● 05.24.17

● Links 24/5/2017: New RHEL Beta, SteamOS Updated

Posted in News Roundup at 3:13 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• I haven’t done any extensive testing, but then, how much testing is really needed to run a bunch of Web apps. The whole idea is to have this cloud-based operating system, with easy, flexible access to your data anywhere you go. So if you judge this from the perspective of a typical desktop, you miss the point.

• But that is the point. When I install something on a desktop-like form factor, I expect its behavior to match. CloudReady takes you away from that experience, and the transition is not comfortable. You feel very limited. This makes a lot of sense for schools, for instance, where you do want to lock down the devices, and make them simple for reuse. In a home setup, why would you go for just cloud, when you can have that plus any which desktop application on a typical system? After all, nothing prevents you from launching a browser and using Google applications, side by side with your desktop stuff. It’s the same thing.

• The notion of reviving old hardware is a bit of a wishful thinking. My eeePC test shows that it gets completely crippled when you run HD content in either Firefox or Chrome. An operating system based on Chromium OS will not drastically change that. It cannot do that. Maybe you will have better performance than having Windows there, the same way I opted for a Linux setup on the Asus netbook, but there are physical limits to what old hardware can accomplish.

• And then, there’s the whole question of cloud … Most people might be comfy with this, after having used smartphones for a while, but I don’t think this is anything novel or mindblowing. CloudReady works as advertised, it’s a very cool concept, but ultimately, it gives you a browser on steroids. Google and Neverware have their own agenda for doing this, but for home users, there really isn’t any added value in transforming their keyboard-and-mouse box into a browsing portal. So if you ask me, am I ready for the cloud, the answer is, only when it becomes sophisticated enough to match my productivity and freedom of creativity. And for you, do you want a simple, locked down, secure and entirely Google machine that isn’t a mobile phone or a dedicated piece of hardware? The answer is 42.

Server

• Large cloud services providers such as Amazon, Google, Baidu, and Tencent have reinvented the way in which IT services can be delivered, with capabilities that go beyond scale in terms of sheer size to also include scale as it pertains to speed and agility. That’s put traditional carriers on notice: John Donovan, chief strategy officer and group president at AT&T technology and operations, for instance, said last year that AT&T wants to be the “most aggressive IT company in the world.” He noted that in a world where over-the-top (OTT) offerings have become commonplace, application and services development can no longer be defined by legacy processes.

• The announcement reflects how rapidly artificial intelligence is transforming Google itself, and it is the surest sign yet that the company plans to lead the development of every relevant aspect of software and hardware.

• Perhaps most importantly, for those working in machine learning at least, the new processor not only executes at blistering speed, it can also be trained incredibly efficiently. Called the Cloud Tensor Processing Unit, the chip is named after Google’s open-source TensorFlow machine-learning framework.

• This week, the matter will be settled once and for all. Ke Jie and AlphaGo will face off in a three-game match in Wuzhen, China, as part of the Future of Go Summit being held by Google.

• Virtualization has been a blessing for data centers – thanks to the humble hypervisor, we can create, move and rearrange computers on a whim, without thinking about the physical infrastructure.

• The simplicity and efficiency of VMs has prompted network engineers to envision a programmable, flexible network based on open protocols and REST APIs that could be managed from a single interface, without worrying about each router and switch.

• Amazon has 14 leadership principles and integrity is not on it.

• The estate of bankrupt US trade school ITT Technical Institutes is today asking a court to stop Microsoft from erasing its cloud data.

• In a filing [PDF] to the US District Bankruptcy Court of Southern Indiana, the caretakers of the defunct for-profit university seek an order to bar the Redmond giant from wiping the contents of ITT’s Office 365 and webmail accounts for students, faculty, and administrators.

• Kubernetes, the cluster manager for containerized workloads, is a hit. With the Big K doing the heavy lifting in load balancing and job management, you can turn your attention to other matters.

• But like nearly every open source project, it’s a work in progress, and almost everyone who works with Kubernetes will find shortcomings, rough spots, and annoyances. Here are four projects that lighten the load that comes with administering a Kubernetes cluster.

• Skyport Systems is a security vendor that first emerged from stealth three years ago in May 2015 and has raised $67 million in venture funding to date. The core promise behind Skyport is secure hardware attestation, with the company’s SkySecure server hardware platform.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Josh and Kurt have a guest! Mike Paquette from Elastic discusses the fundamentals and basics of Machine Learning. We also discuss how ML could have helped with WannaCry.

Kernel Space

• Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the availability of yet another maintenance update to the Linux 3.18 kernel series despite it remaining marked as [EOL] End-of-Life on the kernel.org website.

• Heterogenous memory management (HMM) allows a device’s driver to mirror the address space for a process under its own memory management. As Red Hat developer Jérôme Glisse explains, this makes it easier for hardware devices like GPUs to directly access the memory of a process without the extra overhead of copying anything. It also doesn’t violate the memory protection features afforded by modern OSes.

• Ever since the mass adoption of Agile development techniques and devops philosophies that attempt to eradication organizational silos, there’s been a welcome discussion on how to optimize development for continuous delivery on a massive scale. Some of the better known adages that have taken root as a result of this shift include “deploy in production after checking in code” (feasible due to the rigorous upfront testing required in this model), “infrastructure as code”, and a host of others that, taken out of context, would lead one down the path of chaos and mayhem. Indeed, the shift towards devops and agile methodologies and away from “waterfall” has led to a much needed evaluation of all processes around product and service delivery that were taken as a given in the very recent past.

• The developers behind the Rust-based Redox operating system continue working on the “TFS” file-system that they hope will compete with the long-standing ZFS file-system, but TFS isn’t being tied to just Redox OS.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman informed the Linux community about the release and immediate availability of the seventeenth maintenance update to the Linux 4.10 kernel series, which also marked the end of life.

• Where does The Linux Foundation believe ones time is well spent to catapult their career objectives? It is fairly apparent after reaching out to Clyde Seepersad, General Manager Training and Certification of The Linux Foundation, the cloud is the place to be. When communicating with him on a variety of topics that revolve around The Linux Foundation’s certification offerings and education, the central point of focus is the cloud. Clyde provided us with a slew of information about The Linux Foundation’s efforts to make sure FLOSS continues to succeed for the foreseeable future.

• The Linux Foundation offers many resources for developers, users, and administrators of Linux systems. One of the most important offerings is its Linux Certification Program, which is designed to give you a way to differentiate yourself in a job market that’s hungry for your skills.

• Logitech has provided firmware updates, but not for “unsupported” platforms like Linux. Hughes has filled that gap by getting documentation and a fixed firmware image from Logitech and adding support for these devices to fwupd. He is now looking for testers to ensure that the whole thing works across all devices. This is important work that is well worth supporting.

• This gave an attacker with $15 of hardware the ability to basically take over remote PCs within wireless range, which could be up to 50m away. This makes sitting in a café quite a dangerous thing to do when any affected hardware is inserted, which for the unifying dongle is quite likely as it’s explicitly designed to remain in an empty USB socket. The main manufacturer of these devices is Logitech, but the hardware is also supplied to other OEMs such as Amazon, Microsoft, Lenovo and Dell where they are re-badged or renamed. I don’t think anybody knows the real total, but by my estimations there must be tens of millions of affected-and-unpatched devices being used every day.

• Linux, in keeping with Unix traditions, doesn’t have a comprehensive systems management API. Instead, management is done through a variety of special-purpose tools and APIs, all with their own conventions and idiosyncrasies. That makes scripting even simple systems-management tasks difficult and brittle.

Graphics Stack

• While Ubuntu 17.04 “Zesty Zapus” was just released one month ago, by upgrading the Linux kernel and Mesa you can already score measurable performance advantages if you are using AMD Radeon graphics.

• Collabora’s Emil Velikov announced earlier that the first point release of the recently launched Mesa 17.1 3D Graphics Library is being prepared this week for GNU/Linux distributions.

Applications

• Linfo is a free and open source, cross-platform server statistics UI/library which displays a great deal of system information. It is extensible, easy-to-use (via composer) PHP5 library to get extensive system statistics programmatically from your PHP application. It’s a Ncurses CLI view of Web UI, which works in Linux, Windows, *BSD, Darwin/Mac OSX, Solaris, and Minix.

• These days, EasyTag seems to be my go-to tag editor. While I can’t claim to have tried them all, I have mostly stopped looking now that I have this one. Generally speaking, I like its three-panel layout: file system directory on the left; selected tracks in the middle, showing file name and tags; and specific tags and cover image on the right.

• Simple Scan is one of my personal favourite and perhaps even one of the “essential” apps on the Linux desktop for me. It does what it says on the tin: it’s simple and it scans, with a nice preview system and enough options to be decently functional. Some new designs for the app have emerged and they are looking quite nice indeed.

• GNOME UX designer and Red Hat Desktop Team Member, Allan Day, showed the new mockup designs off in his blog post. Simple Scan has a pretty sparse and simplistic interface already, and I mean that in a positive way, but Allan believes that “just because it’s great, doesn’t mean it can’t be improved” and that most of the improvements are simply “refinements”, rather than major overhauls, in order to make some of the app’s functions a bit easier to discover and navigate.

• A while ago, we have written about Ulauncher which is used to launch application quickly. Today we came up with similar kind of utility called Albert which is doing the same job and have some additional unique features which is not there in ulauncher.

