● 05.08.17

● Links 8/5/2017: Debian GNU/Linux 8.8, Chromebook Shipments Up 38%

Posted in News Roundup at 4:17 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I recently saw a post on Hacker News: “Build yourself a Linux”, a cool project that guides you through building a simple Linux system. It’s similar to Linux from Scratch in that it helps you build a simple Linux system for personal use. I’d like to supplement this with some insight into my experience with a more difficult task: building a full blown Linux distribution. The result is agunix, the “silver unix” system.

• For many years I’ve been frustrated with every distribution I’ve tried. Many of them have compelling features and design, but there’s always a catch. The popular distros are stable and portable, but cons include bloat, frequent use of GNU, systemd, and often apt. Some more niche distros generally have good points but often have some combination of GNU, an init system I don’t like, poor docs, dynamic linking, or an overall amateurish or incomplete design. Many of them are tolerable, but none have completely aligned with my desires.

• I’ve also looked at not-Linux – I have plenty of beefs with the Linux kernel. I like the BSD kernels, but I dislike the userspaces (though NetBSD is pretty good) I like the microkernel design of Minix, but it’s too unstable and has shit hardware support. plan9/9front has the most elegant kernel and userspace design ever made, but it’s not POSIX and has shit hardware support. Though none of these userspaces are for me, I intend to attempt a port of the agunix userspace to all of their kernels at some point (a KFreeBSD port is underway).

Desktop

• I’m so excited to talk about this little precious Galago Pro! I like to name my laptops, and nothing is more fitting for this machine (in my use case) than the name ‘Princess’ because my experience with the Galago so far has been royally spectacular. After more than a month of frequent use, I’ve found the Galago to be an excellent choice for the mobile worker. I’m frequently on a train, plane or bus, so portability is an absolute must-have for me. Although the portability is my favorite feature, I’m fond of a few other things the Galago Pro has to offer.

Server

• Linux started its life in the data center as a cheaper alternative to UNIX. At the time, UNIX operating systems ruled the industry and for good reason. They were performant, fault tolerant and extremely stable. They also were very expensive and ran on very proprietary hardware. A lot of the familiar utilities and applications developed for those UNIX platforms eventually were ported over to Linux. So, once Linux ran services like Apache, it came as no surprise that Linux would usurp and replace the very same technologies that once inspired its creation. The very best part was that Linux ran on commodity x86 hardware. At the end of the day, anyone could deploy a Linux server at a fraction of the cost to deploy something from Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics (SGI) or from any other UNIX distributor.

• Fast-forward to the present, and Linux continues to maintain a strong competitive lead over other server offerings, including the very popular Microsoft Windows. But why is that the case? In order to answer that question, one first must understand what Linux is.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• The ARM64 architecture (AArch64) updates have been queued for the Linux 4.12 kernel.

• While Intel is working on 5-level paging support to allow a virtual address space up to 128 PiB and physical address space of 4 PiB, the PowerPC guys are working on upping their address space capabilities too.

• With the Linux 4.12 kernel, POWER 64-bit server CPUs can now support up to 512TB of virtual address space compared to a previous limit of 128TB.

• Greg KH has submitted the staging changes for the Linux 4.12 kernel.

• Greg wrote of the staging work for 4.12, “Here is the big staging tree update for 4.12-rc1. And it’s a big one, adding about 350k new lines of crap^Wcode, mostly all in a big dump of media drivers from Intel. But there’s other new drivers in here as well, yet-another-wifi driver, new IIO drivers, and a new crypto accelerator. We also deleted a bunch of stuff, mostly in patch cleanups, but also the Android ION code has shrunk a lot, and the Android low memory killer driver was finally deleted, much to the celebration of the -mm developers.”

• Hyperledger Composer, centered on Blockchain technology, has been accepted into incubation by Hyperledger’s Technical Steering Committee.

• Hyperledger Composer, which is a collaborative effort, will be a tool that will help to build Blockchain business networks.

• It’ll help in the development of smart contracts and their deployment across distributed ledgers.

• During the 4.6 development cycle, the operating performance points (OPP) framework gained the infrastructure to do dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) on behalf of device drivers. This helps in reducing the complexity of those drivers, which can instead focus on platform-specific details. The rest of this article discusses what has changed and how can we use it to simplify our device drivers.

• Until Linux kernel release 4.5, the OPP framework was acting as a helper library that provided a table of voltage-frequency pairs (with some additional information) for the kernel. Kernel frameworks, like cpufreq and devfreq, used these OPP tables to perform DVFS for the devices. The OPP framework creates this table dynamically via platform-specific code and statically from device-tree blobs.

• The scheduler is a topic of keen interest for the desktop user; the scheduling algorithm partially determines the responsiveness of the Linux desktop as a whole. Con Kolivas maintains a series of scheduler patch sets that he has tuned considerably over the years for his own use, focusing primarily on latency reduction for a better desktop experience. In early October 2016, Kolivas updated the design of his popular desktop scheduler patch set, which he renamed MuQSS. It is an update (and a name change) from his previous scheduler, BFS, and it is designed to address scalability concerns that BFS had with an increasing number of CPUs.

• The XFS file-system changes have been submitted for Linux 4.12 and includes one main feature change.

• The prominent new feature for XFS in Linux 4.12 is support for the GETFSMAP ioctl. This new ioctl has been under discussion since last year’s Linux Storage summit and is the first Linux file-system seeing mainline support for it. GETFSMAP is used for returning all known space mapping details for that file-system.

• Sometimes it seems that things have gone relatively quiet on the year-2038 front. But time keeps moving forward, and the point in early 2038 when 32-bit time_t values can no longer represent times correctly is now less than 21 years away. That may seem like a long time, but the relatively long life cycle of many embedded systems means that some systems deployed today will still be in service when that deadline hits. One of the developers leading the effort to address this problem is Arnd Bergmann; at Linaro Connect 2017 he gave an update on where that work stands.

• Ted Ts’o has sent in the EXT4 file-system updates targeting the Linux 4.12 kernel merge window.

