● 04.23.17

● Links 23/4/2017: End of arkOS, Collabora Office 5.3 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 8:34 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Linux is a free operating system that anyone can download and install on their computers. It’s one of the top five platforms used in the world, and yet most people don’t understand its benefits. With that in mind, this post will draw your attention towards all the advantages you can expect to encounter. With a bit of luck, you will leave this page with a better understanding of Linux and why you should consider it for your computer network. Whether you’re an individual or business owner, the same rules should apply. The best thing to do is try it out for yourself. However, I’ll try to provide some basic info before you do that.

• “Desktop environment” is the technical term for a typical, full-featured desktop — that is, the complete graphical layout of your system. Besides displaying your programs, the desktop environment includes accoutrements such as app launchers, menu panels and widgets.

• In Microsoft Windows, the desktop environment consists of, among other things, the Start menu, the taskbar of open applications and notification center, all the Windows programs that come bundled with the OS, and the frames enclosing open applications (with a dash, square and X in the upper right corner).

• There are many similarities in Linux.

• The Linux Gnome desktop environment, for instance, has a slightly different design, but it shares all of the Microsoft Windows basics — from an app menu to a panel showing open applications, to a notification bar, to the windows framing programs.

• Good News for Linux Desktop Lovers that Ubuntu 17.04 has been released officially. Code name for Ubuntu 17.04 is Zesty Zapus, as it is not a LTS version so its support will be available for next 9 months only (Jan 2018).

• In December 2016, I kicked off a migration to Linux (from OS X) as my primary laptop OS. In the nearly 4 months since the initial progress report, I’ve published a series of articles providing updates on things like which Linux distribution I selected, how I’m handling running VMs on my Linux laptop, and integration with corporate collaboration systems (here, here, and here). I thought that these “along the way” posts would be sufficient to keep readers informed, but I’ve had a couple of requests in the last week about how the migration is going. This post will help answer that question by summarizing what’s happened so far.

• Let me start by saying that I am actively using a Linux-powered laptop as my primary laptop right now, and I have been doing so since early February. All the posts I’ve published so far have been updates of how things are going “in production,” so to speak. The following sections describe my current, active environment.

• Look inside the Galago Pro and see how easy it is to upgrade!

Server

• When Docker announced the Moby Project earlier this week, it wasn’t entirely clear why it mattered—or even what it was. It sounded like Docker was trying to share its internal processes for building Docker from components donated to the community.

• Despite having access to ever more efficient and powerful hardware, operations that are run directly on traditional physical (or bare-metal) servers unavoidably face significant practical limits. The cost and complexity of building and launching a single physical server mean that effectively adding or removing resources to quickly meet changing demand is difficult or, in some cases, impossible. Safely testing new configurations or full applications before their release can also be complicated, expensive, and time-consuming.

Kernel Space

• The Node.js Foundation was formed in 2015 to serve as a steward over the Node.js sever-side JavaScript platform, providing a new governance model and taking over leadership from Joyent. Now, the foundation has hired its first executive director, Mark Hinkle, who had been vice president of marketing at the Linux Foundation. Hinkle will work to expand the foundation and articulate priorities.

• It’s looking less and less likely like Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) will be mainlined for the Linux 4.12 kernel. This is the long-in-development effort by Jerome Glisse that would benefit CUDA, OpenCL, and more by allow device memory to be transparently used by any device process and for mirroring process address space on a device.

• Only three days after releasing the Linux 4.10.11, 4.9.23 LTS and 4.4.62 LTS kernels, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today, April 21, 2017, the release of a new set of maintenance updates for the Linux 4.10, 4.9, and 4.4 kernel series.

• Considering the fact that nearly three days had passed since the release of the Linux 4.10.11, 4.9.23 LTS and 4.4.62 LTS kernels, the Linux 4.10.12 and 4.9.24 LTS kernels change a total of 78 files, with 993 insertions and 459 deletions for Linux 4.10.12 and 938 insertions and 441 deletions for Linux 4.9.24, while Linux kernel 4.4.63 LTS is again a smaller patch changing a total of 48 files, with 518 insertions and 216 deletions.

• Not only is the BFQ I/O scheduler coming for mainline Linux 4.12 but there are also some more fixes to Btrfs for improving the file-system’s native handling of RAID5 and RAID6 modes.

• Last year the Btrfs RAID 5/6 code was found to be in bad shape and potentially unsafe. Since then there were some partial fixes for Btrfs RAID 5/6.

Graphics Stack

Applications

• We are happy to announce GNU Guile release 2.2.1, the first bug-fix release in the new 2.2 stable release series.

• You may be fed up with traditional way of searching/opening applications on your system. Cerebro is an amazing utility built using Electron and available for Linux, Windows, and Mac. It is open-source and released under MIT license.

• You may have favorite video editor to edit your videos but there is no harm to try something new, its initial release was not that long, with time it made some great improvements. It can be bit hard to master this video editor but if you are not new in this field you can make it easily and will be total worth of time.

• There are many ways to upgrade your Linux Kernel using Synaptics, command line and so. The Ukuu utility is the simply solution to manager your Ubuntu/Linux Mint kernels. If you want to test new fixes in the Linux Kernel then you can install Mainline Kernels released by Ubuntu team but mainline Kernels are intended to use for testing purposes only (so be careful).

• While working with Linux systems, there are several areas where you’ll need to use a text editor including programming/scripting, editing configuration/text files, to mention but a few. There are several remarkable text editors you’ll find out there for Linux-based operating systems.

• It’s been quite some time since we last talked about OpenShot, and more specifically when it had its second major release. Recently, the team behind the popular open source video editor has made its third point release available which happens to come with a couple of exciting new features and tools, so here is a quick guide on where to find them and how to use them.

• Boostnote is an open-source note-taking application especially made for programmers and developers, it is build up with Electron framework and cross-platform available for Linux, Windows and Mac. Being programmers, we take lots of notes which includes commands, code snippets, bug information and so on. It all comes in handy when you have organized them all in one place, Boostnote does this job very well. It lets you organize your notes in folders with tags, so you can find anything you are looking for very quickly.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• After more than three months, the major and stable Wine 2.0 branch got its first point release, versioned 2.0.1, which fixes a lot of issues and crashed with numerous Windows apps and games.

• Wine 2.0.1 is now the latest stable Wine release, recommended for all GNU/Linux users, and besides deprecating the wineinstall component, it implements a total of 47 bug fixes, improving detection of Nvidia GeForce GT 525M GPUs, as well as support for the Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system.

Games

• Topware Interactive are revamping Two Worlds II [Steam] and bringing out a new DLC named Two Worlds II: Call of the Tenebrae. Both will see Linux support on May 25th.

• I’ve been playing with Construct 3 from Scirra on and off during the beta and I have to say I’m really impressed with it.

• I’m no programmer, sure I dabble in PHP to make the code that runs this site, but I’m not very good at it. Construct 3 makes development and prototyping pretty easy, since it’s all based on event sheets.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Everyone loves the desktop operating system. People customize their Linux or Unix desktop with themes, wallpapers, killer configuration and more. These customizations show you how cool your desktop can be!

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This release was brought to you by Albert Astals Cid, Oliver Sander, Luigi Toscano, Martin T. H. Sandsmark, Tobias Deiminger, Antonio Rojas, Burkhard Lück, Christoph Feck, Elvis Angelaccio, Gilbert Assaf, Heiko Becker, Hrvoje Senjan, Marco Scarpetta, Miklós Máté, Pino Toscano, Yuri Chornoivan.

• During the past week (ever since the source tarballs for the new Applications were made available to packagers) I have been working toward an April 2017 release of my ‘ktown’ repository: KDE 5_17.04.

