● 02.13.18

● Links 13/2/2018: Rise of the Tomb Raider on GNU/Linux, KDE 5.43.0, Qt 5.10.1

Posted in News Roundup at 10:57 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• If none of these tips work and you don’t really want to spend a few hundred dollars to fix the machine, I’d suggest switching to a different operating system, like Linux. A version called Ubuntu is more Windows-like and user friendly — and it’s free.

• And a good resource is a Denver company called System 76, which I wrote about a few years ago: “System 76 in Denver shows how easy it is to use Ubuntu Linux computers.” The company sells Linux Ubuntu computers, but last year, it unveiled its own Linux-based operating system called Pop!_os, a trend PCWorld proclaimed “Exciting.”

• Also, if you’re the type of person who prefers hand-holding when it comes to technology, System 76 does offer customer service with their machines — for life.

Audiocasts/Shows

• We’re back and this week’s episode is jam packed with GNews. We got a new Linux kernel, new updates from LibreOffice, Nextcloud, VLC and more.

Kernel Space

• Open source software (OSS) marketing today is unique: it’s a process of co-creating and co-executing a marketing plan with an entire community—developers, end users and vendors. This makes it distinctly different than most traditional technology marketing efforts, which generally focuses on business decision-makers exclusively.

Graphics Stack

• Keith Packard has sent out his latest patches for implementing the non-desktop and DRM lease functionality from within the X.Org Server. This work also includes the relevant DDX bits being wired through for the xf86-video-modesetting driver.

• The “non-desktop” handling is the new property for indicating if a display output is not for a conventional desktop use-case, i.e. a VR HMD as the main use-case from Valve’s perspective. When the VR HMD or other non-desktop output is set, it’s not used by the X.Org Server and any desktop window manager so it can be reserved for the SteamVR compositor.

• With the AMDVLK Radeon Vulkan driver that AMD open-sourced in December continuing to be updated in weekly batches with new Vulkan extensions / features / performance optimizations and the RADV Mesa-based Radeon Vulkan driver continuing to march to its own beat, I have spent the past few days conducting some fresh benchmarks between the AMDVLK and RADV Vulkan drivers with RX 560, RX 580, and RX Vega 64 graphics cards.

• Virtualized GPU access is becoming common in the containerized and virtualized application space. Let’s have a look at why and how.

• For the past few years a clear trend of containerization of applications and services has emerged. Having processes containerized is beneficial in a number of ways. It both improves portability and strengthens security, and if done properly the performance penalty can be low.

• In order to further improve security containers are commonly run in virtualized environments. This provides some new challenges in terms of supporting the accelerated graphics usecase.

• Many of you have expressed interest in Intel’s virtual GPU pass-through support “GVT” and with Linux 4.16 the kernel-side bits have come together for local vGPU display support.

• VFIO updates and Intel DRM driver updates needed for local Intel vGPU display support were merged during this month’s Linux 4.16 merge window.

• Red Hat’s Peter Hutterer has announced the release of libinput 1.10, the latest feature release of this input handling library used by Wayland-based Linux desktops and optionally by those still using the X.Org Server.

Applications

• LinuxQuestions, one of the largest internet Linux groups with 550,000 members, has just posted the results from its latest survey of desktop Linux users. With approximately 10,000 voters in the survey, the desktop Linux distribution pick was: Ubuntu.

• While Ubuntu has long a been popular Linux distro, it hasn’t been flying as high as it once was. Now it seems to be gathering more fans again. For years, people never warmed up to Ubuntu’s default Unity desktop. Then, in April 2017, Ubuntu returned to GNOME for its default desktop. It appears this move has brought back some old friends and added some new ones.

• Yes, guys – another video player! “What’s special about this one?”, you ask. Well, for starters, it began as a (blog post project) for Haskell programmers interested in functional programming and who also have an interest in building GTK UI apps.

• Movie Monad is a free, simple, and open-source GTK video player written in Haskell. If features a UI reminiscent of VLC Media Player, keyboard shortcuts, and the ability to play both local and remote files.

• Are you looking to tweak or manage your disks partitions in Linux? In this article, we will review some of the best tools that help Linux users partition and manage their disks. We will see both command line utilities as well as GUI applications for managing disk partitions in Linux.

Proprietary

• SentinelOne, the autonomous endpoint protection company, today announced it will integrate its SentinelOne Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) service to cover Mac and Linux device platforms. SentinelOne will seamlessly feed all threats and detections from Mac and Linux endpoints into the Windows Defender ATP console, enabling security teams to see and remediate threats across Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. To sign up for beta access, please visit https://go.sentinelone.com/Microsoft-WD-ATP-Onboarding.html.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Super Tony Land [Official Site, Kickstarter] sounds like a platformer that I could enjoy, one that will enable you to make your own challenges, worlds and stories.

• The game will use a “block based programming language” allowing you to create some really wild stuff. Not just in the form of levels, but vehicles and all sorts of wacky creations.

• …it’s open source. sure, you could in theory just turn on the pocketsprite wi-fi, connect your computer up to it, and download games via pocketsprite’s desktop interface, but where’s the challenge in that? if you understand a few youtube-tutorial’s-worth of hacking, you could upload whatever you want to this tiny emulator…

• A Rise of the Tomb Raider Linux release has been officially confirmed.

• Game porting powerhouse Feral Interactive announced via a tweet that it is behind ports of the action-adventure title for both macOS and Linux.

• Porting specialists Feral Interactive are bringing Rise of the Tomb Raider to macOS and Linux.

• Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration is a content complete version of Crystal Dynamics’ highly acclaimed Tomb Raider sequel. The Mac and Linux editions include the base game, first released in 2015, plus the full complement of DLC content.

