● 04.04.17

● Links 4/4/2017: New Linux Foundation Members, Simon 0.4.80 Alpha

Posted in News Roundup at 6:00 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• Ask any Linux enthusiast, and they’ll tell you how awesome an operating system Linux can be. (Well, except Bryan Lunduke, who will say it sucks before he says it’s awesome.) For the desktop user, the freedom from worry about most viruses is a big plus, and not spending $100 upgrading Windows is a big plus too.

• As awesome as Linux is for desktop use, Linux (and BSD for that matter) truly shines as a server. While providing web-based services is one of those server-y things Linux does really well, Linux can do a lot more than host a blog about family outings.

• If you’re looking to host your own services instead of paying for or relying on those in the cloud, running your own home server is one of the best ways to keep your files private.

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

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

• Docker isn’t what it used to be. New security tools, orchestration changes, native Docker support for Windows and the release of LXD are some modifications that are worth knowing about.

• We’re learning about Kubernetes in this series, and why it is a good choice for managing your containerized applications. In part 1, we talked about what Kubernetes does, and its architecture. Now we’ll compare Kubernetes to competing container managers.

• The popular Docker container technology is now vital in developing software optimized for the cloud. Docker allows developers to bundle together pieces of an application to run smoothly across different platforms and devices. Singh, who worked at Amazon for nine years and was one of the earliest to join the AWS team before founding Distelli, says he understands the customer need for running in multiple clouds. With Europa, Distelli wants to provide the tools and technology to make that easier.

• By now, you probably know how popular Docker containers are with technical folks. But do you understand the business case for Docker? Do you know how containers help save companies money? If not, read on.

• Docker became popular in its early days because it simplifies the work of developers and admins in important ways. Containers provide environment parity, which makes it easier to find bugs before they reach end-users. Containers also help developers to deploy software more quickly.

• Docker, microservices, Continuous Delivery are currently some of the most popular topics in the world of programming. In an environment consisting of dozens of microservices communicating with each other, it seems to be particularly important the automation of the testing, building, and deployment process. Docker is an excellent solution for microservices because it can create and run isolated containers with service.

• In a unanimous voting process that concluded Wednesday during KubeCon in Berlin, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Technical Oversight Committee approved Docker Inc.’s motion to donate containerd — the current incarnation of its core container runtime — as an official CNCF incubation project. In the same meeting, the TOC also voted unanimously to adopt CoreOS’ rkt container runtime, as well.

• “Container orchestrators need community-driven container runtimes,” reads a formal statement from CNCF Executive Director Dan Kohn Wednesday, “and we are excited to have containerd which is used today by everyone running Docker. Becoming a part of CNCF unlocks new opportunities for broader collaboration within the ecosystem.”

• Although it is true that microservices follow the UNIX philosophy of writing short compact programs that do one thing and do it well, and that they bring a lot of advantages to a framework (e.g., continuous deployment, decentralization, scalability, polyglot development, maintainability, robustness, security, etc.), getting thousands of microservices up and running on a cluster and correctly communicating with each other and the outside world is challenging. In this talk from Node.js Interactive, Sandeep Dinesh — a Developer Advocate at Google Cloud — describes how you can successfully deploy microservices to a cluster using technologies that Google developed: Kubernetes and gRPC.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced that the DPDK Project (Data Plane Development Kit) community has moved to The Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral home that promotes collaboration around open source technologies, such as a technical governance model that enables the growth of developer communities.

• One of the most exciting parts of being in this industry over the past couple of decades has been witnessing the transformative impact that open source software has had on IT in general and specifically on networking. Contributions to various open source projects have fundamentally helped bring the reliability and economics of web-scale IT to organizations of all sizes. I am happy to report the community has taken yet another step forward with FRRouting.

• FRRouting (FRR) is an IP routing protocol suite for Unix and Linux platforms which includes protocol daemons for BGP, IS-IS, LDP, OSPF, PIM, and RIP, and the community is working to make this the best routing protocol stack available.

• After stirring up a ruckus by using words like “restrictive” and “virus” to describe the GPL in a Linux.com article, the Linux Foundation responds by quietly removing the post from the website.

• After Linus Torvalds was upset about the DRM pull request for Linux 4.11, the deadlines of new feature changes for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code targeting Linux 4.12 is being strictly enforced.

• Red Hat’s David Airlie has announced that 4.12 Git pulls will have a deadline by Linux 4.11-rc6 or else risk being postponed until Linux 4.13. New features will be postponed to the Linux 4.13 cycle for pull requests after this week, in ensuring time for testing of new feature code prior to the opening of the Linux 4.12 merge window around month’s end. This should keep Linus Torvalds happier and ensuring no rushed code is quickly promoted to mainline.

• ONAP is a collaborative open source project hosted by The Linux Foundation and formed in February through the combination of AT&T’s ECOMP and The Linux Foundation’s Open Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O). The two projects joined under ONAP to develop an open software platform for real-time, policy-driven software automation of virtual network functions. ONAP enables software, network and cloud provider companies as well as open source community developers to collaborate in an open ecosystem, encouraging rapid creation of new services and innovation.

• At the end of March, Greg Kroah-Hartman released three new maintenance updates for the long-term supported Linux 4.9 and 4.4 kernel series, as well as the latest stable Linux 4.10 kernel branch.

• Linux 4.10.8, 4.9.20 LTS and 4.4.59 LTS kernels are out, and they come only one day after their previous maintenance updates, which means that all of them are small patches addressing a few bugs that needed to be fixed urgently. Of course, users are urged to update their systems to these new versions as soon as possible.

Graphics Stack

• Apple has been the largest customer of Imagination Technologies with continuing to rely upon PowerVR graphics IP in their chips, but it looks like that is changing and Apple could be rolling out their own GPUs.

Benchmarks

• For getting April started, here is a fresh comparison of various BSDs and Linux distributions tested on an Intel Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E box. Tested operating systems included Antergos, Clear Linux, DragonFlyBSD 4.8, FreeBSD 11.0, Scientific Linux 7.3, TrueOS 20160322, Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS, and Ubuntu 17.04 20170330.

• Xonotic even sees a small improvement with the R9 285 on DRM-Next.