• We release 17.04 with a redesigned profile selection dialog to make it easier to set screen size, framerate, and other parameters of your film. Now you can also play your video directly from the notification when rendering is finished. Some crashes that happened when moving clips around on the timeline have been corrected, and the DVD Wizard has been improved.

• Since we missed by a whisker getting updated PIM (kontact, kmail, akregator, kgpg etc..) into Zesty for release day, and we believe it is important that our users have access to this significant update, packages are now available for testers in the Kubuntu backports landing ppa.

• We were just a bunch of nice-looking guys and girls hanging wifi routers over the windows and trying not being intimidated by an unceasing rain when we had the Brazilian KDE Summit (Akademy-BR) in Praia do Forte (BA) back in 2010. This was somehow the birth of LaKademy (Latin-American KDE Summit), started in 2012 and now having its fifth edition taking place in Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais) from 29th April to 1st May.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Introducing Mycroft Ai on Gnome Shell.

• There are plenty of excellent Qt and KDE apps that GNOME avoid using simply because they don’t like the way Qt apps look on their GNOME Desktop. Well, that excuse is about to expire.

Distributions

• When I started arkOS back in late 2012, I was moved by the idea of creating a new and innovative software stack and operating system that could bring self-hosted server applications to a wide audience. The vision has always been the same: to give the masses the tools and education they need to properly self-host all of their software needs in one place. This project has spawned many different ideas and micro-projects from many different developers including myself, and has helped contribute (I hope!) to a renewed interest in the decentralized “do-it-yourself” internet we have seen with the rise of projects like Indieweb, Sandstorm, Mastodon and more.

New Releases

• OpenELEC 8.0.2 release has been published. Users running OpenELEC 8.0.0 or later with auto-update enabled will be prompted on-screen to reboot and apply the update once it has been downloaded and enabled in some hours. Users running older OpenELEC releases or with auto-update disabled will need to manually update. If you would like to update from an older OpenELEC release please read update instructions/advice on the Wiki before updating. Manual update files can be obtained from the downloads page.

Arch Family

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• What comes after openSUSE Leap 42.3 for SUSE’s community non-rolling distribution? Version 15.

• Richard Brown announced on the behalf of the openSUSE Board and Leap Release Manager that the next version after openSUSE Leap 42.3 will be openSUSE Leap 15. Yes, that’s after pre-42 was openSUSE 13.2.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Debian Family

• This is a post describing my involvement with the Debian GNU/Linux port for RISC-V (unofficial and not endorsed by Debian at the moment) and announcing the availability of the repository (still very much WIP) with packages built for this architecture.

• If not interested in the story but you want to check the repository, just jump to the bottom.

• Debian developers continue making progress with a — currently unofficial — port of their Linux operating system to RISC-V.

• There is a in-progress Debian GNU/Linux port to RISC-V along with a repository with packages built for RISC-V. RISC-V for the uninitiated is a promising, open-source ISA for CPUs. So far there isn’t any widely-available RISC-V hardware, but there are embedded systems in the works while software emulators are available.

Derivatives

• Devuan, the effort to build a systemd-free version of Debian, has released Devuan Jessie 1.0.0, a release candidate felt to be just about the finished article.

• In a mail sent to the project’s followers the self-proclaimed “Veteran Unix Admins” behind Devuan say “This Devuan Jessie release candidate is as close as we can get to a ‘long term support’ universal base distribution free from systemd, in the original spirit of Debian.”

• “The final Devuan Jessie release will follow shortly and then we will turn our attention to ‘Ascii’, the current testing branch.”

• Our April 2017 gift to you is the long-awaited release of Devuan Jessie stable release candidate (1.0.0-RC). If all goes as planned, this will be our first Devuan stable release and our first long term support (LTS) release as well.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu developers today have announced a “tech preview” of their new text-based installer for Ubuntu Server.

• Earlier this month we heard of a new Ubuntu Server installer being worked on and it was dubbed Subiquity. Now that the 17.04 release has cleared and 17.10 development begun, the new installer was announced as a tech preview for Ubuntu Server 17.04.

• Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre announced, “During the 17.04 development cycle, the Ubuntu Foundations team has been working on a new experimental installer for servers. We are now ready to get feedback from a wider audience.”

• Apparently, the recently released Ubuntu operating system (17.04) will be the last time Ubuntu will feature its own desktop shell ‘Unity’ which was first introduced back in 2010. So, it survived 7 years, almost. It actually did not ‘survive’, in my opinion, even though I myself was too quick to criticize it (well, back then I was young, somewhat 😉 ), it thrived! Sure the desktop may have had its flaws, but compared to the GNOME3, the foundation of which Unity was heavily relying upon, Unity was a much sensible desktop shell to use. That is at least my judgement after using it for all these years.

• Ubuntu had to let go Unity because, well first they lost the ideological battle (they were never fully trusted by the coding elite of Free Software Movement & they may have had their reasons, granted, but they never trusted what Ubuntu represented ideologically. As a subtle example, observe that despite using the GNOME’s foundation, Ubuntu was always inclined towards using Qt), and secondly, there wasn’t enough man-power to push forward their technological implementations with brute force (Mir & Unity8 are just two examples) because unless the ‘external circumstances’ are already in place, ideas alone cannot change anything.

• Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus, or let’s face it, Zapata, is a decent release. It has nothing to do with the recent announcement. No hidden symbolism or nostalgia. Simply put, some of the old issues seem to have been ironed out, with the focus on hardware support, speed and some rough edges and papercuts here and there. Pretty nice. Good fonts, too!

• However, the live session is uber-boring, the multimedia stack is a bit weak, and some of the default applications are just useless, thank you Gnome. There are also several visual bugs lingering about, and they shouldn’t be there. Other than that, I don’t have anything else negative to say about Zesty. Oh, you still cannot right-click to create new files. Someone needs to have their laptop confiscated for life. Well, if you like Ubuntu or feel like testing, Zesty offers an improvement experience compared to the last several releases. This is a welcome change, and could signal a fresh breath of hope that is so desperately needed. Grade wise, 7/10. Now, your turn to play.

Flavours and Variants

• Kubuntu 17.04 has been released on April 13th 2017. This review introduces some aspects of Kubuntu from it’s appearance, memory usage, to default software and customization. It’s surprisingly more lightweight in memory use than Ubuntu Unity, with gorgeous and Windows-like look, with complete default applications. This Zesty Zapus release is a good start for any new user to choose Kubuntu as daily OS for personal and collective purposes. Enjoy Kubuntu!

• deepin 15.4 GNU/Linux operating system has been released at April 19th 2017. I list here one official download link and two faster mirrors from Sourceforge. I listed here the Mega and Google mirrors as well but remember they don’t provide direct download. The 15.4 provided only as 64 bit, the 32 bit version has already dropped (except by commercial support). I hope this short list helps you.

Devices/Embedded

• Asus has now made available their first release of the Android operating system on the Asus Tinker Board. Asus has labelled the release as TinkerOS_Android V13.11.0.2 (Beta version). It’s a release of Android 6.0.1 running on kernel 3.10.0.

Phones

Android

Free Software/Open Source

Events

• At the 2017 Vault storage conference, Amir Goldstein gave a talk about using overlayfs in a novel way to create snapshots for the underlying filesystem. His company, CTERA Networks, has used the NEXT3 ext3-based filesystem with snapshots, but customers want to be able to use larger filesystems than those supported by ext3. Thus he turned to overlayfs as a way to add snapshots for XFS and other local filesystems.

