● 04.21.17

● Links 21/4/2017: System76 Entering Phase Three, KDE Applications 17.04, Elive 2.9.0 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 7:04 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux. You have probably heard about this operating system over the years, but what is it really? What can you do with it? How do you get a copy?

• Well, the answers are easier than you can possibly imagine.

• Linux is a computer operating system that has been embraced by vendors, including Telos, Wheatstone and Orban. This operating system can be used to run almost any computerized hardware. It is used on phones, tablets, microphone processors, AoIP controllers and even your microwave oven.

Desktop

• There was a time when Linux was seen as an outcast operating system, and indeed one that was labelled as a ‘cancer’ by Microsoft’s former CEO Steve Ballmer.

• Times have now changed as the 25-year-old operating system has made some serious inroads in the server market, then in the cloud – not forgetting that it underpins the most popular ecosystem out there: Android.

• Phase three moves product design and manufacturing in house. We’re about to build the Model S of computers. Something so brilliant and beautiful that reviewers will have to add an 11 to their scores. Being that we’re System76 and we do things the System76 way, our design principles are polar opposite of the rest of the industry.

• In looking to make their Linux-powered systems more appealing and original to the masses, System76 will begin their own product design and manufacturing.

• First beginning with desktop computers and laptops further down the road, this system provider of Ubuntu-powered systems will begin their own original product designs.

• System76 is one of only a handful of PC vendors that exclusively sells computers with Linux-based software. Up until now, that’s meant the company has chosen hardware that it could guarantee would work well with custom firmware and the Ubuntu Linux operating system.

Server

• Docker is a name that has become synonymous with the application container revolution in recent years. At the helm of Docker Inc. is CEO Ben Golub, who is tasked with leading the company forward and making sure containers are a good idea for not only developers, but also for paying customers.

• In a video interview with eWEEK at the DockerCon 17 conference here this week, Golub details how Docker Inc. has developed its business model and what lies ahead.

Kernel Space

• It looks like with the upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel cycle we will finally see the BFQ I/O scheduler merged.

• BFQ has been in development for several years as the Budget Fair Queueing I/O scheduler. BFQ aims to provide low latency for interactive applications and soft real-time applications, higher speed for code development tasks, high throughput, and strong fairness/bandwidth/delay guarantees.

• Opto 22 is now a silver level member of the Linux Foundation, a non-profit consortium dedicated to growing Linux and promoting standardization and technical collaboration. In joining the foundation, Opto 22 will be spearheading the adoption of open-source technology in the industrial automation and process control industries.

• Industrial automation manufacturer Opto 22 announces it has joined The Linux Foundation as a Silver Level member. As a Linux Foundation member, Opto 22 will help support the greatest shared technology resources in history, while also accelerating the company’s technology and innovation through open-source leadership and participation. In joining The Linux Foundation, Opto 22 hopes to spearhead the adoption of open-source technology in the industrial automation and process control industries, and accelerate the rollout of Industrial Internet of Things applications.

Graphics Stack

• Yesterday I posted the initial Radeon RX 580 Linux benchmarks while now with having more time with this “Polaris Evolved” card I’ve been able to try out a bit more, like the AMDGPU Linux overclocking support. Here are the ups and downs of overclocking the Radeon graphics card under Linux.

• Since last year there has been basic overclocking support in the AMDGPU DRM driver that’s the kernel driver to all newer Radeon GPUs — GCN 1.2+ and optionally the experimental GCN 1.0/1.1 support. With there not yet being a “Catalyst Control Center” / “Radeon Software Settings” area for the modern AMD Linux graphics driver, the overclocking needs to be done from the command-line.

Applications

• ​So for a distro hopper like me, one very useful tool is USB-ISO-MAKER. I always need to have these tools at my disposal as I am always testing out distros. For a long time, I have resorted to Rufus on Microsoft Windows as my most trusted USB ISO MAKER, and for all these times, I must confess, it has served me well. But the problem with Rufus, it requires Windows. So I have been looking for similar tools on Linux but they always seem to be unreliable sometime. The very popular Unetbootin works most of the time but it is in no way as robust as Rufus. There is also dd which is a command line utility but sometimes I do really prefer a GUI and dd can be devastating if you are not very careful. But then there was Etcher. Let me show you why Etcher is so awesome.

• Fasd (pronounced as “fast“) is command-line productivity booster, a self-contained POSIX shell script which enables quick and more efficient access to files and directories.

• SSHGuard is an intrusion prevention utility that parses logs and automatically blocks misbehaving IP addresses with the system firewall. It’s less configurable than the better-known Fail2Ban but has a smaller resource footprint and ships with full IPv6 support. The newly released SSHGuard version 2.0 have been made easier to configure for new users. It also gained support for FirewallD, ipset, and ipfilter firewall backends on Linux; as well as Capsicum sandboxing support on *BSD.

• While we’re still waiting for the next release of Fail2Ban with IPv6 support, I took a look around at some of the alternatives and found an interesting option in SSHGuard. I had to address some Linux compatibility issues when getting started with SSHGuard as the development team was mostly focused on FreeBSD. I submitted patches for those issues and got more involved in the development and release of SSHGuard 2.0 in the process.

• As of now, we have wrote few articles about the same topics but the way of method is different, how to hide files and folders in Linux & how to protect files and folders with password to safe the personal documents from others. It help us to send the secret information over the Internet like mail.

• Today we are going to discuss the same topic once again but the method is completely different. I mean, i will show you, how to hide sensitive data inside image and audio files using steghide utility.

• In the colophon to his book, Just a Geek, actor and writer Wil Wheaton wrote that he wanted to use Emacs to write the book but “couldn’t find the text editor.” Wheaton was joking, of course, but he highlighted an important point about Emacs: it’s gone way beyond its roots as a tool for editing text.

• Thanks to its many modes (extensions that change the way the editor behaves), you can use Emacs for just about anything: browsing the web, reading and sending email, publishing blog posts and books, managing databases, learning with flashcards, and much more.

• Yes, yes – there are already many clipboard managers in the Linux community but how many of them are posses a slick UI and are searchable? Today we bring you one such app to add to the number in your head.

• Indicator Bulletin is a clipboard manager applet through which you can intelligently search for (using regular expressions) and edit text you have saved to its clipboard.

• It was built for Ubuntu by Serg, who already has a handful of clipboard manager apps under his belt.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine maintenance release 2.0.1 is now available.

• For those preferring stable Wine releases to the bi-weekly development snapshots, Wine 2.0.1 is now available as the first point release to this year’s Wine 2.0 debut.

• Wine Staging 2.6 is now available which builds upon the Wine 2.6 development releases with added extras.

Games

• Take this with a pinch of salt, since it’s early days for his next game, but Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) actually showed off his next game ‘Jai Sokoban’ running on Linux.

• BossConstructor [Steam, Official Site], an indie 2D spaceship building and battling game recently added in some free new content.

• There’s a new weapon, Disintegrator Beam, which can be made quite powerful with the addition of extra charger modules attached to the ship.