• In fact, for the desktop, VLC is much more than just a tool to play videos stored on your hard drive! So, stay with me for a tour of the lesser known features of that great software.

• Remote desktop apps are a very useful group of apps because they allow access to a computer anywhere in the world. While the simplest way to do this is via a terminal, if you don’t want to have to type commands but rather want a more advanced way to access a remote computer, here are five of the best remote desktop apps for Linux.

• Solus Project founder and lead developer Ikey Doherty is today announcing the release and immediate availability of the Brisk Menu 0.4.0 application menu for Solus and other supported GNU/Linux distributions.

• OpenShot developer Jonathan Thomas is announcing the release and immediate availability of the third maintenance update to the OpenShot 2.3 stable series of the open-source and cross-platform non-linear video editor.

• NetworkManager is the default service in Fedora for interfacing with the low level networking in the Kernel. It was created to provide a high-level interface for initializing and configuring networking on a system without shell scripts. Over the past few Fedora releases, the NetworkManager developers have put in a lot of effort to make it even better. This article covers some of the major improvements that have been implemented in NetworkManager over the past few Fedora releases.

• Developers of the popular Kodi plug-in Navi-X have pulled the plug on further development, citing the “current legal climate” around its work.

• The developers of the plugin, which first appeared a decade ago, state that they’re no longer able to host Navi-X programme guides:

• ​Once upon a time, there used to be a very popular app called Stormcloud. And then it was no more. With the developer citing a range of issues including issues with the Yahoo API being used and the lack of time on the part of the developer. Some folks in the Linux community tried resurrecting it by creating a fork called Typhoon. And unfortunately, once again, that did not last for a long time. Now another developer by name Daryl Bennett with the aid of the original developer of Stormcloud has resurrected the app, and now it is called Cumulus.

• Streamlink is a command line streaming utility that allows you to watch online video streams in popular media players, such as VLC, MPlayer, MPlayer2, MPC-HC, mpv, Daum Pot Player, QuickTime, and OMXPlayer etc. It is written using Python programming language, and was forked from LiveStreamer, which is no longer maintained. Streamlink currently supports popular live video streaming services, such as YouTube, Dailymotion, Livestream, Twitch, UStream, and many more. Streamlink is built upon a plugin system which allows support for new services to be easily added. A full list of plugins currently included can be found on the Plugins page. Streamlink supports GNU/Linux, *BSDs, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X.

• Having ebooks is really a good thing. It can be read anywhere, you get free from the hassle of storage and many more benefits. But it creates a problem when you got an enormous number of ebooks also in various formats. You will have the problem of searching perfect ebook you want to read at a time, you have to maintain various kind of software for every format and much more.

Proprietary

• FontBase is a cross-platform font manager with a beautifully designed UI and a well-organized panel layout. It is free and just as fast, stable, and reliable as several paid apps in its category.

Instructionals/Technical

• ​Dnscrypt is a protocol that is used to improve DNS security by authenticating communications between a DNS client and a DNS resolver. DNSCrypt prevents DNS spoofing. It uses cryptographic signatures to verify that responses originate from the chosen DNS resolver and haven’t been tampered with. DNSCrypt is available for multi-platforms including Windows, MacOS, Unix, Android, iOS, Linux and even routers.

• One problem that I used to have is to hide two main windows such as Toolbox-Tool Options Layer Brushes, that make my GIMP seems with no accessible icons on it.

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine Staging team announced the release of version 2.8 of the open-source compatibility layer for running Windows programs on top of Linux-based operating systems.

Games

• Total War: Shogun 2 is a strategy game set in feudal Japan during the 16th century. Japan is fractured into multiple clans, each fighting for power. Your task is to lead one of these clans and eventually become the new shogun of Japan. While Fall of the Samurai is set 400 years later in the 19th century.

• Valve haven’t been sitting on their hands, as they have pushed out a fresh update for SteamOS that’s currently in Beta. It’s been a while and it’s a good one.

• Valve has pushed the SteamOS 2.115 update to brewmaster_beta after a long wait and called it a huge update. This release is based on the new Debian 8.8 and comes with all the security patches. Linux kernel has been updated to version 4.11 and a switch has been made from AMDGPU-PRO driver to the open source mesa driver.

• Good news for Mac and Linux fans: Dawn of War III is headed your way. Lead your troops and eradicate the Eldar and Ork scum in the name of the God Emperor (or vice-versa). The releases are set to come out June 8th.

• Turn-based strategy fans will be happy to learn that Feral Interactive, the UK-based video games publisher, has announced that it’s porting the Total War: SHOGUN 2 and Total War: Shogun 2 – Fall of the Samurai titles to Linux and SteamOS platforms.

• Launched on March 15, 2011, Total War: SHOGUN 2 is a turn-based strategy (TBS) game with real-time tactics developed by The Creative Assembly and published by Sega. The action is set in the middle of the 16th century in Feudal Japan and features enhanced full 3D battles that take place both on land and at sea.

• Reus [Steam, Official Site] landed on Linux in some form of Beta quite some time ago, but the game has been updated today to bring it in line with the Windows version with official support.

• Two Worlds II Call of the Tenebrae is a new DLC & Standalone game coming to Two Worlds II along with full Linux support, but sadly the release date has slipped for everyone. They also seem to be having issues with the Linux version.

• While we knew Two Worlds II and the new DLC was coming to Linux, I’ve only just noticed that there will be a standalone version too. They claim you don’t need to have played any of Two Worlds II to enjoy it, which is why it will have a standalone version too.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In KDE we cover a mix of platforms and form factors that make our technology very powerful. But how to reach so many different systems while maintaining high quality on all of them?

• Today I streamed the first half of the Plasma 5.11 wallpaper production, and it was an interesting experience. The video above is the abridged version sped up ~20x, heavily edited to the actual creation, and should be a fun watch for the interested.

• The second version (0.4.90) towards Simon 0.5.0 is out in the wilds. Please download the source code, test it and send us feedback.

• Not only, but to a large extent I worked in the last few months on foundational improvements to KWin’s DRM backend, which is a central building block of KWin’s Wayland session. The idea in the beginninng was to directly expand upon my past Atomic Mode Setting (AMS) work from last year. We’re talking about direct scanout of graphic buffers for fullscreen applications and later layered compositing. Indeed this was my Season of KDE project with Martin Flöser as my mentor, but in the end relative to the initial goal it was unsuccessful.

• Once again a lot has been going on behind the scenes since the last release. The HTML gallery tool is back, database shrinking (e.g. purging stale thumbnails) is also supported on MySQL, grouping has been improved and additional sidecars can now be specified. Therefore the release of 5.6.0 will be (is already) delayed, as we would like to invite you to test all these features. As usual they are available in the pre-release bundles or obviously directly from the git repository. Please report any dysfunctions, unexpected behaviour or suggestions for improvement to our bug tracker.

• On my last blog post I discussed about how some assumptions such as the platform developed on can affect our development. We need to minimize it by empowering the developers with good tools so that they can develop properly. To that end, I introduced runtimes in our IDE to abstract platforms (much like on Gnome’s Builder or Qt Creator).

• The Akademy programme (saturday, sunday) is actually pretty long; the conference days stretch into feels-like-evening to me. Of course, the Dutch are infamous for being “6pm at the dinner table, and eat potatoes” so my notion of evening may not match what works on the Mediterranean coast. Actually, I know it doesn’t since way back when at a Ubuntu Developer Summit in Sevilla it took some internal-clock-resetting to adjust to dinner closer to midnight than 18:00.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Coming about two weeks after the release of Black Lab Enterprise Linux 11, which is based on the Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system using the HWE (hardware enablement) kernel from Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), Black Lab Enterprise Linux 11.0.1 appears to be an unexpected maintenance update addressing a few important issues reported by users lately.

• My approach to development can often differ from my peers. I prefer to spend the early phase of a cycle doing lots of prototypes of various features we plan to implement. That allows me to have the confidence necessary to know early in the cycle what I can finish and where to ask for help.

• Meson is definitely getting more traction in GNOME (and other projects), with many components adding support for it in parallel to autotools, or outright switching to it. There are still bugs, here and there, and we definitely need to improve build environments — like Continuous — to support Meson out of the box, but all in all I’m really happy about not having to deal with autotools any more, as well as being able to build the G* stack much more quickly when doing continuous integration.

Distributions

• More popular versions of Linux such as Ubuntu focus on enhancing the user experience by automatically updating packages and providing flashy, resource-heavy GUIs.

• While user-friendly distributions (distros) certainly have their place, in this guide, we’ve tried to get back to the glory days when developers would customise their Linux build. These Linux distros allow you to fine-tune your development environment so whether you’re a veteran programmer or relative newcomer, you can get on with your coding.

• In short, whatever your programming preferences, you’ll find a distro to suit your needs in this top 10 roundup.

• Conventional security measures like antivirus programs are behind the curve when it comes to modern hackers and malware. Unfortunately, antivirus software and firewalls give users a false sense of security. In reality, new threats are being developed and unleashed into the wild every single day, and even the best antivirus programs have to play catchup.

• Recent ransomware attacks (aka. WannaCry) have targeted Windows-based PCs in over 150 countries – cyber security and privacy is incredibly important. Windows and macOS are easy to use and popular; however, they are much more susceptible to malicious code.