• NEXT3 has a number of shortcomings that he wanted to address with overlayfs snapshots. Though it only had a few requirements, which were reasonably well supported, NEXT3 never got upstream. It was ported to ext4, but his employer stuck with the original ext3-based system, so the ext4 version was never really pushed for upstream inclusion.

• It is five days left until foss-north 2017, so it is high time to get your ticket! Please notice that tickets can be bought all the way until the night of the 25th (Tuesday), but catering is only included is you get your ticket on the 24th (Monday), so help a poor organizer and get your tickets as soon as possible!

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• While not Linux specific by any means, here is a Firefox add-on (currently in Firefox Test Pilot) that I’ve been using and I believe is beneficial to any Firefox user, especially those who want a bit of extra privacy.

• Containers are basically a way of isolating tabs to their own profiles (profile-per-tab, if you like). This isn’t quite the same as separate profiles that Firefox allows you to start up the browser with, but the result is quite similar nonetheless: tabs are confined to their particular container, including cookies and login data, meaning you can not only have multiple logins (for example, one login of Gmail in your “Personal” tab container and another completely separate login in your “Work” tab container) but also prevent online trackers from piecing all your online habits together, more or less.

SaaS/Back End

• OK the first results are in from the OpenStack community naming process for the R release. The winner at this point is Radium.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Today, April 21, 2017, Collabora was proud to announce the official release of Collabora Office 5.3 office suite based on the latest stable LibreOffice 5.3 open-source office suite.

• Today we released Collabora Office 5.3 and Collabora GovOffice 5.3, which contain great new features and enhancements. They also contains all fixes from the upstream libreoffice-5-3 branch and several backported features.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• There’s now yet another open-source media player, but this time focused on the BSD-focused Qt-powered Lumina Desktop Environment.

• Lumina Media Player is one of the new additions for the upcoming Lumina 1.3. Lumina Media Player’s UI is quite simple so far and allows playing of local audio/video files along with basic audio streaming — currently implemented for Pandora.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• I, Leah Rowe, am seeking to submit a proposal to GNU for Libreboot to re-join the GNU project. It was previously a member of GNU between 14 May 2016 to 15 September 2016.

• After leaving the GNU last year and criticizing the Free Software Foundation and all the drama that ensued after this project was just part of the GNU for months, Libreboot is considering re-joining the GNU.

• Libreboot leader Leah Rowe is retracting her statements against the FSF/GNU, wants to make amends, and wants Libreboot back under the GNU umbrella.

• Early this morning, Libreboot’s lead developer Leah Rowe posted a notice to the project’s website and a much longer post to the project’s subreddit, indicating that she would like to submit (or resubmit, it’s not clear how that would work at this point) the project to “rejoin the GNU Project.”

• The project had been a part of GNU from May 14 through September 15 of last year, at which time Ms. Rowe very publicly removed the project from GNU while making allegations of misdeeds by both GNU and the Free Software Foundation. Earlier this month, Rowe admitted that she had been dealing with personal issues at the time and had overreacted. The project also indicated that it had reorganized and that Rowe was no longer in full control.

Licensing/Legal

• For some years now, Bradley Kuhn has been the face of GPL enforcement. At LibrePlanet 2017, he gave a talk about that enforcement and, more generally, whether copyleft is succeeding. Enforcing the GPL is somewhat fraught with perils of various sorts, and there are those who are trying to thwart that work, he said. His talk was partly to clear the air and to alert the free-software community to some backroom politics he sees happening in the enforcement realm.

• Most of the work that Kuhn’s employer, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), does is not dealing with licensing issues. But people love hearing about copyleft, he said. In addition, free-software developers like those at LibrePlanet have a right to know what’s going on politically. There is a lot of politics going on behind the scenes.

• Kuhn works for a charity, not a traditional company or a trade association. That means he has the freedom and, in some sense, the obligation to give attendees the whole story from his point of view, he said. He is lucky to be able to work in that fashion. Kuhn then took a bit of a spin through his history with copyleft and why he decided to step up for it.

• The fundamental mechanism defending software freedom is copyleft, embodied in GPL. GPL, however, functions only through upholding it–via GPL enforcement. For some, enforcement has been a regular activity for 30 years, but most projects don’t enforce: they live with regular violations. Today, even under the Community Principles of GPL Enforcement, GPL enforcement is regularly criticized and questioned. The complex landscape is now impenetrable for developers who wish their code to remain forever free. This talk provides basic history and background information on the topic.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• A few months ago, we noted that the Gates Foundation has emerged as one of the leaders in requiring the research that it funds to be released as open access and open data — an interesting application of the money that Bill Gates made from closed-source software. Now it seems that his successor as Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, has had a similar epiphany about openness. Back in 2001, Ballmer famously called GNU/Linux “a cancer”. Although he later softened his views on software somewhat, that was largely because he optimistically claimed that the threat to Microsoft from free software was “in the rearview mirror”. Not really: today, the Linux-based Android has almost two orders of magnitude more market share than Windows Phone.

Programming/Development

• GitHub has opened the doors on its three year old GitHub Developer Program. As of Monday, developers no longer need to have paid accounts to participate.

• “We’re opening the program up to all developers, even those who don’t have paid GitHub accounts,” the company announced in a blog post. “That means you can join the program no matter which stage of development you’re in,”

Standards/Consortia

• Yesterday, MuleSoft, the creators of RAML, announced that they have joined the Open API Initiative. Created by SmartBear Software and based on the wildly popular Swagger Specification, the OpenAPI Initiative is a Linux Foundation project with over 20 members, including Adobe, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce.

Leftovers

• India must first secure its digital sovereignty before it can begin global trade talks

Science

• Thousands of people descended on Washington and other cities across the country on Saturday to voice support for science, with calls for evidence-based public policy and increased funding for scientific research as President Trump defended his climate policies.

• Scientists and their supporters don’t usually march — but recent events have troubled them. Under Trump, scientists have been silenced; his attempted immigrantion ban directly threatened international scientific collaboration; he’s signed executive orders that will destroy efforts to fight climate change; his proposed budget cuts for 2018 slash funding for crucial scientific research. Though the March for Science has done its best to maintain its political neutrality (Per March for Science PR: “The goal of the March for Science is to highlight the valuable role science plays in society and policy, and to demonstrate deep public support for science”), it has been widely understood as a protest of these policies. D.C. is only one march — more than 600 “satellite” demonstrations took place worldwide.

• Nevertheless, pediatricians and herpetologists are not marching together because these are ordinary times. The obvious impetus is the dominance of a president and a political party increasingly contemptuous of scientific inquiry and inclined to flagrant denial of evidence.

• The March for Science is a response to the Trump administration’s distaste for science — or at least the kind that gets in the way of profit — but it is also a celebration of those among us who have devoted their lives to understanding how the world works. The thousands descending on the National Mall, on the first Earth Day under a regime that has taken a sharp knife to government science budgets, study stars and butterflies, barrier reefs and hedgehog reproduction, viruses and bird flight patterns.

• Most days, they make and test their hypotheses in laboratories or perhaps in the Arctic Circle or the Australian Outback, in an anti-gravity chamber or a deciduous forest. But on this warm April Saturday, they have come together in Washington, D.C, to make a point that feels more urgent than ever: Science matters, and we ignore its findings at our peril.

• “SCIENCE IS real” and “Objective reality exists” read the signs that covered Jessie Square in San Francisco last December. “Immigrants make science great” read some at Boston’s Copley Square in February.

Health/Nutrition

• Investigators identified other children who may have been cut at Attar’s clinic since 2005. “Multiple” girls in Michigan told authorities that Nagarwala performed procedures on their genitals.

