● 04.30.17

● Links 30/4/2017: Linux 4.11 Ready Shortly, Unreal Engine 4.16 Preview, Kirigami 2.1 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 11:17 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The Pine A64 was a 64-bit Quad-Core Single Board Computer which was kickstarted at the tail end of 2015 for delivery in the middle of 2016. Costing just $15, and hailed as a “Raspberry Pi killer,” the board raised $1.7 million from 36,000 backers. It shipped to its backers to almost universally poor reviews.

• Now they’re back, this time with a laptop—a 11.6-inch model for $89, or a 14-inch model for $99. Both are powered by the same 64-bit Quad-Core ARM Cortex A53 as the original Pine A64 board, but at least Pine are doing a much better job this time around of managing user expectations.

• Beside theme you can install these extensions to make desktop look more like Unity. Dash to dock: Enable panel mode and position it on the left; Dynamic Panel Transparency: The non-dark variant comes with a semi-transparent panel. Square icons used in the following screenshots.

• It is glad to see that theme development is much faster now than past. Albatross theme is forked from Shimmer project team, they stopped the development long ago. If you want to keep your desktop simple, clean and elegant then for sure this theme is for you, it is specially targeting Gnome desktop and may work with Xfce. Currently this theme is compatible with Gtk 3.24+/3.22/3.20. If you intend to use this theme in the Xfce desktop then you must use xfwm4 from “Greybird/Adwaita” since that is not packed with this theme. Since this theme is in active development, if you encounter any bug or problem with this theme then report it to get it fixed. Obsidian-1 icons used in the following screenshot.

• As I mentioned in my previous posts that lots theme development going on now but Linux community and a company is not even behind called “System76″. Well they designed theme and icons for their own computers that run Ubuntu but good news is that it is free and comes under GPL-V2 license that means anyone can copy, share or remake their theme suite.

• Last year, I bought an Acer notebook and it came with Windows 10.

• As I didn’t want spyware neither bloatware, I got Linux installed and asked for a refund of the OEM license. After a little of talking, they were wanting to charge me US$100 (to remove the license, which I already had wiped, as I got FDE Linux installed) to refund US$70 of the OEM license.

• This year, wondering to buy a new Acer notebook, I asked them again if they would refund me the OEM license without all the hassle (as they did pay me the US$70, without me having to pay the US$100).

• Revenue generated by Microsoft’s Surface hardware during the March quarter was down 26% from the same period the year before, the company said yesterday as it briefed Wall Street.

• For the quarter, Surface produced $831 million, some $285 million less than the March quarter of 2016, for the largest year-over-year dollar decline ever.

Server

• In April 2015, we announced Scaleway, the first IaaS provider worldwide to offer a BareMetal ARM based cloud.

• For our 2nd anniversary, we’re excited to disrupt once again the hosting industry with the first ARMv8 SSD Cloud Servers for developers.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• The ARM changes for the mainline Linux kernel are usually quite extensive each cycle and with the Linux 4.12 merge window likely opening on Sunday evening it will be no different this time around.

• After announcing earlier this week the availability of a new Beta kernel for CloudLinux 7 and CloudLinux 6 Hybrid users, CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi is now informing us about the release of a Beta kernel for CloudLinux 6 users.

• The updated CloudLinux 6 Beta kernel is tagged as build 2.6.32-673.26.1.lve1.4.26 and it’s here to replace kernel 2.6.32-673.26.1.lve1.4.25. It is available right now for download from CloudLinux’s updates-testing repository and backports a fix (CKSIX-109) for R1Soft’s backup solution from CloudLinux 7′s kernel.

• The upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel cycle plans to introduce support for CryptoCell hardware within ARM’s TrustZone.

• After it was postponed last weekend, the Linux 4.11 kernel is set to be officially released in a matter of hours.

• As of writing, the Linux 4.11 codename remains the “Fearless Coyote”, but there is the possibility that Torvalds may rename it when tagging the official 4.11.0 release today.

• Another feature to look forward to with the Linux 4.12 kernel for those using newer hardware featuring USB Type-C is a port manager.

• The “TCPM” driver is queued as a new staging driver via usb-next for entering the Linux 4.12 kernel in the next two weeks. This USB Type-C Port Manager driver implements a power delivery state machine for source/sink ports. This driver serves as a state machine while other USB Type-C drivers are responsible for the rest of the functionality.

Graphics Stack

• While the DRM-Next merge window is over for new feature material ahead of the Linux 4.12 merge window opening tomorrow, some AMDGPU fixes have been sent out for this next kernel cycle.

• Mesa 17.0.5 is now available as the newest stable release on the Mesa 17.0 series.

• Back in August of 2015, DirectFB disappeared with its project site and code vanishing. Last November DirectFB re-appeared along with a new site and renewed focus on the project. Unfortunately, it’s once again gone silent.

• With all the news this month about Ubuntu dropping Mir / Unity 8 and the continued work by many different desktop/compositor teams on Wayland, I was curious this weekend to check on how DirectFB is doing in 2017… Sadly, DirectFB.net as the new DirectFB site launched last November is now down again. The original DirectFB (dot) org web-site remains squatted. I’ve been unable to find any other “new” DirectFB website.

• The Sway Wayland compositor that aims to be i3-compatible continues picking up new features.

• Development on Sway continues. I thought we would have slowed down a lot more by now, but every release still comes with new features – Sway 0.12 added redshift support and binary space partitioning layouts. Sway 0.13.0 is coming soon and includes, among other things, nvidia proprietary driver support. We already have some interesting features slated for Sway 0.14.0, too!

• Today Sway has 21,446 lines of C (and 4,261 lines of header files) written by 81 authors across 2,263 commits. These were written through 653 pull requests and 529 issues. Sway packages are available today in the official repos of pretty much every distribution except for Debian derivatives, and a PPA is available for those guys.

Benchmarks

• After carrying out the recent Amazon EC2 Cloud benchmarks vs. Intel/AMD CPUs I also decided to run some Linux distribution tests in the Elastic Compute Cloud with not having done any such comparisons in a long time. So for those wondering how different Linux distributions compare in Amazon’s cloud, this article is for you.

Applications

• I didn’t set out to write a blog post about a text editor. I was going to write about one of the other awesome projects that the Ops team is doing here at Wombat. Along the way I decided to give Atom a chance again and I’m glad I did. I enjoyed it enough that I thought I would defer my post about automating my “Ops Environment” on a mac (I promise, I’ll do that one soon-ish) in favor of this.

• ClipGrab is fairly popular application to download video from famous sites of the Internet. It allows you to search video with in application and select to download the video or other way you can copy and paste the video URL to the application to download the video. Since famous video sites are supported by this application, if some site isn’t officially supported, you may still be able to download the videos from it.

