● 01.26.18

● Links 26/1/2018: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Plans, Mycroft Mark II

Posted in News Roundup at 6:28 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• One of the last minute changes sneaking into the Linux 4.15 kernel is support for PDP Xbox One controllers.

• Linux supports a variety of Xbox controllers and various offshoots while now the controllers from Performance Designed Products is the latest. PDP Xbox One Controllers can be found at a variety of Internet retailers but up to now hasn’t played nicely with the Linux kernel: the devices are rather peculiar about their initialization sequence and needed some extra packets before sending any input reports.

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation is pleased to welcome LinuxBoot to our family of open source projects and to support the growth of the project community. LinuxBoot looks to improve system boot performance and reliability by replacing some firmware functionality with a Linux kernel and runtime.

• Firmware has always had a simple purpose: to boot the OS. Achieving that has become much more difficult due to increasing complexity of both hardware and deployment. Firmware often must set up many components in the system, interface with more varieties of boot media, including high-speed storage and networking interfaces, and support advanced protocols and security features.

• LinuxBoot addresses the often slow, often error-prone, obscured code that executes these steps with a Linux kernel. The result is a system that boots in a fraction of the time of a typical system, and with greater reliability.

• Not to be confused with Coreboot or its former name of LinuxBIOS, the Linux Foundation today announced LinuxBoot as a new initiative for replacing system firmware with the Linux kernel/drivers.

• LinuxBoot is backed from the likes of Google and Facebook for improving the system boot speed and reliability by replacing some firmware functionality with the Linux kernel and a runtime.

• Finding itself close to being overwhelmed by the sheer number of open-source networking projects it manages, the Linux Foundation said Tuesday it has decided to create a single administrative structure to govern them all.

• Called the “LF Networking Fund,” the new initiative is a kind of umbrella organization for several networking projects, including the Open Network Automation Platform, OpenDaylight, the Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualization, the Platform for Network Data Analytics, the Streaming Network Analytics System and the Fast data – Input/Output project.

• As an effort to bring early-stage startups together with companies that are officially recognized by Hyperledger, this measure can accelerate the pace with which new ideas find traction and reach maturity.

• Companies previously had to go through a grueling application process to prove the maturity of their code and a commitment of resources before becoming an “officially recognized” by the consortium and getting “incubation status” for their code.

• To give an idea of ​​how strict the process of applying for this status, there are at least 185 members of Hyperledger, but only eight codebases have been officially granted the status.

• This new measure now gives startups access to some of the benefits accessed only by companies that are officially recognized – for example, IBM, Intel and Monax.

• The Linux Foundation is restructuring its operations to better coordinate the activities of multiple open source networking projects that impact the telecom space, including OPNFV, ONAP and OpenDaylight.

• The Linux Foundation recently announced a new project called the LF Networking Fund (LFN), a platform for cross-project collaboration. Among the founding projects of the LFN include FD.io, OpenDaylight, ONAP, OPNFV, PNDA and SNAS.

• The Linux Foundation created an umbrella platform, the LF Networking Fund, to promote cross-project collaboration among open source networking projects under its wing.

Graphics Stack

• GLAMOR as a means of providing 2D acceleration over OpenGL in X.Org Server 1.20 will support for 30-bit RGB colors.

• Landing a few days ago was supporting Deep Color / Depth 30 with the Radeon X.Org driver. But initially that support was limited to using the older EXA 2D acceleration method. Fortunately, the generic 2D-over-OpenGL GLAMOR acceleration code within the X.Org Server now supports 30-bit colors.

• Earlier this month a Red Hat developer managed to achieve full clock-gating for NVIDIA Kepler GPUs using the open-source Nouveau DRM driver. Today the second version of these patches were published.

• Lyude Paul of Red Hat has been tackling this clock-gating support for Kepler1/Kepler2 GPUs, a.k.a. the GeForce GTX 600/700 series. The previous article covers how to enable the support, but when enabled it allows for dropping the GPU power usage by several Watts.

• For those planning to pick up a Raven Ridge laptop or the forthcoming desktop APUs, the Mesa driver now has patches for enabling H.265/HEVC video encode support for VCN 1.0 on Raven hardware.

• AMD developers today sent out a set of 12 patches for adding HEVC encode support to the Gallium3D VL interface, Radeon VCN specific HEVC encode bits, and added HEVC encoding support to the Gallium3D VA “video acceleration” state tracker.

Benchmarks

• Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks looking at Intel Pentium vs. AMD Ryzen 3 performance for Linux gaming. Those tests on the Pentium and Ryzen systems were done with both NVIDIA and AMD Radeon graphics for seeing how the gaming performance compares in the spectrum of sub-$100 CPUs and cheap graphics cards. But for those that were just curious about the CPU performance, here are some benchmarks I also carried out with the Pentium G4600 Kabylake and AMD Ryzen 3 1200.

Applications

• Linux has become a popular open source alternative to the popular Windows and iOS operating systems, and a key factor behind its rise is security.

• The operating system is much less likely to be a target of malware than its better-known competitors as it has far fewer users, more knowledgeable server administrators and a comprehensive permissions system that enhances its defences.

• That doesn’t, however, make Linux invulnerable. Here are some Linux security tools to add an extra layer of protection to the operating system.

• The prrd package was introduced recently, and made it to CRAN shortly thereafter. The idea of prrd is simple, and described in some more detail on its webpage and its GitHub repo. Reverse dependency checks are an important part of package development and is easily done in a (serial) loop. But these checks are also generally embarassingly parallel as there is no or little interdependency between them (besides maybe shared build depedencies). See the following screenshot (running six parallel workers, arranged in split byobu session).

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The progress is stunning made by a lone developer on the DXVK project for mapping the Direct3D 11 graphics API on top of Vulkan for allowing better performance/support for D3D11 games on Wine.

• DXVK is only a few months old and the work of Philip Rebohle who has been working on it nearly daily. It was just a few days ago I wrote about DXVK Is Making Significant Progress In Implementing Direct3D 11 Over Vulkan while already more games are beginning to work.

Games

• Valve released today a new Steam Client Beta update for all supported platforms adding a few HiDPI improvements for both Windows and Linux systems.

• Steam Client always looked bad on high-res monitors, with small text and graphics, but it would appear that Valve finally decided to address these issues and implemented a 2X-scaling mode for Linux-based operating systems, promising high-resolution text and graphics on 4K monitors.

• At the same time as adding HiDPI monitor support for Windows 10, Valve has added a “2X-scaling mode” for the Steam client to satisfy modern high resolution monitors.

• This 2X-scaling mode for the Steam Linux client supports high resolution texts and graphics when running the Steam client on 4K resolution monitors.

• Valve seem to be doing well for early 2018 when it comes to Linux, not only are they updating SteamOS more often, Linux is also getting some overdue attention with the Steam Client too.

