● 04.06.17

● Links 6/4/2017: CentOS Linux 6.9, Ubuntu is Back to GNOME

Posted in News Roundup at 3:54 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• I’ve been using Linux now for 20 years. I was one of those, back in the old days, willing to jump ship on Windows, even though the alternative was, at times, an incredibly frustrating challenge. But then, I happen to also be one of those who loves a good challenge.

• I remember well, those early moments have having to write scripts just to keep a modem persistently connected. I remember my first steps with installing from source (and the ensuing “dependency hell”).

• Last month we told you that Google Chrome might start using native notifications on Linux — and now the first bit of code to enable this has landed.

• Which I guess turns that earlier “might” into a more certain “is”.

• Landing today within Git for Google’s Chrome/Chromium web-browser is initial support for supporting native desktop notifications under Linux.

• Google developers have wired up initial support for native Linux desktop notifications. This native platform bridge for Linux will communicate notification changes to the desktop environment via the D-Bus notification specification.

• Polychromatic, an unofficial desktop app that lets Razer mouse and keyboard users configure their devices on Linux, has received an update.

• Polychromatic v0.3.8 introduces a ‘completely overhauled‘ tray applet that is simpler to navigate and more useful at giving you at-a-glance information about your configured devices.

• While Razer is exploring better Linux support for its products and not just limited to laptops, for now they don’t have any official Linux configuration software for their products. Fortunately, community solutions exist, including Polychromatic that’s been one of the more popular Razer open-source configuration tools in recent times.

Kernel Space

• For those who miss the inane religious debates of the early open source (I mean, free and open source) world, take heart: The ridiculous name calling and finger pointing is alive and well. For a perfect case study, take free software advocate Christine Hall’s bizarre misreading of an innocuous Linux Foundation article entitled Five Legal Risks For Companies Involved in Open Source Software Development, since pulled down in the wake of weeping, wailing, and GNU’shing of teeth. Not content to leave roadkill well enough alone, the HackerNews community took up the battle, that debate overrun with words like “taint,” “freeloading,” and “locked up.”

• Pinterest — “the world’s catalog of ideas” — is built on open source, according to Jon Parise, technical architecture lead and open source program lead at the company. In this interview, Parise explains how adopting open source has changed the company and helped the company’s engineers design software that is more modular, reusable, and well-documented from the outset.

• SVP of AT&T Labs Chris Rice named chair of ONAP Project just weeks after its formation out of The Linux Foundation; releases code in bid for collaboration.

• This is good news. The newest ARM64 chip I’ve been wanting is going “mainstream”, with not just a kernel the FireFly maker can love, but everyone else.

• Linus Torvalds announces Linux 4.11-rc5, Donald Drumpf drains the maintainer swamp in April, Intel FPGA Device Drivers, FPU state cacheing, /dev/mem access crashing machines, and assorted ongoing development.

• Linus Torvalds announced Linux 4.11-rc5. In his announcement mail, Linus notes that “things have definitely started to calm down, let’s hope it stays this way and it wasn’t just a fluke this week”. He calls out the oddity that “half the arch updates are to parisc” due to parisc user copy fixes.

• The Linux Foundation has no respect for FOSS. Nor does it seem care about any users of Linux who aren’t connected with the enterprise. It’s been that way since the beginning. It now appears that the Foundation also has little respect for the GPL…you know, Linux’s license. Nor does it appear to be much of a believer in the notion of transparency.

Graphics Stack

Applications

• Lightworks is a professional-grade video editor available for download on Windows, macOS and Linux — it has just has received an update.

• And boy is it a big one.

• Like a sequel to the Expendables, Lightworks 14.0 is packed to the rafters with cameos from features you always knew were there, but had sort of forgotten all about.

• Darktable is an Open Source workflow application and raw developer for photography. From the perspective of a photographer, picture it as your virtual zoomable light table and darkroom at the same time.

• Not many will disagree with me when I claim that Notepad++ as probably the best text editor for Windows today. Many will also agree with me, when I say Notepad++ is missed by many who use Linux. Therefore, we have searched annals of the internet to come up with 5 alternatives for Notepad++ on linux.

• Opera Software today boasted that the number of new U.S. users of its namesake browser more than doubled days after Congress voted to repeal restrictions on broadband providers eager to sell customers’ surfing history.

• Just two days after releasing the 0.8.5 maintenance update for the Flatpak 0.8 stable series of the open-source Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework, Alex Larsson publishes a new build from the 0.9 branch.

• We still don’t know if the Flatpak 0.9 series is a stable branch or not, but it’s already been adopted by the developers of the Arch Linux and Solus operating systems. Flatpak 0.9.2 is here about 22 days after the first maintenance update in the new series, version 0.9.1.

• I just released version 1.5.0 of Nageru, my live video mixer. The biggest feature is obviously the HDMI/SDI live output, but there are lots of small nuggets everywhere; it’s been four months in the making.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Manipulated [Steam] is a short puzzle-platformer that warns you about having to think. It’s certainly not wrong.

• The fun and charming platform inspired by 8-bit era visuals has gotten a shiny new campaign. This isn’t the only major addition and there’s plenty other new content available to enjoy.

