● 02.06.18

● Links 6/2/2018: MenuLibre 2.1.5, ZFS On Linux 0.7.6

Posted in News Roundup at 7:18 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• Seldon.io has announced the release of a new open-source platform that enables data science teams to run and manage models in production at scale. Seldon Core focuses on solving the last step in any machine learning project to help companies put models into production, to solve real-world problems and maximize the return on investment.

• Traditional infrastructure stacks and devops processes don’t translate well to machine learning, and there is limited open-source innovation in this space, which forces companies to build their own at great expense or to use a proprietary service. Data engineers with the necessary multidisciplinary skillset spanning ML and ops are very scarce. These inefficiencies cause data scientists get pulled into quality-of-service and performance-related challenges that takes their focus away from where they can add the most value  –  building better models.

• The ability to extend Kubernetes is its secret superpower, said Chen Goldberg, Director of Engineering at Google, speaking at the recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Austin.

• In the race to build tools that help engineers become more productive, Goldberg talked about how she once led a team that developed a platform that did just that. Despite the fact the platform initially worked, it was not extensible, and it was also difficult to modify.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Difficult community members are something that every community struggles with from time to time. Whether abundantly obnoxious or merely a minor frustration, designing an environment where a multitude of personalities can work together is complicated and requires careful attention to detail.

Kernel Space

• The PCI subsystem updates for the Linux 4.16 kernel are a bit livelier than usual with a number of notable additions.

• LizardFS for those unaware is yet another distributed file-system project with this MooseFS fork focusing on POSIX compliance, multi-platform support and aims to be fault-tolerant.

• Michal Bielicki of Skytechnology, the primary company behind LizardFS, was at FOSDEM 2018 presenting about their past year of work and provided a glimpse at the year ahead.

• ZFS On Linux 0.7.6 was released overnight as the latest release for these out-of-tree modules supporting the ZFS file-system natively on the Linux kernel via the OpenZFS code-base.

• Last week the main pull request of XFS file-system driver updates for the Linux 4.16 was sent in and referred to by XFS maintainer Darrick Wong as having great scads of new stuff. The Oracle engineer has now sent in a secondary pull request of XFS for Linux 4.16.

Linux Foundation

• Want to get a job in IT? Then, you need to know Linux and open-source software. While nothing beats hands-on experience, classes are a great way to get started. So, it comes as no surprise that The Linux Foundation recently announced would-be IT staffers have now taken a million Linux and open-source software classes.

• The Linux Foundation has been able to reach so many students because of its partnership with edX. EdX is the non-profit online learning platform from Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Their popular massive open online courses (MOOC) make it possible for you to take classes anywhere in the world on your schedule.

• As we kick off 2018, the OPNFV Compliance & Certification committee—the members driven body within OPNFV that defines recommendations to the Board for policies and oversight for compliance and certification—is pleased to announce the launch of the OPNFV Verified Program (OVP). The program is designed to simplify adoption of NFV in commercial products by establishing an industry threshold based on OPNFV releases. The fact we are using an open source platform as referent to measure compliance of commercial products—not necessarily based on its source code—is a new and innovative step for the industry.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the schedule of sessions and speakers for Open Source Leadership Summit, taking place March 6-8 in Sonoma, CA.

Graphics Stack

• Xorgproto had its inaugural release today as the collection of all the X.Org Server protocol headers formerly distributed as separate, standalone packages.

• Red Hat’s Adam Jackson wrote in announcing xorgproto 2018.1, “This package combines the protocol headers, which were formerly scattered in individual packages. At this point none of them are changing rapidly enough to justify such fine granularity, particularly when what changes do occur tend to affect multiple extensions at once (Present and DRI3 for example).”

• Going back about two years has been work towards supporting atomic mode-setting on Weston and we are finally seeing this support land for Wayland’s reference compositor.

• Daniel Stone of Collabora has been leading this longstanding effort adding atomic mode-setting support for Weston. By using the modern atomic mode-setting interface to the Linux DRM drivers, the operation is much cleaner with testing a desired mode ahead of the actual commit operation, reducing possible flickering in some situations, and also being faster than the traditional mode-setting code-paths. With recent Linux kernel releases, the major DRM/KMS drivers support the atomic mode-setting functionality.

• X’s network transparency was not designed as ‘it will run xterm well’; originally it was to be something that should let you run almost everything remotely, providing a full environment. Even apart from the practical issues covered in Daniel Stone’s slide presentation, it’s clear that it’s been years since X could deliver a real first class environment over the network. You cannot operate with X over the network in the same way that you do locally. Trying to do so is painful and involves many things that either don’t work at all or perform so badly that you don’t want to use them.

Benchmarks

• The third development release of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 7.8-Folldal release is now available for our cross-platform, open-source automated benchmarking software and framework.

Applications

• Linux is a great option for privacy-minded users in general, due to its open source and transparent nature, and the fact that there are even specific distros for the privacy conscious. But you can take things a step further on Linux with a VPN service that adds a whole extra layer of security to keep your internet connection private. Not to mention the other benefits of VPNs, such as unblocking content or circumventing censorship.

• While Linux users routinely draw the short straw in terms of software support for their beloved OS, when it comes to VPNs, the situation isn’t so bad, with a decent amount of providers offering native apps for Linux.

• Papyrus is an open-source and multi-platform base note manager with a primary focus on social features and privacy. It is developed by Aseman, the same company behind Cutegram, an excellent alternative to Telegram’s desktop client for Linux.

• It prides itself on being smart, easy, secure, modern, and different; with a User Interface that is user-friendly and will be intuitive enough for anybody to install the app and get on with creating, syncing, and sharing notes.

• The time of the release arrived. A little more than three months have passed since the latest minor version, 4.1, has been released. There are tons of improvement and a few nice significant features in this release!

• With improved support for Budgie, KDE, and MATE desktop environments, MenuLibre 2.1.5 continues to provide one of the best menu editing experiences for the Linux desktop.

• MenuLibre is the menu editor program supporting FreeDesktop.org’s Desktop Entry Specification and supports most desktop environments out there for customizations of their menus.