• Firstly, SteamOS was updated again on the 15th of January to include the latest 4.14.13 Linux Kernel release. Then, they pushed the previous beta out to everyone that includes updated Mesa and NVIDIA drivers. On top of that SteamOS just got another update for security fixes to catch up with Debian 8.10. Seems like Valve are starting to get updates out quicker for SteamOS this year, which is a really healthy sign for things to come.

• As promised, the developers of Train Station Simulator [Steam, Official Site] have put up a Linux alpha build for you to play around with. Of course, you do need to own it to actually test it.

• They even did a livestream to talk about porting it. In it, the developer working on the Linux version specifically mentioned the privacy issues in Windows 10 (even though they like it) as a reason for doing this. Even with the developer stating they love Windows 10, they also made their thoughts on Linux quite clear—”It is amazing what the community has come up with here, in all these various software packages that comprise Linux, it’s incredible, it’s no question for a free and open source set of software Linux is absolutely incredible and amazing.”. I’ll be honest, that warmed my heart right up.

• Helium Rain [Steam] is a gorgeous space sim and the developers have been really supportive of Linux, this update is a real juicy one too.

• They’ve updated their build of Unreal Engine, which includes a new audio pipeline and support for Vulkan. If you add “-vulkan” (without quotes) as a launch option for the game on Steam, it will now use the Vulkan API. The developer says that it’s a little slower right now, but for AMD GPU owners it might be more reliable.

• Seems Humble have some pretty good deals going for Linux gamers right now, so let’s take a little look.

• As we have shown in past benchmarks, while current generation Linux games with current Linux GPU drivers using the Vulkan API rather than OpenGL may not be significantly faster with higher-end hardware right now, the impact of this newer Khronos graphics API tends to be more profound on lower-end hardware, especially when it comes to lightening the load on the CPU. Following the recent Pentium vs. Ryzen 3 Linux gaming tests, I carried out some fresh benchmarks looking at OpenGL vs. Vulkan on the Ryzen 3 1200 quad-core CPU with NVIDIA and Radeon graphics.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Last week, KDE pledged to make 2018 the year its Plasma Mobile user interface for mobile devices becomes fully a functional mobile environment and deploy it on as many devices as possible, including the upcoming Librem 5 Linux phone from Purism, which should be available in Q1 2019.

• But they need community’s help to test Plasma Mobile on their devices or virtual machines and report issues they might discover. As such, KDE released today the first-ever dedicated Plasma Mobile ISO image that users can download and boot on real machines or virtual ones like QEMU/KVM or Oracle’s VirtualBox.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• If you’ve been itching to toy with the latest development builds of WebKit on Linux you’ll be pleased to know it’s just gotten a bit easier.

• It’s all thanks to the newly announced ‘Epiphany Technology Preview‘, a development version of the Epiphany web browser (also known as GNOME Web) running atop the latest WebKitGTK+ snapshot.

• We launched PipeWire last September with this blog entry. I thought it would be interesting for people to hear about the latest progress on what I believe is going to be a gigantic step forward for the Linux desktop. So I caught up with Pipewire creator Wim Taymans during DevConf 2018 in Brno where Wim is doing a talk about Pipewire and we discussed the current state of the code and Wim demonstrated a few of the things that PipeWire now can do.

• PipeWire was announced last year as a new Red Hat projects with aspirations to be to video as PulseAudio is to audio on the Linux desktop. Other PipeWire goals include professional audio support equal to or better than JACK, full Wayland/Flatpak support, and more. Red Hat is making a lot of progress on PipeWire, but it’s not yet ready to be the default on the Linux desktop.

• Red Hat’s Christian Schaller has shared a status update on PipeWire after discussing the latest state with PipeWire creator Wim Taymans.

• Unless you’re one of a very lucky few, you probably use apps with title bars. In case you’ve never come across that term, title bars are the largely empty bars at the top of some application windows. They contain only the window title and a close button, and are completely separate from the window’s content. This makes them very inflexible, as they can not contain any additional UI elements, or integrate with the application window’s content.

• GNOME developer Tobias Bernard has announced “The CSD Initiative” in a push for more applications to support client-side decorations and as part of that to abandon boring title bars in favor of modern header bars.

• By using client-side decorations (CSD) rather than server-side decorations, applications are able to draw their own title/header bars and that makes for more interesting possibilities to save precious screen real estate and be more innovative about packing additional functionality into what otherwise would be a rather empty bar on the screen.

Distributions

• By design, Linux is a very secure operating system. In fact, after 20 years of usage, I have personally experienced only one instance where a Linux machine was compromised. That instance was a server hit with a rootkit. On the desktop side, I’ve yet to experience an attack of any kind. That doesn’t mean exploits and attacks on the Linux platform don’t exist. They do. One only need consider Heartbleed and Wannacry, to remember that Linux is not invincible.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• This is an update to our current Meltdown and Spectre situation on openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed.

• We have released kernels with initial Meltdown and Spectre mitigations begin of January.

• A total of six snapshots arrived and brought new versions of Ruby, YaST, KDE’s Plasma 5.12 Beta and many others.

• The latest snapshot, 20180124, switched the default for Ruby to version 2.5. Package improvements were made to the command line tool SUSEConnect 0.3.7. A change to cups-filters 1.19.0 in order to allow builds on systems without python2 was made with python3-cups rather than using python-cups. Enscript 1.6.6 fixed a handful of bugs and spec-cleaner 1.0.2 added groups for Rust and made the switch to pytest. Git, squid and perl-Encode also received minor updates in the snapshot.

Red Hat Family

• Everyone wants a safer operating system, and that’s Red Hat’s main goal in its just-released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.5 beta.

• RHEL 7.5 Beta is designed to provide a consistent foundation across the hybrid cloud. It also offers key new and enhanced features around security and compliance, platform efficiency, and manageability. The newest member of the RHEL 7 family supports not just x86 chips but also IBM Power, IBM System z, and ARM as well.

• Red Hat Inc. has announced the general availability of the beta release of their upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 operating system, due for release early this spring.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 is the fifth maintenance update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system series and brings with it yet another layer of security and performance new features and improvements that would benefit enterprise customers on the desktop, server, and cloud infrastructures.

• As expected, Red Hat ships the latest mitigations for the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities with the latest RHEL 7 milestone. In addition, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 release promises to continue to support alternative architectures besides x86 and x86_64 platforms, including IBM Power, IBM System z, and ARM.

• This series takes the reader on a journey, taking a peek inside life in a Red Hat Open Innovation Labs residency. This is the top tier experience for any customer; exposing them to open collaboration, open technologies, and fast agile application delivery methods.

• This experience often escapes organizations attempting digital transformation. Through submersion in an Open Innovation Labs residency, Red Hat shares its experience in managing, developing, and delivering solutions with communities, open technologies, and open collaboration.

