● 05.01.17

● Links 1/5/2017: Linux 4.11, Linux Mint 18.2 Plans

Posted in News Roundup at 3:31 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Microsoft Demise

• Today, as Microsoft published its earnings report for Q3 FY2017, it revealed that its “Phone revenue declined $730 million”. Based on its earlier financial disclosures, that means the company’s phone hardware revenue fell to just $5 million for the entire quarter ending March 31, 2017.

• Former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Commissioner Julie Brill is joining Microsoft to head its privacy lobbying department, the company announced Friday.

Server

• Some genuinely exciting news piqued my interest at this year’s DockerCon, that being the new Operating System (OS), LinuxKit, which was announced and is immediately on offer from the undisputed heavyweight container company, Docker.

• The behemoth has announced a flexible, extensible Operating System where system services run inside containers for portability. You might be surprised to hear that even includes the Docker runtime daemon itself.

• [...]

• As the powerhouse that is Docker continues to grow arms and legs there’s no doubt whatsoever that these giant-sized leaps in the direction of solid progress will benefit users and other software projects alike.

• A few years ago, I attended my first Linux conference, DevConf 2014. Many of the speakers talked about containers and how wonderful they were, and my interest was piqued, but I’ve never really had an opportunity to use them.

• As the sysadmin for a school, there just isn’t much need for the scalability provided for by containers. Our internal web site runs on a single VM, and the short downtimes required for system updates and upgrades are not a problem, especially if I plan them for the weekends. On the flip side, having something that we can use to spin up web services quickly isn’t a bad idea, so, over the last few months, I’ve been experimenting with Kubernetes.

• Today I’m going to talk about Docker. I may have been laying around a draft about my start on Docker world, but probably will be below some web dust by now in my drafts…

Kernel Space

• Automotive companies are increasing the connectivity of their cars. In the process, they’re all developing their own automotive software. Linux thinks that its open source software, AGL, will unify the industry. Will the cars of the future speak Linux?

• As expected, Linus Torvalds proudly announced today, April 30, 2017, the general availability of the final release of the Linux 4.11 kernel, a major update that adds numerous improvements and new features.

• Linux kernel 4.11 has been in development for the past two months, since very early March, when the first Release Candidate arrived for public testing. Eight RCs later, we’re now able to download and compile the final release of Linux 4.11 on our favorite GNU/Linux distributions and enjoy its new features.

• So after that extra week with an rc8, things were pretty calm, and I’m much happier releasing a final 4.11 now.

• We still had various smaller fixes the last week, but nothing that made me go “hmm..”. Shortlog appended for people who want to peruse the details, but it’s a mix all over, with about half being drivers (networking dominates, but some sound fixlets too), with the rest being soem arch updates, generic networking, and filesystem (nfs[d]) fixes. But it’s all really small, which is what I like to see the last week of the release cycle.

• Linus Torvalds has announced the Linux 4.11 stable kernel release as anticipated.

• Linus Torvalds has given the world version 4.11 of the Linux kernel.

• “So after that extra week with an rc8, things were pretty calm,” Torvalds posted to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, adding “I’m much happier releasing a final 4.11 now.

• So what do we get this time around? Among other things, Linux is now better at hot-swapping solid state disks and can now do journaling on RAID 4/5/6 volumes. While we’re talking storage, there’s also support for the OPAL self-encrypting disk drive standard.

Graphics Stack

• Mesa, the open source graphics drivers have been updated in the last few days to 17.0.5 (announcement here) and it contains a bunch of fixes.

Benchmarks

• Our latest Windows 10 Creator Update versus Linux benchmarking is taking a quick look at the Intel HD Graphics 630 Kabylake performance with Windows 10 on the latest Intel driver compared to Ubuntu 17.04 and Clear Linux.

Applications

• It’s hard work monitoring and debugging Linux performance problems, but it’s easier with the right tools at the right time. Here’s the most comprehensive list of Linux Monitoring Tools on the Internet.

• VSXu, the OpenGL-accelerated audio/music visualizer combined with a visual programming language, released their v0.6 release to end out April. The VSXu 0.6 milestone incorporates more than two years of work.