• Today’s MenuLibre 2.1.5 release notably adds support for menu editing on the Budgie and KDE Plasma desktop environments. This adds to MenuLibre officially supporting GNOME, LXDE, LXQt, Pantheon, Unity, and Xfce.

Instructionals/Technical

• What the heck is the POSIX shell anyway? Well, the POSIX (the Portable Operating System Interface) shell is the standard Unix shell – standard meaning it was formally defined and shipped in a published standard. This makes shell scripts written for it portable, something no other shell can lay claim to. The POSIX shell is basically a formalized version of the venerable Bourne shell, and on your system it lives at /bin/sh, unless you’re one of the unlucky masses for whom this is a symlink to bash.

Games

• It seems we completely missed the fact that Aerofly FS 2 Flight Simulator [Steam, Official Site] is coming to Linux and the developer asked for testers.

• Parkitect [Official Site, GOG, Steam] is such a beautiful theme park building game and they’re working towards their final release with the third beta.

• This latest beta version adds in the Magic Carpet ride, which really looks slick in-game. Their attention to details in the animations is incredible, all the rides simply look amazing when moving. Also the fact that you see your actual visitors on them as well—brilliant.

• Gaming in Linux has evolved a lot in the past few years. Now, you have dozens of distros pre-optimized for gaming and gamers. We tested all of them and hand-picked the best. There are a few other articles and lists of this type out there, but they don’t really go into detail and they are pretty outdated. This is an up-to-date list with any info you’d need.

• Tesla vs Lovecraft [Steam, Official Site] is another top-down shooter from 10tons Ltd that puts you in the shoes of Nikola Tesla as you face off against lovecraftian nightmares.

• Few games make me repeatedly go back and try to improve my times, with Remnants of Naezith [Steam, Official Site] being one such game that has completely hooked my attention. The game released yesterday with same-day Linux support from developer Tolga Ay.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Users of Kubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark can now update to the newly released Plasma 5.12.0 via our backports PPA.

• See the Plasma 5.12 release announcement and the release video below for more about the new features available.

• Well, currently WikiToLearn runs on MediaWiki, which is a good model for dealing with an encyclopedia but, when you are trying to build a more structured content, it doesn’t fit.

• For the release 1.0 we have developed CourseEditor, which tries to make the unstructured content more structured, for example offering a drag-and-drop UI to manage a course structure.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Last minute work ahead of the imminent UI/feature freeze for GNOME 3.28 landed on Monday for the GNOME Shell.

• Most notable to the work that landed on Monday is the Thunderbolt policy provider and indicator. These are the UI/shell elements to Red Hat’s Bolt project for dealing with secure handling of Thunderbolt peripherals when connected to Linux systems. The GNOME Shell bits interface with the Bolt daemon via the org.freedesktop.bolt D-Bus service. Great to see this UI work land in time for GNOME 3.28.

• Yesterday I wrote about GTK4 dropping the Mir display back-end in favor of the Wayland back-end. Additionally, the “big GDK lock” was also stripped out. The latest is some additional cleaning to lighten the tool-kit code-base by about seven thousand lines of code.

• The latest significant cleanup is removing old GTK 2.x/3.x version references in the code and documentation. By dropping these old version annotations, GTK+ 4.0 saw nearly eight thousand lines of code removed but just over one thousand new insertions across more than 400 files.

Distributions

New Releases

• I’ve released a new version of ExTIX 18.2 Deepin today with Calamares 3.1.9 installed from source and kernel 4.15.1-x86_64-exton. Calamares is an installer framework. By design it is very customizable, in order to satisfy a wide variety of needs and use cases. All packages have been updated to the latest available version as of today. Study all installed packages in ExTiX Deepin Build 180206.

• About ExTiX 18.2 with the Deepin 15.5 Desktop I’ve made a new extra version of ExTiX with Deepin 15.5 Desktop (made in China!). Deepin is devoted to providing a beautiful, easy to use, safe and reliable system for global users. Only a minimum of packages are installed in ExTiX Deepin. You can of course install all packages you want. Even while running ExTiX Deepin live. I.e. from a DVD or USB stick. Study all installed packages in ExTiX Deepin.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• If there’s one thing that Linux needs to aid its march onwards it is (arguably) more enterprise robustness.

• Actually, if there’s one thing that Linux needs for enterprise success it’s firms like Microsoft stating that it loves Linux, but we’ve already experienced that epiphany, so what else can we hope for?

• There is no signs of slowing down openSUSE’s rolling release Tumbleweed as six snapshots of new software were released this past week.

• Not all the snapshots were large; in fact, one offered just a handful of new packages, but the releases keep coming.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat is, by its very nature, a deviation from the norm in this series of profiles. It is not a company with an open source program, but rather an open source company with an open source and standards office and an engineering team dedicated to curating communities and tending upstream contributions. In essence, Red Hat is a living, breathing testament to the success of open source. However, it still benefited from some organization and goal-setting in its community efforts.

• “The Open Source and Standards office, or what some would refer to as an open source program office, was established six years ago to create a consistent way to support communities which Red Hat is actively participating. We created a centralized organization of expertise and resource to support our goals by flanking the considerable upstream engineering efforts ,” explained Deborah Bryant, senior director, Open Source and Standards, in the office of the CTO at Red Hat.

• I traveled a lot this past fall. That meant long plane rides, during which I had a chance to read a book that’s been on my list for years: Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I’ve always been interested to learn more about Abraham Lincoln, but I wasn’t expecting to get so many valuable and relevant lessons in open leadership from a closer examination of how Lincoln worked with his team of direct reports (his cabinet).

Finance

Fedora

• Over the past few months Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been focusing on Linux power improvements, in particular to extend the battery life of laptops running Fedora Linux. As indicated by his presentation this past weekend at FOSDEM 2018, he’s making great strides in that effort.

• Among the areas that Hans has been pursuing for lowering Fedora’s power consumption out-of-the-box includes working on Panel Self Refresh handling, SATA power management changes, enabling auto-suspend for more devices, and other work as part of this effort.