Applications

• Following previous article, it’s an overview to OnlyOffice word processor. I divide this article to 3 parts: user interface, equation editor, and document formats. The OnlyOffice word processor resembles WPS modern interface and it’s compatible with .odt & .docx documents. It’s a good replacement for WPS Writer or Microsoft Word when you want ribbon-like interface and Word document compatibility. OnlyOffice is free software licensed under GNU AGPLv3 and available for GNU/Linux.

• Rapid Photo Downloader developer Damon Lynch announced this past weekend the release of the first Beta build of the upcoming Rapid Photo Downloader 0.9 series of the open-source and free photo and video downloader for Linux PCs.

• Rapid Photo Downloader 0.9 will be the next major release of the application developed by a photographer for amateur and professional photographers alike. The new series has been in development for the past one a half years, during which it received an Alpha milestone approximately eleven months ago.

• It’s spent 2.5 years in development, but the first beta release of Rapid Photo Downloader 0.9 is now available to download.

• It’s been almost 7 years since we last featured this app on this site, so I’ll totally understand if you don’t recall much about it!

• Designed and built by a photographer, Rapid Photo Downloads lets you import photos and videos from a connected camera or smartphone quickly and, it claims, reliably.

• Now, I appreciate that few of you will have much use for this app, but it’s too cool to not throw a few words up here about.

• It’s called Gkill and it’s an interactive command-line process killer for Windows, macOS and Linux.

• The app is written in Go, and lets you quickly filter through and kill running tasks and processes using your keyboard.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Unity Technologies informs Softpedia about the availability of the Unity 5.6 game engine for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, iOS, and Microsoft Windows.

• Unity 5.6 appears to be the last maintenance update for the Unity 5 series, adding quite a bunch of improvements and new features. These include lighting improvements through a Progressive Lightmapper preview, which provides new light modes, better graphics performance, and Vulkan support enhancements.

• Armor Clash II [Steam], a cheap-looking RTS game will release soon with Linux support. Even though it looks a little tacky, I think it could be a good bit of fun.

• Fun 2D racer ‘Race Online’ [Steam] is set to release tomorrow on April 5th and the developer has detailed some changes coming to online play.

• A new video game adaptation of the 1989 novel ‘The Pillars of the Earth’ by Ken Follett is being developed by Daedalic Entertainment [Official Site] and they will be bringing it to Linux.

• Following last month’s ioquake3 security issue, the project has been reassessing their state of security and could use some help on that front as well as other matters.

• Superposition Benchmark [Official Site], the new tool from UNIGINE Corp will release this week. It looks like it will put some real stress on your system.

• According to Feral Interactive on Twitter in reply to my question, it seems Linux gamers will not be getting F1 2016, due to low sales of the previous title.

• I noted in my original review about issues of performance, which for the Linux version still hasn’t gotten any better.

• MegaGlest [Steam, Official Site], an open source RTS game that has been going for years is now available on Steam. Great to see this happen!

• Road Redemption [Steam], the bike racing and combat game inspired by Road Rash has a massive update, but the Linux version is currently behind.

• Parkitect [Official Site, GOG, Steam], the theme park building game that supports Linux has released another alpha. Amongst other things, it continues their UI overhaul.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• As reported last month, KDE’s speech recognition software is being revived and released today is a new development release.

• The first version (0.4.80) towards Simon 0.5.0 is out in the wilds. Please download the source code, test it and send us feedback.

• I’v been living here for the past six months, and I wanted to write earlier, but you guys know how things are, things like that can simply be in your head for quite a while before you actually do something. So, if anyone from the KDE community would like to get together for something in Munchen, please get in touch. I live near the Worthsee area, quite far from munchen ~40 minutes via SBahn, but I work in the heart of the city.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The shift from GTK-2 to GTK-3 has caused frustration that I think I’ve talked about here before. Much as Americans have historically hyperbolicly hinted at moving to Canada (especially now), I have on occasion talked about migrating preferred toolkits to QT. But… maybe this is actually gonna happen?

• Back in the times of QT 4, I noticed that the (then GUI) QT settings configuration tool had an option to just use my GTK (then 2) theme. Set and forget, and my desktop looks all smooth and integrated. I was reading about something mostly unrelated when I learned that QT5 still has this feature. There’s an environment variable – QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE – that I can set to “gtk3″, and then I’m back to not worrying about QT theming.

• Last week when writing about the release schedule for GNOME 3.26, one of the first questions was about what features are coming to this next installment of the GNOME desktop.

• While the GNOME 3.26 development cycle is still very young, below is a look at some of the features being talked about for GNOME 3.26. The list was made by looking at various individual program roadmaps, developer blogs, and more. The list is far from extensive and some of these items may not end up getting completed in time for the September debut of GNOME 3.26, but as of now this is a look at what’s planned. As the GNOME 3.26 development cycle progresses, we should get a better understanding of what will make the cut for GNOME 3.26.0.

Distributions

New Releases

• After more than 2 years of development, the developers of the independently developed Vine Linux distribution designed for the Japanese Linux community announced today the release and immediate availability of Vine Linux 6.5

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the April 2017 issue. With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community.

Arch Family

• The month of April kicks off with the release of a new ISO snapshot of the widely-used Arch Linux operating system, Arch Linux 2017.04.01, which brings the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source applications.

• Last month, when we reported on the release of the Arch Linux 2017.03.01 ISO snapshot, we told you that support for 32-bit installations was dropped from the official images of the independently developed GNU/Linux operating system, which slimmed down the images in size with a couple hundred MB.

Red Hat Family

• At last year’s Red Hat North American Partner Conference, company sales chief Arun Oberoi set a goal of the company reaching a 50/50 balance between its Linux and non-Linux businesses. A year into the effort, the open-source pioneer says it’s making strong progress.

• Mark Enzweiler, senior vice president of global channels and alliances at Red Hat called Oberoi’s declaration “a stake in the ground” and “an aspirational goal,” and one that the company and its partners are moving on.

• Red Hat’s upcoming messaging product release, Red Hat JBoss A-MQ 7, redefines what enterprise developers should look for in a high-performance messaging platform. It has an updated broker that’s built on a modern, asynchronous architecture for improved performance and scalability, and a new router component that can be networked to create a messaging backbone spanning datacenters, cloud and on-premises deployments.

