● 07.13.17

● Links 13/7/2017: Systemd 234, Fedora 27 Plans

Posted in News Roundup at 3:16 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• ASUS, the Taiwanese computer and phone hardware and electronics company, announced the Chromebook Flip C213 as an ultimate future-proof education computer for IT in schools.

• The ASUS Chromebook Flip C213 is designed from the group up for kids in elementary schools as it’s built tough so that it can resist accidental drops and other impacts. To achieve this goal, ASUS has put a protective, military-grade rubber that uses reinforced nano-molding technology around the laptop’s all four exterior edges and corners.

Server

• By now, you’ve almost certainly heard of Docker containers. You know Docker is massively popular. But do you know why? Here’s a look at the factors driving tremendous interest in Docker today.

• Before delving into a discussion of the factors behind Docker’s popularity, it’s worth noting that Docker is not the only container platform out there. Nor was it the first to come along.

• Other frameworks, like OpenVZ and LXC, were available starting in the mid-2000s. Other container-like technologies, such as FreeBSD jails, go back even further. Docker was released only in 2013, making it a very young technology compared to most of today’s mainstream enterprise technologies.

• Curiously, however, it was Docker, not a more mature container platform, that has risen to massive prominence over the past few years. That’s an outcome worth pondering — for the purposes both of understanding what makes containers in general so popular, as well as why Docker in particular has succeeded so spectacularly, whereas alternative container frameworks have seen little adoption.

Kernel Space

• Stable kernels 4.12.1, 4.11.10, and 4.9.37 have been released. They all contain important fixes and users should upgrade.

• Linux is best known as the most used open source computer operating system in the world. You can think of Linux as the the software that is under all the other software on your computer, making requests on behalf of those programs and forwarding the requests onto the computer’s hardware.

• What operating system will be in use in the 23rd century? For fictional inhabitants of The Expanse, a critically acclaimed sci-fi series, it’s Linux.

• In many performance-oriented settings, the number of times that data is copied puts an upper limit on how fast things can go. As a result, zero-copy algorithms have long been of interest, even though the benefits achieved in practice tend to be disappointing. Networking is often performance-sensitive and is definitely dominated by the copying of data, so an interest in zero-copy algorithms in networking comes naturally. A set of patches under review makes that capability available, in some settings at least.

• When a process transmits a buffer of data, the kernel must format that data into a packet with all of the necessary headers and checksums. Once upon a time, this formatting required copying the data into a single kernel-space buffer. Network hardware has long since gained the ability to do scatter/gather I/O and, with techniques like TCP segmentation offloading, the ability to generate packets from a buffer of data. So support for zero-copy operations has been available at the hardware level for some time.

• Since its launch in February of last year, FD.io has been delivering complex routing/switching at the multi-million FIB scale at higher performance than any other software vswitch/vrouter. This is analogous to a shift from something that needs to be delivered via truck (say, an early version of a “computer”) that can now be transferred via carry-on bag (today’s thin and lightweight laptops).

• At launch, FD.io’s VPP technology could route/switch at half a Terabit per second at multimillion fib entry scales. Close examination of the bottlenecks revealed that it was being limited by the ability of the PCI bus to deliver packets from the NIC to the CPU. VPP had headroom to do more, but the PCI bus bandwidth imposed limitations.

• Network acceleration has always been a subject that naturally attracts the interest of network device vendors and developers. Kernel network acceleration techniques that require, for example, the caching of kernel networking data structures inside the network driver (or maintaining a private modified kernel for a specific device) are naturally frowned upon and bound to be rejected by the kernel networking community. There are also user-space kernel-bypass solutions, including the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK).

• Among the most popular open-source projects providing user-space network acceleration are Snabb, netmap, and DPDK. With the recent announcement by Jim Zemlin this April that DPDK project has moved to the Linux Foundation, it seems that this is a good time to get an overview of the current status of this project and its roadmap.

• The kernel’s file capabilities mechanism is a bit of an awkward fit with user namespaces, in that all namespaces have the same view of the capabilities associated with a given executable file. There is a patch set under consideration that adds awareness of user namespaces to file capabilities, but it has brought forth some disagreement on how such a mechanism should work. The question is, in brief: how should a set of file capabilities be picked for any given user namespace?

• Linus Torvalds released the 4.12 kernel on July 2, marking the end of one of the busiest development cycles in the kernel project’s history. Tradition requires that LWN publish a look at this kernel release and who contributed to it. 4.12 was, in many ways, a fairly normal cycle, but it shows the development community’s continued growth.

• The 4.12 kernel includes 14,821 non-merge changesets contributed by 1,825 developers. That is not the highest changeset count we’ve ever seen — 4.9 is likely to hold that record for some time — but it comes in at a solid #2. The 4.12 kernel did set a new record for the number of developers participating and for the number of first-time contributors (334), though. This was also a significant release for the growth of the kernel code base: 4.12 has just over one million lines of code more than its predecessor.

Graphics Stack

• Andres Gomez of Igalia is organizing the Mesa 17.1.5 point release to happen this week with numerous fixes to the open-source Linux graphics stack.

• Wayland release manager Bryce Harrington at Samsung OSG has announced the alpha releases of the upcoming Wayland 1.14 and Weston 3.0.

• The Wayland 1.14 release is expected in about one month along with Weston 3.0, with this Wayland reference compositor being bumped from v2.0 due to more ABI breakage.

Benchmarks

• With Mesa’s GL threading support ready for wider testing and the developers pursuing per-application enabling of this driver-agnostic Mesa OpenGL multi-threading work, here are some benchmarks of mesa_glthread when using a Pentium and Core i7 CPUs as well as a Radeon RX 580 and R9 Fury.

• AMD developer Marek has reported that BioShock Infinite can be around 76% faster, Civilization VI around 20% faster, Alien Isolation by around 60%, among other improvements when explicitly turning on mesa_glthread for games benefiting from this CPU multi-threading behavior. But for other games it can regress the performance, which is why this feature isn’t turned on unconditionally.

• When receiving the long-awaited AMD ARM board yesterday I also received Le Potato Libre Computer Board and the Firefly RK3399.

• Le Potato is the recently talked about ARM SBC that is the New Libre-Focused ARM Board Aims To Compete With Raspberry Pi 3, Offers 4K.

Applications

• The official Blender release is now being downloaded over half a million times per month, and a total of 6.5M last year.

