● 05.29.17

● Links 29/5/2017: Another Linux RC, Enlightenment 0.21.8 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 7:11 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The Samsung Chromebook Pro is finally going to be a real device. Lost in the hubbub of Google I/O Friday, Samsung quietly dropped a press release pegging the device for a May 28 release date.

• With the Chromebook Pixel off the market, the all-aluminum, touch-and-pen enabled, Android app-packing Samsung “Chromebook” models were immediately looked to as the flagships of the Chromebook universe. Samsung announced the ARM-powered Chromebook Plus and Intel-powered Chromebook Pro at CES in January, and the Plus saw a reasonable release date the next month. Review units for the faster, Intel-powered Chromebook Pro went out in February, too, but the actual release date remained a mystery.

Kernel Space

• It’s never too late to jump into the future, so if like me you want to jump into the world of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, and altcoins, it pays to have a fundamental understanding of the technology that makes it all possible.

• Cryptocurrencies are booming beyond belief. Bitcoin is up sevenfold, to $2,500, in the last year. Three weeks ago the redoubtable Vinay Gupta, who led Ethereum’s initial release, published an essay entitled “What Does Ether At $100 Mean?” Since then it has doubled. Too many altcoins to name have skyrocketed in value along with the Big Two. ICOs are raking in money hand over fist over bicep. What the hell is going on?

• We’re happy to share that Hyperledger’s Technical Steering Committee (TSC) has granted the Hyperledger Sawtooth maintainer’s request to advance the project’s status from Incubation to Active. Hyperledger Iroha also graduated today.

• Hey, things continue to look good, and rc3 isn’t even very big. I’m hoping there’s not another shoe about to drop, but so far this really feels like a nice calm release cycle, despite the size of the merge window.

• Knock wood.

• Anyway, rc3 has a little bit of everything. The biggest single change is actually just a documentation update (the intel pstate docs were converted to rst format), so the diffstat actually looks a bit odd with a wuarter just being documentation. There’s also some tooling updates (perf and some bpf selftest).

• But if you ignore those two pieces, it looks pretty normal: two thirds of it being drivers (gpu, nvme, scsi, tty, block), with the remainder being about half networking and haf “misc” (core kernel, header files, XFS, arch updates).

• Go forth and test,

• Linus

• Linus Torvalds has announced the third weekly test candidate for the upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel debut.

• Linus commented of Linux 4.12-rc3 that it isn’t a very big release over the prior RCs and so far it’s a “nice calm release cycle.” The biggest change this past week was actually documentation updates.

• Even if it’s Memorial weekend, Linus Torvalds is on the job announcing the release and immediate availability of the third RC (Release Candidate) milestone of the upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel series.

• The open source Cloud Foundry application development platform was publicly announced over six years ago, and along the way, we have connected with other projects, adopting technologies from other open source communities as they matured. For example, before Docker was a company or even a project, the Cloud Foundry platform was using Linux containers to isolate deployed applications from one another. Our container implementation wasn’t built in a general purpose way like Docker’s; it wasn’t designed to solve all of the potential use cases for a container runtime. It was designed specifically to support the stateless web applications that Cloud Foundry was initially intended to support, and to do that in a secure, multitenant fashion.

Graphics Stack

Applications

• Please note that MAAS 2.2 will replace the MAAS 2.1 series, which will go out of support. We are holding MAAS 2.2 in the above PPA for a week, to provide enough notice to users that it will replace 2.1 series. In the following weeks, MAAS 2.2 will be backported into Ubuntu Xenial.

Instructionals/Technical

• ​One of the most important things for Linux users is to know what to do if the root password is lost. Many times we create a strong password for our computer, but sometimes we forget it. This trouble is mostly for servers, and CentOS is a Linux distro focused on servers, so in this article, we’re going to learn how to reset password in CentOS Linux.

Games

Desktop Environments/WMs

• This is another bugfix and stability release for the Enlightenment 21 Release series.

• Enlightenment 0.21.8 was released this week as the latest stable point release to the E21 series.

• Enlightenment 0.21.8 has a number of fixes, including some display fixes, avoid starting XWayland repeatedly, X11 and Wayland specific alterations, and other routine work.

• Simon Lees from the Enlightenment project announced earlier this week the release and immediate availability of the eight bugfix and stability release for the Enlightenment 0.21 desktop environment stable series.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I’ve been running Artful aka 17.10 on my laptop for maybe a month now with no real issues and thats thanks to the awesome Kubuntu developers we have and our testers!

• The development team behind the KDevelop open-source and cross-platform IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for C, C++, Python, JavaScript and PHP, were proud to announce this weekend the availability of KDevelop 5.1.1.