• Feral Fury [Steam] is a twin-stick shooter with an overall dark feel to it. I’ve played it for a while and I’ve grown to really enjoy it, even if it’s a little punishing. It’s made by Skandivania Games, two Swedes currently living in Norway. For a two-person team, it’s got an amazingly polished feel to it.

• If you like your weird games with no speech, check out One Eyed Kutkh [Steam, Official Site] which has been released for free on Steam. It’s based on the fairy tales of the Far North, apparently.

• I have been an addict of Myst like games since the very beginning. Solving mind boggling riddles by logical means (instead of weapons) was always my preferred gaming. And it seems 2016 had a great share of games fitting to my taste: Obduction, The Eyes of Ara, The Witness, and last but not least Quern – Undying Thoughts. Due to work, research, online courses, diapers, and some real life (these are also the excuses for my long silence on this blog) it took me ages to complete this games, but with a bit of help I finally manged it.

• In the fall of 1989, Brøderbund published game designer Jordan Mechner’s seminal platformer Prince of Persia for the Apple II. Now, in 2017, a fan has released a level editor for that original Apple II version of the game: leapop.

• Fellow devs may appreciate that the editor is licensed for modification or redistribution (under the terms of the GNU General Public License), so you can download the tool and poke around to see how it was done.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Thanks to BacktrackAcademy, newcomers and enthusiasts can learn more about the basics of Linux Administration. I am in charge of teaching an online course called Introduction to GNU/Linux in the platform that BacktrackAcademy offers. The course is going to be released into two weeks, and of course, the Operating System that I use is Fedora 25 and the user friendly Desktop: GNOME 3.22.

• GNOME 3 introduced an extensions framework that allows its users to extend the desktop shell by writing extensions using JavaScript and CSS. It works quite well and dozens of extensions have already been uploaded to the extensions site. Some of these solve some annoyances that users typically share with GNOME, while others add useful functionality.

• During DebCamp last year, I started packaging some of these for Debian. That’s been going really well. Now that Ubuntu is finally dropping Unity in favour of GNOME, it helps to serve as a nudge to get this blog post out that’s been stuck in drafts. These extensions also make their way into Ubuntu and other Debian/Ubuntu derivatives.

• Many GTK+ users and developers have already heard of the GTK+ Inspector, a tool to inspect, modify and understand GTK+ applications. The Inspector is extremely powerful, and allows theme designers to test CSS changes on-the-fly and magnify widgets to see even the smallest details, lets developers check the application widgets and their properties, and lets users to play (and eventually break) applications.

• In this article, we’ll explore the GTK+ Inspector and show what can you do with it.

• Since Gtk+ 3.0, GtkScrolledWindow has the ability to set the minimum content sizes (both width and height) through the GtkScrolledWindow:min-content-width and GtkScrolledWindow:min-content-height properties, and their related functions.

Distributions

Reviews

• ​We all know KODI. For those who don’t know, KODI is a free, open source media player developed by XBMC foundation. KODI is a highly customizable and a powerful media player which can play almost any of the media available today. KODI supports the variety of operating systems, which means you can use it on your favorite OS without any complications.

New Releases

• The NuTyX team is please to annonce the 9.0 release of NuTyX.

• NuTyX 9.0 comes with kernel 4.10.8, kernel lts 4.9.20, glibc 2.25, gcc 6.3.0, binutils 2.28, python 3.6.0, xorg-server 1.19.2, qt 5.8.0, plasma 5.9.4, kf5 5.31.0, gnome 3.22.2, mate 1.16.1, xfce4 4.12.3, firefox 52.0.2, etc….

• More then 2500 commits since the 8.2 version.

• GoboLinux developer Lucas Correia Villa Real announced the release of the first maintenance update to the GoboLinux 016 series, which was a major update of the independently developed Linux-based operating system.

• Development of GoboLinux 016 started more than two years, and the major release brought a container-free filesystem virtualization tool called Runner and a daemon-free network manager called GoboNet. GoboLinux 016.01 is the first point release, coming only three and a half months after GoboLinux 016.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• With that in mind, my first test subject is openSUSE Tumbleweed GNOME. I’ve tried openSUSE before, but it has been a while since the last time. Additionally, its support cycle is only 3 years, but it does have a rolling-release version called Tumbleweed, so I figured I might try that. I created a live USB of the 64-bit ISO using the “dd” command, as recommended on the website. Follow the jump to see what it’s like.

• The openSUSE Conference is about seven weeks away and this year will again have high-quality keynote speakers.

• Keynote speakers for this year’s conference at the Z-Bau in Nuremberg, Germany, from May 26 – 28 will be from SaltStack, KDE and Free Software Foundation Europe.

• Matthias Kirschner, President of FSFE, will take the stage on May 26 at 10 a.m. and provide attendees an exorbitant amount of information about governance and open source.

• Later that evening, there will be entertainment and a Brazilian style barbecue, so stick around for the Friday night fun.

Slackware Family

Red Hat Family

• We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS Linux 6.9 and install media for i386 and x86_64 Architectures. Release Notes for 6.9 are available at:

• http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS6.9

• CentOS Linux 6.9 is derived from source code released by Red Hat, Inc. for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9. All upstream variants have been placed into one combined repository to make it easier for end users. Workstation, server, and minimal installs can all be done from our combined repository. All of our testing is only done against this combined distribution.