• Join me as I share experiences from inside a real life residency, watching Red Hat work intimately with a customer. This will expose new ways of working and leveraging open technologies using fast, agile application delivery methods and open collaboration.

Finance

Debian Family

Derivatives

• SolydXK is a Debian-based Linux distribution that comes with a choice of the Xfce (SolydX) or KDE (SolydK) desktop. The latest edition of SolydXK, released this month, provides a state-of-the-art Linux platform.

• When I first reviewed the SoldXK distro back in 2013, it was an impressive new kid on the Linux block. Schoelje, a key developer of two discontinued desktop options within the Linux Mint distro, has helped the SolydXK distro grow into a reputable Linux offering built around two popular computing options.

• Those two desktop options drew me to the Linux OS years ago. Both have their strong points.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Bionic Beaver, the codename for the next Ubuntu LTS release, is due in April 2018 and will ship with both the traditional Xorg graphics stack as well as the newer Wayland based stack, but Xorg will be the default.

• 17.10, released in October 2017, ships with the Wayland based graphics server as the default and the Xorg based equivalent is available as an option from the login screen. When we started out on the GNOME Shell route for 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) we knew that we needed to have Wayland as the default option otherwise we wouldn’t know if it would work well for our users in the LTS only 6 months later. The LTS is supported for five years meaning that we need to be certain that what goes out the door on release day will be maintainable and sustainable for the duration and will serve all our users and customers needs, which is no mean feat.

• Coming a few days after the last kernel update released earlier this week, which included mitigations for the Spectre security vulnerability that puts billions of devices at risk of attacks, today’s security update addresses a logic error in Linux kernel’s x86-64 syscall entry implementation, discovered by Jay Vosburgh.

• According to the security advisory published today by Canonica, it would appear that the security issue has been introduced by the mitigations for the Spectre hardware bug, and it could allow a local attacker to either execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (DoS attack).

• The Snapcraft Summit, taking place in Seattle from January 29th to February 2nd, is a forward-thinking five day software hackathon being attended by major software vendors and snap developers working to move the industry forward with software delivery.

• In the style introduced by the famous BarCamps of old, the agenda is totally free-form and attendee-generated. Of course, that doesn’t mean we’ll sit down and relax! There are many things planned that need tackling. Every attendee already has a long laundry list of things to work on; as a group we will move forward and check things off the list as the days go by. We are going to be covering a wide range of technologies and domains, from GUI oriented electron based applications and its development stack to robotics, with a spice and language frameworks and command line tools for the cloud would be the few to mention.

• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will come with the Xorg display server enabled by default. Canonical cites stability and reliability concerns over Wayland as reason for the change.

Devices/Embedded

• If you want a smart speaker cum virtual assistant like Amazon Echo and Google Home that doesn’t spy on you, Mycroft Mark II is what you are looking for. The open source device is open for pre-order via its crowdfunding campaign.

• Mycroft has Kickstarted an open source “Mycroft Mark II” smart speaker and voice assistant that runs Linux on a quad-core Xilinx SoC, and offers a 6-mic beamforming array, 10W speaker, 4-inch touchscreen, and a promise of user privacy.

• When Mycroft launched its Kickstarter campaign for the original, voice-activated Mycroft home automation hub back in Aug. 2015, the Amazon Echo speaker and its Alexa voice agent had made a splash, but had yet to become a household fixture, and Google had yet to launch its Google Home with its Google Assistant agent. Now, the company has returned to Kickstarter to launch a more powerful, and similarly open source hardware and software Mycroft Mark II into a market in which sales of Alexa and Google Assistant based voice activated devices are soaring along with concerns about invasions of privacy.

• The Mycroft Mark II Open Source Voice Assistant (that doesn’t spy on you) just launched on Kickstarter. Mycroft source code is available on GitHub.

• Mycroft is a project that, until now, required some computer know-how to get going. What might be easy for a technology hobbyist or professional could be an intimidating experience for the average user. Because of this, there has been glaring void in the landscape of personal assistant software.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• t the recent KubeCon North America conference, in Austin, USA, Bloomberg presented their new open source “PowerfulSeal” tool, which enables chaos testing within Kubernetes clusters via the termination of targeted pods and underlying node infrastructure. The Kubernetes container orchestration platform is a popular choice for deploying (distributed) microservice-based applications, and practices from chaos engineering can assist with building resilient systems.

• PowerfulSeal follows the Principles of Chaos Engineering, and is inspired by the infamous Netflix Chaos Monkey. The tool allows engineers to “break things on purpose” and observe any issues caused by the introduction of various failure modes. PowerfulSeal, written in Python, is currently Kubernetes-specific and only has “cloud drivers” for managing infrastructure failure for the OpenStack platform, although a Python AbstractDriver class has been specified in order to encourage the contribution of drivers for additional cloud platforms.

• In the world of free software engineering, we have lofty goals: the FSF’s High Priority Project list identifies goals like private real-time communication, security and diversity in our communities. Those deploying free software in industry have equally high ambitions, ranging from self-driving cars to beating the stock market.

• Yet over and over again, we can see people taking little shortcuts and compromises. If Admiral McRaven is right, our failure to take care of little decisions, like how we choose an email provider, may be the reason those big projects, like privacy or diversity, appear to be no more than a pie-in-the-sky.

Events

• It’s been a while huh? The past six months held me busy traveling and studying abroad in Australia, but I’m back! With renewed energy, and lots and lots of GNOME socks for everyone. Like previous years, I’m helping out in GNOME’s FOSDEM booth at the FOSDEM 2018 conference.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the program for Embedded Linux Conference + OpenIoT Summit North America, taking place March 12-14 in Portland, OR. Attendees have access to all sessions and activities at both events, which are co-located in the same venue.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The development team behind the WebExtensions architecture is no exception, landing a slew of new API and improvements that can now be found in Firefox 59 (just released to the Beta channel).

• We are happy to let you know that Friday, February 2nd, we are organizing Firefox 59 Beta 6 Testday.

• In preparation for the MDN redesign I examined our analytics to get an idea of how wide our users’ browser windows were. I wanted window widths, not screen sizes and I thought a chart would tell a more compelling story than a table.

• Throughout the years, we have been extremely lucky to have an amazing array of great people joining us and contributing in many various ways. There has been some spam here and there, we’ve had some people getting very emotional and unhappy about various aspects of SUMO or Mozilla, but so far we have had relatively few cases that needed Administrator investigation.

• Obviously, all that luck does not mean that interpersonal conflicts on different levels do not happen right now or will not happen in the future. We acknowledge this fact and want to be prepared for such moments, as infrequent as they are. Staying a step ahead of potential problems will help us provide you with a SUMO community experience you all can enjoy and be a part of.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Rotary encoder specialist POSITAL has expanded its interface offerings for its magnetic Kit Encoders, launched with great success last year, with support for the non-proprietary open-source BiSS Line communication protocol. This enables the practical implementation of single-cable technology, which is becoming increasingly popular with motor and robot manufacturers. POSITAL’s easy-to-install motor feedback kits, which feature 17-bit electronic resolution, bridge the gap between simple resolvers and more complex and expensive optical encoders for servomotors, robot joints and other applications where absolute rotary position feedback is required.