• Following blog post from Patrick Griffis about new themes support in Flatpak, we started working on supporting this new feature too. Currently wherever you start a Qt application, it would always look like a KDE application or something would be missing, like icons so you would end up with bad experience and mixed feelings. This is going to change now as we now support Gnome in form of icons, widget style and Qt platform theme and with this, when you run a Qt application in Gnome, it will look definitely better and more natively than before. We packaged regular adwaita icons which are used by default in Gnome as extension of freedesktop runtime. For widget style we use adwaita-qt style, which is a Qt style attempting to look like Gtk’s adwaita and the most important part putting this all together is QGnomePlatform, a Qt platform theme which reads your Gnome configuration and applies it to running Qt applications. QGnomePlatform also enforces Qt apps to use adwaita icons and adwaita-qt style by default so that’s another reason why it is important. Both adwaita-qt and QGnomePlatform projects are by the way authored by Martin Bříza, a collegue of mine from Red Hat so if you meet him in person somewhere buy him a beer for that he cares about Qt integration in Gnome :). Now coming to a question how to install this and make it work. Basically all you need to do is install following extensions and you shold be done:

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.25.2, the second development release in the GNOME 3.26 cycle, is now available.

• GNOME’s Javier Jardón announced the availability of the second development milestone towards the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment, due for release later this year on September 13.

• GNOME 3.25.2 is now available as the latest test snapshot leading up to this September’s GNOME 3.26 stable debut.

• Canonical/Ubuntu ended up sponsoring a hackfest taking place in just over one week in Taipei where GNOME developers will be working on this fractional scaling support, possibly XWayland client support, and more. Details on that upcoming hackfest here.

• Simon Steinbeiß has announced the debut of the first GTK+3 release of the xfce4-panel package.

• Late last year, an upgrade to Fedora 25 caused issues with the new version of KDE Plasma that made it difficult for me to get any work done. So I decided to try other Linux desktop environments for two reasons. First, I needed to get my work done. Second, having been using KDE exclusively for many years, I thought it might be time to try some different desktops.

Distributions

• This Chinese distribution is a very interesting piece of software. Very unique, and a refreshing departure from what you normally get. I was truly and deeply [sic] amazed by how well it was stitched together, when I last tested it, back in my Lenovo T61 days. It had its own presentation layer, its own applications, and it seemed to be doing well. Unfortunately, I was not able to get it running on my G50 box. Neither the official 15.3 release, nor 15.4 RC2. It does support UEFI, and you actually see the boot menu, and there’s the lovely Deepin splash screen, which features the effect of the distro name/logo getting filled with water. But then, when it’s time to reach the actual installation screen, which offers language selection, you only end up with a black screen. Oops. So close.

Reviews

• Ahh, Void Linux. You may or may not have heard of it. If you have, more than likely it was by word of mouth, so to speak, from internet comments on a forum, YouTube video or in passing on Reddit. But this little distro rarely gets any press or recognition otherwise. Perhaps it’s time that changes, as Void Linux is an interesting distro in its own right and a good alternative to something like Arch Linux. It also has a no-systemd approach.

• Void is an independently developed, rolling release Linux distribution. The Void distribution runs on 32-bit and 64-bit x86 processors as well as several ARM boards including the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone and Cubieboard2. The Void distribution is available in Cinnamon, Enlightenment, LXDE, LXQt, MATE and Xfce editions with some additional desktop environments offered through the project’s software repositories. There is also a plain edition which I believe sets up a minimal command line environment.

• There are a number of features which set Void apart from most other Linux distributions. Void uses the XBPS package manager for working with source and binary packages. Void was an early adopter of OpenBSD’s LibreSSL library which acts as a drop-in replacement for the OpenSSL security library. Further, Void has an init implementation called runit which is unusually small and simple. Another interesting feature of Void is the distribution can use one of two C libraries. Most Linux distributions use the glibc library. Void does provide glibc and also offers installation media with the lightweight musl library.

• I decided to download the Void project’s MATE edition which is 637MB in size. Booting from the supplied media brings up a screen where we can choose between starting the distribution’s live environment or loading Void into RAM and then launching the desktop environment. The latter option uses more memory, but makes the distribution run faster and frees up the drive or port where our installation media is located.

New Releases

• Mark Greaves of the Peppermint development team was proud to announce today the release and immediate availability of the Peppermint 8 GNU/Linux distribution.

• Based on the Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system and the HWE (hardware enablement) Linux 4.8 kernel and graphics stacks from Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), which includes the X.Org Server 1.19 and Mesa 17.0.2 packages, Peppermint 8 is here in its final, production-ready state to conquer your personal computers with a highly customized MATE desktop environment.