Debian Family

• 39 package reviews have been added, 55 have been updated and 23 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

• Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you’re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Used by millions around the world, Slack is an enterprise software platform that allows teams and businesses of all sizes to communicate effectively. Slack works seamlessly with other software tools within a single integrated environment, providing an accessible archive of an organisation’s communications, information and projects. Although Slack has grown at a rapid rate in the 4 years since their inception, their desktop engineering team who work across Windows, MacOS and Linux consists of just 4 people currently. We spoke to Felix Rieseberg, Staff Software Engineer, who works on this team following the release of Slack’s first snap last month to discover more about the company’s attitude to the Linux community and why they decided to build a snap.

Devices/Embedded

• With the launch of Forthings – Farnell’s new PayPal-enabled website for makers and educators – I noticed Pi Desktop, a lovely-looking tiny Raspberry Pi 3 based desktop computer – just what I am looking for as used a Pi 3 as my home computer, until I got fed up with the tangle of cables.

• F&S announced a 40 x 35mm “PicoCore MX7ULP” module that can run Linux and FreeRTOS on an NXP i.MX7. You also get up to 32GB eMMC plus optional WiFi/BT and extended temp support.

• F&S Elektronik Systeme, which has produced a number of NXP-based COMs over the years, including the i.MX6 UL based efus A7UL and QorIQ LS1012A based efus A53LS, has launched the first in a new line of pin-compatible PicoCore branded modules that feature a tiny 40 x 35mm footprint. The PicoCore MX7ULP, which will formally launch at Embedded World (Feb. 27-Mar. 1), and ship in the third quarter, features NXP’s power-sipping i.MX7 SoC.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Many internet-scale companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, have established formal open source programs (sometimes referred to as open source program offices, or OSPOs for short), a designated place where open source consumption and production is supported inside a company. With such an office in place, any business can execute its open source strategies in clear terms, giving the company tools needed to make open source a success. An open source program office’s responsibilities may include establishing policies for code use, distribution, selection, and auditing; engaging with open source communities; training developers; and ensuring legal compliance.

• As businesses are keen to embrace flexible working and digital transformation, there’s increased focus on collaboration and sharing of information.

• But with existing regulations like HIPAA and upcoming ones like GDPR it’s important to keep collaboration secure. German company Nextcloud is launching a solution in the form of a self-hosted, open source platform offering end-to-end encryption, video and text chat, and enhanced collaboration.

• Nextcloud 13 is out after 9 months of development and testing. This release brings improvements to the core File Sync and Share like easier moving of files and a tech preview of our end-to-end encryption for the ultimate protection of your data. It also introduces collaboration and communication capabilities, like auto-complete of comments and integrated real-time chat and video communication. Last but not least, Nextcloud was optimized and tuned to deliver up to 80% faster LDAP, much faster object storage and Windows Network Drive performance and a smoother user interface. Read on to find out what else is new and don’t miss our thanks and invitation on the bottom!

• Today, we’re seeing the same software giants ride the wave of popularity surrounding open source solutions, releasing portions of their code to users at no cost. Is this a generous gesture to help the cause or a more calculated attempt to get the developer community to offer up advice on how to improve their products? You can be the judge.

• Remember the glorious year 2009 when I won the Nordic Free Software Award?

• This award tradition that was started in 2007 was put on a hiatus after 2010 (I believe) and there has not been any awards handed out since, and we have not properly shown our appreciation for the free software heroes of the Nordic region ever since.

• Simon Phipps, past president of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and founder of UK-based open source management consulting company, Meshed Insights, points out that without open source, we might not have the Internet or the worldwide web; our computers and mobile devices might be very different; cloud computing and the Internet of Things would probably be impossible to scale, and Google and Facebook might not exist.

• First let me say in full disclaimer that I love open source software and initiatives, and I come from the enterprise world as it where in 1998. The days where IT budgets were as fat as overfed guppy goldfish, and open source tech was barely used in production environments.

• LilyPond is another useful software that provides music notation for everyone. This music engraving tool is devoted to creating the highest-quality sheet music.

• [...]

• This is a free software that is a part of the GNU Project.

Events

• It’s arguable, but by now, it’s pretty safe to say that the proverbial year of Linux on the desktop is never happening. But… do we really need it so much? Especially if there an impressive lineup of upcoming libre software releases set for 2018? Let’s see what this year is bringing us.

• Robbie Harwood gave an overview of Kerberos for Developers. Kerberos has a reputation for being difficult to use and manage. As far as I can tell, maintaining a server can still be tricky but using it as a developer has improved significantly. There are several libraries available, including bindings in python which were demoed. Although I don’t do much with Kerberos applications usually, it’s good to know there are easy to use APIs available.

• There was a joint presentation on Hardware Root of Trust. This was an overview of current TPM support. TPMs have historically been somewhat controversial as they have been associated with reducing user freedom. TPMs are also very good at providing a secure way to store keys for protecting data, which was much of the focus of the talk. There’s been ongoing work to make TPMs do useful things such as disk encryption. The TPM software support has come a long way and I look forward to seeing new uses.

• Ulrich Drepper gave a talk on processor architectures. This seemed very timely given the recent speculative execution shenanigans. There was a lot of focus on the existing Intel architecture and its limitations. We’re beginning to hit physical limits to increase speed (see the slides about memory power use). As processor architectures get more complex, compilers and programmers have to improve as well. Sometimes I do miss working with hardware (until it breaks of course).

• Last week, Red Hat was present at the SnowCamp conference in Grenoble, France. The SnowCamp is a technical conference that includes a unique combination of deep dive sessions (universities), technical talks, and a final day on the ski slopes. With around 400 attendees and 70 sessions, this third edition of the SnowCamp was a great opportunity to meet the developers from the Grenoble area, in the most innovative city in the world (Source: Forbes and Mashable). Red Hatters presented 2 universities and 7 talks covering many projects and products, such as OpenShift, Infinispan, Monitoring, and Containers.