• There are wide variety of audio players available for Linux and you may have your favorite one installed on your system. aTunes is not new audio player but its initial release was way back in 2006 and the most recent version was released in June, 2014. In almost two years there is no news on the website or release from developers, well it is open-source released under GPL-V2 license and we don’t see any other to carry on the development of this great application. It is written in Java programming language and it’s cross-platform available for Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac. It uses Mplayer as its playback engine and supports wide variety of known formats such as: MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, WMA and other formats.

Instructionals/Technical

• SSH is short for Secure Shell. Secure Shell is a network protocol that provides administrators with a secure way (with encryption) to access a remote computer. it allows an administrator to log into virtual space server with an SSH key instead of a typical password. This eliminates the usual weakness of cracking passwords since SSHs almost can not be deciphered or cracked. So how exactly does this work? Let’s find out in this tutorial.

Games

• Thimbleweed Park [Steam, GOG, Official Site] developer Ron Gilbert mentioned on Twitter how strong the Linux (and Mac) sales have been, and that it would be silly to ignore it.

• Diluvion [Steam], the deep-sea exploration game now has a Linux beta, but the developers suggest holding off for a bit while they get the sound working.

• Epic Games on Friday released the first public preview of the upcoming Unreal Engine 4.16.

• There are many changes to find with Unreal Engine 4.16 while some of the highlights include volumetric fog support, a new clothing solver, optimized distance field lighting, garbage collection improvements, and more.

• A Preview of the upcoming 4.16 release is available now on the Launcher and Github. We have made this Preview available so that our developer-community can help us catch issues before the final release. As fixes are implemented, we will release updated previews throughout the development cycle. Please be aware that the preview releases are not fully quality tested, that they are still under heavy active development, and that they should be considered as unstable until the final release. Developers should not convert their projects for active development on preview releases. Please test on copies of your project instead.

• Last Thursday the newest member of the GOL Livestream Team, iAlwaysSin, completed her live playthrough of the extremely scary Alien Isolation. And, to commemorate this achievement (and all the deaths that occurred in the process) I decided to download and edit all the VODs together into a nice highlight reel. With my sarcastic remarks, of course.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Kirigami UI lets you easily design and create convergent apps that work on desktop and mobile environments. Platforms supported by Kirigami UI include Windows, Android, and Linux. Kirigami is especially indicated for KDE’s Plasma Desktop and the upcoming Plasma Mobile platform, KDE’s graphical environment for mobile devices. Apps developed with Kirigami will probably also work on MacOS X and iOS with minimal tweaking, although these platforms are not officially supported yet.

• In fact, today’s release has benefited from the feedback from the Subsurface Mobile community — the most prominent users of Kirigami outside of KDE at the moment. The Subsurface app, originally created by Linux creator Linus Torvalds, has successfully been ported to both iOS and MacOS X.

• [...]

• To find out more about this release and learn more about Kirigami in general, visit our KDE techbase website. If you would like to get started developing your apps with Kirigami, visit the Kirigami2 API overview.

• You can also talk directly to the developers and become a part of the future of desktop/mobile convergence by visiting our forum, joining in the conversation on the Plasma IRC channel, or hanging out in our Telegram group.

• While convergence may be dead at Ubuntu/Canonical, KDE developers continue working on Plasma Mobile and their convergence vision driven in part by the Kirigami user-interface framework.

• KDE’s Paul Brown announced the general availability of version 2.1 of the open-source Kirigami UI framework for producing convergent user interfaces for mobile and desktop environments.

• Kirigami 2.1 is here three and a half months after the launch of Kirigami 2.0 as the project’s most mature version to date. Prominent features include ItemViewHeader, a standardized title for ListViews, which can be customized with a background image that uses a parallax effect when scrolled and the header is adjusted accordingly. Multiple behaviors can be set for this component.

• The days are gone when the Linux desktop was dominated almost entirely by KDE and GNOME. However, the influence of their design philosophy remains, with KDE favored by a third of users, and many modern desktop alternatives, from GNOME itself to Linux Mint’s Cinnamon and MATE using applications originally designed for GNOME. Broadly speaking, KDE’s design philosopy can be described as completist, and designed for users of all levels of experience, while GNOME’s is minimalist, and aimed particularly at new users — although all levels of users can appreciate GNOME design as well.

• By “completist,” I mean that KDE applications try to include every function that could possibly be included in a task. Confusion is limited by the setting of intelligent defaults, but more functions are still visible than most everyday uses require. Perhaps the ultimate example of this design is digiKam, which over the year has calved new windows the way that polar ice caps calve glaciers.

• At the opposite end of the spectrum, GNOME applications tend to include only the features for the most common use-cases. This choice makes GNOME apps easy to use, but can leave users stranded if any problems emerge. A typical example is Simple Scan, which is so uncluttered that at first it can almost seem confusing.

• In KDE neon‘s constant quest of raising the quality bar of KDE software and neon itself, I added a new tool to our set of quality assurance tools. CMake Package QA is meant to ensure that find_package() calls on CMake packages provided by config files (e.g. FooConfig.cmake files) do actually work.

• A bit later than planned, but here are the 2017 Krita Survey results! We wanted to know a lot of things, like, what kind of hardware and screen resolution are most common, what drawing tablets were most common, and which ones gave most trouble. We had more than 1000 responses! Here’s a short summary, for the full report, head to Krita User Survey Report.

• Once 1.5.0 was release I thought the next release would be a small one, it started with a bunch of bug fixes, Simon Wilper made a contribution to Utils::Sql, basically when things get out to production you find bugs, so there were tons of fixes to WSGI module.

• The Latin America KDE Summit, LaKademy, just started today in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. The country is in the middle of a general strike, which I’m supporting, but the LaKademy couldn’t stop. We’ve been organizing this meeting for a year.

• Of course, I inferred it was something to connect a phone and a PC in some way and enabling the swapping of files in between the two devices, but I really did not care much about it. After all, that is what bluetooth is for, right?

• Today, I decided to give it a try on PCLOS.

• So after a long hiatus I chose the Plasma QuickShare applet (which is sort of the Plasma5 replacement for the old Pastebin Plasmoid) as my point of re-entry into KDE code work. There was after all a deal of itches there I wanted scratched. It’s been quite a bit of fun figuring out the various interesting frameworks QuickShare is connected to at the backend. Anyways, some days ago I got a rudimentary Nextcloud plugin past review and pushed it, which should mean it’ll soon be coming to a 5.10-powered desktop near you

• We recently added a new toy to The Qt Project, and I wanted to give an overview on what it is and how it can be used.