• Many asked, now Feral Interactive have answered. Rise of the Tomb Raider [Steam] is officially on the way to Linux! What a fantastic way to start a Tuesday with news like this! It still amazes me to this day that Linux will have games like this, very happy with the news!

• Feral aren’t saying exactly when it will arrive, but they had a tweet out that said “This Winter” which has since been deleted (Edit: replaced with this one). You can see the official confirmation on their official site which now says “This spring”, so it could be here sometime between March and late June.

• Feral Interactive has announced today that they are porting Rise of the Tomb Raider to Linux.

• Rise of the Tomb Raider was released for Windows in January of 2016 as the latest in the Tomb Raider franchise. Now two years later the Linux port will be released in the months ahead. When Feral has asked the community about games coming to Linux, this title has repeatedly been brought up as a title many Linux gamers would like to see following the port of the 2013 Tomb Raider game.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.43.0.

• KDE Frameworks are 70 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the Frameworks 5.0 release announcement.

• This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

• With the new Plasma LTS came an update to KDE neon LTS Edition and lots of people asking which edition to use and what the difference is. This caused us to review the purpose of LTS and as a result we’ve just hidden LTS from the download page. The only difference with the LTS edition is that it stays on Plasma’s LTS release but apps and libraries still get updates. This doesn’t fit well with the main use cases of an LTS which is that it only gets bug fixes and no new features. Further we test Neon LTS edition less than any other edition so it’s more likely we’ll miss some problem, which is the opposite of what most people would expect. There are distros whose release model fits better with the needs of Plasma LTS but the constant updates of Neon don’t fit too well. We’ll keep the edition around and don’t expect to make any changes to the repositories or builds, they’re useful for devs testing Plasma LTS, but we’re not advertising it for download since it gives a different expectation of what to expect than fits into the release method of Neon.

• The KMarkdownWebView software is for the rendered display of Markdown documents, using web technologies. It implements a C++/Qt-based wrapper around a local webpage with a JavaScript library (“marked”) which creates HTML from the plain text in Markdown format passed in.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• As you may already know, Python is one of the hottest programming language out there, with thousand of job offerings, so makes sense, at least for me, to push this language as official one for GNOME Mobile applications.

• elementary OS is doing a good job on engagement new developers, while use Vala as its official language. For me, Vala is a good candidate for advanced/performance constrained Mobile applications.

• GNOME 3.28 will release with another batch of new wallpapers that only a freaction of you will ever see. Apart from those I also made a few for different purposes that didn’t end up being used, but it would be a shame to keep shelved.

• So here’s a bit of isometric goodness I quite enjoy on my desktop, you might as well.

Distributions

• Linux is built for tinkering and experimentation, which means it’s always morphing and changing. New distros are popping up all the time, because all it takes is a little bit of determination, time and effort to create a custom operating system.

• Not all of them hit the mark – there are stacks of Linux distros that have seen little to no action, and we’re almost certain that some have been released and never installed by anyone other than their creator.

• Namib is an ideal Linux distro for anyone who wants to ease into the Arch approach to computing.

• Namib is a newcomer — the third and current release (version 17.11) arrived late last year. However, it makes up for its lack of age by its performance. Namib makes Arch simple.

• Surprisingly very user-friendly as well as compatible with older computers, Namib also is very stable.

• Since Namib is based on the Arch philosophy, it uses rolling releases so you do not have to reinstall the entire operating system every time a major update occurs. The Pacman package manager handles new system components along with security and application updates automatically.

• Namib is very up to date.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• Since we released 4.14.18 yesterday, we now are in pretty good shape with the mitigations, especially on x86_64. We now have bits in place for Spectre v1, v2 and Meltdown.

• Of course over the coming weeks/months there will be more follow-up fixes upstream to cover corner cases, missed fixes and improvements for all of this…

• And we still need Intel and AMD to release microcodes so hardware vendors can release updated BIOS/EFI firmwares and to the public so we can provide microcode updates in case of vendors not providing new BIOS/EFI firmwares.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• As part of a continuing set of analysis posts dedicated to examining major developments across the major (and some lesser) open source Linux distributions, we consider 2017 at open German softwarehaus SUSE.

Red Hat Family

• Deploying his company’s open hybrid cloud product, preparing for next-generation IT, building an ‘inclusive meritocracy’ — Red Hat CIO Mike Kelly talks turkey with SearchCIO.

• In any fast moving environment, there are going to be a certain amount of myths and misperceptions that get communicated and spread around a community. This week, in Part 1 of a 2-part series, we take a look at some of the common and recent myths and misperceptions about containers and Kubernetes.

Finance

Fedora

• The recent DevConf.cz conference in Brno, Czechia is a great example of an event by and for developers and open source community members. Hundreds of speakers showed off countless technologies and features advancing the state of open source in Linux and far beyond. Here’s a taste of the conference in the form of three videos concerning Fedora that were part of the schedule.

Debian Family

• A new version of the 3D printer slicer software Cura, version 3.1.0, is now available in Debian Testing (aka Buster) and Debian Unstable (aka Sid). I hope you find it useful. It was uploaded the last few days, and the last update will enter testing tomorrow. See the release notes for the list of bug fixes and new features. Version 3.2 was announced 6 days ago. We will try to get it into Debian as well.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Skype is used by hundreds of millions of users globally to make free video and voice calls, send files, video and instant messages. It has been two years since Skype first launched to Linux users on the Electron framework. This brings us to the present day, where the team recently launched their first snap and at the recent Snapcraft Summit, Senior Software Engineer Jonas Tajrych explains Skype’s progress from first discovering snaps in 2016 to its release.