Web Browsers

• And now Google is doing their own thing. Some positive parts about it, but by focusing on filtering annoying types of ad units they’re closer to the Adblock Plus “Acceptable Ads” racket than to a real solution. So it’s better to let Ben Williams at Adblock Plus explain that one. I still don’t get how it is that so many otherwise capable people come up with “let’s filter superficial annoyances and not fundamental issues” and “let’s shake down legit publishers for cash” as solutions to the web advertising problem, though. Especially when $16 billion in adfraud is just sitting there. It’s almost as if the Lumascape doesn’t care about fraud because it’s priced in so it comes out of the publisher’s share anyway.

Mozilla

• Last year we announced Project Things by Mozilla. Project Things is a framework of software and services that can bridge the communication gap between connected devices by giving “things” URLs on the web.

• Today I’m excited to tell you about the latest version of the Things Gateway and how you can use it to directly monitor and control your home over the web, without a middleman. Instead of installing a different mobile app for every smart home device you buy, you can manage all your devices through a single secure web interface. This blog post will explain how to build your own Web of Things gateway with a Raspberry Pi and use it to connect existing off-the-shelf smart home products from various different brands using the power of the open web.

• Last year, we said that Mozilla is working to create a framework of software and services that can bridge the communication gap between connected devices. Today, we are pleased to announce that anyone can now build their own Things Gateway to control their connected device directly from the web.

• We kicked off “Project Things”, with the goal of building a decentralized ‘Internet of Things’ that is focused on security, privacy, and interoperability. Since our announcement last year, we have continued to engage in open and collaborative development with a community of makers, testers, contributors, and end-users, to build the foundation for this future.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Licensing/Legal

• Open Source. Ideally, any open source or similar publicly available software incorporated into the software would be specifically identified in the documentation and reviewed by the customer as part of its vendor due diligence. Customers should consider including representations by the vendor that the software will be free from any “viral” open source software (e.g., a GNU general public license) that could result in obligations for disclosure of the source code or free licensing of the software or any software used in connection with the software.

• Open-source software has revolutionized the computing in the past few decades. Have an Android smartphone? That uses open-source software. The server hosting this website is running open-source software. Parts of macOS use open-source software. Same with the iPhone. I could go on, the point is that open source software is everywhere.

• Open-source software is as much a social contract as it is a legal agreement. That is why companies that break the open-source “contract” are immoral and unjust. Over the years there have been quite a few companies and individuals that have violated the open-source ethos and often it is consumer pressure, and the occasional court case, that brings the offenders to repentance. So, what is open source? What are the licenses governing it? How do companies violate it? Let me explain.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• The MycetOS (Mycetoma Open Source) project was launched today by the University of Sydney, Erasmus MC, and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) to use an Open Pharma approach to discover compounds that could lead to new treatments for patients suffering from fungal mycetoma (eumycetoma), a devastating disease for which current treatments are ineffective, expensive, and toxic.

Open Data

• The ongoing debate on how the federal government processes its spending data continued Tuesday, as the House Oversight Committee approved a bill that would allow agencies to use open source elements for the electronic tracking of grant information. The markup also included a tit-for-tat about the bill’s potential long-term impact.

• The committee advanced the Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency (GREAT) Act by voice vote after tacking on an amendment by Gerry Connolly, D-Va., to give the executive branch more latitude in implementing the legislation. The bill would overhaul the government’s reporting structure for grant and cooperative agreements by requiring that agencies use nonproprietary, or open source, data taxonomies and identifiers for grantees.

• The current identifiers, maintained by contractor Dun & Bradstreet, are known as the data universal numbering system, or DUNS. It requires grantees and contractors to purchase a software license to access the government’s data system to receive funds.

Programming/Development

• The Ultimate Quality Development System (UQDS) is a software development process that provides clear guidelines for how to use branches, tickets, and code reviews. It was invented more than a decade ago by Divmod and adopted by Twisted, an event-driven framework for Python that underlies popular commercial platforms like HipChat as well as open source projects like Scrapy (a web scraper).

• Divmod, sadly, is no longer around—it has gone the way of many startups. Luckily, since many of its products were open source, its legacy lives on.

• When Twisted was a young project, there was no clear process for when code was “good enough” to go in. As a result, while some parts were highly polished and reliable, others were alpha quality software—with no way to tell which was which. UQDS was designed as a process to help an existing project with definite quality challenges ramp up its quality while continuing to add features and become more useful.

Standards/Consortia

• Among the many interesting presentations at this year’s FOSDEM event included an update on the AV1 royalty-free, open-source video codec by Mozilla/Xiph.Org’s Tim Terriberry.

• The AV1 codec continues gaining steam with even last month Apple joining the ranks of the organizations forming the Alliance for Open Media. But even with the backing of most major tech companies, AV1 still isn’t done quite yet.

Leftovers

• I learned to think this way when I was a magician. Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano.

• [...]

• We need our smartphones, notifications screens and web browsers to be exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first. People’s time is valuable. And we should protect it with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights.

Hardware

• Intel’s x86 silicon architecture has been a dominating force in data center and enterprise servers for a long time, but now a former Intel president wants that to change.

• On Feb. 5, former Intel president Renee James officially launched her new venture called Ampere. The new company uses ARM server processor to enable a new generation of server architectures fro hyperscale cloud computing. James worked ad intel from 1998 until February 2016.

Health/Nutrition

• Prisons in at least a dozen states — Alabama, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma and Virginia — are being sued over failure to treat hepatitis C.

• Donald Trump is an international ignoramus. He knows so little about what is happening in so many places that when he pulls out his cellphone to tweet an observation about developments beyond the borders of the United States, the expectation is that he will get something wrong.

• But there are some issues on which he is so scorchingly ignorant that his outbursts invite a shaming rebuke from a more informed global leader.

• That happened Monday morning, when Trump decided to offer a crash course in comparative health-care systems.