• KDevelop, your cross-platform IDE, since version 5.1 has initial OpenCL language support.

• On his spare time, Elad Lahav (a kernel developer at BlackBerry) built an experimental Qt-based desktop environment to try and see if he could use QNX as a desktop operating system. And it works!

• While QNX remains targeted as an operating system for mobile/embedded solutions, a BlackBerry developer in his spare time has fitted QNX 7 with a Qt5 desktop.

• QNX 6 and prior had a desktop option, but was removed in QNX 7, which was released this past March. QNX 7.0 also brought support for 64-bit (and maintaining 32-bit) Intel x86 and ARM platforms along with C++14 support. For those wanting to experiment with QNX 7, a BlackBerry kernel developer has been working on making this operating system more desktop friendly.

• Having Qt allowed me to port one of my favourite applications, SpeedCrunch. It was a simple matter of running ‘qmake’ followed by ‘make’. Next, I ported the QTermWidget library so that I could have terminal windows.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.25.1 is now available as the first development milestone in the road to this September’s GNOME 3.26.

• GJS — the GNOME JavaScript system that allows for GObject introspection and other capabilities via JavaScript on the desktop — is planning for further improvements with GNOME 3.26.

• Despite my recently found liking for Gnome 3, largely because of Fedora 24 and Fedora 25, plus some rigorous work with extensions like Dash to Dock, it is still a highly inefficient desktop environment. The unnecessary touch emphasis is there, regardless of what anyone says, and it makes things difficult.

• For instance, Show desktop. This is an action slash widget in pretty much every other desktop, and despite occasional setbacks and regressions, it’s always been there, a loyal companion in the moment of need. Not so in Gnome 3. Not just hidden. Not there at all. And what if you want it? Far from trivial. Hence this tutorial.

• I follow a great many sources for news and one that popped up in my feed is the ‘gnome-dash-fix’ script. It sorts out the mess that is the GNOME application launcher.

Distributions

Reviews

• Let us continue with the spring season distro testing. Next on the menu: Kubuntu. After many years of offering bland, emotionless releases, we had a cautiously reasonable Yakkety Yak edition, so me hopes are high for today.

• And for today, we will examine the latest Kubuntu, which officially bears the name of Zesty Zapus, but once again, like my recent Ubuntu review, my version of the distro’s name is totally better. So allow me to ask thee, what is the answer to Linux, multiverse and constant forking?

• As usual, Kubuntu 17.04 does not give you any surprises. It is stable and reliable. It is reasonably resource-hungry. There are no wonders in this new release. Just a well-rounded distribution for everyday use.

• Yes, there are small bugs or inconveniences here and there, but they are not huge and can be easily fixed, replaced or lived with. The biggest of them for me, of course, is the lack of multimedia codecs. You can heal that easily.

New Releases

• Clear Linux’s Kent Helm was proud to announce the release and general availability of Intel Clear Containers 2.1.6, a maintenace update that promises to improve compatibility with recent Docker releases, but also adds various bug fixes.

• The Polish developers of the Debian-based SparkyLinux operating system are ending the month of April by informing the community about everything good or bad that happened to their open-source project during the last few weeks.

• First thing first, the distribution is now powered by the latest stable kernel, Linux 4.10.13, so you are urged to update your SparkyLinux installation as soon as possible, and remember to reboot the machine after installing the new kernel. Enlightenment’s EFL libraries were also updated, to version 1.19.0.

• After 6 months of community testing, we are proud to announce Lakka 2.0!

• This new version of Lakka is based on LibreELEC instead of OpenELEC. Almost every package has been updated!

• We are now using RetroArch 1.5.0, which includes so many changes that listing everything in a single blogpost is rather difficult.

Arch Family

• Regular readers can pretty much ignore this one. We’ll be back to cartoons, O’s baseball and the usual inanity soon, tomorrow in fact. I just wanted to revisit my dedication to Linux, prompted by a recent mixed bag of experiences that left me feeling even more positive about a relative newcomer to the distro scene: Manjaro.

• It all started a few days ago, when I decided to finally try to update the eight remaining Linux installs on my main desktop PC. I’ve been using Linux Mint (18.1 Cinnamon) as my daily driver for several months, originally in an attempt to keep my bandwidth usage to a reasonable level, and then due to inertia/lack of issues. I could have gone with my trusty Debian stable install, my go-to for years up till then, but I guess I was just getting bored.

Red Hat Family

• Aiming to make it simpler to build distributed applications at scale, Red Hat today updated its open source messaging platform to include support for a much wider variety of clients, in addition to improving overall scalability.

• Version 7 of Red Hat JBoss AMQ adds support for clients running Java Message Service (JMS) 2.0, JavaScript, C++, Microsoft.Net, and Python to existing support for MQTT and AMQP protocols to the asynchronous messaging platform.

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

Derivatives

• After announcing the availability of new builds of his AndEX Nougat 7.1.1 Android-x86 fork that lets users run Android 7.1.1 on their PCs, now Arne Exton released a custom build of Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Raspbian PIXEL image.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical’s Dimitri John Ledkov informs the Ubuntu Linux and Ubuntu Touch communities that the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system will drop support for the Upstart init daemon and CGManager project.

• One of the great disadvantages of the Linux desktop is its software distribution mechanism. While the overall concept of central software repos works great and has been adapted into powerful Stores in commercial products, deploying and using programs, delivered as packages, is a tricky business. It stems from the wider fragmentation of the distro ecospace, and it essence, it means that if you want to release your product, you must compile it 150 odd ways, not just for different distributions but also for different versions of the same distribution. Naturally, this model scares away the big game.

• Recently though, there have been several attempts to make Linux packages more cross-distro and minimize the gap between distributions. The name of the game: Snap, and we’ve tasted this app-container framework before. It is unto Linux what, well, Windows stuff is unto Windows, in a way. Not quite statically compiled stuff, but definitely independent. I had it tested again in Ubuntu 17.04, and it would appear that Snap is getting more and more traction. Let’s have another look.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• And you can help making it accessible to more GNU/Linux users!

• We have decided not to create a Replicant 6.0 SDK as part of the upcoming Replicant 6.0 release. For three previous Replicant versions (2.2, 4.0 and 4.2), a SDK was provided.

• Replicant offered its own SDK because the Android SDK released by Google is distributed under a non-free license and suggests installing non-free plug-ins such as the Google APIs. For a long time, Replicant has provided the only Android SDK that is available under a free license and that doesn’t offer to install non-free software.

• Over the years, various efforts have been made to bring GNU/Linux to mobile devices (for example Maemo, Meego, Mer, SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile). They have either achieved their individual goals or are working in direction of achieving them.

