● 04.13.17

● Links 13/4/2017: Nginx 1.12, GNOME 3.24.1 Released; Mark Shuttleworth Back to CEO Role

Posted in News Roundup at 9:33 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The words ‘bleeding edge’ suggest considerable risk. But a system that’s always improving and updating has its benefits. You might see gains in speed, along with security, for example. If you like that sort of thing (and are willing to take a bit of a risk), here are a few Linux operating systems you might want to try.

• As a longtime user of Chromebooks, I know how useful and convenient those devices can be. They’re light, the hardware is solid, and Chromebooks are excellent devices to carry while traveling or working on the go.

• The main drawback of Chromebooks, though, is how tightly they’re tied to Google’s services. Over the last little while, I’ve been steadily de-Googlizing my life. One of the last big obstacles to doing that has been my Chromebook.

• In particular, I recommend Linux Mint. It’s stable, it works like a fine-tuned watch, and it’s free. If you use the Cinnamon desktop, your users will think they’ve traveled back in time to the Windows XP desktop.

• Applications are easy to set up. These days, you just download and install them from an app store.

• Linux programs are also simple to use. Personally, I find that LibreOffice works just fine for office work. It’s latest version, 5.3.2, works better than ever with Microsoft Office’s OpenXML formats. And there’s always Google Docs.

• What’s that? You can’t live without Microsoft Office? Then don’t. You can run Office 365 on Linux. For that matter, when a user pointed out that OneDrive ran like a dog on Linux, Microsoft fixed it. Yes, you read that right. Microsoft fixed a serious bug with how a Microsoft app ran on Linux.

• A few years before that, Microsoft tried to take on a different type of small, cheap notebook: the netbook. When Asus launched the original Eee PC in 2007 it ran a Linux-based operating system rather than Windows. For some people that was part of the appeal. For others, it was an obstacle to overcome.

• Part of what prompted me to start this website was the amount of interest there was in my articles about how to install Windows XP on the Eee PC.

• Microsoft lowered the Windows license fees for small, low-cost laptops and Linux netbooks became a thing of the past as more and more PC makers shipped models with Windows software. Then netbooks themselves sort of faded away.

• Or did they? Almost nobody uses the word “netbook” anymore, but their legacy lives on in affordable portable computers including Windows, Android, and iOS tablets and convertibles, cheap Windows notebooks, and perhaps most of all, in Chromebooks.

• Not all Chromebooks are dirt cheap. But some certainly are. And part of the reason is that device makers don’t have to pay for the operating system. Google gives it away for free.

• [...]

• One problem is that new PCs aren’t just competing with Chromebooks. They’re also competing with older PCs. Can’t find a super-cheap 2017 model? Then consider picking up a refurbished 2016 model.

• Chromebook sales have always been a bit of a mystery just like Microsoft’s own Surface sales, but we won’t know the full impact unless Google is willing to share how many are being used on a daily basis. Until then, it’s a guessing game of vague statements from analyst firms, or victory claims in small markets. Either way, it’s about time Chromebooks are considered as PCs by all involved.

• System76 announced today on their Twitter account that pre-orders are available for “Galago Pro,” an all-new and powerful laptop preloaded with the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system.

Server

• Rancher Labs released its ultra-lightweight Linux distribution on Tuesday, a product that illustrates how the container tech revolution is creating room for innovation in the operating system.

• RancherOS, an operating system built from containers and geared exclusively for hosting them, achieves an unprecedentedly small footprint by eliminating Linux system libraries and utilities outside the kernel. Those often-extraneous components can be reintroduced separately in Docker containers when needed.

Kernel Space

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.10.10 kernel.

• All users of the 4.10 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 4.10.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.10.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

• Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today, April 12, 2017, the release and immediate availability of three new kernel updates, namely Linux 4.10.10, 4.9.22 LTS, and 4.4.61 LTS.

• Coming only four days after their previous maintenance updates, the Linux 4.10.10, Linux 4.9.22 LTS, and Linux 4.4.61 LTS kernels are here with a set of new improvements for users of Linux-based operating systems. Despite the short development time, it looks like Linux kernel 4.10.10 changes a total of 99 files, with 1208 insertions and 604 deletions, and Linux kernel 4.9.22 LTS changes 134 files, with 1944 insertions and 784 deletions.

• ntel’s Clear Linux distribution has switched from using the ACPI CPUFreq scaling driver for recent generations of Intel hardware to now using the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.

• Kent Overstreet continues developing Bcachefs as what he hopes will be a next-generation Linux file-system code that’s originally derived — but now distantly removed — from the Bcache code-base.

• Last month we reported on Bcachefs rolling out a new on-disk format with encryption and better multi-device support while Kent Overstreet has issued a new post with the latest happenings. Bcachefs was launched in 2015, for those that don’t remember, with hopes of EXT4/XFS-like speed but with Btrfs/ZFS-like features.

Graphics Stack

• Mir currently works with mesa-kms graphics, mesa-x11 graphics or android HWC graphics (work has been done on vulkan graphics and is well beyond proof-of-concept but hasn’t been released).

• Switching the driver support doesn’t impact the shell or applications. (Servers will run unchanged on mesa, on X11 and android.) Mir provides “abstractions” so that, for example, user input or display configuration changes look the same to servers and client applications regardless of the drivers being used.

• Canonical developer Alan Griffiths has been blogging a lot in recent days about the Mir display server. He’s been trying to get the community to support Mir and even potentially add native Wayland client support. His latest post is entitled “Why Mir” with many still wondering why they should care about Mir when Wayland has proven to be the tested and widely-adopted path forward.

• Griffiths talks up Mir’s abstractions, Mir’s support for Mesa KMS/X11 and Android HWC graphics (though they too are all capable with Wayland), “beyond proof of concept” Vulkan support even though that isn’t public yet and Wayland Vulkan support is, and Mir as a display server provides “sensible defaults.”

• Elie Tournier, the GSoC student developer who last year worked via GSoC on “soft” FP64 double-precision support for older GPUs lacking the hardware capabilities, has posted patches wiring up his soft implementation for Intel “Gen 6″ (Sandy Bridge) graphics thereby allowing ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support.