• What if reaching the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals on access to health for all depended on the willingness of all actors to see beyond outdated dichotomies? The concept may seem obvious, but is easier described than done. In an effort to break silos, the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI) brought together stakeholders of all sides last week to discuss how to harness political and economic will to achieve innovation leading to new medicines that are available and affordable for all in need.

• [...]

• The increasing threat of antimicrobial resistance where the current innovation model is hardly applicable since the new antibiotics will have to be sparingly used, and the escalating prices of new cancer drugs give an opportunity to address the issue in-depth.

Security

• Enterprises invest a lot of time, effort and money in keeping their systems secure. The most security-conscious might have a security operations center. They of course use firewalls and antivirus tools. They probably spend a lot of time monitoring their networks, looking for telltale anomalies that could indicate a breach. What with IDS, SIEM and NGFWs, they deploy a veritable alphabet of defenses.

• But how many have given much thought to one of the cornerstones of their digital operations: the operating systems deployed on the workforce’s PCs? Was security even a factor when the desktop OS was selected?

• Adobe warned on Thursday that attackers are exploiting a previously unknown security hole in its Flash Player software to break into Microsoft Windows computers. Adobe said it plans to issue a fix for the flaw in the next few days, but now might be a good time to check your exposure to this still-ubiquitous program and harden your defenses.

• Adobe said a critical vulnerability (CVE-2018-4878) exists in Adobe Flash Player 28.0.0.137 and earlier versions. Successful exploitation could allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

• A new variant of the malicious Scarab ransomware has been uncovered in the wild that uses a different distribution method and threat to scare victims into paying up. While the original Scarab ransomware was distributed by a massive spam campaign hosted by the Necurs botnet, the new variant dubbed “Scarabey” targets Remote Desktop Protocol connections and is manually dropped on servers and systems.

• Simon Edwards, European cyber security architect at Trend Micro, told SC that one of the Shadow Broker releases included a ‘new’ version of Conficker (Eclipsed Wing) which would connect it to the exploit used for WannaCry.

• [...]

• “However, Trend has seen samples of this onsite in the NHS; the samples use Domain Generation Algorithms to communicate to C&C servers so generate quite a lot of network traffic. Once again patching is critical, but once again (in the case of the NHS specifically) this might not be possible for systems running critical medical equipment.”

• If there’s one thing I wish people from outside the security industry knew when dealing with information security, it’s that Security is not an absolute. Most of the time, it’s not even quantifiable. Even in the case of particular threat models, it’s often impossible to make statements about the security of a system with certainty.

• The market and competition for container security technology is continuing to grow. Among the newest entrants in the space is Layered Insight which announced its new CEO Sachin Aggarwal on Feb. 5.

• Layered Insight got started in January 2015 and has been quietly building its technology and a business ever since. The company has not announced any funding yet, though Layered Insight does already have product in-market as it aims to help organizations gain better visibility and control of container environments.

• REMEMBER THOSE LEAKED NSA TOOLS? Well, they can now hack any version of Windows, not just the old version of Microsoft’s operating system.

• Researcher Sean Dillon from cybersecurity firm RiskSense tweaked the source code of three nicked NSA exploits – EternalSynergy, EternalChampion and EternalRomance – to work against Windows versions dating back as far as Windows 2000.

• Going by the name of ‘zerosum0x0′ on GitHub and Twitter (hat tip to Betanews for that), Dillon noted his modifications to the code exploits the CVE-2017-0143 and CVE-2017-0146 vulnerabilities in numerous versions of unpatched Windows OS.

• In the meantime, others in the open source community have stepped up to prevent some of the worst potential damage from AutoSploit. Security expert Jerry Gamblin posted to GitHub his own bit of code that he says will block Shodan from being able to scan your systems. However, it is questionable as to whether this response will be widely used, considering the generally poor performance of the software industry for implementing critical patches when they are announced from the project managers themselves.

Defence/Aggression

• Russian President Vladimir Putin obviously has his faults and has made his share of mistakes. Yet, my experiences with him, as well as what I have heard over the years from people I trust –– including U.S. officials who have with him worked closely –– indicate that Putin is essentially a straightforward, reliable and exceptionally inventive man.

• The Russian president is clearly a long-term thinker and planner and has proven to be an excellent analyst and strategist. He is a leader who can quietly work toward his goals under mounds of accusations and myths that have been steadily leveled at him since he became the Russian Federation’s second president.

• [...]

• I’ve been in country long enough to reflect deeply on Russian history and culture, to study their psychology and conditioning, and to understand the marked differences between American and Russian mentalities which so complicate our political relations with their leaders.

• As with personalities in a family or a civic club or in a city hall, it takes understanding and compromise to be able to create workable relationships when basic conditionings are different. Washington has been notoriously disinterested in understanding these differences and attempting to meet Russia halfway.

• Lithuania’s president said Monday Russia has deployed additional nuclear-capable missiles in its Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad on a permanent basis, calling it a threat to Europe.

• President Dalia Grybauskaite told reporters after visiting NATO troops in the central Lithuanian town of Rukla that “Iskander missiles are being stationed in Kaliningrad for permanent presence as we speak.” She called it a threat not only to Lithuania but to “half of all European countries.”

• NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller, who also visited the Rukla base where the military alliance’s multinational battalion is stationed, said Grybauskaite’s assertion, if true, was “a very serious matter,” according to the Baltic news agency BNS.

• According to the students who are currently on the run following the unrest at the campus, few weeks to the Student Union Government, SUG election, there was a threat by a student on a Facebook page warning the school authority should take action against the alleged claim of blasphemy or the Muslim students would take all necessary action to stop academic activities in the institution.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• A British court is to decide on Tuesday (Feb 6) whether to lift a UK arrest warrant for Julian Assange, potentially paving the way for the WikiLeaks founder to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has spent the last five years.

• If the court rules in Assange’s favour, allowing him to leave the embassy in the British capital without fear of arrest, it would be the first time that he has stepped outside embassy grounds since seeking asylum there in June 2012.

• A British judge is scheduled to rule Tuesday on Julian Assange’s bid to force Britain to drop a warrant for his arrest, a development that would remove a substantial legal hurdle to his leaving the Ecuadorean Embassy in London that has been his refuge for more than five years.