Tizen

Android

• It’s not quite like learning a new language or how to ride a bike, but at times it does feel a little bit like both.

• After nearly 10 years of faithful Apple consumption — listening to iTunes, watching an Apple TV, reading iBooks — I did something completely unexpected this month: I made the leap from the neatly walled garden of Apple’s smartphone, smart watch and tablet and into the wilds of the loosely controlled world of Android gadgets.

• I could blame the change on a variety of must-need wearable, quasi-smart doodads, or virtual reality, or even an edge-to-edge screened smartphone that looks like you’re carrying a piece of the sky around in your pocket. But the real culprit for my leap of consumer faith isn’t one single Samsung product; it was an ecosystem of them.

• GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton was happy to announce the release of a new build of his custom built Android-x86 project that lets uses runs the latest Android mobile operating system on their personal computers.

Free Software/Open Source

• The ETSI Open Source MANO group (ETSI OSM) has announced OSM Release TWO. The standards body says this new release of its management and orchestration (MANO) work brings significant improvements in terms of interoperability, performance, stability, security and resources footprint to meet operators’ requirements for trials and upcoming RFx processes.

• He made it clear he is not advocating for this view, just a thought experiment. I had, well, a few thoughts on this.

• I tend to think of open source projects in three broad buckets.

• Firstly, we have the overall workflow in which the community works together to build things. This is your code review processes, issue management, translations workflow, event strategy, governance, and other pieces.

• Secondly, there are the individual contributions. This is how we assess what we want to build, what quality looks like, how we build modularity, and other elements.

• Thirdly, there is identity which covers the identity of the project and the individuals who contribute to it. Solomon taps into this third component.

• I’ve been meaning to write about the demise of Ostatic for a month or so now, but it’s not easy to put together an article when you have absolutely no facts. I first noticed the site was gone a month or so back, when an attempt to reach it turned up one of those “this site can’t be reached” error messages. With a little checking, I was able to verify that the site has indeed gone dark, with writers for the site evidently losing access to their content without notice. Other than that, I’ve been able to find out nothing.

• Even the site’s ownership is shrouded in mystery. The domain name is registered to OStatic Inc, but with absolutely no information about who’s behind the corporation, which has a listed address of 500 Beale Street in San Francisco. I made an attempt to reach someone using the telephone number included in the results of a “whois” search, but have never received a reply from the voicemail message I left.

• Back in the days when FOSS Force was first getting cranked up, Ostatic was something of a goto site for news and commentary on Linux and open source. This hasn’t been so true lately, although Susan Linton — the original publisher of Tux Machines — continued to post her informative and entertaining news roundup column on the site until early February — presumably until the end. I’ve reached out to Ms. Linton, hoping to find out more about the demise of Ostatic, but haven’t received a reply. Her column will certainly be missed.

Events

Web Browsers

Chrome

Mozilla

• The Firefox web browser is in a bit of a moving state right now in regards to the browser’s add-on system and add-ons that are available for it.

• Mozilla plans to make Firefox 57 the first version of the browser that supports only WebExtensions. WebExtensions in plain old English are very similar to Google Chrome extensions, only that the Firefox version supports more powerful add-ons than Google Chrome does once Mozilla reaches feature parity with Chrome.

• Containers is a new feature of the Firefox web browser that is currently being tested and in active development.

• The feature allows you to launch websites and services in containers to separate them from one another in various ways.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle released two new maintenance updates of its open-source and cross-platform virtualization software, VirtualBox 5.1.22 and VirtualBox 5.0.40, for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.

• Both VirtualBox 5.1.22 and VirtualBox 5.0.40 are bugfix releases that come about ten days after the launch of the previous updates, in this case VirtualBox 5.1.20 and VirtualBox 5.0.38. They include pretty much the same changes with small exceptions.

• The French city of Nantes (Nantes Métropole) has released an open source tool used to schedule its migration to LibreOffice. The shift from commercial software to the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite started in 2013 and is intended to save the administration EUR 260 000 per year. The transition was finalised in April 2016.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Since I’m here at the Creative Commons 2017 Global Summit this weekend, I want to take a break from our usual Techdirt history posts and highlight the new State Of The Commons report that has been released. These annual reports are a key part of the CC community — here at Techdirt, most of our readers already understand the importance of the free culture licensing options that CC provides to creators, but it’s important to step back and look at just how much content is being created and shared thanks to this system. It also provides some good insight into exactly how people are using CC licenses, through both data and (moreso than in previous years) close-up case studies. In the coming week we’ll be taking a deeper dive into some of the specifics of the report and this year’s summit, but for now I want to highlight a few key points — and encourage you to check out the full report for yourself.

Open Data

• Arizona State University has earned 14 National Science Foundation early career faculty awards, ranking second among all university recipients for 2017 and setting an ASU record. The awards total $7 million in funding for the ASU researchers over five years.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Scientific publishing house Elsevier has just launched the first issue of HardwareX, an open access journal on the free and open-source design, building and customising of scientific infrastructure (hardware). The journal says it is open to input from all scientific, technological and medical disciplines.

Programming/Development

• This post is to inform you about a bug in GCC that may cause memory (or other resource) leaks in your valid C++ programs.

• It’s worth noting that the word “free” in free/open-source software implies not just free of cost, but also freedom from commercial dependence upon multi-national software vendors.

• To emphasise this, the biography of Richard Stallman, the founder of the free software movement which ultimately produced the Linux operating system, is titled Free as in Freedom.

• In fact, it is impossible to run a modern government without computers; so it should not be acceptable that sovereign nations like Bangladesh be forever dependent on foreign IT vendors, especially when the Linux alternative offers both freedom and zero-cost.

Leftovers

• Anyone who’s struggled to schlepp a thirty-rack of Miller High Life home from the local beer joint might start to feel some phantom back pain when they drink in this picture of a 1,000 pack of the Finnish beer Keisari Lager.

• That’s right—for some insane reason, a 1,000-pack of beer is currently on sale in a store somewhere in Finland.

Hardware

• Most of the functionality of the base station is provided by two daemons, xagent and vzdaemon. xagent appears to be responsible for registering the device with the cloud service, while vzdaemon handles the camera side of things (including motion detection). All of this is running as root, so in the event of any kind of vulnerability the entire platform is owned. For such a single purpose device this isn’t really a big deal (the only sensitive data it has is the camera feed – if someone has access to that then root doesn’t really buy them anything else). They’re statically linked and stripped so I couldn’t be bothered spending any significant amount of time digging into them. In any case, they don’t expose any remotely accessible ports and only connect to services with verified SSL certificates. They’re probably not a big risk.