• A new beta release of Fsearch, a fast GTK file search app for the Linux desktop inspired by the Everything Search Engine, is available for testing.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• On SteamDB, Dawn of War III has two content depots named “feral_data_test” and “feral_mp_test”. That’s a pretty big indicator that something is happening, since Feral Interactive ported the previous Dawn of War II + the expansions to Linux it’s also quite possible which gives this a fair bit of credit. Still, it is just speculation right now. Feral don’t tend to talk about any of their work before release as well, so asking them would be pointless. Feral did do a teaser of a new port recently, so who knows, it could be.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• As explained in our call for testing post, we missed by a whisker getting updated PIM 16.12.3 (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.

• Therefore packages for PIM 16.12.3 release are now available in the Kubuntu backports PPAs.

Distributions

• Manjaro 17.0 KDE is the latest release of Manjaro Linux. This release brings new KDE Plasma 5.9.x as desktop environment include the most of KDE applications 16.12 and KDE Frameworks 5.32.

• The NES Classic Edition is a very fun nostalgia-based gaming console. As someone who grew up with Nintendo, I knew I wanted the mini system as soon as it was announced. A family member was able to score me one on launch day, and I’ve been very happy with it. Unfortunately, other people have not been so lucky. Supply was very limited and it has since been discontinued. If you do not already have it, you are sort of out of luck without paying high prices on eBay or Craigslist.

• If you are only looking to replay the NES games of your youth, and you are OK with doing it in an unofficial way, emulation is another route. In fact, if you’d rather not play these games on your PC, you can instead use a Linux-based operating system and a Raspberry Pi (or other devices) hooked to a television. One such distro is Lakka, which just reached version 2.0. It is arguably better than an NES Classic Edition as it can also play games from other systems, such as SNES, Sega Genesis, Nintendo 64, PlayStation 1, and many more.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• I often hear complains of Bluetooth on Linux and how it just doesn’t work well. I scratch my head as I just don’t understand the problem because I just cannot relate at all. Bluetooth in Linux has been a breeze! I don’t know if it is universally this easy with KDE Plasma or the way openSUSE packages it all together but of any Bluetooth enabled device I have ever used, KDE Plasma on openSUSE does it right.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• We the Fedora Respins-SIG are happy to announce new F25-20170428 Updated Lives. (with Kernel 4.10.12). This round also has an additional Updated Security Lab Spin in supportof the upcoming LFNW 2017 With F25 we are now using Livemedia-creator to build the updated lives.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonincal has once again returned to his positition of CEO, as Jane Silber, the previous CEO now heads to the Board of Directors; and big changes happen to the staff lineup as a result.

• In a blog bost by Sibler, she says, “I originally agreed to be CEO for 5 years and we’ve extended my tenure as CEO by a couple of years already. We’ve been preparing for a transition for some time by strengthening the executive leadership team and maturing every aspect of the company, and earlier this year Mark and I decided that now is the time to effect this transition.”

Flavours and Variants

• In the latest monthly progress report on Linux Mint, some of the upcoming changes for the GNOME3-forked Cinnamon Desktop Environment were shared.

• Many thanks to all the people who donated to us and who help to fund our project. Donations are down to about 60% of what they were last year, but they’re still quite high. In the first trimesters of 2015, 2016 and 2017 we respectively received $23k, $40k and $25k. Our development team has gotten bigger and our budget is being extended to include some administrators and designers. Other figures and metrics indicate we’re growing so this probably just reflects an exceptional year for donations in 2016.

• Linux Mint is adopting the LightDM display manager to handle and authenticate user sessions.

• Revealing plans in its latest monthly update, Mint says it will formally drop the MDM Display Manager (MDM) in favour of LightDM with Mint 18.2, release date for which is as-yet unknown.

• The popular Ubuntu-based Linux distribution mooted a possible switch earlier this year, noting that it had a key feature MDM lacks (guest sessions), and has become something of a standard across distributions.

• The news from the Linux Mint team was quite interesting this week. First up, Linux Mint 13 has officially hit EOL (end of life), so you really do need to upgrade.

• LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is set to get the MATE desktop version 1.18 “this week” and they have ported mintMenu over to GTK3, since the rest of MATE is now using GTK3 too it makes sense.