• We briefly covered Diluvion [Steam, Official Site] before, as the developers were considering Linux support, looks like they decided to! A beta was mentioned and it looks like it might be up to test now.

• Techland claim to have finally fixed the Linux co-op in Dying Light [Steam] in a patch released today! Finally, I tried many times with various Linux gamers and it never worked. I was able to connect to Windows users and they were able to connect to me, but Linux to Linux just didn’t work.

• Aspyr Media today rolled out the Spring Update for Sid Meier’s Civilization VI [Steam] for Linux gamers, but sadly cross-platform multiplayer still isn’t ready. They did previously confirm to me directly that it would be in, but it’s just not ready.

• We see a lot of games get delayed for Linux, but why is this? I decided to ask around about the difficulties facing developers when porting games to Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• April 20, 2017. KDE Applications 17.04 is here. On the whole, we have worked to make both the applications and the underlying libraries more stable and easier to use. By ironing out wrinkles and listening to your feedback, we have made the KDE Applications suite less prone to glitches and much friendlier.

• Yet another tick in the box for my love of how customizable Linux desktops are. United is a new theme for KDE that aims to emulate the Unity look and feel.

• This could be a good option for those Unity fans who want to keep a similar experience, but maybe try something a little different.

• A new petition is calling for Canonical to make KDE Plasma Ubuntu’s next desktop, following news that the distro is to drop Unity in favour of GNOME.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• A number of GNOME modules are switching to meson for 3.26. I myself was an early adopter for this: recipes has had meson build support since the beginning of the year, and after the 1.0 release, I’ve dropped autotools support on the master branch.

• autotools are of course very familiar to most of us, and we know how to get most things done there. But it often isn’t pretty, and using meson feels like a breath of fresh air. Others have been praising meson for its simplicity, ease of use and speed, so I am not going repeat that here.

• GStreamer 1.12.0 will soon be released as the latest version of this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework.

• GStreamer 1.12 is bringing waylandsink DMA-BUF importation support so zero-copy multimedia playback will now work under Wayland. GStreamer 1.12 is also bringing Fraunhofer FDK AAC encoder/decoder support, Intel Media SDK support for accelerated video encode/decode on embedded Linux and Windows, OpenCV improvements, CineForm support, and more.

Distributions

Gentoo Family

Arch Family

• Google’s Pixel C tablet has some killer hardware under the hood, and thanks to XDA user Samt434, that killer hardware is able to run Arch Linux natively. Most implementations of Linux on Android run through an emulator or interpreter, but this method installs the ARM version of Arch Linux directly to the Pixel C’s internal drive, and has to wipe out Android entirely in order to make the device a Linux machine. A lot of things are still broken, but the fact that it’s booting at all is a minor miracle. If you would like to install this build despite that, Samt434 has provided a tutorial showing exactly how to do it, along with the files you’ll need.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Snapshots released the past two weeks of openSUSE Tumbleweed have slowed down a bit, but new software continues to be updated in the five snapshots that have been release since April 6.

Red Hat Family

• As you’ve probably heard, this year’s Red Hat Summit is in Boston May 2-4. Product Security is looking forward to taking over multiple sessions and activities over the course of those 3 days, and we wanted to give you a sneak peek of what we have planned.

• First of all, I was invited to come and give a talk by a friend, who lives in St Petersburg and works as a UX specialist (more about him later). He said people will be very interested in how open source design happens, what tools we use and what problems we face. It was an excellent opportunity to promote Red Hat and Fedora and meet professionals in my field of work. Furthermore, the UX scene in Russia is a bit different, and I was interested to find out how they work and what projects are going on. As always, conferences are great networking events, and I was happy to find out some people even came specifically to see me talk. So, altogether I really enjoyed ProfsoUX, now let’s talk about it in more detail.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Virtualization 4.1, the latest release of the company’s Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)-powered enterprise virtualization platform. Providing an open source infrastructure and centralized management solution for virtualized servers and workstations and built on the enterprise-grade backbone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Virtualization 4.1 delivers expanded automation capabilities through integration with Ansible by Red Hat while new networking and storage capabilities offer a stable, flexible foundation for IT innovation.

• If you’re walking in the area of Boston’s City Hall Plaza today, you might find yourself the subject of unique photo collage tomorrow.

• Twenty-five local middle school girl are out roaming the city with digital cameras they built themselves as part of Red Hat Inc.’s (NYSE: RHT) CO.LAB initiative. On Friday, they’ll turn the photos into a digital art installation that will be displayed at City Hall and Boston University.

• The girls built the cameras on Wednesday out of Raspberry Pi computer kits — small, simple devices that teach the basics of programming. (Click through the gallery above to see the building process.)

Finance

Fedora

• Last week the Fedora community was asked to share ideas for encouraging new contributors. Opensource.com collected many great responses. This week the blogging challenge continues with ideas on how to maintain existing community. his is another critical issue for Fedora on a regular basis. Share your thoughts and become part of the worldwide spread of open source and the ideas behind it.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.9.0

• Preparations for the release of TeX Live 2017 have started a few days ago with the freeze of updates in TeX Live 2016 and the announcement of the official start of the pretest period. That means that we invite people to test the new release and help fixing bugs.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• From a rethinking of mobile strategy to a change in the CEO office, big changes are afoot at Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux. Here’s what they could mean for the future of the open source company and the software it produces.

• As regular readers of The VAR Guy (which at one time had an entire sister site devoted to Ubuntu) know, Canonical is a relatively major company in the open source space.

• Founded in 2004, Canonical is not as old or as big as competitors like Red Hat. The latter is a publicly traded company founded in the heady days of the late 1990s, when the dot com world was bubbling over and Linus Torvalds was considered the fifteenth-most important person of the twentieth century.

• Unity, probably the most universally debated DE in the GNU/Linux community; despised by some, yet absolutely loved by others. Unity was created by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, for Ubuntu. It’s possible to install Unity on other systems, but 99% of the users you see using Unity are running it with Ubuntu.

• If you’re using a computer with Ubuntu 16.10 Desktop installed, chances are that you’ve already been prompted to upgrade to the latest version, which is Ubuntu 17.04 Desktop. It’s a simple and painless process that takes just a few hours.

• Following the successful launch of Ubuntu 17.04, the Ubuntu Server team is beginning to formalize their plans for Ubuntu 17.10.

• Development on Ubuntu 17.10 “AA” has yet to officially begin with Mark Shuttleworth not yet announcing the codename. I’ve heard a yet to be substantiated comment from a fellow that part of the reason AA isn’t yet open for development is they are weighing possible internal development changes, perhaps even making Ubuntu rolling-release-like, but not quite rolling like Arch or Gentoo, following the turnover and other changes going on at Canonical. Anyhow, the server team is moving ahead in trying to plan some of their work for the “AA” cycle.

• According to Launchpad, it looks like we finally have the codename for the successor to the Zesty Zapus.