• Linux is free and open source, which means there are hundreds of “flavors.” These individual distributions are tweaked to different specifications. Security-focused users will be pleased to know that there are a number of Linux distros designed with security and privacy in mind.

• Linux distributions geared toward casual desktop users are important, but developers also need to use Linux. Developers have different needs than other users, so certain distributions can be better than others for development purposes. But which distros are well suited for developers?

Reviews

• ​Depth/Deepin OS is not just another Linux Distro, but one with something new to show. Deepin OS is simply speaking, just beautiful. Deepin OS, formerly known as Deepin, Linux Deepin, and Hiweed GNU/Linux is a Linux distro with an identity crisis. Seriously, this distro has undergone name changes you always have to check twice if the name is still the same. And that is all the negative you are going to say about this distro. Honestly speaking, Deepin OS is surely going to blow you away. I have been keeping an eye on this distro since 2013 and it still manages to impress me.

• Libre OS USB is not yet released to the public as it needs crowd-funding to be released on a larger scale and keep it maintained. Once released Libre OS USB will be completely free for everyone and will release a new version on every Long Term Support version of Ubuntu. Furthermore, intermediate versions on every Ubuntu release will also be made available to the public.

New Releases

• The development team behind the Parrot Security OS announced the official availability of the 3.6 release, a maintenance update that focuses on reliability and stability of the security-oriented operating system for ethical hacking.

• Parrot Security OS 3.6 has been in development for the past two and a half months, and while it may not introduce any major new features, it attempts to improve the build platform and various key components of the operating system to make it better, more reliable and less resource hungry.

• 4MLinux developer and founder Zbigniew Konojacki‏ is informing Softpedia today about the release and immediate availability for download of the Beta version of the upcoming 4MParted 22.0 open-source disk partitioning live OS.

• 4MParted is a freely distributed live system that users can deploy on a USB flash drive or CD/DVD disc and use it independently of the operating system installed on a personal computer to manipulate partitions. The Beta release of the upcoming 4MParted 22.0 version is based on 4MLinux 22.0 and GParted 0.28.1.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• ROSA is a desktop distribution that was originally forked from Mandriva Linux, but now is independently developed. While the company which produces ROSA is based in Russia, the distribution includes complete translations for multiple languages. The ROSA desktop distribution is designed to be easy to use and includes a range of popular applications and multimedia support. ROSA R9 is available in two editions, one featuring the KDE 4 desktop and the second featuring the KDE Plasma 5 desktop. These editions are scheduled to receive four years of support and security updates.

• I decided to download the Plasma edition of ROSA R9 and found the installation media to be approximately 2GB in size. Booting from the ROSA disc brings up a menu asking if we would like to load the distribution’s live desktop environment or begin the installation process. Taking the live option brings up a graphical wizard that asks us a few questions. We are asked to select our preferred language from a list and accept the project’s warranty and license. We are then asked to select our time zone and keyboard layout from lists. With these steps completed, the wizard disappears and the Plasma 5.9 desktop loads.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• The conference program is impressive and if you can make it, you should consider stopping by.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat on Tuesday announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 beta.

• RHEL 7.4 includes new security and compliance features and streamlined automation, along with tools for improved systems administration.

• This latest upgrade comes nearly three years into the series 7 lifecycle. It continues to provide enterprises with a rich and stable foundation for both existing applications and a new generation of workloads and solutions.

• There is a common misconception that companies can’t make money from open source solutions, such as Linux. While a company like Canonical — maker of Ubuntu — is in a state of confusion, Red Hat continues to see success in the enterprise. The company is quite profitable with is popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system, serving as a great example for the open source community.

• Today, Red Hat announces that RHEL 7.4 has achieved Beta status. The pre-release version of the distribution is available immediately, and administrators can begin testing now. The company promises many security additions including Network Bound Disk Encryption and OpenSSL HTTP/2.0 enhancements.

• Updated to version 3.10.0-614.10.2.lve1.4.48, the new CloudLinux 7 kernel can be downloaded from the updates-testing repository, and it looks like it adds a fix for a security issue (CVE-2017-7895) that was patched upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 series of operating systems, among other supported releases that were also affected.

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

• The project is named “Debuerreotype” as an homage to the photography roots of the word “snapshot” and the daguerreotype process which was an early method of taking photographs. The essential goal is to create “photographs” of a minimal Debian rootfs, so the name seemed appropriate (even if it’s a bit on the “mouthful” side).

Derivatives

• Untangle NG Firewall, the open-source and powerful Debian-based network security platform featuring pluggable modules for network apps, has been updated to version 13.0, a major release adding new features and numerous improvements.

• The biggest improvement brought by the Untangle NG Firewall 13.0 release is to the poor latency generated by excess buffering in networking equipment, called bufferbloat, by supporting a queueing algorithm designed to optimize QoS and bandwidth to enforce a controlled delay.

• The Debian-based Parsix distribution has announced that it will be shutting down six months after the Debian “Stretch” release.

• If you want to keep the government and other people out of your business when surfing the web, Tails is an excellent choice. The Linux-based operating system exists solely for privacy purposes. It is designed to run from read-only media such as a DVD, so that there are limited possibilities of leaving a trail. Of course, even though it isn’t ideal, you can run it from a USB flash drive too, as optical drives have largely fallen out of favor with consumers.

• Today, Tails achieves an important milestone. Version 3.0 reaches RC status — meaning the first release candidate (RC1). In other words, it may soon be ready for a stable release — if testing confirms as much. If you want to test it and provide feedback, you can download the ISO now.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• After patching six vulnerabilities in the kernel packages of the Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system, Canonical also updated the kernels of the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr).

• Only the kernel packages of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 16.04.1 LTS releases received the most attention in this new update, addressing a stack-based buffer overflow (CVE-2017-7187) issue discovered by Dmitry Vyukov in Linux kernel’s generic SCSI (sg) subsystem, which lets local attackers that had access to an sg device to crash the affected system or execute random code.

• The NHS could be considering switching its software infrastructure from Windows to Ubuntu, after Windows XP vulnerabilities were exploited in the recent cyber attack that crippled the National Health Service. Or is it just an elaborate gag?

• Intel has launched its “Euclid” robotics compute module, which runs Ubuntu on an Atom x7-Z8700, and offers a RealSense 3D cam, WiFi, and sensors.

• When Intel demonstrated its Intel Euclid robotics controller at last August’s Intel Developer Conference, the company gave no indication of its release date or even if it would be more than a proof of concept. The candy-bar sized module is now available for order as part of a $399 Intel Euclid Development Kit, with shipments due by the end of the month. A Euclid community site has gone live with tutorials and documentation.

• In October 2004 the first Ubuntu release, Ubuntu 4.10, debuted. Codenamed Warty Warthog because it was rough around the edges, Ubuntu 4.10 inaugurated a tradition of releasing new version of Ubuntu each April and October that Canonical has maintained up to the present — with the exception of Ubuntu 6.06, which came out a couple of months late in 2006.

• Ubuntu 4.04 launched six months after Mark Shuttleworth first met with Debian developers to discuss the creation of a new, Debian-based Linux distribution that would emphasize ease-of-use, regular release cycles, accessibility and internationalization.

• Last week, when Canonical published new kernel updates for all of its supported Ubuntu Linux releases, they also pushed a new kernel live patch to users of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system using the Canonical Livepatch Service.

• Canonical decided to drop Unity in favor of GNOME, which is probably not the best decision. I think that it’s probably a mistake, but it was also an unavoidable move for the company.

• People have to keep in mind that Ubuntu for desktop was never profitable, and it’s easy to see why. There are very few ways to monetize a free operating system. The only way to get some money out of it is to provide specialized support for companies, but that’s also not a really profitable avenue.

• Many of us are wondering what to expect from Ubuntu 17.10 when it’s released later this year.

• Mark Shuttleworth’s announcement that Ubuntu is dropping Unity and returning to GNOME was short, sharp and shocking. It left us all asking questions about the future of Ubuntu desktop as a whole.

Flavours and Variants

• Ubuntu MATE 17.04 32-bit Live left an ambiguous impression on me.

• It was fast and responsive on a high-spec laptop. Felt relatively solid. Set of default applications was good. Multimedia playback caused no issues.

• However, small bugs here and there were quite annoying: frozen screen after the Keyboard icon click, no search in the menu, issues with the search in the default software management tool, issues with keyboard layout setup. And the memory usage is simply frightening.

• All these are not something you would expect from a newly-released distribution in 2017.

• ​Over the years, Lubuntu and Xubuntu have been two popular flavors that have provided an alternative to a lot of folks who have preferred something other than vanilla Ubuntu with the Unity desktop. Lubuntu and Xubuntu have been the choice of Linux enthusiasts and users who would rather have a lean or lightweight Linux distro or one that will provide the best performance on an old desktop or laptop. But how do these two distros compare, which one would I recommend and why? Let’s read along as I weigh the strengths and weaknesses of these two awesome Ubuntu flavors.

Devices/Embedded

• Arduino is prepping a “LoRa Gateway Kit” to bring LoRa wireless to its Linux-driven Arduino Tian, plus a “LoRa Node Kit” for the Arduino Primo.