Benchmarks

• Released at the end of last week was a long-awaited update to the Radeon hybrid Linux driver, AMDGPU-PRO. The AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 update brings support for newer kernel releases so this driver finally deploys nicely on Ubuntu 16.04.2 / 16.10 and also has a number of fixes. Here are some benchmark results of this latest AMDGPU-PRO release compared to the latest open-source Radeon Linux driver stack in the form of the Linux 4.11 kernel and Mesa 17.1-dev with OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks.

• For those interested in benchmarking with Vulkan, it seems UNIGINE have it on their roadmap for the new Superposition for this year.

• I ran some AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 vs. Mesa 17.1-dev RadeonSI (and Linux 4.11 DRM) tests on an Ubuntu 16.10 system using a Radeon RX 480, R9 Fury, and R9 290. In this article are Superposition benchmarks while an article coming out today is providing more benchmarks of AMDGPU-PRO 17.10, which was released by AMD at the end of last week.

Applications

• A new release is available of the nginx web server that’s continuing to take on Apache with reportedly now having around a 33% web server market-share while Apache has dipped below 50%.

• Nginx 1.12 brings variables support and improvements to HTTP/2, the stream module enhancements, support for multiple SSL certificates of different types, improved dynamic modules support, and other innovations.

• Making money from open-source software is not exactly a straightforward proposition, but the poster child for businesses based on open-source code is Red Hat.

• The so-called “Red Hat model” involves charging customers a subscription for a business-ready version of its open-source Linux distribution. This gets customers a certified and maintained release with regular updates and security fixes.

• Containers are an extremely mobile, safe and reproducible computing infrastructure that is now ready for production HPC computing. In particular, the freely available Singularity container framework has been designed specifically for HPC computing. The barrier to entry is low and the software is free.

• At the recent Intel HPC Developer Conference, Gregory Kurtzer (Singularity project lead and LBNL staff member) and Krishna Muriki (Computer Systems Engineer at LBNL) provided a beginning and advanced tutorial on Singularity. One of Kurtzer’s key takeaways: “setting up workflows in under a day is commonplace with Singularity”.

• Cloud Commander (cloudcmd) is a simple open source, traditional yet useful cross-platform web file manager with console and editor support.

• It is written in JavaScript/Node.js and enables you manage a server and work with files, directories and programs in a browser from any computer, mobile or tablet.

• A Linux version of Nylas Mail, the cross-plaform desktop e-mail client, is available for testing. The open-source app succeeds the old Nylas N1 client, which was discontinued last year. Since we last mentioned the app back in January a few things have changed.

• Blender 2.79 is under development and it sounds like this release should be quite exciting for those into performance improvements or better OpenCL support.

• With Blender 2.79, the OpenCL support has improved and should be closer to parity with Blender’s CUDA capabilities. The OpenCL Cycles renderer has shorter render times by up to 50% in some cases, tiles are now seen updating while rendering, support for SSS and volume rendering, optimized transparent shadows, and various fixes.

Proprietary

• We told you last week that development of the Vivaldi 1.9 web browser kicked off in style with the first snapshot, which brought numerous improvements to existing features, as well as some new ones.

• At the request of many users, Vivaldi 1.9 will let you shuffle the order of your extensions, and today’s Vivaldi 1.9.811.13 snapshot is here to make it easier to fine tune screenshots taken with the built-in screenshot tool, but also to improve the URL autocomplete functionality and the Chromecasting Tab.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Jupiter Hell, a project I personally backed is really showing how to do a Kickstarter properly in terms of Linux support and open communication.

• If fighting hordes of enemies with fancifully implausible-but-shooty ranged and melee weapons is what you desire in life, Woodpunk [Official Site] might satiate the need. The developers have recently announced Linux support and are looking for enough votes on Greenlight to proceed.

• Brawl of Ages [Steam, Official Site] is a free to play online 1on1 fast-paced strategy game that recently launched with Linux support. It’s being published by S2 Games, who created Strife with a new developer BNA Studios taking the helm. It actually uses the same engine as Strife, even down to using some of the same characters.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Here is our first update of GNOME 3.24, including many bug fixes, documentation improvements and translation updates.

• Matthias Clasen has announced the first point release to last month’s big GNOME 3.24 desktop release.

• Matthias Clasen was pleased to announce today, April 12, 2017, the availability of GNOME 3.24.1, the first point release to the latest GNOME 3.24 desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.

• GNOME 3.24 launched three weeks ago as the most advanced version of the open-source desktop environment used by default in numerous Linux-based operating systems, including Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, openSUSE, and many others. As mentioned before, GNOME 3.24.1 is the first maintenance update to the stable series, adding various improvements and bug fixes.

• GNOME Music 3.24.1.1 has just been released, a good time to reflect on what has happened last development cycle.

• A goal for Music is to make it an exemplary application of GNOME/GTK+ Python programming and make it an entry-level project for new contributors. However the codebase was a mixture of coding styles and oversized multi-functional classes. Python is a powerful and easily accessible language, but the downside is that it can quickly get out of control if not some constraints are set on how to use it. So we started a rework to split up some of the bigger source files and enforce PEP-8 (code-style) & PEP-257 (docstrings) on new commits and bring existing code in line with it. We are not quite there yet on the clean-up front, but we have come a long way and going forward it is gonna get better.

Distributions

Reviews

• This is the next installment of my series of reviews to determine which Linux distribution I can use to replace my current installation of Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya” Xfce on my personal laptop. The (not strict) criteria that I am considering are that the distributions should be well-known, which is reflected to some degree in DistroWatch rankings, as this implies that the distribution may have official or strong community support for popular proprietary packages; additionally, the distributions I consider should preferably have MATE or Xfce editions (though I’m open to other DEs as well), and should have a long (more than 3 years from now) support cycle or use a rolling-release support model.

New Releases

• Just shy of a year since our v14.1 release I am relieved to announce that Core v14.2 is finally ready for prime time!

• It’s been a while in the making, but v14.2 Core is now available for immediate launch in the cloud via the Hub. Amazon MarketPlace builds are on the way too, although no ETA at present. (Almost) all of the other builds (e.g. ISO, OVA, Xen, Proxmox etc.) can also be downloaded from the Core appliance page. Alternatively, all the currently appliance builds are available for direct download from one of our mirrors.