• Artful Aardvark is registered on Launchpad as the Ubuntu release to be delivered in October 2017. We have yet to see Mark Shuttleworth comment on his blog about it, but there is also now the artful archive.

• Still wondering what the Ubuntu 17.10 codename will be? Well, it seems we have our answer.

• According to this page on Launchpad, the home of Ubuntu development, Ubuntu 17.10 due in October is nicknamed the “Artful Aardvark”.

• The ‘Artful’ repos have also opened, meaning packaging, tooling and development on the next short-term release of Ubuntu can now begin.

• Mark Shuttleworth typically announces the new Ubuntu codename in an alliteratively ascribed blog post announcement, but one for the Artful Aardvark is yet to appear.

• Unity and I never saw eye to eye, but it did a good job of pushing the Linux desktop in new directions and it emphasised something that, particularly when it arrived, was otherwise lacking – innovation in design.

• Unity might have borrowed a few elements from Apple’s OS X, but it quickly outgrew those initial imitations and forged its own path and its own aesthetic, something that’s all too rare in open-source software.

Flavours and Variants

• Budgie is a new desktop interface built from scratch which focuses on simplicity and elegance. It is developed by the Solus team. It uses GNOME technologies beside their own modifications to give a better user experience.

• Ubuntu Budgie is an Ubuntu-based distribution which uses Budgie desktop interface as its default. It’s an official Ubuntu flavor. Ubuntu Budgie 17.04 was the first release of this distribution, which was released 3 days ago.

• We downloaded the new distribution and played with it for a while to see what it has. This was our experience. TL;DR: Generally so good, nothing so special to see, but there are some small glitches.

• The deepin development team has released deepin 15.4 Linux distro. This release is powered by Linux kernel 4.9.8, which means that now more number of devices are supported. The major highlights of this elegant operating system are new designs for control center and desktop, improvements in the installer and hot corners, etc.

Devices/Embedded

• ​Linux is used almost everywhere from cars to smartphones and one the most important are small devices that we actually can call a computer, and is being used widely, in robotics, can be connected to your TV and be used as computer with a big screen, IoT (the inter connection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data), on drones and many other good options that can be applied.

• The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the new kids on the block. It promises connection of sensors and actuators to the internet, for data to flow both ways, and once on the internet, to become part of new and exciting business systems, reaching up into the realms of big data and artificial intelligence.

• IoT applications will rely on a large and complex system. One of the components in this will be the connections between sensors and actuators and the internet. This will most likely be wireless, and it will have to be low power. If you have a thousand sensors, they will most likely be running off batteries, and you will want those batteries to last years, not days.

• The Linux Foundation’s open source Zephyr Project received considerable attention at this February’s Embedded Linux Conference (ELC). Although there are still no shipping products running this lightweight real-time operating system (RTOS) for microcontrollers, Fabien Parent and Neil Armstrong of the French embedded firm BayLibre shared their experiences in developing a wearable device that may end up being the first Zephyr-based consumer electronics product.

• BayLibre’s device has an ARM Cortex-A SoC connected via an SPI bus to a Cortex-M4 STM32L4xx. This is linked via I2C to other, more lightweight Cortex-M cores. Parent and Armstrong could say no more about the design, but they explained why they chose Zephyr and discussed the project’s pros and cons.

• Arbor’s Ubuntu-ready “EmQ-i2401” Qseven 2.0 COM features an Apollo Lake SoC, extended temp support, and an optional EPIC carrier board.

• Arbor’s EmQ-i2401, which runs Ubuntu or Windows 10 on Intel’s latest “Apollo Lake” SoCs, follows its Intel “Bay Trail” based EmQ-i2301 Qseven module. It competes with other Qseven 2.x compliant Apollo Lake modules such as the Portwell PQ7-M108 , Advantech SOM-3569, Congatec Conga-QA5, and Seco Q7-B03.

• Linkwave’s “Pilot” is a Raspberry Pi HAT add-on with a Sierra Wireless HL 3G/HSPA radio, a SIM slot, as well as a GNNS location chip.

• Sierra Wireless announced that Linkwave Technologies has released a $101 3G/HSPA wireless add-on for the Raspberry Pi. The Pilot board incorporates a Sierra Wireless HL module for 3G/HSPA cellular data service, plus a 3V micro-SIM lets you load a 3G card of your choice. The board complies with the Raspberry Pi HAT add-on spec, and can be powered separately or directly from the Raspberry Pi 2, 3, or Zero.

PhonesTizenSamsung Awards Tizen App Development Course Completion Certificates At 4 Russian UniversitiesAndroidMIUI is never going to be close to stock Android, and that’s a good thingChrome 58 for Android allows full screen web apps, tweaks History & Autofill settingsAnother Android flagship, the Nexus 6P, ends up in a class-action lawsuitSeems like makers of flagship Android devices can’t get it right these days. We recently reported on an ever-expanding class-action lawsuit targeting LG’s flagships: the G4, G5, V10, V20, and Nexus 5X. Those phones, according to the suit and thousands of online complaints by users, have a legendary bootloop issue caused by shoddy construction that bricks the phones or slows them to a crawl.Location tracking Android spyware found in Google Play storeHow to limit data usage on AndroidGoogle Home finally gains multi-user supportAndroid Wear 2.0 Update: Huawei, Moto And Asus Coming SoonParanoid Android Teases Another ReturnFree Software/Open Source

• It is inarguable there is a lot of value that we humans get from meeting with people in person. For a free/open source software project, this is often cited as the glue that holds together people whose normal interactions are textual (email, IRC) and lower-resolution than an in-person interaction gives. People who are bound together not by an employment agreement but rather a social agreement.

• Take a look at the next desktop PC or laptop you come across. Odds are good it won’t be running an open-source operating system. Microsoft’s closed-source Windows has by far the highest share of the PC client operating system market, followed in a distant second by Apple’s macOS. Linux and other wholly open source operating systems have only a tiny market share.

• It’s not hard to see why. Despite the advances made by distributions such as Ubuntu, desktop Linux is still miles behind Windows and macOS in terms of the look, the feel and the slickness that most office workers have come to expect. The vast majority of companies simply aren’t prepared to make office workers use an open source OS — and most office workers aren’t prepared to use them, either.

• UNESCO and the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) today signed an agreement at the Organization’s headquarters to contribute to the preservation of the technological and scientific knowledge contained in software. This includes promoting universal access to software source code.

• Open source is a developer-centric solutions model, which, in a nutshell, could be described as building communities of developers to solve problems.

• Baidu Inc. will share software technology it is developing for self-driving cars in a bid to catch up with competitors including General Motors Co. and Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc.

Events

• FOSSASIA 2017 reminded me of foss.in. After a long time, finally, a conference which has the similar aspects. Similar kind of tight organizing team, the presence of upstream communities from different locations. The participation from the local Singapore tech community along with Hackerspace Singapore is a serious boost. This was my 4th FOSSASIA conference, and also 3rd time in Singapore. I should thank Mario, Hong, and rest of the organizers to make this event a very pleasant experience.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google’s vast wealth and huge influence is built on one thing – advertising – so it might seem bizarre for the search giant to make it less likely that users would see ads.