• At the Maker Faire Bay Area, Arduino showcased its new Arduino LoRa Gateway and LoRa Node shields that run on Arduino boards. Due to arrive later this year, the boards will be offered in a LoRa Gateway Shield Kit for the Linino Linux-enabled Arduino Tian, and a LoRa Node Shield Kit designed for the Arduino Primo or other Arduinos with at least 32KB of flash.

• Asus has released a new version of their TinkerOS Android distribution for the Asus Tinker Board. It’s still powered by Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow running on a 3.10.0 kernel. But unlike the previous release, Android 13.11.0.4 is not classed as a beta release. The release seems pretty stable.

• The TinkerOS Android release offers a few notable improvements including some handy bug fixes. The previous Android image produced fuzzy text on some HDMI monitors. The only way to obtain sharp text was to reset the HDMI resolution after each boot. This issue is fixed in the new release. The release also fixes a volume consistent issue in the setting and notification bar.

• The COM Express Compact Type 6 “MSC C6C-AL” taps Intel’s Apollo Lake and offers up to 16GB DDR3L, microSD and optional eMMC, plus support for 5x PCIe slots.

• If you’re a homeschool parent or a teacher with a limited budget, Internet-in-a-Box might be just what you’ve been looking for. Its hardware requirements are very modest—a Raspberry Pi 3, a 64GB microSD card, and a power supply—but it provides access to a wealth of educational resources, even to students without internet access in the most remote areas of the world.

• The Squeezebox Touch provided a family-friendly interface to access our music library, either directly on the device or via a range of mobile applications. Logitech discontinued its development in 2012, but I was happy as they open sourced the Squeezebox’s server software as Logitech Media Server and supplied the open source code used on the physical Squeezebox devices.

• PIC32 uses the MIPS32 instruction set. Since MIPS has been around for a very long time, and since the architecture was prominent in workstations, servers and even games consoles in the late 1980s and 1990s, remaining in widespread use in more constrained products such as routers as this century has progressed, the GNU toolchain (GCC, binutils) has had a long time to comfortably support MIPS. Although the computer you are using is not particularly likely to be MIPS-based, cross-compiling versions of these tools can be built to run on, say, x86 or x86-64 while generating MIPS32 executable programs.

• As long as you keep your expectations in check, it’s perfectly feasible to run the latest Raspberry Pi as a desktop computer.

• However, the base Raspberry Pi 3 is a bare bones board, so anyone wanting to set it up as a desktop PC will need to buy their own case and other add-ons.

• Lime Micro has launched three open source “LimeNET” SDR systems that run Ubuntu Core on Intel Core CPUs, including one with a new LimeSDR QPCIe board.

• Lime Microsystems has gone to Crowd Supply to launch three fully open source LimeNET computers for software defined radio (SDR) applications. The systems run Ubuntu “Snappy” Core Linux on Intel’s Core processors, enabling access to an open, community-based LimeSDR App Store using the Ubuntu Core snap packaging and update technology. The SDR processing is handled by three variations on last year’s open source LimeSDR board, which run Intel’s (Altera) Cyclone IV FPGA.

Phones

Tizen

• The Samsung Z4, the fourth smartphone in Samsung’s Z series and a successor to the Z2 (and not the Z3, as many would assume), has been formally announced and made an appearance at the Tizen Developer Conference (TDC 2017) this past week. The Z4 was rumoured to make its way to India on May 19th (Friday) and it did – arriving with offline retailers after launching in the country last Monday (one week ago).

• While Samsung has developed Tizen TV apps using JavaScript, You.i TV’s Engine Video app runs on Native Client (NACL), a web technology that does not only allows C++ applications to run in a standard browser but is said to be 24 times faster than JavaScript. Now that Samsung has approved You.i TV’s video engine platform, developers can craft more video content for Tizen Smart TV owners.

• Samsung Smart TV, powered by the intuitive, self-developed Tizen operating system, has gotten a cool new app which enables consumers to view the location of their friends, loved ones or even a pizza delivery or cable technician in real-time directly from their home’s largest screen. The new app is developed by Glympse, the leading real-time location services platform.

• Popular Drone manufacturer DJI has been making drones with some of the finest cameras in the industry used by both amateurs as well as professional cinematographers. Some of these Aerial content are turning out to be really impressive. However, the medium to consume this content so far has either been via phones/online. Now, DJI is experimenting with a new way to attract users towards its Drone business- DJI has now developed a Smart TV app which is like a YouTube of UAV videos.

• Samsung is staying busy these days. After rolling out the new value pack update for the Gear S3 worldwide last month, and now bringing Samsung Pay to UK Gear S3 users, Samsung is now rolling out another Gear S3 update for USA users. The new update brings quite a few new features, among them the option to add date and music complications to select watch faces, a new auto refresh for the Alti-Barometer, reminder date and times for S Voice, a TTS option in Settings with additional languages available for download, and an Auto Switch feature for the Gear S2, Gear S3, and Gear Fit2.

Android

• If your device is running Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow or above, you can now pimp it out with the latest Google O Pixel launcher. One of the contributors on the XDA Developers forum has recently posted the APK file, which you can install on your smartphone.

• Before you download the file, make sure your device can install apps that aren’t listed on the Play Store. To do so, open up the Settings menu, tap on Security, and enable the “Unknown sources” option. Once that’s done, all you have to do is download the file and then tap on it in the notification shade to install the launcher on your device.

• The best emojis on the market are no more: Google’s weird blobs are being retired in favour of more conventional circular yellow faces.

• The hottest tech-show ticket these days is Google I/O. In the just-finished 2017 conference, Google announced lots of great stuff, including a lightweight version of Android, Android Go; a first look at the next version of Android, Android O; and a major upgrade to Google Home. One thing that was noticeably missing, however: big news about Android apps on Chrome OS.

• After informing us about the availability of a new build of his RaspAnd Nougat operating system for Raspberry Pi 3 and 2 SBCs based on Android 7.1.2, Arne Exton released an updated RaspAnd Marshmallow 6 version.

• Android Go was announced during the opening keynote of the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View on Wednesday. Since the announcement, there has been a lot of confusion regarding the project – is it a new version of Android? Can Android Go devices run all Android apps, or only the apps that have been optimised for the Go experience? How will this impact OS updates for consumers, and what will developers need to do differently to optimise their apps for Android Go?

• Downloading massive files isn’t always convenient, especially if you don’t have great Internet. And unless you’ve still got an unlimited data plan, letting the download continue while you’re on the move without WiFi is just a bad idea. Google seems to agree, as Android O’s second developer preview now features a ‘pause download’ button.

• What Google wants to do with Android going forward is to separate the underlying Android operating system from the ‘Vendor interface’ that contains all the low-level software and drivers. This code modularity would allow Google to issue Android updates much faster to more devices, not just Nexus and Pixel phones.

• Google Fuchsia first saw the light of day in the summer of 2016 as an unannounced bit of code posted on GitHub. Now, in May 2017, the word is being spread by so many tech news outlets that we don’t have room to list them all.

• The Fuchsia demo app is called Armadillo, and you’re free to build it for yourself. We even found an article for you titled How to build Fuchsia Armadillo for Android in case you want to see how Fuchsia looks on your own Android phone or tablet.

Free Software/Open Source

• Nextcloud informs Softpedia today about the official availability of the final release of Nextcloud 12, a major milestone of the self-hosting cloud server technology that introduces numerous new features and improvements.

• The biggest new feature of the Nextcloud 12 release appears to be the introduction of a new architecture for massive scalability, called Global Scale, which is a next-generation open-source technology for syncing and sharing files. Global Scale increases scalability from tens of thousands of users to hundreds of millions on a single instance, while helping universities and other institutions significantly reduce the costs of their existing large installations.

• ReactOS 0.4.5 is a maintenance update that adds numerous changes and improvements over the previous point release. The kernel has been updated in this version to improve the FreeLoader and UEFI booting, as well as the Plug and Play modules, adding support for more computers to boot ReactOS without issues.

• AT&T has been the headliner in the carrier race to software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). But Sprint is putting its own stamp on the space this week with its debut of a new open source SDN/NFV mobile core solution.

• Google is not only one of the biggest contributors to the open source community but also has a strong track record of delivering open source tools and platforms that give birth to robust technology ecosystems. Just witness the momentum that Android and Kubernetes now have. Recently, Google launched a new home for its open source projects, processes, and initiatives. The site runs deep and has several avenues worth investigating. Here is a tour and some highlights worth noting.

• The app is called Smart Receipts, it’s licensed AGPL 3.0, and the source code is available on GitHub for Android and iOS.

• Open-sourcing is more than throwing code over the wall and hoping somebody uses it. I knew this in theory, but being part of the TensorFlow team at Google has opened my eyes to how many different elements you need to build a community around a piece of software.

• Internet relay chat (IRC) is one of the oldest chat protocols around and still popular in many open source communities. IRC’s best strengths are as a decentralized and open communication method, making it easy for anyone to participate by running a network of their own. There are also a variety of clients and bots available for IRC.

• Chef, a leading DevOps company, announced at ChefConf 2017 that it was adding new capabilities to it flagship Continous Automation/DevOps program, Chef Automate. This enables enterprises to transition from server- and virtual machine- (VM) based IT systems to cloud-native and container-first environments with consistent automation and DevOps practices.