• During the period of July 2016 and July 2017, Blender has seen the release of Blender 2.78 and a/b/c fix releases.

• GIMP is the multi-platform image manipulation tool stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. GIMP works on many operating systems and it is translated in many languages. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms. Both stable and development version is available via 3rd party repositories.

• Streamlink is a cross-platform command line utility tool (and API) with which you can stream videos from several streaming services including Twitch and YouTube Live via any video player app of your choosing e.g. VLC and MPV player.

• Being a fork of Livestreamer, Streamlink’s main purpose is to help users avoid buggy and/or CPU-heavy flash plugins in order enjoy an excellent video streaming experience. The CLI tool also has an API that developers can use in their applications for free.

• KeePass is a free open source password manager which helps you to manage your passwords securely.

• We can put all our passwords in one database which is locked with one master password or a key file.

• So we have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database.

• Indeed, the system you are running on your machine already have launcher or in other case you are using minimal desktop or you don’t like to scroll through launcher to find an App you want to launch. It won’t be wrong to say Gnome-Pie can be alternative option to your Current OS menu. Gnome-Pie is an awesome circular launcher designed to be fun, fast and visually appealing for Linux desktop. Basically it is made of several pies, each pie consist of multiple slices. The use can press a key stroke to open desired pie. By activating one of its slices, applications may be launched, key presses may be simulated or files can be opened.

• Succeeding systemd 233 is now systemd 234 with yet more features added as well as a new build system.

• Systemd 234 continues the growing trend by open-source projects of supporting the Meson build system. Systemd’s Meson support is currently complementary to Automake, but they intend to remove the Automake support in one of the upcoming releases, thereby exclusively using Meson for building systemd in the not too distant future.

Instructionals/Technical

• For a long time LXD has supported multiple storage drivers. Users could choose between zfs, btrfs, lvm, or plain directory storage pools but they could only ever use a single storage pool. A frequent feature request was to support not just a single storage pool but multiple storage pools. This way users would for example be able to maintain a zfs storage pool backed by an SSD to be used by very I/O intensive containers and another simple directory based storage pool for other containers. Luckily, this is now possible since LXD gained its own storage management API a few versions back.

Games

• GOG have revived another set of classic games today as the platformer series The Humans joins their shelves. The Humans Bundle contains Humans 1-3!

• With the first title originally released in 1992, you could have found it on systems like the Amiga and it certainly looks like something I remember.

• Publisher Kalypso Media has confirmed the Sudden Strike 4 real-time tactics game is still on track for launch-day Linux support.

• This World War II themed video game is set for release on 11 August and at least as of this morning in a tweet from Kalypso, Linux support is on target for launch alongside Windows, mac OS, and PlayStation 4.

• Shakedown: Hawaii [Official Site], the open-world comedy adventure where you’re building a ‘legitimate’ corporation was previously said that it would come to Linux, but now it’s not so likely.

• Video games have a long history of counterfeit cartridges trying to pass themselves off as legitimate. But while there are plenty of obvious knock-off video game hardware floating out there, it’s pretty rare to see a game console that tries to exactly mimic the look and functionality of a legitimate system.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• From the very beginning, watercolor was conceived as brush engine. I think it is the best place for it. But it brings some troubles. The most important problem is how to make undo engine.

• During a new stroke, the system can have previous strokes that continue to change. And it’s not clear how watercolor should behave with the rest of the engines. And I would like to ask your help. If you have any idea about it, please leave it in comments =)

• Heya fellow KDE people,

• just a couple of weeks ago I got the opportunity to attend the Google Code-In Summit held in several locations scattered around the San Francisco Bay area. I can tell you first hand: It’s been an awesome trip and I encourage anyone else to participate if the opportunity arises.

• There will be a workshop titled “Playing with the amalgam of QML and JavaScript” conducted by me.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• A quick update on my work for GNOME during GSoC. The initial work from Carlos has been split into a library handling the cloud provider management called libcloudproviders and a patch for GTK+ to add cloud providers to the GtkPlacesSidebar.

• Work is underway on a new way to integrate cloud storage providers with Nautilus, delivering a more consistent and uniform experience.

• In previous post, Code Search for GNOME Builder: Indexing, I wrote about how indexing of source code is implemented to support searching symbols in GNOME Builder. After discussing with Christian Hergert, we changed the design of indexing to make it easier to support indexing of source code in languages other than C/C++.

• This is the new design, An interface IdeCodeIndexer is created. This interface will take a source file of a particular language and returns a list of info of symbols present in that file. Returned list of symbols are in form of GListModel. Any class that implements this interface can provide indexing support for a language.

Distributions

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• BlackSuse OS is an opensuse-based system. Focused on security penetration testing and other small things Our repository is ready. The system is 80% functional.

Slackware Family

• This month’s security update for the Flash Player plugin has arrived. The new version is 26.0.0.137 for both the PPAPI (Google Chrome and friends) and the NPAPI (Mozilla Firefox and friends) based plugins.

• I know… Flash is a monster and should be killed. But as long as people need it on Slackware, and as long as Adobe keeps releasing Linux plugin updates, I will package them and add them to my repository.

Red Hat Family

• When open source works, like Linux, it becomes a powerful platform that drives innovation across multiple areas, from applications to hardware and even security, where the open source community becomes an asset rather than a liability because they help identify vulnerabilities and fixing them as a community, according to Wright. Further, the emergence of mid-stream organisations like OPNFV now brings together different open source projects, making them accessible by users, and creating environments no only for collaborations, but solutions integration and testing, he adds.

• The open source community, 5G standardisation and service providers are converging towards a singular goal. As Red Hat CTO Chris Wright explains, open source networking projects are now developing the core technologies necessarily for 5G, which has articulated the same requirements for an agile infrastructure capable of support multiple application types.

• And while there is still a gap between open source developed technologies and formal standardisation for 5G, the solutions themselves are rapidly becoming mainstream within service provider environments.

Finance

Fedora

• While Fedora 26 just shipped yesterday, developers are already talking about their very early release estimates for Fedora 28 and Fedora 29 in 2018.

• The Fedora 27 schedule has been firmed up for a while now and puts the change checkpoint completion deadline on 1 August, beta freeze on 5 September, beta release on 26 September, and the estimated release date for Fedora 27 at 24~31 October.

• Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has now laid out “super drafty” release schedules for F28 and F29 based on the fact they like early May and late October releases. The May/October cadence allows them to avoid major public holidays while also being timed nicely around GNOME releases, GCC updates in the spring, etc. They try to hit these targets, but release delays often interfere.