Health/Nutrition

• The upshot of the judges’ opinion? Monsanto has engaged in practices that have violated the basic human right to a healthy environment, the right to food, the right to health, and the right of scientists to freely conduct indispensable research.

• Every week in Des Moines, Iowa, the employees of a small nonprofit collect bins of unexpired prescription drugs tossed out by nursing homes after residents died, moved out or no longer needed them. The drugs are given to patients who couldn’t otherwise afford them.

• But travel 1,000 miles east to Long Island, New York, and you’ll find nursing homes flushing similar leftover drugs down the toilet, alarming state environmental regulators worried they’ll further contaminate the water supply.

• New York state’s failures in moving hundreds of mentally ill residents into more humane living conditions are worsening, plagued by delays and a potentially suspect evaluation process, according to a court-appointed monitor.

• Under the terms of a landmark settlement, the New York State Department of Health in 2014 was ordered to assess and then relocate residents of many of the state’s scandal-scarred adult homes — facilities that had for years been warehousing the mentally ill in squalid and often violent conditions. An independent monitor was installed as part of the settlement to ensure the state met its obligations to move residents into safer and better-supported housing arrangements.

• Several conservative news outlets have criticised the New York Times for their use of the term “genital cutting” rather than “female genital mutilation” (FGM), after the newspaper said it would stop .using the latter term because it is “culturally loaded”.

• All of this, the application of a politically correct filter by The New York Times, the avoidance of the issue by the left, even the destruction of female sexuality by ancient cultures, is political.

• And who suffers? Political wits and activists don’t suffer. Girls suffer.

Security

• We’ve been sharing some of our works on security practices ( STIG-4-Debian, Debian GNU/Linux profiles, etc) for servers running in data center. PaX/Grsecurity is the corner stone to most of our solutions. Evidences have revealed that PaX/Grsecurity can defeat multiple public exploits w/o any patch fixes in critical scenarios for a long run. With PaX/Grsecurity, for the 1st time we believe that we can build the defense based on free/libre & open source software/firmware solution to prevent many threats from Ring 3/0/-1/-2/-3. HardenedLinux is going to continue develop solutions of defense based on PaX/Grsecurity. From our point of view, we see no other option. Please remember this date: Apr 26 2017. This is the day we lost our Ark.

• Canonical, through Adam Conrad, informed us today that the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system is now officially dead, reaching end of life on April 28, 2017.

• If you’re still using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on your desktop or server systems, it’s time to upgrade to a newer, supported release. You can choose to upgrade to either Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), which will be supported for two more years, until April 2019, or Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), supported until April 2021.

• All this adds up to a lot of work, which is not taken care of for you by default in Docker. It is no surprise that many Docker images are insecure, given this picture. The unfortunate reality is that many Docker containers are running with known vulnerabilities that have known fixes, but just aren’t, and that’s sad.

• Occasionally fuckups happen, even with Qubes (although not as often as some think).

• What should we – users or admins – do in such a situation? Patch, obviously. But is that really enough? What good is patching your system if it might have already been compromised a week earlier, before the patch was released, when an adversary may have learned of the bug and exploited it?

• That’s an inconvenient question for many of us – computer security professionals – to answer. Usually we would mutter something about Raising the Bar(TM), the high costs of targeted attacks, attackers not wanting to burn 0-days, or only nation state actors being able to afford such attacks, and that in case one is on their list of targets, the game is over anyway and no point in fighting. Plus some classic cartoon.

• While the above line of defense might work (temporarily), it really doesn’t provide for much comfort, long term, I think. We need better answers and better solutions. This post, together with a recently introduced feature in Qubes OS 3.2 and (upcoming) 4.0, is an attempt to offer such a solution.

• A new strain of Linux malware has been detected. Dubbed Linux/Shishiga, the malware could transform into a dangerous piece of malware. Linux/Shishiga was officially discovered and examined by researchers at Eset.

• “About 75 percent of the devices that are control systems are on Windows XP or other nonsupported operating systems,” said Daryl Haegley, program manager for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations and Environment.

• [...]

• “A lot of these systems are still Windows 95 or 98, and that’s OK—if they’re not connected to the internet,” Haegley added.

• This is the official CFP for P70.

• In this paper, we provide a in-depth analysis of CVE-2015-5165 (a memory-leak vulnerability) and CVE-2015-7504 (a heap-based overflow vulnerability), along with working exploits. The combination of these two exploits allows to break out from a VM and execute code on the target host. We discuss the technical details to exploit the vulnerabilities on QEMU’s network card device emulation, and provide generic techniques that could be re-used to exploit future bugs in QEMU.

• Former MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon and retired US Army Colonel Ann Wright, who is also a retired US State Department official, shared their views on these and other questions with RT.

• On Friday, WikiLeaks released a series of documentations on a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) project known as ‘Scribbles,’ which was allegedly created to allow ‘web beacon’ tags to be embedded “into documents that are likely to be copied.”

• WikiLeaks began publishing a huge cache of secret documents on the CIA named ‘Vault 7’ in March.

• The documentation says: “Scribbles (SCRIB) is a document watermarking tool that can be used to batch process a number of documents in a pre-seeded input directory. It generates a random watermark for each document, inserts that watermark into the document, saves all such processed documents in an output directory, and creates a log file which identifies the watermarks inserted into each document.”

• It says the tool was successfully tested on Office 2013 (on Windows 8.1 x64), documents from Office versions 97-2016 (Office 95 documents will not work!) and documents that are not locked forms, encrypted, or password-protected.

• There is a limitation to the Scribbles system: if a document that has the watermarks in it and is opened in OpenOffice, LibreOffice the watermark images and URLs may become visible.

• Last year, Capt. Sean Ruddy and his team of operator-soldiers from the US Cyber Brigade entered a Locked Shields, a NATO-organized cyber-defense war game that pits teams from dozens of countries against “live-fire” attacks. It was their first time. And of the 19 countries represented, the US finished dead last. This week, they got their shot at redemption.

Defence/Aggression

• UK security services have managed to decode the last message sent out by Khalid Masood before he rammed his high- speed car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and stabbed to death a police officer at the gates of Parliament on March 22.

• [...]

• Details of the method used cannot be disclosed for security reasons, but sources said they now have the technical expertise to repeat the process in future.

• It’s now a year since UK Parliament unanimously voted to declare Isis violence against Christians and other ethnic minorities in the Middle East as genocide – and yet these crimes against humanity continue unchallenged due to the perceived inactiveness of world leaders — from 10 Downing Street to the White House, the Kremlin, the Elysee and the United Nations.