• The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that at least 513,000 girls have been cut or face the risk of being cut in the U.S., a roughly threefold increase from 1990 [...]

• On Tuesday 18 April, two protection orders were granted by the Sheffield Family Court, allowing SYP to protect two females who were identified as being at risk of FGM.

• She was arrested on Thursday at Detroit Metropolitan Airport while trying to catch a flight to Nairobi, Kenya.

• Instead, what happened was an online demand from some rather nasty Muslims that she not set foot in Australia. This black African woman was accused, among other things, of advocating “white supremacy” and “misogyny” because of her opposition to the Muslim practice of forcible genital mutilation of little girls (as happened to her).

• Authorities would not disclose what religion the defendant practices, or what cultural group she is affiliated with — stating only that she is part of a religious and cultural community that’s known to practice genital mutilation on girls. One Indian-American leader said female genital mutilation is not a Hindu practice.

• Last week, an Indian American doctor was arrested in Michigan, charged with performing female genital cutting on two seven-year-old girls. As the story hit the local press and then the New York Times, and as it was shared by George Takei and Nicholas Kristof, my phone kept blowing up with breathless messages and links from childhood friends across the country.

• “This story isn’t going away,” said one friend over the phone. We both grew up in the same controversial, secretive South Asian Muslim sect as the doctor, a 44-year-old emergency room physician named Jumana Nagarwala who was born in Washington, DC. “This time, the community can’t just pretend it’s not happening.” Just today, two more followers of the sect were arrested in connection with the case.

• Privatisation of water is unwarranted, unjustified and unnecessary. In pushing for it, we are not really addressing the key issue plaguing the water sector, which is a need for better governance. We need a democratic, transparent, accountable and participatory governance in a bottom-up approach, on each aspect of the urban water sector where water privatisation is advocated.

• Nestle extracts billions of dollars worth of groundwater from western Michigan, but it pays the state just $200 a year in paperwork fees to do so.

• Water use isn’t as much of a concern when it’s returned in an unpolluted form back to the water system where it came. It’s so-called consumptive uses, where the water is gone from the watershed after it’s used, that are of most concern.

• The amount of lead flowing from the Room 222 fountain was also three times the 5,000 ppb level at which the EPA classifies water as “hazardous waste.”

• The participation of small-scale farmers at the table of international negotiations and the protection of agricultural biodiversity are key to food security, according to the Quaker United Nations Office, which published last month two policy briefs with a list of recommendations.

• The public could soon get a look at confidential reports about errors, mishaps and mix-ups in the nation’s hospitals that put patients’ health and safety at risk, under a groundbreaking proposal from federal health officials.

• The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services wants to require that private health care accreditors publicly detail problems they find during inspections of hospitals and other medical facilities, as well as the steps being taken to fix them. Nearly nine in 10 hospitals are directly overseen by those accreditors, not the government.

• There’s increasing concern among regulators that private accreditors aren’t picking up on serious problems at health facilities. Every year, CMS takes a sample of hospitals and other health care facilities accredited by private organizations and does its own inspections to validate the work of the groups. In a 2016 report, CMS noted that its review found that accrediting organizations often missed serious deficiencies found soon after by state inspectors.

Security

• Security experts believe that tens of thousands of Windows computers may have been infected by a highly advanced National Security Agency backdoor. The NSA backdoor was included in last week’s leak by the mysterious group known as Shadow Brokers.

• BrickerBot works in similar fashion to Mirai in that both programs attempt to leverage the tendency for users to neglect to change the factory default username and password combo that ships on IoT devices.

• Although Linux operating systems are fairly stable and secure, they may not completely be immune to threats. All computer systems can suffer from malware and viruses, including those running Linux-based operating systems. However, the number of critical threats to Linux-based operating systems is still way lower than threats for Windows or OS X.

• Therefore, we need to protect our Linux systems from the various forms of threats such as viruses that can be transmitted in many ways including malicious code, email attachments, malicious URLs, rootkits to mention but a few.

• In this article, we will talk about 8 best free anti-virus programs for Linux systems.

• Misner’s post showed that three of nine vulnerabilities from the leak were fixed in a March 14 security update. Security commentators were bamboozled. As Ars Technica pointed out, when security holes are discovered, the individual or organization that found them is usually credited in the notes explaining the update. No such acknowledgment was found in the March 14 update.

• The Seleznev arrest and trial garnered international attention, in no small part because the 32-year-old hacker is the son of Valery Seleznev, a member of the Russian Parliament and ally to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Valery Seleznev has accused the US of “kidnapping” his son.

Defence/Aggression

• I’m so sorry to disappoint so many people, but there is not going to be a war with North Korea.

• No, no, Trump is not going to start a war there. And, no, Kim Jong Un is not going to start a war there. It is not going to happen, despite a cottage industry of pundits who seem to really believe war is only moments away.

• Let’s start with the obvious. A war on the Korean peninsula benefits no one and is really, really bad for everyone (we’ll get to the irrational madman theory in a moment.)

• Today’s show is devoted to the US drone warfare program, its consequences for targeted populations, and activists’ efforts to stop it. Selay Ghaffar with the Solidarity Party of Afghanistan joins in by phone from Kabul, and explains who the actual victims of drone strikes are. And three California peace activists (Toby Blome, Eleanor Levine and Mike Rufo) discuss why they’ve made drones the focus of their work, and how they conduct their protests at US Air Force drone bases.

• George W. Bush’s recent public relations tour, designed to rebuild his image as a tortured artist wrestling with the demons—a flawed but morally introspective tragic figure—has been remarkably effective. As FAIR (3/7/17) noted last month, Bush has been the lucky recipient of dozens of friendly write-ups, interviews and TV appearances, all with only the mildest of liberal chiding around the margins.

• In all of the fawning press coverage, one thing has been notably absent: Bush’s Iraqi victims.

• Bush’s new PR tour centers around him painting wounded American veterans—foregrounded as the primary negative consequence of Bush’s invasion of Iraq. In ten of the most prominent articles praising Bush in the past few months, not a single one mentions his Iraqi victims…

• In the immediate aftermath of the attack in Paris on Thursday night, claimed by the Islamic State, several French commentators suggested that the presidential election could be swayed by the fatal shooting of a police officer on the Champs-Élysées.

• That’s largely because opinion polls suggest that the electorate was still divided almost evenly between four leading candidates ahead of Sunday’s first round vote, with a large number of undecided voters who could break for the anti-Muslim candidate of the far-right, Marine Le Pen, if fear of terrorism spikes.

• The episode with the Vinson — which was sailing south for an exercise with the Australians as the administration was suggesting publicly that it was sailing north toward Korea — will lead additional foreign observers to conclude that the muscular talk is just talk. This is on top of what was already a severe international credibility problem with a president who has established a well-deserved reputation for dishonesty.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• But if the US Department of Justice prosecutes Assange, as it reportedly may soon, he could become something else: the first journalist in modern history to be criminally charged by American courts for publishing classified information. WikiLeaks may not look like a traditional journalism outlet, but it shares the same ends—publishing true information from its sources. And that means legal action against Assange could threaten the freedom of the press as a whole.

• Every newspaper worth its salt has published classified information, and who believes the Trump administration, with its press hatred, would stop there?

• “I love WikiLeaks,” President Donald Trump last year told an adoring crowd on the campaign trail. At around the same time, one of his supporters, Representative Mike Pompeo, tweeted triumphantly that emails from the Democratic National Committee provided “further proof … the fix was in from President Obama on down”. To give his lies authority, he added: “Leaked by WikiLeaks.” Those cloudy and insubstantial allegations have been widely credited with helping Mr Trump win his election, but times are different now. Mr Pompeo is director of the CIA and has denounced WikiLeaks as “a non-state, hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors, like Russia” – something entirely obvious to the rest of the world back when Russia was, in the opinion of many, conspiring to help Mr Trump and Mr Pompeo to attain their present eminence.