• The highlights for this release include, a significant confconsole update, as well as new versions of TKLBAM and Webmin. It will also include a new OpenStack build courtesy of Tomas (from ‘Home at Cloud’).

Red Hat Family

• CLOUDERA, the provider of the global platform for machine learning and advanced analytics built on open source technologies, announced that it is collaborating with software providers Red Hat and Microsoft to cultivate a big data talent ecosystem in Malaysia.

• Focused on developing data scientists to find insights and solve meaningful business problems across industries, the collaboration will see the companies cross-promoting each other’s training programmes through a collaboration with Iverson Associates, a Malaysian professional IT training provider.

• Red Hat continues to be a leader in transparency regarding security problems that are discovered in our software and the steps we take to fix them. We publish data about vulnerabilities on our security metrics page and recently launched an API Service that allows easier (and searchable) access to the same data. This data is important to administrators for understanding what known security problems exist and determining what they should do about it.

• Red Hat Inc. today published an online tool that helps organizations estimate the complexity involved and time required to build a mobile app depending upon answers to a questionnaire.

• By answering 10 questions in the Mobile App Assessment Tool, line-of-business staffers, IT decision-makers and mobile development managers can get a report estimating the complexity, time and cost involved in developing individual mobile apps, the company said.

• Like most DevOps programs, Red Hat’s Ansible doesn’t require your IT staff to be coding wizards. It’s meant to make server and cloud deployment and configuration easy.

• Red Hat announced the general availability of Ansible 2.3, the updated version of the company’s agentless open-source IT automation framework. Ansible 2.3 includes performance enhancements and advanced networking capabilities, as well as added features that aim to cater to network operators’ needs.

• Within 10-20 years, virtually all computing will reside on public clouds, AWS chief Andy Jassy declared in 2015. However, even if one agrees with this prediction, getting there will involve a heck of a lot of ugly reality between now and then. That “reality” involves a roiling cauldron of public, private, and hybrid cloud services, not to mention earth-bound, on-premises servers. In the midst of that infrastructural confusion, there is opportunity for someone to provide consistency at the app layer to which developers can write.

Finance

• Company earnings numbers are typically highly analyzed by investors and analysts alike. Earnings are important because they can provide insight into a company’s profitability. Sell-side Street analysts are expecting Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) to post quarterly EPS of $0.34. The company is next scheduled to release earnings on or around 2017-06-28 for the period ending 2017-05-31.

Fedora

• Fedora is a community with a lot of moving parts and has at least five different ways of thinking about new contributor onboarding. Unlike some single code-base communities where there is a focus around a repository or a bug tracker, Fedora is constantly working on lots of things and the linkages can be hard to see. Some of those activities are directly (in a creation sense) related to the amazing Linux distribution we produce.

• Saturday, apr 7, it was my first participation of FLISOL in the city of Blumenau at FURB – University of Blumenau organized by friends of the Hackerspace Blu group.

• I attendee some good talks about oVirt, Python and Government with Free Software. Those who were not shy about asking, won Fedora 25 Live Medias and others grab threes options of stickers at entrance table of event.

• No version published yet, version 7.2.0-dev is still under development, but I think it is useful to be able to start testing.

• RPM of this upcoming version of PHP 7.2, are available in remi repository for Fedora 24, 25, 26 and Enterprise Linux 6, 7 (RHEL, CentOS, …) in a fresh new Software Collection (php72) allowing its installation beside the system version.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• When Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical and Ubuntu Linux leader, stepped down as CEO in favor of COO Jane Silber in 2010, no one was too worried. Silber may not have been flashy, but she knew how to keep the company moving forward. In a way, it was like Tim Cook taking over Apple after Steve Job’s death.

• Last week we were the first to exclusively report that Jane Silber would be out as Canonical’s CEO with Mark Shuttleworth returning to the role as CEO. Today, Jane Silber has publicly announced she’s indeed stepping down.

• Jane Silber announced today she’s indeed stepping down as Canonical enters “a new phase of accelerated growth.”

• I joined Canonical as COO in 2004, excited by the vision of Ubuntu and the possibilities that could unfold from the software, the collaboration with the open source community, the energy of an international, distributed start-up and the impact it could have on the world. When Mark asked me to become CEO in 2010, I added the challenge of driving commercial success to that list. The intervening years, and the adjective/animal pairs, have flown by and I’m still excited by Canonical and those very same things.

• Snaps make it easier for application developers to package, distribute and update their software — and support for them has landed in Fedora 24, 25 and 26.

• More than 80 Canonical workers are facing the axe as founder Mark Shuttleworth has taken back the role of chief executive officer.

• The number, revealed today by The Reg, comes as Shuttleworth assumed the position from CEO of eight years Jane Silber, previously chief operating officer.

• The Reg has learned 31 or more staffers have already left the Ubuntu Linux maker ahead of Shuttleworth’s rise, with at least 26 others now on formal notice and uncertainty surrounding the remainder.

• Today, April 13, 2017, Canonical released the final version of the Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system, which has been in development for the past six months, since last October’s launch of Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak).

• As part of today’s Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) release, the Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 official flavor made its appearance online as well, so we can now have an in-depth look at its new features.

• Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 is the first release of the flavor to ship with an up-to-date GNOME Stack, based on the recently released GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, which is a major update introducing numerous novelties, such as Night Light, a cool feature to protect your eyes by automatically reducing the blue light emitted by your computer’s screen.

• Heads up folks, you can download Ubuntu 17.04 right now. The official release announcement is yet to go live but the final stable ISOs are up on the official Ubuntu server and many mirrors.

Devices/Embedded

• MYIR’s 70 x 55mm MYS-6ULX SBC runs Linux 4.1.15 on the i.MX6 UL or new i.MX6 ULL, offering -40 to 85°C support or WiFi, respectively.

• MYIR, which has built SBCs based on the TI AM437x (Rico Board) and Zynq-7000 (Z-turn Board), among others, has announced what appears to be the first SBC to offer both NXP’s low power, Cortex-A7 i.MX6 UltraLite (UL) and the newer, more affordable i.MX6 ULL SoC. Each model of the MYS-6ULX SBC is identical except for the processor and one special feature provided by each: The i.MX6 UL version has -40 to 85°C support instead of 0 to 70°C, and the i.MX6 ULL model features a USB-powered WiFi radio.