• Today being the last day of April, Linux Mint leader Clement Lefebvre published the monthly newsletter of the project to inform the community about what’s coming for the popular, Ubuntu-based distribution in May.

• The developer starts by warning those who still use the Linux Mint 13 “Maya” release that it reached end of life as it was based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), which also reached end of life on April 28, 2017. Therefore, Linux Mint 13 will no longer receive security updates so you must upgrade to a newer release.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• ​In a recent article, we talked about android emulators for Ubuntu or Linux in general. Most of the time we need to play a game or try some applications on android or even when we don’t have a smartphone we opt to use an emulator to try applications. A fan on facebook let us know about Anbox and asked for the tutorial on Anbox installation in Linux. So here you have how to install Anbox in Linux.

Free Software/Open Source

• For those with a first-generation Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop, it’s now supported by mainline Coreboot.

• The open-source Haiku operating system still maintaining compatibility with BeOS is nearing its first beta milestone.

• Haiku OS developers have been working on network improvements, a variety of driver fixes, user-interface modifications, and more.

Events

• Flisol this year was organized by Jose Reyes and Luis Manuel part of the new organization force in Panama, it was great to see all new generation of Fedora Panama members organizing events. While those are the faces at the events there are others working with them which make the team work.

• For a while my activity has been watching new people organizing, and doing the events, which is a really good thing, we need to refresh and recharge, plus we need to see new people in charge, it has been fun looking at Abdel playing the role of the elderly of the group couching and advising the young new generation of Fedora and Free Software fellows.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The most recent version of Firefox Nightly, the browser’s cutting edge version, highlights the add-ons that are not WebExtensions with the Legacy tag.

• One of the concerns that Firefox users who run one or multiple add-ons in the browser have currently is whether their add-ons will make the cut when Firefox 57 comes along.

BSD

• TrueOS, which was formerly named PC-BSD, is a FreeBSD-based operating system. TrueOS is a rolling release platform which is based on FreeBSD’s “CURRENT” branch, providing TrueOS with the latest drivers and features from FreeBSD. Apart from the name change, TrueOS has deviated from the old PC-BSD project in a number of ways. The system installer is now more streamlined (and I will touch on that later) and TrueOS is a rolling release platform while PC-BSD defaulted to point releases. Another change is PC-BSD used to allow the user to customize which software was installed at boot time, including the desktop environment. The TrueOS project now selects a minimal amount of software for the user and defaults to using the Lumina desktop environment.

• Not everything has changed. TrueOS still features many of the same utilities PC-BSD offered, including encrypted removable media, like USB thumb drives, as well as ZFS boot environments. The project, under the new name, still supplies two editions we can download: a Desktop edition and a Server edition. Both editions run on 64-bit x86 computers exclusively. I will be focusing on TrueOS’s Desktop offering in this review. The Desktop edition is available through a 2.3GB download. Unlike most Linux distributions, TrueOS offers different downloads depending on whether we intend to copy the installation image to USB or DVD media.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• The end of the semester brings a lot of reminders to students: Grades are coming, everyone has to pack for home and students have to sell back overpriced textbooks for a fraction of what they paid.

• The last one always feels like a kick in the gut.

• In this generation, the cost of college is astronomical. There are plenty of ways that the government and your high school can help you get aid, but sometimes this doesn’t cover the cost of textbooks.

Programming/Development

• Not clear that anyone gets this from my web site instead of just using the version included in git-buildpackage, but just in case, this release syncs up the version with patches already applied to git-buildpackage (thank you, Guido!).

Leftovers

Hardware

• There are now four USB charging and data standards – 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and 3.1 and each means different things in terms of power delivery, data transfer speeds, fast charge support, and cable types.

Health/Nutrition

• Thousands of people will gather in Washington, D.C., Saturday for a march to demand action on climate change and rejecting the Trump administration’s promise to overturn or scale back the federal efforts on climate. The People’s Climate March comes one day after President Donald Trump announced yet another executive giveaway to the fossil fuel industry, an order that will begin a legally contentious attempt to cancel President Barack Obama’s bans on offshore drilling in the Arctic and off the Atlantic coast. The order could eventually open for drilling additional new waters in the Gulf of Mexico, or even in the Pacific, where hardly any new drilling has taken place since a massive spill coated beaches in the 1960s and helped launch the environmental movement.