• This would be just another example of the shameless dishonesty of the Trump administration, if there were not credible reports that the US Department of Justice is considering an attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange. This would threaten one of the core freedoms of the press. Mr Assange is in many ways an unattractive champion of liberty. But he is right to claim that at least sometimes his organisation serves a journalistic function and should be protected in the US by the first amendment. Some of the documents that WikiLeaks has published, and that other media organisations, including the Guardian, have also used, were obtained by means that may have been illegal. But there is a longstanding principle that this does not in itself make their publication illegal. If we, as journalists, had to rely solely on public-spirited and scrupulously honest sources, some very important stories would be missed. Key stories that hold the powerful to account in a democracy would no longer be heard. The defence of a free press is that it doesn’t necessarily make its participants virtuous, but it harnesses some of their vices to the public good. The dumping of unredacted documents, as WikiLeaks did with the Turkish ruling party’s internal emails, is wrong, and so is the apparent refusal to offend powerful patrons. Nonetheless offending or embarrassing the wealthy and the influential – even if they are your friends – is an important function of journalism. It is also constitutionally protected in the US.

• Arresting Julian Assange is a priority, says US attorney general Jeff Sessions

• Donald Trump, who once told supporters “I love WikiLeaks”, has said “it’s OK with me” if the Justice Department wants to charge Julian Assange.

• US officials have prepared charged seeking the arrest of the Wikileaks founder. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has told reporters that securing the arrest of Mr Assange, who has been living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012, is a priority.

• President Donald Trump says that if the Justice Department wants to charge WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, “it’s OK with me.”

• Trump says he is not involved in that decision-making process, but would support Attorney General Jeff Sessions if he charged Assange with a crime.

• The administration has stepped up its rhetoric against WikiLeaks in recent days, despite the fact that Trump welcomed the group’s release of a top Hillary Clinton aide’s emails during the election.

• Sessions told reporters Thursday that Assange’s arrest is a priority as the Justice Department steps up efforts to prosecute people who leak classified information to the media. CIA Director Mike Pompeo last week denounced WikiLeaks as a “hostile intelligence service” and a threat to U.S. national security.

• Amid a swirl of reports that U.S. authorities “have prepared charges to seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions isn’t ruling out the possibility that cracking down on WikiLeaks could lead to other media outlets being prosecuted for covering leaks.

• During a Friday morning CNN appearance, Sessions was asked by anchor Kate Bolduan whether “folks should be concerned that this would also open up news organizations like CNN and the New York Times to prosecution.”

• Sessions wouldn’t rule anything out.

• “That’s speculative, and I’m not able to comment on that,” he replied.

• Amidst Sweden’s compact oligopoly stream media, with a clear warmongering agenda, just how wide known could become a small organization of professors and doctors fighting for world peace? An organization whose age it is said being less than two years? With no sponsoring or governmental funding as ALL the rest of similar organizations in Sweden? With all media exactly in the opposite ideological side?

• The answer is, “Thanks, quite wide known in Sweden, indeed”. Thanks to this front-page article about us in DN [front-page image above, online edition April 20, 2017], the cable by Swedish news agency TT, and the publications of the same day in Aftonbladet, Expressen, Göteborg Posten, VK, Metro, etc, etc.

• Paradoxically, it was never our goal to become this much known in Sweden. We aimed from the beginning [See SWEDHR Foundation Manifest] to solely intervene in the international debate of human rights and health, and to work for diminishing the current risks of a world conflagration. We believe we had perhaps achieved that goal, when we could document that during 2016, our online magazine The Indicter did receive more than a quarter of million readers. In addition, in less than six months, The Indicter Channel has got over 360,000 subscribers.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Indonesia, with its thriving paper and palm oil industries, is losing more forest than any other country. Despite a forest development moratorium, the Southeast Asian nation has lost at least 39 million acres since the last century, according to research from the University of Maryland and the World Resources Institute.

• Indonesian annual peat fires destroy the environment and pose a public health threat. This project will transfer expertise for better modelling Indonesian peatland extent and depth and promote sustainable peatland management and collaboration between Australian and Indonesian experts.

• There has been less talk about where exactly those people will go when they leave their homes. Research on climate migration has painted sea level rise as “primarily a coastal issue,” writes Mathew E. Hauer in Nature Climate Change this week. But the inland regions that absorb climate change migrants will need to have sufficient transport, housing, and infrastructure to absorb the migrants.

• A recent Endangered Species Research special issue summarizes some of the devastating longterm effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on protected marine mammals and sea turtles. The issue compiles 20 scientific studies authored by NOAA scientists and partners covering more than five years’ worth of data collection, analysis, and interpretation. The research indicates that populations of several marine mammal and sea turtle species will take decades to rebound. Significant habitat restoration in the region will also be needed. NOAA scientists used a variety of cutting-edge research methods in these studies and many others as part of a Natural Resource Damage Assessment. This is the legal process where we investigate the type of injuries caused by the oil spill, quantify how many animals were harmed, develop a restoration plan to compensate for the natural resource injuries, and hold responsible parties liable to pay for the restoration.

• The New York Times is the most influential newspaper in the English-language world, not just because of its reach and leadership status within the industry, but because it defines the boundaries of acceptable debate. Being in the New York Times is a legitimizing event, one that cements ideas as not fringe, “other,” or in the realm of the dreaded, career-ending “conspiracy theory.” So it understandably upset many liberals when the Times decided to bestow upon hard-right Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page editor Bret Stephens the ultimate stamp of Acceptable Opinion approval by affording him a regular op-ed column in the Times.

• You might think of the rainforest or the endangered polar bear on this day, but Earth Day is a commemoration with decidedly American roots, born in 1970 with marches and rallies by 20 million people nationwide.

• It was a time of activism on behalf of civil rights and the environment and it came just two years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act to ban discrimination in housing, and five years after the creation of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Finance

• Two years in, Hall says, teaching the miners to code hasn’t been the hardest part. It’s finding enough clients to hire them – despite staffers having completed more than 60 projects and getting Drupal-certified, Hall says, companies are still cautious to take a chance on them. Part of that is because they are new, but part of it, he believes, is because some companies still hold regional biases.

• The results of the research showed that on average German firms had 26 employees per supervisor. In Switzerland this ratio was 13.6 to one, in the UK it was 10.3 to one, and US firms had 7.1 workers for every superior.

• Scarcely had the starting gun for Britain’s election battle been fired when technology guru Bill Gates waded in with a doom-laden warning to the Prime Minister.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• This week’s news that the former Chancellor George Osborne had “fallen on his sword, a bit” and decided not to seek re-election as an MP in June’s general election was greeted with applause, however limited, from within senior ranks of the UK Conservative Party.

• Many agreed Osborne was juggling too many post-Treasury roles – in investment, finance, academia, and imminently in journalism as the editor-elect of London’s Standard newspaper – to continue representing his Tatton constituency with any effectiveness.

• Writing in the paper he will shortly be in charge of, Osborne admitted that despite walking away from the House of Commons, he wanted to stay “active in the debate about our country’s future”, that he wanted a Britain that is “free, open and diverse”, and promised to give his readership “straight facts and informed opinion.”

• What this sudden outbreak of self-declared independence omitted to mention was that Osborne’s damascene conversion to the “facts” of politically neutral journalism, will all kick-off (presumably with a flashy fanfare of new-era celebrations at the Standard) at the very beginning of a critical election campaign.