• First up as a new feature for EXT4 is support for the new GETFSMAP ioctl. This comes just after XFS getting GETFSMAP support too for the Linux 4.12 kernel; see that earlier article for more details on this new capability for Linux file-systems.

Graphics Stack

• DragonFlyBSD has updated their port of the Radeon DRM Linux driver code to provide better open-source AMD graphics support.

• Earlier this week I posted a number of Radeon RX 550 Linux benchmarks making use of AMD’s popular open-source driver stack. For those wondering how the open-source driver compares to the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid proprietary driver for this sub-$100 Polaris GPU, these benchmarks will interest you.

• The initial work towards ARB_bindless_texture support for Mesa has been merged to master.

• Samuel Pitoiset, working for Valve on improving the open-source AMD graphics driver stack, has merged the initial GLSL patches for stepping towards bindless textures within Mesa. ARB_bindless_texture isn’t all good to go yet, but it’s being worked on so hopefully by Mesa 17.2 we will see it completed.

Applications

• GNU/Linux users are well aware of the fact that many pieces of software commonly used in Microsoft Windows, do not function for us using things like WINE; and so we must find alternatives to use.

• Granted, you could use a virtual machine to run Windows, but as I have encountered and I am sure others as well; not everything runs smoothly when you go down that route.

• One example using my laptop was that Adobe Premiere for video editing was extremely challenging to use in a Virtual Machine due to resources…So, what options do we have?

• dmenu 4.7 has just been released.

• Today I’m excited to release debug-me, a program for secure remote debugging.

• For the last couple of years, I have self-hosted my calendar and address book data. Originally I just kept local calendars and address books in Evolution, but later I moved to a self-hosted CalDAV/CardDAV server and a plethora of clients.

• I released modulemd-1.2.0 yesterday, the module metadata reference and its Python manipulation library.

• This version defines two new important sections, artifacts and buildopts, and clarifies & extends the format specification a bit, standardizing several profile names (kudos to Tomáš Tomeček) and explaining module inclusion in a somewhat more verbose way.

• There are already a good number of to-do list applications for all OS platforms, but this one is different. It has a stylish inbuilt timer.

• Among the many other projects created by Manuel Khel, Go For It! is a stylishly modern to-do list productivity app with an inbuilt timer that helps you keep track of your current tasks.

• The app has three main panels, To-Do which contains your list; Timer, which is where the inbuilt timer lives in; and Done, which lists your completed tasks designed with a strikethrough.

• Though I tend to stream music from the cloud when at my desktop PC, I prefer to download and play local audio files when listening to podcasts and audio books on the move. Earlier this week I needed convert a stack of old audio books from the .m4a format to a more Android-friendly format like .mp3 — and SoundConverter did what I needed effortlessly.

• There are few standard ways to manage sources in Linux operating system, from command-line which can be difficult for some new users and built-in GUI way doesn’t offers much (beside add and remove PPA). Aptik application first introduced in 2014 which made its way in community fairly easily. If you use standard version of Ubuntu and have many PPAs added in your system and you want to upgrade then this tools comes very handy and let you upgrade your OS quite easily, once you upgrade the OS you can re-install all the packages which were removed before upgrade or you can choose your strategy for upgrade process. Not only for upgrade, if you have another system that run Linux and you want to transfer packages from one to another then in that case it can be very useful tool.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Chrome’s Ozone abstraction layer has added support for gamepads.

• Ozone, the platform abstraction layer focused on input and graphics to Chrome beneath the Aura window system, is now aware of gamepads. With Chromium Git is initial support for gamepads and gamepad events and ties into evdev for input on Linux.

• Following a successful crowdfunding campaign, the first episode of the point and click adventure game, SnarfQuest Tales [Official Site] has gone gold and has been available for some time.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The next-generation of KDE CI is nearly here. Ben Cooksley from the KDE Sysadmin team has announced that it is nearly ready to go. On the FreeBSD side, Ben has done the heavy lifting on the CI side and I’ve done a little futzing around to get the build node in working order by installing system-wide dependencies.

• In a few days (May 13th-14th) the KDE e.V. board will be having an in-person board meeting in Berlin.

• On May 1, another edition of LaKademy, the Latin American KDE Summit, came to an end. This was the 5th edition of the event, which continues to attract new people interested in being part of the community. This time we had 6 beginners, which is a great number, considering that the event itself is small, since it is not an event of talks or courses, but a concentrated one, in the contribution sprint style.

• The Plasma 5.9.5 update provides another round of bug-fixes and translations to the 5.9 release, which will probably be the last one before 5.10 is out by the end of May.

• Hello world! For those who don’t know me, I am Chinmoy, a first year undergraduate student studying computer science at Dr. Ambedkar Institute of Technology, Bangalore, India. I am one of the 1,318 students selected for this years Google Summer of Code. I will be working with Arnav Dhamija and Elvis Angelaccio (my mentors) on the KDE project “Polkit Support in KIO”.

• In the last days we created a stable Craft branch which builds Qt 5.62 and KDE Frameworks 5.33.0 (KF5), and backported all important patches for the 5.33.0 release.

• This is the branch you should use when ever you want to provide an application installer. Providing builds of unstable KF5 git versions isn’t really a good practice, but was done never the less.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• A few months back we took a look at the new GNOME Recipes app that’s currently in heavy development. Matthias Clasen has announced that along with a growing team of developers, some further improvements are on the way, both in terms of user experience and the selection of recipes and cuisines available.

• As the other directors are aware, I’ve over-committed myself. I think I did a good job keeping up with GNOME Board issues, but it was sometimes a real stretch. And due to some budget and planning items happening at work, I’ve been busier in 2017 than I planned. I’ve missed a few Board meetings due to meeting conflicts or other issues.

• Aurora-Next theme isn’t new but it’s initial release was back in early 2015 and it looked great at that time and looks even more better, there are three variants in this suite and support almost every desktop such as Unity, Gnome Shell, Xfce, Cinnamon, Mate and so on but not compatible with KDE. You can choose from Blue, Green and Red variant from this suite as per your requirements. There are three Gnome Shell themes and Cinnamon theme with every variant, the supported versions of GTK are 3.20 and up. Numix-White icons used in the following screenshots. You can use Unity Tweak Tool, Gnome-tweak-tool to change icons.