• It’s not even been a year since Frank Karlitschek, co-founder and former CTO of ownCloud, forked ownCloud into Nextcloud. Since then, this do-it-yourself, open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud has become increasingly popular. Now, its latest version, Nextcloud 12, the program is adding more Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) features.

• More than a month later, the buzz over Mastodon has quieted. But though it may not be making headlines, the service continues to grow.

Events

• I’ve scheduled a public instance of my “Building and Using Shared Libraries on Linux” course to take place in Munich, Germany on 20 July 2017. This one-day course provides a thorough introduction to building and using shared libraries. covering topics such as: the basics of creating, installing, and using shared libraries; shared library versioning and naming conventions; the role of the dynamic linker; run-time symbol resolution; controlling symbol visibility; symbol versioning; preloading shared libraries; and dynamically loaded libraries (dlopen). The course format is a mixture of theory and practical.

• #AskLF, was created to broaden access to thought leaders, community organizers, and expertise within The Linux Foundation. While there are many opportunities to interact with staff at Linux Foundation global events, which bring together over 25,000 open source influencers, a live Twitter Q&A will give participants a direct line of communication to designated hosts.

• Just like organizations can build up technical debt, so too can they also build up something called “security debt,” if they don’t plan accordingly, attendees learned at the WomenWhoCode Connect event at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco last month.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• We’re deeply disheartened. Today’s FCC vote to repeal and replace net neutrality protections brings us one step closer to a closed internet. Although it is sometimes hard to describe the “real” impacts of these decisions, this one is easy: this decision leads to an internet that benefits Internet Service Providers (ISPs), not users, and erodes free speech, competition, innovation and user choice.

SaaS/Back End

• After six years as a formal project, OpenStack has survived numerous raids and famines and now finds itself in a not-too-weird space of being boring, on-premises infrastructure. That is, “boring” in the good way of focusing on what users want and fixing existing problems, only chasing shiny objects – cough, PaaS, cough, containers, cough, orchestration – as much as needed.

Databases

• Crate.io, the winner of our Disrupt Europe 2014 Battlefield, is launching version 2.0 of its CrateDB database today. The tool, which is available in both an open source and enterprise version, started out as a general-purpose but highly scalable SQL database. Over time, though, the team found that many of its customers were using the service for managing their machine data and, unsurprisingly, decided to focus its efforts on better supporting those clients.

• There’s a new open source database on the block. Although it has a name that will most likely make you cringe for the first dozen or so times you hear it — CockroachDB — I have a feeling that if it isn’t already on your radar, it will be soon.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• For the last five months, The Document Foundation has made use of OSS-Fuzz, Google’s effort to make open source software more secure and stable, to further improve the quality and reliability of LibreOffice’s source code. Developers have used the continuous and automated fuzzing process, which often catches issues just hours after they appear in the upstream code repository, to solve bugs – and potential security issues – before the next binary release.LibreOffice is the first free office suite in the marketplace to leverage Google’s OSS-Fuzz. The service, which is associated with other source code scanning tools such as Coverity, has been integrated into LibreOffice’s security processes – under Red Hat’s leadership – to significantly improve the quality of the source code.

• Margins specify the amount of space to leave between the edges of the page and the document text. You can define it for the left/inner, right/outer, top and bottom side individually. Page margins are defined by default at 0.79″ respectively 2cm on each side in LibreOffice Writer (located under Format > Page). These default values are under close scrutiny now.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• Overall an excellent book which is typical Michael W Lucas writing style. Easy to follow, clear cut instructions, and tons of new stuff to learn. If one must use OpenBSD or FreeBSD, then the chances are high that one will stick with the defaults that come with OpenBSD. No need to use fat Apache, or Nginx/Lighttpd web server especially when httpd and relayd audited for security by OpenBSD core team.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GNU Guix and GuixSD 0.13.0 releases are here about five months after the December 2016 launch of version 0.12.0, and it appears to be a major milestone implementing a few important changes. First off, this release can now be installed on computers powered by AArch64 (64-bit ARM) processors.

Public Services/Government

• Since Salehi joined the CIO team in 2015, the government has made great strides toward open sourcing its code. The Federal Source Code Policy, released in August 2016, was the first U.S. government policy to support open source across the government.

• The government of the autonomous region of Galicia (Spain) will continue to encourage the use of free and open source software solutions in the public and private sector. This week, the government published the ‘Free Software Plan 2017’, outlining 110 actions.

• In its ‘Plan de acción software libre 2017’, Galicia announces new initiatives to promote sharing and reuse of ICT solutions. The government is to share new software solutions, but will also emphasise the reuse of existing tools, pointing to Mancomún, the region’s software repository, the catalogue maintained by the Spanish central government’s Centre for Technology Transfer, and to the European Commission’s Joinup eGovernment portal.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• Countering the fake news threat has become a real challenge for social media platforms, which also serve as avenues of news dissemination along with the traditional media outlets.

Programming/Development

• The University of Chicago Law School, where Barack Obama taught constitutional law until making a slight career change, describes the Socratic method as an inquiry practice based on “asking continual questions until a contradiction was exposed, thus proving the fallacy of the initial assumption.” A catchier description, offered by this quick how-to for using the method with children, is “clarify, synthesize, restate.”

• Unless your spirit animal is Emily Dickinson, when you make a thing, you want to share it with the world. Sharing your work means that you need a website. Of course, you could simply partake in digital sharecropping and use any of the various social media sites to get your work in front of an audience. There sure are plenty to choose from… and not just “conventional” social media sites. With places like Artstation, Flickr, Soundcloud, and Wattpad, there’s an outlet for you, whatever your medium.

• It’s not uncommon to find yourself in a situation where you have an idea and you want to implement it in code exactly the way you are thinking about it in your mind. However, sometimes you have to compromise the idea to fit the code, instead of modeling the code to fit the idea. D supports several programming paradigms, including functional style, imperative, object oriented, metaprogramming, and concurrent (actor model), all harmoniously integrated. You have the option to choose whichever paradigm is convenient for modeling code to fit your idea.

• The elevent update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp landed on CRAN yesterday following the initial upload on the weekend, and the Debian package and Windows binaries should follow as usual. The 0.12.11 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, the 0.12.4 release in March, the 0.12.5 release in May, the 0.12.6 release in July, the 0.12.7 release in September, the 0.12.8 release in November, the 0.12.9 release in January, and the 0.12.10.release in March — making it the fifteenth release at the steady and predictable bi-montly release frequency.

• Haskell is a standardized, general-purpose, polymorphically statically typed, lazy, purely functional language, very different from many programming languages. Recent innovations include static polymorphic typing, higher-order functions, user-definable algebraic data types, a module system, and more. It has built-in concurrency and parallelism, debuggers, profilers, rich libraries and an active community, with approximately 5,400 third-party open source libraries and tools.

Standards/Consortia

• If we work together on a project based on open tech, these are the principles I will try to stick to. I wanted to put all this in one place, so I can pass it along to future software developers.

Leftovers

• Announced in April, the American Technology Council is comprised of federal officials who oversee technology-focused agencies, and it’s officially led by Chris Liddell, a White House aide who previously served as the chief financial officer at Microsoft. The initiative itself lives under the umbrella of Kushner’s Office of American Innovation, which aspires to cure longtime, unresolved government ills, such as the poor, aging technology in use at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

• An outfit called Arca Noae has released a new version of IBM’s venerable OS/2 operating system, named ArcaOS 5.0.

• The Register understands that Arca Noae has a licence from IBM to do a distribution of OS/2, the OS that Big Blue pitched against Windows 95 back in the day. OS/2′s fourth release was widely regarded as technically superior to Windows 95 and Windows NT but didn’t catch on because of a clunkier GUI and Microsoft’s hardball licensing tactics that made it commercially suicidal for PC-makers to offer the OS.

Health/Nutrition

• As for partner Warren Buffett, the man known by his fans as the Sage of Omaha, he called health-care costs "the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness" and claimed he "personally" supported a single-payer system.

Security

• WikiLeaks has published a new batch of the ongoing Vault 7 leak, detailing a spyware framework – which "provides remote beacon and loader capabilities on target computers" – allegedly being used by the CIA that works against every version of Microsoft’s Windows operating systems, from Windows XP to Windows 10.

• Critical tasks are often trusted to Linux or similar operating systems (Unix, BSD, etc.) because of reliability and security. When efficiency is required, Linux is often tapped because it can be deployed in a very efficient manner. Linux acts internally like the prison, not the food court. The system itself is constantly monitored open source code, and most of what runs on it is openly monitored as well. Software is usually distributed via secure repositories. The system is free and easily updated, there is no such thing as a pirated copy of Linux. There is a regular schedule of updates, they come out every Sunday.

• This weekend, a vulnerability in some versions of the Windows operating system resulted in the biggest cybersecurity attack in years. The so-called “WannaCry” malware relied on at least one exploit included in the latest Shadow Brokers release. As we have repeated, attacks like this are a clarion call for reform to the government’s Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP).

• Ransomware attacks are all the rage these days among hackers, and many people are worried about becoming victims. Are Linux users secure against such attacks?

• This topic came up recently in a thread on the Linux subreddit, and the folks there had some interesting thoughts to share about Linux and ransomware attacks.

• A few people have asked me over the past week whether or not Linux is susceptible to ransomware attacks. While the answer is fairly straight forward, let’s go over a couple things here first.