Devices/Embedded

• Contemporary Controls is launching a “BASpi” Raspberry Pi add-on that supports the BACnet building control standard and Sedona Framework, and provides 6x relay outputs and 6x inputs, including analog, temp, contact closure, pulse, and resistance inputs.

• Home automation is a new phenomenon compared to more established building automation technology, which largely follows the BACnet (Building Automation Control network) standard. We have seen various Linux-ready IoT products that offer some BACnet support, including Echelon’s IzoT Router. However, Contemporary Controls’ new BASpi Raspberry Pi 3 add-on board is the first product we’ve seen that is specifically designed for the standard.

• Since Steam already works (with full game controller support) on Windows 10, I didn’t bother trying to install Steam or any heavier-duty games in Linux.

• Overall I’d say that for now Linux on the GPD Win 2 is a bit of a mixed bag, at least for the prototype I’m testing. It’s usable, but I can’t think of a lot of reasons why you would really choose it over Windows 10 on this particular device… unless you either really hate Windows or really know what you’re doing and think you might be able to get the non-working hardware to function properly.

• That said, there is a way to have the best of both worlds. The GPD Win 10 ships with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update pre-installed, which means you can use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to install Ubuntu or OpenSUSE from the Windows Store.

Android

• The next major Android version, Android P, could see a release in almost half a year’s time. So, other than guessing the name of the new dessert, features are being anticipated by the Android lovers.

• A new update of the AndEX Oreo 8.1 computer operating system, a clone of the Android-x86 project, has been released, promising to let users install Android apps from the Google Play Store.

• Previous releases of AndEX Oreo 8.1, which lets you install Google’s latest Android 8.1 Oreo mobile operating system on your personal computer, didn’t actually let users install Android apps from Google Play Store, but using a third-party package manager called Aptoide App Manager.

• Developer Arne Exton has recently informed us about the availability of a new AndEX Oreo 8.1, build 180202, which apparently makes the Google Play store works as intended, allowing users to install their favorite Android apps without relying on a third-party application management tool.

Free Software/Open Source

• Researching the best open source accounting software isn’t as simple as one might think. There are a number of important variables you must consider before taking the leap. This is especially important for those businesses that already have an accounting/bookkeeping solution in place. Making sure you can achieve the same level of control and functionality is very important when switching to a Linux-centric accounting application.

• You probably heard, but the private rocket company SpaceX did a thing last week. And while it was really cool to watch live video from a freakin’ rocket on my pocket computer, that’s not all there is to it. As I thought about the Falcon Heavy launch, I realized it contains a lot of lessons from my experience in open source projects.

Events

• Over the past week and a half we have highlighted many of the interesting presentations that took place at the annual Free Open-Source Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels. Here’s a look back if you are behind on your Phoronix reading.

Web Browsers

• Min is an open source web browser with a clean UI and minimalist look. Despite being minimal, Min packs enough features for a standard web browsing experience.

• Remember the last time we discussed non-Google web browsers? Well, here is one more to the list.

• Min is an open source web browser written using CSS and JavaScript using Electron. If you hate using Electron-based applications, perhaps you can still read about Min even if you don’t use it.

Mozilla

• The Application Cache (AppCache) interface provides a caching mechanism that allows websites to run offline. Using this API, developers can specify resources that the browser should cache and make available to users offline. Unfortunately, AppCache has limitations in revalidating its cache, which allows attackers to trick the browser into never revalidate the cache by setting a manifest to a malformed cache file. Removing AppCache over HTTP connections removes the risk that users could see stale cached content that came from a malicious connection indefinitely.

Databases

• …Altibase, an enterprise grade relational database, announced that it is now open source.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Funding

• In a world where sensors are capturing ever-increasing amounts of data, being able to collect that high volume and measure it over time becomes increasingly important. InfluxData, the startup built on top of the open source time series database platform, announced it has received a $35 million Series C investment today led by Sapphire Ventures, the investment arm of enterprise software giant, SAP.

Public Services/Government

• The JSE-listed company says the partnership addresses an identified gap in the market by bringing the value and innovation that open source solutions provide, in enabling EOH customers’ digital transformation journeys.

• LSD was founded by Stefan Lesicnik in 2001. In the early days, the company focused on supporting basic Linux servers.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

Programming/Development

• For as long as I can remember, I’ve been toying with numbers. As an undergraduate student in the late 1970s, I began taking statistics courses, learning ways to examine and analyze data to uncover some meaning.

• Back then, I had a scientific calculator that made statistical calculations much easier than ever before. In the early ’90s, as a graduate student in educational psychology working on t-tests, correlations, and ANOVA, I started doing my calculations by meticulously writing text files that were fed into an IBM mainframe. The mainframe was an improvement over my handheld calculator, but one minor spacing error rendered the whole process null and void, and the process was still somewhat tedious.

• I am pleased to inform that Qt 5.10.1 is released today. As a patch release, Qt 5.10.1 does not add any new functionality but provides many bug fixes and other improvements.

• Compared to Qt 5.10.0, the new Qt 5.10.1 contains over 300 bug fixes and in total close to 1400 changes since Qt 5.10.0. For details of the most important changes, please check the Change files of Qt 5.10.1.

• The Qt Company has announced the availability of Qt 5.10.1, the first bug-fix release to Qt 5.10 that shipped back in December.

• In the approximately two months since Qt 5.10.0, today’s point release has more than 300 bug fixes and around 1,400 changes in total over the previous release.

Leftovers

• Earlier this week the European Parliament voted 384 to 153 to review whether Daylight Saving Time is actually worth it. Although the resolution it voted on was non-binding, the majority reflected a growing dissatisfaction with a system that’s been used by the US, Canada, most of Europe, and regions in Asia, Africa, and South America for decades.