• I previously mentioned that the Fedora 26 release was imminent, and it was released as planned: the release announcement is a bit thin, but the release notes are, as always, very complete. It is worth reading through both of them before starting to install or upgrade Fedora.

• For new installations, the standard Workstation version, which has the Gnome 3 desktop, can be downloaded from the Get Fedora page. Other desktops, and other targets, can be downloaded from the Fedora Spins page.

• The Red Hat-backed Fedora Project released the latest version of its open source operating system that powers container management, data center operations, and developer workstations.

• The Linux-based Fedora OS was initially released in 2003 and is the basis for a number of distribution platforms, including Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux platform and the One Laptop Per Child XO project.

• While the DNF 2.0 package manager is found with this week’s Fedora 26 release, DNF developers aren’t done with changes to the package manager for Fedora.

• With the Fedora 27 cycle they are hoping to accomplish a unified database for DNF in handling package management. Currently, DNF makes use of obsolete Yum databases and related to that PackageKit is also using the Yum databases in a “very hacky way” while the goal is to provide a new, unified package database.

Debian Family

• Debian 9 Stretch is a horrible disappointment. It’s a completely unusable product in my scenario, and I see no real reason why I should bother using it. Ubuntu and friends offer a superior experience. Perhaps Debian serves a purposes somewhere, but I fail to see it. What really irks me is that in six or so years since I’ve last tried it, it’s as if nothing at all has changed. Exactly the same kind of issues, only different hardware and kernel modules.

• Perhaps without Debian we wouldn’t have Ubuntu and such. For that matter, we also wouldn’t have pyramids without slaves. But that does not mean we should be grateful for slavery in giving us big stony architecture. Similarly, Debian may be a baseline for many other distributions. But on its own, without a thick layer of customization and changes, it fails horribly on the desktop. This test makes me sad and angry. Because I know an end when I see one. It’s still a few years away, but it will inevitably come. Anyway, completely not recommended. My last venture into Debian this way. We’re done.

Derivatives

• A rumor went out in the Linux world that Parrot developer team is trying to switch from Debian GNU / Linux to Devuan GNU/Linux. After the release , they wiped out this rumor via a tweet “Our release team is evaluating a possible migration of our project from Debian to Devuan,”.

• It seems that Parrot developer team is not ready yet to work with Devuan. They mentioned this in a Facebook Status —“It is not an easy migration and we have still to decide what to do.”

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Arbor’s “EmETXe-i90M0” COM Express Basic Type 6 features 7th Gen Core EQ SoCs, -40 to 85°C support, triple displays, and an optional carrier.

• For the last four years, Debian and Ubuntu have been in the top three Linux distributions on Distrowatch. Since 2005, neither has been out of the top six. Together, they form one of the greatest influences on Linux development, and that influence seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future. They remain closely related, although if you look closely subtle differences in direction and orientation start to emerge

• You may have heard that Debian is a distribution for experts, and Ubuntu for beginners. That is true, so far as it goes. However, that distinction is more historic than contemporary.

• After Ubuntu burst on to the scene in late 2004, it spent several years making the desktop easier to use, especially for non-English speakers. However, thanks to free licenses, Ubuntu’s improvements have spread to most desktop environments.

• Moreover, Ubuntu’s days of interface innovations are largely in the past. Under the direction of the parent company Canonical, Ubuntu development has been focused elsewhere. For over six years, the emphasis was on the development of the Unity desktop into a common interface for phones, tablets, and desktops. Meanwhile, Canonical seems more concerned with OpenStack, embedded systems and servers. Although the recent abandonment of Unity in favor of GNOME could mean a return to innovation on the Ubuntu desktop, it is still too early to tell. For now, Ubuntu seems no more innovative than Debian.

• At the end of June, Zachary Fouts noticed something on his Ubuntu system that surprised him a bit: an entry in the “message of the day” (motd) that looked, at least to some, like an advertisement. That is, of course, not what anyone expects from their free-software system; it turns out that it wasn’t an ad at all, though it was worded ambiguously and could be (and was) interpreted that way. As the discussion in the bug Fouts filed shows, the “ad” came about from a useful feature that may or not have been somewhat abused—that determination depends on the observer.

• It is a longstanding Unix tradition to print a message of the day when users log in; in ages past, administrators would often note upcoming software upgrades and/or maintenance downtime that way. Typically that message has come from the /etc/motd file, but Ubuntu has long had a way to dynamically generate messages from local system information (e.g. number of package updates or reboot needed) using scripts in the /etc/update-motd.d/ directory. In Ubuntu 17.04, a new script was added that reaches out to a URL and grabs what it finds there to display as the motd.

• [...]

• Ubuntu Product Manager Dustin Kirkland, who is the author of the original dynamic motd as well as the new motd-news feature, soon arrived in the bug thread (after commenting in a related Hacker News thread). In a lengthy comment, he explained how motd-news works along with some history and functioning of the dynamic motd feature he developed back in 2009. He described how Ubuntu is using the feed and how it can be configured to consult a local URL to get news items that would be displayed instead of (or in addition to) the official feed. There are several categories of messages that will be added, including internet-wide problems (such as Heartbleed) or important information about Ubuntu itself (like an EOL date reminder).

• The release of Yunit packages for ubuntu 16.04 LTS marks or first milestone, regarding the availability of Yunit for all the supported platforms. Our next steps is to setup a CI infrastructure which will give us the ability to actually start working with the code and start improving Yunit by either fixing existing unity 8 bugs in launchpad or developing new features.

Flavours and Variants

• ExTiX developer Arne Exton is informing us today about the availability of a new update to his Ubuntu- and Debian-based ExTiX Linux distribution, versioned 17.7.

• ExTiX 17.7 comes as an update for the previous release, ExTiX 17.5, which the developer launched in early May as the first of the GNU/Linux operating system to be powered by a kernel from the Linux 4.11 series, and it introduces the first ever flavor that’s built around the Budgie desktop environment from the Solus Project.

Devices/Embedded

• It’s the year of GNU/Linux in your pocket! That’s the motto developer Ashish Gulhati put for its new Noodle Pi project, which now has a Kickstarter page and promises to let you create your own, integrated Raspberry Pi pocket computer.

• A new open source robot personal assistant has been created by a team of developers based in Barcelona Spain which builds on the company’s mission to make social robots accessible to everyone.