• We support the PATCH Act because it aims to codify and make the existing Vulnerabilities Equities Process more transparent. The Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP) is the U.S. government’s process for reviewing and coordinating the disclosure of new vulnerabilities learns about.

• Google is slowing down the process for publishing web applications to prevent a repeat of the phishing attack that abused users’ trust in its sign-in system with a fake Google Docs app.

• Google has warned web app developers that new rules and an additional risk assessment may add “some friction” to the process of publishing apps.

• Eight days ago, the WCry ransomware worm attacked more than 200,000 computers in 150 countries. The outbreak prompted infected hospitals to turn away patients and shut down computers in banks and telecoms. Now that researchers have had time to analyze the self-replicating attack, they’re learning details that shed new and sometimes surprising light on the world’s biggest ransomware attack.

• [...]

• Chief among the revelations: more than 97 percent of infections hit computers running Windows 7, according to attacks seen by antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. By contrast, infected Windows XP machines were practically non-existent, and those XP PCs that were compromised were likely manually infected by their owners for testing purposes. That’s according to Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research and Analysis Team, who spoke to Ars.

• Researchers have detected a new worm that is spreading via SMB, but unlike the worm component of the WannaCry ransomware, this one is using seven NSA tools instead of two.

• The worm’s existence first came to light on Wednesday, after it infected the SMB honeypot of Miroslav Stampar, member of the Croatian Government CERT, and creator of the sqlmap tool used for detecting and exploiting SQL injection flaws.

• The cool thing about all this virtual storage stuff is that the entire Windows application–files, applications, the works–are contained in one file. That file can easily be backed up, archived, encrypted and stored on the cloud, copied hundreds of times, or deleted. VirtualBox can even take snapshots of the virtual drive within the application, freeing you from any hassle of backing up virtual storage files yourself.

• In a survey for Reuters, BitSight found that 67 per cent of infected PCs it infected were running Windows 7, despite the OS being installed on fewer than half of Windows PCs worldwide.

• All connections except Updates to Microsoft blocked. Still connects to a range of ad servers. Yes advertising servers. Burnett confirms that all these calls are made by Windows 10, not by any apps.

• Weblate has started to use HackerOne Community Edition some time ago and I think it’s good to share my experience with that. Do you have open source project and want to get more attention of security community? This post will answer how it looks from perspective of pretty small project.

• I’ve applied with Weblate to HackerOne Community Edition by end of March and it was approved early in April. Based on their recommendations I’ve started in invite only mode, but that really didn’t bring much attention (exactly none reports), so I’ve decided to go public.

• In 2013, a mysterious group of hackers that calls itself the Shadow Brokers stole a few disks full of National Security Agency secrets. Since last summer, they’ve been dumping these secrets on the internet. They have publicly embarrassed the NSA and damaged its intelligence-gathering capabilities, while at the same time have put sophisticated cyberweapons in the hands of anyone who wants them. They have exposed major vulnerabilities in Cisco routers, Microsoft Windows, and Linux mail servers, forcing those companies and their customers to scramble. And they gave the authors of the WannaCry ransomware the exploit they needed to infect hundreds of thousands of computer worldwide this month.

• After the WannaCry outbreak, the Shadow Brokers threatened to release more NSA secrets every month, giving cybercriminals and other governments worldwide even more exploits and hacking tools.

• The Let’s Encrypt project has re-shaped the market for SSL/TLS certificates, providing millions of free security certificate to organization around the world.

• Among the many backers of Let’s Encrypt is content delivery network platform provider Akamai. In a video interview with eSecurityPlanet, Andy Ellis, Chief Security Officer at Akamai, explains why Let’s Encrypt matters and his view on the effort’s real value.

Defence/Aggression

• The statement condemned Indonesian human rights violations in Papua and called for a resolution supporting the right of West Papuan political self-determination.

• However, Indonesia’s embassy in New Zealand says the ACP agreed in April that the group would not cover the issue of Papua in future meetings.

• Investigators remain divided over whether there was a spy within the Central Intelligence Agency who betrayed the sources or whether the Chinese hacked {sic} the CIA’s covert communications system, the newspaper reported, citing current and former US officials.

• The Chinese killed at least a dozen people providing information to the CIA from 2010 through 2012, dismantling a network that was years in the making, the newspaper reported.

• Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law Tuesday in the southern region of Mindanao, after deadly clashes between security forces and Islamic State group-linked militants in a major city there.

• The announcement, made by his spokesman at a press conference in Moscow where Duterte was on an official visit, fulfills an often-repeated warning by the president that he would enforce military rule to quell security threats.

• It’s 2017, and the world is shaken by another depraved mass murder, carried out and claimed in the name of ISIS. This time, it is children who are targeted. And just like the countless other times before, the mass media coverage seems stuck on a loop: the same few videos of victims panicking, anguished parents waiting for their children, and distraught mothers sobbing dominate our screens, playing again and again and again and again.

• ISIS has a media strategy, and unfortunately, it is aimed exactly at generating this type of coverage. In fact, this media strategy is instinctively shared with other sensational mass killers — school shooters, white-supremacist terrorists, and others. They crave the distorted infamy they hope they will get after their death; they carefully prepare manifestos they hope will be published; they record videos they hope will be played on loop on cable TV.

• President Donald Trump opened a brief April phone call with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte by commending the strongman’s bloody war on drugs, according to a transcript obtained by The Washington Post and the The Intercept.

• “I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” said Trump. “Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that.”

• In a phone call from the White House late last month, U.S. President Donald Trump heaped praise on Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, one of the world’s most murderous heads of state, for doing what Trump called an “unbelievable job” in his war on drugs. Trump offered an unqualified endorsement of Duterte’s bloody extermination campaign against suspected drug dealers and users, which has included open calls for extrajudicial murders and promises of pardons and immunity for the killers.

• “You are a good man,” Trump told Duterte, according to an official transcript of the April 29 call produced by the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs and obtained by The Intercept. “Keep up the good work,” Trump told Duterte. “You are doing an amazing job.”

• President Rodrigo Duterte did not say how long martial law will be in effect in Mindanao, but he did warn he will be “harsh” in dealing with terrorists.

• Duterte, who is on his way to the Philippines after cutting his official visit in Russia, said he will be happy if it is over within a month, but is also not hesitant to keep it for a year.

• American officials have been criticised for leaking the identity of the Manchester bomber before British police officially named him.

• Salman Abedi was identified in media reports that attributed “US officials” as the source even as their British counterparts remained tight-lipped.

• While addressing her country following the attack, British Prime Minister Theresa May exhibited hints of the Victorian stoicism and “stiff upper lip” that’s traditionally been attributed to the British people during times of hardship. With calm and steady diction, she noted that this is not the first time terrorism has shaken Manchester.

• Donald Trump has clashed with the respected leaders of numerous American allies, but he seems to get along just fine with the notoriously corrupt and criminal leaders of other nations. But as much praise as Trump has already heaped Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, a mass murderer, it turns out Trump has said even nicer things to him in private. We know this, because someone leaked the transcript of their phone conversation.

• [...]

• On the other hand, madman Trump told madman Duterte that he thinks North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un is a “madman with nuclear weapons,” a rare correct assessment of a foreign leader from the normally oblivious Trump. The trouble: Donald Trump is also a madman with nuclear weapons.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• On Sunday, speculation that the young DNC staffer was involved in the leaks was promoted by internet millionaire and the embattled founder of Megaupload, Kim Dotcom. Mr Dotcom tweeted that Mr Rich was the leaker and that he himself was also involved, promising to issue a statement after meeting with his lawyers this week.

• Swedish prosecutors have dropped an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange has denied the allegations, which he calls a pretext for his ultimate extradition to the U.S. to face prosecution under the Espionage Act. Since 2012, Assange has taken refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. It’s not clear whether Assange will emerge any time soon. “This is a small victory, but in this long road to free Julian Assange and all the people working for WikiLeaks,” says our guest Renata Avila, a Courage Foundation trustee and human rights lawyer. “But it will finally help us lawyers to focus on the main issue, which is the persecution, the political persecution, and imminent prosecution of Julian Assange in the United States.”

• The hunt for the Wikileaks founder has been a brutal and corrupt assault on freedom of speech from the beginning, writes John Pilger.

• Julian Assange has been vindicated because the Swedish case against him was corrupt. The prosecutor, Marianne Ny, obstructed justice and should be prosecuted. Her obsession with Assange not only embarrassed her colleagues and the judiciary but exposed the Swedish state’s collusion with the United States in its crimes of war and “rendition”.

• The Wall Street Journal has published an editorial titled “The U.S. Can Get Julian Assange” and subtitled “Avoid extradition and use secret services to airlift him to stand trial in America.” This horrifying article, run by one of America’s major mainstream publications, details how US special forces could technically storm the embassy of a sovereign nation, kidnap an Australian journalist who has broken no laws, and drag him back to the States in a way that the editorial’s author claims has legal precedent in America. The mass media propaganda machine of a government that tortures whistleblowers is openly advocating kidnapping an Australian citizen, from an Ecuadorian embassy, in the UK, in order to stop him from traveling to Ecuador. Because he helped show the American people the truth about their government.

• In his first interview, former US government lab worker Jason Scott Katz tells Motherboard about how trying to decrypt one file led to an FBI raid, losing his job, moving to Iceland, and founding the Pirate Party there.