Science

• Science fiction no more — in an article out today in Nature Biotechnology, scientists were able to show tiny autonomous bots have the potential to function as intelligent delivery vehicles to cure cancer in mice.

• These DNA nanorobots do so by seeking out and injecting cancerous tumors with drugs that can cut off their blood supply, shriveling them up and killing them.

• “Using tumor-bearing mouse models, we demonstrate that intravenously injected DNA nanorobots deliver thrombin specifically to tumor-associated blood vessels and induce intravascular thrombosis, resulting in tumor necrosis and inhibition of tumor growth,” the paper explains.

• Three commercially released facial-analysis programs from major technology companies demonstrate both skin-type and gender biases, according to a new paper researchers from MIT and Stanford University will present later this month at the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.

• In the researchers’ experiments, the three programs’ error rates in determining the gender of light-skinned men were never worse than 0.8 percent. For darker-skinned women, however, the error rates ballooned — to more than 20 percent in one case and more than 34 percent in the other two.

• In January, The Verge reported that the Trump administration was preparing to end US support for the International Space Station by 2025, prompting outcry from Congressional officials. The Washington Post says that it has viewed an internal NASA document that outlines the agency’s intentions to privatize the station after funding ends in 2024.

• Smartphone makers have had us drooling for years over the idea of a phone that’s all screen, with no buttons or borders to interrupt the pure design.

• But try as they might, the concept hasn’t exactly come to fruition. The most popular devices have come with extremely thin bezels — or, like the iPhone X, add a notch toward the top of the phone to house the camera and all its front-facing sensors.

• A California State Assembly candidate discussed the importance of combating censorship in scientific research at an event at Boyer Hall on Monday.

• Tepring Piquado, who is running to represent California’s 54th State Assembly district, said at the UCLA Science Policy Group’s monthly meeting that legislators must help reduce science censorship by being unbiased when making policy decisions that involve scientific research funding and publicity. Piquado said research censorship can prevent scientific discoveries from best benefiting the public as a whole.

• The Science Policy Group is an organization made up of undergraduate and graduate students that organizes events to advocate for more scientific input in public policy. Jennifer Tribble, a neuroscience doctoral student and president of the organization, said the group is concerned that the current presidential administration does not value evidence-based research.

• Part of what makes graphene so fantastically useful is its amazing thinness – it’s just one atom thick.

• Scientists have now found hundreds of other materials that are equally thin, providing a wide selection of new materials with perhaps as much potential as graphene.

• The team analysed data in open resources including the Crystallography Open Database, looking for materials with structural similarities to graphene with the help of a custom computer program.

Hardware

• Broadcom’s Eric Anholt has shared another routine status update about his ongoing work with the open-source VC4 graphics driver supporting current generation Raspberry Pi hardware as well as his work on the next-gen Broadcom VC5 open-source graphics driver.

• Suddenly, he said, he noticed smoke. It was coming from the area of his right ear. More specifically, the smoke was being emitted from one of his AirPods.

• He says that he immediately put both AirPods on a piece of workout equipment and walked away. By the time he came back, the smoking AirPod appeared to have completely burst apart.

Health/Nutrition

• Life expectancy in the US has fallen for the second year in a row.1 This is alarming because life expectancy has risen for much of the past century in developed countries, including the US. The decline in US health relative to other countries, however, is not new; it has been unfolding for decades (fig 1). In 1960, Americans had the highest life expectancy, 2.4 years higher than the average for countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). But the US started losing ground in the 1980s. US life expectancy fell below the OECD average in 1998, plateaued in 2012, and is now 1.5 years lower than the OECD average.2

• Herbicides can no longer control the weeds that threaten crop productivity and food security in the UK because the plants have evolved resistance, and future control must depend on management strategies that reduce reliance on chemicals.

• A nationwide epidemiological assessment of the factors that are driving the abundance and spread of the major agricultural weed, black-grass, was the focus of collaborative work led by the University of Sheffield, with Rothamsted Research and the Zoological Society of London.

• When she woke up the next day, she started to worry about rabies. She went to the local urgent care center, which sent her to the emergency room. It was the only facility that stocked the drugs necessary to treat rabies, a situation that is typical across the United States.

• A few weeks later, the bill arrived: $6,017. The vast majority of the charge was for a drug to treat rabies exposure called immunoglobulin. The emergency room billed this drug at $3,706.

Security

• A security consultant based in the UK has discovered cryptocurrency mining scripts embedded on thousands of websites, including many belonging to the UK, US and Australian governments.

• The KDE Project released a new major version of their widely-used Plasma desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions, a release that adds numerous new features and fixes security vulnerabilities.

Defence/Aggression

• There are reports the U.S. Army is readying about a thousand additional troops for deployment to Afghanistan where they will link up with some 14,000 other U.S. service members tasked with an unachievable mission.

• At the same time, this news was drowned about by the latest catastrophic attack, a horrific bombing that left more than 100 dead — The United States Central Command Commander General Votel was even nearby — in the very center of a “secure” district of Kabul.

• The persistence of such violence after 16 years of U.S. intervention raises serious questions about the need for and ability of the United States military to address what is at root an internal Afghan security problem increasingly disconnected from core American security interests.

• I am no stranger to these un-winnable crusades. In early 2011, my own unit flew into Kandahar — part of the last few thousand troops authorized under the Obama “surge.”

• This talk of reinforcement, escalation, and “surging” is nothing new. It is history repeating itself. These next 1,000 soldiers will enter the Afghan maelstrom as no less than the fifth surge attempted by military and political “strategists” who are clearly out of ideas (perhaps because there is no military solution to a fundamentally political problem).