• We can see only a few minor differences between Axiomtek’s PICO512 and the earlier PICO500, such as the removal of audio I/O, and the addition of an I2C interface. The separate SMBus interface has switched to the board’s low-speed connector. As with the PICO500, there’s also a high-speed connector with USB 3.0, DDI, and PCIe signals.

Phones

• Just to back up for a second, the still-unofficial Surface Phone is considered to be Microsoft’s very last shot at making Windows a serious smartphone contender against Apple and Google, as Windows phones slip under 1% global market share. Microsoft hasn’t shipped a flagship Windows phone since late 2015′s Lumia 950.

Tizen

• March 2017 has come and gone and that means the March Top 100 apps of the Tizen Mobile App Incentive Program have been announced. Winners are being contacted right now so they can have their share of $9 million in cash and prizes. You could even earn $10,000 if you make it to the Top 100. The program is a global program open to all developers, so get coding now !!!!

• In all Tizen Phones, there’s only one way to backup and restore your files, Samsung Cloud. But last week, SomyaC released the Backup And Restore app with this Music Recognizer app. They have now submitted an updated version of the Backup And Restore app to address a particular bug.

• Hey Tizen Developers or Devs, the Tizen Tools team are proud to announce the latest release of the Tizen SCM Tools packages, taking it to version 17.01.2, which has the following updates: gbs 0.24.6, MIC Image Creator 0.27.4 and repa 0.5.

Android

• Smartphones have the power to make our lives more efficient. They also have the power to cause major migraines.

• Let’s face it: Technology wouldn’t be technology without the occasional facepalm-inducing failure—and mobile devices are no exception. But an annoying Android error doesn’t have to send you scrambling to the nearest clueless carrier store or online help forum. I’ve been covering and personally using Android since its infancy, and I’m here to help. (My certified-geek badge is on file in the main office if you need to see it.)

• Today I am making a project public I am working on for more than 1.5 years now. Back in 2015 I started working on a prototype of what I call Anbox today. It was born out of the idea of putting Android into a simple container based on LXC and bridging relevant parts over to the host operating system while not allowing any access to real hardware or user data. The Android applications should integrate well into the existing desktop environment like they were regular applications. There were quite a few problems to solve on the way to a really working implementation but it is now in a state that it makes sense to share it with a wider audience.

• The Android Auto functionality is built-into the vehicle’s 12-inch display that runs Ford’s SYNC 3 platform, and also includes Apple’s CarPlay support. Optional 10-inch adjustable rear seat displays are available for beaming content from the front console to passengers in the back. Lincoln also has a deal with Sling that lets owners view live TV channels via a Slingbox product at home.

• Bharti Airtel is betting on a new internet-based set-top box to revive its direct-to-home (DTH) business, once said to be on the block, and increase its subscriber base and revenue while competing with Dish TV, Tata Sky and Videocon D2H.

• Airtel Digital TV, the DTH arm of Bharti Airtel, today launched an Android-enabled set top box (STB) that will allow consumers to watch online content on television besides regular satellite channels.

• Priced at Rs 4,999 for new customers, Airtel Internet TV STB are pre-loaded with movie application Netflix, support casting of content from YouTube, enable users to download applications from Google Play store and play games on TV for 3 months as it is targeting 20 million non-smart TV sets.

• With Google’s Pixel now available and the new Samsung Galaxy S8 on the way, there’s never been a better time to switch from iPhone to Android.

• You can look forward to a battery that lasts more than a day and the freedom to do pretty much whatever you want with your smartphone.

• So, are you ready to make the switch?

• In this guide, we’ll show you how to get set up on an Android smartphone without losing your contacts, photos or even your music.

• Huawei is already testing an Android O build for the Mate 9, one member of the XDA Developers boards claims. The Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer reportedly started the process of updating its proprietary EMUI launcher in an effort to make it compatible with the upcoming major iteration of Google’s operating system. The initial build based on the first developer preview of Android O is missing some key features and only supports English and Mandarin Chinese, the source said, noting that the software is also missing eRecovery and Huawei’s System Update app. None of that is particularly surprising considering how the build itself was likely made for the purposes of internal testing and will never be pushed out to users in its current form.

• Internet service providers in the United States have just been given the green light to sell usage history of their subscribers by S J Res 34, opening the gates for private subscriber data to become public. The law appears to direct ISPs to provide an “opt-out” mechanism for subscribers to retain private control of their usage history, which every subscriber should complete.

Free Software/Open Source

• An Indian software engineer has won the top prize at a global challenge for an open-source tool that enables users to interactively view UN General Assembly resolutions and gain a deeper understanding of the voting patterns of member states. Abdulqadir Rashik, also an entrepreneur, won the ‘Unite Ideas #UNGAViz Textual Analysis and Visualisation Challenge’ for his ‘Global Policy’, an open-source tool that enables users to search and interactively view General Assembly resolutions to gain a deeper understanding of the voting patterns and decisions made by United Nations Member States.

• A10 Networks Inc. has integrated its application delivery controller with a second open source load balancer, as enterprises turn to free software for services provided by ADC vendors.

• The vendor announced this week integration between the Harmony Controller and HAProxy, one of several widely used open source load balancers for applications running on Linux. Harmony also supports NGINX, which developers also use with Linux software.

• My instance mastodon.social has recently surpassed 43,000 users. I have closed registrations both to have more time to investigate the infrastructure and ensure a good experience for existing users, and to encourage more decentralization in the network (with a wonderful effect — the Mastodon fediverse now hosts over 161,000 people spread out over more than 500 independent instances!)

• But providing a smooth and swift service to 43,000 users takes some doing, and as some of the other instances are approaching large sizes themselves, it is a good time to share the tips & tricks I learned from doing it.

• In the olden days, creating a website from scratch was easy.

• With a basic understanding of HTML, and maybe a little CSS, you could put together a pretty functional web page with very little effort. Throw it onto your web server, and you were good to go.

Events

• One of the best things about MariaDB’s first annual user conference (M|17) was hearing from open source advocates who flew in from APAC countries to tell their stories. Alibaba presented on how they use open source at monster cloud scale. I also got some interesting views on why some open source database projects are a lot better than others.

Web Browsers

• Google has announced that its widely used Octane JavaScript benchmark is being retired, with Google saying that it’s no longer a useful way for browser developers to determine how best to optimize their JavaScript engines.