• The Red Hat Enterprise Linux team, through John Terrill, informs Softpedia today, April 5, 2017, about the availability of the Beta releases of the upcoming Red Hat Software Collections 2.4 and Red Hat Developer Toolset 6.1 tools.

• Designed for aspiring developers who want to create modern applications, Red Hat Software Collections 2.4 Beta delivers a set of new language additions that include nginx 1.10, Node.js 6, Ruby 2.4, Ruby on Rails 5.0, and Scala 2.10, along with the Apache 2.4, Apache Maven 3.3, Eclipse 4.6.2, Python 2.7, and Thermostat 1.6 updated runtime languages and databases.

Finance

Fedora

• Hi again folks! Two bits of Fedora 26 news today. First off, Fedora 26 Alpha has been released! It got delayed by a couple of weeks due to rather a grab-bag of issues – mainly problems with FreeIPA and several kernel bugs – but the delays did at least mean we wound up with a really pretty solid build, according to our testing so far. Please do grab the Alpha, play around with it, and see how it works for you. Remember to read the Common Bugs page, though I’m still working on it at the moment.

• Transparency is the best policy and communication is key. This is why I felt it was important to make this announcement ahead of time to make clear expectations for the coming months. This past December, I was happy to accept a Production Engineer Intern position at Jump Trading, LLC. From June to August, I will be working at their office in Chicago, IL. I’m excited for this opportunity to learn from some of the sharpest people in the industry and to leave my own mark as an intern during the summer.

• During the hiring process, I was happy to ensure that contributing to open source software would still be possible during my time of employment. I saw during my on-site interview that Jump Trading employs open source software throughout the company but also contributes back to open source, either with hours or donations. However, while I am still able to contribute to Fedora, I do not anticipate being able to maintain the level of activity that I contribute at now during my internship.

• Open source probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think about medicine. But with standards for exchanging digital data comes a foot in the door for open source. By implementing these standards, open source gives patients access to their medical data. An example is MRI image data.

• Nitrate is an open source test plan, test run and test case management system I have been working on for a while now. I have been maintaining a custom fork over at Mr. Senko which includes various bug fixes and enhancements which are not yet upstream.

• We the Fedora Respins-SIG are happy to announce new F25-20170404 Updated Lives. (with Kernel 4.10.8) This Release includes Security and Robotics Labs as Special requests.

Debian Family

• Univention GmbH, through Maren Abatielos, informs Softpedia today about the official release and immediate availability of the Univention Corporate Server 4.2 operating system.

• Univention Corporate Server 4.2 entered developed in early February, and the biggest new change of this release is, of course, the switch to the latest Debian Stable repositories. In other words, the server-oriented operating system is now powered by the Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” series.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• We are wrapping up an excellent quarter and an excellent year for the company, with performance in many teams and products that we can be proud of. As we head into the new fiscal year, it’s appropriate to reassess each of our initiatives. I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

• I’d like to emphasise our ongoing passion for, investment in, and commitment to, the Ubuntu desktop that millions rely on. We will continue to produce the most usable open source desktop in the world, to maintain the existing LTS releases, to work with our commercial partners to distribute that desktop, to support our corporate customers who rely on it, and to delight the millions of IoT and cloud developers who innovate on top of it.

• Canonical has announced via Mark Shuttleworth they are ending their development of the Unity 8 desktop environment and will be switching back to GNOME desktop by Ubuntu 18.04.

• Presumably this also means the end of Mir development too, with GNOME focusing on Wayland. Additionally, Ubuntu is ending development of their phone and convergence initiatives. Shuttleworth wrote today, “I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.”

• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will use GNOME as its default desktop environment, and not Unity 8 — or even Unity 7.

• With Unity 8 (and Mir) being years behind schedule, Mark Shuttleworth today made the surprise announcement of abandoning Unity 8 and shifting back to GNOME while also stopping their Ubuntu Phone efforts. This was the biggest Ubuntu shock in years and as such I’ve thrown together today a bit of a tribute or look back at the various desktop milestones of Ubuntu since its first release covered by Phoronix back in 2004. Check it out if you are a relatively new Linux user or just wish to relive the old screenshots of GNOME2, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Ubuntu TV, the early Unity days, the ambitious Mir plans, and more.

• Canonical is re-shifting its priorities to its strong suit: The cloud and the Internet of Things.

• Today we all read the announcement of Ubuntu’s decision to refocus on cloud and IoT activities, dropping Unity 8 to move back to a GNOME-based desktop for the 17.04 LTS. This marks a return to the fold, with Ubuntu having originally shipped GNOME all those years ago, and lest we forget, having contributed to early Wayland discussions.

• UBports’ Marius Gripsgård is well known in the Ubuntu Phone community for porting Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system to a bunch of devices that we wouldn’t even dream to request from Canonical.

• In early February, the developer announced that he and his team at UBports managed to successfully port Canonical’s Ubuntu OS to the Fairphone 2 modular smartphone, joining the OnePlus One and Nexus 5 ports. Fairphone 2 Ubuntu Phone devices were showcased at MWC (Mobile World Congress) 2017 in Barcelona.

• Back in 2010 I wrote a post about Canonical’s business direction, in response to something Bradley Kuhn had posted. Both he and I were worried about Canonical becoming reliant on an “open core” business model – worried not just from the perspective that it would dilute the principle of Ubuntu, but that frankly every time I have seen this executed before it has been a dismal failure.