• The product is used to validate and test an Application Programming Interfaces (API) and generate its OpenAPI documentation.

• As the so-called API economy now comes into being — and exists as a defined elemental ‘thing’ inside the wider software application development universe — there is (very arguably) additional need for tools that can quantify, qualify and indeed validate and test how software developers will integrate with APIs and get them to function as intended.

BSD

• Struck by the small number of reported BSD kernel vulnerabilities compared to Linux, von Sprundel sat down last summer and reviewed BSD source code in his spare time. “How come there are only a handful of BSD security kernel bugs advisories released every year?” he wanted to know. Is it because the BSDs are so much more secure? Or is it because no one is looking?

• von Sprundel says he easily found around 115 kernel bugs across the three BSDs, including 30 for FreeBSD, 25 for OpenBSD, and 60 for NetBSD. Many of these bugs he called “low-hanging fruit.” He promptly reported all the bugs, but six months later, at the time of his talk, many remained unpatched.

• “By and large, most security flaws in the Linux kernel don’t have a long lifetime. They get found pretty fast,” von Sprundel says. “On the BSD side, that isn’t always true. I found a bunch of bugs that have been around a very long time.” Many of them have been present in code for a decade or more.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GNU Project and GCC developers have announced the release of GCC 7.3. GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection. This is a bug fix release as it has important fixes for regressions and bugs in GCC 7.2. It has more than 99 bugs fixed since the previous release of GCC.

• The Linux operating system (OS) will turn 30 in the year 2021.

• We know that Linus Torvalds first penned (typed) his work plans for what turned out to be Linux on a Usenet posting as follows:

• “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU) for 386(486) AT clones,” wrote Torvalds.

• No brief history of Linux is needed here, there are plenty of write ups detailing the origins of UNIX, MINIX, the birth of GNU and Richard Stallman’s creation of the GNU General Public License.

• Glibc 2.27 will be released as soon as next week as the latest half-year update to the GNU C Library.

• The Glibc 2.27 cycle has been very heavy on performance optimizations. As covered recently, there’s been AVX2/FMA optimizations, other optimized functions, numerous FMA optimizations, and more. Long story short, if you’re running a recent AMD/Intel x86_64 CPU, there are chances you could see good performance improvements out of Glibc 2.27.

Licensing/Legal

• Most Android smartphone users understand the operating system which powers their device is “open source.” For many, that’s where their understanding ends. The legality of open source technology like Android is a mystery outside the geeky inner circle of coders and hackers who make a hobby out of tinkering with the system.

• [...]

• Here’s a brief synopsis of the ins and outs of the laws governing Android:

• Android is based on Linux, an open-source operating system. Linux is published under the General Public License (GPL), which regulates how Linux can be used, edited, and distributed.

• On top of the Linux kernel, there are lots of other components to Android. Most are also licensed under an “open source” license. The preferred license for the Android Open Source Project is the Apache Software License, Version 2.0 (“Apache 2.0”), and the majority of the Android software is licensed with Apache 2.0.

• Anyone can download and share the Linux kernel for free. If they edit the Linux code in any way, they can share that too, as long as they make the altered system available for anyone else to freely download. This is because their Linux derivative is still bound to the GPL.

• Since Android is a Linux derivative, it is thus bound by the GPL. Therefore, the Android source code must be freely available to anyone who would like to see it.

• If anyone changes the Android source code, it is also bound to the respective licenses. If that new code is then amended, it is regulated by the same license, and so on ad infinitum.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Siemens PLM Software and Launch Forth are partnering to empower and educate the future workforce by offering free professional CAD software to a co-creation community of 185,000 innovators that are focused on product development, idea generation, and creating solutions for challenges both big and small.

• As businesses and lines of work trend toward a global gig economy, Siemens and Launch Forth hope to enable and support the future workforce by providing them with the tools and tutorials they need to learn and grow within their career. According to Forbes, 57.3 million people make up the freelance community in the US alone.

Programming/Development

• Warning: this article can be a troll, but php is faster than python.

Leftovers

Science

• The privacy implications of collecting DNA are wide-ranging, not least because they don’t relate solely to the person from whom the sample is taken. Our genome is a direct product of our parents’ genetic material, so the DNA strings of siblings from the same mother and father are closely related. Even that of more distant relations has many elements in common, since they derive from common ancestors. Thus a DNA sample contains information not just about the donor, but about many others on the relevant family tree as well. A new paper published in Nature Genetics (behind a paywall, unfortunately) shows how that fact enables the genomes of long-dead ancestors to be reconstructed, using just the DNA of their descendants.

• As an article in Futurism explains, the unique circumstances of the individual chosen for the reconstruction, the Icelander Hans Jonatan, aided the research team as they sought to piece together his genome nearly two centuries after his death in 1827. The scientists mainly came from the Icelandic company deCODE Genetics, one of the pioneers in the world of genomics, and highly-familiar with Iceland’s unique genetic resources.

Health/Nutrition

• One hundred years after the great Spanish flu pandemic, World Health Organization members today underlined their satisfaction with the organisation’s framework to get countries best prepared for the next pandemic: The WHO Executive Board agreed on keeping most of the funds coming to the framework for preparedness measures, and a smaller portion for response measures, unless emergency strikes.

• Member nations of the World Health Organization became accustomed in recent years to singing by the WHO director general, and sometimes crying, but under the new DG there seems to be a move toward the whole room getting up in the middle of serious negotiations and … dancing.

• After the Executive Board agreed on a decision today on physical activity for health, Assad Hafeez, the Board Chair, suggested a short session of physical activity. Mexican chicken dancing (pajaritos a volar in Spanish or la danse des canards in French) chaos ensued:

Security

• Most of us in the Free and Open Source software world know about Wireshark and using it to capture network traffic information. This book mentions that tool, but focuses on using a different tool that was written by the author, called CANAPE.Core. Along the way, the author calls out multiple other resources for further study. I like and appreciate that very much! This is a complex topic and even a detailed and technically complex book like this one cannot possibly cover every aspect of the topic in 300 pages. What is covered is clearly expressed, technically deep, and valuable.

• “The HNS botnet communicates in a complex and decentralized manner and uses multiple anti-tampering techniques to prevent a third party from hijacking/poisoning it,” Bitdefender researchers wrote in a blog post published on Wednesday (24 January). “The bot can perform web exploitation against a series of devices via the same exploit as Reaper (CVE-2016-10401 and other vulnerabilities against networking equipment).”