• Red Hat’s latest Gluster storage update improves performance, deepens container support and introduces space-saving alternative to three-way replication to ensure data integrity.

• This is the final notification for the retirement of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. This notification applies only to those customers subscribed to the channel for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

• The end of March 2017 concluded with the end of life for various GNU/Linux distributions based on the Red Hat’s RHEL5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5) series.

• Red Hat published today, April 3, 2017, the final notification for the retirement of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system, targeted at customers subscribed to the company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 channel. Users are being notified that Red Hat won’t provide active support for RHEL5 starting March 31, 2017. However, Red Hat offers a special add-on for those who don’t want to upgrade.

Finance

• The $15 billion company, which offers open-source software products to businesses, released robust fourth-quarter results just a few days ago. It beat revenue growth expectations and consequently announced fiscal year 2018 guidance that surpassed previous expectations.

• The buoyant Q4 earnings report and current period outlook signify a comeback from Red Hat’s Q3 miss in December. But how did Red Hat grow Q4 revenues by 15.7% and beat estimates?

Fedora

• DNF 2.2.0, and LIBDNF 0.8.0 were released. The release adds new API for adding and initialization of new REPO object into REPODICT class. Also interesting could be a new API callback that allows to inform users about running scriplets during RPM transaction. Additionally it also fixes over 13 bugs. For complete list of changes see DNF release notes.

• We the Fedora Respins-SIG are happy to announce new F25-20170331 Updated Lives.

• So there is a thread on Hacker News based on a question from a Canonical employee asking for feedback on what people want from the next version of Ubuntu. I always try to read such threads even when they are not about Fedora or Red Hat. I fact I often read such articles and threads about non-Linux systems too to help understand what people are looking for and thus enable us to prioritize what we do with Fedora Workstation even better.

• Open source projects are built online and a lot of their community members are placed all over the world. Even though projects have people from around the world, this doesn’t stop ambitious community members to organize open source conferences or events in their own cities. Whether they’re focused generally to open source or for a specific project, you can find a variety of conferences, hackathons, workshops, or meet-ups all over the world. Fedora benefits from having Ambassadors to attend these events to introduce Fedora and spread the word about the community. It’s not uncommon to see Fedora participating in these events, and Linux Weekend 2017 in Tirana, Albania was not an exception.

• Alex Larsson from the Flatpak (formerly XDG-App) project, an open source initiative to develop a distro-agnostic Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework, announced today the release of Flatpak 0.8.5.

• Some of you out there reading our regular Flatpak reports may wonder what’s Flatpak 0.8.5 doing here when we already got Flatpak 0.9.1. Well, it looks like the Flatpak devs are still maintaining the stable 0.8 series of the project for various GNU/Linux distributions that did not yet moved to the 0.9 branch.

• Spring arrived and doing spring-cleaning I thought about all the cleanup tasks in Fedora. If you are interested in doing some Fedora spring-cleaning, I will show you some opportunities to get your hand’s dirty and Fedora cleaner.

Debian Family

• March 2017 was my seventh month as a Debian LTS team member.

• Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you’re interested in Android, Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.

Derivatives

• The development team behind the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux operating system series announced recently the availability of a new kernel and latest security updates in the official repositories of the Nev (8.15) release.

• just to let you know that the Devuan’s bug tracking system is finally available online at:

• https://bugs.devuan.org

• The system is compatible with the BTS used by Debian (we are actually using the same code base), and shares the same workflow.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Download Ubuntu 17.04 beta preview, recently released, and visually speaking you might be a little disappointed.

• Unity is almost entirely the same with some minor updates for a few core apps. Most of what’s new comes from the move to GNOME 3.24 for a few apps and core components.

• Looks it’s said are not as important as what’s inside that counts, and with the 17.04 beta it couldn’t be more true. Under the hood of his software update there’s enough new stuff that to make the final version well worth the update.

• With 17.04 Ubuntu’s Software Center gains some new powers, thanks to the underlying GNOME Software apps’ new support for Snap URLs. The URL support means that if you’d like to tell someone to install a Snap application you can simply give them a URL. That makes sharing Snap applications considerably easier.

• Nutty is a simple third party app that provides essential information on your system’s network-related aspects by displaying them in tabs.

• Being an app that was developed for elementary OS, Nutty network diagnostics features a clean Graphical User Interface and appropriately-titled tabs that aid its intuitive workflow.

• I’m Alan Griffiths and I’m a software developer. Being a software developer means I deal with a lot of problems that are rarely appreciated by non-developers. This is a story about dealing successfully with one of these problems.

• Software developers often talk about “technical debt”. This phrase comes from a metaphor that tries to explain the issue without being “too technical”. I think the term was first used by Ward Cunningham, but I could be wrong.

• The metaphor describes the effect of doing things in a way that meets the immediate goals but introduces future costs. For example, using fixed English text in an application can get it working for a demo or even an initial release, but if it needs to work in other languages there will be a lot of changes needed. Not just to text, but to assumptions about layout.

• More and more recently we have found ourselves talking about Mir’s abstraction layer, MirAL. It turns out that this set of interfaces to Mir has advanced from being a hobby project by a Canonical developer to now being a formal project within the organization and more of Unity 8 is making use of MirAL’s API/ABI.

• It’s the icon theme we use on our own desktops, and the icon theme that we often recommend to new users looking to give their Ubuntu desktop a “fresher” look than stock (sorry Ubuntu Mono Dark, but you’re so 2010).

• But it seems that this set, arguable one of the most popular Linux icon sets currently available, is in trouble — and it needs your help.

• Today, April 3, 2017, Canonical announced that OVH, the leading and fastest-growing cloud computing company offering VPS and dedicated servers, as well as other web services, joined the company’s Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud program.

• The new Canonical and OVH partnership will benefit OVH customers running public or private clouds, VPS, and bare metal servers on their infrastructures, minimizing the downtime and bandwidth costs. Being an Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud partner, OVH will now be able to distribute Ubuntu guest images to all of their users.

Devices/Embedded

• iWave has launched a rugged, 56 x 50mm “iW-RainboW-G25S” SBC with a Snapdragon 820 SoC, up to 6GB of LPDDR4 RAM, up to 128GB eMMC, WiFi, BT, and GPS.