• Ananich said one of his top priorities on the policy front would be to get rid of the emergency-manager law.

• Flint, Mich., switched drinking water sources 3 years ago. It’ll be 3 more years before the city can replace 18,000 underground water pipes. Residents must use filters to reduce lead exposure.

• He argued that raw Flint River water is not actually as corrosive a source as has been portrayed, but that in-system factors like the main breaks and fluctuations of plant operation as Flint workers grappled with early indications of water quality issues elevated the corrosivity in treated water, thus compounding a “complicated puzzle” of factors affecting the water in Flint’s system.

Security

• The other day I ran across someone trying to keep their locker secured by using a combination lock. As you can see in the picture, the lock is on the handle of the locker, not on the loop that actually locks the door. When I saw this I had a good chuckle, took a picture, and put out a snarky tweet. I then started to think about this quite a bit. Is this the user’s fault or is this bad design? I’m going to blame bad design on this one. It’s easy to blame users, we do it often, but I think in most instances, the problem is the design, not the user. If nothing is ever our fault, we will never improve anything. I suspect this is part of the problem we see across the cybersecurity universe.

• Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most software is distributed pre-compiled to end users.

• The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to permit verification that no flaws have been introduced — either maliciously or accidentally — during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.

• This is a follow-up to the End of Life warning sent last month to confirm that as of today (April 28, 2017), Ubuntu 12.04 is no longer generally supported. No more package updates will be accepted to the 12.04 primary archive, and it will be copied for archival to old-releases.ubuntu.com in the coming weeks.

• Dropping support for SSHv1 and associated ciphers that were either suspected to or known to be broken has been planned for several releases, and has been eagerly anticipated by many in the OpenBSD camp.

Defence/Aggression

• Answering a question about whether another nuclear test by North Korea would mean a military response by the US, Mr Trump appears to be undecided

• DONALD Trump’s National Security Advisor has revealed that US patience is wearing thin and warned the conflict “will end soon one way or another”.

• In other words, many professionals who are counted on for digging out the facts and speaking truth to power have sold themselves to those same powerful interests in order to keep high-paying jobs and to not get tossed out onto the street. Many of these self-aggrandizing professionals – caught up in the many accouterments of success – don’t even seem to recognize how far they’ve drifted from principled professionalism.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Saturday’s Peoples Climate March brought together activists from indigenous resistance groups to Black Lives Matter to the Boy Scouts, all demanding: Act now.

• Construction of a new natural gas project in Florida, the Sabal Trail pipeline, is nearing completion as the Trump administration threatens to eliminate federal Everglades restoration and water protection programs. The pipeline will transfer natural gas from a pipeline hub in Alabama to a hub in Central Florida. From there another pipeline, the Southeast Connection, scheduled to finish construction in 2019, will bring the gas to new power plants in South Florida. The Everglades region will become the end of the line for gas extracted via hydraulic fracturing as far north as Pennsylvania.

• “In our time of need she hid us, she provided us shelter, she provided us food, and she protected us,” said Betty Osceola, a member of the Miccosukee tribe, referring to the Everglades. “Now it’s our turn to protect her. That’s why our tribe does what we do.”

• With the wide path of destruction that Donald Trump has been cutting — in which the damage is affecting matters ranging from principles of nondiscrimination to ethical integrity of government officials to reliable health care for Americans — it is easy to lose sight of what ultimately would be the most consequential destruction of all: the damage to a habitable planet.

Finance

• Pick any other major city or metropolitan area in the U.S., and the situation’s probably the same: a massive surge in deliveries to residential dwellings, one that’s outstripping deliveries to commercial establishments and creating a traffic nightmare.

• [...]

• While truck traffic currently represents about 7 percent of urban traffic in American cities, it bears a disproportionate congestion cost of $28 billion, or about 17 percent of the total U.S. congestion costs, in wasted hours and gas. Cities, struggling to keep up with the deluge of delivery drivers, are seeing their curb space and streets overtaken by double-parked vehicles, to say nothing of the bonus pollution and roadwear produced thanks to a surfeit of Amazon Prime orders.

• The UK prime minister Theresa May often uses the phrase “getting on with the job” in respect of her government’s approach to Brexit.