• JULIAN Assange could walk free from the Ecuadorean Embassy where he has been holed up for more than five years, following a key judgment due on Tuesday, UK time.

• The decision on whether a UK arrest warrant for Assange should be dropped could mean the Australian activist would be able to leave the Knightsbridge embassy as it’s the “only remaining action he’s got against him” according to the UK Crown Prosecution Service.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will learn on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT) if he has succeeded in having a warrant for his arrest in the UK dropped.

• If his bid is successful he could eventually leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he’s been holed up for more than five years because of fears he’ll be extradited to the US.

• Assange, 46, fled to the embassy in the British capital in 2012 after skipping bail to avoid being sent to Sweden to face an allegation of rape, which he denied.

• [...]

• Judge Emma Arbuthnot said she would make her ruling on the arrest warrant on February 6.

• Assange, 46, fled to the embassy in the British capital in 2012 after skipping bail to avoid being sent to Sweden to face an allegation of rape, which he denied. He had feared Sweden would hand him over to the US to face prosecution over WikiLeaks…

• A British judge on Tuesday upheld a U.K. arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, leaving him still a wanted man in the country where he has spent more than five years inside the Ecuadorean Embassy.

• Judge Emma Arbuthnot rejected a call from Assange’s lawyers for the warrant to be revoked because he is no longer wanted for questioning in Sweden over alleged sex crimes. It was issued in 2012 for jumping bail.

• Residents of Knightsbridge are steeling themselves for the arrival of the world’s media again this afternoon as judgment is handed down in the latest, and potentially crucial, legal case involving Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

• The Australian-Ecuadorean (he was granted Ecuadorean citizenship in recent weeks) has been a resident of the embassy beside Harrods department store for the last five and half years.

• Missouri governor Eric Greitens, along with his staff, are the targets of a recently-filed public records-related lawsuit [PDF]. Two St. Louis County attorneys are accusing the governor of dodging public records laws with his use of Confide, an app that deletes text messages once they’re read and prevents users from saving, forwarding, printing, or taking screenshots of the messages.

• The governor’s use of the app flies in the face of the presumption of openness. The attorneys are hoping the court will shut down the use of Confide to discuss official state business. The governor has argued an injunction would constitute prior restraint.

• Ordering Gov. Eric Greitens and his staff to stop using an app that erases text messages would violate their free speech rights, attorneys for the governor argued in a brief filed Tuesday.

• Greitens and his senior government staff use an app on their personal phones called Confide that erases text messages after they are read and prevents someone from saving, forwarding, printing or taking a screenshot of texts. Because the app is designed to eliminate a paper trail, it is impossible to determine whether the governor and his staff used it to conduct state business out of view of the public, or whether they’re using it for personal and campaign purposes.

• A UK arrest warrant against Julian Assange is still valid, Westminster Magistrates’ Court has ruled. Lawyers for the WikiLeaks founder asked the court to withdraw the warrant, saying it had “lost its purpose”. It was issued in 2012 after he allegedly breached bail conditions by seeking asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy, where he has remained. He had been facing extradition to Sweden to answer sex assault claims but these charges have since been dropped.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• On Dec. 6, former Volkswagen engineer Oliver Schmidt was led into a federal courtroom in Detroit in handcuffs and leg irons. He was wearing a blood-red jumpsuit, his head shaved, as it always is, and his deep-set eyes seemed to ask, “how did I get here?” As Schmidt’s wife tried to suppress tears in a second-row pew, U.S. District Judge Sean Cox sentenced him to what, had it been imposed in Schmidt’s native Germany, would rank among the harshest white collar sentences ever meted out: seven years in prison.

• Schmidt was being punished for his role in VW’s “Dieselgate” scandal, one of the most audacious corporate frauds in history. Yet his sentence brought no catharsis, least of all to Cox, who at times seemed pained while imposing it. Sometimes, he told Schmidt apologetically, his job requires him to imprison “good people just making very, very bad decisions.”

Finance

• China is set to block all websites, local and foreign, connected with trading in cryptocurrencies or initial coin offerings, a newspaper affiliated to the People’s Bank of China says.

• Stripe will open its first engineering center outside the United States in Dublin, the company told Reuters today. Dublin isn’t a surprising choice. Though the online payment processing provider is based in San Francisco, its founders are Irish and Stripe’s European headquarters are already in the Irish capital, where it has about 100 employees.

• CEO Patrick Collison and head of engineering David Singleton told Reuters the firm considered placing its first few dozen engineering jobs outside of the US in countries across Europe, but settled on Ireland because of its international approach and widening talent pool.

• The overtime and shift-trading ban implemented today by municipal employees will have a negative impact on a wide variety of public services, says Henrika Nybondas-Kangas, the chief negotiator for Local Government Employers (KT).

• The Finnish Union of Practical Nurses (Super), Union of Health and Social Care Professionals (Tehy), Trade Union for the Public and Welfare Sectors (JHL) and Public Sector Professionals (JUKO) have instructed their members to turn down all requests to work overtime and trade shifts as of Tuesday.

• The stock market went on a wild ride again on Monday, with the Dow Jones industrial average closing down 1,175 points, its worst point drop in history. The Dow closed down 4.6 percent and turned negative for the year.

• At one point Monday afternoon, the Dow was down 1,579 points — the largest intraday point drop in the history of the index.

• RG: It really looks like a fraud under the guise of an infrastructure plan, more so than an infrastructure plan itself. Typical of this White House, we’ve seen very little detail about what the plan actually calls for, except for the things that you mentioned. Just last night, we heard of the idea of $1.5 trillion in investment. But I want to dissect that a little bit, because although it sounds very good, sort of a hefty sum at $1.5 trillion, we know, through leaks and other sources, that he’s actually only trying to put down about $200 billion in terms of infrastructure.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Moreover, those sources confirmed the dismissals of staff writers Celeste Katz and Josh Saul, reporters who had written several articles on the magazine’s financial dealings and the ongoing investigation into the publication’s parent company, Newsweek Media Group, by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. Josh Keefe — an editor for International Business Times, another Newsweek Media Group property — was also fired.