• The posts are worth re-reading in the context of Mark Shuttleworth’s announcement today that Ubuntu will be dropping a number of their in-house technologies and, more importantly, abandoning the explicit goal of convergence. I would also say, read the comments on the blogs – both Bradley and I found it deeply strange that Canonical wouldn’t follow the RHEL-like strategy, which we both thought they could execute well (and better than an open core one).

Devices/Embedded

• The Pisound is a sound card HAT add-on for the Raspberry Pi with 192kHz 24-bit stereo I/O, classic MIDI In and Out ports, onboard knobs, and a user button.

• A Lithuania-based Pisound project has tripled its funding goal on Indiegogo, with 23 days left. You can buy the Pisound audio and MIDI card for $89 with shipments expected in July. The 100 x 56mm HAT add-on works with any 40-pin Raspberry Pi board, communicating via SPI, as well as a translator microcontroller for the MIDI interface. The board draws under 300mA @ 5.1VDC, and is powered directly from the Raspberry Pi.

Phones

Tizen

Android

• It’s easy to get obsessed over numbers — especially when it comes to something as volatile as operating system market share.

• (And yes, I realize that may be one of the nerdiest sentences I’ve ever written. I’m okay with that.)

• Silly as it sounds, it’s true: For anyone interested in mobile tech, watching market share numbers can be like watching a dramatic race — one where the once-overlooked underdog is now leading the pack and leaving the former frontrunners in the dust, one by one.

• It’s hard to think of Android as an underdog these days, but in its infancy — way back in the ancient era of 2008 to 2010 — those of us who dared to look past the platform’s humble start and toward the bigger picture forming around it were treated like floundering fools on the virtual town square.

• A recent report from StatCounter said that Android is more popular than Windows in terms of internet use. Here’s what that means for the future of Android and the desktop.

Free Software/Open Source

• Sustainers educate the public through blog posts, talks, and social media about the digital infrastructure that they use every day and for the most part, take for granted. They convince the companies that they work for to donate money, infrastructure, developer time, and source code to the community at large. They also reach out to companies they don’t work for and evangelize about the benefits of helping open source projects live and grow. They don’t give up until they have a solution.

• It appears the people developing Libreboot have done some of the hard work necessary to fix potentially toxic personal dynamics after last year’s controversy, when the project removed itself from the FSF and GNU.

• The virtues of open source have long been shouted from the rooftops by all those that invested in it, both financially and spiritually, and really, that’s what the DataWorks Summit in Munich has been pushing.

• There’s a belief that the open source way of working can play a key role in fundamentally changing the way that the technology industry operates, and it’s one that seems to be resonating with vendors and customers alike.

• A growing coalition of companies, colleges and research institutions is trying to tackle financial literacy as a societal problem.

• “This is not an issue that’s just about poverty,” said Beth Coco. Last year, she left her post as entrepreneur-in-residence at University at Albany’s Small Business Development Center to head a financial literacy program through SEFCU.

• Open source technology permeates throughout our society, playing an important role in much of the technological advancements in the world, such as the WordPress blogging platform. Developers recognize the value of these projects, but there is some grumbling about how there should be ways for project contributors to be remunerated for their contributions.

• Currently, developers have the option to solicit funds to support their efforts using PayPal or some other payment mechanism, but supporters may be skeptical about their donations going towards the open source project instead of lining the pockets of a single individual. Additionally, some contributors may be wary about being the person tasked with collecting these funds. This is something that Open Collective wants to solve. It is already using its service to help developers quickly set up virtual legal entities on-demand to collect contributions in a transparent manner.

• Most of these machines are made by just three companies—Dominion Voting Systems, Hart InterCivic, and Election System and Software. Together, these companies comprise a powerful oligopoly in the market, and keep their software secret from the public. So, if we want to validate their security and accuracy, beyond the arguably insufficient certification process, we just have to take the corporations’ word for it.

• [...]

• Proponents of open-source elections seek to bust the trust of proprietary equipment. Successfully doing so would mean that municipalities across the country, armed with software that is open to public inspection and license, would no longer be forced to conduct balloting using systems that are controlled by a single vendor from end to end. Instead, they could use the open-source software of their choice, and run it on the hardware of their choice, provided the technologies are certified.

• This week, I had the opportunity to create several new listings in Virtuapedia’s Industry Organizations, which is one of the most unique and useful parts of the Pedia. In it, there are more than 400 organizations and standards bodies that all directly relate to the communications industry, including descriptions of what they do, vendor members and industry professional members.

• SocGen is burnishing its open source credentials by sponsoring an initiative by Inria, the French National Institute for computer science and applied mathematics, to create a global library of source code.

• [...]

• For the 5000 staff working at Les Dunes, Societe Generale’s technology hub in eastern Paris, the potential of open source software is evaluated for each and every project under review, says Xavier Lofficial, group head of transformation, processes and information systems at Societe Generale

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Thunderbird 52.0 is now available as the latest stable release for those using this Mozilla-developed mail client.

• Mozilla officially launched the final release of the Thunderbird 52.0 open-source email, chat, calendar and news client for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows platforms.

Databases

• The company that produces the open source cross-platform document-oriented database MongoDB has denied that it has any direct ties to the CIA, despite the fact that the spy agency’s venture capital arm is listed as one of its investors.