• Of course Donald Trump wants a military parade. I’d be surprised if he didn’t. It’s just what an insecure narcissist would want. A parade would be the national equivalent of his strutting around like a peacock, dying to turn heads. Even a politician can see that: “I think confidence is silent and insecurity is loud,” Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy said. “America is the most powerful country in all of human history; you don’t need to show it off.”

• But harbor no doubts: Trump’s parade will be the biggest, best, and most-watched military parade in history — guaranteed. And I don’t mean just American history.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• In the latest news about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, The Guardian is reporting Sweden attempted to drop extradition proceedings against Assange five years ago but were pressured to reverse course by British prosecutors. Sweden eventually dropped its investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct by Assange last year. The news comes just days after a British judge upheld the British arrest warrant for Assange, who has been living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012. Another judicial decision is expected on Tuesday, when a British court is scheduled to respond to a motion by Assange’s attorneys, who are attempting to force Britain to drop its arrest warrant for him.

• Swedish prosecutors were considering dropping the extradition proceedings against Julian Assange in 2013, new evidence shows. But the UK government pressured Sweden to keep the case against the WikiLeaks founder going.

• Assange is still in the UK five years later. And these latest revelations are stoking suspicions that the government is keeping him detained for political reasons.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will hear on Tuesday whether his legal bid to halt action against him for breaching bail has been successful, in a ruling that could pave the way for him to leave the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

• Even if a judge rules in his favour, though, he may elect to stay in the embassy, where he has been holed up for almost six years, because of his fear that the United States may seek his extradition on charges related to the activities of WikiLeaks.

• Assange, 46, fled to the embassy in June 2012 after skipping bail to avoid being sent to Sweden to face an allegation of rape, which he denied. The Swedish case was dropped in May last year, but Britain still has a warrant for his arrest over the breach of bail terms.

• A judgment on whether to lift a UK arrest warrant against Julian Assange will be made on Tuesday.

• Senior District Judge Emma Arbuthnot last week rejected his legal team’s argument that the warrant issued in 2012 was no longer valid because an investigation by the Swedish authorities into a sex-related allegation had been dropped.

• A London court will rule on Tuesday whether it would be in the interests of justice to pursue action against WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange for failing to surrender to bail back in 2012.

• If the judge rules in his favor, then Assange, 46, would be free to leave the Ecuadorean Embassy in London where he has been holed up for more than five years.

• The Australian could still face extradition to the United States to answer to charges related to the operations of WikiLeaks.

• Westminster Magistrates Court will return a decision on whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can leave the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

• Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who was imprisoned for providing government secrets to WikiLeaks, will speak at Bard College in Annandale on Feb. 21.

• “A Conversation with Chelsea Manning” is sold out and will be held at Bard’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Anyone wishing to be placed on the waiting list should arrive at the Fisher Center at 5 p.m. the day of the talk.

• Earlier in the day, media reported that Vanessa Trump, the wife of the US president’s son Donald Trump Jr., had been taken to a New York hospital after opening an envelope that contained an unidentified white powder that was subsequently determined to be non-hazardous.

• She said: “I find arrest is a proportionate response even though Mr Assange has restricted his own freedom for a number of years.

• “Defendants on bail up and down the country, and requested persons facing extradition, come to court to face the consequences of their own choices. He should have the courage to do the same. It is certainly not against the public interest to proceed.”

• Assange, 46, skipped bail to enter the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual assault and rape, which he denies.

• Though Swedish prosecutors dropped the investigation against him, he faces arrest if he leaves the building in Knightsbridge, London, for breaching his former bail conditions in the UK.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Seven months before Hurricane Harvey inundated the Houston area with a trillion gallons of water and led to widespread criticism of the Red Cross, Harris County adopted a disaster-preparation plan that’s key assumption was that the Red Cross would be slow to act. “In a major disaster where there is widespread damage, the local resources of the Red Cross may be overwhelmed and not available immediately,” stated the plan. “It may be upwards of 7 days before the Red Cross can assume a primary care and shelter role.”

• The 17-page document, entitled the “Mass Shelter Plan,” was unanimously approved by the county’s governing body on Jan. 31, 2017. ProPublica obtained the plan, which until now has not been public, as part of a public records request.

• The Mass Shelter Plan described the Red Cross as the county’s “lead partner” but was unequivocal in assigning responsibility should a calamity occur: “In the event of an emergency that requires evacuation of all or any part of the Harris County population, Harris County is ultimately responsible for the coordination of the evacuation, shelter and mass care of displaced local residents.”

• President Trump is expected to unveil on Monday a plan that would fulfill one of his signature campaign promises: a $1.5 trillion, once-in-a-generation proposal to rebuild, restore and modernize the nation’s aging infrastructure.

• “We will build gleaming new roads, bridges, highways, railways and waterways all across our land,” Mr. Trump said in his State of the Union address.

• But while the proposal represents one of the administration’s main legislative ambitions, it could directly clash with one of its defining regulatory principles, which is to question the risk from global warming and roll back regulations addressing climate change.

• The Trump infrastructure blueprint is almost certain to call for expensive new roads, bridges, airports and other projects in areas that are increasingly vulnerable to rising waters and other threats from a warming planet. Engineers and researchers say that construction plans should consider these design constraints at the outset. Their concern is that a plan led by a White House that has both discounted climate science and weakened climate change regulations could mean that costly projects may be vulnerable to damage or, in a worst-case scenario, quickly rendered obsolete by the changing environment.

Finance

• The Chinese firm, the dominant e-commerce player in its country, gobbled up a 15 percent stake in Beijing Easyhome Furnishing for RMB 5.45 billion, or around $867 million, and pumped $486 million into a big data retail firm in two deals announced over the weekend.