• Bill Nye the “Science Guy” is taking aim at President Trump’s Cabinet picks, singling out Environmental Protection Agency Administrator (EPA) Scott Pruitt and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos as “the least qualified people on the planet” to head their agencies.

• In an interview with the Guardian published on Saturday, Nye accused the Trump administration of “dismantling” the government from within, specifically pointing to White House chief strategist Steve Bannon as a driving force behind the strategy.

• Surgeon General Vivek Murthy resigned at the request of the White House after assisting in the transition to the Trump administration. Dr. Murthy’s deputy, Rear Adm. Sylvia Trent-Adams, will assume the position of acting surgeon general. Trent-Adams, a 24-year veteran of the corps, also served as its chief nurse officer and as deputy associate administrator of the Department of Health and Human Services’ HIV and AIDS bureau.

• The department’s spokeswoman, Alleigh Marré, noted Murthy’s aid to the transition in a statement on his resignation, saying, “Secretary [Tom] Price thanks him for his dedicated service to the nation.”

• Standard media treatment sticks to a simple left-right dualism: “racist” rejection of immigrants is the main issue and that what matters most is to “stop Marine Le Pen!” Going from there to here is like walking through Alice’s looking glass. Almost everything is turned around.

• An early insider account of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, entitled Shattered, reveals a paranoid presidential candidate who couldn’t articulate why she wanted to be President and who oversaw an overconfident and dysfunctional operation that failed to project a positive message or appeal to key voting groups.

• The satellite marches around the world suggest Trump isn’t the sole cause of scientists’ unease. Globally, there is a “trend of anti-intellectualism”, said Johnson, where politicians play to voters’ base emotions rather than provide evidence-based policy.

• The two specific items to be voted on Thursday include a plan to make it easier for broadband providers to charge other businesses higher prices to connect to the main arteries of their networks. The action would clear the way for internet service providers like AT&T and CenturyLink to raise connection fees charged to hospitals, small businesses and wireless carriers in many markets where there is little or no competition for so-called backhaul broadband service.

• The other item up for vote is a move to ease the limit on how many stations a broadcast television company can own. The action is expected to invite more consolidation in that sector.

• It was, of course, the far-left New York Times (1/10/17) that ran the story that appears to have started the snowball rolling, reporting earlier this month that Fox had paid some $13 million to settle at least five lawsuits from women staffers, who charged the host with things like verbal abuse, sexual comments, unwanted advances and phone calls better left undescribed. Corporate advertisers, undeterred by O’Reilly’s years of on-air racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, outright lying and hate-mongering, evidently decided that was a bridge too far. OK.

• It’s hard not to celebrate the end of the sheer toxicity O’Reilly’s show put out. But activist groups like UltraViolet and Color of Change who worked for his ouster underscore that the problem is bigger than him. Fox News executives gave cover for harassment and abuse for years; there’s no reason to believe that culture has changed, particularly as the network won’t make the results of their investigation public.

• I am personally very frustrated and disappointed by negative voting. At the previous election my MP said to me words equivalent to, “Vote for me because at least I’m not one of them.” This is not exactly a resounding reason to do anything.

• Unless the BBC takes firm disciplinary action against Nick Robinson for this, they cannot keep pretending that the UK any longer holds free and fair elections. For a state broadcaster to show this level of venom and bias against the opposition leader is utterly unacceptable.

• It is indisputable that Robinson’s history is as a high ranking Conservative Party activist. They dominate BBC News, as a plain matter of fact. They have changed the culture of the BBC so they no longer feel any need to disguise their Tory cheerleading.

• This taxi driver was the only member of the public who managed to get anywhere near Theresa May on her much publicised “meet the people” election visit to Bolton yesterday. As not one local person was allowed to speak to her, he is expressing his views in the only way available. He is also exercising his essential democratic right to make his views plain during an election.

• [...]

• That May’s police escort see it as their job to prevent any expression of dissent says everything about the kind of Britain she is creating. It goes along with her failure, twice, to accept Angus Robertson’s invitation to distance herself from the Daily Mail’s “Crush the Saboteurs” headline.

• [...]

• The media picture with which we are presented is not just a distortion, it is the polar opposite of the reality. It was not a “meet the people” visit, it was an “avoid the people” visit. With not even other members of the political establishment being allowed to question her in debate, this is an Uzbek style election in the UK.

• It’s been almost 100 days, and these people still can’t find the car keys. They’ve managed to enflame a fairly routine dust-up with North Korea to the point that even China’s military is going on high alert, all so Trump can look tough and distract everyone from the numerous, burgeoning scandals tied to his presidency and his business relationships. Mike Pence is running around yelling about swords at a country that can’t feed itself. North Korea is a struggling country with a stout paint job; its government pulls these attention-grabbing stunts every so often to raise its visibility in the world, and to broker a back-room deal to get food on the sly so the population doesn’t starve to death. It’s been like this for decades, but leave it to Trump to turn it into the potential strikepad for World War Whatever while losing track of the largest flotation device in maritime history. These guys could screw up the recipe for tap water.

• Under the Trump regime, an ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action. As civic culture collapses under the weight of a ruthless mix of casino capitalism and a flight from moral responsibility, crimes against humanity now become normalized in a rush of legislation that produces massive amounts of human suffering and misery while widening the scope of those considered disposable. What is new about the culture of cruelty is that its blend of hate, suffering and spectacle has become normalized. Matters of life and death are now being determined by a neo-fascist government that relies increasingly on punishing apparatuses such as the criminal justice system and budgetary policies that bear down ruthlessly on the poor, undocumented immigrants, Muslims and Black youth. In this interview, Henry Giroux argues that it is crucial to understand how matters of life, death and politics converge in a country marked by a rabid notion of individualism, the celebration of profit over human needs and an addiction to violence.

• On actual Tax Day, April 18, we headed to the headquarters of Goldman Sachs here in New York to call them out for avoiding $10 billion in taxes, or for rather extracting $10 billion from our tax dollars. [They do this] by exploiting loopholes or their roles in company mergers and acquisitions. We really wanted to send a message that it is not only about Trump releasing his taxes, but it is also about the 1% and companies like Goldman Sachs that really continue to exploit tax loopholes and avoid massive amounts of taxes that could be going to pay for basic services.

• National Democrats have used hyperbolic Russia-bashing to shield themselves from blame for Hillary Clinton’s defeat and to block progressives from pulling the party away from Wall Street, writes Norman Solomon.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The National Communications Commission (NCC, 國家通訊傳播委員會) has rebutted concerns that its latest bill could pave the way for media censorship in Taiwan.

• At a public hearing held by New Power Party Legislator Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) on Thursday, experts expressed concerns over the regulation governing the establishment of public television enterprises promulgated by the NCC in March.

• Article 4 of the act stipulates that a government agency or an administrative institution is allowed to establish a public television company for “the public interest or public welfare.”

• Hsu criticized the terms “public interest” and “public welfare” for being too vague, providing a quick way for the government to easily establish its own television stations, which could in turn lead to the domination of Taiwan’s media environment.

• Censorship should be left on the ash heap of history where it belongs.

• The Berkeley administration is incentivizing anyone who doesn’t want a particular speaker to be heard to threaten (or even engage in) acts of violence. This all but guarantees that speakers who are controversial on a particular campus will be silenced, and teaches a generation of students that resorting to violence will be rewarded. Students are learning deeply illiberal lessons. I can think of few things that are more corrosive to higher education or a pluralistic democracy.

• Two men stabbed a Gopalpura resident on Wednesday evening, after a disagreement on singer Sonu Nigam’s social media rant against the azaan turned violent.