• Jack Costley, MongoDB Inc’s senior communications manager, told iTWire in response to queries that In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, was a small investor in MongoDB.

Mastodon

• Twitter started out like many exciting tech projects. It invented and then offered a unique “microblogging” service, a kind of interactive RSS feed. Twitter as a company was open to fresh ideas and offered a lot of features. It gradually became such a big deal in modern web usage that it, presumably, felt the need to reel it all back in. Today, Twitter clearly can’t support all the crazy things people want to do with it, and has gotten rid of a lot of the features they once offered, and are frequently criticized for being simultaneously unmoderated and too restrictive.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• It has been estimated that 50 to 80 percent of modern enterprises aren’t using their location data to aid in making business decisions. And yet, the global geographic information system (GIS) market is anticipated to reach $14.6 billion by 2020, signaling massive opportunities for growth. At the same time, organizations are moving away from proprietary software and the burden of single-vendor lock-in towards more flexible and budget-friendly open-source solutions. The concurrent rise in GIS and open source is creating new ways for organizations–to make the most of the geospatial data at their disposal and turn it into actionable insights, particularly those in the fields of energy, agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, finance and government.

• Boundless, the leader in open GIS, today announced that Jim Reiss has joined the company as Vice President of Sales. Reiss will be responsible for leading the Boundless sales organization and driving rapid growth in revenue and customers.

• [...]

• Jim has extensive open source experience, pioneering one of the first embedded Linux offerings in the market and more recently, helping grow and see the successful acquisition of Zend Technologies, the global entity behind the open source PHP web-programming language. He has both inside and enterprise sales leadership experience and is passionate about driving a healthy sales funnel using his broad experience in demand generation, go-to-market strategies and customer-centric sales methodologies.

BSD

• Unlock tree, we are now hacking on 6.1-current.

Public Services/Government

• The government of Slovakia is about to amend its eGovernment Act, to allow for the creation of a central system for managing public records. Slovakia intends to have this central system in place by 2020.

• [...]

• The new systems will help improve and harmonise eGovernment services and procedures. The central system should especially reduce costs. The use of the centralised public records system is to be made mandatory. Public administrations that already have public record solutions in place will be given time to transition to the new, central system. They will be able to choose to integrate their system directly with the central portal, or use local copies of the central registry.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• In the inaugural issue of the Journal of Open Hardware I review emerging business models for open source hardware. Many of these models are borrowed from the free and open source software industry and will no doubt be familiar to you. However, traditional companies should also take a close look at adding open source hardware to their strategy.

Leftovers

• The need to integrate the ballooning range of software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools being used within enterprises is driving the adoption of application programming interfaces (APIs.) While many think of APIs in the enterprise as being introduced as a way to leverage a microservices architecture or as part of a broader cloud migration effort, integration is actually the early driver for using APIs in many businesses across industry sectors.

• One of China’s top universities is preparing to open a campus at the heart of British academic life, just months after President Xi Jinping called for Chinese universities to be transformed into strongholds of Communist party rule.

• Peking University, an elite Beijing institution where Mao Zedong once worked as a librarian, will open a branch of its HSBC Business School in Oxford early next year, the respected financial magazine Caixin reported on Thursday.

Health/Nutrition

• The International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) governing body is meeting this week, along with its technical, and consultative committees. On the agenda is a potential international system of cooperation, disputed by civil society. Separately, Benin, a least-developed country, appears to be in the process of ratifying the UPOV convention, raising questions since a regional organisation of which Benin is part already joined UPOV in 2014.

Security

• Intelligence agencies could hack into Samsung smart TVs caused by a deep flaw in the ecosystem of the Seoul-based tech giant. According to security researchers, there are up to 40 zero-day exploits for the Tizen operating system that Samsung uses for its TV, phones, and smartwatches. These vulnerabilities could be used by attackers to hack the Samsung gadgets remotely.

• Yesterday, Apple rushed out an emergency patch to plug a severe security hole that can be exploited to wirelessly and silently commandeer iPhones, iPads and iPods.

• Now we know why: this remote-code execution vulnerability lies in Broadcom’s Wi-Fi stack, which Apple uses in its handhelds. Many other handsets also use Broadcom’s naff chipset, and, as a result, we expect – and hope – a lot of other phone and tablet makers push out patches: any gadget using Broadcom’s vulnerable tech is at risk to over-the-air hijacking, not just Apple’s iThings.

• A few months back, we covered a nasty and incredibly advanced piece of malware dubbed Pegasus. Created by a relatively obscure Israeli security company called the NSO Group, Pegasus seemingly set a new bar for mobile hacking sophistication. Built upon three previously undisclosed iOS zero-day exploits, Pegasus, once installed, was able to eavesdrop on conversations, remotely spy on a users’s text messages, location, browsing history, calendar records, photos and more.

• A critical vulnerability in the widely used Xen hypervisor allows attackers to break out of a guest operating system running inside a virtual machine and access the host system’s entire memory.

• This is a serious violation of the security barrier enforced by the hypervisor and poses a particular threat to multi-tenant data centers where the customers’ virtualized servers share the same underlying hardware.

• [...]

• Qubes OS, an operating system that uses Xen to isolate applications inside virtual machines, also put out an advisory warning that an attacker who exploits another vulnerability, for example inside a browser, can exploit this Xen issue to compromise the whole Qubes system.