• This in turn is part of her supposed “strong and stable” leadership.

• Rhetoric, of course, is one thing.

• But there are at least three ways in which May’s government has not got on with the job with Brexit and wasted precious time instead.

• I have seen nobody make the obvious rejoinder. Under the Tories the wealthiest 1% have the greatest percentage of national income in modern political history. That is why they pay more tax. But due to tax avoidance, it remains the case that the wealthiest pay a lower percentage of their income in tax than any other group. There is no chance that this obvious reply will be given to Theresa May by an interviewer, or that Adam Boulton will start proclaiming it on the airwaves.

• Hundreds of thousands of immigrants and allies are expected to strike and protest on Monday, taking part in what organizers are hoping will be the largest national strike since the May Day demonstrations of 2006.

• “I definitely think this is going to be one of the biggest May Day marches,” Kent Wong, executive director of the UCLA Labor Center, told The Nation, which noted that “[t]he turbulent Trump era and draconian attacks on immigrant communities all but guarantee a bigger and more passionate turnout than usual this year.”

• Just over one year ago, Brazil’s elected president, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached — ostensibly due to budgetary lawbreaking — and replaced with her centrist vice president, Michel Temer. Since then, virtually every aspect of the nation’s political and economic crisis — especially corruption — has worsened.

• Temer’s approval ratings have collapsed to single digits. His closest political allies — the same officials who engineered Dilma’s impeachment and installed him in the presidency — recently became the official targets of a sprawling criminal investigation. The president himself has been implicated by new revelations, saved only by the legal immunity he enjoys. It’s almost impossible to imagine a presidency imploding more completely and rapidly than the unelected one imposed by elites on the Brazilian population in the wake of Dilma’s impeachment.

• But if Mayer is officially done with Yahoo, she won’t be leaving empty handed. Mayer will walk away with $186 million.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The Facebook founder has made it his mission to visit all 50 states this year, a statesmanlike-tour that some have interpreted as evidence he is planning a presidential run.

• Donald Trump has blamed the US constitution for the problems he has encountered during his first 100 days in office.

• In an interview with Fox News to mark the milestone, the Republican called the system of checks and balances on power “archaic”.

• “It’s a very rough system,” he said. “It’s an archaic system … It’s really a bad thing for the country.”

• Mr Duterte’s spokesman says the US President called and expressed Washington’s commitment to their treaty alliance and his interest in developing “a warm, working relationship” with Mr Duterte.

• “By essentially endorsing Duterte’s murderous war on drugs, Trump is now morally complicit in future killings,” John Sifton of Human Rights Watch told the Times.

• Now, the administration is bracing for an avalanche of criticism from human rights groups. Two senior officials said they expected the State Department and the National Security Council, both of which were caught off guard by the invitation, to raise objections internally.

• Nearly 100 days into the Trump presidency, corporate media are still struggling to reckon with the man that occupies the White House. An administration so proudly reckless in its actions and so brazenly detached from the truth has routinely overwhelmed political reporters whose accountability muscles have atrophied. And from cable news panels to newspaper op-ed pages, Trump’s aberrant behavior has so traumatized the media establishment that it often seems to operate in a state of collective shock.

• This disconnect with the White House, however, presents a fundamental problem for elite pundits. Their “serious” stature and editorial relevance—their livelihoods, in other words—rest upon their proximity to and influence on power. Normalizing and currying favor with power—no matter how abnormal or extreme—is an occupational hazard.

• I imagine I’m not the only political and media observer sickened by the dominant (“mainstream”) corporate media’s habitual reference to xenophobic, right-wing, white-nationalist, and neo-fascist politicians like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen as “populists.” Populism properly understood is about popular and democratic opposition to the rule of the money power – to the reign of concentrated wealth. It emerged from radical farmers’ fight for social and economic justice and democracy against the plutocracy of the nation’s Robber Baron capitalists during the late 19th century.

• Between two evils, which one should the Left choose? The answer seems deceivingly straightforward: how could a left-leaning voter choose the Front National? But Emmanuel Macron’s arrogance and incompetence are not helpful. On Tuesday, he went on television to request no less than a “vote of adhesion” against Le Pen.