• Computer boffins in Canada are working on anti-censorship software called Slitheen that disguises disallowed web content as government-sanctioned pablum. They intend for it to be used in countries where network connections get scrutinized for forbidden thought.

• Slitheen – named after Doctor Who aliens capable of mimicking humans to avoid detection – could thus make reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights look like a lengthy refresher course in North Korean juche ideology or a politically acceptable celebration of cats.

• A bad review on Yelp is an anathema to a business. No one wants to get trashed online. But the First Amendment protects both the reviewer’s opinion and Yelp’s right to publish it. A California appeals court ran roughshod over the First Amendment when it ordered Yelp to comply with an injunction to take down speech without giving the website any opportunity to challenge the injunction’s factual basis. The case is on appeal to the California Supreme Court, and EFF filed an amicus brief asking the court to overturn the lower court’s dangerous holding.

• Few organizations have been more engaged in fighting President Donald Trump’s attacks on civil liberties and civil rights than the ACLU. But it’s important to remember that political candidates — including Donald Trump — have constitutional rights, too.

• A judge recently held that Donald Trump may have committed incitement when, at a campaign rally in Kentucky last year, he called on his audience to eject protesters who were subsequently manhandled by the crowd. While it’s a closer case than most, I don’t think those words can clear the high bar for what constitutes incitement.

• On top of that, UC Berkley just announced the cancellation of a scheduled talk by commentator Ann Coulter. This in the wake of violent riots that resulted in the cancellation of Milo Yiannopoulos’s address at the same school in February. A university once championed for its commitment to free expression in the 1960s now seems destined to babysit the next generation of proto-fascists.

• And although we are far away from lynching a student for criticizing Islam, our college campuses are perhaps the last place one can hear honest criticism of Islam. It has been said that Islamophobia is “a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”

• A local police inspector investigating the case, Nadeem Ashraf, said the women were arrested this week for killing Fazal Abbas, aged around 50, who fled Pakistan in 2004 following accusations of blasphemy.

Privacy/Surveillance

• New proposals to make U.S. entry screening even more invasive will threaten our privacy, freedom of expression, and digital account security—and you can raise your voice against them.

• New York Times columnist Tom Friedman outraged many readers when he wrote an opinion piece on 12 April calling on President Trump to “back off fighting territorial ISIS in Syria”. The reason he gave for that recommendation was not that US wars in the Middle East are inevitably self-defeating and endless, but that it would reduce the “pressure on Assad, Iran, Russia and Hezbollah”.

• That suggestion that the US sell out its interest in counter-terrorism in the Middle East to gain some advantage in power competition with its adversaries was rightly attacked as cynical.

• But, in fact, the national security bureaucracies of the US – which many have come to call the “Deep State” – have been selling out their interests in counter-terrorism in order to pursue various adventures in the region ever since George W Bush declared a “Global War on Terrorism” in late 2001.

• Planning on going to a protest? You might not be aware that just by showing up, you can open yourself up to certain privacy risks — police often spy on protesters, and the smartphones they carry, and no matter how peaceful the demonstration, there’s always a chance that you could get detained or arrested, and your devices could get searched. Watch this video for tips on how to prepare your phone before you go to a protest, how to safely communicate with your friends and document the event, and what to do if you get detained or arrested.

• This is the third and final installment in our series on the Constitution at the border. Today, we’ll focus on the Fifth Amendment and passwords. Click here for Part 1 on the First Amendment or Part 2 on the Fourth Amendment.

• Derechos Digitales, the leading digital rights organization in Chile, has launched a new report in collaboration with EFF that evaluates the privacy practices of Chilean Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This project is part of a series across Latin America, adapted from EFF’s annual Who Has Your Back? report. The reports are intended to evaluate mobile and fixed ISPs to see which stand with their users when responding to government requests for personal information. While there’s definitely room for improvement, the first edition of the Chilean ¿Quién Defiende Tus Datos? (Who Defends Your Data?) report has some hopeful indicators.

• Chileans go online more than any other nationality in Latin America. When Chileans use the Internet, they put their most private data, including their online relationships, political, artistic and personal discussions, and even their minute-by-minute movements online. And all of that data necessarily has to go through one of a handful of ISPs. That means that Chileans are more likely to be putting their trust in their providers to defend their data than anyone else in Central or South America.

• It’s Paraguay’s turn to take a closer look at the practices of their local Internet companies, and how they treat their customer’s private information. Paraguay’s ¿Quien Defiende Tus Datos? (Who Defends Your Data?) is a project of TEDIC, the country’s leading digital rights organization. It’s part of a continent-wide initiative by South America’s leading digital rights groups to shine a light on Internet privacy practices in the region, based on EFF’s annual Who Has Your Back report. (Derechos Digitale’s Chile report was published on Monday, and digital rights groups in Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina will be releasing similar studies soon.)

• TEDIC’s survey comes at a tense moment in Paraguayan politics. After 24 years of relatively stable democracy, the country has spent the last few months caught in a high-stakes political battle. The current President, Horacio Cartes, pushed through an amendment to end his office’s constitutional term limits. The opposition sees echoes of the presidential power-grab that led to Paraguay’s last dictatorship. After riots in March led to setting fire of the Congress and the shooting of an opposition party member by police, Cartes has now declared he will not run for re-election. Still, talk of the “shadow of dictatorship” continues to hover over Asunción. Paraguayan Internet users want to know how their ISPs will defend their data in the event of a repressive or suspicious state.

• It’s no surprise that Americans were unhappy to lose online privacy protections earlier this month. Across party lines, voters overwhelmingly oppose the measure to repeal the FCC’s privacy rules for Internet providers that Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed into law.

• But it should come as a surprise that Republicans—including the Republican leaders of the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission—are ardently defending the move and dismissing the tens of thousands who spoke up and told policymakers that they want protections against privacy invasions by their Internet providers.

• A man in Michigan has sued Confide, a secure messaging app that is reportedly used by Republicans in the Trump White House, over allegations that the app isn’t nearly as secure when run on a desktop computer, as opposed to a mobile device.

• Facebook’s F8 developer conference on Tuesday brought the launch of the beta version of Delegated Account Recovery, a way for the social network to be the backup security key in case you forget your password on different, non-Facebook services.

• A magistrate judge in the US has ordered Google to hand over customers’ mail messages it has stored abroad, arguing that since the company has access to them in the US they are subject to federal search warrants.

• Google still hasn’t shed its “bad guy” clothes when it comes to the data it collects on underage students. In fact, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says the company continues to massively collect and store information on children without their consent or their parents’. Not even school administrators fully understand the extent of this operation, the EFF says.

• The implementation of the Executive Order immediately resulted in substantial chaos in the travel industry as companies aligned their practices to the new reality of ‘non-admission’. It also sparked controversy in many parts of the country owing to the questionable legality of separating families and the constitutionality of the order itself. Several legal challenges were successfully waged in US trial courts, leading to a decision of the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on February 9, which upheld the original decisions and refused to reverse the lower courts. The first plaintiffs in the matters were two states: Washington and Minnesota.

• [...]

• While citizens generally are not required to provide much in the way of documentation other than a passport to enter their own state, they may have to provide substantial amounts of personal data to sponsor third-country national family members or visitors. This information is also now freely available to the US authorities (on a reciprocal basis of course). But the US only has two such agreements in force: with Canada and the UK. Although in principle such agreements were to be concluded between the so-called ‘Five Eye countries’ (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA), no agreement with the latter two countries has yet been concluded. It may simply be that the US has decided that negotiating such agreements requires too much time and has the disadvantage of requiring reciprocity, prompting the authorities to seek a more coercive way to encourage the “sharing” of personal data.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The spotlight returned to Asia this week after fierce statements by some prominent imams demanding her execution as “deterrent” for the violence that led to Mashal Khan’s lynching. The Mardan University student was killed, denuded, and tortured for allegedly glorifying the Ahmadi faith.