• Now a days there are much themes are in development for Gnome Shell because every new release of Gnome Shell makes old theme highly incompatible and bit difficult for creators to manage their themes for newer version of Gnome Shell. But there are still some people who are working on Gnome Shell themes. Here is one of the theme called Mist, basically this theme is inspired by the appearance of the GDM3 login manager, the main goal of this theme is to make Gnome Shell fully transparent. This means a panel that blends right into the desktop, simple flat, transparent buttons, and the bare minimum when it comes to menus and elements that overlap the work-space. This theme is compatible with Gnome Shell 3.24/3.22/3.20/3.18/3.16 and 3.14 versions, you need to enable user-themes extension in Gnome-Tweak-Tool to change Shell theme.

• GNOME Project’s Matthias Clasen is reporting on the development of the recently introduced GNOME Recipes application, an open-source and easy-to-use program that’ll help you to discover what to cook.

• GNOME Recipes has been in development during the GNOME 3.24 cycle, with which it was first introduced to the public in its final, production-ready state. The graphical user interface of the app should be very familiar to GNOME users as it resemblance the look and feel of the GNOME Software package manager.

Distributions

• Like all good things, Apricity OS must come to an end. It has been our privilege to develop the operating system, and to be a part of a community as great as our own. But unfortunately, we no longer have time for its required upkeep. We hope that your time using our operating system has been enjoyable, and that you continue to explore using Linux in the future. You all, our users, have made this experience incredible for us, and we cannot thank you enough for the support.

• The Arch Linux based distribution, Apricity OS, has announced in an undated notice on its website that it’s shutting down. I learned the of news today when given a heads-up by a follower on Twitter.

• We’re extremely sorry to inform our readers that the team of developers behind the Apricity OS has ceased the development of the Arch Linux-based operating system.

• We were the first to introduce you guys to Apricity OS about 20 months ago, on the 6th of September, 2015, and, shortly after, the GNU/Linux distro become hugely popular among those who wanted to install an Arch Linux-based operating system on their personal computer with an easy-to-use graphical interface.

• The development team behind the Chakra GNU/Linux operating system, through Neofytos Kolokotronis, is reporting on the latest updates that landed in the stable software repositories of the GNU/Linux distribution.

• Chakra GNU/Linux users will be glad to learn that the latest KDE Plasma 5.9.5 desktop environment, which is the last maintenance update in the series, has landed in the repos, bringing them a great number of patches for their beloved KDE apps and utilities.

Reviews

• Using GNU/Linux is by default more secure than using Microsoft Windows, this is common knowledge; however just because you use GNU/Linux, does not mean that your system is secure, and that is why some distributions have been created in order to maximize security; such as QubesOS.

• QubesOS is very different from your typical run of the mill distro, such as Ubuntu or even the more hardcore like Arch Linux and Gentoo. QubesOS runs multiple virtual machines linked together under a single user-interface, to form a container based / compartmentalized operating system.

• The purpose of this, is hypothetically speaking if an adversary were to gain remote access into your machine, they would be bound to only having access to the compartment they broke into.

New Releases

• 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki is informing us today about the immediate availability of the second point release of the 4MLinux 21 GNU/Linux operating system.

• 4MLinux 21.2 is yet another minor update of the independently-developed distribution, coming about five weeks after the 4MLinux 21.1 release. It’s here with a new kernel from the long-term supported Linux 4.4 series, namely Linux kernel 4.4.63 LTS, a bunch of updated packages, and better support for wireless APs that are protected with passwords.

• OSMC’s slightly belated April update is here with a variety of improvements and fixes.

Red Hat Family

• A quick recap with self reminders of session links.

• Sunday night was dinner with a couple of other instructors. Always a blast.

• Monday night was the Ansible (Red Hat Management) Social. The venue (Coppersmith) was really cool. Their description is as a vintage warehouse but it looked to me like it had once been a firehouse. The kitchen was in a pair of old food trucks welded together. And there was draft cider.

Finance

Fedora

• Fedora is a wonderful Linux distribution, as it is both stable and modern. One of the biggest selling points of the operating system is that is relies on truly free open source software. This means it won’t have patented or closed-source non-free packages by default. Of course, in-the-know Fedora users often added these needed packages after the fact by using third-party repositories, such as RPM Fusion.

Debian Family

• Those of you using the Debian Stable a.k.a. Debian “Jessie” operating system series will be glad to learn that the eighth point release was just launched today, Debian GNU/Linux 8.8, with more than 150 bug fixes and security updates.

• As reported the other day, the Debian Project launched the eighth maintenance update for the stable Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” operating system series, which brings a total of 90 security updates and more than 60 miscellaneous bug fixes.

• We promised that you’d be the first to know when Live and installation ISO images of the Debian GNU/Linux 8.8 release will be available for download, so here you go. The Debian Project just finished uploading all the Debian GNU/Linux 8.8 “Jessie” Live CDs and installation mediums for all supported hardware architectures.

• The Debian Project has announced the release of eight stable update of Debian 8 jessie. Debian GNU/Linux 8.8 comes with many package updates, 60+ bug fixes, and 90 security fixes. As it’s not a new major version release, the existing users who are already having all the latest security updates installed don’t need to do anything. The interested users can use the aptitude (or apt) package tool to perform the upgrade.

• The Debian Project has launched the eighth update of its stable distribution Debian 8, codename Jessie.

• The update adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments.

• Debian hasn’t released a new version of Jessie, but its Version 8.8 that landed over the weekend repairs more than 100 package bugs.

• As the announcement notes: “Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.”

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• An email client was once a mandatory offering for any operating system, but that may be changing. A discussion on the ubuntu-desktop mailing list explores the choices for a default email client for Ubuntu 17.10, which is due in October. One of the possibilities being considered is to not have a default email client at all.

• Jeremy Bicha raised the issue in mid-April. He noted that Ubuntu had switched from Evolution to Thunderbird in 2011 and thought it time to revisit that decision. For one thing, while an email client is useful, it may not be “useful enough to enough people to justify it being installed for everyone”. If there is to be a default email client, though, which should it be?