• Seattle’s election commission says Facebook broke a city law that requires it to disclose who paid for campaign ads. Reuters reports that the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission’s executive director, Wayne Barnett, said Facebook must reveal advertising spending information for last year’s city elections or potentially face fines of up to $5,000 per ad purchase.

• Facebook must disclose details about spending in last year’s Seattle city elections or face penalties, Wayne Barnett, executive director of the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, said in a statement.

• “We gave Facebook ample time to comply with the law,” Barnett said.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has been accused of threatening to bar a reporter from Modern Healthcare from its press calls.

• The threat came after the reporter, Virgil Dickson, claimed he did not agree to alter a story he wrote to take out a part regarding CMS administrator Seema Verma, according to the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ).

• The United States government, in the closest collaboration with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other powerful information technology corporations, is implementing massive restrictions on Internet access to socialist, antiwar and progressive websites. Similar repressive policies are being enacted by capitalist governments in Europe and throughout the world.

• wo Kenyan television channels shut down by the government over their coverage of the political opposition resumed partial broadcasting on Monday although a third channel remained off the air.

• NTV resumed broadcasting on pay-to-view channels, it announced on its Twitter feed, although its free-to-air channel was still off. KTN News resumed on its free-to-air channel.

• Two Kenyan television channels shut down by the government over their coverage of the political opposition resumed partial broadcasting on Monday, although a third channel remained off the air.

• The unprecedented act of censorship sparked a local and international backlash against the government of President Uhuru Kenyatta, who won an election in October.

• So reads the opening line of a discussion page for the #MeToo campaign in China, posted on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.

• “Rice bunny” (米兔), pronounced as “mi tu”, is a nickname given to the #MeToo campaign by Chinese social media users.

• The #RiceBunny hashtag, accompanied by emojis of rice bowls and bunny heads, is used by Chinese women to expose sexual harassment — often in conjunction with other Chinese hashtags, such as #IAmAlso (#我也是）and #MeTooInChina (#MeToo在中国).

• While it is alarming, it is not entirely unexpected that debate around the film Inxeba has descended into threats of violence and the cancellation of screenings mere days after its general release in South African cinemas. For it was less than six months ago that Nakhane, the film’s lead actor, first received death threats, and the AmaXhosa King, Mpendulo Zwelonke Sigcawu, expressed his intention to halt distribution of the film.

• The release of local movie, Inxeba, in SA at the weekend was met with derision from certain quarters.

• But those opposed to the now controversial movie have not done their cause any good in the way they have gone about it.

• Inxeba, The Wound, is based on the Xhosa rite of passage but with a homosexual twist to the tale. Critics, many without as much as seeing the film, have declared that it ridicules and disrespects the Xhosa culture and the initiation tradition.

• in 1866 gustave courbet—a french painter who led the realism movement in the 19th-century—realized ‘l’origine du monde’, a famous painting also known as ‘the origin of the world.’ quite controversial for its time, the picture depicts a naked woman lying on the bed with her legs spread.

• A judge in Brooklyn has thrown out a libel lawsuit against two reporters brought by the subjects of a 2015 ProPublica investigation that raised serious concerns about lax state oversight of nursing home ownership in New York.

• Kings County Supreme Court Justice Paul Wooten held that the article was not libelous because it was a “fair and true report” of actions taken by state and federal agencies. New York law generally shields accurate accounts of official government actions from claims of libel (which refers to false statements that harm a person’s reputation). That’s to insulate government watchdog reporting from the chilling effect of litigation.

• Wooten decided the case last month, but the opinion was published electronically on Monday.

Privacy/Surveillance

• One of the strengths of AI systems is that they can ingest huge quantities of seemingly unrelated data to find hidden patterns and relationships. That makes them perfect for cross-referencing “anonymized” personal information from multiple sources in order to reveal the identity of individuals who are the source of that data.

Civil Rights/Policing

• British security researcher Lauri Love has won an appeal against extradition to the US to face charges of allegedly breaching the computer networks of a number of federal government agencies.

• I am absolutely thrilled for Lauri, his family, friends, his legal team and all the supporters who have worked so hard to bring us to this point. As we demonstrated at appeal, Lauri was only ever in this position because he had been marked out for unfair, discriminatory and vindictive treatment. With any luck, today’s ruling will mean that prosecuting authorities finally start respecting the clear will of the British public: we do not extradite our geeks to face medieval punishment in the United States.

• In 2013 Love was accused of hacking [sic] into several high-level targets in the United States, among them the FBI, NASA, and the Federal Reserve. If found guilty in a US court, he could have faced a sentence of up to 99 years in prison.

• Following the verdict on Monday, 32- year old Love thanked everybody for their support, however he is not yet in the clear as he could still be charged an tried for his offences in Britain

• At three sites near and around downtown Minneapolis, activists tried to disrupt Super Bowl festivities on Sunday afternoon by blocking streets, light-rail trains and, briefly, a stadium entrance.

• The Silicon Valley insiders are now acting as outsiders in launching their new organization, The Center for Humane Technology. They are starting a campaign called The Truth About Tech, funded in part by $7 million from the non-profit media watchdog group Common Sense Media, which will help drive the movement forward across the country.

• His new organization moves away from helping people take control of their time, and focuses instead on raising awareness of what he believes are the manipulative design techniques of, as he put it in a recent Bloomberg interview, a “civilization-scale mind-control machine.”

• The sentence was met with protests by Amnesty International, the UN and Sweden’s Foreign Ministry. An initial appeal was rejected in December, and his lawyer now says a further request to have the sentence overturned has been denied.

• Following the ongoing protests by the public and the youth on February 1 on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the rule of religious fascism in Iran, Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the regime, dispatched Mullah Ahmad Khatami, member of the board of the regime’s Assembly of Experts to Tehran Friday prayer to intimidate the rising people and protesters.