• But the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google is planning to introduce ad-blocking in its popular Chrome web browser.

• So rumors have started flying that Google is about to build some ad blocker technology into Chrome, that would block ads that the company considers to be “unacceptable ads” — as determined by the “Coalition for Better Ads.” Of course, while a coalition for “better ads” sounds like a good thing, this Coalition for Better Ads has been criticized. It was put together by the biggest companies in the internet ad space, and many worry that it’s just an attempt to whitewash over a lot of bad practices by declaring just the extremely egregious practices as “bad.” Either way, the original report from the paywalled Wall Street Journal notes that the ad blocker might even block all ads on sites that run “bad” ads (i.e., not just the bad ads).

• There have been all sorts of reactions to the news of a built-in Chrome ad blocker, but a lot of people are raising the antitrust questions. Obviously, Google is unlikely to consider its own ads to be the “bad ads.” And thus, an official Google ad blocker — especially one that allows its own ads through and is default on its very popular browser — at least raises eyebrows about antitrust issues. There’s a strong argument to be made (and I’m pretty sure that some ad firms would raise this with a court within a day or so of such an ad blocker being released) that this is an anti-competitive move to suppress competing ad firms.

Mozilla

• Firefox is a wonderful open source web browser. As a result, it comes pre-loaded on many Linux-based operating systems, such as Ubuntu and Fedora. Yeah, some people choose to install Chromium or Chrome instead, but Mozilla’s offering remains a staple in the Linux community.

• If Thunderbird looked like the design you see above would there be any question on whether Ubuntu should drop it from the default install? I think not.

• The open saucy Ubuntu is considering dumping the Thunderbird mail app because users tend to favour using webservices mail instead.

• Ubuntu 17.10 may not include a default desktop email app at all and Thunderbird is Ubuntu’s default email app at the moment.

• Mozilla Firefox 53 has been released, and is now available to download right now. The latest release of the popular open-source web-browser ships with two new compact themes, reader mode improvements, and updated site permission requests.

• We believe openness is a core component not just of a healthy Internet, but also a healthy society. Much like open practices can unlock innovation in the realm of technology, open practices can also invigorate fields like civics, journalism — and science.

• In laboratories and at academic institutions, open source code, data and methodology foster collaboration between researchers; spark scientific progress; increase transparency and encourage reproducibility; and better serve the public interest.

• Project Quantum is how Mozilla plans to adapt for this new age. Mozilla is using its safer Rust programming language for parts of Quantum. The company has an experimental rendering engine called Servo that’s written in Rust, and pieces of this will make their way into Firefox. The initial focus will be on updating those parts of Gecko that are most amenable to parallel or GPU-based computation, and Firefox 53 contains the first element of this. Firefox 53 will (for most people; it requires Windows 7 with the Platform Update, or better, plus a GPU that isn’t blacklisted) create a separate GPU process that’s used to perform compositing. The compositor process takes the different elements of the page and the Firefox window and merges them together to create the finished product.

SaaS/Back End

• The Sunnyvale, Calif. company is doing this by launching a new single integrated distribution of OpenStack and Kubernetes: Mirantis Cloud Platform (MCP) 1.0. This new release also offers a unique build-operate-transfer delivery model.

• Mirantis, one of the earliest players in the OpenStack ecosystem, today announced that it will end-of-life Mirantis OpenStack support in September 2019. The Mirantis Cloud Platform, which combines OpenStack with the Kubernetes container platform (or which could even be used to run Kubernetes separately), is going to take its place.

• While Mirantis is obviously not getting out of the OpenStack game, this move clearly shows that there is a growing interest in the Kubernetes container platform and that Mirantis’ customers are now starting to look at this as a way to modernize their software deployment strategies without going to OpenStack. The new platform allows users to deploy multiple Kubernetes clusters side-by-side with OpenStack — or separately.

• It used to be the Hadoop Summit, but the strategic focus at Hortonworks the enterprise-ready open source Apache Hadoop provider, has evolved. So, this year it was renamed DataWorks Summit. The company now encompasses data at rest (the Hadoop Data Platform now in version 2.6), data in motion (the Hadoop Data Flow) and data in the cloud (the Hadoop Data Cloud). Hortonworks aims to become a multi-platform and multi-cloud company. The focus is on the data in data driven organisations. Just a few years ago Hortonworks connected with IT architects. Today it’s launching conversations with lines of business and chief marketing officers.

• OpenStack Ocata has now been out for a little over a month and we’re about to see the first milestone of the Pike release. Past cycles show that now’s about the time when people start looking at the new release to see if they should consider moving to it. So here’s a quick overview of what’s new in this release.

CMS

• You’re launching a new business and you want to create a mobile application for you or your customers? Many tools exist to achieve it, but do you know the differences between them and what it implies for your business?

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Scality, world leader in object and cloud storage, today announced immediate availability of a new open-source Scality S3 Server release, under the Apache 2.0 license, with support for high availability and multiple cloud data backends.

Funding

• Docker Inc., which provides an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship and run distributed applications, is a company sometimes knocked for failing to monetize, is a case study in how the evolving open-source community is rethinking how to drive profit.

• “Open source today is very different than open source five years, ago, 10 years ago,” said Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock Partners. “The ecosystem is very different, because all of a sudden, the developers and contributors are not just kind of your misfits and rebels working on the weekends. They are Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies.”

BSD

• [...] clang(1) added to the base system (as a non-default compiler) on the amd64 and i386 platforms

Compiler

• Here, at the Compiler’s Laboratory of UFMG, we’ve been trying to understand the meaning of incomplete C code. How well can a parser reason about a source when declarations (or complete headers) are missing? In the C language, challenges appear already during parsing, since, not only syntax, but also semantic information (possibly absent) is required. Yet, the really cool challenges emerge when we want to reconstruct a partial program into a complete one that passes the type-checker.

• The GCC 7 mainline code-base hit the important milestone today of having zero P1 regressions — issues of the highest priority — and as such they branched the GCC7 code-base and GCC 7.1 RC1 is then being announced later this week as they prepare for this first stable release of GCC 7.

Public Services/Government

• The UK Government Digital Service (GDS) has released a ‘Technical Architects recruitment guide’. The agency hopes to attract more technical architects by describing its recruitment process, thereby helping candidates to prepare better for the job interviews and making these more accessible to people unfamiliar with the Civil Service Commission recruitment principles.

• Using open source software and avoiding proprietary products is the only way to structurally prevent vendor lock-in. This principle has once again become clear from two procurement announcements recently published on Tenders Electronic Daily (TED), the public procurement journal of the European Union.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Our code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/Midburn/. And while it still need to be more tidy, I prefer the release early and often approach. The main idea we want to bring to the Burn infrastructure is using Spark as a database and have already began talking with parallel teams of other burn events. I’ll follow up on our technological agenda / vision. In the mean while, you are more than welcome to comment on the code or join one of the teams (e.g. volunteers module to organize who does which shift during the event).