• Well, I have to say that Ubuntu Phone was dead for me after the Mark’s announcement a few weeks ago. I even posted the end of uNav and I switched to Android. But my post was a trigger for myself: because the community will not allow uNav to die so easily and of course, the Ubuntu Phone You opened my eyes mates!

Flavours and Variants

• Thank you to everyone who commented and voted. While the votes are useful the comments (from all the online Ubuntu MATE communities) are what have been most useful.

• You can now control paired Bluetooth devices (like phones!) from the sound indicator. Additionally, we now show an icon in the panel when an app is using the microphone, making it easy to see at a glance if something starts listening in.

• A couple of weeks ago I shared my AppCenter Spotlight: Beta Testers piece and got a great response. People continue to be excited to see the progress of AppCenter and how it’s coming together end-to-end.

• Since that story, I’ve been playing around with four more apps that have been added by our awesome beta testers. I think my favorite thing about AppCenter right now (besides how easy it is!) is that each new app I try seems to be unique and category-defining. When there are orders of magnitude more apps in AppCenter, these are the ones that set the bar. And so far, they’ve done a great job.

• Lubuntu 17.04 continues to deliver a nice and friendly environment for those who like a light and snappy uncomplicated experience without many graphical bells and whistles. And it still lacks a common theme for applications and their design, because LXDE is not fully a “desktop environment” per se.

• The Live session of Lubuntu 17.04 felt quick and snappy for me, which is no wonder on my new laptop.

• The only small problem I mentioned in this review was the set of default applications. But that’s easy to fix, isn’t it?

• How do you find Lubuntu 17.04 yourself?

Devices/Embedded

• Do you still think that to work with a certain USB device you have to have it physically attached to your computer? In this case you haven’t heard of USB Network Gate yet! USB Network Gate is available for different platforms, which includes USB Network Gate for Linux. The latest version 4.0 allows working with any USB device even in those “seems impossible” situations when a USB device is oceans away from you.

• This week, just nine weeks after its launch, we will ship the 250,000th Pi Zero W into the market. As well as hitting that pretty impressive milestone, today we are announcing 13 new Raspberry Pi Zero distributors, so you should find it much easier to get hold of a unit.

Phones

Android

• It’s hard to say how long it will be before most Android devices are running Nougat, or a later version of Android, but even then the slow pace of updates from some manufacturers and carriers will remain an issue.

• Are you a command line guru, or do you simply want to make your Android device unusable for friends and family, then check out T-UI Launcher app. Unix/Linux users will definitely love this.

• In this case, I must praise both Motorola for assembling a great phone and Google for improving Android to a very high degree. In its vanilla form, it’s most palatable, and this combo just works great. And this for only about 200-odd dollars, which is about one half or even one third of what you’d pay for top-end devices, and you sure don’t get 2x or 3x more. Clean, simple, secure, fast, I only have positive attributes to share here. This from a Linux guy who loves Windows Phone and does not like mobile devices at all. Sounds mad, but that’s what it is. Now, off you go, enjoy your lives and apps and such. 9.5/10. Color me surprised, Motorola Moto G4 is an excellent product. Most recommended.

• It’s not that hard to add points to your loyalty cards on Android Pay, but it looks like Google is mulling on an experimental feature to automate the process. 9to5google has torn the latest version of the app apart and found lines of code that hint at a feature called “Visual ID,” which authenticates your loyalty points by using facial recognition. Based on the strings the publication found, you’ll have to create a “face template” when you activate the feature. Participating stores that have Visual ID cameras installed will then confirm your identity when you walk in. Once the system determines that it’s you, and it ascertains your location using Bluetooth, Google will send them your loyalty details.

• Better cooperation between Google and its major OEMs is essential to ensure that as many phones as possible are kept up to date with security patches. Most of the 3.5 million instances of malware that crop up this year will never get close enough to infect your phones, but it only takes one.

• Inside what used to be an abandoned Fry’s Electronics warehouse in Palo Alto, California, Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, and three other Silicon Valley veterans are trying their hands at one of the tech industry’s biggest challenges: building hardware.

• The four co-founded Playground Global, a startup “accelerator,” in 2015. That’s techspeak for a company that helps nurture young startups by providing support like mentorship, office space, and — in the case of Playground, which works mostly with hardware startups — machinery for prototyping.

• There will be no more beta-tested versions of Android Nougat software, as Google has finally killed off the beta program. Instead, we’re now hanging around for the full launch of Google’s Android O, following the release of the Developer Preview on March 21.

• Developers subscribed to the new Developer Preview are currently in ‘Preview 1’, which is basically an alpha phase. We’re not expecting to see a beta until the official Android O launch, which is likely to take place on May 17 during Google’s annual I/O developer conference.

Free Software/Open Source

• The opposition to the orthodox view is based on the liberal belief that an author has the legal (or moral) right to copyright protection and does not have a societal obligation to share what the author considers a secrets — even to the consumers of the code. This ideology opposed what it considers to be a forceful tactic on the part of GPL-like licenses to compel authors to share code they don’t otherwise want to share. They see licenses like the GPL as overreaching against their right to make money in a manner that preserves “intellectual property” rights. Since orthodox free software advocates do not believe in intellectual property rights, their licenses intentionally threaten to erode the marketplace of proprietary software. Thus, the Free Software movement is bad for those who seek to thrive in the proprietary marketplace.

• Two years earlier, Sun had acquired MySQL, the open-source relational database engine ranked as second only to Oracle’s as the world’s most popular database. MySQL was a potential rival to Oracle’s cash cow, and its developers feared that the database giant would starve it to death. So they took out an insurance policy, building a drop-in replacement called MariaDB that quickly flourished, capturing customers such as Google Inc. MariaDB Corp. was founded to commercialize its namesake product with a business model built on packaging, support and training.

Events

• The Android/Mobile microconference has been accepted for this year’s Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), which will be held in Los Angeles, CA, US on 13-15 September in conjunction with The Linux Foundation Open Source Summit.

