but.

• The New York Civil Liberties Union released a video last week, calling on Gov. Cuomo and legislators to overhaul and properly fund the state’s failing public defense system. New York state leaves responsibility for public defense to its counties, creating an underfunded, patchwork, and unconstitutional system in which poor New Yorkers accused of crimes often do not receive adequate legal representation. Under the Sixth Amendment, every person is guaranteed an attorney regardless of their ability to pay. The new 60-second video, #LostInTheSystem, comes as the New York State legislature considers public defense within the state budget process, with a looming March 31 deadline.

• Moore was 20 years old in 1980 when he was involved with two others in the botched robbery of the Birdsall Super Market in Houston that ended with the shooting death of a 70-year-old store clerk. Less than three months later Moore was sentenced to death for his role in the crime.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Without that connection, slow as it felt, I never would have had the opportunity to discover Linux, or open source, or any of the many wondering pieces of our connected global culture that are only possible because of shared experience. And yet, I have to remind myself regularly, there are many people without this basic level of access, both across the globe and around the block. I’m excited by open source projects seeking to put a dent in this problem of global information access through mesh networking, distributed server projects like FreedomBox, and other projects working to bridge the digital divide.

DRM

• Amazon is taking a tough stance against vendors who sell fully-loaded Kodi boxes and other “pirate” media players through its platform. The store now explicitly bans media players that “promote” or “suggest” the facilitation of piracy. Sellers who violate this policy, of which there are still a few around, risk having their inventory destroyed.

• [...]

• While Kodi itself is a neutral platform, [...]

• On April 13th, that may change. Unless we can stop it, the W3C will welcome a new wave of user-hostile DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) onto the Web, making it harder than ever for us to be secure and free online.

• There’s only two weeks left until members of the World Wide Web Consortium vote on whether the web’s premier open standards organization will add DRM to the toolkit available to web developers, without effecting any protections for people who discover security vulnerabilities that affect billions of web users, let alone people who adapt web tools for those with disabilities and people who create legitimate, innovative new technologies to improve web video.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• As is commonly said, mistakes happen and it’s what we do about those mistakes that is important. Too often when the mistakes are concerning trademark bullying, there is nothing done to acknowledge or address that bullying. The bully will simply state the oft-repeated excuse that they must bully according to trademark law, which isn’t remotely the case. And, because there is no acknowledgement that anything was done wrong, the bullying then continues.

• Well, after a recent dust-up over trademarks between BrewDog, a self-styled “punk brewery,” and a family-owned pub, it seems that the brewery is actually going all in on reforming how it approaches trademark issues, and even intellectual property more generally.

Copyrights

• If parents are aware that their children have committed copyright infringement they must identify them to the court if required to do so, or pay their fines. That was the ruling of Germany’s Federal Court of Justice this week in a case concerning the unlawful distribution of ‘Loud’ by Rihanna, carried out by a minor in 2011.

• While copyright collection societies the world over tend to be good hosts for the disease of corruption, not all corruption is equal. These collection groups often like to jack up fees when someone points out that they actually have to do their job, to threaten businesses in the most insane ways, and also to, oops, sometimes just totally forget to pay the artists they purport to benefit. Over in Kenya, however, the dominant copyright collection group, MCSK, went for and hit the corruption trifecta by engaging in all of three at the same time. Not a good look for anyone who thinks these collection groups have a role to play for artists.

• Spotify is pulling the plug on free access to some artists’ newest releases, according to The Guardian. Currently, Spotify’s 50 million paid users fork over £10/month to play their music offline without ads, but now they’re also getting exclusive access to artists’ biggest new releases. Meanwhile, Spotify’s other 50 million free users have their access suddenly restricted.

• [...]

• Because Spotify’s decision affects 50 million users, this move could create huge waves for both Spotify and the music industry as a whole, since it could encourage users to regress from free (and legal) methods to their familiar free (and illegal) methods. Most everyone knows you can type in “Taylor Swift discography torrent” into Google and get years of Taylor Swift’s music in minutes without paying Spotify, record labels, or Taylor Swift. So what will happen when 50 million users you’ve been slowly leading away from piracy suddenly feel like they’ve been left out in the cold?

• Eugene Volokh, just recently teamed up with Paul Levy to track down who was behind a scam abusing the court system with forged or fraudulent court documents to get questionable or fake court orders to force Google to takedown links. It’s a sketchy (and illegal) “reputation management” trick and it appears that at least a few folks are doing it. Volokh has just spotted another one and it comes with a Prenda Law twist.

• The background for the changes stems from the recognition that the Register of Copyrights is currently seen essentially as an at-will employee of the Librarian of Congress – who is not really focused on IP Policy or Efficiency.

• Thanks to the First Amendment and longstanding copyright limitations, copyright holders don’t have the legal right to prevent others from using their works to express messages that they disagree with or find offensive, nor do they have a right to prevent someone who lawfully purchases a copy of their work from reselling it, repurposing it, or destroying it entirely.

• That’s because copyright law in the United States doesn’t provide authors the ability to launch lawsuits over their “moral rights” (except for some works of visual art covered by the Visual Artists Rights’ Act). And that’s a good thing – by limiting authors’ abilities to control how their works are used, U.S. copyright law creates space for downstream creators and users to adapt and remix existing works to create new interpretations and meanings, without facing a veto from the original author. It also allows those who own physical copies of copyrighted works to use those copies in the ways that make most sense for them – they can annotate them, take them apart and reassemble them into new creations, give them away, or even destroy them.

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