Screenshots/Screencasts

• BlankOn 10 tambora is the latest release of Linux Blankon. Linux BlankOn is a Linux distribution developed by the BlankOn Developer Team. This distribution is designed and adapted to the needs of the general computer user in Indonesia. BlankOn Linux is developed openly and together to produce a typical Linux distro of Indonesia, especially for education, office and government.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• “This round will be noticeably missing from it’s usual GPG clearsigned CHECKSUM|HASHSUM files hosted on https://community.ameridea.net due to a key cycling operation,” reads today’s announcement. “This post will be updated with the new KeyID|Fingerprint next week however.”

Debian Family

• There aren’t all that main changes in the Debian Installer Stretch RC4 release, and among those that caught our attention, we can mention support for Xunlong Orange Pi Plus and Xunlong Orange Pi Plus 2 single-board computers, switch to DTB for Buffalo Linkstation LiveV3 (LS-CHL), and bump of Linux kernel version to 4.9.0-3.

• After much anticipation, the Debian Release Team has finally announced the release date of Debian 9.0 “Stretch” GNU/Linux distribution. As per their announcement, the distro is slated to arrive on June 17.

• Devuan Linux has their first stable release today. It is based on Debian 8.0 Jessie and though Devuan release is also called Jessie, it is not going to share the codename of releases in the future.

• Today, about a month later than I had intended due to having three consecutive work weeks that mostly drained me of energy, I finally uploaded Debian Policy 4.0.0.0 to Debian experimental.

Derivatives

• The self-described “Veteran Unix Admin collective” that in 2014 promised to give the world a cut of Debian without systemd has delivered: Devuan 1.0.0 LTS hit the web today.

• The collective’s objections to systemd were rooted in the belief that its inclusion in Debian created “a lock in systemd dependencies which is de-facto threatening freedom of development and has serious consequences for Debian, its upstream and its downstream.”

Canonical/Ubuntu

Devices/Embedded

• What started off as a hobby project for the Finnish engineer Linus Torvalds, has turned into a global phenomenon. Today Linux is literally powering the modern economy – everything from Amazon public clouds, stock exchanges, and social networks run on Linux. It also runs in devices like sensors, printers, routers…and what not. Linux virtually owns the smartphone market with Android.

• The Cortex-A75 offers up new levels of performance for premium tier products, with a greater than 20 percent typical performance boost in a range of scenarios when compared with the existing Cortex-A73. Furthermore, the CPU offers up the same levels of sustained performance as the A73, meaning that performance shouldn’t dip when running high-intensity tasks for longer periods of time. ARM has paid a lot of attention to ensuring that these new performance gains don’t come at the expense of energy efficiency either.

Phones

Tizen

Android

• Moving on to the design. The Honor 9 looks quite different when compared to its predecessor. It has a glass back that is curved on the sides, which should make the device sit better in the hand. Honor has also decided to move the fingerprint scanner from the back to the front. Based on the images, we know that the device will be available in gold, but we do expect to see it in a few other color options once launched.

Free Software/Open Source

Web Browsers

• We suspect many users have jumped between Firefox and Chrome/Chromium over the years. Some power users may have switched to keyboard-driven apps like Qutebrowser. Or maybe you’re still rocking Lynx! In any case, let us know in the comments below, and we’ll read out the best in our upcoming podcast.

Databases

• ​Databases are a crucial tool for any developer or a development enterprise. If you are a software developer you already know that your application needs a database to store data. One thing to have in the count is to choose the best database for your application. There are two types of databases, SQL and NoSQL databases. The first one being the oldest. SQL databases are very famous and still being used largely around big organizations and most of SQL solutions are paid but, there are good free solutions out there with MySQL Community Edition and PostgreSQL on the top. In this article, we will let you know more about this two databases and how to migrate from MySQL to PostgreSQL.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Users looking for a Microsoft Office clone on Linux will be disappointed to hear that WPS Office’s development on Linux has been halted. The most recent build for Linux was released almost one year ago, with the most recent version being v10.1.0.5672 Alpha.

• The fact that development had stalled was raised after one Twitter users reached out to WPS Office to ask why there hadn’t been a new release for a while. The response came back saying that it was “on a halt” and that it needs “community builds”; there’s little chance that community builds will become a thing within the next few months given that WPS Office is not even open source, making community maintenance somewhat of a challenge.

BSD

• While Linux and other operating systems (including DragonFlyBSD) have supported 64-bit inodes for data structures on file-systems, FreeBSD has been limited to 32-bit. But thanks to the work of many on the ino64 project, FreeBSD now has support for 64-bit inodes while retaining backwards compatibility.

• The KDE Continuous Integration system builds KDE software from scratch, straight from the git repositories, and usually from master (or whatever is considered the development branch). It’s been building for Linux for a long time, and has recently been expanded with FreeBSD servers as well. KDE sysadmin has been kind enough to provide two more VMs (with some more compiling “oomph”) so that we can keep up better, and the CI has just been expanded with all of the Plasma products. That means we’re now building KDE Frameworks, and the Plasma desktop.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• I’m glad to announce the release of GNU libmicrohttpd 0.9.55.