• The iW-RainboW-G25S single board computer, which iWave also calls the APQ8096 SBC and Snapdragon 820 SBC, runs Android Marshamallow on Qualcomm’s quad-core APQ8096 SoC, better known as the Snapdragon 820. Designed for high-end embedded applications that require high processing power, graphics and multimedia capabilities, the SBC weighs in at a tiny 56 x 50mm and supports -20 to 85°C temperatures.

• The Orange Pi Zero with the H2+ SoC is a single board computer that is great for maker projects and IoT scenarios. It is best for use cases that do not require a graphical desktop or connection to a monitor as it does not include an HDMI port and only has AV out via an expansion board.

• Perfectron’s Linux-friendly, 3.5-inch “OXY5361A” SBC supplies 6th Gen CPUs with industrial temp support, and a pair each of mini-PCIe, GbE, and DP links.

• The OXY5361A follows earlier x86-based 3.5-inch SBCs from Perfectron such as the 5th Gen “Broadwell” based OXY5338A. The new OXY5361A runs on dual-core, 15W TDP 6th Gen Core “Skylake” U-Series processors. Other Skylake-U SBCs include Axiomtek’s Pico-ITX PICO500, Diamond’s recent, 3.5-inch Venus, and ADL’s 3.5-inch ADLQ170HDS.

• Active Silicon’s Linux-ready, Haswell-based “USB3 Vision Processing Unit” acquires and processes image data from up to 4x USB3 Vision cameras.

• Active Silicon’s USB3 Vision Processing Unit (USB3 VPU) is designed for a variety of high-end industrial and medical computer vision applications, including its primary application of computer assisted surgery. The USB3 VPU has four inputs for USB3 Vision cameras and four 3G-SDI outputs configured to output two channels of 3G-SDI video, each with a duplicate output.

Phones

Tizen

• An operating system designed by Samsung to run everything from smart phones to refrigerators, slated for use in millions of cellphones in 2017, does not provide adequate security for public use, according to new research.

• “It may be the worst code I’ve ever seen,” researcher Amihai Neiderman of Equus Security told Motherboard, which was given an advance briefing of a report being presented today at a security conference hosted by Kaspersky Lab in St. Maarten.

Android

• Exactly one month ago, Google announced they had just launched a new Issue Tracker project for their Google Cloud Platform products. Until now, if you wanted to submit a bug about a Google product then you were pointed at a code.google.com URL. For Android, this would be the AOSP Issue Tracker and it would be the Chromium Issue Tracker for Chrome. This worked fine for a while, but even this issue tracker had some bugs and it just looked like a dated system.

• For decades, the answer to the question “What’s the most popular operating system?” was Windows. You may not have liked it, but macOS, OS/2, Linux, you name it, couldn’t knock it off its pedestal. But, then along came smartphones and tablets, and PCs started their long sales decline. In March 2017, by web-analytics company StatCounter’s reckoning, Android became more popular than Windows.

• Usage figures published by StatCounter show that Android accounted for 37.93 percent of the worldwide OS Internet usage share in March. Windows is not far behind at 37.91 percent, but Android taking the lead is being described as a “milestone in technology history.”

• [...]

• Windows is starting to lose out overall, although it still accounts for 84 percent of the worldwide desktop operating system market.

• Google is getting ready to release the next Version of Android, Android O. According to the New York Times, a ‘developers preview’ was released on March 21 for the benefit of app developers, so they could begin to work with the upcoming system.

• In 1999 Judge Jackson’s Findings of Fact concluded that: “Microsoft threatened to terminate the Windows license of any OEM that removed Microsoft’s chosen icons and program entries from the Windows desktop or the ‘Start’ menu. It threatened similar punishment for OEMs who added programs that promoted third-party software to the Windows ‘boot’ sequence. These inhibitions soured Microsoft’s relations with OEMs and stymied innovation that might have made Windows PC systems more satisfying to users.”

• Smartphones and children have a tricky relationship. While phones can be entertainment centers for kids, these devices are designed for adults and leave children’s privacy and innocence vulnerable — especially if they have their own phones. Google aims to empower parents and safeguard children who use Android phones with its Family Link app.

• The Galaxy S8 is the hottest Android handset that money can buy right now, but HMD and Nokia may be working on a flagship Android device that might deliver even better specs than Samsung’s top phone.

• The stat trackers at StatCounter have come out with their internet usage numbers for the month of March, and they have, for the first time, reported Android as the world’s most popular operating system. Nudging ahead of the once-untouchable Windows by a tiny fraction, Android is now the world’s most-used platform for getting online according to these latest figures. This represents a natural progression from the difference in devices shipped every year — more than a billion for Android versus 200-something million PCs per year for Windows — but StatCounter is among the first to claim that Android is now in the lead in usage numbers as well.

• Our Samsung Galaxy S8 vs LG G6 comparison is here, to give you all the info you need to help you decide which South Korean phone maker’s new handset is best for you in 2017.

• Sure, they look different in terms of design and internal specs, but the dimensions, weight, and many key features are exactly the same. Android phone buyers have a tough choice on their hands.

Free Software/Open Source

• The monthly status report on the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system reveals their latest efforts.

• A few years back, Adobe and Google teamed up to launch a new open-source font for Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) languages. Today, the two companies are expanding on this project with the launch of a serif CJK font. Adobe calls this new font Source Han Serif, while Google calls it Noto Serif CJK.

• Just like with the first project, Adobe font designer Ryoko Nishizuka worked on the overall design of the font and the company then worked with a number of local foundries in China, Japan and Korea to finish all of the 65,535 glyphs that make up the full font (which also includes Latin, Cyrillic and Greek glyphs based on Source Serif). All of those glyphs are available in seven weights, so we’re talking about more than 450,000 glyphs here — a huge number compared to your average Latin font.

• 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.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Funding

BSD

• A notable recent happening is getting a -current BeagleBone Black Tor relay up and running.

Public Services/Government

• Progressive Coders, the group that he founded uses OpenStreetMaps. This community supported, open source mapping software help thousands of volunteers find Indivisible near them.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• But to me, striving to become more open is less like a journey and more like a serious evolution. In my case, evolving to an open mindset has truly meant challenging my own mental models and norms. It has meant wrestling with tensions between how things have been done in the past with how they could be done differently in the future. It’s an evolution that really begins (and continues to this day) with a decision to change and embrace what being open really means.