• Tomorrow I’m traveling out to Raleigh, NC for a gathering to work on CI and Infrastructure for Fedora and will be out there all next week. We will of course be around on IRC and hope to pull in remote folks that are interested in participating, but if you need us for something and can’t find anyone, please file a ticket and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

CMS

• The Drupal content management system (CMS) has been an open-source tool of choice for many web site owners for well over a decade now. Over that time, it has been overseen by its original developer, Dries Buytaert, who is often referred to as the benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) for the project. Some recent events have led a sizable contingent in the Drupal community to question his leadership, however. A request that a prominent developer leave the Drupal community, apparently over elements of his private life rather than any Drupal-related misstep, has led to something of an outcry in that community—it may well lead to a change in the governance of the project.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• 2015 was two years ago, and to the surprise of many, we actually had hoverboards at the time. Of course, these weren’t Back to the Future-style hovering skateboards; they were crappy two-wheeled balancing scooters that suffered a few battery explosions and were eventually banned from domestic flights by some carriers. But oh boy, there were some funny Vines of these things.

• While the rest of the world moved on from hoverboards, [Casainho] has been working on Open Sourcing the firmware for these interesting bits of electronics and motors. Now, his work is wrapping up and he has new firmware for electric unicycles and hoverboards.

Programming/Development

Leftovers

• The personnel at the ER reacted swiftly.

• “They put me on a 72-hour psych hold and sent me to a psychiatric hospital, which I’ll tell you is much worse than prison. They don’t want you to leave,” Terrance told me. “If you have good insurance, they want to keep you there. So after my 72-hour hold was up, they asked me to commit myself voluntarily. And when I refused to do that, they got a judge’s order to keep me locked up.”

• Terrance felt he was being held against his will. So he came up with a plan. “I told them I was calling my insurance company and canceling my insurance.”

• They released him immediately.

Science

• Researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) developed the nickel-zinc (Ni-Zn) batteries in which a three-imensional Zn “sponge” replaces the powdered zinc anode, or positively charged electrode, traditionally used.

• With 3D Zn, the battery provides an energy content and rechargeability that rival lithium-ion batteries while avoiding the safety issues that continue to plague lithium.

Health/Nutrition

• It is no exaggeration to say that if it were to become law, this bill would kill significant numbers of Americans. People who lose their Medicaid, don’t go to the doctor, and wind up finding out too late that they’re sick. People whose serious conditions put them up against lifetime limits or render them unable to afford what’s on offer in the high-risk pools, and are suddenly unable to get treatment.

• Minnesota is experiencing its largest measles outbreak since the 1990s following a targeted and intense effort by anti-vaccine groups there to spread the false belief that vaccinations cause autism.

• As of Thursday, health officials reported 41 confirmed cases, nearly all unvaccinated children from a Somali immigrant community in Hennepin County. The community has for years been a target of anti-vaccine groups, aided by Andrew Wakefield, a fraudulent former physician.

• According to many media this morning, citing anonymous sources, the World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Body has reached a decision in a dispute challenging Australia’s tobacco product plain packaging law. Australia appears to have won the case. The WTO is non-committal and says only a “confidential interim report” has been circulated. Australia is not commenting.

• The much-awaited, postponed decision by the WTO Dispute Settlement Body on the case pitting Australia against Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Indonesia has, according to sources, been delivered, apparently backing Australia’s argument that its law requiring plain packaging for tobacco does not violate any WTO rules, including those on intellectual property rights.

Security

• Let’s take that again: a blank password to an always-open port sidesteps every single bit of authentication and security that is otherwise present.

• A remote hijacking flaw that lurked in Intel chips for seven years was more severe than many people imagined, because it allowed hackers to remotely gain administrative control over huge fleets of computers without entering a password. This is according to technical analyses published Friday.

• If it had seemed to infosec that the magazine might’ve had to go out of its way to find such an un-diverse group of hackers … turns out, it did. Thompson’s social media post revealed that during the course of reporting the story, there was “a meeting with the woman who runs the college’s official hacking group.”

• The weakness within the protocol has been known about since 2014, and in January, criminals exploited it to bypass the two-factor authentication method that banks use to protect unauthorised withdrawals from online accounts, German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung has reported.

• The “Google Docs” phishing attack that wormed its way through thousands of e-mail inboxes earlier this week exploited a threat that had been flagged earlier by at least three security researchers—one raised issues about the threat as early as October of 2011. In fact, the person or persons behind the attack may have copied the technique from a proof of concept posted by one security researcher to GitHub in February.

• WordPress is a free and open-source, highly customizable content management system (CMS) that is being used by millions around the world to run blogs and fully functional websites. Because it is the most used CMS out there, there are so many potential WordPress security issues/vulnerabilities to be concerned about.

• Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) are a favorite attack method of hackers and hacktivists, in large part due to their simplicity. We list the different types of DDoS attacks and offer resources to stop DDoS attacks.

• The messaging app Telegram recently introduced end-to-end encrypted voice calls. As most of you probably know, encryption without verification is pretty useless since there is the risk of man-in-the-middle attacks. I don’t want to get too much into details about this. The point I want to make is, that you should verify your partners fingerprint (hash of the used key) in order to be secure.

• The interesting part of Telegrams new feature is the way they verify fingerprints. Traditionally you are presented with a String of (typically hexadecimal – 0-9,A-F) characters. In the case of Conversations the fingerprint are 64 hexadecimal characters. Telegram on the other hand introduced the way of displaying 4 out of a set of 333 emojis (1). Note that this is only used to verify that the current voice call is secure. The next call would have a different fingerprint, so keep in mind, that we are talking about two different use cases here.

• Still, how do those two methods compare? Could we use emoji in conversations to verify the fingerprint of identity keys?

• HandBrake is an open-source and free transcoder for digital video files. It makes ripping a film from a DVD to a data storage device such as NAS boxes easier. HandBrake works Linux, macOS, and Windows. A Recent version of Handbrake for Mac and possibly other downloads at the same site infected with malware. If you have downloaded HandBrake on Mac between 2/May/2017 and 06/May/2017, you need to delete the file ASAP. HandBrake infected with a new variant of OSX.PROTON malware.