• Check out the demonstration video below to learn more about the Q.bo One personal robot which is taken to Indiegogo this month to raise the required funds it needs to go into small-scale production.

• Advantech’s 3.5-inch “RSB-4760” SBC and “EPC-R4760” box PC feature the quad -A53 Snapdragon 410, and offer WiFi, BT, GNSS, M.2, GbE, mini-PCIe, and more.

• Advantech’s IoT gateway-like EPC-R4760 box PC is the first embedded computer we’ve seen that builds on Qualcomm’s quad-core, 1.2GHz Cortex-A53 Snapdragon 410, also known as the APQ8016. Advantech’s 3.5-inch RSB-4760, however, joins several other Linux- and Android-friendly SBCs built on the SoC, which features a Qualcomm Adreno 306 GPU. In addition to Arrow’s Qualcomm-backed, open-spec DragonBoard 410c, we have seen commercial SBCs like Inforce’s 6309 Micro SBC and cheaper, less feature rich 6309L model.

• You might be knowing that Raspberry Pi is a small palm sized computer that lets you perform certain tasks and it even has the capability to replace a basic computer. Recently, a developer even took up the task to use a Raspberry Pi 3 as his primary computer after losing his MacBook Pro at a laptop. Just in case you wish to get started with Pi, follow our getting started with Raspberry Pi guide.

• Coming back to Rock64, sold by Pine64, it’s a new Raspberry Pi competitor that lets you run 4K videos by spending $25 only; that’s cheaper that a Pi 3. Apart from the 4K playback at 60Hz, Rock64 also beats Raspberry Pi when it comes to supporting HDR10, via HDMI 2.0.

• The large ecosystem of add-on boards is a key factor in the success of the Raspberry Pi, which torched the competition in our recent hacker board reader survey. Much of the Pi add-on business has moved to the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) I/O specification, which launched in 2014 as an easier, more standardized way to extend the Pi’s 40-pin expansion connector.

• Below is a roundup of 10 of the most interesting and highly regarded HATs on the market. This is not a review, but rather a selection intended to reflect the amazing diversity of Pi HATs. We have skipped numerous application segments here, especially in the purely industrial market and in basic accessories like touchscreens and cameras. It should also be noted that there are many excellent Pi add-ons that do not follow the HAT specification.

• Compared to traditional Pi add-ons or shields, HATs, which are often called bonnets in the UK, are automatically recognized by the SBC. With the help of a pair of I2C EEPROM pins, the HAT works with the Pi to automatically configure the GPIOs and drivers. The 65x56mm HAT daughter-cards stack neatly on top of the SBC next to the Ethernet and USB ports. This reduces cable clutter and allows both Pi and HAT to fit into standard enclosures. HATs also provide mounting holes that match up with the standard RPi B+, 2, and 3.

• Kontron’s “SMARC-sAMX7” module runs Yocto Linux on an i.MX7 SoC with up to 64GB eMMC, dual GbE controllers, -20 to 85°C support, and an optional eval board.

• The last time we checked in on Kontron’s SMARC computer-on-modules, it was to report on the Atom E3800-based SMARC-sXBTi, billed as the “world’s first x86-based SMARC COM.” With its new SMARC-sAMX7, the company has once again tapped the 82 x 50mm “short” version of the SMARC form factor, but this time with a low-power, ARM Cortex-A7 NXP i.MX7 SoC. The device runs a Yocto Project based Linux distribution with U-Boot bootloader, and is available with a new SMARC Evaluation Carrier 2.0 designed to support SMARC 2.0 (see farther below).

Tizen

• Two of Samsung’s Artik IoT gateway modules-The Artik 530 and the Artik 710 have recently been certified by SAP to run on SAP Leonardo IoT Edge, thus enabling Edge computing on Artik hardware. SAP’s Leonardo provides various analytics solutions on its cloud which when combined with Artik’s hardware provides more flexibility and faster deployment of analytics for developers who are working in IoT projects from multiple industrial domains.

• Samsung Electronics always want to satisfy consumer preferences and good taste – so It recently introduced its new Family Hub refrigerator. Samsung Electronics Family Hub refrigerator is definitely the future and it has modernized the concept of kitchen appliance. It is no longer just a fridge to keep food in good condition, now, it is practically the heart of a connected home.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Ecologists Without Borders and Pronatura México are two nongovernmental organizations that have been trying to quantify and, ultimately, help reverse the decline of mangrove forests in the Marismas Nacionales. In the summer of 2015, EcoWB approached the University of Washington looking for students with GIS experience to recommend a solution. EcoWB needed a cost-effective option that was documented in enough detail for their partner organizations in Mexico to implement it themselves. The UW graduate student team recommended that EcoWB use a free and open source GIS toolkit from the Natural Capital Project’s Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs. The lessons learned from the team’s work, described below, suggest that, in some situations, a free and open source GIS solution is a better option than a proprietary one.

• GitHub is asking for feedback and collaboration from its user community in updating its Terms of Service and other site policies.

• The web-based version control and data hosting organisation is effectively saying then that open source Terms of Service, should indeed be open source.

• Intel is an active contributor to multiple open source projects, but there are unifying goals and strategies for the company’s engagement with the open source community. According to Intel’s John Healy, the company’s involvement with open source is to first ensure a democratic environment to foster ideas, technical contributions to accelerate development, and market driven to ensure technologies and solutions reach commercialisation – to ensure the loop is closed.

• Lyft has spent a lot of time building tools that help it simulate the results of machine learning algorithms, and the company plans to make them available more broadly in the near future.

• The company will make the core of its ContraxSuite analytics system free and open source while offering retrofitting services at a cost.

• A few months back, we posed the question of whether the world needs another streaming engine. Now we’ll extend that question to querying. Virtually each streaming engine has a way to submit queries – otherwise, why would you need a streaming engine? Although streaming engines offer the promise of fresh real-time data, the ugly truth is that they must cache data first. That means that most streaming query engines must look back at data that has already been collected.

• [...]

• The result is the Bullet project, which Yahoo just open sourced on GitHub.

• Intel developers continue working on Cannonlake support for Coreboot while sadly we’ve seen no activity yet for getting Ryzen/Epyc CPUs working with Coreboot.

• Back in June I wrote about Intel prepping Cannonlake Coreboot support and since then that work has continued on getting Coreboot ready to this next-gen successor to Kabylake.