• The Libre Space Foundation is an organization dedicated to the development of libre space hardware. It was born from the SatNOGS project — the winners of the first Hackaday Prize — and now this foundation is in space. The Libre Space Foundation hitched a ride on the Orbital ATK launch yesterday, and right now their completely Open Source cube sat is on its way to the International Space Station.

• We can all agree that we have some life-saving medicines available to us. We may have benefited directly, or have family members who are benefiting at the moment.

• Some medicines, however, are too expensive. Some don’t work too well and there are, of course, many terrible diseases for which we have no medicines at all. These issues affect rich and poor nations alike.

Open Access/Content

• Every cost associated with higher learning has steadily increased over the past decade, but none more so than college textbooks. While tuition increased by 63% between 2006 and 2016, and housing costs increased by 50%, the cost of textbooks went up by 88%, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Hardware/Modding

• As mentioned in my Working on Android post, I’ve been using a mechanical keyboard for a couple of years now. Now that I work on Flowhub from home, it was a good time to re-evaluate the whole work setup. As far as regular keyboards go, the MiniLa was nice, but I wanted something more compact and ergonomic.

• Researchers from Seoul National University of Science and Technology in Korea have published the schematics for an open source 3D bioprinter.

• I’ve heard about 3d-printing a lot in the past, although the hype seems to have mostly died down. My view has always been “That seems cool”, coupled with “Everybody says making the models is very hard”, and “the process itself is fiddly & time-consuming”.

• In a letter to the Lustre community posted on the Intel website, Vice President of Intel’s Data Center Group Trish Damkroger informs that effective immediately the company will be contributing all Lustre development to the open source community. Damkroger also announced that Brent Gorda, General Manager, High Performance Data Division at Intel is leaving the company. Gorda is the former CEO of Whamcloud, the Lustre specialist acquired by Intel in 2012.

• According to The Register, Trish Damkroger, Intel’s Vice President and General Manager for Technical Computing Initiative sent an email this week to partners and customers confirming the change.

• [...]

• The Enterprise Edition provides large-scale, high bandwidth storage with the power and scalability of Lustre, whilst the Foundation Edition offers maximum speed and scale Lustre storage with support from Intel.

• Open source development has brought a lot of advantages to desktop 3D printing. Is our flirtation with open source a youthful indiscretion that will soon be discarded? Or is open source the key to our recent past and to unlocking the future of 3D printing?

• Ten years ago, John Kawola remembers the 3D printing industry as a very different place to how it looks today. While still a dynamic field with innovation aplenty, it was dominated by a handful of players. “3D Systems, Stratasys, EOS and EnvisionTEC,” the President of Ultimaker North America lists. Between them, they dominated the 3D printer business, they drove innovation at a rate smaller companies could not keep up with, and they all had a closed materials environment.

Programming/Development

• Whether you’re taking up programming for the first time, or learning your 50th language, you might ask, “What’s the best way to learn to program?” I surveyed dozens of people who taught themselves to program in Rust as part of my OSCON talk in 2016, and asked the expert autodidacts what advice they would give to others for picking up a new language. I found that despite their diverse backgrounds, all of my interviewees shared five common approaches to building new programming skills.

• The GitHub Developer Program (programme, if we’re using Her Majesty’s English) has been around for around three years now.

• Essentially, this initiative exists to encourage developers to test out application builds that integrate with GitHub.

• GitHub Inc. has revamped its developer program with several changes, including opening it up to all developers for the first time.

• Previously, the three-year-old GitHub Developer Program was available to only those developers who had paid accounts at the open source code repository and software development platform specializing in Git-based version control.

Leftovers

• Most failures in the pure software realm don’t lead to the same visceral imagery as the above, but they can have widespread financial and human costs all the same. Think of the failed Healthcare.gov launch, the Target data breach, or really any number of multi-million dollar projects that basically didn’t work in the end. In 2012, the US Air Force scrapped an ERP project after racking up $1 billion in costs.

• It’s pretty rare for us to bring up the issue of “moral rights” over creative works in the US, and even rarer to directly reference VARA — the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 — and yet, here we are, twice in one week discussing VARA claims. Even more incredibly, both are about sculptures that were placed for free in parts of lower Manhattan, right off Wall St. The claim that’s received lots of attention was the one over the Wall St. Bull and the fact that another statue was placed near the bull, which the artist claims changes his message, and thereby violates VARA. This other claim is from another sculptor, Steve Tobin, who is suing Trinity Church for moving his 9/11 memorial sculpture to Connecticut.

• [...]

• In the end, while the damaging of the statue perhaps adds at least some greater credibility to the VARA claim — even though it wasn’t designed to be a mutilation, just an accident while moving — the fact that an artist can claim (even after giving up all rights and title to the piece) that because the piece has some connection to a site, the owners can no longer move it, would be really, really dangerous. Yes, there’s a stronger argument here as to why this one location is directly tied to this piece of artwork (and many other artists would have trouble showing the same level of connection), any time you argue that artwork is so connected to its siting that moving it would violate the law… something seems to have gone wrong. I can certainly understand why the artist is upset, but as we noted with the bull, artists give up quite a lot of control when they let art out into the world and, as in this case, hand ownership over to a third party.

Science

• Scientists and science supporters will take to the streets in a global March for Science on 22 April . What began as a small Facebook group in the US capital, Washington DC has spiralled into a global phenomenon that will now see marches and other events in more than 500 locations around the world, from Seattle to Seoul.

• It is great news that so many people are prepared to stand up and defend the need for evidence-based thinking and the scientific method. But it is also a sad comment on our times that a March for Science is needed at all. Post-truth populism has infected democracies around the world, scientific objectivity is under threat from multiple sources and there seems a real danger of falling into a modern dystopian dark age.

Health/Nutrition

• Civil society and farmers allege communication blackout from by the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) about a protocol protecting new plant varieties. The 2015 protocol was highly criticised by those organisations as endangering traditional practices of African farmers. Draft regulations could not be adopted in December, but the regional organisation, according to the civil society and farmer groups, is keeping the outcome of the December meeting secret.

• Scientists and mungbean growers around the world now have access to an open-source website containing the latest genetic information on the qualities of 560 accessions of mungbean.

• The new website, from QUT’s Centre for Tropical Crops and Biocommodities, provides a database of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genetic markers which can be used to map a variety of traits like disease resistance and yield.

Security

• A “benign” worm is scouring the net seeking out poorly protected smart gadgets.

• CCTV systems, routers, digital video recorders and other internet-of-things (IoT) devices are now believed to be harbouring the Hajime worm.

• COMPUTER security is a contradiction in terms. Consider the past year alone: cyberthieves stole $81m from the central bank of Bangladesh; the $4.8bn takeover of Yahoo, an internet firm, by Verizon, a telecoms firm, was nearly derailed by two enormous data breaches; and Russian hackers interfered in the American presidential election.