Programming/Development

• RApiDatetime provides six entry points for C-level functions of the R API for Date and Datetime calculations. The functions asPOSIXlt and asPOSIXct convert between long and compact datetime representation, formatPOSIXlt and Rstrptime convert to and from character strings, and POSIXlt2D and D2POSIXlt convert between Date and POSIXlt datetime. These six functions are all fairly essential and useful, but not one of them was previously exported by R.

• The computer systems we use today make it easy for programmers to mitigate event latencies in the nanosecond and millisecond time scales (such as DRAM accesses at tens or hundreds of nanoseconds and disk I/Os at a few milliseconds) but significantly lack support for microsecond (μs)-scale events. This oversight is quickly becoming a serious problem for programming warehouse-scale computers, where efficient handling of microsecond-scale events is becoming paramount for a new breed of low-latency I/O devices ranging from datacenter networking to emerging memories (see the first sidebar “Is the Microsecond Getting Enough Respect?”).

• The dominance of GitHub in the project hosting and code sharing space has claimed another victim, with Microsoft announcing plans to shut down its CodePlex site following a period of decreasing use.

• The writing has been on the wall for CodePlex since early 2015, when Microsoft started its own projects on rival GitHub’s servers. Since then, Redmond reports that interest in its site has dwindled and it’s had fewer than 350 projects get a source code commit in the last month, while Redmond contributors on GitHub outnumber any other company’s – just.

• Python is a popular language capable of scripting as well as object-oriented programming. Several frameworks provide a GUI (graphical user interface) for Python, and most of them are good at something, whether it’s simplicity, efficiency, or flexibility. Two of the most popular are wxPython and PyQt, but how do they compare? More importantly, which should you choose for your project?

• When you start a usability test, the first question you may ask is “how many testers do I need?” The standard go-to article on this is Nielsen’s “Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users” which gives the answer right there in the title: you need five testers.

• But it’s important to understand why Nielsen picks five as the magic number. MeasuringU has a good explanation, but I think I can provide my own.

Leftovers

• Eventually it was used on more hit records than any other drum machine

Science

• Known as the Gaussian correlation inequality (GCI), the conjecture originated in the 1950s, was posed in its most elegant form in 1972 and has held mathematicians in its thrall ever since.

• [...]

• Not knowing LaTeX, the word processor of choice in mathematics, [...]

• These findings suggest that birds learn the behaviour of car drivers, and that they use their brains to adjust behaviour in an attempt to avoid mortality caused by rapidly and predictably moving objects.

• A UK government research council is spending £20m to build six regional high-performance computing (HPC) centres.

• The Engineering and Physics Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) oversees a three-tier HPC structure and is building out the second tier.

• The top and most powerful tier is the ARCHER supercomputer, a Cray XC30 accessed via the UK’s National Supercomputing Service. Tier 2 consists of regional centres, all interconnected through the JANET network, with the base tier 3 being individual institutions’ own HPC systems.

• A UK-based team of researchers has created a graphene-based sieve capable of removing salt from seawater.

• The sought-after development could aid the millions of people without ready access to clean drinking water.

• The promising graphene oxide sieve could be highly efficient at filtering salts, and will now be tested against existing desalination membranes.

• It has previously been difficult to manufacture graphene-based barriers on an industrial scale.

Health/Nutrition

• Orphan drugs are those which treat rare diseases. The determination of which diseases are “rare” is made based upon disease prevalence in the population. In the United States, a disease is considered rare if it affects fewer than 200,000 people in the country, while Japan uses a less than 50,000 patient limit, and the European Union refers to a disease affecting less than 5 per 10,000 people.

• A new report from Public Citizen, the US-based consumer rights advocacy group, shows that the 20 largest pharmaceutical corporations are spending significantly less on research and development of new medicines than they are making in profits.

• The report shows that, on average for these top companies, profits rose nearly 24 percent between 2014 and 2015, and that the group as a whole profited over US$100 billion each year from 2014 – 2015. Pharmaceutical companies argue that the large sums invested in research and development are what drive increases in the prices of medicine, according to the report. Public Citizen included examples of statements from industry leaders and the industry’s lobbying group, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA),

Security

• As IoT adoption grows, more IT teams will consider running Linux for IoT devices. Learn the key steps and components involved, including the cross compiler toolchain.

• A security breach of an Internet of Things (IoT) device can lead to serious hazards. The always-on, always-connected nature of IoT devices exposes a larger threat surface that requires stronger security capabilities. That’s why integrating security into these devices is critical not just during the build phase but throughout the product life cycle.

• Earlier this year, a team of researchers from security vendor Cylance demonstrated a proof-of-concept ransomware program that ran inside a motherboard’s Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI)—the modern BIOS.

• The new Ikea lightbulb is the latest in its line of “Home Smart” products. However, it seems the popular do-it-yourself (DIY) company’s new product may pose a cybersecurity risk.

• No technology is perfect and facial recognition software is obviously no exception. But whereas law enforcement groups use this flawed technology in too many instances, device manufacturers are beginning to ship out security features that rely on facial recognition software almost ubiquitously. Many might look at this modern technology and imagine defeating it and logging into another person’s phone would resemble some kind of Mission Impossible style convolution. Sadly, as proven again recently with the release of Samsung’s Galaxy S8, defeating the security feature is laughably simple.

Defence/Aggression

• Scotland Yard is examining allegations of war crimes by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, the Guardian can reveal, triggering a possible diplomatic row with Britain on the eve of Theresa May’s visit to the Arab state.

• Masterminds use internet to organise stone pelting across Jammu and Kashmir.

• According to military intelligence, the Pakistan establishment and anti-India forces across the border have been goading Kashmiris to disrupt counter-insurgency operations.

• Spain has urged the British government to keep a cool head in the negotiations over the future of Gibraltar after the former Conservative leader Michael Howard suggested Theresa May would be prepared to go to war to protect the territory as Margaret Thatcher once did over the Falklands.

• “Someone in the UK is losing their cool and there’s no need for it,” said Spain’s foreign minister, Alfonso Dastis.