Events

• The Document Foundation’s Mike Saunders is announcing today that the LibreOffice Conference 2017 event will take place later this year in October and that it now has a host city.

• This year’s LibreOffice Conference will take place from 11 – 13 October in Rome, Italy. It’s a great opportunity for LibreOffice developers, users, supporters, translators and other members of the community to meet up, share ideas and make plans for future versions of the software.

• Docker and other containers are IT’s future. To manage containers, you need to use a container DevOps program. Of these, which include Dockerswarm mode and Mesosphere Marathon, Kubernetes is becoming the most popular. Therefore, if you plan on working with the cloud and containers, you need to learn all you can about Kubernetes. The Linux Foundation is making that easy by offering a free online Introduction to Kubernetes class.

• At Kinvolk we spend a lot of time working on and talking about the Linux userspace. We can regularly be found presenting our work at various events and discussing the details of our work with those who are interested. These events are usually either very generally about open source, or focused on a very specific technology, like containers, systemd, or ebpf. While these events are often awesome, and absolutely essential, they simply have a focus that is either too broad, or too specific.

• Actor and online entrepreneur Joseph Gordon-Levitt will be speaking at Open Source Summit North America — Sept. 11-14 in Los Angeles, CA — about his experiences with collaborative technologies.

• From October 4–6 developers, software architects, engineers, and community organizers will gather in Vancouver, British Columbia for Node.js Interactive — an event hosted by the Node.js Foundation. The conference features keynotes, presentations and workshops that are aimed to help Node.js users better understand how to work with Node.js and JavaScript as well as best practices in contributing to the project.

• A short reminder: the “Call for Presentations” deadline for the next OpenStack Summit in Sydney, Australia (November 6-8, 2017) is less an a day away.

CMS

• During the recently-held Hack/Doc Fest, the US Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project (CLAMP) took the time to acknowledge some of the people who have helped make this growing alliance what it is and what the alliance has meant for the development of Moodle. But beyond that, the Recognition Awards, given to people chosen by CLAMP’s Steering Committee, are a nod to the human element in the future development of open technologies for the development of critical thinking skills everywhere.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Juniper Networks is currently building out an Intent-based networking capability that will us a Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller model.

Funding

• Buoyant, the year-old startup behind the popular open source Linkerd project and creator of the new service mesh category of cloud infrastructure software, has banked $10.5 million in Series A funding.

• The round, announced July 11, was led by Benchmark Capital, with additional participation from #Angels, a female-led investment group of current and former Twitter executives.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Have you ever met a man you didn’t see why women would cozy up to, but they did? Or, in the interests of non-sexism, a woman you wondered why men liked, but they did?

• That is RMS.

• I suspect women are attracted to him because he is steadfast, moral, and more than a bit of a hero in his own way. He is also a genius, for real, in the sense that he is the only person I have ever known personally who won a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.”

• Wow. If there is ever an all-star team for Mental Sportsball, RMS is sure to be on it. I’d vote for him. Wouldn’t you? And I’m sure a whole lot of attractive women — not necessarily all Free Software devotees — would, too.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• In the first part of this series, I presented a list of factors that can influence someone’s decision to approach a project or problem with either a cooperative or competitive mindset. In this follow-up article, I’ll present a few scenarios that illustrate the ways these factors can interact to shape specific instances of collaboration or competition.

Programming/Development

• Tabs versus spaces: What seems like an age-old debate in the development community has seen renewed interested in the past several weeks as a report came out from Stack Overflow revealing that developers who use spaces may make more money than those who use tabs. Who knew that indentation style could have such a big impact on you, personally?

• Programmers are master logicians – well they sometimes are. Most of the time they are as useless at it as the average joe. The difference is that the average joe can avoid logic and hence the mistakes. How good are you at logical expressions and why exactly is Augustus De Morgan your best friend, logically speaking?

• One of the most common arguments against Meson is that “it is only fast because it uses Ninja rather than Make, using any other Ninja build generator would be just as fast”. This is always stated as fact without any supporting evidence or measurements. But is this really the case? Let’s find out.

• For testing one needs a project that has both CMake and Meson build definitions. I’m not aware of any so I created one myself. I took the source code of the Mediascanner 2 project, which is using CMake and converted it to use Meson. This project was chosen solely based on the fact that I wrote the original CMake definitions ages ago so I should have a fairly good understanding of the code base. The project itself is a fairly typical small-to-medium project written in C++ with a handful of system dependencies.

• ECMAScript 2017, the latest edition of the specification upon which JavaScript is based, plugs a gap left by awkward extinction of some Node.js code last year.

• In March, 2016, as a result of a naming conflict with instant messaging app Kik, developer Azer Koçulu withdrew more than 250 of his modules from NPM, the service Node.js developers use to install dependencies.

• The big languages are popular for a reason: They offer a huge foundation of open source code, libraries, and frameworks that make finishing the job easier. This is the result of years of momentum in which they are chosen time and again for new projects, and expertise in their nuances grow worthwhile and plentiful.

• Sometimes the vast resources of the popular, mainstream programming languages aren’t enough to solve your particular problem. Sometimes you have to look beyond the obvious to find the right language, where the right structure makes the difference while offering that extra feature to help your code run significantly faster without endless tweaking and optimizing. This language produces vastly more stable and accurate code because it prevents you from programming sloppy or wrong code.

Leftovers

• There are currently around 7,000 languages being used today, with one language dying every two weeks. UNESCO says that half of the world’s languages may vanish in a century’s time. And, in my home country of India, 220 languages have died in the last 50 years and 197 languages are endangered.

Science

• First, participants spent almost 40 minutes out of every 100-minute class period using the internet for nonacademic purposes, including social media, checking email, shopping, reading the news, chatting, watching videos, and playing games.

• Lithium ion batteries, as the name implies, work by shuffling lithium atoms between a battery’s two electrodes. So, increasing a battery’s capacity is largely about finding ways to put more lithium into those electrodes. These efforts, however, have run into significant problems. If lithium is a large fraction of your electrode material, then moving it out can cause the electrode to shrink. Moving it back in can lead to lithium deposits in the wrong places, shorting out the battery.

Health/Nutrition

• Access to affordable and quality medicines for all is one of the major commitments of the World Health Organization, and its new medicines and health products strategic framework for the next 15 years calls for new research and development (R&D) models, including delinkage of the R&D costs from the price of products, and fair pricing.