• Away from the headlines, a black market in computerised extortion, hacking-for-hire and stolen digital goods is booming. The problem is about to get worse. Computers increasingly deal not just with abstract data like credit-card details and databases, but also with the real world of physical objects and vulnerable human bodies. A modern car is a computer on wheels; an aeroplane is a computer with wings. The arrival of the “Internet of Things” will see computers baked into everything from road signs and MRI scanners to prosthetics and insulin pumps. There is little evidence that these gadgets will be any more trustworthy than their desktop counterparts. Hackers have already proved that they can take remote control of connected cars and pacemakers.

• Remote access Trojans are mainly used to steal consumer data, either for consumers themselves or the conglomerate keeping this information safe from prying eyes. However, it appears criminals are looking at a different approach for these tools right now. A new open source remote access Trojan can now be used to extract data from the Telegram communication platform.

• The NSA’s Equation Group hacking tools, leaked last Friday by the Shadow Brokers, have now been used to infect thousands of Windows machines worldwide, we’re told.

• On Thursday, Dan Tentler, founder of security shop Phobos Group, told The Register he’s seen rising numbers of boxes on the public internet showing signs they have DOUBLEPULSAR installed on them. These hijacked machines can be used to sling malware, spam netizens, launch further attacks on other victims, and so on.

• DOUBLEPULSAR is a backdoor used to inject and run malicious code on an infected system, and is installed using the ETERNALBLUE exploit that attacks SMB file-sharing services on Windows XP to Server 2008 R2. That means to compromise a computer, it must be running a vulnerable version of Windows and expose an SMB service to the attacker. Both DOUBLEPULSAR and ETERNALBLUE are leaked Equation Group tools, now available for any script kiddie or hardened crim to download and wield against vulnerable systems.

Defence/Aggression

• Earlier this week, we wrote about the silly take at Wired, more or less suggesting that it was somehow Facebook’s issue that a troubled individual took a video of himself randomly killing an elderly man and then uploaded the video to Facebook. Unfortunately, others have had similar takes, including the New Yorker’s Steve Coll, whose piece is mostly balanced and admits that it’s basically impossible for Facebook to prevent this thing… but then at the end ignores all that and says, effectively, “Well, Facebook’s big so it has no excuse not to do something.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• German media reported on Thursday that Angela Merkel’s Chancellery has been included in an ongoing investigation into a recent WikiLeaks release of confidential documents.

• Broadcaster NDR reported on Thursday that according to unnamed sources, public prosecutors in Berlin are investigating employees of the Chancellery in their search to find who sent confidential documents to WikiLeaks.

• The question is provocative, but the answer is hard. The reaction to WikiLeaks’ publication of the fruits of Russia’s DNC hack raises many puzzles about how we should think about publication of truthful secret information that touches on public affairs. These puzzles are important to figure out, since organizational doxing is growing more prevalent and consequential and our intuitions about it are not obviously coherent. I don’t have great answers to what traditional news sources like the Times should do with hacked documents, but in practice I think the Times and other mainstream news organizations operate more like WikiLeaks than we have appreciated. Even if I am wrong about that, I hope the following analysis and questions shed a little light on the problem.

• Many people who are appalled by WikiLeaks’ publication of the stolen DNC emails applauded the publication by mainstream news organizations of Snowden’s stolen NSA documents. They emphasize Snowden’s good intent as a whistleblower, the Times’ aim to foster the public interest, and the positive consequences of publication for the public interest (such as exposure of the U.S. intelligence practices, the spread of encryption, more NSA transparency, and a global privacy movement). By contrast, one story goes, Russia and WikiLeaks had bad intent and publication of the DNC emails skewed the public interest.

• US authorities have prepared charges to arrest the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, according to CNN.

• US authorities have prepared charges to seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, US officials familiar with the matter tell CNN.

• The Justice Department investigation of Assange and WikiLeaks dates to at least 2010, when the site first gained wide attention for posting thousands of files stolen by the former US Army intelligence analyst now known as Chelsea Manning.

• Prosecutors have struggled with whether the First Amendment precluded the prosecution of Assange, but now believe they have found a way to move forward.

• During President Barack Obama’s administration, Attorney General Eric Holder and officials at the Justice Department determined it would be difficult to bring charges against Assange because WikiLeaks wasn’t alone in publishing documents stolen by Manning. Several newspapers, including The New York Times, did as well. The investigation continued, but any possible charges were put on hold, according to US officials involved in the process then.

• Berlin’s chief public prosecutor has extended an investigation into the release of a trove of documents by WikiLeaks to include the chancellery as well as the Bundestag lower house of parliament, broadcaster NDR said on Thursday.

• Last December, WikiLeaks released the confidential documents, which German security agencies had submitted to a parliamentary committee investigating the extent to which German spies helped the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) to spy in Europe.

• Federal prosecutors are weighing whether to bring criminal charges against members of the WikiLeaks organization, taking a second look at a 2010 leak of diplomatic cables and military documents and investigating whether the group bears criminal responsibility for the more recent revelation of sensitive CIA cyber-tools, according to people familiar with the case.

• The Justice Department under President Barack Obama had decided not to charge WikiLeaks for revealing some of the government’s most sensitive secrets — concluding that doing so would be akin to prosecuting a news organization for publishing classified information. Justice Department leadership under President Trump, though, has indicated to prosecutors that it is open to taking another look at the case, which the Obama administration did not formally close.

Finance

• But for more than a decade before immigrants flooded the market, contractors and their corporate clients were pushing to undercut construction wages by shunning union labor.

• [...]

• The result: Today slightly more than 1 in 10 construction workers are in a union, compared with 4 in 10 in the 1970s.

• The president of the European parliament has said Britain would be welcomed back with open arms if voters changed their minds about Brexit on 8 June, challenging Theresa May’s claim that “there is no turning back” after article 50.

• Speaking after a meeting with the prime minister in Downing Street, Antonio Tajani insisted that her triggering of the departure process last month could be reversed easily by the remaining EU members if there was a change of UK government after the general election, and that it would not even require a court case.

• Argentina believes Brexit might cost Britain the support of European allies for its control of the Falkland Islands and is watching developments closely, the Argentinian foreign minister said in Brussels.

• Visiting the EU capital for trade talks on Thursday, Susana Malcorra stressed it was too soon to say whether Britain quitting the bloc might soften EU backing for London against an 18th-century claim to the South Atlantic islands that Buenos Aires has maintained despite losing a brief war there in 1982.

• The president of the European parliament has said Britain would be welcomed back with open arms if voters changed their minds about Brexit on 8 June, challenging Theresa May’s claim that “there is no turning back” after article 50.

• Speaking after a meeting with the prime minister in Downing Street, Antonio Tajani insisted that her triggering of the departure process last month could be reversed easily by the remaining EU members if there was a change of UK government after the general election, and that it would not even require a court case.

• “If the UK, after the election, wants to withdraw [article 50], then the procedure is very clear,” he said in an interview. “If the UK wanted to stay, everybody would be in favour. I would be very happy.”