• Octane was developed for and by the developers of V8, the JavaScript engine used in Chrome. It was intended to address flaws in the earlier SunSpider benchmark, developed by Apple’s Safari team. SunSpider’s tests were all microbenchmarks, sometimes testing something as small as a single operation performed thousands of times. It wasn’t very representative of real-world code, and it was arguably being gamed, with browser vendors introducing optimizations that were aimed primarily, albeit not exclusively, at boosting SunSpider scores. This was being done even when those optimizations were detrimental to real-world performance, because having a good score carried so much prestige.

Chrome

• Chrome 59 stable isn’t expected until early June, but when this release comes it will bring with it an interesting feature: a headless mode.

• Chrome’s headless mode is made for headless/server environments, such as where you may automatically want to be capturing screenshots of rendered pages, etc. This is very practical for automated testing. Or there’s the use-case of just wanting to interact with the DOM but not caring about presenting the contents on any connected physical display.

SaaS/Back End

• Quite a bit, actually. Open source projects frequently struggle to find a name that’s suitably memorable, descriptive, appropriate, and, above all else, does not find the project in accidental legal trouble.

• While nailing down the name for an open source project can be a challenge, so too can be the naming of individual components or releases. Several projects within OpenStack are on their second name: Quantum became Neutron, Savanna became Sahara, and Marconi became Zaqar.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• In the last 3 months I played with the awesome feature of Notebookbar. This experimental feature give the user the possibility to use a tabbed toolbar like Microsoft does, but it offers more, much more. I like the idea from the LibreOffice UX team about the context based toolbar. Advantage of the different UI elements.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Two of the top three highest-ranked projects in the index, Linux and MySQL, have spawned successful companies, Thakker pointed out. No. 1-ranked Linux underpins Red Hat and Ubuntu, while database company MySQL, later acquired by Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle), is powered by MySQL technology, which ranked No. 3. And the popular version-control system Git, which ranked No. 2 on the list, has inspired companies like GitHub and GitLab.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Today I’m announcing pragmatique, a new project.

• Its primary focus is to open up the efforts I’ve been working on for some time to other people, to provide space as a community, and to work on more than just software.

• Our main project is pragmaOS, an on-going project to build a live-system for applications around GNUnet and further software solutions which make use of GNUnet, based on GuixSD.

Public Services/Government

• Last month, the Portuguese Ministry of Health started a pilot to make it easier for citizens to get ‘proof of fitness’, a requirement to obtain or renew a driving licence. For this purpose, the Portuguese National Broker (PNB) platform was extended to include the exchange of Driving Licence Certificates between the Ministry and the Portuguese Institute for Mobility and Transport (IMT, I.P.).

• The PNB platform is the national eHealth message exchange, providing technical, semantic and legal interoperability between all health-related entities in the country. Its role is to facilitate the exchange of messages (services/interfaces) while at the same time implementing security mechanisms for authentication and access control. The infrastructure currently processes an average of 300,000 messages per day.

• Sharing and reuse of IT solutions should become the default for the EU’s public administrations, said Mário Campolargo, Deputy Director General for the Directorate General of Informatics (DIGIT) of the European Commission at the Sharing & Reuse Conference 2017 in Lisbon, Portugal, last week. “This is the key for open modern government”, he said.

• “I would estimate that almost 30 percent of the software we are using (in administration and in 25 schools) is based on open source,” Herbert Rettberg, IT manager at the German City of Göppingen said in an interview blog recently published by consultancy firm IT-Novum.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Leaders and managers everywhere collectively groan with the thought of a new cohort to manage. Boomers and Gen Xers typically try to align the new kids on the block with Millennials—which would be a mistake. While Gen Z and Millennials have similarities, their motivators and influencers are vastly different. Each of the differences affects attraction, recruitment and retention of Gen Z talent.

Open Hardware/Modding

• “Lukas started his epic SDR-from-scratch build when he was 16. Projects like this aren’t completed overnight. (He’s now 18. We’re impressed.)”

• The FreeSRP is an open-source (hardware and software) platform for software-defined radio that is affordable, high performance, compatible with existing SDR software such as GNU Radio, and includes an expansion port for hardware add-ons.

• This Friday, Hackaday.io will be graced with purveyors of Open Source Silicon. Join us in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat this Friday, April 14 at noon PDT (19:00 UTC) for a conversation with SiFive, an ‘Open’ silicon manufacturer.

• This week, we’re sitting down with SiFive, a fabless semiconductor company and makers of the HiFive1, an Open Hardware microcontroller that you can just go out and buy. Late last year, SiFive released the HiFive1, an Arduinofied version of SiFive’s FE310 System on Chip. This SoC is a RISC-V core and one of the first microprocessors that is completely Open Source. It is an affront to Stallmanism, the best hope we have for truly Open hardware, and it’s pretty fast, to boot.

Programming/Development

• LLVM, the open source compiler framework that powers everything from Mozilla’s Rust language to Apple’s Swift, emerges in yet another significant role: an enabler of code deployment systems that target multiple classes of hardware for speeding up jobs like machine learning.

• To write code that can run on CPUs, GPUs, ASICs, and FPGAs—hugely useful with machine learning apps—it’s best to use the likes of OpenCL, which allows a program to be written once, then automatically deployed across different types of hardware.

• Weblate 2.13.1 has been released quickly after 2.13. It fixes few minor issues and possible upgrade problem.

• In this article, I outline 12 suggestions for study techniques. Remember that everybody learns differently. Some of these techniques may work excellently for you, whereas others may not meet your needs at all. If you start to feel stuck with one strategy, try another and see where it gets you.

Standards/Consortia

• The folks behind StreamComputing BV are looking to strengthen the OpenCL compute ecosystem by improving the documentation and code samples as well as better overviews for those wishing to learn this Khronos compute standard.

Leftovers

Hardware

Security

• One of the most unwanted baggages for crypto implementations written prior to this decade is the (pseudo-)random generator, or simply PRNG. Speaking for GnuTLS, the random generator was written at a time where devices like /dev/urandom did not come by default on widely used operating systems, and even if they did, they were not universally available, e.g., devices would not be present, the Entropy Gathering Daemon (EGD) was something that was actually used in practice, and was common for software libraries like libgcrypt to include code to gather entropy on a system by running arbitrary command line tools.