Defence/Aggression

• Over 50 Saudi and Pakistani channels, including Zakir Naik’s banned Peace TV preaching Salafist Islam, and others indulging in anti-India propaganda are running without necessary clearances via private cable networks in Kashmir.

• All this is happening under the nose of the PDP-BJP government, which even subscribes to these cable services in some of its offices and buildings.

• The latest pretend protection of us by the TSA is to ask truck rental agencies to be more vigilant about who’s renting — though anyone with an IQ over room temperature realizes that somebody could just shoot somebody who’s already driving a truck and then go murder a bunch of people.

• Inspections have been ordered at every German army barracks, after Nazi-era memorabilia was found at two of them.

• The defence ministry said the command came from the inspector general of the Bundeswehr (Germany’s armed forces).

• All barracks will be searched for material linked to the Wehrmacht, the army which served Adolf Hitler.

• North Korea claimed it detained another U.S. citizen on Sunday, stoking further discord as the two countries face their biggest tensions in years.

• The North’s state media said Kim Hak Song, who worked at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, was arrested on Saturday on charges of “hostile acts” against the country. This would bring the tally to four U.S. citizens held by the reclusive nation.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Laura Poitras’s new film Risk opens May 5. It documents six years in the life of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks and controversial inhabitant of the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Laura Poitras received the Oscar for Best Documentary for her previous film, Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden. She also won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014, and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2012. This interview has been edited and condensed.

• Lady Gaga — all in black and wearing a witch’s hat — is interviewing Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he’s been holed up for years.

• As the pop star, in a bizarre scene from a new documentary, quizzes the WikiLeaks founder about everything from his legal problems to his favorite food, Assange interrupts: “Let’s not pretend for a moment I’m a normal person.”

• Indeed, in Laura Poitras’s film about Assange, “Risk,” he comes across as neither normal nor particularly sympathetic.

• Consider: He has been accused of rape in Sweden (he says he was entrapped and had to seek asylum from extradition); he has published leaked information that has intruded into private lives; and he may have helped Russian agents try to get Donald Trump elected president.

• But everyone who cares about the free press in America needs to understand something else, too.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• The terms “pro-life” and “pro-environment” are not normally linked, but a growing number of Christian leaders insist they should be.

• Pope Francis said so in his 2015 encyclical on the environment and human ecology. Now, the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), a nondenominational organization committed to “creation care,” is promoting the argument that if you value life from its conception, you should value a clean Earth for the rest of a child’s life and for future children.

• On Friday afternoon, President Trump signed a bipartisan spending bill negotiated in the House to fund the federal government through September 30, 2017. The bill contained funding for energy-related programs and offices that the president has called to be defunded. And, late this week, the Department of Energy (DOE) internally announced a cancellation of its grant freeze.

• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Scott Pruitt sent a memo to agency employees last week saying that he would recuse himself from lawsuits that he brought against the Agency as Oklahoma Attorney General, according to Reuters. Pruitt sued the EPA more than a dozen times under the Obama Administration, challenging policy from the Clean Power Plan to the Waters of the United States rule.

Finance

• Trump’s call for massive corporate tax cuts doesn’t just revive failed Reagan-era economic policies, it’s another sign of how America’s super-rich have staged a coup.

• New York is facing a crisis. The city that never sleeps has become the city with the most people who have no home to sleep in. As rising rents outpace income growth across the five boroughs, some 62,000 people, nearly 40 percent of them children, live in homeless shelters—rates the city hasn’t seen since the Great Depression.

• In its earlier years, the company employed cutthroat tactics against its competitor Lyft At one point, Uber employees would summon Lyft drivers and then cancel rides. Kalanick once bragged about a feature, called “God View,” which it used to track a journalist and other noteworthy individuals. He has charged into legal battles with transportation regulators and taxi drivers in cities across the world.

• The European Commission is changing its approach to trade deals after strong headwinds jeopardized agreements with the U.S. and Canada.

• In June 2013, a young American postgraduate called Sophie was passing through London when she called up the boss of a firm where she’d previously interned. The company, SCL Elections, went on to be bought by Robert Mercer, a secretive hedge fund billionaire, renamed Cambridge Analytica, and achieved a certain notoriety as the data analytics firm that played a role in both Trump and Brexit campaigns. But all of this was still to come. London in 2013 was still basking in the afterglow of the Olympics. Britain had not yet Brexited. The world had not yet turned.

• [...]

• In Britain, we still trust our government. We respect our authorities to uphold our laws. We trust the rule of law. We believe we live in a free and fair democracy. Which is what, I believe, makes the last part of this story so profoundly unsettling.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• French President-elect Emmanuel Macron used his victory speech on Sunday to tell supporters of his far-right opponent that he understood their anger and promised to prioritize security and social policy.

• After being attacked for a seemingly over-the-top reaction to his first round win, Macron delivered a sober speech after defeating Marine Le Pen in a runoff vote. He stressed national unity and expressed respect to Le Pen for her campaign.

• “The only thing your mouth is good at is being [Russian President] Vladimir Putin’s c—k holster,” he said of Trump.

• It described the leak as a “real attempt to disrupt the French presidential election” and said it would be taking all steps to find out who was behind the “unusual operation.”

• The paper said it was impossible to check the leaked files in time before the vote and the release of the files had the clear goal of harming the validity of the ballot at a time when the main interested parties are legally forbidden from responding to the allegations.

• Le Pen firmly backs the Syrian regime and distanced herself from US President Donald Trump over recent US airstrikes targeting President Bashar Assad’s regime, and she is friendly with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Macron wants international pressure on Assad and to maintain sanctions against Russia over Ukraine.

• The vote is also being seen as a test for global populism and the future of the European Union.

• Voting is underway in the final round of France’s presidential race after a massive online dump of frontrunner Emmanuel Macron’s campaign data delivered a final dramatic twist to the country’s most bruising, divisive and significant election in decades.

• The French election watchdog warned that it could be a criminal offence to publish the tens of thousands of hacked emails and other documents – some reportedly fake – amid an electioneering blackout lasting from midnight on Friday until polls close at 8pm on Sunday.