• Since Rockhopper is an oil exploration company, it must have carried out detailed studies on the geology of the field before deciding to drill for oil and gas. Either its geologists were negligent in not spotting that there was a risk of earthquakes which made the area unsuitable for exploitation, or the company knew about the dangers, and decided to continue with its plans anyway. In any case, it’s ridiculous that Rockhopper thinks the Italian government owes it money for “lost future profits” that clearly never existed anywhere other than in the company’s fantasies.

• This is a general problem with corporate sovereignty claims: they often invoke some mythical “future profits” as if those were indisputable and guaranteed. But business is based on rewarding calculated risk-taking, and that includes the risk that hoped-for profits never materialize. ISDS is an attempt to remove the risk of investment from companies, and place it squarely on the public’s shoulders, without any quid pro quo.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Instead, Trump’s actions point to a subtler type of influence. Whether or not he wants it to be—indeed, whether or not he even knows it—it is natural that Trump’s attitude toward Erdogan and Turkey is shaped in part by the fact that he has business interests within the country.

• President Trump’s average approval rating is the lowest since Gallup began presidential approval surveys in 1953, the polling firm said Thursday.

• Trump’s approval rating has been as low as 39 percent since January, but averaged out at 41 percent. According to Gallup, the historical average approval of presidents is 61 percent.

• The previous president to hold Gallup’s lowest approval rating in their first quarter was former President Bill Clinton, who had a 55 percent approval rating.

• One in four political links shared on social media in France ahead of the first round of the country’s presidential election Sunday contained misinformation, according to a study by Oxford University researchers.

• “Highly automated accounts,” which “occasionally generated large amounts of traffic” are particularly targeting Conservative presidential candidate François Fillon, according to the study, which is to be published Friday but was previewed by Reuters.

• But Europeans are sharing better quality news than Americans did ahead of the U.S. presidential election last year, the study found.

Censorship/Free Speech

• So here we are. The data show that we are having the fewest number of our most successful posts and the most of our least successful at a time when our strategy hasn’t significantly changed and our fans have grown.

• Now that Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy has dipped into bogus lawsuits and DMCA notices targeting supposedly-libelous reviews and comments, he’s apparently stepped up his detective work. Volokh and Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen managed to expose the person behind a series of bogus lawsuits aimed at cleaning up clients’ search engine reputations. (Pissed Consumer has also uncovered some of the same tactics.)

• Journalists are increasingly resorting to self-censorship to avoid falling foul of the authorities in the face of physical and psychological intimidation, the Council of Europe said Thursday.

• About 40 percent of 940 journalists interviewed in a three-year study said they had experienced interference in their work serious enough for it to impact their private lives, the council said.

• More than two-thirds of those questioned said they had suffered threats of violence, a third cited police intimidation and 53 percent said they were subjected to online harassment, the report by Europe’s leading human rights monitor said.

• A survey published today by the Council of Europe, based on a sample of 940 journalists reporting from the 47 Council of Europe member states and Belarus, shows that journalists in Europe are often exposed to serious unwarranted interference in their work, including intimidation and violence. As a consequence, many also suffer from fear, which frequently leads to self-censorship.

• Almost one third of the journalists who participated in the survey, carried out between April and July 2016, had experienced physical assault over a period of three years. The most common interference, reported by 69% of the journalists, was psychological violence, including intimidation, threats, slandering and humiliation.

• The Stasi Museum in Berlin is a monument to the ultimate surveillance society. It is housed in the old Stasi headquarters. The Stasi were the state police of communist East Germany; whose job was to spy on the population.

• On display is every type of spy gadget imaginable for a pre-internet era.

• One in six East Germans were either full time spies or informers for the Stasi, watching their neighbors.

• The series, which is about a teenage girl’s suicide and involves graphic rape scenes, has divided opinion about whether it is appropriate for young people.

• Deputy Chief Censor Jared Mullen told Morning Report Netflix had stopped submitting material to the censor’s office ahead of releasing it for New Zealand audiences in August – probably based on government advice.

Privacy/Surveillance

• A senior intelligence officer who led counter-terrorism operations for the London 2012 Olympics has been appointed as head of the UK’s surveillance agency GCHQ.

• The Office of the Director of National Intelligence Wednesday published a document advocating for the protection of what newly minted spy chief Dan Coats has described as the “crown jewels” of the intelligence community.

• The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act, in particular Section 702, authorizes the bulk of the intelligence community’s overseas digital collection powers. A new informational questionnaire published by the ODNI, says maintaining those surveillance powers is “the intelligence community’s top legislative priority for 2017.”

• If Congress didn’t reauthorize those authorities, it would “greatly impair the ability of the United States to respond to national security threats,” the document notes.

• A new factsheet by the NSA and FBI has laid bare ludicrous contradictions in how US intelligence agencies choose to interpret a law designed to prevent spying on American citizens, but which they use to achieve exactly that end.

• Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on Wednesday said it would be “wise” to have separate leaders for the two organizations, pushing for a civilian head of the NSA during remarks at Columbia Law School in New York.

• Currently, the two organizations are both led by Adm. Mike Rogers. Congress elevated Cyber Command to a unified combatant command using annual defense policy legislation passed last year, but also required the Pentagon to conduct a full assessment before splitting it from the NSA.

• Should government to protect us from snooping teddy bears and untrustworthy toasters? The California State Senate seems to think so.

• With traditional devices on the decline, laptop and desktop computers now account for less than 25 percent of internet network traffic. Indeed, American households now use, on average, seven connected devices every day. As this so-called “internet of things” continues to expand, an array of connected objects—from toasters to lightbulbs to dishwashers—now include embedded microprocessors, multiplying the number of potential threat vectors for data breaches and cyberattacks.

• On Wednesday Juha Sipilä’s government unfurled long-awaited draft legislation aimed at beefing up the country’s intelligence-gathering muscle. Experts immediately weighed in, saying that the draft bill clearly needs finessing.

• Capital-based daily Helsingin Sanomat interviewed two experts who both said that the government’s attempt to craft unified legislation governing intelligence-gathering activities still needs work. HS spoke with international law professor Martin Scheinin, who said outright that Finland doesn’t need such legal reform – at least not in the form proposed by the Interior and Defence ministries.

• “It has not been shown that there are any shortcomings in the powers of Finnish police, customs and intelligence police,” Scheinin told the paper.

• In an update to Microsoft’s Office 365 system requirements released on Thursday, Microsoft said that consumers who have already purchased “perpetual”—i.e., standalone—versions of Office, such as Office 2010, Office 2013, and Office 2016, would be cut off from accessing the business versions of OneDrive and Skype after mainstream support expires.

• Giroptic released a new Android-compatible version of its mobile 360 camera as part of the F8 giveaway.

• Zak said he had bought a set of Bose QuietComfort 35 wireless Bluetooth headphones. He alleged that unknown to customers, a Bose Connect app had been designed to collect and record the titles of the music and audio files that users of its wireless products played.

• Additionally, he claimed, Bose was transmitting this data, including personal identifiers, to third parties, including a data miner, without the user’s consent or knowledge.