• Released GnuTLS 3.5.11 which is a bug fix release in the stable branch.

• One issue though: people have to trust me — and my computer’s integrity. Reproducible builds could address that.

• My release process is tightly controlled, but is my project reproducible? If not, what do I need? Let’s check!

• Anyone who uses technology benefits from open-source software. Most applications you use have implemented open-source code to varying degrees. This isn’t just small-time developers that use this code, either. Many large enterprises rely on this software to build their own products and solutions.

• Because of this, any CIO would be wise to have their developers follow the same blueprint. However, some developers have concerns about open-source. In an open environment where any contributor can drop potentially harmful code into the global library, is it safe — or wise — to lean heavily on these development resources?

• So far in this series, we’ve walked through security considerations for your SysAdmin workstation from choosing the right hardware and Linux distribution, to setting up a secure pre-boot environment and distro installation. Now it’s time to cover post-installation hardening.

• A critical Microsoft Word zero-day that was actively exploited for months connected two strange bedfellows, including government-sponsored hackers spying on Russian targets and financially motivated crooks pushing crimeware.

• Researchers who track nation-state groups say open-source hacking tools increasingly are becoming part of the APT attack arsenal.

• Nation-state hacking teams increasingly are employing open-source software tools in their cyber espionage and other attack campaigns.

• From all the bug fixes in this release, I’d like to point out one which required a backwards incompatible change and requires an update to existing policies. The Linux USB root hub devices use the kernel version as the bcdDevice attribute value. The value is part of the USB descriptor data which USBGuard uses for computing the device hash and therefore causes the device hash to change on every kernel update. This in turn makes USBGuard rules which rely on this hash to not match and block the device. And because it’s a root hub device that gets blocked, all the other devices get blocked too. The bug fix is simple, reset the bcdDevice value to zero before hashing (applied only for the Linux root hub devices).

Defence/Aggression

• A Q&A with CNN legal analyst and national security law professor Steve Vladeck about the legal issues surrounding President Donald Trump’s authorization of a strike against a Syrian government air base.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Deleting records of government business from government-issued devices is—let’s be clear—illegal.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• An estimated 40 tons of bushmeat is flown into Geneva and Zurich airports every year, with a similar story likely unfolding in other European capitals, where poached, wild caught meat – including endangered species – is illegally being traded and served on urban dinner plates. The problem could be serious, and some trafficking could be well organized, but only a few surveys in a couple of countries have been done so far to determine what’s happening at European points of entry.

Finance

• “Uber plays by its own rules – [it has been accused of] shortchanging drivers, [avoiding] local taxes and sometimes laws by hiding behind an army of expensive lawyers and lobbyists,” said Carys Afoko, communications director of SumOfUs. “And now, we’re exposing it.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• While there is scant evidence that the spammer’s arrest had anything to do with the election, the success of that narrative is a sterling example of how the Kremlin’s propaganda machine is adept at manufacturing fake news, undermining public trust in the media, and distracting attention away from the real story.

• No matter the outcome of Turkey’s referendum on constitutional reform Sunday, there is no good option left for the country’s people.

• A victory for the Yes vote would institutionalize a de facto one-man rule under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The remaining, already severely weakened, voices of the opposition will be even more easily labeled as “traitors.”

• If the No camp prevails, people’s hopes for change might be reignited. But a more insecure Erdoğan would likely crack down even more harshly on any form of criticism.

• In Turkey, the pervading climate is one of fear and collective insanity. As concerns over the transparency of the vote grow, silent grievances are deepening.

• The Yes campaign is backed by vast public resources, making it impossible to talk about a fair race. Indeed, in an environment where people are scared to express their opinion in surveys, few pollsters are confident enough to call it a close one.

• “Naysayers” are treated like terrorists. Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have confirmed cases of intimidation against the No campaign across the country.

• A recent debate about “Russiagate” on RT’s Crosstalk show, with CIA whistleblower, John Kiriakou, and former US diplomat, James Jatras, along with host Peter Lavelle.

Censorship/Free Speech

• I work on federated standards and systems, particularly ActivityPub. Of course, if you work on this stuff, every now and then the question of “how do you deal with abuse?” very rightly comes up. Most recently Mastodon has gotten some attention, which is great! But of course, people are raising the question, can federation systems really protect people from abuse? (It’s not the first time to come up either; at LibrePlanet in 2015 a number of us held a “social justice for federated free software systems” dinner and were discussing things then.) It’s an important question to ask, and I’m afraid the answer is, “not reliably yet”. But in this blogpost I hope to show that there may be some hope for the future.

• I recently wrote about possible routes for anti-abuse systems. One of the goofier routes I wrote about on there discussed genetic programming. I get the sense that few people believe I could be serious… in some ways, I’m not sure if I myself am serious. But the idea is so alluring! (And, let’s be honest, entertaining!) Imagine if you had anti-abuse programs on your computer, and they’re growing and evolving based on user feedback (hand-waving aside exactly what that feedback is, which might be the hardest problem), adapting to new threats somewhat invisibly from the user benefiting from them. They have a set of friends who have similar needs and concerns, and so their programs propagate and reproduce with programs in their trust network (along with their datasets, which may be taught to child programs also via a genetic program). Compelling! Would it work? I dunno.

• [...]

• Lee and I met up at the Haymarket Cafe, which is a friendly coffee shop in Northampton. I mentioned that I had just come from LibrePlanet where I had given a talk on The Lisp Machine and GNU. I was entertained that almost immediately after these words left my mouth, Lee dove into his personal experiences with lisp machines, and his longing for the kind of development experiences lisp machines gave you, which he hasn’t been able to find since. That’s kind of an aside from this blogpost I suppose, but it was nice that we had something immediately to connect on, including on a topic I had recently been exploring and talking about myself. Anyway, the conversation was pretty wild and wide-ranging.

• A study of nine websites that use comment service Disqus to let readers post responses to articles found that sock puppets can be identified based on their writing style, posting activity and relationship with other users.

• A profile in The College Voice, the student newspaper of Connecticut College, of an activist-turned-artist named Mike Alewitz details his radical, politically charged career that is characterized as much by the provocative works he produced as by the incidents of censorship the works inspired.