• Why this matters: Intel has been busy working with PC makers and OS vendors like Microsoft to release microcode that includes so-called mitigations, microcode updates that patch the vulnerabilities. But even that hasn’t gone so well: Intel advised end users to stop applying patches after systems unexpectedly rebooted. Now, Intel has revealed it’s working on a more permanent fix, but the impact on users remains unknown.

• Similar to the proliferation of mobile devices in the enterprise several years ago where organizations were feeling the pressure to have a mobile strategy but didn’t know where to start, we’re seeing the same situation with development methodologies. To accelerate development velocity, teams are feeling the pressure to “do DevOps,” and when integrating security, to “do DevSecOps.” But much like during the initial mobile wave, many companies say they’re implementing these methodologies, and might even think they are, but in reality, they’re not. Yet.

• In 2018, we’re expecting DevOps to become the new norm for larger enterprise teams. This is because we’re likely to see developers on older, higher value systems implementing a more DevOps centric approach, having seen it work on projects that have traditionally been highly visible, but low value.

• January 2018 has emerged to become a banner month for cyber-security acquisitions, with at least 10 acquisitions announced so far, four of which were announced between Jan. 22 and 25. Cisco continued the trend on Jan. 24 by announcing its intention to acquire privately-held server security startup Skyport.

• Financial terms of Cisco’s Skyport acquisition are not being publicly disclosed. A Cisco spokesperson told eWEEK that the deal is expected to close in Cisco’s 2018 fiscal third quarter. However, a Cisco spokesperson said the company doesn’t plan to continue marketing the existing Skyport System server security products.

• [...]

• It’s the Linux-based SkySecure Server platform tied into the SkySecure Center service that further validates the integrity of firmware, BIOS, software and cryptography.

• The business will be the new home of VirusTotal, which Google acquired in 2012. Chronicle’s other story will be “a new cybersecurity intelligence and analytics platform that we hope can help enterprises better manage and understand their own security-related data.”

• Github rejected a DMCA takedown request from Chinese drone-maker DJI after someone forked source code left in the open by a naughty DJI developer, The Register can reveal.

• This included AES keys permitting decryption of flight control firmware, which could allow drone fliers with technical skills to remove geofencing from the flight control software: this software prevents DJI drones from flying in certain areas such as the approach paths for airports, or near government buildings deemed to be sensitive.

• Though the released key is not for the latest firmware version, The Register has seen evidence (detailed below) that drone hackers are already incorporating it in modified firmware available for anyone to download and flash to their drones.

• DJI declined to comment for this article. Github ignored The Register’s invitation to comment.

• [...]

• The code was forked by drone researcher Kevin Finisterre, who submitted a successful rebuttal to the takedown request on the grounds that Github’s terms and conditions explicitly permit forking of public repos.

• “DJI mistakenly marked code repositories as public subsequently granting license for anyone to fork said repos. This accident can be evidenced by their press release,” wrote Finisterre, linking to a DJI statement.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• In May last year Swedish prosecutors dropped their probe into the allegations but British police have insisted Assange would still be arrested for breaching bail conditions should he leave the building.

• British police have said the charge of skipping bail was a much less serious offence than rape, but he could still face up to a year in jail if convicted.

• Earlier this month, Ecuador said it had given citizenship to Assange, hours after the British government refused a request for him to be given diplomatic status, which could have given Assange immunity from arrest should he try to leave the embassy.

• It means he could be free as early as next month, with a decision on the outcome due to be made on February 6.

• A British judge said Friday that she would rule over Julian Assange’s arrest warrant appeal early next month.

• WikiLeaks’ Assange could be free to walk out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London if his application to quash the arrest warrant for breach of bail conditions is successful, according to the British Prosecution Service.

• The ongoing six-year confinement of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in London’s Ecuadorian embassy is dangerous to his physical and mental health, according to new clinical assessments.

• A pair of doctors reached the verdict after spending 20 hours over three days in October performing “a comprehensive physical and psychological evaluation” of Assange, The Guardian reported Wednesday.

• Five years holed up in an Ecuadorian embassy in London are taking a toll on the mental and physical health of the WikiLeaks publisher, according to a report.

• Doctors who performed the most recent assessment on the hacktivist said Julian Assange hasn’t been outside for five-and-a-half years and has “had no access to sunlight” or “appropriate ventilation” during his stay at the embassy, the Guardian reported.

• They said the prolonged stay indoors “has taken a considerable physical as well as psychological toll.”

• There is a recent twist in the Julian Assange saga leading to new claims that the UK has the legal obligation to allow Assange to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London without arresting him. In December, Ecuador granted Assange its nationality following which it then purported, this January, to appoint Julian Assange as one of its diplomats to the UK (see here). Apparently, the UK rejected that appointment. It has now been reported by Reuters that a legal team is working on filing a case at the International Court of Justice in order to have Assange’s Ecuadorean diplomatic status affirmed under international law. The strategy being pursued by Ecuador is a very interesting one raising tricky questions of diplomatic law. Undoubtedly, Ecuador was aware that the UK would seek to deny diplomatic status to Assange. However, Ecuador argues that what has happened is that while it has appointed Assange as a diplomat, what the UK has done is to declare him persona non grata, and that having done that, the UK now has an obligation to allow Assange to leave the UK within a reasonable period of time, whilst enjoying diplomatic immunities within that period of time.

Finance

• The proposed legislative reform is based on forthcoming changes from the European Union, after December decisions from the European Parliament and the European Council to pursue the same agenda. EU authorities say they are targeting bitcoin anonymity in order to tackle tax evasion and other crimes.

• I’m not the first to critique Johnson’s work. Bryan Clark’s What the NY Times got wrong about Bitcoin is obviously written by a Bitcoin believer, because he missed the whole point of the article. It isn’t about Bitcoin, it is about decentralizing the Web.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• There’s a lot of complaining about gerrymandering, but what should districts look like? We went back to the drawing board and drew a set of alternative congressional maps for the entire country. Each map has a different goal: One is designed to encourage competitive elections, for example, and another to maximize the number of majority-minority districts. See how changes to district boundaries could radically alter the partisan and racial makeup of the U.S. House — without a single voter moving or switching parties. How we did this »

• But it’s unclear what, exactly, could entice Trump to re-enter the agreement. The president did not say what specific changes he wants to see made.

• If you want a good example that shows how Facebook cares more about pleasing its shareholders than the it does about stopping fake news, look how this fake news story, which claims a CDC doctor says the flu vaccine is causing the flu outbreak, is spreading across Facebook (current number of shares: 691k). Remember, Facebook has complete control over the stories its users see in their timeline, and Facebook uses this power to encourage people to pay it to promote posts. It could just as easily use this power to throttle dangerous fake news like this, but that would mean less user engagement, and therefore less money to Facebook.