• Canonical released earlier a new kernel security update for all supported Ubuntu Linux releases that appears to patch a vulnerability discovered recently in the upstream Linux kernel packages.

• According to the Ubuntu Security Notice USN-3256-1 advisory, the system could be made to crash under certain conditions. The security issue (CVE-2017-7308) was discovered by Andrey Konovalov in Linux kernel’s AF_PACKET implementation, which incorrectly validated some block-size data.

• CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi announced today, April 5, 2017, the availability of a new Beta kernel update for users of the CloudLinux 7 operating system series, patching a couple of vulnerabilities discovered lately.

• The announcement comes just one day after CloudLinux released a new stable kernel version for CloudLinux 7 and CloudLinux 6 Hybrid users, which included a fix for an out-of-bounds heap access security issue in XFRM framework of the Linux kernel, which was patched upstream in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Defence/Aggression

• I exchanged emails of condolences with the embassy public relations officer, who was a great friend of hers. I saw heart-wrenching tributes to Anne Smedinghoff posted on-line. Secretary Kerry eulogized Anne Smedinghoff, praising her idealistic commitment to “changing people’s lives.” He noted the “extraordinary harsh contradiction” of her being killed while carrying books to a school. He described the Zabul media event was “a confrontation with modernity,” and said Smedinghoff embodied “everything that our country stands for.” It did little to salve my dismay that yet another promising American had been lost for such a dubious, failed cause. I thought of the remarks Kerry made on Capitol Hill in 1971, when he was a young, anti-war Vietnam vet.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• If carbon emissions continue on their current trajectory, new findings show that by mid-century, the atmosphere could reach a state unseen in 50 million years. Back then, temperatures were up to 18°F (10°C) warmer, ice was almost nowhere to be seen and oceans were dramatically higher than they are now.

• Climate change is rapidly becoming a crisis that defies hyperbole.

• For all the sound and fury of climate change denialists, self-deluding politicians and a very bewildered global public, the science behind climate change is rock solid while the impacts – observed on every ecosystem on the planet – are occurring faster in many parts of the world than even the most gloomy scientists predicted.

• Given all this, it’s logical to assume life on Earth – the millions of species that cohabitate our little ball of rock in space – would be impacted. But it still feels unnerving to discover that this is no longer about just polar bears; it’s not only coral reefs and sea turtles or pikas and penguins; it about practically everything – including us.

• Three recent studies have illustrated just how widespread climate change’s effect on life on our planet has already become.

• Europe’s energy utilities have rung a death knell for coal, with a historic pledge that no new coal-fired plants will be built in the EU after 2020.

• The surprise announcement was made at a press conference in Brussels on Wednesday, 442 years after the continent’s first pit was sunk by Sir George Bruce of Carnock, in Scotland.

Finance

• Nigel Farage has been jeered in Strasbourg after comparing the EU parliament to the Mafia over its Brexit demands of the UK.

• Asked to retract his “unacceptable” remark by the body’s president, Italian Antonio Tajani, the former UKIP leader replied that in respect of national sensitivities he would instead brand them “gangsters”.

• Recent college graduates who borrow are leaving school with an average of $34,000 in student loans. That’s up from $20,000 just 10 years ago, according to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• For the first 10 weeks of President Trump’s administration, no adviser loomed larger in the public imagination than Stephen K. Bannon, the raw and rumpled former chairman of Breitbart News who considers himself a “virulently anti-establishment” revolutionary out to destroy the “administrative state.”

• But behind the scenes, White House officials said, the ideologist who enjoyed the president’s confidence became increasingly embattled as other advisers, including Mr. Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, complained about setbacks on health care and immigration. Lately, Mr. Bannon has been conspicuously absent from some meetings. And now he has lost his seat at the national security table.

Censorship/Free Speech

• So if there’s one thing we’ve probably repeated more than others around here, it’s the idea that in the IoT and copyright maximalist era, you no longer truly own the things you think you own. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about video game consoles, software, smart home hubs, ebooks, DVDs or routers — in the always-connected, copyright mad, instantly-upgradeable firmware age, companies are often quick to remove some or all functionality at a whim, leaving you with little more than a receipt and a dream of dumb technology days gone by.

• But we’ve also noted repeatedly that part of this new paradigm involves companies using this capability to punish customers for poor reviews. This is, it should go without saying, an idiotic policy that almost always invokes the Streisand effect and makes the “problem” of a negative review significantly worse than if the company in question had done nothing at all.

• Donald Trump’s war on the press has prompted protests from prominent members of his own party. Former president George W. Bush, hardly a liberal, pointed out that “we need the media to hold people like me to account. I mean, power can be very addictive and it can be corrosive and it’s important for the media to call to account people who abuse their power.”

• “There shouldn’t be any censorships but classifications. The people should be given the choice whether they want to watch the movie or not,” says the actor while speaking to News18.com.

• I wish to address a problem that is quietly flying under the radar. That is the pressure being put on every Department in Washington to conform to the Trump line. This has included scrubbing web sites of “offensive language” or “inappropriate messages” that the Trump team finds does not fit the Administration’s line of thinking.