• Today’s titans tower over their kingdoms, secure behind their walls of user data and benefiting from extreme network effects that make serious competition from startups nearly impossible. US antitrust laws, written in the industrial age, don’t capture many of the new realities and potential dangers of these vast data empires. Maybe they should.

• Consider this: For the past seven years, the travel-and-tourism sector has outperformed the overall economy every year, contributing as much as $7.6 trillion in 2016, including the wider impact on the economy, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. During the next decade, the council predicts, almost one in four jobs created worldwide will be related to tourism.

• Accredited Surety is one bail shark among many who exploits poor Americans trying to make bail.

• Chances are you’ve never heard of Bermuda-based insurance investment conglomerate Randall & Quilter and its wholly owned Florida-based company Accredited Surety.

• Accredited is one of nine major insurance companies that underwrite most of the money-bail businesses in the U.S. Companies like Accredited play a significant role in propping up the two-tiered American justice system that sells liberty to people who can afford it, plunges people into debt who struggle to pay it back, and deprives many others the opportunity to return to their lives, families, and jobs while the court determines their guilt or innocence.

• And because of its unapologetic gluttony, Accredited is our bail shark of the month.

• Like a proud parent, R&Q was “pleased to announce” its acquisition of Accredited in 2014. In a press release, R&Q Chairman and CEO Ken Randall said, “We are delighted to have reached agreement with Accredited. There is an excellent cultural fit and this represents an important milestone in … securing stable income streams from associated fee and distribution income.”

• Clearly, that culture is profit.

• What grim pleasures Brexit offers. This week it’ll give us a series of speeches by Cabinet ministers laying out their vision for Britain outside the EU, a kind of choose-your-own-adventure book in which you decide which of the warring factions should go through to the final round.

• Boris Johnson’s offering comes tomorrow, but previews of it are in the press today. The foreign secretary apparently wants to bring Remainers and Leavers together in a vision of a ‘liberal Brexit’. He even takes John Stuart Mills’ name in vain by recruiting him for the Leave cause.

• You can just about make an argument for liberalism and Brexit if you support staying in the single market and customs union, where goods and people still flow freely. But that is not the Brexit we’re getting. We’re getting reactionary Brexit. It is defined by a love for – even a fetishisation of – borders. It is the single greatest victory for illiberalism in the modern British period.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The study suggests that a perfect storm of factors is conspiring to manipulate how we see truth, and the danger is not being aware of how those factors can mold our thinking.

• Some are not new. Studies have long shown that human beings are resistant to information that upsets their worldview. “People do not just maintain preexisting beliefs: Being confronted with corrective information can make misperceptions more ingrained and cause people to become less willing to consider alternatives,” the authors note.

• But why do we appear so prone to that temptation now?

• Hundreds of federal political ads — including those from major players such as the Democratic National Committee and the Donald Trump 2020 campaign — are running on Facebook without adequate disclaimer language, likely violating Federal Election Commission rules, a review by ProPublica has found.

• An FEC opinion in December clarified that the requirement for political ads to say who paid for and approved them, which has long applied to print and broadcast outlets, extends to ads on Facebook. So we checked more than 300 ads that had run on the world’s largest social network since the opinion, and that election-law experts told us met the criteria for a disclaimer. Fewer than 40 had disclosures that appeared to satisfy FEC rules.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Human rights groups including Amnesty International have warned that the interview has the hallmarks of a forced confession.

• YouTube has announced further restrictions on the use of the site beyond the existing rules for striking channel owners off when videos deemed unsuitable are uploaded, in a clear indication that all the steps it has taken over the last 10 months to sanitise the platform have not had the desired effect.

• Eric Goldman has come across an amazing pro se lawsuit [PDF] being brought by Nicholas C. Georgalis, an aggrieved social media user who believes he’s owed an open platform in perpetuity, no matter what awful things he dumps onto service providers’ pages. Oh, and he wants Section 230 immunity declared unconstitutional.

• Georgalis — who sidelines as a “professional training professionals” when not filing stupid lawsuits — is suing Facebook for periodically placing him in social media purgatory after removing posts of his. The lawsuit is heady stuff. And by “heady stuff,” I mean we’re going to be dealing with a lot of arguments about “sovereign rights” and “common law” and other related asshattery.

• With the event at Santa Clara earlier this month, and the companion essays published here, we’ve been talking a lot lately about how platforms moderate content. It can be a challenging task for a platform to figure out how to balance dealing with the sometimes troubling content it can find itself intermediating on the one hand and free speech concerns on the other. But at least, thanks to Section 230, platforms have been free to do the best they could to manage these competing interests. However you may think they make these decisions now, they would not come out any better without that statutory protection insulating them from legal consequence if they did not opt to remove absolutely everything that could tempt trouble. If they had to contend with the specter of liability in making these decisions it would inevitably cause platforms to play a much more censoring role at the expense of legitimate user speech.

• Fearing such a result is why the Copia Institute filed an amicus brief at the Ninth Circuit last year in Fields v. Twitter, one of the many “how dare you let terrorists use the Internet” cases that keep getting filed against Internet platforms. While it’s problematic that they keep getting filed, they have fortunately not tended to get very far. I say “fortunately,” because although it is terrible what has happened to the victims of these attacks, if platforms could be liable for what terrorists do it would end up chilling platforms’ ability to intermediate any non-terrorist speech. Thus we, along with the EFF and the Internet Association (representing many of the bigger Internet platforms), had all filed briefs urging the Ninth Circuit to find, as the lower courts have tended to, that Section 230 insulates platforms from these types of lawsuits.