• Tom Perez’s lackluster first year as head of the Democratic National Committee provides a metaphoric glimpse into the waning influence of the Democratic Party as a whole, explains Norman Solomon.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Unfortunately, Facebook’s solution to this problem doesn’t seem to be the best one. Last week, it said its plan is to only put front and center links from outlets that users deem to be “trustworthy.” Which just proves that Facebook would rather put the responsibility for policing misinformation on the community instead of itself. This is concerning because Facebook is, essentially, letting people’s biases dictate how outlets are perceived by its algorithms.

• Spain’s government has gotten into the business of regulating speech with predictably awful results. An early adopter of Blues Lives Matter-esque policies, Spain went full police state, passing a law making it a crime to show “disrespect” to law enforcement officers. The predictable result? The arrest of someone for calling cops “slackers” in a Facebook post.

• Spain’s government is either woefully unaware of the negative consequences of laws like this or, worse, likes the negative consequences. After all, it doesn’t hurt Spain’s government beyond a little reputational damage. It only hurts residents of Spain. When you’re already unpopular, thanks to laws like these and suppression of a Catalan independence vote, what difference does it make if you’re known better for shutting down dissent than actually protecting citizens from hateful speech?

• Gai strutted onto the stage dressed in a traditional Taoist robe, his arms covered in tattoos, his hip retro glasses reflecting a phalanx of flashing lights.

• “Wake upppp! Beijinggggg!” he shouted to a crowd of 17,000 young fans in a stadium in the city’s west. Then Gai, 27, began rapping.

• A huge range of expressive works—including books, documentaries, televisions shows, and songs—depict real people. Should celebrities have a veto right over speech that happens to be about them? A case currently before the California Court of Appeal raises this question. In this case, actor Olivia de Havilland has sued FX asserting that FX’s television series Feud infringed de Havilland’s right of publicity. The trial court found that de Havilland had a viable claim because FX had attempted to portray her realistically and had benefited financially from that portrayal.

• Together with the Wikimedia Foundation and the Organization for Transformative Works, EFF has filed an amicus brief [PDF] in the de Havilland case arguing that the trial court should be overruled. Our brief argues that the First Amendment should shield creative expression like Feud from right of publicity claims. The right of publicity is a cause of action for commercial use of a person’s identity. It makes good sense when applied to prevent companies from, say, falsely claiming that a celebrity endorsed their product. But when it is asserted against creative expression, it can burden First Amendment rights.

• The last time we checked in with Vice Media it was firing off a cease and desist letter to a tiny little punk band called ViceVersa, demanding that it change its name because Vice Media has a trademark for the word “vice” for several markets. In case you thought that occurrence was a one-off for Vice Media, or the result of an overzealous new hire to the company’s legal team, Vice Media is again trademark bullying another comany, Vice Industry Token. VIT is apparently a pornography cryptocurrency company, which is a three-word combination that I bet god herself could never have imagined being uttered. The claim in the C&D notice that VIT got is, of course, that Vice Media has a “vice” trademark and that this use infringes upon it.

• Vice Industry Token is asking the court to evaluate whether it’s infringing on Vice Media’s trademark.

• The city of Sarajevo passed a law in 2000 forbidding anyone but the city of Sarajevo from using the name Sarajevo. Not much has been said about it because the Sarajevo city council hasn’t done much about it. But recently owners of Facebook pages containing the word “Sarajevo” have been receiving legal threats from the city’s government.

• Sarajevo resident Aleksandar Todorović wrote a long blog post detailing the stupidity of this law, which contains firsthand accounts of Facebook page owners who’ve been threatened with criminal proceedings for failing to secure permission to use the name of a city on their pages. As Todorović notes, his blog post is illegal, simply because it hasn’t been pre-approved by Sarajevo’s city council.

• The law can be read here (and loosely translated by Google). It basically states the city owns the name and all others wishing to use it must ask the city council for permission before using it. It also states there are some requests that just aren’t going to be granted.

• German editor Philipp Gromov has cut 11 documentary features, series and shorts since 2010. He began his career on The Other Chelsea: A Story from Donetsk, which tells the story of a small mining town in Ukraine. His latest feature, The Cleaners, premieres in competition at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. The film offers a rare glimpse into the lives of digital “cleaners”: anonymous people contracted by Silicon Valley companies to scrub the internet of content deemed “inappropriate.” Gromov spoke with Filmmaker about cutting the film and why The Cleaners has inspired him to cut his own use of social media.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect in May 2018, and with it, a new set of tough penalties for companies that fail to adequately protect the personal data of European users. Amongst those affected are domain name registries and registrars, who are required by ICANN, the global domain name authority, to list the personal information of domain name registrants in publicly-accessible WHOIS directories. ICANN and European registrars have clashed over this long-standing contractual requirement, which does not comply [PDF] with European data protection law.

• This was one of the highest profile topics at ICANN’s 60th meeting in Abu Dhabi which EFF attended last year, with registries and registrars laying the blame on ICANN, either for their liability under the GDPR if they complied with their WHOIS obligations, or for their contractual liability to ICANN if they didn’t. ICANN has recognized this and has progressively, if belatedly, being taking steps to remediate the clash between its own rules, and the data protection principles that European law upholds.

• Finnish MPs consider allowing intelligence agencies to intercept confidential communications without the suspicion of a crime.

• The highest court in the European Union will decide on Thursday whether an Austrian privacy activist can bring a class action lawsuit against Facebook for what he says are illegal violations of the privacy of users.

• Law enforcement officers will often testify that seeking warrants is a time-consuming process that subjects officers’ sworn statements to strict judicial scrutiny. The testimony implies the process is a hallowed tradition that upholds the sanctity of the Fourth Amendment, hence its many steps and plodding pace. The problem is law enforcement officers make these statements most often when defending their decision to bypass the warrant process.

• Criminals move too fast for the warrant process, they argue. Officers would love to respect the Fourth Amendment, but seem to feel this respect is subject to time constraints. Sometimes they have a point. And when they have a legitimate point, they also have a legitimate exception: exigent circumstances. In truly life-threatening situations, the Fourth Amendment can be shoved aside momentarily to provide access to law enforcement officers. (The exception tends to swallow the rule, though. Courts have pushed back, but deference to officers’ assertions about exigency remains the status quo in most courtrooms.)

• “I would like to learn more about how you arrived at and justify this ill-informed policy proposal. Please provide me with a list of the cryptographers with whom you’ve personally discussed this topic since our July 2017 meeting and specifically identify those experts who advised you that companies can feasibly design government access features into their products without weakening cybersecurity. Please provide this information by February 23, 2018.”

• I cannot wait to see FBI Director Christopher Wray try to escape the petard-hoisting Sen. Ron Wyden has planned for him. Wray has spent most of his time as director complaining about device encryption. He continually points at the climbing number of locked phones the FBI can’t crack. This number signifies nothing, not without more data, but it’s illustrative of Wray’s blunt force approach to encryption.