• GNU libmicrohttpd is a small C library that is supposed to make it easy to run an HTTP server as part of another application. GNU libmicrohttpd is fully HTTP 1.1 compliant and supports IPv6. Finally, GNU libmicrohttpd is fast, portable and has a simple API and (without TLS support and other optional features) a small binary size (~32k).

• This lightweight web server continues to be HTTP 1.1 compliant and provides a simple API for integration into other GPL applications. There are security fixes in libmicrohttpd uncovered by the Mozilla Secure Open Source Fund initiative. There are also fixes for building on Linux in some conditions and other basic fixes and optimizations.

Programming/Development

• With JavaScript and the V8 engine at the core, an event-driven architecture, and scalability out of the box, Node.js has quickly become the new de facto standard for creating web applications and SaaS products. Many frameworks like Express, Sails, and Socket.IO enable users to quickly bootstrap applications and focus only on the business logic.

• As for every AFUP event, organization was perfect, and I was able to meet a lot of developers and PHP users.

• More code for supporting the OpenACC 2.5 specification has been landing in mainline GCC.

• A set of 13 patches amounting to nearly 800k lines of new code were sent out Sunday morning for adding a D language front-end to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

Leftovers

Science

• My best answer is that, if we are really going to turn over our homes, our cars, our health and more to private tech companies, on a scale never imagined, we need much, much stronger standards for security and privacy than now exist.

• On Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the site of a future lithium-ion battery factory in the eastern German town of Kamenz. The factory is being developed by Mercedes-Benz manufacturer Daimler, which will devote approximately €500 million (or $562 million) to churning out batteries for electric vehicles and stationary storage.

Hardware

Health/Nutrition

• In the first few hours of a hospital stay, the microbes living on the walls and other surfaces of the hospital try to overthrow your skin microbiome. Then all hell breaks loose. Within 24 hours—and possibly as little as seven—your microbes rise up to beat back the invaders. Before the germ clouds settle, your microbiome has invaded the room.

• NHS campaigners have slammed town centre bosses after they were told to pack up and leave because they hadn’t paid for the right to hand out leaflets.

• Six members of Keep Our NHS Public’s recently launched Swindon branch were talking to shoppers and distributing leaflets at the junction of Canal Walk and Regent Street on Saturday morning when they were approached by the inSwindon street team.

• They were told that because they had not sought prior approval to be in the town centre they must leave – they were given ten minutes to do so and were told that if they refused the police would be called.

Security

• Those of you with long memories might remember one of the more amusing (or perhaps annoying) bugs of the Windows 95 and 98 era: certain specially crafted filenames could make the operating system crash. Malicious users could use this to attack other people’s machines by using one of the special filenames as an image source; the browser would try to access the bad file, and Windows would promptly fall over.

• It turns out that Windows 7 and 8.1 (and Windows Vista, but that’s out of support anyway) have a similar kind of bug. They can be taken advantage of in the same kind of way: certain bad filenames make the system lock up or occasionally crash with a blue screen of death, and malicious webpages can embed those filenames by using them as image sources. If you visit such a page (in any browser), your PC will hang shortly after and possibly crash outright.

• CentOS maintainer Johnny Hughes informs the community of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based and security-oriented operating system about the availability of an important kernel update.

• Passengers at Heathrow were ordered to leave the terminal and told they would not be able to access their luggage for the rest of the day because the baggage system was down. One traveller claimed they had been told it could take a week for their bags to be returned, while another said she had been warned it could take three hours to exit the airport.

• The IT failure had affected check-in and operational systems, including customer service phone lines.

• The researchers — Yanick Fratantonio of the University of California, and Chenxiong Qian, Simon Pak Ho Chung and Wenke Lee, all from the Georgia Institute of Technology — called it a Cloak and Dagger attack as it happened without the owner of the smartphone being aware that any attack had taken place.

• The attack does not exploit any vulnerability, but takes advantage of two permissions that are allowed for apps to use certain features on Android.

• Fine, the current process is rocky. Some of that is that it’s not matured yet (Alexa, when did Vincent Price die? No, not “play vincent price die”, not “christ die”, not “do you speak some price dead”, you stupid pile of undocumented microchips!) Some of it is that basically every large company underestimates how much people’s accounts are set up incorrectly or incompletely; after all, employees have everything set up right, because they know what they’re doing, and so this never comes up in testing. Some of it is because I’m joining dots on three or four very different puzzles: I’m sure if I were to get a Google Home and use Google Mail to send my shopping list to Google Keep and then buy things from Google Shopping, or if I were to get some theoretical Home Siri device and play music from my Apple account and put things in my Apple iCloud account… then all this would be a lot more seamless. But you should beware people who proclaim that technology would be easy if all us heathens were just to renounce our diverse needs and join their true faith. Mastery goes to the designer who can cope with us real people, in all our glittering and varied patterns and colours and desires. Not just the ones who take the easy way out and block you if you haven’t already bought all the rest of your stuff from them too.