• Former Senator Joe Lieberman is reportedly President Trump’s leading choice to replace the recently-fired James Comey as FBI director. If you’re a person who values free speech and press freedom rights, it’s hard to imagine a worse pick for FBI director than Lieberman.

• It was only a week ago we learned that Trump allegedly urged Comey in a private meeting to prosecute reporters for publishing classified information. So one of the most vital issues for any confirmation hearing will be whether the next FBI director will respect journalists’ right to report on the government. You don’t have to look far to understand how dangerous an FBI Director Lieberman would be to the journalism profession.

• In 2010, when WikiLeaks, in conjunction with The New York Times, The Guardian, and other papers, started publishing secret State Department cables, then-Senator Lieberman was Congress’s leading advocate for prosecuting the publishers of the cables—First Amendment be damned. At the time, he loudly called for the prosecution of WikiLeaks, saying, “I don’t understand why that hasn’t happened yet. … I think it’s the most serious violation of the Espionage Act in our history, and the consequences globally that have occurred.”

Finance

• While selling benefits of "telework" to others, IBM forces relocation in stealth layoff.

• Apple, which charges a transaction fee for payments made with the service, sees Apple Pay as one of the ways it can grow its services business, as other areas such as the iPhone and iPad slow. The service, which debuted in the US in 2014, has expanded to 16 countries after launching in Italy last week.

• As fears rumble of a new global era of protectionism, Asia Pacific trade ministers gathered in Vietnam on Sunday with Australia, Japan and New Zealand at the forefront of efforts to save the deal.

• *Sigh*. People. People people people. "Work from home" does not mean "100% full time work from home and never in the office". It can range from "emergency" WFH, to part time WFH, to full time. Companies should offer these options.

• However, drivers for those high-demand routes won’t see an increase in pay. The difference between those increased fares and the driver’s pay goes to Uber [...]

• In this context, the Commission is assessing the needs, expectations and practices of end users of online tools for skills and qualifications such as Europass. End users include job-seekers, pupils/students, workers, employers, education or training providers and guidance and counselling advisors.

• The European Union’s top court has just handed down an important ruling about an otherwise minor trade deal between the EU and Singapore. The two sides initialled the text of the agreement in September 2013, and since then it has been waiting for the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to hand down its judgment. The issue is who gets to sign off on the deal: is it just the European Union, or do all 28 Member States of the EU need to agree too? There’s clearly a big difference there, because in the latter case, there are 28 opportunities for the deal to be blocked, whereas in the former situation, the EU can simply wave it through on its own. The CJEU ruling (pdf) is fairly straightforward: the EU can sign and conclude trade deals covering most areas, but not for a few that must involve the EU Member States. Of most significance is the following:

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• So let’s talk about impeachment. Although if we’re being more precise, impeachment doesn’t remove a president from office; conviction on impeachment charges does.

• There are many troubling aspects of Donald Trump’s still-young presidency, but his warm embrace of Riyadh this weekend might be the most troubling of all.

• "Many of us wish we could study Facebook," said Prof Philip Howard, of the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, "but we can’t, because they really don’t share anything." Howard is leading a team of researchers studying "computational propaganda" at the university, attempting to shine a light on the ways automated accounts are used to alter debate online.

• The moderators have about 10 seconds to decide on whether to remove material from the site, according to The Guardian.

• The Guardian published the Facebook files on Sunday night. It reported some disturbing findings about what can and can’t be moderated on Facebook, after the newspaper was passed more than 100 internal training manuals that included spreadsheets and flowcharts on how the Mark Zuckerberg-run company deals with hate speech, violence, self-harm, and a whole range of other issues.

• President Donald Trump’s apparent suggestion that the FBI should "consider putting reporters in prison" has been decried as a dangerous new assault on press freedom and prompted a call to action by American journalists who have been jailed in the US for their work.

• Finally, Mr Brooks claimed Mr Trump had not developed a "theory of mind", the ability to understand what someone else is thinking.

• Mr Arnett and Ms Jensen, however, said it was unfair to attribute all of these qualities to children.

• [...]

• "It is time to call it out for what it is: evil."

• In an interview with the New York Times, Evan Williams was asked about remarks made by Mr Trump in March when he said: "I think maybe I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Twitter."

• What is the role of the Democratic National Committee in presidential elections? Is it to sway the vote toward a safe, solid and respected insider who will supposedly drive the party straight into the White House, or is it to provide voters the ultimate decision as to which campaign will take the ballot, without any bias or partiality?

• That is the question at the heart of a class-action lawsuit charging the Democratic National Committee with fraud, deceptive conduct and negligent misrepresentation over the course of the 2016 primaries, in which Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was defeated by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Democratic ticket. Jared Beck, a Harvard law expert and one of the attorneys backing the suit, has demanded the DNC repay its donors and Sanders supporters for contributions made throughout the election, citing a misappropriation of public funds.

• President Donald Trump first trip overseas has — so far –gone seamlessly if one disregards the chaos he left at home with multiple bombshells dropped by the Washington Post and the New York Times regarding White House doings.

• However, as the world awaits Trump’s speech on Islam, he was the recipient of a great deal of mockery on Twitter for a half-curtsy he bestowed upon the king of Saudi Arabia.

• First Lady Melania Trump swatting away president Donald Trump’s hand on the tarmac in Israel Video of the couple arriving at an airport in Israel shows President Donald Trump reaching out to hold his wife’s hand. But Melania, who was apparently not interested in touching her husband at that moment, appears to slap the president’s hand.

• The townhouse on High Seas Court in the Cove Village development, in the Baltimore suburb of Essex, was not exactly the Cape Cod retreat that its address implied: It was a small unit looking onto a parking lot, the windows of its two bedrooms so high and narrow that a child would have had to stand on a chair to see out of them. But to Kamiia Warren, who moved into the townhouse in 2004, it was a refuge, and a far cry from the East Baltimore neighborhood where she grew up. “I mean, there were bunny rabbits all hopping around,” she told me recently.

• In the townhouse next door lived an older woman with whom Warren became friendly, even doing her grocery shopping once in a while. But over the course of a few months, the woman started acting strangely. She began accosting Warren’s visitors. She shouted through the walls during the day. And at night she banged on the wall, right where Warren kept the bassinet in which her third child slept, waking him up.

• Donald Trump made overtures toward the Islamic world during his visit to Saudi Arabia, softening his outward stance on Islam, but his administration recently appointed a recognized anti-Muslim campaigner.

• Katharine Gorka, a controversial national security analyst and anti-Muslim activist, has been named as an “adviser” to the Department of Homeland Security’s policy office, after serving on President Trump’s transition team for the department. During Barack Obama’s presidency, Gorka extensively criticized DHS for teaching employees — wrongly, in her view — that Islam is a religion of peace.

• Gorka’s appointment is listed in documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the watchdog group American Oversight. Her title, as of April 7, is listed as adviser to the department’s office of policy. The documents also list a previous “temporary transitional” appointment in the chief of staff’s office, with a pay grade listed as GS-15, the highest standard pay for a federal civil servant, indicating a salary of at least $8,600 a month.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Facebook’s secret rules and guidelines for deciding what its 2 billion users can post on the site are revealed for the first time in a Guardian investigation that will fuel the global debate about the role and ethics of the social media giant.

• The Guardian has seen more than 100 internal training manuals, spreadsheets and flowcharts that give unprecedented insight into the blueprints Facebook has used to moderate issues such as violence, hate speech, terrorism, pornography, racism and self-harm.

• The European commission sanction against Facebook will do little to deter it from harvesting ever more our private data

Privacy/Surveillance

• MINISTERS are to enforce striking new powers to compel tech giants to hand over encrypted data to terror investigators within weeks.

• The government will ask Parliament to nod through the new orders – dubbed Technical Capability Notices – as soon as the election is over, The Sun has learned.

• Netgear last week pushed out a firmware update for its wireless router model NightHawk R7000 with a remote data collection feature that collects router’s analytics data and sends it to the company’s server.

• For now, the company has rolled out the firmware update for its NightHawk R7000, but probably other router models would receive the update in upcoming days.

• The US National Security Agency has been hit by two legal losses that may put the last part of its controversial spying program on US citizens under threat.

• In one case, brought by customers of AT&T and run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the NSA was ordered [PDF] to provide relevant evidence that would prove or disprove that consumer’s communications had been tapped – a legal first.

• In the second case, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an appeals court reversed [PDF] the earlier dismissal of a lawsuit and allowed Wikimedia to continue in its fight to sue the NSA for violating the First and Fourth Amendments.

• Both cases tackle the same issue: the use of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act to carry out “upstream” interception of internet traffic. In effect, the NSA ordered telecom companies to give them permanent access to the online activities of millions of US citizens by tapping the internet’s backbone.

• As information about police use of cell tower spoofers began leaking out, those who had kept the public (including defendants, judges, and even some prosecutors) out of the loop began defending their use of domesticated military technology. They said pay no attention to the possible civil liberties violations. Just think of all the good they’re doing. They promised Stingrays would only be used on the worst of the worst, and only when time was of the essence: terrorists, murderers, kidnappers, etc.