• Writing for Open Democracy, Kateryna Botanova, a Ukrainian curator and critic, denounces the rise of anti-Russian censorship in Ukraine amidst Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing conflict with pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine. According to Botanova, the Ukrainian government has banned Russian films and books from being broadcast or sold in Ukraine, and has even banned a popular sitcom because one of its Russian actors expressed support for Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Botanova argues that with this kind of censorship, Ukraine is putting nationalism above democracy and freedom of speech. As she writes, “The more single-mindedly Ukraine tries to get ‘away from Moscow,’ the more it slips into the system the Kremlin enforces.”

• The Government is very keen to ensure that extremist material is removed from private platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. It has urged use of machine learning and algorithmic identification by the companies, and threatened fines for failing to remove content swiftly.

• Today Amber Rudd claims to have developed a tool to identify extremist content, based on a database of known material. Such tools can have a role to play in identifying unwanted material, but we need to understand that there are some important caveats to what these tools are doing, with implications about how they are used, particularly around accountability. We list these below.

• One of the UK’s largest cinema chains, Vue, refused to screen a film premiere at one of its outlets last week. The film, called Voices of the Silenced, was produced by the Core Issues Trust, and explores the extent to which Christians feel under severe pressure to conform to contemporary morality, in particular the demand to approve of homosexuality. Vue cancelled the screening following complaints from gay-rights charity Stonewall, which said the film promotes gay-cure therapy.

Privacy/Surveillance

• A German consumer rights group said on Monday that a court had found Facebook’s use of personal data to be illegal because the U.S. social media platform did not adequately secure the informed consent of its users.

• The verdict, from a Berlin regional court, comes as Big Tech faces increasing scrutiny in Germany over its handling of sensitive personal data that enables it to micro-target online advertising.

• The Federation of German Consumer Organisations (vzvb) said that Facebook’s default settings and some of its terms of service were in breach of consumer law, and that the court had found parts of the consent to data usage to be invalid.

• As part of a sequence of 12, the tweets are now claimed to be a coded back-channel used to communicate with a Russian who was negotiating to sell to the NSA a set of cyberweapons stolen from it in 2016 by a group calling itself The Shadow Brokers.

• These tools were leaked to the world and used by cybercriminals to launch attacks, such as May 2017’s WannaCry ransomware attack (later blamed by the US on North Korea).

• Digital cameras can store a wealth of personal information and yet they’re treated as unworthy of extra protection — both by courts and the camera makers themselves. The encryption that comes baked in on cellphones hasn’t even been offered as an option on cameras, despite camera owners being just as interested in protecting their private data as cellphone users are.

• The Freedom of the Press Foundation sent a letter to major camera manufacturers in December 2016, letting them know filmmakers and journalists would appreciate a little assistance keeping their data out of governments’ hands.

• You may have seen a new button in Facebook’s mobile app lately: under the Settings menu, a “Protect” option leads you to download an app called Onavo Protect. Don’t do it.

• If you head to Facebook’s settings and scroll down—you may need to click “More” to view more options—you’ll see this button. (On Android, you’ll need to go into “Mobile Data” first.)

• By now it has been pretty well established that the security and privacy of most “internet of things” devices is decidedly half-assed. Companies are so eager to cash in on the IOT craze, nobody wants to take responsibility for their decision to forget basic security and privacy standards. As a result, we’ve now got millions of new attack vectors being introduced daily, including easily-hacked “smart” kettles, door locks, refrigerators, power outlets, Barbie dolls, and more. Security experts have warned the check for this dysfunction is coming due, and it could be disastrous.

• Smart televisions have long been part of this conversation, where security standards and privacy have also taken a back seat to blind gee whizzery. Numerous set vendors have already been caught hoovering up private conversations or transmitting private user data unencrypted to the cloud. One study last year surmised that around 90% of smart televisions can be hacked remotely, something intelligence agencies, private contractors and other hackers are clearly eager to take full advantage of.

• It is also able to track a person’s digital footprint and could detect, for example, if someone has been viewing external travel websites while they are logging into Facebook.

Civil Rights/Policing

• So when my husband and I noticed our teens increasingly tuning us out as they washed dishes, hung out in their rooms, or traveled in the car, we became curious about what they were listening to and how they were interpreting the lyrics they were hearing. We decided to try an experiment: Every time we were driving together, each person would take turns DJing by connecting their device to our dashboard stereo. We would listen together and talk about the artist, the music, the lyrics, and why our kid liked the song. What that meant was not only did our teens select songs, but my husband and I also shared our picks, as well as our thoughts on some of the iffy content in our kids’ music.

• A federal appeals court has ruled a group of immigrants detained at the for-profit Aurora ICE Processing Center in Colorado can proceed with their class action lawsuit against the prison’s owner, GEO Group. The men accuse GEO Group of forcing detained immigrants to clean the prison without pay, under threat of solitary confinement. The men are also accusing GEO Group of breaking labor laws by paying detained immigrants only $1 a day.

• Local media often function as PR surrogates for police and powerful private interests. The marks of this ideological, political role were all over a Pittsburgh CBS affiliate’s gratuitous, over-the-top hit piece on reformer Judge Mik Pappas (KDKA, 2/2/18).

• Endorsed by the Pittsburgh Democratic Socialists of America chapter, Pappas won his seat last year on, among other things, the promise not to rubber-stamp court-ordered evictions and to end cash bail—practices that disproportionately affect the poor and people of color. There’s a growing movement challenging these tools of state power as unneeded and discriminatory, but they’re unsurprisingly popular among real estate interests and the police, whose outrage and disdain for the newly elected progressive are channeled by local reporter Andy Sheehan.