• Buoyed by a total of 18 speculative verb forms—five “mays,” eight “woulds” and five “coulds”—New York Times reporters David E. Sanger and William J. Broad (4/24/17) painted a dire picture of a Trump administration forced to react to the growing and impending doom of North Korea nuclear weapons.

• Military technology has moved on since the Vietnam war. The defeat of the United States by an army employing basic artillery and machine guns supplemented by creative use of bamboo, has left an indelible impression on the western psyche. But it is in many ways a false one. Many trillions of dollars have been spent since on military technology, and the gap in resources between the USA and most potential opponents is enormous.

• The effect of this technology gap is plain to see in recent conflicts. In Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya the conventional fighting was won extremely quickly. In Iraq really substantial Iraqi conventional forces, technologically rather more advanced than North Korean, were wiped out while they inflicted almost no damage. The Falklands War was also a striking instance of the difference between the most advanced and middle ranking military technology. The gap has grown since. Modern western military aircraft technology is very little vulnerable to the air defence systems that can be deployed against it.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• “Obama having opened the legal campaign against the press by going after the roots of investigative reporting on national security — the sources — Trump is going to go after the gatherers/gardeners themselves (and their bosses, publishers). To switch the metaphor, an indictment of Assange is a ‘first use’ of ‘the nuclear option’ against the First Amendment protection of a free press. (By the way, the charges they’re reportedly considering against him — conspiracy, theft, and violation of the Espionage Act — are exactly the charges I faced in 1971.)

• A few months ago I asked Julian whether he expected that Donald Trump would end the case against him in the United States. WikiLeaks had after all published the DNC and Podesta emails, which revealed the corruption at the heart of the Clinton campaign and the way the Democratic primaries had been rigged against Bernie Sanders.

• Julian replied that no, he expected the opposite to be true. Trump would feel the need to be openly active against Assange to show that there had been no relationship between him and WikiLeaks. Julian was of course right, and Trump’s Attorney-General has announced that the United States wants to extradite Assange on charges of espionage related to the Snowden revelations of mass illegal government surveillance.

• It is worth noting that this is not really new. The Obama administration was sitting on sealed indictments against Assange for years. Obama prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other President in history. Having come to power promising to take action against senior CIA figures for waterboarding, the only person his Administration prosecuted – and jailed – over it was John Kiriakou for blowing the whistle on waterboarding.

• [...]

• The sexual allegations against Assange in Sweden have always been risible when considered in detail. The physical evidence against Assange is faked. The condom he allegedly wore and furtively ripped during intercourse with Anna Ardin contains none of his DNA – a physical impossibility had he worn it.

• Assange’s DNA is present in another condom provided by Sofia Wilen, but there is no dispute the pair had consensual sex with that condom. What is alleged is that after drowsing off post-coitus, Assange initiated sex a second time while Wilen was still, in her own words “half asleep”, so she was not able to give fully informed consent. Assange adamantly denies this.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Some types of algae naturally produce toxins. When these algae grow rapidly, they create a bloom that can kill off other species in the same ecosystem. A number of species (including Alexandrium fundyense and Dinophysis acuminate) produces toxins that accumulate in shellfish. People who eat these shellfish can experience paralytic or diarrhetic shellfish poisoning. So these blooms can hurt aquatic ecosystems, fisheries, and people.

• There was the idea that contract farming might be a solution but even that was corrupted by Multi-national companies such as Pepsi and others that the Government is showing movement to have a “model contracting law” . There are loads of stories on downtoearth magazine which deals with the above and all sorts of issues the farmer faces.

Finance

• Earlier this year, Germany’s Rheinische Post newspaper published excerpts from a secret government report, showing that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to bring about 1.5 million Muslim migrants into the country between 2015 and 2016 was not a humanitarian gesture, but a deliberate attempt to slow the decline of Germany’s population, and maintain the viability of the German welfare state.

• The allegedly unpaid taxes refer to the period between 2011 and 2015, when Amazon (AMZN.O) made revenues of around 2.5 billion euros in Italy, the source said.

• Facebook, Amazon, Neflix and Google have been roaring away since the turn of this year. Their share prices have climbed so far, so fast, that together they are now worth an extraordinary $250bn more than just four months ago.

• [...]

• Together the four firms are now valued on Wall Street at more than $1.5tn, about the same as the Russian economy.

• Recently executives of Wells Fargo were forced to give back some of the money they personally made by coercing employees to open and charge fees on some 2 million accounts for people without their knowledge—with, it should not be forgotten, a target on low-income and African-American communities. Millions of Americans are still struggling with the impact of these predatory measures and their like. And let’s not forget, either, the more than 5,000 low-level employees Wells Fargo fired, as though they’d come up with the hyper-aggressive cross-selling goals themselves.

• The group ProPublica has exposed how efforts to make paying your taxes easy and free with a pre-filled filing from the government, as is done in parts of Europe, have been repeatedly derailed by vigorous lobbying from H&R Block and the makers of TurboTax. It’s a kind of icing on the cake of a tax system that many suspect is unfair and slanted against the little guy. But while we complain about tax policy as bureaucratic or baroque, the impact of that policy goes well beyond irritation.

• Gina Miller, the campaigner behind the successful supreme court Brexit challenge, has raised £300,000 in crowdfunding to directly support up to 100 pro-Europe candidates in her tactical voting election initiative.

• Miller confirmed she would not be standing for election but said the money would be given directly to candidates believed to have a chance of defeating politicians supporting Theresa May’s hard Brexit strategy.

• New statistics show that highly educated professionals are currently leaving Finland at a far greater rate than they are moving to the country. Published in the journal Acatiimi, the figures show that Finland suffered a net loss of over 1,000 such professionals between 2005 and 2015.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• “For me there are things that remain strange, like for example the visit of his daughter to Germany which was treated almost like a world event, while the mix of politics with family and business reminds us instead of nepotism and would be unimaginable here,” he said.

• The Washington Post has repeatedly failed to inform readers about major financial conflicts of interest in pieces by opinion writer Ed Rogers. Rogers is a leading Republican lobbyist who has used his Post column to advocate for the interests of his firm’s clients without disclosure in at least a dozen instances since the beginning of 2016.

• Without saying the words “Russia,” “Hillary Clinton,” or “Donald Trump,” Facebook acknowledged Thursday for the first time what others have been saying for months.

• In a paper released by its security division, the company said “malicious actors” used the platform during the 2016 presidential election as part of a campaign “with the intent of harming the reputation of specific political targets.”

• The problem is, it wasn’t the Chinese government issuing these statements; it was a market-driven tabloid that strives for exactly this sort of attention.