• It was the third blasphemy-related incident in Pakistan in April, after a student was beaten to death by a lynch mob and a faith healer was shot dead.

• Earlier this week we noted that 162 tech companies (including us) had signed an amicus brief for the appeal in the 4th Circuit (in Virginia) arguing that President Trump’s travel ban executive order was unlawful.

• Red Hat today joined more than 150 business leaders and companies, large and small, in asking U.S. Courts of Appeal to affirm lower court decisions enjoining the President Trump’s Executive Order on immigration. The brief lays out the importance of immigration to the U.S. economy and innovation.

• What state saddled its residents with 23,000 wrongful drug convictions, then dedicated millions of taxpayer dollars and years of public labor opposing efforts to get justice for the wrongfully convicted? Surprise, it’s progressive Massachusetts.

• Massachusetts is seriously regressive on criminal justice issues. Despite massive scandals at the Hinton and Amherst drug labs and glaring racial inequities, our elected leaders too often fail to acknowledge what the criminal punishment system is actually doing — or to whom or how. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In the wake of two historic drug lab scandals, resulting in tens of thousands of tainted convictions and ruined lives, we in Massachusetts have an opportunity and obligation to fix the system.

• Over the last year, large numbers of Americans have grown politically active for the first time. Reflecting the depth of our constitutional crisis, however, many seem not to know how to meaningfully raise their voices or participate in the political process.

• In an early episode of the television series “Girls,” Adam sends Hannah a photo of his penis and then a text message: “SRY that wasn’t for you.”

• Hannah and her friends debate the intention of Adam’s actions, but one thing is clear: The explicit photo he sent isn’t unusual, and it certainly isn’t criminal.

• A jury in Sacramento, California, last week awarded more than $11 million to the family of a 16-year-old-boy who had been sexually assaulted by a peer at his group home in Davis. The jury found that operators of the group home failed to look after the boy as the facility for troubled youngsters descended into a prolonged period of chaos and violence.

• The boy, Deshaun Becton, was 11 at the time of his 15-month stay at the home, but functioned at the level of a 5-year-old, making him especially vulnerable to children with records of violence and predation, the jury found. One night in May 2013, he disappeared for several hours. As it turned out, he was in a public bathroom of a nearby park, where he was victimized by an older, larger female resident of the home. His parents weren’t notified by the home’s staff for 24 hours after he left.

• In cartoonish U.S. historical understanding, the United States is, was, and ever shall be a force for good, whereas Nazism arose in a distant, isolated land that lacked any connection to other societies. In a cartoonish reversal of that understanding, which would make a good straw man for critics of this book, U.S. policies have been identical to Nazism, which simply copied them. Obviously this is not the case.

• In reality, as we have long known, the U.S. genocide of Native Americans was a source of inspiration in Nazi discussions of expanding to their east, even referring to Ukrainian Jews as “Indians.” Camps for Native Americans helped inspire camps for Jews. Anti-Semites and eugenicists and racists in the U.S. helped inspire those in Germany, and vice versa.

• After three years of sustained community mobilization and advocacy, the Providence City Council in Rhode Island voted this Thursday to unanimously approve among the most visionary set of policing reforms proposed around the country to protect civil rights and civil liberties, including digital liberties. EFF supported the proposed Community Safety Act (CSA), and its adoption represents a milestone that should prompt similar measures in other jurisdictions.

• American Airlines is investigating after a video surfaced on social media showing a confrontation between a passenger and a flight attendant aboard one of its flights.

• The video, filmed by another passenger Friday, appears to be the aftermath of an incident during boarding of a flight from San Francisco to Dallas. It does not show what happened beforehand.

• There was an elephant in the room — a big, beautiful, concrete elephant — at the Border Security Expo in Texas last week, a gathering of industry and immigration officials, where Trump’s border wall was discussed in tones of measured exasperation. While the conference attendees seemed largely pleased with the president and the public’s attention to their mission, the wisdom of a wall is a conversation that most of these people have been having for over a decade.

• “We already have about 650 miles of various types of wall. We’ll put the wall where it makes sense,” said Randolph “Tex” Alles, the acting deputy commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection in his opening remarks, echoing comments by many former border officials. “It being a contiguous or continuous barrier across the entire border is not what the secretary [of Homeland Security] is talking about.”

• “I don’t think my county needs a border wall. I’ve got 200 foot bluffs on my border,” Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez of Val Verde County in Texas remarked on a panel with other local law enforcement. What’s more, local ranchers “don’t want the federal government on their property” to build a wall.

• The chief of police in San Antonio, William McManus, refused to discuss the matter at all. “It’s all been beaten to death,” he said.

• The Trump administration is doubling down on a controversial plan to prosecute immigrant parents who pay to have their children smuggled into the U.S. Speaking at a press conference in El Paso, Texas, Thursday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said that when it comes to enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, “everything’s on the table.”

• The State of New Jersey is moving to revoke or suspend the license of a prominent psychologist, accusing him of failing to prevent details of patients’ mental health diagnoses and treatments from being disclosed when his practice sued them over unpaid bills.

• The complaint against the psychologist, Barry Helfmann, a past president of the New Jersey Psychological Association, followed a ProPublica story published in The New York Times in December 2015 that described the lawsuits and the information they contained.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Canada is also taking a case-by-case approach to zero-rating instead of banning it outright. But yesterday, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) ordered changes to one carrier’s zero-rating program and announced that it will enforce stricter guidelines for determining whether zero-rating programs are discriminatory.

• The commission also approved a separate proposal easing restrictions on broadcast television corporations seeking to buy more stations. Mignon Clyburn, the Democratic commissioner, voted against the proposal and warned that greater media consolidation would give fewer companies a bigger voice.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• I have personally made something of a crusade as of late out of my position that the world’s trademark offices need to be more nuanced when it comes to the alcohol industry. Far too many disputes have arisen recently between beer breweries, wineries, and spirit-makers, when anyone with a base understanding of those industries realizes how separate they actually are, rendering the potential for customer confusion a moot argument. To the layperson less familiar with both the purpose and nuanced aspects of trademark law, however, this position can require some convincing.

Copyrights

• John Deere has turned itself into the poster-child for the DMCA, fighting farmers who say they want to fix their own tractors and access their data by saying that doing so violates the 1998 law’s prohibition on bypassing copyright locks.

• Deere’s just reiterated that position to a US Copyright Office inquiry on the future of the law, joined by auto manufacturers (but not Tesla) and many other giant corporations, all of them arguing that since the gadgets you buy have software, and since that software is licensed, not sold, you don’t really own any of that stuff. You are a licensee, and you have to use the gadget according to the license terms, which spell out where you have to buy your service, parts, consumables, apps, and so on.

• Fansubbing—the unofficial creation of fan-made subtitles for TV shows and movies—is illegal, a Dutch court ruled this week.

• A group of fansubbers who turned the tables on BREIN by taking the anti-piracy group to court have lost their legal battle. The Free Subtitles Foundation sought a legal ruling determining that fansubbers act within the law, but this week the Amsterdam District Court sided with BREIN on all counts.

• The RIAA has sued Grande Communications for failing to take action against its pirating subscribers. The music industry group says that the Texas-based ISP’s subscribers engaged in more than a million BitTorrent-based infringements yet took “no meaningful action to discourage this continuing theft.”

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