• Despite being the candidate of the political and economic establishment, the former banker is not surfing a wave of popular support. An Opinionway poll carried out after Sunday’s vote shows that 54% of people who cast their vote for Macron, voted tactically. The truth is that the former economy minister has no solid constituency backing him, and no real popularity.

• The leader of a far-left movement who won nearly 20 percent of the vote in the first round of France’s presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, told his seven million voters in a YouTube address on Friday that he would not tell them how to vote in the final-round run-off next weekend.

• As for himself, Mélenchon said that he would cast a ballot, and that it would not be for Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the far-right National Front, who courted his voters in a video of her own on Friday. But Mélenchon also refused to say, like the leaders of other parties across the political spectrum — and celebrities including the French soccer legend Zinedine Zidane — that he would vote for Le Pen’s centrist rival, the former banker Emmanuel Macron, to stop the far-right from gaining power.

• Long before Hillary Clinton was parachuted into New York State to become its Senator, I was certain that she was a disaster waiting to happen. Nothing that has happened in the years since has disabused me of that belief. Now that the Democratic Party has taken up her reckless anti-Russia campaign with a degree of enthusiasm that only sore losers in denial can muster, I am more convinced than ever that I was right.

• For a variety of reasons that I have discussed many times on this site and elsewhere and that I will not go back over now, I opposed lesser evil voting in the 2016 presidential contest. I am as confident now as I ever was that this was the right thing to do. In elections for President, it almost always is.

• Nevertheless, I had no doubt that of the two god-awful choices voters faced, Trump was worse. I never gave this much thought, however, because it seemed inconceivable that any Democrat, even one with a proven record of failing at everything she does, could lose to such a buffoon.

• The conventional wisdom has it that Hillary is a “pragmatist,” who has been around the block a dozen times and who knows how to get things done. I, along with many others who had been paying attention, knew better. I knew that as a First Lady she was no prize, that she had done a lackluster job as a Senator, and that, as Barack Obama’s first term Secretary of State, she brought chaos, destruction, misery and death to every geopolitically significant project the two of them undertook.

• No wonder Trump admires Vladimir Putin so much: They are the Midas and Ali Baba of autocracy. But conservatives they are not, unless to conservatives greed has become the coin of the realm.

• One more thing: President Trump doesn’t sleep much at night, reportedly getting about five hours of shut-eye (obviously, the cause is not a guilty conscience). President Coolidge loved to sleep, as much as twelve hours at a time. When he awoke from a White House nap he often would ask his butler, “Is the country still there?”

• He meant it as a joke. Today, the question isn’t funny.

• The corporation has become more powerful than the state because the state has allowed it to happen. Over decades, by both Democrats and Republicans, unaccountability has become normalised, barely opposed by politicians or the media class. In Disaster Capitalism, I investigate the role of Western and indigenous private contractors in Afghanistan since 2001. They have left a trail of destruction and killed countless civilians. Barely anybody has been held to account, fuelling the insurgency still engulfing the country. President Trump may widen the war there but his chances of success are negligible.

• Britain’s governing Conservative party has seen its lead narrow considerably over the last week, a poll by YouGov showed on Sunday, the third poll of the weekend to show the party’s advantage over the opposition shrink.

• British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative party was set to garner 44 percent of the vote, the poll for the Sunday Times showed, still a commanding 13 point lead over Labour, who polled at 31 percent.

Censorship/Free Speech

• This morning, Turkey decided to censor the entire Wikipedia in all its editions. Work is ongoing by local activists to establish the exact technical scope.

• What’s most important for me is what you just mentioned haphazardly, we are over 30. Civics has not been taught in the American public school system since 1970. And that means everyone in Congress never studied the constitution and the bill of rights as you and I might have.

• “I never voiced my personal disagreements because having dissenting views is strictly forbidden in the activist circles I was a part of”

• Controversial, critical, confrontational, and challenging speech is an essential part of any successful college education. Without it, institutions of higher education cannot truly be said to be preparing students for the world outside of the ivory tower.

• For many, a college campus is the last stop on the train to true adulthood. Part of being an adult in America means living our constitutional values — foremost among them, our First Amendment rights to make our opinions heard — and to listen to others speak.