• Datasets from the recent Verizon 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) show that some security teams still may be operating under false assumptions regarding what it takes to keep their organizations secure.

• For starters, the same security standards don’t apply across all vertical industries, says Suzanne Widup, a senior consultant for the Verizon RISK Team and co-author of the Verizon DBIR.

• If you have drunk the MVP cool-aid and believe that you can create a product in one month that is both valuable and secure — think twice before you launch your “proto-product”. After you review the checklist below, acknowledge that you are skipping many of these critical security issues. At the very minimum, be honest with your potential users and let them know that you don’t have a complete product yet and are offering a prototype without full security.

• [...] we interviewed 60 participants about their experience with different communication tools and their perceptions of the tools’ security properties. We found that the adoption of secure communication tools is hindered by fragmented user bases and incompatible tools. Furthermore, the vast majority of participants did not understand the essential concept of end-to-end encryption, limiting their motivation to adopt secure tools

• VMware fixed two bugs in its VMware Workstation late Thursday night, including an insecure library loading vulnerability and a NULL pointer dereference vulnerability.

• The virtualization software company warned of the issues Thursday night in a security advisory VMSA-2017-0009.

Defence/Aggression

• Trump’s words were more a vindication of some of Obama’s major policies rather than a break from them.

• For the first time since President Donald Trump took office, a U.S. warship has sailed near a Chinese-controlled island in the disputed South China Sea, signaling an attempt to project a more assertive American stance against Beijing just before a major regional defense summit.

• The mission, a passage by the guided missile destroyer USS Dewey­ on Wednesday within twelve nautical miles of Mischief Reef, in the Spratly island chain, was long anticipated and delayed. The last such operation took place in October, and U.S. commanders who had already chafed under Barack Obama’s tight leash had hoped to get a freer hand and to carry out more patrols under Trump.

• North Korean state media claims the country has tested a “a new type of anti-aircraft guided weapon.”

• State-run media KCNA said on Saturday that Kim Jong Un watched the test and said that defects in the system have been fixed.

• The new reported test comes after heightened tensions in the Korean peninsula, and follows international condemnation of several banned ballistic missile tests the isolated nation has carried out so far this year.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Researchers from Bochum, Germany, and San Diego, California, say they’ve found the precise mechanisms that allowed diesel Volkswagens and Audis to engage or disengage emissions controls depending on whether the cars were being driven in a lab or driven under real-world conditions. As a bonus, the researchers also found previously-undisclosed code on a diesel Fiat 500 sold in Europe.

• Reducing greenhouse gas emissions may seem like taking responsibility for the sake of future generations. But the pace of climate change is certainly meaningful within a single lifetime.

• One way to think about climate change, as explored in a new study led by Victoria University of Wellington’s Dave Frame, is that temperature patterns eventually move out of the range you’re accustomed to. Weather and climate are naturally variable, but if the climate shifts, unusual conditions can become the new normal. The “unusual” end of the spectrum gets replaced with more extreme conditions than before.

• Plastic is durable—very, very durable—which is why we like it. Since it started being mass-produced in the 1950s, annual production has increased 300-fold. Because plastic is so durable, when our kids grow up and we purge our toy chests, or even just when we finish a bottle of laundry detergent or shampoo, it doesn’t actually go away. While we’re recycling increasing amounts of plastic, a lot of it still ends up in the oceans.

• Floating garbage patches have brought some attention to the issue of our contamination of the seas. But it’s not just the waters themselves that have ended up cluttered with plastic. A recent survey shows that a staggering amount of our stuff is coming ashore on the extremely remote Henderson Island.

Finance

• “No deal is better than a bad deal.” Those fateful words made it into the Conservative manifesto, in relation to Brexit.

• It sounds plausible, of course. And rather like the Leave campaign’s “take back control” slogan, it rings true on an emotional level. Why on earth should we accept an insulting and punitive deal offered by Europe? Better, surely, to just walk away.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• In the meantime, the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party needs to show that it can do more than just draw crowds and raise money—though both are of crucial importance. And the Clinton wing needs to show—by action, as well as rhetoric—that it doesn’t put holding on to power ahead of either opposing the Republican agenda or actually winning elections.

• “Instead of a documentary about the abuse of state power and WikiLeaks’ important role in exposing it,” the statement continues, “the emphasis of the film is now … disputed claims about an ex-boyfriend.”

• French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged to a French newspaper that his intense handshake with President Trump ahead of the NATO summit in Brussels “wasn’t innocent,” but instead was meant as a show of resolve, The Associated Press reported Sunday.