• While he noted that Howard “hadn’t exactly said” that the UK would go to war over the issue, Dastis added: “Making comparisons with past situations like the Falklands is a little out of context. The Spanish government is a little surprised by the tone of comments coming out of Britain, a country known for its composure.”

• Spanish foreign minister Alfonso Dastis has said his government had been “surprised by the tone of comments coming out of Britain” about Gibraltar.

• He told a Madrid conference: “It seems someone is losing their cool.”

• On Sunday ex-Conservative leader Lord Howard said the UK would be willing to defend Gibraltar in the same way it defended the Falklands 35 years ago.

• And Gibraltar’s chief minister Fabian Picardo said: “Gibraltar is not a bargaining chip in these negotiations.”

• The first British female fighter to battle Isil has accused MI5 of targeting her family by taking away their laptops and phones.

• Kimberley Taylor travelled to Syria to join Kurdish forces in the battle to reclaim Raqqa in March last year from Islamic State (Isil) fighters.

• Ms Taylor, from Blackburn, is the first known British woman and has claimed her family is being threatened with prosecution.

• She told the BBC that her parents’ laptops and phones were taken away and have still not been returned – a month after they were seized.

• Anton Chekhov’s rule was that if a gun appears in act one, by act three it must go off. This basic principle of drama holds true in diplomacy as well: don’t make promises you can’t keep, or threats you can’t deliver on. It’s a principle that Conservative politicians blathering about conflict with Spain over Gibraltar would do well to study.

• On Sunday, the former Tory leader Michael Howard, citing Margaret Thatcher’s war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, said he was “absolutely certain that our current prime minister will show the same resolve in standing by the people of Gibraltar”. It was no slip. This war meme over Gibraltar is not new in Tory thinking. Luke Coffey of the Heritage Foundation – a US conservative thinktank – has, since the Brexit vote, been calling for warships to be deployed around Gibraltar. Yesterday, in response to the row over Howard’s comments, Coffey retweeted a picture of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano sinking.

• As refugees from Islamic countries pour into Sweden, feminists there have had enough and are fleeing suburbs after a slew of rapes and sexual assaults.

• Famed feminist Nalin Pekgul, who called attention to the rising insecurity of women in the suburbs, says she now avoids the center of town in Tensta, where she lived for 30 years. And the former Left Party official Zeliha Dagli moved from Husby to the inner city.

• The US and UK enjoy a “cosy relationship” with Saudi Arabia that is incompatible with the human rights values they claim to espouse, human rights activist Peter Tatchell told Radio Sputnik.

• Last week, British police began examining allegations of war crimes committed by Saudi Arabia in Yemen in order to assess whether criminal charges could be brought over Riyadh’s devastating bombing campaign.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange has thrown barbs at Guillermo Lasso, the losing candidate in Ecuador’s runoff elections, who had vowed that he would ask the Australian to leave the country’s embassy in London if he were elected.

• FOIA clearinghouse MuckRock has been on the receiving end of government antipathy before. Local government agencies aren’t happy the service is able to work around location restrictions by offering proxies for out-of-state requesters. So far, this hasn’t done much to slow the flow of public records to MuckRock.

• MuckRock users have been thwarted individually, mainly with FOIA fee requests ranging from $270,000 to $660 million. Various agencies have also cut MuckRock out of fee exemptions, claiming the service just isn’t journalistic enough to avail itself of fee waivers.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• The government of the Belgian region of Flanders has renewed its efforts to promote the use of solar energy. An online geographic map calculates the suitability and profitability of placing solar panels on the roofs of buildings.

Finance

• Some see the charges as a thinly disguised method for cruise lines to push the responsibility for paying crew members to their customers. To that point, cruise industry watcher CruiseCritic has reported that some lines now pay housekeeping and dining department workers on ships as little as $2 per day in base wages, relying on the automatic gratuity to provide the great bulk of their compensation. As much as 95% of pay for some cruise ship workers now comes from automatic gratuities, according to CruiseCritic.

• To keep drivers on the road, the company has exploited some people’s tendency to set earnings goals — alerting them that they are ever so close to hitting a precious target when they try to log off. It has even concocted an algorithm similar to a Netflix feature that automatically loads the next program, which many experts believe encourages binge-watching. In Uber’s case, this means sending drivers their next fare opportunity before their current ride is even over.

• MPs have warned about the risks of the UK and EU failing to reach a Brexit trading agreement, urging ministers to work out how much “no deal” would cost.

• The Brexit committee said Theresa May’s claim that “no deal is better than a bad deal” was “unsubstantiated” until an economic assessment was published.

• But the report divided the cross-party committee, with some members saying it was too pessimistic about Brexit.

• Theresa May told the BBC the government was preparing for “all scenarios”.

• More than 100 jobs are at risk at a Welsh university as it faces a drop in student applications.

• The University of South Wales blamed Brexit and student grant cuts as being among the reasons for the fall in applications.

• It is consulting with staff on making 139 redundancies across all four of its faculties and support departments in Cardiff, Treforest and Newport campuses.

• The losses represent 4.6% of the university’s workforce. It is understood that management jobs are most at risk.

• A lawyer and a trio of Green party politicians filed an Irish lawsuit seeking to give the U.K. a last-minute Brexit escape clause if public sympathy turns against leaving the European Union during two years of negotiations triggered last week.

• Lawyer Jolyon Maugham, who has been a vocal Brexit opponent, filed the suit in Dublin Friday, according to an April 1 statement on Maugham’s website. He is seeking a declaration that Article 50 “is revocable at the discretion” of any EU member state, Maugham says in the case filings.

• Theresa May’s March 29 notification of Article 50 initiated a two-year period permitting Britain to negotiate with the remaining member states on their future relationship. In a six-page letter submitted to EU President Donald Tusk, May formally began talks that will end with Britain breaking ties with its largest trading partner after more than four decades.

• Not yet a week since the triggering of article 50, and already hope of cordial negotiations seems optimistic. At the weekend, amid early jostling over the post-Brexit fate of Gibraltar, former Tory leader Michael Howard implied that one way to resolve that situation could be a war with Spain.

• I have always preferred policy to be based on facts rather than prejudice. A good example of the latter is the way the immigration figures are presented. At the moment our policy is not, alas, founded on evidence. It hurts our higher education institutions, which are already faced with the challenges of our forthcoming divorce from the European mainstream.