• Following a damning report over the weekend by China’s state-run broadcaster, China Central Television, alleging the proliferation of vulgar content through popular live streaming apps, authorities in Beijing met yesterday with the operators of three popular apps, ordering them to fully submit to “rectification,” or zhenggai  –  a term that refers in Chinese to an overhaul of operations, possibly involving the removal or reshuffling of management staff.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The NSA indicated today that it will halt one of its most controversial spying practices, related to its surveillance of virtually all text-based communications entering or exiting the United States. If true, this is a significant step forward in the fight to restrict the NSA’s wildly expansive spying powers. But, unless Congress codifies this restriction, there is a risk that this practice will be resumed. Moreover, the NSA’s change still leaves in place a warrantless surveillance regime that sweeps up countless Americans and must be reformed.

• Binney responded:

• Absolutely nothing has changed.

• In 1951, doctors harvested cells from Henrietta Lacks while she was receiving treatment for cervical cancer and discovered that her cells had an amazing capacity to reproduce. “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” which aired last weekend on HBO and is based on the book of the same name, tells the dramatic story of how scientists used the “HeLa” cells in research for decades without the knowledge of her family.

• Because of the book and film, the story of the Lacks family’s fight to understand and influence how Henrietta’s cells are used is finally getting the attention it deserves. But echoes of what she went through exist to this day, as I learned when navigating my own family history of cancer.

• On April 6, Russian math instructor Dmitry Bogatov was arrested in Moscow and charged with “preparing to organize mass disorder” and making “public calls for terrorist activity” due to a gross misunderstanding about the operation of the Tor internet anonymization service. Bogatov is accused of authoring a series of online posts published to the sysadmins.ru discussion platform on March 29 under the username “Ayrat Bashirov.” One post called for protesters to attend an unsanctioned, anonymously organized demonstration on April 2 with “rags, bottles, gas, turpentine, styrofoam, and acetone.” Another post linked to the music video for Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild,” described by investigators as “a video recording with insubordination to the legal demands of the police, and mass disorder.”

• This is important work by Adobe. Gag orders almost always violate the First Amendment; they prevent service providers from notifying users that the government is requesting their sensitive data and from being transparent about surveillance in general. And yet, providers receive indefinite gags with frustrating frequency. In most contexts, the government must do little to justify these gags and instead relies on rote invocations of national security and the sanctity of investigations.

• Google Assistant is Google’s answer to Amazon’s Alexa smart home assistant. Initially only available with limited functionality in the Google Allo application, Google Assistant later rolled out with the Google Home and Pixel smartphones to bring the full power of Google’s assistant to consumers.

• EFA noted AFP commissioner Andrew Colvin’s assertion that “the police officers investigating the leak did not realise they were required to obtain a warrant to access the journalist’s metadata” but described the officers’ lack of awareness of that requirement as “inexcusable.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• In 2012, tens of thousands of artefacts from the golden age of Timbuktu were at risk in Mali’s civil war. This exclusive extract describes the race to save them from the flames – and how lethal attacks could still threaten the town’s treasures.

• “So he did what most other people do in the tough jails, he converted to Islam.

• “Then the trouble went away because it’s the Muslims who run the big Category A jails.”

• Those of us who have worked with scenarios know that one of the reasons why they can create such a powerful platform for dialogue and transformation is that they are stories. We experience stories through our imaginations, not just through our logical minds, so we partly help create them as we listen to them. We are in them. We watch the imaginary movie and supply details that may not have been in the original. We respond emotionally to a fiction just as we do to a fact-based story. And our ideals of a better future are embedded in stories that embody our values.

• The idea of democracy is in crisis. Western democracies themselves are not appreciably weaker or poorer, but their voters are discontent and express that anger by leaning towards candidates whose style, at least, seems to challenge the Enlightenment ideals on which democracy was founded. “Come let us reason together” seems a very weak prologue to action these days.

• Last week, in “A Young Prince Is Reimagining Saudi Arabia. Can He Make His Vision Come True?,” Washington Post foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius (4/20/17) wrote what read like a press release for the Saudi regime. What’s more, he’s written the same article several times before. For almost 15 years, Ignatius has been breathlessly updating US readers on the token, meaningless public relations gestures that the Saudi regime—and, by extension, Ignatius—refer to as “reforms.”