Security

• Josh and Kurt talk about Let’s Encrypt, certificates, Kaspersky, A/V, code signing, Not Petya, self driving cars, and failures that become security problems.

• Keeping our data safe online is something that we get told about a lot. That is because as members of the information generation, it’s all too easy for our most valuable assets our identity and privacy to be compromised. But how can we keep our data safer? Read on to find out.

• From ABTA, to election hacking to WannaCry, it seems not a day goes by without a cyber-attack dominating the headlines. Cybercrime doesn’t discriminate; it affects organizations of all shapes and sizes. Added to this is the mounting pressure caused by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which will penalize organizations that do not comply with laws that aim to keep customer data safe. It’s imperative for organizations to re-evaluate their security posture and plan for the future.

• If an iSCSI target becomes unavailable, attempts to reconnect will cause a leak. Initiating a new connection to an available target will work as expected. Microsoft is working on a resolution and will provide an update in an upcoming release.

• Why the word hacking go along with computers? The computer gives us a vast area to explore our creativity. It’s huge code base, and their intricacies and the complicated machines offer us opportunities to HACK.

• Today, July 13th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes documents from the Highrise project of the CIA. HighRise is an Android application designed for mobile devices running Android 4.0 to 4.3. It provides a redirector function for SMS messaging that could be used by a number of IOC tools that use SMS messages for communication between implants and listening posts. HighRise acts as a SMS proxy that provides greater separation between devices in the field (“targets”) and the listening post (LP) by proxying “incoming” and “outgoing” SMS messages to an internet LP. Highrise provides a communications channel between the HighRise field operator and the LP with a TLS/SSL secured internet communication.

• WikiLeaks has today published the 16th batch of its ongoing Vault 7 leak, this time instead of revealing new malware or hacking tool, the whistleblower organisation has unveiled how CIA operatives stealthy collect and forward stolen data from compromised smartphones.

• Previously we have reported about several CIA hacking tools, malware and implants used by the agency to remotely infiltrate and steal data from the targeted systems or smartphones.

• Kaspersky Lab, a private company, seems to be caught in the middle of a geopolitical fight where each side is attempting to use the company as a pawn in their political game.

• A recent paper [PDF] by a group of eight cryptography researchers shows, once again, how cryptographic breakthroughs are made. They often start small, with just a reduction in the strength of a cipher or key search space, say, but then grow over time to reach the point of a full-on breaking of a cipher or the implementation of one. In this case, the RSA implementation in Libgcrypt for 1024-bit keys has been fully broken using a side-channel attack against the operation of the library—2048-bit keys are also susceptible, but not with the same reliability, at least using this exact technique.

• The RSA cryptosystem involves lots of exponentiation and modular math on large numbers with sizable exponents. For efficiency reasons, these operations are usually implemented by a square-and-multiply algorithm. Libgcrypt is part of the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) project and underlies the cryptography in GPG 2.x; it uses a sliding window mechanism as part of its square-and-multiply implementation. It is this sliding window technique that was susceptible to analysis of the side channel and, thus, allowed for the break.

• It turns out someone called in to Verizon claiming to be me. The individual claimed his phone (my phone) had been stolen, and he wanted to transfer service to another device. He had enough information about me to pass whatever verification Verizon required, and if he’d been a little smoother on the phone, he’d have likely gotten my number. It turned out that the Verizon employee felt the call was suspicious and disabled the account instead of transferring service. (I know that only because the employee made a note on the account.) After a stressful day of back and forth, the company I work for was able to get my phone turned back on, and I still have the same phone number I’ve always had—thank goodness.

Defence/Aggression

• Drone strikes and surveillance are a major component of modern warfare, but few people outside the military understand how these programs work. That’s why former military technician Lisa Ling became a whistleblower after 14 years in the National Guard. She wanted policymakers to know that drones are not reliable, and they can create more problems than they solve.

• Lisa Ling joined the military in 1991, serving as an army medic and nurse before transferring to the Air National Guard (ANG). In the ANG, she became a communications technician working on various types of electronic equipment, including the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS). Besides her overseas deployments, Lisa was mobilized during a partial unit mobilization of the 234th intelligence Squadron to the 48th Intelligence Squadron at Beale Air Force Base from October 2007 to September 2009. The 48th Intelligence Squadron provides in-garrison and deployed communications, as well as logistics maintenance for the DCGS.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Concluding a months-long deathwatch, one of the largest icebergs ever seen finally separated from Antarctica’s Larsen C Ice Shelf sometime in the last couple days. The 5,800-square-kilometer iceberg contains over a trillion tons of ice. For years, researchers have been keeping an eye on a growing rift in the floating ice shelf that raced toward completion in recent months.

• One of the challenges of discussing climate change is that it really is that bad. Completely realistic projections of things like sea-level rise, loss of agricultural productivity, and so on can sometimes sound like a disaster movie.

• This is a bit of a problem in two ways. The first is that people naturally tend to dismiss possible future outcomes that they don’t want to believe will happen. The second is that, since its predictions are for very negative changes, all of climate science has been branded “alarmist.” In fact, if you do a Web search for “alarmist,” the first results that aren’t basic definitions or the Alarmist Brewery are all about climate change.

Finance

• In 2016, Michael Hood, an Uber driver, claimed in a proposed class-action lawsuit last year that he has been misclassified as an independent contractor rather than an employee, and as such is consistently being paid below minimum wage after expenses. At one point in 2015, after expenses, Hood alleges he made under $2 per hour—well below North Carolina’s minimum wage at the time, which was $7.25 per hour.

• I do not share some journalists’ affection for political chaos. It may give us plenty to talk and write about, but its consequences will inevitably be felt more keenly the further one climbs down the socio-economic ladder from Fleet Street and broadcast studios. Nonetheless, as I first began to write this piece earlier last month, I felt confident I had the makings of a quasi-satirical survey of how an election that had looked so good for the Conservative Party when it was called in mid-April could have turned so bad so quickly. And, more pertinently, what impact it would all have on Brexit.

• [...]

• Without this majority, she explained, invariably after stating that she was about to be “very clear”, she would not be able to secure the Brexit terms and conditions most advantageous to the United Kingdom. She had not yet been remotely clear about what these terms and conditions might be, but she was very clear that if she were to lose as few as six seats then “I will lose this election and Jeremy Corbyn will be sitting down with the Presidents, Prime Ministers and Chancellors of Europe”. This was a “cold hard fact”.