Privacy/Surveillance

• And now, with the new privacy not-rules, Verizon is free to take the data generated from the tracking supercookies it imposes on its network customers, mash it up with AOL’s ad stack, and promise advertisers hyper-targeted marketing information that can’t be blocked or stopped because Verizon will own both the pipes and an enormous amount of the content flowing through it.

• Charlie Savage of the New York Times has obtained another document detailing the internal guidelines of the NSA’s STELLAR WIND program as a result of the NYT’s long-running FOIA lawsuit against the government. The new document is a memo from the Department of Justice, which details its lawyers’ attempts to suss out the government’s obligation to defendants when it comes to evidence derived from classified surveillance programs.

• As we’ve discussed for many years, Homeland Security and the Justice Department have convinced too many courts that there is some sort of 4th Amendment “exception” at the border, whereby Customs and Border Patrol agents (CBP) are somehow allowed to search through your laptops, phones, tablets and more just because, fuck it, they can. Now bipartisan pairs in both the Senate and the House have introduced a new bill that would require that CBP get a warrant to search the devices of Americans at the border. On the Senate side, the bill is sponsored by Senators Ron Wyden and Rand Paul, and in the House, it’s Reps. Blake Farenthold and Jared Polis. Honestly, it’s absolutely ridiculous that this kind of bill is even needed in the first place, because the 4th Amendment should just take care of it. But with DHS and the courts not properly appreciating the 4th Amendment’s requirment for a warrant to do a search, here we are.

• For years, one of the greasier lobbying and PR tactics by the telecom industry has been the use of minority groups to parrot awful policy positions. Historically, such groups are happy to take financing from a company like Comcast, in exchange for repeating whatever talking point memos are thrust in their general direction, even if the policy being supported may dramatically hurt their constituents. This strategy has played a starring role in supporting anti-consumer mega-mergers, killing attempts to make the cable box market more competitive, and efforts to eliminate net neutrality.

• The goal is to provide an artificial wave of “support” for bad policies, used to then justify bad policy votes. And despite this being something the press has highlighted for the better part of several decades, the practice continues to work wonders. Hell, pretending to serve minority communities while effectively undermining them with bad internet policy is part of the reason Comcast now calls top lobbyist David Cohen the company’s Chief Diversity Officer (something the folks at Comcast hate when I point it out, by the way).

• Last week, we noted how Congress voted to kill relatively modest but necessary FCC privacy protections. You’d be hard pressed to find a single, financially-objective group or person that supports such a move. Even Donald Trump’s most obnoxious supporters were relatively disgusted by the vote. Yet The Intercept notes that groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens and the OCA (Asian Pacific American Advocates) breathlessly urged the FCC to kill the rules, arguing that snoopvertising and data collection would be a great boon to low income families…

• US President Trump Monday signed the repeal of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) broadband privacy rules passed by both houses of Congress in March. The decision by Congress and the new administration to smash the FCC broadband privacy rules, data security and security breach notification obligations do not bode well for internet users who want to have a say with regard to their confidentiality, according to a range of tech experts.

• D-Day for encryption may be here sooner than you think. The EU justice commissioner Věra Jourová said this week that the European Commission will propose in June new measures to enable police to access data from encrypted apps.

• Jourová said there will be three or four options proposed including binding legislation and voluntary agreements with companies.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Indonesia is ranked 130th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2016 World Press Freedom Index.

• The Human Rights situation in both Bahrain and Arabia is appalling.

• [...]

• 10- The participants call for the immediate release of human rights activists like Nabeel Rajab, Dr Abdul Jalil AlSingace and Abdul Hadi AlKhawaja of Bahrain and Raif Badawi, Abdulla Al Hamed and Abul Khair of Saudi Arabia. They salute the bravery of these activists and urge the West to embrace Arab activism that seeks to improve human rights and achieve democracy in Arabia.

• [...] when asked whether groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir should be banned in Australia she said they should be treated like “skinheads”.

• “White supremacists and all sorts of remnants of the Nazi Party … are stigmatised and they are actively marginalised and that’s what we should do with Hizb ut-Tahrir, Jemaah Islamiyah, with the Diobandi, with the Muslim Brotherhood, with all Islamism organisations that set up shop in Australia and other liberal societies.”

• The court heard Miss Al-Jeffrey, who has dual British and Saudi Arabian nationality, had now been promised freedoms which she did not believe she would have been given by her father had it not been for the proceedings.

• For $27.5 million you can own a valuable memento of a dark period of recent American history. The jet above is currently for sale in Dallas, Texas. The Boeing 737 business jet seats up to 16 passengers and includes one queen and two single beds, a lounge bar, and three built-in 42-inch TV screens. The jet’s listing does not mention, however, that in its former career, it was part of the Central Intelligence Agency’s extraordinary rendition program, transporting “high-value” terrorism detainees around the globe to “black sites” where they faced “enhanced” interrogation techniques.

• As of 3 April, organizers of public events will have to adhere to strict measures including applying for a permit at least 28 days in advance and informing the police of the estimated size of the gathering. Failure to do so will result in a fine of SGD $20,000 or imprisonment for up to a year, or both.

• US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials should immediately release persecuted Singaporean activist and blogger Amos Yee, who was granted asylum by a US immigration judge on March 24, 2017, PEN America and Human Rights Watch said today. Yee, who has been detained since December, remains in ICE custody on the grounds that the Department of Homeland Security may file an appeal against the grant of asylum.