• But then even more Stingray documents made their way into the public domain. These showed the devices were deployed in bog-standard drug investigations or, worse, used just because agencies had them. This perhaps reached its nadir when a police department fired up its Stingray to hunt down someone who had stolen less than $60 worth of fast food. To make matters worse, the Stingray failed to track down the alleged thief.

• A federal appeals court on Tuesday revived a Wikipedia lawsuit that challenges a U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) program of mass online surveillance, and claims that the government unconstitutionally invades people’s privacy rights.

• By a 3-0 vote, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, said the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, had a legal right to challenge the government’s Upstream surveillance program.

• The decision could make it easier for people to learn whether authorities have spied on them through Upstream, which involves bulk searches of international communications within the internet’s backbone of cables, switches and routers.

• In return for that $150 million investment, IBM will receive the medical records of 61 million Italians in what seems to be their entirety. According to Barbacetto (original in Italian), the information provided will include: demographic data; all medical conditions, diagnoses, and their treatment; emergency and other hospital visits, including dates and times; prescriptions and their costs; genomic data and information about about any cancers; and much else besides.

• This information will be supplied in a supposedly anonymous form, with obvious personal indicators removed. However, it has been known for decades that detailed medical records can never be considered truly anonymous. [...]

• Even worse, profiling and similar techniques are increasingly used not just to classify and understand people, but also to make decisions that have far-reaching consequences, from credit to housing, welfare and employment.

• Unfortunately, the Intercept decided not to publish most of the document, so all of those people with “a Ph.D. in a related field” can’t read and understand WindsorGreen’s capabilities. What sorts of key lengths can the machine brute force? Is it optimized for symmetric or asymmetric cryptanalysis? Random brute force or dictionary attacks? We have no idea.

• There’s one big caveat: Blackburn’s bill would prevent individual states and municipalities from imposing laws that are stricter than the proposed federal standard.

• Disabling your browser’s local storage of data, even if you’re not technically using "incognito" mode, will also trigger the anti-private mode message on the Globe website. But you can disable third-party cookies and still view Globe articles in regular mode, as long as you allow the websites you visit to store data.

• The Swedish State Railways has decided to accept under-the-skin RFID tag implants for ticket purchases, arguing it enhances ticketless travel better than having your ticket in your mobile. Actually, they didn’t argue that at all. They just said “we’re digital” and “it works” as if that would justify the rest.

• I think you can see why it’s more than annoying that some of my colleagues saw the EO and thought it was a good thing. It’s not. It’s about 500 steps backward from where we were last year, with a layer of malfeasant opportunism on top.

• And we weren’t exactly in a great place last year with our government coming to grips with our nation’s cybersecurity, either.

• A North Carolina judge now stripped of his robe has been sentenced to two years of probation and ordered to pay a $5,000 fine as part of a plea deal with federal prosecutors. Arnold Ogden Jones had pleaded guilty to charges that he tried to bribe an FBI official with beer and cash to get his wife’s text messages when he was a Wayne County judge in 2015.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Senators Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) sent a letter to Pai Friday, one day after CQ Roll Call reporter John Donnelly accused FCC guards of forcing him out of the building when he was trying to talk to Pai and Commissioner Michael O’Rielly.

• Brennan’s attorney, Michael Rose of Portland, disagreed with the decision. "Mr. Brennan was simply exercising his First Amendment right to protest the unnecessarily intrusive search by the TSA agents, who responded much like a colony of ants whose hill was kicked over," he told Ars in an e-mail. "Their untoward reaction to his protest was the sole cause of any ‘interference’ with the smooth operations at PDX, which was the basis for the fine."

• The latest human rights report produced by Mr. Tillerson’s own department mentions Saudi Arabia’s "restrictions on universal rights, such as freedom of expression, including on the internet, and the freedoms of assembly, association, movement, and religion," as well as the country’s "pervasive gender discrimination." Raif Badawi, a writer, has been in prison since 2012 after starting a blog called Free Saudi Liberals Network.

• Corbett wrote that there was some logic to the ban since lithium batters were opaque to X-rays and a metal box, which was the same size as a battery and filled with explosives, would look the same.

• But, he said, there were problems with the approach. For one, anyone who planned to use a laptop to conceal a bomb would simply use something else once the ban was in place. Secondly, by forcing all the batteries (inside devices) to be stored in the hold, the chance of fires was increased.

• And thirdly, he wrote, the ban was not economically viable as it meant the loss of millions of hours of productivity.

• "Yesterday’s incident at the FCC is not an isolated one and seems to be a part of a larger pattern of hostility towards the press characteristic of this Administration," they wrote. The pair requested a response by Friday, May 26th, asking for Pai’s description of the event and the FCC’s security policies, an explanation for the security guard’s actions, and an assurance that such incidents "will not happen again."

• It is early on in Abu Zubaydah’s time at a CIA black site. He insists to his interrogators that he has no additional information on jihadist operations planned against the US, but his captor won’t stop slapping him. Eventually a hood is placed over Zubaydah’s head and he is placed into a confinement box by unseen security officers. He is told this is his new home until he’s prepared to provide information on operations against the US.

• The South China Morning Post has a story about a new requirement for drone owners in China to register with the country’s civilian aviation regulator starting next month. So is this yet another example of the Chinese authorities clamping down on a potentially subversive new technology by ensuring that drone use can be tracked?

• A federal appeals court on Friday struck down a regulation requiring the public to register drones. The US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found that the Federal Aviation Administration did not have the authority to regulate so-called “model aircraft.”

• It’s been another busy week for our president. Following on the heels of his revelation that he fired FBI Director James Comey over the ongoing Russian ties investigation (and following on the heels of Trump’s tweeted threat about secret recordings of conversations with Comey), the FBI’s acting director said the investigation is still ongoing, a special counsel was picked to oversee the investigation, and people close to Comey hinted the FBI might have some recordings of its own that undercut the president’s narrative.

• Last night at 10.30 PM at a pop concert in Manchester Arena, an explosion killed at least 22 including children and injured at least 59. Reports have been coming in during the early hours of the morning confirming the suspect to have been killed in the blast. This has been described as one of the deadliest attacks in the UK of the last decade.

• There is still speculation as to the motives of the killer and an ongoing investigation to uncover whether they acted alone or part of a wider group.

• What we do know is the misery following this horrific attack will be hijacked by the grief vultures of the far right. Already high profile racist Katie Hopkins is calling for a “final solution” on Twitter, while other fascist media personalities are scrambling for any information they can twist in order to fuel their anti-migrant, anti-Muslim agendas, and continue attacking the Left who dare challenge their blatant racism. There are two fascist demonstrations planned for Liverpool and Manchester in the coming weeks that will, no doubt, use last night’s tragedy in order to attract bigger numbers and use the deaths of dozens of ordinary people in order to grow their organisational capacity. They must be opposed.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• I’d say around 80% of the time someone asks for help on a website, there are a number of stock responses I end up giving — to the point I end up sounding like a broken record.

• Speaking to reporters last week, FCC chairman Ajit Pai hinted that the agency would likely honor those astroturfed comments, nonetheless.

• I worry 100 years from now our descendants may not know much about us or be able to read our emails or tweets or documents because nobody saved them or the software you need to read them won’t exist anymore.

• Most users who use the internet today, are mostly focused on three protocols, HTTP, TLS, and DNS.

• While these users may not care these days how their pages are displayed to them, there was once a competing protocol to the one that we known and love that is HTTP.

• Located just 10 ports down from HTTP is Gopher, on TCP port 70. A protocol that looks a lot like a much more basic HTTP/1.0.

• It’s a deliberate effort by Google to break the open web.

DRM

• Now you might be buying the book from Amazon, or you might be buying it from a third-party seller. And there’s no guarantee that if the latter is true, said third-party seller bought the book from the publisher. In fact, it’s most likely they didn’t.

• Which means the publisher might not be getting paid. And, by extension, neither is the author.

• Every Ozimal digirabbit in the venerable virtual world Second Life will starve to death (well, permanent hibernation) this week because a legal threat has shut down their food-server, and the virtual pets are designed so that they can only eat DRM-locked food, so the official food server’s shutdown has doomed them all.

• Over the last year, we’ve noted the surge in so-called “right to repair” laws, which would make it easier for consumers to repair their electronics and find replacement parts and tools. It’s a direct response to the rising attempts by companies like John Deere, Apple, Microsoft and Sony to monopolize repair, hamstringing consumer rights over products consumers think they own, while driving up the cost of said product ownership. John Deere’s draconian lockdown on its tractor firmware is a large part of the reason these efforts have gained steam over the last few months in states like Nebraska.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The right to be credited is part of the so-called "moral rights," which are baked into many copyright laws around the world, adopted at the international level through the Berne Convention.

• However, in the United States, this is not the case. The US didn’t sign the Berne Convention right away and opted out from the "moral rights" provision when they eventually joined it.

• Vodlocker.to is offering an interesting service that not only provides streaming movies and TV shows in the browser but also allows them to be published anywhere on the web. After entering the movie’s IMDb number, users get an embed code which can be entered into any web page, where the movie will play in a YouTube-like window. There’s even support for Chromecast.

• After admitting to several criminal acts, including the operation of a piracy honeypot, Prenda Law attorney John Steele has now been disbarred by the Illinois Supreme Court. As a result, the troubled attorney will no longer be allowed to practice law in the state. While the decision doesn’t come as a surprise, several victims of the trolling operation will welcome it with a smile.

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