• The renown of our universities has ensured that they have been magnets for some of the best and brightest students and researchers from around the world. This has made them even stronger academically and more competitive internationally. Foreign students help maintain academic quality and assist in sustaining specialised courses, not least in the sciences. They are at the heart of research collaboration. In the long term, they create links of friendship and shared interest with other countries. International students, educated in Britain, are an important part of what is often called soft power.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• One of the dangers is unquestionable. Of the two existential threats — the threats to the termination of the species basically and most other species – one of them, climate change, on that I think there’s no basis for discussion.

• Before we dive into a little reality check for America, I would like to lay out what this article is, and is not – and what you the reader can expect to take away from it. This way you can save time, and simply decide not to read further.

• What I am willing to offer you is the Truth as I have discovered it. My quest for this particular Truth began quite some time prior to even the concept of election hacking, with an investigation into the Guccifer phenomenon. I did not search out these Truths so that I could enlighten the world, I am not a journalist. This is part of my job as an Information Activist to be aware of the playing field and actors operating in Cyber Space. As such, I neither have, nor would I provide if I did – any sort of hard ‘forensic’ evidence of what I am about to tell you. For the average reader, the veracity of my conclusions must rest solely upon my own reputation in both knowledge and honesty. I am simply not in the business of providing evidence to the world and potentially law enforcement that could be used against my fellow hackers in the Underground. If it’s proof you demand, your journalists and law enforcement will need to seek that out themselves based on what I will present here – as I’ll not help them. That is their job, not mine.

Censorship/Free Speech

• When documentary filmmaker Kacey Cox heard that Anastasia Lin, an actress he’d previously worked with, had won Miss World Canada based on a platform for human rights—and would have to enter China to compete in the finals—he knew he had to film her journey.

• “You couldn’t have written a better story,” Cox said.

• Miss World is a U.K.-based pageant with the motto “beauty with a purpose,” and Lin brought a message of religious freedom to the stage. She was outspoken about human rights atrocities in China, like the persecution of practitioners of various faiths, and the Chinese regime’s harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience.

• The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not known for taking criticism—there have been many cases of foreign citizens being arrested in the country for speaking out about issues like Lin has. She was admittedly nervous when she first got the news of where the finals would be held.

• Instagram is approaching updated censorship guidelines for all accounts. The update will blur out content that could be considered objectionable, letting the user choose if they would like to view the content.

• [...]

• The blurring of certain content may affect a variety of users including brands, bloggers, photojournalists and photographers. Much of what popularly followed users share could be censored if found offensive by others.

• [...] pushing for a crackdown on free speech in hopes of expanding race-based discrimination laws to cover insults against those who follow the religion of Islam.

• The news that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has cancelled her speaking tour of Australia due to ‘security concerns’ should concern anyone who believes in freedom. It is a dark day when a woman who fled to the West to escape the Islamist suffocations of Somalia, and precisely so that she might think and speak freely, feels she cannot say certain things in certain places. That even a Western, liberal, democratic nation like Australia cannot guarantee Hirsi Ali the freedom to speak her mind without suffering censorship or harm is deeply worrying. It points to the mainstreaming of intolerance, to the adoption by certain people in the West of the illiberalism that makes up the very Islamist outlook that Hirsi Ali and others have sought to escape.

• Ali is a controversial figure attracting widespread criticism among the liberal left and death threats from the religious right.

• In an article for the Hoover Institution last month, Ms Hirsi Ali described what she called “political Islam” as being not just a religion but “a political ideology, a legal order, and in many ways also a military doctrine associated with the campaigns of the Prophet Muhammad”.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Congress has decided that Internet Service Providers shall be Common Carriers but without the obligations of a Common Carrier. Specifically, which was the shocker last week – telephone secrets don’t apply as they do with other telecommunications providers, and ISPs are also free to modify anything they like without liability for it.

• Roughly a year ago, a Canadian court ruled that Vice Media must turn over conversations one of its journalists had with an alleged terrorist to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The ruling created a chilling effect, carving a hole in journalistic protections in favor of national security concerns. Not only would it deter journalists from speaking to sources who might, at some point in the future, face criminal charges, but it also would deter sources from speaking to journalists for fear their cover might be blown by law enforcement court orders.

• Vice appealed the decision. Unfortunately, there’s no better news awaiting them at the Ontario Court of Appeals. Elizabeth Raymer of Legal Feeds reports the higher court has upheld the previous ruling.

• Tuesday’s congressional vote to repeal U.S. restrictions on broadband providers doesn’t mean that online privacy is dead. Consumers will just have to pay for it.

• The coming repeal, which President Trump is expected to sign into law, paves a clearer path for broadband providers to sell customers’ internet browsing history and other online data, without their consent.

• Privacy advocates are worried. Imagine corporate giants snooping on your internet activities, and then bombarding your PC, phone and TV with targeted ads.

• Rep. Devin Nunes, who heads the House Intelligence Committee, has been all over the privacy/security map in recent weeks. He’s publicly decried the supposed “illegal surveillance” of former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn while trying to avoid undercutting the NSA programs and presidential authority that make it all this spying possible.

• His hypocrisy knows no bounds. Nunes has repeatedly suggested NSA spying activities (under Executive Order 12333) should receive even less oversight. Now he’s complaining the spy infrastructure he wholeheartedly supports is too big and dangerous, now that it’s resulted in Mike Flynn’s departure.

• The DOJ is attempting to prosecute the creator of a remote access software — not because he used it for nefarious purposes — but because it can (and has been) used by criminals. Kevin Poulsen has the whole bizarre story at The Daily Beast — one that involves a 26-year-old programmer and the remote administration tool (RAT) he created and sold.

• Taylor Huddleston, creator of NanoCore, a RAT that has been linked to intrusions in ten countries, had his home raided by FBI agents on December 6th. The 14-page indictment paints Huddleston as a willing accomplice — someone who sold his product to bad people to do bad things.

• Current spying campaigns run by the CIA could be disrupted, say experts, after more data on the agency’s hacking techniques was released by Wikileaks.

• CIA code that obscures malware’s origins was detailed in the latest release by the whisteblowing site.