• Alewitz, a former professor at Central CT State University , who earned his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1983, is best known for his murals depicting the American labor movement. According to the profile author, his “stories are a routine of acceptance and decline, of struggle and movement. His pieces are vibrant, loud, colorful. They declare to be acknowledged.”

• This is an interesting opinion from the Texas Supreme Court on citing Wikipedia as a dictionary. The underlying case involves an article in D Magazine titled “The Park Cities Welfare Queen.” The article purports to show that the plaintiff, Rosenthal, “has figured out how to get food stamps while living in the lap of luxury.” After publication, evidence emerged that the plaintiff had not committed welfare fraud. She sued the magazine for defamation.

• The appeals court denied the magazine’s anti-SLAPP motion in part because it held the term “Welfare Queen,” as informed by the Wikipedia entry, could be defamatory. The Texas Supreme Court affirms the anti-SLAPP denial, but it also criticizes the appeals court for not sufficiently examining the entire article’s gist. Along the way, the court opines on the credibility and validity of Wikipedia as a dictionary. TL;DR = the Supreme Court says don’t treat Wikipedia like a dictionary.

• Last Thursday, Twitter sued the federal government. At issue was a demand from the Department of Homeland Security that Twitter reveal the user(s) behind an account critical of the Trump administration. The government withdrew its request the next day, and the issue seemingly drew to a close.

• A recent incident brought this home. I work with a colleague at Tehran University. They wanted a copy of a book, but were not able buy it. I went to Amazon, purchased an e-version, and sent the link to them. When she tried to get the book she got a message that, “This title is not available for customers from (the) Islamic Republic of Iran.”

• Even as it was arresting, torturing and imprisoning human-rights lawyers, the Chinese government blocked discussion of its actions on local social media, including images distributed by those drawing attention to what had taken place.

• Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab discovered that WeChat, China’s digital-communication lifeblood, has censored 42 combinations of terms related to the “709 crackdown,” so called because it began on July 9, 2015.

• The research underscores how Chinese authorities assert broad control over information inside the country, eliminating unfavourable information.

• A censorship watchdog has warned that novels by shamed comedian Bill Cosby are vanishing from school libraries.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Are your hard drives encrypted? Especially laptop drives? If you have data stored on your computers that someone can use to make your life miserable, including credit card numbers, an encrypted hard drive can save the day in case of theft. Using Linux is pretty good, too, since a passworded Linux install will foil most low-end thieves.

• Australia’s mandatory data retention scheme comes into effect today, with telecoms providers expected to retain and store their customers’ Internet usage metadata. In response, privacy group Digital Rights Watch has declared this event National Get a VPN Day, vowing to equip citizens with the tools they need to avoid surveillance.

• The DOJ is proud to announce it’s flexing its new Rule 41 muscle. The changes proposed in 2015 sailed past a mostly-uninterested Congress and into law, giving the FBI and other DOJ entities permission to hack computers anywhere in the world with a single warrant.

• With the new rules, the law has finally caught up with the FBI’s activities. It deployed a Network Investigative Tool — the FBI’s nifty nickname for intrusive malware that sends identifying info from people’s computers to FBI investigators — back in 2012 during a child porn investigation and mostly got away with it. It tried it again in 2015 and ran into a bit more resistance.

• There’s been a lot of hype and confusion about Congress’s decision (supported by the new FCC) to kill off the broadband privacy rules that were put in place late last year by the Tom Wheeler FCC, though they had not yet been officially implemented. As we noted, it’s an unfortunate exaggeration (pushed by some well meaning folks) to say that ISPs will now be packaging up and selling individuals’ specific browsing history. That’s just not true. Some people responded to us by noting that just because that’s not how the ad market works today, it doesn’t mean that won’t change. But… that’s probably not the case. Don’t get me wrong: getting rid of these privacy rules is still a really bad idea, but let’s look a little deeper at what ISPs can’t do, before we explain why those privacy rules are still important.

• First off, as we noted, the market for internet data is not in sharing some sort of dossier on what you like, but rather connecting into a marketplace, where the information is shared for the purpose of displaying ads, but not in a way where your actual info goes to the advertiser. That is, when you, say, go shopping for a camera, and then start seeing ads for cameras everywhere, it’s not that the camera makers now know that you, Joe Schmoe, like cameras. Instead, what happens is that some company took that info (Joe Schmoe is shopping for cameras) and that gets put into a marketplace where some real time bidding happens for ad placement, such that when Joe Schmoe visits another site, there’s a near instantaneous call out for who will pay the most for the ad slot, and with that info is, effectively, this otherwise anonymous person was just looking at cameras, and the camera company will say “I’ll pay an extra $0.0002 for that ad compared to the TV maker” and thus the camera ad gets shown. The camera maker or retailer never knows its Joe Schmoe, and doesn’t somehow “know” anything more about Joe.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Last December, more than 200 girls arrived at Samwelly’s sanctuary from all over Tanzania; some as young as eight years old fled their homes to avoid cutting.

• With her book The Veiled Threat dealing with the plight of Muslim women in Europe, former radical feminist Zana Ramadani has kicked the Islamist hornets’ nest in Germany. Being born a Muslim herself, Ramadani is fearful of her life after receiving countless death threats from radical Muslims in Germany. German authorities have not granted her police protection yet.

• The boy, a class nine student, was robbed of his sight for the rest of his life but doctors managed to save his life.

• So how could United possibly make things worse? Not to worry. This is the airline that knows how to add insult to injury.

• They then — thuggishly — had the man, Dr. Dao, dragged out of his seat on the plane as if he had done something criminal.

• As for the stories coming out about him now, the reality is, what he’s done in his life is immaterial. He bought that seat, he got to the airport on time, and he got into his seat without incident.

• And what was United’s stellar PR response?

• It appears the DOJ will no longer be in the business of policing the police. A memo issued by every cop’s new best friend, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, states the DOJ will be doing more to empower police and will conduct fewer civil rights investigations of law enforcement agencies. On one hand, it makes sense to have the locals handle their own problems. On the other hand, the locals have repeatedly shown a willingness to ignore abusive policing until the feds are forced to step in.

• It may be difficult to roll back DOJ agreements and oversight of investigated agencies immediately. It may, in fact, be impossible. Those consent decrees that have made their way through the court system on the way to being put into force would take some serious litigating to roll back. It’s not clear the DOJ’s interested in attempting an expensive clawback of police oversight and policy changes.