• “One must show that you won’t make small concessions, even symbolic ones, but also not over-publicize things, either,” he told Le Journal du Dimanche, according to the AP.

• The handshake between Macron and Trump on Thursday drew attention for its visible intensity, with both pairs of knuckles turning white from pressure.

• A Florida GOP campaign consultant who runs a blog under a pseudonym directly contacted the hackers behind the breach of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and he solicited material from them. The Wall Street Journal reports that Aaron Nevins set up a Dropbox account specifically for “Guccifer 2.0” to drop files into, and he received 2.5 GB of data from the Democratic Party breaches—including the “get out the vote” strategy for congressional candidates in Florida.

• If the age of Trump doesn’t end relatively soon, the daily effort to sort out what happened from what didn’t may eventually become too much for many of us. Memory fatigue may set in, and the whole project of keeping the past in focus shelved. In that case, we might very well start to give up the concept of citizenship altogether and decide instead to just get on with our own private uninsured, underpaid, and overworked lives.

• In other words, we can’t allow this White House circus of horrors to fold its tents and skulk away from truth under the cover of darkness. There’s too much at stake and too much to repair in its wake.

• Independent ethics groups and some congressional Democrats have expressed alarm at reports that dozens of ex-lobbyists and others with ties to Wall Street and energy companies have found jobs in the Trump administration.

• Their cushy setup, known as 2 and 20, works like this: Right off the top, they take 2 percent of the money put up by each wealthy client, which hedge fund whizzes like Mercer keep, even if the investments they make are losers. If their speculative bets do pay off, they pocket 20 percent of all profits. Hedge fund lobbyists have rigged our nation’s tax code so these Wall Street miners pay a fraction of the tax rate that real mine workers pay.

• Nicola Sturgeon has defended Jeremy Corbyn’s view that there is a link between the deadly attack in Manchester and UK foreign policy.

• Speaking to Sky News’s Sophy Ridge, the Scottish First Minister denied Prime Minister Theresa May’s claims that Mr Corbyn had blamed foreign policy for the fatal bombing by Salman Abedi that killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert on Monday.

• The conspiracy theory around murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich isn’t weird so much as sad: it drags a man’s fairly recent death into the spotlight in order to promote the idea of a “deep state” plot, based on evidence that’s either speculative or factually wrong. But it’s brought together a strange coalition of well-known subscribers — including the internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom.

• President Trump chose to ride in a golf cart while his foreign counterparts took a walk through Taormina, Sicily, on Saturday during the Group of Seven summit.

• The Times of London reported the six other world leaders — from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan — walked 700 yards to take a group photo at a piazza in a hilltop town. The U.S. leader decided to wait until he could get a golf cart.

• As Jeremy Corbyn carries on narrowing the gap in the polls, the Conservative Party is seemingly resorting to increasingly desperate measures to target voters. It is accused of using “dark ads” to drown out advertisements that promoted 18-25-year-olds registering to vote. But these “dark ads” are causing further controversy because they are based on scaremongering and dodgy figures.

• It is quite extraordinary to read today’s coverage in Britain’s supposedly left-liberal newspaper the Guardian. In the “man bites dog” stakes, the day’s biggest story is the astounding turn-around in the polls two weeks before the British general election. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has narrowed the Conservatives’ lead from an unassailable 22 points to 5, according to the latest YouGov survey. It looks possible for the first time, if the trend continues, that Corbyn could even win the popular poll. (Securing a majority of the British parliament’s seats is a different matter, given the UK’s inherently undemocratic electoral system.)

• Seven years after the end of the Second World War, on the 10th of March 1952, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the newly established Federal Republic of Germany received an astounding note from the Soviet Union.

• The Soviet Union offered to withdraw the troops that then occupied eastern Germany and to end its rule over the occupied zone. Germany would be reunited under a constitution that allowed the country freedom to choose its own social system. Germany would even be allowed to rebuild its military, and all Germans except those convicted of war crimes would regain their political rights. In return, the Allied troops in western Germany would also be withdrawn—and reunited Germany would be forbidden to join the new NATO alliance.

• Ever since anyone can remember, there have been complaints that British elections have become “too presidential”. Back in the 1970s, when the principals were Ted Heath and Harold Wilson, their duel was ridiculed as “a man with a boat and a man with a pipe”.

• So this spring’s contest, with its relentless focus on the woman with the bag and the man with the beard, is not so much a new development as the culmination of a long-established trend. This was by Tory design because making it a personality contest was supposed to be to their benefit. The name of Theresa May is emblazoned on her campaign coach in lettering so enormous that it probably can be seen from outer space. The word Conservative is a microscopic footnote. The Tory campaign has been organised around the projection of the Supreme Leader to the virtual exclusion of every other member of the cabinet. Even Margaret Thatcher in her pomp would share appearances with her ministers. Mrs May has granted just the one “podium moment” to a member of the cabinet when she appeared alongside Philip Hammond and conspicuously failed to reassure the chancellor that he was safe in his job.