• China is home to nearly 2,000 newspapers — many of them state-owned to some degree and all of them subject to increasingly tight censorship — but few come close to exerting the influence abroad that the Global Times does. Established under the ownership of the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship paper, the People’s Daily, in 1993, the nationally circulated daily claims a Chinese readership of several million. Since 2009, there has also been an English edition that shares editorial content with the Chinese flagship. It has earned attention — and notoriety — in China and abroad for its hawkish editorials and has been labeled by Western observers as “China’s Fox News.”

• At a press conference before he took office, then-President-elect Donald Trump said he had signed paperwork “turning over complete and total control” of his business empire to his sons. His lawyer said the more than 400 businesses would be placed in a trust by Inauguration Day.

• Now, nearly 100 days later, he’s nearly fulfilled this promise.

• A former director of an anti-immigration group, Julie Kirchner, is expected to be named as ombudsman to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Monday, according to a person with knowledge of the pending appointment.

• Kirchner was from 2005 to 2015 director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that has advocated for extreme restrictions on immigration.

• The ombudsman’s office at USCIS provides assistance to immigrants who run into trouble with the agency, such as immigration applications that take too long to process or applications that may have been improperly rejected. The ombudsman also prepares an annual report for Congress in which they can issue audits and policy recommendations without consulting with USCIS in advance.

• There are no major ideological differences between White House strategist Steve Bannon and French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. Yet it seems that the Washington Post considers them to be very different. According to the Post, Bannon and his backers are “conservatives.” Le Pen and her National Front, meanwhile, are “far right.”

• Of course, the whole notion that Bannon is “conservative” is ludicrous on its face. A typical “conservative” would not boast of being a “Leninist” who “want[s] to destroy the state [and] … bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Imagine a conservative who provides a media “platform for the alt-right,” which includes white supremacists, xenophobes, and neo-Nazis. Conservatives generally don’t find compelling the writings of the notorious French antisemite and Nazi collaborator Charles Maurras, or the fascist Italian writer Julius Evola, who believed that Mussolini was too soft and should have ruled more like Adolf Hitler.

• I’d say it means that something has gone incredibly wrong with this country’s political system, that large numbers of us are desperate, and are willing to hand over power to absolutely anyone. That’s brings us to the peculiar reality that it’s not just Obama and Trump’s elections that had something significant in common, it’s likely their presidencies.

• I was delighted that the Metro newspaper conducted a sober appraisal of my statement that Tory policies are identical in most important respects to the BNP manifesto of 2005, and found I was right. You might imagine that might cause May’s advisers at least to try to make her meetings not look like BNP gatherings. But evidently they have decided it is more important to continue to prioritise the racist vote. The are banking on it being all white on election night.

• May meets nobody except ardent Tories or those in no position to argue – employees of companies in their workplace or tenants. It is appalling abuse of power.

• May is simply refusing to participate in democracy – which involves candidates being open to question and debate. There is really little point in having an election of this kind. Which presumably explains this question being asked in YouGove’s current political poll.

• “I am not refuting that”? How does that translate into “General…Sees Russia Sending Weapons to Taliban”? If NASA tells Reuters that they can’t refute speculation that there might be life on Mars, will Reuters run a story headlined “NASA Sees Life on Mars”? That would be a scoop!

• Ali writes that Nicholson’s no-comment comments “are among the strongest suggestions yet that Moscow is providing arms to the Taliban.” Maybe next time Reuters could wait for a somewhat stronger suggestion—involving actual evidence, perhaps—before running a story that could inflame the new Cold War.

Censorship/Free Speech

• “People are being killed for their Facebook posts. I don’t want to be killed, so I am deleting my account,” Muhammad Aslam, a shop owner in the Pakistani town of Chichawatni, wrote on Facebook last week. “Someone issued a death edict against me for my post on Facebook.”

• Turkey has blocked Wikipedia, the country’s telecommunications watchdog has said, citing a law that allows it to ban access to websites deemed obscene or a threat to national security.

• There is no official statement on why the site has been blocked but Turkish media is reporting the cause as “terror-related content.”

• The Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday evening its website would be “undergoing changes” to better represent the new direction the agency is taking, triggering the removal of several agency websites containing detailed climate data and scientific information.

• [...]

• The staffer described the process of reviewing the site as “a work in progress, but we can’t have information which contradicts the actions we have taken in the last two months,” adding that Pruitt’s aides had “found a number of instances of that so far” while surveying the site.

• ALL who cherish free expression, especially on campuses, must combat the growing zeal for censorship.

• Where are the faculty? American college students are increasingly resorting to brute force, and sometimes criminal violence, to shut down ideas that they don’t like.

• Yet when such travesties occur, the faculty are, with few exceptions, missing in action, though they have themselves been given the extraordinary privilege of tenure to protect their own liberty of thought and speech. It is time for them to take their heads out of the sand.

• Banning the screening of documentaries keeps Malaysians inside their “cocoons” instead of learning more about the world, a local activist has said.

• Lena Hendry said screenings of human rights documentaries ― generally not shown on television channels ― are important to create greater awareness for a better society.

• Turkey has blocked online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the telecommunications watchdog said on Saturday, citing a law allowing it to ban access to websites deemed obscene or a threat to national security.

• Turkey blocked access to Wikipedia on Saturday, according to Reuters, using a law designed to grant authorities the ability restrict content the country considers obscene or a threat to national security.

• The BBC’s Mark Lowen says website blocking is common in Turkey, with Twitter, Facebook and YouTube among past targets. Twitter reports that Turkey, whose notoriously thin-skinned president Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently assumed greater powers, is the origin of more than half the requests it receives to remove tweets.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Before Friday, the NSA had a policy of sucking up texts and emails exchanged between Americans and people outside the U.S., with impunity, if those communications even mentioned non-American targets of NSA surveillance. The agency did not require a warrant to collect this information.

• But the NSA announced Friday that it would no longer participate in this form of collection. Snowden counted that as a win for whistleblowing.

• Snowden is the former NSA contractor who leaked documents about the agency’s spying programs and techniques to several journalists and news outlets in 2013.

• The National Security Agency is set to halt one of its most controversial practices: the ability to track and read any email or text, from an American to someone overseas, provided it mentions an NSA target overseas.

• Instead, it will only track direct communications with that target, the agency said in a statement. And it “will delete the vast majority” of data already collected in such operations.

• The NSA is stopping its use of one controversial surveillance technique that impacts Americans’ privacy.

• Make no mistake. This is good news for anyone who wants government surveillance to follow the law. But there’s much more to be done to rein in unconstitutional spying.

• Initially reported by The New York Times today and confirmed by the agency itself, the NSA will no longer conduct “about” searches of the full content of Internet communications, including to and from innocent Americans, that are “about” — or mention — a foreign intelligence target’s email address or other identifier. The NSA said the changes were a result of “inadvertent compliance incidents,” or violations of court-imposed restrictions.