• Ignatius columns on Saudi Arabia break down roughly into two groups: straight reporting mixed with spin and concern trolling, and outright press releases documenting the dictatorship’s spectacular reforms.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• This week on CounterSpin: FCC chair Ajit Pai has announced his plans to gut net neutrality; the former Verizon lawyer and Jeff Sessions staffer declared his intentions at a private event in DC. So the victory activists fought for—having broadband recognized as a public utility like the telephone, and not some sort of corporate gift—is in jeopardy. What does this mean for all of us who rely on an open internet, and in particular for communities of color, for whom the web’s relatively even playing field is crucial for communication and organizing? We’ve addressed this issue many times on the show. We’ll do a backgrounder on how we got here and what’s at stake with two of the leaders of the fight, Craig Aaron president of Free Press and Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice.

• Startups, entrepreneurs, investors, accelerators, and incubators are signing onto a letter urging Trump’s FCC Chairman Ajit Pai not to undermine the FCC’s net neutrality rules.

• So far, media outlets have reported that Chairman Pai intends to surrender the legal authority the FCC holds over cable and telephone companies. All the FCC apparently wants in exchange is empty promises from the industry to not end Internet freedom while relying on the Federal Trade Commission to protect users. Our letter to Congress details why that plan, as reported, will fail to protect an open Internet and how placing all of their eggs in the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) basket invites the industry to game the system and avoiding any meaningful accountability.

• But Pai can’t reverse the will of millions of Internet users without giving us a chance to weigh in – directly and through our representatives. The FCC’s net neutrality rules are crucial for the Internet – they help make sure that ISPs run their networks in ways that are fair to users and innovators alike. Without those protections, ISPs can abuse their position as gatekeepers to the broader Internet to further cement their monopolies, hurting Internet users, content providers, nonprofits and small businesses in the process. We don’t need to look back very far to see the kind of harmful practices ISPs can get up to without effective oversight. We can’t let the FCC trade the desperately-needed rules of road we fought so hard to put in place for empty promises. It’s time to tell Congress: Don’t let the FCC surrender the Internet!

• Rolling back the FCC’s Open Internet Order would mean losing the only rules that meaningfully prevent ISPs from taking advantage of their control over your Internet connection to shape your Internet experience and the market for services and devices that rely on that Internet connection. Since most Americans have only one option for broadband service, ISPs would have unchecked power to extract tolls from you and from businesses that wish to reach you. While the big incumbents like Facebook and Netflix might be able to pay those tolls, the next Facebook or Netflix would have a very hard time competing. Investors hesitate to fund startups that can be held for ransom by someone like an ISP. And the situation is even more dire for nonprofits like schools, libraries, educational sites, and political groups.

DRM

• “E-readers, which was once a promising category, saw its sales peak in 2011. Its success was short-lived, as it spiraled downwards within a year with the entry of tablets,” Euromonitor said in a research note.

• According to the Pew Research Center, 65% of Americans reported reading a printed book in the past year, compared to only 28% who read an e-book.

• A quarter of the population hadn’t read a book of any kind, whether in print, electronic or audio form.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Helsinki City Museum has made over 45,000 photos from the city dating back to the 1840s available for browsing and free credited use via a new online service.

• The issue in both cases is whether and when a home broadband provider should cut off a customer’s Internet service when someone using that service is accused of copyright infringement. The legal hook for this controversy is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Section 512, which protects ISPs and other Internet intermediaries against the risk of massive copyright penalties stemming from a customer’s copyright infringement. But to get the protection of Section 512, an ISP has to terminate “subscribers and account holders … who are repeat infringers” in “appropriate circumstances.”

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), on behalf of its client Kyle Goodwin, is asking a federal appeals court to break through the five-year logjam in the Megaupload.com case, and help lawful users who are still waiting for the return of their photos, videos, and other personal files after the government seized Megaupload’s servers.

• Megaupload was a popular cloud-storage site when the FBI shut it down in January of 2012 looking for evidence of copyright infringement. Agents seized all of Megaupload’s assets during their search, locking out customers from their accounts. Goodwin, a sports videographer, lost access to video files containing months of his professional work.

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