• It’s those that haven’t been formalized through this process that are in danger of being scaled back, if not removed completely. The DOJ has filed a motion asking for time to review its proposed consent decree with the Baltimore PD in light of AG Sessions’ memo. The DOJ also just finished wrapping up an investigation of the Chicago PD, but statements made by Sessions and President Trump indicate the White House and DOJ are more interested in solving Chicago’s crime problem, rather than its police problem.

• The recent success of 17-year-old Singaporean Amos Yee in seeking political asylum in the US has led to a diplomatic dispute between the two countries.

• And while the international media, including the media in Hong Kong, have referred to Yee as a “political dissident”, he has received very little sympathy from among Singaporeans themselves.

• Young, vulnerable people are being targeted with online classified adverts offering accommodation in exchange for sex, a BBC investigation has found.

• The deals, which are legal, are on classified ad sites such as craigslist.

• Charities have described the adverts as exploitative and Hove MP Peter Kyle wants them made illegal. Craigslist, which on one day carried more than 100 such adverts, has not commented.

• One student described how she felt her only option was a “sex-for-rent” deal.

• Of course, protesting what goes on in Pakistan doesn’t really work if what you’re going for in protesting Israel is cover for Jew hatred — basically, having a plausibly deniable way to protest Jews.

• Oh, and I’m not in favor of everything that goes on in Israel. In fact, I think that if Jews looked at the highest for of righteousness in Judaism, saving a life, they’d do as LA writer Ken Layne once suggested and move Israel to Baja.

• Same weather — missing a few urns and the religious connection and history. However, to save a whole lot of lives (Israeli and Palestinian, in a conflict unlikely to ever end, except in a nuking, Israelis should move away from the people trying to murder them. (And yes, Israel bought Arab land fair and square, for elevated prices, early on, despite Arabs telling other Arabs not to sell.)

• After Israelis vacate to Mexico, the land they’ve left will surely become like all the other Middle Eastern countries — where various sects of Islam are busy killing each other for being “not Muslim enough,” or just because.

• The Jews — in the form of Israelis — are just a convenient distraction from this.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• La Quadrature du Net publishes a position paper co-drafted with the FDN Federation and presented/exposed during the stakeholders meeting organised by the Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communications (BEREC) on 14 March 2017 in Brussels.

• The proposals aim to allow a better monitoring of Net Neutrality and present helpful evidence for regulators to enforce the application of Net Neutrality especially through a tool developed to allow users to report Net Neutrality violations in the easiest way possible.

• The situation is slightly convoluted and thoroughly infuriating. EPB—a power and communications company owned by the Chattanooga government—offers 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, and 10 Gpbs internet connections. A Tennessee law that was lobbied for by the telecom industry makes it illegal for EPB to expand out into surrounding areas, which are unserved or underserved by current broadband providers. For the last several years, EPB has been fighting to repeal that state law, and even petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to try to get the law overturned.

• “The FCC just held a closed door meeting with lobbyists from the Big Cable, and now they’re moving fast to slash net neutrality and open the flood gates for fast lanes and slow lanes, throttling, and censorship,” the group wrote in its call to action.

DRM

• The second day of LibrePlanet 2017 started with a talk by author, blogger, editor, activist, and Internet freedom fighter Cory Doctorow. Straight through to Sumana Harihareswara’s closing keynote, the day was full of conversations and presentations touching on a broad range of topics across the free software movement.

• Doctorow presented “Beyond unfree: The software you can go to jail for talking about.” Related to his current anti-Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) work, he addressed the wide range of risks threatened by copyright, trademark, and patent laws, as well as the use and institutionalization of DRM. But he did not just paint a bleak image, instead reminding the audience that the fight against DRM and similar restrictions is ongoing. “My software freedom,” Doctorow said, “is intersectional.”

• You might think that copyright on its own has enough problems. And yet DRM, originally designed to protect digital copyright material from unauthorized copying, has managed to make things much worse. It not only punishes with extra inconvenience those who acquire legal copies — but not those who manage to find illegal versions without DRM — it also allows the DMCA to be used to disable competitors’ products, to create repair monopolies, and even to undermine the very concept of ownership. You can see why the copyright industry really loves DRM, and fights to preserve its sanctity. And you can also see why the following news from Portugal, where the parliament has just approved a bill allowing DRM circumvention and even bans in certain situations, is such a big deal.

• The recent saga of Denuvo DRM has been fairly fast moving as these things go. Once thought to be the DRM unicorn that video game makers had dreamed of for years, the time it took for cracks to be released for Denuvo-protected games shrunk to months, then weeks, and finally days. It seemed for all the world like Denuvo was destined for the grave.

• But these things don’t always progress in linear fashion. The recently released Bioware title Mass Effect: Andromeda was patched recently for a variety of gameplay functions. Unheralded in the patch notes was the updated version of Denuvo included within it. That updated version appears to be setting back cracking groups, forcing Mass Effect pirates into using the older, pre-patched version of the game.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• For several years now, we’ve put out the steady warning that the alcohol industries have a trademark problem. In some ways, it’s one of those kinda sorta good problems to have in a goods industry, in that the reason there is a problem at all is because of how well the alcohol business is doing. Not just well in terms of total sales, but also in terms of being an ecosystem that encourages new businesses, startups, and expansion. Those are all signs of a healthy market, but with that comes the trademark problem. With so many new players and and a finite amount of language with which those players can brand themselves, trademark disputes in what has previously been known to be an IP congenial industry have exploded in number.

• It’s become bad enough that the North Bay Business Journal in Santa Rosa, California, smack dab in the middle of wine country, conducted a written Q&A with a couple of intellectual property attorneys to get their thoughts. You can practically hear the frustration at how this is all progressing dripping off of their responses.

Copyrights

• Eventually, because New Yorkers seemed to like the damn thing, the city granted a “temporary” permit allowing the statue to remain (a little ways away from where it was originally placed) — and so it’s remained there, “temporarily,” for 28 years. Of course, there have been some conflicts over the bull. In 2009, we wrote about Di Modica suing people for copyright infringement, which seems kind of nutty given that he originally just dumped the statue in the street without getting permission.

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