• I’m sure Wray views himself as a man carefully picking his way through the encryption minefield. But there’s nothing subtle about his approach. He has called encryption a threat to public safety. His lead phone forensics person has called Apple “evil” for offering it to its users. He has claimed the move to default encryption is motivated by profit. And if that’s not the motivation, then it’s probably just anti-FBI malice. Meanwhile, he claims the FBI has nothing but the purest intentions when it calls for encryption backdoors, even while Wray does everything he can to avoid using that term.

• He claims the solution is out there — a perfect, seamless blend of secure encryption and easy law enforcement access. The solution, he claims, is most likely deliberately being withheld by the “smart people.” These tech companies that have made billionaires of their founders are filled with the best nerds, but they’re just not applying themselves. Wray asserts — without evidence — that secure encryption backdoors are not only possible, but probable.

• The FBI set the first (and second!) rules of Stingray Club: DO NOT TALK ABOUT STINGRAY CLUB. Law enforcement agencies seeking to acquire cell tower spoofing tech were forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement forbidding them from disclosing details on the devices to defendants, judges, the general public… sometimes even prosecutors.

• A new wave of parallel construction washed over the land, distancing defendants from the source of evidence used against them. Pen register orders — used to cover the tracks of Stingray searches — started appearing en masse, as though it was 1979 all over again. If curious lawyers and/or judges started sniffing around, agencies were instructed to let accused criminals roam free rather than expose details about Stingray devices. According to the FBI, public safety would be irreparably damaged if Stingray details were exposed. Apparently the return of dangerous criminals to the street poses no harm to the public.

• During the past three weeks, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed into law vast new powers for the NSA and the FBI to spy on innocent Americans and selectively to pass on to law enforcement the fruits of that spying.

• Those fruits can now lawfully include all fiber-optic data transmitted to or in the United States, such as digital recordings of all landline and mobile telephone calls and copies in real time of all text messages and emails and banking, medical and legal records electronically stored or transmitted.

• Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, repeated his public observations that members of the intelligence community — particularly the CIA, the NSA and the intelligence division of the FBI — are not trustworthy with the nation’s intelligence secrets. Because he has a security clearance at the “top secret” level and knows how others who have access to secrets have used and abused them, his allegations are extraordinary.

• Siri is one of the earliest digital personal assistants available to consumers, but it was only released in 2011. Then came Amazon’s Alexa in 2014 and Google Assistant in 2016. These programs are designed to take commands by accurately recognizing the voice of the device owner.

• The super-secret agency that monitors all electronic communications of Americans, a resource that was used to spy on the Trump campaign through a questionable warrant from the FISA Court, suddenly has decided to revise its mission statement page. A spokesman for the NSA is claiming it’s no big deal, but it is one heckuva weird coincidence in the midst of a major scandal regarding what looks like abuse of its spying powers.

• A cloud service’s technical and support staff may be based in a different country from where the data is hosted but still have access to patient information.

Civil Rights/Policing

• When Save the Children hired Gerald Anderson in 2013, the global charity believed it was hiring a veteran humanitarian executive with a sterling resume. Anderson had spent more than 15 years working around the world for the American Red Cross, rising through the ranks to lead the group’s massive relief effort after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. After that, the Red Cross made him head of its half-billion-dollar response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

• Perhaps most crucially, the Red Cross gave him “very positive references,” including from a senior official, Save the Children said.

• The Chicago Police Department says complaints against officers for making racial and ethnic slurs and other discriminatory comments have declined in recent years.

• But as a story we published this week shows, it’s a stubborn problem in a city that has long struggled with racism.

• We wrote about Officer John Catanzara, a 23-year veteran who, over the years, two superintendents have tried to fire. In September, he was reprimanded for a controversial Facebook post. Now, he is under investigation for two other complaints about his social media conduct.

• One of the complaints, lodged by his district commander, alleges that the officer displayed “bigoted views” and “hostile remarks” on Facebook, including against Muslims, women, liberals, Michelle Obama and those who are economically disadvantaged.

• This is not the first time I’ve written about an officer accused of similar conduct, which in the sterile language of digital complaint data is coded as “Verbal Abuse: Racial/Ethnic.”

• In September, Chicago Police Officer John Catanzara made headlines after posting on Facebook a picture of himself, in uniform, holding an American flag and a homemade sign that read, “I stand for the anthem. I love the American flag. I support my president and the 2nd Amendment.”

• He was reprimanded for violating rules that prohibit officers from making political statements while on duty. But if that discipline was intended to change his ways on social media, Catanzara instead is living up to the words he uses to describe himself on Facebook: “A give no f#$%s, say it like it is man.”

• The NYPD reveals itself as an unelected branch of New York City government that elected leaders will not defy.

• In New York City, bills are passed by city council members and signed by the mayor. But when the legislation is about policing, there is another, de-facto branch of government that must sign off: the New York Police Department. Though its leaders are not elected to office, the police bureaucracy acts as an unofficial gatekeeper that must be appeased before bills become law.

• After more than 5 years of pressure from advocates, two measures, once known as the Right to Know Act, became law last week. The bills together were designed to improve police encounters by giving people more information about their rights when being stopped, questioned, and searched.

• Sadly, on its way to the council floor, one of these bills took a detour that has become all-too-familiar for police reform advocates. The NYPD exercised its unofficial but very real veto power, and a bill requiring police to identify themselves to people they stop was rewritten — by the police.

• In a series of closed-door meetings, the city council speaker, the mayor, and lawyers for the NYPD inserted a loophole in the bill that allows police to avoid identifying themselves in the most common types of police interactions, including traffic stops. This compromised provision was designed and agreed to without consultation from any of the advocates or community members who were calling for the bill, including several family members of people killed by the NYPD. Yet, our elected officials made sure the police department had the final word at the negotiating table.

• The power of the police department over New York City elected officials is immense, uncompromising, and resilient.

• Techdirt posts about sexting have a depressingly similar story line: young people send explicit photos of themselves to their partners, and one or both of them end up charged with distributing or possessing child pornography. Even more ridiculously, the authorities typically justify branding young people who do this as sex offenders on the grounds that it “protects” the same individuals whose lives they are ruining. Judging by a story in The Local, reporting on a press release that first appeared on the MyNewsDesk site (original in Danish), the police in Denmark seem to be taking a more rational approach.

• Police in Denmark are set to take legal action against up to 1,000 people over the distribution of a video and images of a sexual nature across the country.

• The video was primarily sent to and shared between young people, the police said in a major announcement on Monday morning.

• Following a brief government shutdown over the weekend, House Democrats conceded to fund the government until February 8. The deal came after congressional Republicans agreed to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Programs for six years and promised a discussion on DACA. But many viewed this concession as a betrayal by the Democrats, who have not been guaranteed any reasonable action on immigration reform in return for re-opening the government.

• On January 8, the Trump administration abruptly put an end to Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Salvadorans now living and working in the US. Many have been in the country for 15 or 20 years, and have established jobs and families. Nearly 200,000 Salvadorans now living in the U.S. may be affected. According to the the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Salvadorans, who account for about 60% of TPS recipients, will have until Sept. 9, 2019 to either adjust their status if eligible, make plans to return to El Salvador, or face deportation.