• The Australian Federal Police has admitted that it illegally obtained the phone records of an unnamed journalist, thus violating the new metadata regime put in place by the Coalition government in 2015.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Badawi, 33, was arrested in 2012 for criticising the Saudi religious police in an online forum and was sentenced to 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes for insulting Islam.

• “I hope the chancellor will directly ask the Saudi leaders to pardon him,” Haider told DPA by phone from Canada, where she lives with the couple’s three children.

• Accompanied by a 1,500-strong entourage, Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz arrived in Indonesia on March 1 for a nine-day gala tour. He was welcomed warmly not only as the monarch of one of the world’s richest countries, but as the custodian of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina.

• While appearing to be taking a holiday rather than embarking on an official state visit — the 81-year-old sovereign spent six days at a resort in Bali — the king had some serious business to attend to. In what was advertised as an effort to promote “social interaction” between Saudi Arabia and Indonesia — with His Majesty announcing a billion-dollar aid package, unlimited flights between the two countries and the allotment of 50,000 extra spots per year for Indonesian pilgrims to make the hajj to Mecca and Medina – it seems as if the real purpose of the trip was to promote and enhance Salafism, an extremist Sunni strain, in the world’s largest Muslim country, frequently hailed in the West as an example of a moderate Islamic society.

• Human Rights Watch research has exposed a damning pattern of unlawful police conduct in these killings, designed to paint a veneer of legality over summary executions. Many of the 3,271 killings the police attribute to “vigilantes” are in fact death-squad style extrajudicial executions by police and police agents.

• In a statement that is ought to stir a hornets’s nest, a Muslim woman cleric on Friday said that women who wear tightly-fitted clothes are like pollutants who cause harm to to the society. The cleric went on to blame ‘such women’ for increased incidents of rape in the country and said that such women are as dangerous to the society as is the disease of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome).

• The public defender’s office in Alameda County, California, has recently appealed a local judge’s recent rejection of its demands to fix an upgraded court software. That software led to the unconstitutional and erroneous jailing of some of its clients.

• “These delays and errors violate Government Code § 69844’s express requirement that Superior Court clerks enter judicial orders ‘forthwith,’ as well as the constitutional right to a complete and accurate record on appeal and the Fourth Amendment prohibition upon unlawful arrests and illegal searches,” Charles Denton, an assistant public defender, wrote in his April 10 brief.

• Denton largely reprised many of the same arguments that his office made when he appeared before the Superior Court.

• As Ars reported in December 2016, the Alameda County Superior Court switched from a decades-old courtroom management software to a much more modern one on August 1, 2016. Known as Odyssey Court Manager, the new management software is made by Tyler Technologies.

• However, since then, the public defender’s office has filed approximately 2,000 motions informing the court that, due to its reportedly imperfect software, many of its clients have been forced to serve unnecessary jail time, be improperly arrested, or even wrongly registered as sex offenders.

• In early July 2013, just over a week after his arrival in Russia and less than a month after the first details of his revelations about mass government surveillance were published, Edward Snowden applied for asylum in 21 different countries.

• One of these applications was to Germany, whose government turned the whistleblower down on the grounds that the “preconditions” for asylum had not been met. The United States, after all, was a democratic country with a strong rule of law, then-Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said, and anyway Germany had an extradition agreement with it.

• But many German people felt differently, and within months campaigns had sprung up calling on the government to grant the former NSA contractor asylum. Tens of thousands of people even bought stickers for their front doors offering “a bed for Snowden,” should he make it to German soil.

• On April 13, private prison company GEO Group announced its first new contract to detain immigrants under the Trump administration: a 1,000-bed detention center that will be built in Conroe, Texas, just north of Houston and next door to an existing GEO Group detention center.

• The Conroe contract is only the beginning of what promises to be an enormous, multi-year boondoggle for private prison companies. Since Trump’s election, companies like GEO Group and the Corrections Corporation of America — which last year borrowed a tactic from the likes of Phillip Morris and Blackwater to rebrand itself CoreCivic — have seen their stock prices skyrocket.

• For months, the Trump administration has tried to bully local communities into signing up to become extensions of the federal deportation system. That campaign of threats and public shaming based on flawed data — which has been mostly unsuccessful — suffered another major blow yesterday. A federal court in San Francisco ruled in two cases that the president’s threats were unconstitutional, and stopped the government from carrying them out anywhere in the country. The ruling vindicates the constitutional rights of cities, counties, and states to refuse to participate in deportations. And like the court orders halting the president’s Muslim ban, the ruling shows the crucial role that courts play in preventing presidential overreach.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai casts the debate as “lawyers and bureaucrats” (evil) versus “engineers, technologists and businesses” (good). By lumping the latter three into a single category, he obscures the fact that the engineers and technologists largely support regulation of the businesses that have been stifling, not stimulating, advancement in Internet technology.

• Once Pai’s notice is approved, which is likely to happen at the FCC’s open meeting May 18, the public will have 60 days to file comments. Then people will have another 30 days to respond to the comments.

• Of all the points contained in Pai’s rant, four particularly egregious lies stood out to us.

• While killing net neutrality may be rolled out with specious promises of “free video,” there is nothing here for ordinary people. Lowering prices is just not something that cable or phone companies will do except under pressure. Instead, the repeal of net neutrality will simply create ways for cable and phone companies to tax the web and increase your broadband bill. Raise your hand if that sounds enticing.

• With the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) now in Republican hands, it has moved quickly to reverse rules that guarantee free and open access to the internet, giving conservative media outlets exactly what they have been asking for.

• “Organizing the Women’s March on Washington would have been much harder without Net Neutrality. We may not even have been able to afford it.”

• I can go through all the ways in which Pai’s fanfare of dog-whistle blasts is completely inaccurate as a matter of both law and reality. (“The internet is the greatest free-market success story in history!” “Regulation has led to a decrease in investment!”) But I won’t reach anyone who doesn’t already agree with me. And I won’t persuade Pai, who seems determined to be a free-marketeer politician, poised to run for the governor of something, someday.

• So the only thing I can think to do that might make a difference is to tell you what happens in those small towns and poorer areas— the places Pai claims have been harmed by Title II — when no one in the federal government is brave enough to say that high-speed internet access should be subject to genuine government oversight and strong industrial policy, aimed at constraining and channeling the otherwise overwhelming power of private companies.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Is YouTube an active host and, if so, ineligible for the safe harbour protection within Article 14 of the E-commerce Directive?

• As readers with an interest in intermediary liability know, this is not a novel question: indeed, it has been already raised a number of times before national courts.

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