• At sentencing, they kind of saved me for last. I had just turned 21. It was 1998. I remember the judge saying, “Jason, I’ve thought about this all week. … I’ve written Congress about these sentencing guidelines for crack-cocaine but my hands are tied.” After, he starts reading my sentence off to me: “life without parole …” After life without parole, I didn’t hear the other part.

• I don’t even know how I got back to the prison cell. When it was all added up, I got life without parole plus 320 years, 8 years of probation, and a $6,000 fine. Your mind can’t take in that reality — that you’re going to die in prison.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The executive order says that New Jersey state agencies may only buy Internet service from ISPs that adhere to net neutrality principles. But the net neutrality protections will cover ordinary residents as well as government officials. That’s because the order says that “adherence to ‘net neutrality’ principles means that an ISP shall not [violate the rules] with respect to any consumers in New Jersey (including but not limited to State entities).”

• If you’ve been playing along at home, Trump’s FCC hasn’t been particularly kind to consumers, competition, or the health of the internet. It has, however, been a massive boon to major ISPs terrified of disruption and competition, especially those looking to forge new media monopolies where they dominate both the conduit — and the content — coming to the home.

• Under Pai, the FCC has gutted broadband programs for the poor, protected the cable industry’s monopoly over the cable box from competition, made it easier for prison phone monopolies to rip off inmate families, dismantled generations old media consolidation rules simply to aid Sinclair Broadcasting’s merger ambitions, killed meaningful broadband privacy protections, tried to weaken the standard definition of broadband (to help hide competition gaps) and weakened rules preventing business broadband and backhaul monopolies from abusing smaller competitors, hospitals, or schools.

• But the FCC’s actual data—based on the extensive Form 477 data submissions Internet service providers must make on a regular basis—only covers broadband deployments through December 2016. Pai wasn’t elevated from commissioner to chairman until January 2017, and he didn’t lead the vote to repeal the net neutrality rules until December 2017. And, technically, those rules are still on the books because the repeal won’t take effect for at least another two months. Further Reading FCC admits mobile can’t replace home Internet, won’t lower speed standard Further Reading Goodbye, net neutrality—Ajit Pai’s FCC votes to allow blocking and throttling

• The timing means that it would be impossible for Pai to present evidence today that broadband deployment is increasing as a result of the net neutrality repeal.

DRM

• TickBox makes a computer hardware device that allows users to search for unauthorized streams of copyrighted content through the combination of open source media player software, Kodi, and “add on” software programs. The company boasts that users can quit paying high monthly fees and access the hottest TV shows, blockbusters, premium content, and live sporting events – all through the TickBox.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Ars has published both slide decks from Waymo and Uber in full, but below are some selected highlights.

• This is a reference for a preliminary ruling from The Netherlands (District Court of The Hague) concerning the absolute grounds for refusal of registration of sign that consist exclusively of “the shape which gives substantial value to the goods”.

Trademarks

• Nearly three years ago, Bell’s Brewery, whose products I used to buy greedily, decided to oppose a trademark for Innovation Brewing, a tiny operation out of North Carolina. The reasons for the opposition are truly difficult to comprehend. First, Bell’s stated that it uses the slogan “Bottling innovation since 1985″ on some merchandise. This was only barely true. The slogan does appear on some bumper stickers that Bell sells and that’s pretty much it. It appears nowhere in any of the brewery’s beer labels or packaging. Also, Bell’s never registered the slogan as a trademark. Bell’s also says it uses the slogan “Inspired brewing” and argues that Innovation’s name could create confusion in the marketplace because it’s somehow similar to that slogan.

• This is a good lesson in why trademark bullying of this nature is a pox on any industry derived largely of small players, because it’s only in the past weeks that the Trademark Trials and Appeals Board in Virginia has ruled essentially that Bell’s is full of crap.

• Toyota recently lost a trade mark case at India’s Supreme Court, in a surprising decision that has shaken up the principle of territoriality in trans-border reputation

• The case also reinforces the applicable threshold for marks to be regarded as “well-known”. Singapore law recognizes that marks can be well-known in Singapore so long as it is well-known to any relevant sector of public in Singapore.

Copyrights

• VideoLAN, the team behind the VLC media player, recently revealed that they turned down several tens of millions of euros to bundle their software with advertising. The same cannot be said of third-party developers cloning VLC for profit, however. An ad-supported clone discovered on Google Play has a staggering five to ten million downloads and breaches VLC’s GPL license, yet Google refuses to take it down.

• An interesting case caught my eye this week, and piqued my interest enough to explore further. In Folkens v. Wyland Worldwide the Ninth Circuit considered whether Wyland’s depiction of crossing dolphins copied from Folkens’s original. Below is a reproduction from the complaint, but it doesn’t really do them justice. Better versions of Folkens (pen and ink) and Wyland (color) highlight the similarities and differences.

• This sermon literally also discourages people from spending too much money on their cars. Yes, it really does.

• King’s sermons, which are not in the public domain, are notoriously difficult to republish or reuse. [...]

• Using a civil rights hero to sell cars in a Super Bowl commercial may seem absurd on its face, but it’s particularly ridiculous when said civil rights icon actually spoke out against car commercials.

• Piracy challenger Virgin Media has been caught running, er, piracy-enabling software in one of its physical stores.

• Virgin Media has long taken a hard-line on piracy, and last year started sending out letters warning customers suspected of piracy to cease their wicked ways and adopt acceptable services like Netflix and Spotify instead.

• Virgin Media is one of the largest premium telecoms suppliers in the UK and Ireland but the way one of its stores has advertised its “Full House” package leaves a bit to be desired. While asking for 99 euros to supply a top-rated packaged, an advertising display simultaneously showed notifications from one of the most popular movie and TV show piracy applications.

• Cloudflare has terminated service to several domain names of Sci-Hub, which is often referred to as “The Pirate Bay of Science.” The CDN provider was compelled to take this action in response to a permanent injunction the American Chemical Society obtained late last year. While Cloudflare previously objected to a similar request, there is no sign of protest this time around.

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