• Prisoners in Pennsylvania can spend decades in solitary confinement, harming their physical and mental health.

• Imagine an ordinary parking space. Now add walls and a ceiling made of thick concrete, closed off by a solid steel door. The lights are always on, so it’s never dark. You eat there, you sleep there. You are alone. Three times a day an officer slides a food tray through a slot. There is a toilet. A few times a week, if you’re lucky, you’re taken to a small cage where you can “exercise,” alone. If you are visited by family or clergy, you are not allowed to touch them. You cannot participate in any vocational, recreational, or educational programs or any form of communal religious worship or prayer.

• This is life for a prisoner on Pennsylvania’s death row.

• The policy of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections is to house all prisoners with death sentences in solitary confinement until they are executed or released. One prisoner has been in solitary for over 35 years. Of the 156 men currently sentenced to death in the commonwealth, almost 80 percent have been held in solitary confinement for more than a decade.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• But Net Neutrality enjoys farcically high support — 83%! — and virtually the only “persons” who oppose Net Neutrality are bots and media corporations, and they don’t buy hamburgers.

• Burger King released a new three-minute long commercial on Wednesday that attempted to explain the concept of net neutrality using their trademark burger, the Whopper, as a metaphor.

• New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the executive order yesterday, days after Montana Governor Steve Bullock did the same. The states are challenging the Federal Communications Commission, which repealed its own net neutrality rules and preempted states from imposing similar ones.

• It’s also important to keep in mind that calendars can be carefully managed in case they’re ever made public. There are lots of empty spaces in Pai’s schedule when, I assume, he was doing something, and there’s a lack of any chunks of time devoted to policy development. And lest we forget that not so long ago Pai refused to hand over his calendar and emails to congressional investigators looking into how the FCC developed its net neutrality rules.

• The General Accounting Office (GAO) says the agency will launch an investigation into the fraud that occurred during the FCC’s rushed repeal of net neutrality rules. Consumers only had one real chance to weigh in during the public comment period of the agency’s misleadingly-named “Restoring Internet Freedom” proposal. But “somebody” paid a group or individual to fill the comment period with bogus comments from fake or even dead people, in a ham-fisted attempt to downplay massive, legitimate public opposition to the plan.

• The FCC then blocked a law enforcement investigation into the fraud, refusing to hand over server logs or API key data that could easily disclose the culprit(s). FOIA requests and public requests for help (one coming from myself) were also promptly ignored by the Trump FCC.

• Last year we witnessed the elimination of critical privacy and network neutrality protections in the broadband market. But these moves would be less dangerous if we were able to vote with our wallets, and choose a provider that respected our privacy and didn’t engage in unfair data discrimination. Unfortunately, most of us have only one choice for high-speed Internet; if Comcast behaves badly we can complain but we can’t hit them where it really hurts by switching to someone else.

• The good news: communities across the country are trying to fix that by developing their own community broadband networks. And some members of Congress trying to help. Led by Congresswoman Eshoo, Congress recently introduced HR 4814, the Community Broadband Act of 2018, to empower local citizens to explore community broadband as a means to induce competition and lower prices. In particular, the bill tackles barriers raised by laws in more than 20 states that prevent local communities from building their own networks.

• The FCC and its large ISP allies are trying to change the subject in the wake of their hugely unpopular attack on net neutrality. With net neutrality having such broad, bipartisan support, the FCC is trying to shift the conversation away from net neutrality (which remember, is just a symptom of a lack of broadband competition), toward a largely-hollow focus on expanding broadband to rural areas. The apparent goal: to convince partisans that net neutrality is only a concern among out of touch Hollywood elites, and the FCC is hard at work on the real problem: deploying broadband to forgotten America.

DRM

• Apple has also reportedly hired a lead executive from Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook platform, to help reinvigorate its e-book efforts. The iBooks app remains one of the few Apple programs that hasn’t received a significant update in years. That is likely due in part to a 2013 ruling by the US Department of Justice covering fixed pricing for e-books in Apple’s iBooks store. Apple was fined $450 million.

• Any reading of our thorough coverage of Denuvo DRM could be best summarized as: a spasm of success in 2015 followed by one of the great precipitous falls into failure in the subsequent two years. While some of us are of the opinion that all DRM such as Denuvo are destined for eventual failure, what sticks out about Denuvo is just how stunningly fast its fall from relevancy has come about. Once heralded as “the end of game piracy,” even the most recent iterations of Denuvo’s software is being cracked on the timeline of days and hours. You would be forgiven if, having read through all of this, you thought that Denuvo was nearly toxic in gaming and security circles at this point.

• But apparently not everyone thinks this is true. Irdeto, the company out of the Netherlands we last saw pretending that taking pictures of toys is copyright infringement and insisting that a real driver of piracy was winning an Oscar, has announced that it has acquired Denuvo.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• That anger means that even in the absence of the copyright and pharma patent extensions, there is still likely to be some resistance to the new deal, and not just in Canada. For example, economists estimate that the CPTPP will boost Australia’s economy by only 0.04% per year — a negligible amount that will be swamped by fluctuations in other factors. Some Australian businesses warn that the continuing existence of bilateral trade deals with eight of the CPTPP countries will lead to a complex “noodle bowl” of rules and regulations that could make it harder, not easier, to conduct business with them. In New Zealand, a long-standing critic of TPP, Professor Jane Kelsey, is particularly worried about a chapter on electronic commerce. And in Malaysia, a consumer group has urged the government there not to sign the deal, which it said would be “even worse” than TPP for the country.

• There’s no denying that Rupert Murdoch built up quite a media empire over the decades — but that was almost all entirely focused on newspaper and pay TV. While he’s spent the past few decades trying to do stuff on the internet, he has an impressively long list of failures over the years. There are many stories of him buying internet properties (Delphi, MySpace, Photobucket) or starting them himself (iGuide, Fox Interactive, The Daily) and driving them into the ground (or just flopping right out of the gate). While his willingness to embrace the internet early and to try things is to be commended, his regular failures to make his internet ventures successful has pretty clearly soured him on the internet entirely over the years.

• Indeed, over the past few years, Murdoch or Murdoch surrogates (frequently News Corp’s CEO Robert Thomson) have bashed the internet at every opportunity, no matter how ridiculous. Almost all of these complaints can be summed up simply: big internet companies are making money and News Corp. isn’t — and therefore the problem is with those other companies which should be forced to give News Corp. money.

• When The New York Times discovered that a site was sharing copies of their articles without permission, it demanded the associated domain registration service to identify the owner. While some companies may be eager to comply, Njalla is not. The anonymous registration service replied with some unusual responses instead, reminiscent of TPB’s infamous ‘legal threats’ section.

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