• The complaint filed in U.S. district court in Illinois alleges Bose collected information such as music and audio choices through its Connect mobile app, then shared that with other companies — including a data mining firm — without user consent.

• The Trump administration is rebranding the country: Make America Fear Again. In response to a national crime wave that doesn’t exist, the head of the DOJ is rolling back police reform and replacing it with extra “toughness.” Under the new regime, law enforcement officers will have the full (and, apparently, unconditional) backing of the White House.

• The DHS is joining the DOJ in flexing its new muscle. DHS Secretary John Kelly has already stated he’s looking to turn requests for visitors’ social media/email account information into demands, which would include the mandatory relinquishment of account passwords.

• “What they [the government] haven’t taken into account is privacy or security,” Mr Jackman told The Independent explaining there is “absolutely no prohibition” on companies that provide the age verification checks from “monetising” the data of the website visitors.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The row began after Sonu Nigam tweeted saying how the sound of azaan woke him up from sleep. He had said that it was “forced religiousness” and use of loudspeakers at religious places should stop. Reacting to Sonu’s statement, a Kolkata Imam Syed Shah Atif Al-Qaderi said that he would give Rs 10 lakh to anyone who shaves Sonu Nigam’s head and garlands with him footwear.

• Just one week before parliament is to approve a list of candidates, a letter published this week by Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the head of the Guardian Council, declared it is against Sharia (Islamic law) for non-Muslims to be candidates in Shia Muslim-majority areas in city and village council elections. These contests, along with the presidential election, are set for May 19.

• Hardline Muslim groups alleged that the governor had insulted Islam and dishonoured the Quran by quoting a verse during his campaign to boost his chances of winning the governor’s post for a second term.

• At many American universities today, any critical examination pertaining to Islam, including Shariah and the treatment of women in Islam, is declared to be out of the realm of scrutiny. My thoughts on the crisis within Islam were so terrifying to Brandeis University — the university named for a champion of the First Amendment — that it withdrew its invitation to speak and accept an honorary degree. A strange irony that my story frightened the university more than the litany of honor killings and wholesale abuse of women in so many parts of the Islamic world.

• Nearly four years after the NYPD was ordered by a federal judge to implement body cameras, the department is finally getting around to finalizing its rule set for deployment. Part of the delay is due to the NYPD seeking input from the public — input it has apparently decided to ignore.

• As Scott Greenfield notes, the NYPD gets everything wrong about its policies, applying guidelines that directly contradict the responses received from everyone in New York City not wearing a blue uniform.

• Three purpose-built blocks are to open within high-security jails to hold the most dangerous extremist prisoners away from other inmates.

• The Ministry of Justice said the blocks will have their own facilities and be able to hold up to 28 people in total.

• The first unit will open this summer at Frankland Prison, County Durham, with two more to follow at other jails.

• Ministers said last year that they wanted to isolate extremist inmates who “seek to poison the minds of others”.

• [...]

• Justice Secretary Liz Truss first announced the plans last August after accepting a recommendation from an independent review into radicalisation in English and Welsh prisons.

• The report had found evidence of inmates advocating support for so-called Islamic State and some prisoners acting as “self-styled emirs” to radicalise offenders.

• This is one of the strangest “but for video” cases ever. We know many cops are hesitant to clip body-worn cameras on themselves for a variety of reasons. The official statements always express concern about privacy, as though people interacting with public servants somehow believe these interactions are private. Others show concern for police officers’ privacy, as though the public is really hoping to FOIA footage of officers sitting in the break room or using the restroom.

• Deep down, everyone knows the cameras are a tool of accountability, albeit one that’s far from perfect. Body camera footage frequently goes “missing” when force is deployed questionably. And it’s completely possible to make the footage subjective with strategic body positioning and constant yelling of exonerative phrases like “Stop resisting!”

• So, it’s accountability in its infancy, run through a layer of law enforcement-friendly filters (footage is controlled by police officers and often sheltered from FOIA requests). But it’s much better than what we had before, where all action had to take place in front of stationary dashboard cameras.

• As you’ll recall, back in early February, over 100 tech companies signed onto an amicus brief, arguing that President Trump’s initial plan to bar immigration from certain countries was unconstitutional and illegal. A month later, a smaller group of companies signed onto an amicus brief in the district court in Hawaii concerning the revised travel ban (and a few people noted that some of the companies that signed onto the first brief had not signed onto the second one — wondering if that meant many companies weren’t as worried about the revised ban. Except, yesterday an even larger group of tech companies (162 in total) signed onto a new amicus brief for the 4th Circuit court of appeals which is the next appeals court hearing a case on the revised travel ban. And, yes, we at the Copia Institute signed onto this one as well (we also signed onto the first two).

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) today strengthened its commitment to net neutrality by declaring that Internet service providers should treat data traffic equally to foster consumer choice, innovation and the free exchange of ideas. As such, the CRTC today is publishing a new framework regarding differential pricing practices.

• Canada is strengthening regulations to protect the principle of net neutrality just as the U.S. is preparing to gut Obama-era internet rules.

• “While the CRTC could have gone further,” the group said in a statement, “today’s ruling is still a very positive step in the right direction.”

• With broadband privacy rules dead, ISP lobbyists and their loyal lawmakers have begun quickly shifting their attention to killing FCC oversight of broadband providers and net neutrality. We’ve pointed out how folks concerned about this shouldn’t expect a lot of help from the likes of Facebook, Netflix and Google this go round. We’ve also noted how folks need to begin waking up to the false arguments being used to sell the pitch (namely that gutting net neutrality and FCC authority over ISPs will be fine because existing FTC rules will protect users, which simply isn’t true).

• By now, most people understand that the residential broadband market simply isn’t very competitive. They also understand that’s in large part due to the lobbying and financial stranglehold many providers have over both state and federal lawmakers and regulators. But however uncompetitive the residential broadband market is, the business “special access market” (often called Business Data Services (BDS)) is notably worse. This important but overlooked segment of the telecom market connects schools, cell towers, ATMs, retailers, and countless others to the internet at large.

• But consumer groups and smaller companies for years have complained that this segment suffers under an absurd amount of monopoly control, resulting in many companies and organizations paying sky-high rates for basic connectivity. According to the FCC’s own data (pdf), in the lion’s share of markets, 73% of the special access market is controlled by one provider (usually AT&T, CenturyLink or Verizon), 24% usually “enjoys” duopoly control, and only a tiny fraction of markets have more than two choices of BDS providers providing this key connectivity.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• A New York federal court has dismissed the ‘piracy liability’ case U.S. Internet provider Windstream filed against music group BMG and its anti-piracy partner Rightscorp. The court rules that, without concrete examples of alleged copyright infringements, it can’t just give blanket approval to the ISPs business model.

• The use of pirated content in Russia may significantly increase in the event of a decision by leading foreign video-sharing websites and servers to leave the country due to the planned imposition of restrictions on their ownership by foreigners, which is currently being considered by the Russian government and the local Parliament (State Duma).

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