• The Campaign for Better Transport said the fine was “too little, too late”. Spokeswoman Lianna Etkind said: “The Southern fiasco is estimated to have cost the economy over £300m, and the government has already covered millions of pounds in delay repayments on behalf of Southern as well as handing GTR £20m of public money last year as part of an emergency package.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• In this case, “honest and candid” reportedly involves a posse of around eight assistants and managers pulling up with little to no warning in black SUVs so that Mark can chit-chat with the regular schmucks who helped make him the fifth richest man alive. Any interaction is almost immediately commodified as a painstakingly-manicured photo op, shot in a manner that minimizes the incongruity between Zuckerberg’s indoor kid complexion and the backdrop of some blighted Rust Belt town. After that, the Cone of Silence descends.

• There’s a new dictionary definition of ‘bittersweet’ and it belongs to this journalist who dedicated a year of his life to investigating Donald Trump Jr and the alleged Russian connections to the Trump election campaign.

• Hours earlier, his son Donald Jr. hit send on an email confirming a meeting with a lawyer with alleged ties to the Russian government with the promise of damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Following a report that Chinese authorities had ordered state-owned ISPs to block VPNs, the government has published a statement. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said no such notice had been issued and “legitimate access” to the global Internet, by businesses and general users, will be permitted.

• Google is currently taking part in the “day of action” with other internet giants to promote net neutrality laws that Donald Trump has decided to scrap. Google argues net neutrality is needed to stop internet censorship. However, what google isn’t tellling people is that Google loves censorship and current laws allow internet giants to use their market dominance to censor websites that they do not wish for people to see. Google uses computer algorithms code named penguin and panda to censor to target and censor websites that do not meet Googles “guidelines” Over the past couple of years MILLIONS of small businesses have suffered as Google uses its 90% market share in internet search which essentially makes it a gatekeeper to the internet to censor small websites from its search results in order to FORCE them to buy extortionate Adwords ads just to be seen.

• The Federal Censorship Commission is making a grab for power. Ajit Pai, the new FCC chairman hand-picked by Trump, put forth a plan to end Net Neutrality and the FCC voted this plan forward on May 18. Pai, appointed by Trump in January, has already abused his office in an attempt to censor the opposition. After comedian Stephen Colbert made a vulgar joke at Donald Trump’s expense, Pai announced that the FCC would investigate the comedian.

• Hong Kong’s media is regularly accused of self-censorship, with opposition politicians, journalists, and media groups such as the Hong Kong Journalists Association often voicing concern. Broadly defined, media censorship means not publishing or broadcasting news, or downplaying anything that a media organization considers sensitive or which conflicts with that organization’s political agenda.

• In the Hong Kong context, self-censorship is more tightly defined as a media organization ignoring or downplaying news that it feels embarrasses or offends mainland China. This definition is clearly one-sided because it assumes that only media considered as Beijing-friendly self-censor. But it is this definition that the Hong Kong public believes. The fact, of course, is all media organizations, both here and abroad, self-censor in varying degrees.

• El Salvador’s government has proposed a new bill which says the press should self-regulate to produce “non-violent” content and promote peace.

• It is part of wider strategy to reduce the country’s murder rate, one of the world’s highest according to the UN.

• Critics accuse the state of trying to censor the press.

• In recent months, social media platforms—under pressure from a number of governments—have adopted new policies and practices to remove content that promotes terrorism. As the Guardian reported, these policies are typically carried out by low-paid contractors (or, in the case of YouTube, volunteers) and with little to no transparency and accountability. While the motivations of these companies might be sincere, such private censorship poses a risk to the free expression of Internet users.

Privacy/Surveillance

• A high-ranking official of the National Security Agency said in a talk here Wednesday that the electronic surveillance agency is working to improve its public relations in the wake of Edward Snowden’s damaging leaks.

• Jonathan Darby, the NSA’s deputy chief of cybersecurity operations, said the agency realized it had to “get out and talk more about what we do” after Snowden in 2013 revealed ways in which U.S. spy agencies collect phone, email and other communications.

• Darby contended that most of the Snowden-related stories in 2013 were “twisted or dead-out wrong,” and he pushed back on a movie glorifying the former NSA contractor’s actions, saying the leaks put people’s lives at risk.

• Snowden fled to Moscow in June 2013 after he was identified as the source of information several newspapers printed about previously undisclosed NSA surveillance programs. Snowden remains in Russia, where he was granted asylum until 2020.

• According to sources reported by The Information, Amazon is currently looking at opening up this private transcript data to its developers, which could help them build better voice apps for Alexa. It would also raise serious privacy concerns for users.

• So if Trump is innocent, his best shot at avoiding impeachment is order the NSA to declassify its data on the “hacking” of the DNC’s servers and Podesta emails.

• Twelve organizations teamed up to file a lawsuit to stop the implementation of a new data mining law in the Netherlands. The new law was adopted by the Dutch Senate on Tuesday and gives the intelligence services more capabilities to spy on internet traffic on a large scale.

• “We trust that the Dutch judges will pull the brake and say: this law goes too far”, human rights lawyer Jelle Klaas, who is representing the coalition of organizations in their lawsuit, said to RTL Nieuws. The coalition includes the Public Interest Litigation Project, civil rights organization Privacy First, the Dutch Association of Journalists, the Dutch Association of Criminal Law Attorneys and the Platform for the Protection of Civil Rights.

• After forcing Facebook users to switch to a separate Messenger app to continue chatting, the social network is about to start pushing adverts on those using the function.

• The Department of Homeland Security has been pushing a plan that if enacted would require all Americans submit to a facial-recognition scan when departing the country. This step would be a way to expand a 2004 biometric-tracking law meant to target foreigners.

• Pilots projects are underway at six U.S. airports – Boston, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, New York City and Washington, D.C. DHS aims to have high-volume U.S. international airports engaged beginning next year.

• During the pilots, passengers will be able to opt out. But a DHS assessment of the privacy impact indicates that won’t always be the case.

Civil Rights/Policing

• EFF believes that everyone should be free to learn to protect themselves online and that this is information they have the right to share. Digital security trainings like this one are frequently held across the world to educate lawyers, journalists, and human rights advocates on how best to protect themselves and their communities. Teaching or learning these skills is certainly no grounds for detention. By conducting this raid, Turkey joins Iran and Ethiopia as countries where innocent citizens are intimidated and arrested simply for learning the basic principles of modern technology.