• The code could be used to create a “signature” for CIA malware, said one virus hunter.

• The information is part of a larger cache about CIA hacking tools that started to be released last month.

• An Australian anti-war activist was among the victims of alleged illegal email hacking by UK police, according to whistleblower claims being investigated by the British police watchdog.

• Ciaron O’Reilly, a Ploughshares and Catholic Worker organiser, is one of 10 people named in a letter to the Green party peer Jenny Jones by an anonymous whistleblower who alleged the emails of those individuals were among those illegally monitored by a secretive Scotland Yard unit working with Indian police and hackers.

• Following the Congress vote to dismantle privacy protections for broadband subscribers, VPNs have suddenly become a very hot area, despite the complex issues surrounding them. We’ve reported on various instances of authorities around the world either banning VPNs, or flirting with idea of doing so. But there’s no doubt that the main battleground over VPNs is in China, where the government has been clamping down on their use with ever-greater rigor.

• But following a Congressional vote this week to effectively scrap digital privacy rights and give US ISPs the right to sell pretty much any data they can gather on you without needing to seek permission (or even inform you)… suddenly it doesn’t seem so crazy.

• Montana will soon require law enforcement to obtain a search warrant before looking through your electronic communications such as emails, text messages, and chats. Montana Governor Steve Bullock is holding off on signing the bill, HB 148, which would increase electronic privacy protections in the state, but only because he seeks to amend the upcoming electronic privacy protections to be even stronger.

• On Monday, President Donald Trump signed a repeal of online privacy rules that would have limited the ability of ISPs to share or sell customers’ browsing history for advertising purposes. Trump’s action follows the Senate and House voting to eliminate the rules issued by the Federal Communications Commission during Barack Obama’s presidency.

• Multiple technicians with Best Buy’s Geek Squad repair service received hundreds of dollars from the FBI in exchange for seeking child pornography on customers’ computers…

• Defense lawyers for the doctor argue that Geek Squad City’s technicians acted as government agents by receiving payments from the FBI, regularly speaking with and referring cases to the FBI, and creating a program to search for child porn. If a government agent wants to search a computer, they need a warrant, and the case has raised issues of privacy invasion and violation of constitutional search and seizure rights.

• And as with most new technologies, it raises security and privacy issues.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Wahhabis control six percent of mosques in the UK, while the fundamentalist Deobandi control up to 45%.

• Financing is one of the lines opponents have taken, with Bahrain offering to facilitate the planning and help arrange money to fund the building itself.

• That’s the same Bahrain that’s been slammed by human rights organisations, and that is close to the wahhabist monarchy of Saudi Arabia.

• The police have gone to great lengths to argue that the identities of their undercover officers must be concealed forever.

• However it was the police themselves who are responsible for helping to unmask the latest undercover officer whose identity has been confirmed.

• The public inquiry into undercover policing confirmed last Wednesday that Roger Pearce had been an undercover officer for the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). He had used the fake identity of “Roger Thorley” during his deployment.

• Today in Timika, West Papua, over a thousand people gathered in a rally to show their support for the Global Petition for West Papua and the Swim for West Papua team that will carry it to the United Nations in August 2017.

• If you’re of a certain age, you will remember the derision with which video games as an entertainment industry were met some time ago. While many of the claims about gaming encountered during that time, such as the impact of violent games on young minds or the assured claims that playing games would rot the brains of young people who played them, please understand how much louder that silliness was shouted years back. I can personally recall my own father insisting that if I played video games, I would end up having oatmeal for brains. Good one, Dad, except I played them anyway and now I’m a real-life grown-up with a family and two jobs and a house and all that jazz. Jazz, of course, being a previous receptacle for many of these same claims, but I digress.

• Video games often blamed for rotting minds may actually protect them, according to a series of studies.

• Researchers report that Tetris—a classic game that takes hold of spatial and visual systems in the brain as players align irregular polygons—seems to jumble the mind’s ability to process and store fresh traumatic memories. Those improperly preserved memories are subsequently less likely to resurface as intrusive, distressing flashbacks, which can contribute to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, complicated grief, and other mental health issues.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Gigi Sohn, a former top Wheeler aide, said the decision shows the Republican FCC is more focused on putting “incumbents first” than on competition.

DRM

• W3C members, which include the industry’s major players as well as smaller charities and activist groups, have until 13 April to share their thoughts about the proposed standard. W3C director and World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee will respond to objections and make a final decision about whether to approve EME as a web standard.

Intellectual Monopolies

• One key issue was whether DE 1 084 173, published almost 50 years before the priority date of Nike’s patent, was a suitable starting point for inventive step analysis. Would the person skilled in the art, when seeking to increase wear resistance and stiffness of shoes with textile uppers while maintaining their comfort (as the court defined the problem, at para. 10), in 2002 consider prior art from the early 1950s as a suitable starting point?

Trademarks

• In March, for the first time, the Japan Patent Office (JPO) recognised two colour per se trade marks

Copyrights

• When Megaupload was raided in 2012, more than 1,100 servers were seized in the United States. In addition, 32 were targeted in Canada, and the battle to determine who can access them has continued ever since. The Ontario Court of Appeal has now decided that won’t be the FBI.

• It is not just the numbers that set Italy apart, the blocking mechanism itself is unique as well. To have a website blocked, rightsholders can ask the local telecoms watchdog AGCOM to issue an order, without need for a trial.

• Previously unreleased documents acquired by Techdirt show, fairly conclusively, that Congress will be making a huge and dangerous mistake if it moves forward with changing how the head of the Copyright Office is appointed. And despite the fact that the RIAA & MPAA are eagerly supporting this change, the people it will hurt the most are content creators. Because the Copyright Office is basically incompetent when it comes to modernizing its technology. That’s what was found by a thorough (but not publicly released) Inspector General’s report, detailing how the Copyright Office not only threw away $11.6 million on a new computer system that it said would cost $1.1 million, but also lied to both Congress and the Library of Congress about it, pretending everything was going great.

• In reality the project was a complete and utter disaster. It was put together by people who seemed to have no clue how to manage a large IT project, and there was basically zero effort to fix that along the way. After literally wasting $11.6 million on nothing, the entire project was scrapped in October of last year.

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