• Labour deputy leader Tom Watson has ridiculed Theresa May as “weak and unstable” as the Conservative leader’s engulfed by a doorstep backlash.

• With opinion polls moving dramatically Labour’s way the veteran campaigner said he’s picking up huge public concern over Tory raids on the elderly’s winter fuel allowances and social care price hikes.

• By now, most Techdirt readers realize that far too many members of Congress don’t so much have thoughts about technology policy, as they do bulleted mental lists of talking points provided by a lobbyist happy to do their thinking for them. That has been particularly true when it comes to telecom policy over the last few months, especially the GOP’s ham-fisted attack on popular consumer broadband privacy protections and the telecom sector’s self-serving frontal assault on net neutrality.

Censorship/Free Speech

• We’ve heard many stories at this point about video game producers attempting to use copyright and the DMCA as a censorship tool against criticism. As it happens, the frequency of these stories has tapered off somewhat as best as I can tell, even as the indie gaming scene has resulted in an explosion of small gaming studios. The reason for that delta is probably that the gaming community as a whole has become both far more educated and vocal about any attempts to use copyright as a censorship tool. Rightly or wrongly, honesty and transparency in gaming reviews and commentary has become something of a thing the past few years and one of the possibly unintentional results of that campaign has been for attempts at stifling criticism about games to be top of the average gamer’s mind.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Certain senators have repeatedly pushed for encryption bans or encryption backdoors, sacrificing personal security for national security in a move that will definitively result in less of both. Former FBI Director James Comey’s incessant beating of his “Going Dark” drum didn’t help. Several legislators always managed to get sucked in by his narrative of thousands of unsearched phones presumably being tied to thousands of unsolved crimes and free-roaming criminals.

• As has been explained time and time again, the only way you prevent bad guys from having encryption is by preventing everyone from having effective encryption… and that makes everyone significantly less safe. Seriously, the only way to do this is to put dangerous vulnerabilities into encryption that will certainly be hacked fairly quickly. This doesn’t make people safer. It makes them less safe.

• The thing about biometric scanning as a security practice is it is one of those things that sounds great. “Lock your phone with your fingerprint or facial scan”, shout the manufacturers and security companies that came up with the scans. Well, shit, thinks the average person, if nobody else has my face I’m in the clear. Even when movies and television tackle the subject, the methods for breaking the biometric security typically involve convoluted plans and insane stunts so brazen they would make Danny Ocean’s jaw drop.

• But that thing changed with Windows 10. A shift in Microsoft’s philosophy has lead to a massive collection of data from Windows computers. For me, it’s not only a privacy issue but a security issue. — it’s hard to control what is happening on your computer when you aren’t in control.

• The researchers noted that encryption alone does not provide adequate privacy protection for smart homes, as their analysis did not rely on deep packet inspection, just send/receive rates of encrypted traffic.

• Stephen Fry has called for Facebook and other "aggregating news agencies" to be reclassified as publishers in order to stop fake news and online abuse spreading by making social media subject to the same legal responsibilities as traditional news websites.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The WSJ cited a survey by the Airline Passenger Experience Association, a trade group, that showed that 43% of global passengers carried a tablet aboard, and 70% of this group used them during the flight.

• The study also found that 38% of global passengers carried laptops on board, and 42% of these passengers used the devices.

• Tigerswan, a secretive private mercenary company, was hired by Energy Transfer Partners to run campaigns against Dakota Access Pipeline protesters in five states, including states in which they were not licensed to operate [...]

• You hear that, you bunch of ungrateful Americans? No matter how many citizens are gunned down for holding game controllers or toddlers torched by carelessly-tossed flashbang grenades, these fine men and women are to be given “unparalleled support.” They apparently “deserve” it — a term that must be wholly divorced from the process of earning it.

• Billionaire Saudi Arabian arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi is best known for his roles in some of the most infamous political scandals of the 1980s. They include the Iran-Contra affair (he was a key middleman in the arms-for-hostages exchange) and accusations that he concealed funds alongside Philippines First Lady Imelda Marcos. (Khashoggi was acquitted on federal charges of obstruction of justice and mail fraud after more serious charges of racketeering and conspiracy were dropped.)

• We’ve already discussed a memo read by some FBI officials that supposedly was a record of an Oval Office conversation between former FBI Director James Comey and Donald Trump apparently contains the president asking after the possible prosecution of journalists for publishing leaks. Hearsay squared, but still in line with Trump’s antagonistic relationship with free speech.

• There’s not much popular support for treating journalists like criminals just for doing their job, but there appears to be plenty of administrative support for the idea. Comey claimed he wouldn’t go after journalists for publishing leaks — something he said with one side of his mouth while redefining journalism to exclude Julian Assange and Wikileaks, which the DOJ is apparently considering pursuing charges against.