• The hack, on which neither Macron or his opponent, far-right leader Marine Le Pen, were allowed to comment publicly, was “clearly an attempt at democratic destabilisation, like that seen during the last presidential campaign in the US,” according to his En Marche! campaign team.

• Member of the European Parliament Nils Torvalds of the Swedish People’s Party of Finland has announced his bid for the presidency.

• The Swedish People’s Party of Finland will nominate its official presidential contender in June.

• According to Torvalds, the upcoming election will define Finland’s path in an ”increasingly complicated world”. In a press release, Torvalds writes that the debate around the elections will focus on foreign and security policy, global insecurities and environmental questions.

• ProPublica writes “Steven Munoz [above] allegedly assaulted five freshmen. His hiring at the State Department raises further questions about the Trump administration’s vetting process.” The story lists accusations of unwanted sexual touching from 2009 that first surfaced in 2012 via a leaked email, when Munoz did some work for the Rick Santorum campaign. Munoz claimed the acts were consensual. All of the information is available via Google searches; no investigative journalism is needed.

• Upshot? A South Carolina prosecutor reviewed the case and its 200 pages of evidence and declined to seek an indictment in 2013.

• Accusations and an investigation that lead to no charges. That’s it.

• [...]

• If it’s that the military academy did a poor job of investigating the allegations, then write that story. If the local prosecutor failed in her responsibilities, then investigate and write that story. If you have evidence Munoz is sexually assaulting people in his political appointee job today in Washington, let’s hear it. If you can find that the Trump vetting process uncovered evidence of Munoz’ guilt and hired him anyway, let’ see that headlined.

• But if all you are doing is resurfacing old, dismissed allegations of a salacious nature in hopes of embarrassing the administration and making yourself look like The Resistance for a news cycle, then, no, you are just conducting an old-fashioned witch hunt.

• Shame on you, ProPublica, and your organization’s otherwise proud record.

• Organizers barred journalists on Sunday from a publicly advertised event in Shanghai that offered Chinese investors the chance to get U.S. immigrant visas if they put money in a real estate project linked to the family of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law.

• The two-tower luxury apartment complex in New Jersey, One Journal Square, is being developed by KABR Group and the Kushner Companies, which until recently was headed by senior White House advisor Jared Kushner, the husband of Trump’s daughter Ivanka.

• Extreme right-wing Twitter users in the United States and France continued to attack the centrist candidate in France’s presidential election, Emmanuel Macron. On Saturday, however, it appeared they were losing ground to opponents countering their attacks with mockery and accusations of Russian involvement.

• Turnout in the French presidential election is so far sharply down on the past two polls as voters choose between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen.

• A turnout of 65.3% was recorded at 17:00 local time (15:00 GMT) in an unpredictable campaign that has divided the country.

• The bitterly fought poll was concluding on Sunday amid massive security.

• The final polling stations close at 20:00 (18:00 GMT), with the result set to be reported immediately afterwards.

• Le Pen says she has called Emmanuel Macron to congratulate him on his victory.

• Emmanuel Macron has triggered a political earthquake in French politics.

• A year ago, he was a member of the government of one the most unpopular French presidents in history.

• Now, at 39, he has won France’s presidential election, defeating first the mainstream centre left and centre right and now the far right as well.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Police in the Republic of Ireland have launched an investigation after a viewer claimed comments made by Stephen Fry on a TV show were blasphemous.

• Officers are understood to be examining whether the British comedian committed a criminal offence under the Defamation Act when he appeared on RTE in 2015.

• Fry had asked why he should “respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world…. full of injustice”.

• At first glance, the censorship seems invisible, but its omnipresent washing of people’s feelings and perceptions creates limits on the information people receive, select and rely upon.

• State-controlled Zimbabwe Broadcasting Holdings (ZBH) — managers of ZTV — has defended its censorship of live parliamentary debates, arguing it was their editorial policy, targeted at making the channel family friendly.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The political legitimacy of democratic capitalism, that unlikely political formation that has brought us the end of history and now presents itself as the only bulwark against rightwing extremism, rests on a clear distribution of functions between governments and corporations. The former take on the role of regulating the latter in order to protect the customers from the occasional harmful effects of the otherwise beneficial business activity.

• Thomas Drake still thinks about waking up a free man, instead of the lifelong prison term he was promised by the government he used to work for.

• Drake woke up Wednesday in a guesthouse on the campus of Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn. The former senior executive of the National Security Agency spoke at the college’s annual MAYDAY! Peace Conference last week as part of his second career: the whistleblower warning the nation about the rise of mass surveillance.

• The US State Department is opening the public comment period for a proposal that seeks to inspect social media accounts and other data of visa applicants the government believes may pose a danger.

• The new vetting, the State Department said, likely will only impact about 0.5 percent of visa applicants per year—roughly 65,000 people. The new vetting being proposed would apply to applicants “who have been determined to warrant additional scrutiny in connection with terrorism or other national security-related visa ineligibilities,” according to a notice in the Federal Register by the State Department.

• Another small dart has been lodged in the thigh of the Fifth Amendment by the courts. A Miami, FL federal judge has ruled that defendants in a sex video extortion case must turn over their phones’ passwords.

• Defense attorney Martha Boersch has strong words for federal law enforcement’s warrantless use of cell-site simulators, better known as stingrays.

• Her client, Purvis Ellis, charged with attempted murder and racketeering, was tracked down to an East Oakland apartment in January 2013 with the help of not just one stingray, but two. Prosecutors initially insisted that only one stingray was used, but as was revealed last summer, that turned out to not be the case. The Oakland Police Department’s own stingray was seemingly insufficient, so officers then called in the FBI, both times without a warrant.

• More details of how the UK’s new surveillance law will operate have been revealed, in details about the use of encryption.

• Under draft regulations to support the new Investigatory Powers Act, the government will be able to issue ‘technical capability notices’ to companies with more than 10,000 UK users to make it easier for police, spy agencies and other government bodies to access their customers’ communications.

• A leaked draft statutory instruments document has detailed how the government is seeking to compel telecommunications operators to provide real time access to named individuals’ communications within one working day under the recently passed Investigatory Powers Act. This includes encrypted messages.

• The government also asks for the capability to “provide and maintain the capability to simultaneously intercept, or obtain secondary data” from 6,500 people at any one time.