• The inherent problem of defending free speech is that one cannot pick and choose whose speech to defend. It would be so much simpler if every free speech agitator was intelligible and coherent and dignified. But this is seldom the case. And, to be sure, Amos Yee doesn’t fit that description.

• The 18 year-old Singaporean registered his first high-profile arrest in 2015 when he posted a video online mocking the death of the country’s founder and prime minister, the late Lee Kuan Yew. The deceased statesman’s son, Lee Hsien Loong, currently serves as prime minister. A short part of the video included comments about religion, which led to Amos Yee being convicted for wounding religious feelings, a crime under the Sedition Act, and he served 50 days on remand.

• The following year, Yee was once again in front of the courts, and again for insulting religion after posts he made on his blog. Pleading guilty, he was imprisoned for six weeks and fined almost $1,400 for ignoring a notice issued by the police to present himself for questioning.

• On his Stanford University application, Ahmed was posed the question, “What matters to you, and why?”

• The activist from Princeton, New Jersey, decided to use the opportunity to write “#BlackLivesMatter” a 100 times.

• To his surprise, the answer caught the attention of the California school’s admissions office and Ahmed received his acceptance letter on Friday.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• As they’ve long made clear, Trump, FCC boss Ajit Pai, and other net neutrality opponents have every intention of killing net neutrality rules. Of course, given the huge, bipartisan consumer popularity of net neutrality, these folks can’t just come out and say they’re doing that, lest they incur the wrath of internet users and activists. As such, they’ve begun laying the groundwork for a misleading argument that attempts to make gutting oversight of the uncompetitive broadband industry — and killing net neutrality — sound almost pleasant.

• The latest example of this came via an op-ed this week in the Washington Post, jointly written by FCC boss Ajit Pai and FTC boss Maureen Ohlhausen, entitled “No, Republicans didn’t just strip away your Internet privacy rights.” Of course they did, and there’s not any real debate that this is what happened, but this being the post-truth era — countless individuals labor under the illusion that facts are somehow negotiable. Amusingly, the editorial can’t even make it a full sentence without being misleading (read: lying)…

Intellectual Monopolies

• The World Health Organization has been recommended to provide details on its spending of funds provided to its pandemic influenza framework by the private sector.

• Last week, a longstanding demand by the private sector – the major financial contributor to the framework – was clearly heard by the framework’s advisory group, which recommended an independent audit, according to sources.

• Other topics addressed by the meeting included the management of virus genetic data under the framework, and how to address the decreasing number of viruses shared with the framework.

Trademarks

• This Kat has come across several news reports recently on “China is trying to curry favour with the new American president by granting him preliminary approvals to his 38 trade mark registrations” (e.g. here and here), which unfortunately contain some unnecessary negative assumptions upon the Chinese trade mark system. To clear the air, this Kat would like to briefly share some fact-based disagreements.

Copyrights

• This seems like something we’ll need to keep repeating: revealing entertainment spoilers is not copyright infringement. What ought to be common sense is apparently not so for all kinds of content owners in the entertainment space. As such, DMCA notices or threats for DMCA notices have been used to combat spoiler releases in all kinds of forms, from movie predictions, to television show predictions, to video game footage that reveals spoilers. Some of these instances involve actual footage of the copyrighted material while some don’t, but the core of the matter is that if you’re talking copyright infringement because of spoilers, you’re doing copyright wrong.

• The latest version of this comes from Atlus, developers of Persona 5. The American division of Atlus put out a notice on its website, in which it starts off with bubbling excitement over the release of the game, but then spills into a lecture on what gamers can stream and what they cannot.

• Copyright trolls are a plague spreading across the world, one which has received far too little social medicine for the taste of many. This virulent form of rent-seeking tends to put out some of the more despicable strategies, from flatout falsely accusing people of piracy, lying to international students about the punishment for copyright infringement, and threatening those that expose their actions.

• But a case that was winding its way through German courts sees copyright trolls there now going even further, winning the argument over whether parents should have to serve their own children up to the courts for copyright trolls.

• On Monday, we published documents we obtained that revealed a massive amount of incompetence and waste at the Copyright Office. They had officially asked for $1.9 million on a technology modernization program, then spent $11.6 million on it without telling anyone about the ever-growing money pit, only to cancel the contract with the vendor last October with nothing to show for it. Oh, and throughout the process, it appeared that the Copyright Register misled both Congress and the Library of Congress.

• It would appear that this is not the only time that the former Register of Copyrights, Maria Pallante, was found to be misleading Congress and the Library of Congress concerning the Copyright Office’s budget and monetary needs. In the recent markup for a bill in the House Judiciary Committee that would make change the Copyright Register position to be a Presidential appointment, rather than by the Librarian of Congress, Rep. Zoe Lofgren revealed that Pallante had apparently put in place a fake $25 million budget line item, asking the Librarian of Congress to testify under oath what it was for, despite it being made up.

• Controversial New Zealand-based internet mogul Kim Dotcom plans to launch a Bitcoin payments system for users to sell files and video streaming as he fights extradition to the United States for criminal copyright charges.

• The German-born entrepreneur, who is wanted by U.S. law enforcement on copyright and money laundering allegations related to his now-defunct streaming site Megaupload, announced his new venture called ‘Bitcontent’ in a video posted on Youtube this week.

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