• The question that must be asked (but can’t be answered) is: how many times has this sort of thing happened? Only a very small percentage of frisks receive courtroom challenges. And stop-and-frisk programs have been heavily criticized for their routine abuse of civil liberties. There’s no expertise on display here: only the inability to work backwards from an illegal search, even when given a chance to “correct the record” post-search by aligning the paperwork with a less-unconstitutional narrative.

• Taking the surveillance out of the Middle East isn’t going to solve at least one logistical problem keeping this from becoming a day-to-day reality for already heavily-surveilled UK citizens. As is pointed out by officers in the discussion thread, Digital Barrier’s real-time face scanning is going to need far more bandwidth than is readily available to law enforcement. One commenter notes they can’t even get a strong enough signal to log in into their email out in the field, much less perform the on-the-fly facial recognition Digital Barrier is promising.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Compuserve needed to display stock quotes, weather maps, and other graphs—simple images that would suffer from having jagged lines. So Wilhite decided to base the GIF on a lossless compression protocol called Lempel–Ziv–Welch, or LZW.

• [...]

• The file format also became the center of one of the web’s first patent disputes. In 1994, IT giant Unisys claimed to own the LZW protocol that Wilhite used in the GIF specification.

• The FCC has just published the notice of proposed rulemaking that would roll back the 2015 Open Internet Order establishing net neutrality. Its first and primary justification for doing this is a way of defining broadband access that’s so backwards it’s ridiculous. It would be funny, if the future of the internet didn’t depend on this incredibly disingenuous maneuvering.

• After the introductory bloviation and half-told history, the “Restoring Internet Freedom” proposal begins its argument in earnest. The first point the FCC makes is regarding the text of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and how it defines “telecommunications service” (how broadband is currently defined, allowing net neutrality rules to be effected) and “information service” (how it was before the net neutrality rule).

• You might start getting many more voicemails if Republicans get their wish.

• A marketing company called All About the Message recently petitioned the Federal Communications Commission for a ruling that would prevent anti-robocall rules from being applied to “the delivery of a voice message directly to a voicemail box” without ringing the recipient’s phone. These ringless voicemails are already happening, but their legal status is unclear.

• You may remember, a few years ago, Verizon attempted to start its own tech blog, called “SugarString,” where the founding editor they hired was telling potential reporters they couldn’t write about net neutrality. After that got mocked around the web, the whole idea of SugarString faded away. However, these days, Verizon actually owns a ton of content sites. It bought AOL in 2015, which already owned the Huffington Post, Techcrunch, Engadget and more. More recently, of course, it bought Yahoo as well. Suddenly, Verizon owns a ton of tech reporting.

• [...]

• Of course, you might claim that Verizon just purchased Yahoo, so perhaps word had not yet filtered down. But let’s shift over to TechCrunch, which has been on the AOL banner for years, and the Verizon/AOL banner for quite some time as well. Over there, a reporter by the name of Devin Coldewey has written a series of truly excellent articles about the FCC’s plans to roll back net neutrality. Those pieces are thorough, detail-oriented and not prone to the sorts of hyperbole that (unfortunately) have been seen on both sides of the net neutrality debate. For example, look at his article from last week that carefully goes through the arguments against net neutrality that people are making, and then carefully debunks each one.

• With UK Prime Minister Theresa May recently calling for a new election there, which she is expected to win easily (despite recent reports of narrowing polls), last week May’s Conservative party released its Manifesto (what we in the US tend to call a party’s “platform”). There are all sorts of things in there that are getting press attention, but for the stuff that matters here on Techdirt, let’s just say May’s view of the internet is not a good one. A part of the plan is basically to regulate, tax and censor the internet, because the Conservative Party leadership doesn’t seem to much like the internet — and they especially dislike the fact that Google and Facebook are so successful.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• John Steele, one of the masterminds behind the Prenda Law “copyright trolling” scheme, has been disbarred. Court papers indicate that Steele agreed to the disbarment, which was announced by the Illinois Supreme Court on Friday.

• Disney chief Bob Iger recently announced that hackers had obtained one of the company’s movies and were holding it to ransom. This Wednesday, TorrentFreak concluded it was a hoax, and on Thursday, Disney admitted that was indeed the case. When the ‘hack’ had so little credibility from the beginning almost a month ago, why debunk it so late?

• Three years ago, Colombian researcher Diego Gomez was charged with copyright infringement for uploading one (1) academic paper to Scribd, and was facing four to eight years in prison for the allegedly heinous act of sharing knowledge. This week, the Colombian court acquitted him of all charges.

• [...]

• Unfortunately, the case is not over: the prosecutor is expected to appeal the case to the Bogota Appeals Court.

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