• Facebook plans to have roughly two-dozen shows for this initial push and has greenlit multiple shows for production, according to people familiar with the discussions. They said that the social network has been looking for shows in two distinct tiers: a marquee tier for a few longer, big-budget shows that would feel at home on TV, and a lower tier for shorter, less expensive shows of around 5-10 minutes in length that refreshes every 24 hours.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In the footage, provided to Ars by Cajar’s attorney, Jensen reenacts the vehicle search at a local tow yard. Jensen later texted (PDF) a local Pueblo County prosecutor telling her that the video was staged. That prosecutor then alerted her superiors, and charges against Cajar were dropped.

• The elders’ council or khap pranchayat of a predominantly Muslim village, Madora, have set the fine as large as 21,000 rupees (around $330) on those who break the ruling.

• Organisers said the event will “highlight the voices of people on the frontlines of resistance – many of them persecuted and exiled – as well as address challenges faced by activists and freethinkers, elaborate on the links between democratic politics and free expression and conscience, promote secular and rights-based alternatives, and establish priorities for collective action.”

• A 10-year-old boy has been killed and five other people wounded after a mob attacked a police station in an attempt to lynch a Hindu man charged with blasphemy in south-west Pakistan, officials said. It was the third major vigilante attack linked to accusations of insulting Islam in less than a month, as law enforcement agencies struggle to deal with a surge in violence.

• Support for female genital mutilation is high. Some 70 per cent of men, and more than half of women, approve of the practice.

• The cradle of Islamic civilization is rooted in tribalism, and in many tribal communities a woman’s anatomy is viewed through the periscope of reproduction, service, and control. Contained sexuality, including through FGM, is designed to limit a woman’s sexual experience to the framework of marriage and reproduction. Destroying the clitoris means destroying a woman’s ability to fully experience and enjoy sex, including using that experience to communicate her desire and enjoyment even with her husband. She exists simply for reproductive purposes or to service the needs of her husband. What it comes down to is control; it is much easier to control someone who cannot feel. This is not acceptable. We must all stand up for the right of women in all societies to fully develop all aspects of their being.

• Sumbal’s family as well as the entire Christian community in the town now live in constant fear that Ahmed could involve the family or another community member in a false case of blasphemy, a routine occurrence used against minorities in Pakistan for settling personal scores.

• He said the Brotherhood is engaged in a fight for its life, playing all its cards – including using financial support from Turkey and Qatar and the Brotherhood lobby in America – to avoid being designated as a terror organization.

• AIMPLB was forced to take this stand in the face of searing criticism from different quarters for not ending a regressive practice like triple talaq. It wants to save its credibility. So, it asks for a social boycott of people divorcing wives through pronouncement of triple talaq in a single sitting. The decision to ask for social boycott is a slap in their face as it proves that the practice is despicable. But still they don’t want to dispense with it, perpetuating misogyny in the name of religion.

• In the world of law enforcement, there’s very little more ridiculous than police unions. That’s the unfortunate side effect of feeling compelled to defend every “bad apple,” no matter how rotten they are. The Cleveland police union has reached the apotheosis of law enforcement spin — this time taking the form of a lawsuit that looks like a punchline.

• A statute aimed at suppressing protests against oil and gas pipelines has been signed into law in Oklahoma, as a related bill advances through the state legislature. The two bills are part of a nationwide trend in anti-protest laws meant to significantly increase legal penalties for civil disobedience. The Oklahoma law signed this week is unique, however, in its broad targeting of groups “conspiring” with protesters accused of trespassing. It takes aim at environmental organizations Republicans have blamed for anti-pipeline protests that have become costly for local governments.

• The statute Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin approved Wednesday was rushed into immediate effect under a provision that declared the situation “an emergency.” It will dramatically increase penalties against protesters who trespass on property containing a “critical infrastructure facility.”

• As he sat in a darkened corner of a neighborhood bar, Aaron Gach, an artist and lecturer at a local art college, told Ars about what happened to him in February 2017 episode at San Francisco International Airport, where he agreed to unlock his iPhone and have it be searched by border agents rather than risk being detained and delayed further.

• [...]

• After he unlocked his iPhone SE, agents took it out of sight for five to 10 minutes before giving it back and sending him on his way. Gach still has no idea why.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The debate over net neutrality has always been much more than a technocratic squabble over controlling Internet pipes. What it’s really about is a far larger power struggle over access to information and people’s rights to express themselves politically and creatively. It’s also about the government’s role in ensuring a level playing field and preventing corporate monopolies from abusing a socially vital infrastructure.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The right of farmers to use, exchange and sell farm-saved seeds should be ensured through national laws and a revision of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), so the objectives of another United Nations international treaty on plant genetic resources can be fulfilled, a recent research paper states.

• The South Centre recently published a research paper [pdf] entitled, “Implementing farmers’ rights relating to seeds,” authored by Carlos Correa, special advisor on trade and intellectual property at the intergovernmental South Centre.

Trademarks

• We see all kinds of dumb and frustrating examples of trademark bullying here at Techdirt. From questionable claims of infringement entirely, to the over-policing of broad or generic terms that never should have been granted trademark protection to begin with, to vice-like licensing terms that appear to be designed more to put licensees out of business rather than building any kind of long-term business model out of trademark rights. That said, at least in most of these stories the offending party has the trademark its bullying with. That may not be the case when it comes to Worldwide Entertainment Group Inc., which is being sued by a Coatian festival promoter after being milked over a trademark the promoter says Worldwide doesn’t actually have.

Copyrights

• The copyright industry has been pushing for tougher penalties since at least 1905, and against access for the public to culture and knowledge since at least 1849, when they opposed public libraries in the UK. The message from this industry has been remarkably consistent. However, the actions of this industry are as consistently hypocritical as that lobbying message. Here are some of the worst recent examples

• With an overview of the infringements, the hosting provider can choose to limit the sharing permissions of users, or terminate their accounts if warranted.

• This is an important decision that sends an important message to the licensees and Njord Law that the rule of law can not be set aside in their eagerness to deal with illegal file-sharing.

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