• During his tenure as Assistant Attorney General in the Bush Administration, Wray vocally defended a range of controversial provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act—including Section 215, which would later provide the basis for the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone metadata.

• When Wray went before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2003 to defend the PATRIOT Act, a Department of Justice document indicated that Section 215’s business records provision had never been used. Wray insisted that was a sign of restraint: “We try to use these provisions sparingly, only in those instances where we feel that this is the only tool that we can use.” In fact, as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) made clear in its report on the bulk metadata program, Section 215 was sitting fallow because the Bush Administration was already collecting much of that data—without statutory authorization.

• Granted, Wray didn’t have all of the information about that secretive wiretapping program until 2004, which we’ll get into below. Still, his insistence that Section 215 was just an effort to bring counterterrorism powers in line with ordinary criminal authorities reflected a concerning lack of skepticism about the risk of abuse. The same holds for his defense of a range of other PATRIOT Act provisions: “sneak and peek” warrants that allow law enforcement to search first and serve notice later; a reduced bar for obtaining a FISA warrant that one district court later found inconsistent with the Fourth Amendment; and a vaguely worded expansion of the kind of Internet data, some of it potentially very sensitive, that can be collected with a pen/trap order.

• Experience teaches that broad grants of surveillance authority are invariably abused, as the PATRIOT Act has been. During Wray’s confirmation process, lawmakers should press him on his insistence that the Act “helped preserve and protect liberty and freedom, not erode them.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Today’s digital protest is an important effort to help preserve the net neutrality rules that help uphold a free and open internet. It’s also not enough.

• Under the present net neutrality rules, there’s a clear standard that prevents ISPs from blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization of “lawful” traffic. In addition, they allow Internet providers to be regulated as carriers under Title II.

• The FCC chairman leading net neutrality rollback is a former Verizon employee and whose views on regulation echo those of broadband companies

• Comments on the FCC’s new proposal will be open until August and an as yet unscheduled vote is expected later this year.

• [...]

• Another supporter, the Writers Guild of America, has called the move a “war on the open internet”.

• There are two kinds of people in this world: those who have never heard of net neutrality, and those who are deeply, deeply tired of engaging in the debate over net neutrality.

• You might have noticed something unusual when you visited the EFF website today: our site was “blocked” unless you shelled out for “premium” Internet access.

• As part of the day of action to support net neutrality, we decided to imagine what might happen if FCC Chairman Ajit Pai caves to industry pressure and abandons the net neutrality rules the FCC adopted just two years ago. If you don’t want to live in that future, it’s time to take action.

• Why was it fucked? Because the free and open internet was in danger of becoming tightly controlled by giant telecom corporations that were already doing things like blocking apps and services from phones and excusing their own services from data caps. Because the lack of competition in the internet access market let these companies act like predatory monopolies. And because our government lacked the will or clarity to just say what everyone already knows: internet access is a utility.

• We can win again. Below are three things you can do today to make sure we let everyone in Congress and the FCC know that we won’t let them destroy net neutrality.

• Will the voice of the people be drowned out by a flood of corporate cash?

• A host of internet giants – from social networks to dating apps to porn sites – will join a protest Wednesday against plans to roll back rules protecting “net neutrality”.

• The sites will display a variety of messages, or simulate the potential effects of losing the basic principle of all internet traffic being treated equally.

• The US communications regulator earlier this year voted to remove an Obama-era rule that would prevent the prioritisation – or “throttling” – of data, as well as other measures campaigners consider to be detrimental to the internet.

• Opponents to net neutrality say it stifles innovation and discourages investment in telecoms infrastructure.

• Technology giants like Amazon, Spotify, Reddit, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and many others are rallying today in a so-called “day of action” in support of net neutrality, five days ahead of the first deadline for comments on the US Federal Communications Commission’s planned rollback of the rules.

• In a move that’s equal parts infuriating and exasperating, Ajit Pai, the FCC’s new chairman appointed by President Trump, wants to scrap the open internet protections installed in 2015 under the Obama administration. Those consumer protections mean providers such as AT&T, Charter, Comcast, and Verizon are prevented from blocking or slowing down access to the web.

• The FCC wants to destroy net neutrality and give big cable companies control over what we see and do online. If they get their way, they’ll allow widespread throttling, blocking, censorship, and extra fees. On July 12th, the Internet will come together to stop them.

DRM

• Before I continue, I want you to fully realize that with Slackware Linux, your rights are not taken away. You are free to use – or not use – technologies that allow you to watch “protected” content like Netflix videos. Our browsers will work just as well if you choose not to use DRM technologies. The libraries which implement the DRM layer are separate from the Slackware packages containing the browsers (Firefox, Chromium) and are not distributed with the OS. It is up to you to add DRM extensions if you need them. You are and remain in control of your OS.

• Five days ago, the World Wide Web Consortium announced that it would go ahead with its project of making DRM for web-video, and that the Director, Tim Berners-Lee had overruled or decided not to act further on all objections about the dangers this posed to legitimate and important activities including security audits, accessibility adaptation and competition.

• The W3C has an appeals process, which has never been successfully used in W3C history. If 5 percent of the members appeal a decision by the Director, all members are entitled to vote, and if there’s a majority in favor of overulling the Director, the decision is unmade.

• Days ago, Ars reported on a controversial decision by the industry trade group that oversees the global development of Web standards. The decision by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to back a standard for implementing digital rights management (DRM) for Web-based content is now under appeal, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced Wednesday.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• York University is required to pay the interim tariff established by the Copyright Board of Canada in 2010, Canada’s Federal Court rules in Access Copyright v York University. The court said the tariff is “mandatory, not voluntary”

• In 2012, three academic publishers, Oxford University Press (OUP), Cambridge University Press (CUP) and Taylor & Francis, sued the University of Delhi (DU) and Rameshwari Photocopy Service (based at the university) for copyright infringement for photocopying parts of their textbooks and distributing them in course packs – collections of assigned reading materials – exclusively to students for a fee.

• The publishers sought to compel Delhi University to enter into a licensing agreement with the Indian Reprographic Rights Organization (IRRO), that manages certain rights on behalf publishers and other rightsholders in India.

• The battle over now-famous selfie photographs taken by a macaque monkey will head back to federal court. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco on Wednesday will hear arguments on whether an animal can own the copyright to a photograph. The proceedings will be broadcast online.

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