• In the early hours of May 6, 2016, the lives of rookie police officer Stephen Mader and R.J. Williams intersected in Weirton, West Virginia. Both men were young fathers. Mader was a white cop holding a gun. Williams was a Black man holding a gun. This tragedy ends exactly as you’d expect — with R.J. Williams killed by a police bullet — but with a twist: Mader did not kill him. In fact, he tried his best to save Williams’ life. And for doing his duty, Mader was fired.

• Today we can announce a resolution of the case in favor of a police officer who chose not to shoot a Black man.

• To settle all outstanding claims, the City of Weirton will pay Mader $175,000. And while justice prevailed for Mader, R.J. Williams is still dead — a constant reminder police nationwide need the proper de-escalation training needed to avoid unnecessary killings, especially of Black men and boys.

• Growing attention to the racial and colour-based discrimination that sub-Saharan Africans and African slave descendants face in the Maghreb and in the Middle East has opened up new spaces to debate the relationship between ‘racism’ and legacies of slavery in the two regions. While these debates are far from new in a context like Mauritania, where former slaves and slave descendants have struggled for decades against descent-based discrimination, in many other North African and Middle Eastern countries they have emerged only relatively recently. This is perhaps because, as the Moroccan historian Chouki El Hamel notes, a “culture of silence” has long prevented these countries from engaging with, and discussing overtly, questions of race, slavery and colour.

• With this week’s special series, we seek to unpack the ‘racial issue’ in different post-slavery contexts in West Africa, North Africa and the Middle East by interrogating its connections with local histories of slavery and their contemporary legacies. Drawing on fresh case studies from Senegal, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Emirates and Yemen, the contributors reflect on the complex intersections of historical and contemporary dynamics that shape present imaginations of ‘blackness’, black identities, and belonging. They also look at new forms of racial discrimination and activism based on specific constructions of race.

• Online publisher and blogger Eskinder Nega has been imprisoned in Ethiopia since September 2011 for the “crime” of writing articles critical of his government. He is one of the longest-serving prisoners in EFF’s Offline casefile of writers and activists unjustly imprisoned for their work online.

• Now a chance he may finally be freed has been thrown into doubt because of the Ethiopian authorities’ outrageous demand that he sign a false confession before being released.

• The Ethiopian Prime Minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, announced in January surprise plans to close down the notorious Maekelawi detention center and release a number of prisoners. The Prime Minister said that the move was intended to “foster national reconciliation.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Protecting net neutrality is core to the internet and crucial for people’s jobs and everyday lives. It is imperative that all internet traffic be treated equally, without discrimination against content or type of traffic — that’s the how the internet was built and what has made it one of the greatest inventions of all time.

• It should not be surprising that arguably the biggest mistake in Internet policy history is going to invoke a vast political response. Since the FCC repealed federal Open Internet Order in December, many states have attempted to fill the void. With a new bill that reinstates net neutrality protections, Oregon is the latest state to step up.

• Oregon’s Majority Leader Jennifer Williamson recently announced her intention to fight to restore much of what the FCC repealed last December under its so-called “Restoring Internet Freedom Order.” Her legislation, H.B. 4155, responds to the FCC’s decision by requiring that any ISP that receives funds from the state to adhere to net neutrality principles—not blocking or throttling content or prioritizing its own content over that of competitors, for example.

DRM

• All the while, HBO and Time Warner’s timidity and failure to listen to consumers resulted in many of its shows breaking piracy records. And while HBO couldn’t be bothered to offer a legitimate standalone streaming alternative to piracy, it did spend a lot of time and money trying to derail these efforts, including “poisoning” seeded copies of HBO programs on BitTorrent and sending out oodles of nastygrams to ISPs. Other HBO executives, meanwhile, seemed to share the cable industry mindset that this whole cord cutting thing was just a temporary phenomenon that would blow over.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Conflict between a Des Moines brewery and apartment complex is spilling over into the legal system.

• Confluence Brewing Company on Friday filed a trademark lawsuit and motion for an injunction in Polk County District Court seeking to stop Confluence on 3rd apartments from using the name “Confluence.”

• It’s been a minute since we’ve had to cover some trademark nonsense in the beer industry. In fact, several recent stories have actually represented what might be mistaken for a clapback on aggressive trademark protectionism in the alcohol space. But, like all great things, it just couldn’t last. The specific tomfoolery that has brought reality crashing down on us once again comes out of Iowa, where Confluence Brewing has filed a trademark suit against Confluence On 3rd, which is an apartment complex that does not serve or make beer.

Copyrights

• Today, we delivered a petition to the U.S. Copyright Office to keep copyright’s safe harbors safe. We asked the Copyright Office to remove a bureaucratic requirement that could cause websites and Internet services to lose protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). And we asked them to help keep Congress from replacing the DMCA safe harbor with a mandatory filtering law. Internet users from all over the U.S. and beyond added their voices to our petition.

• Under current law, the owners of websites and online services can be protected from monetary liability when their users are accused of infringing copyright through the DMCA “safe harbors.” In order to take advantage of these safe harbors, owners must meet many requirements, including participating in the notorious notice-and-takedown procedure for allegedly infringing content. They also must register an agent—someone who can respond to takedown requests—with the Copyright Office.

• The DMCA is far from perfect, but provisions like the safe harbor allow websites and other intermediaries that host third-party material to thrive and grow without the constant threat of massive copyright penalties. Without safe harbors, small Internet businesses could face bankruptcy over the infringing activities of just a few users.

• Now, a lot of those small sites risk losing their safe harbor protections. That’s because of the Copyright Office’s rules for registering agents. Those registrations used to be valid as long as the information was accurate. Under the Copyright Office’s new rules, website owners must renew their registrations every three years or risk losing safe harbor protections. That means that websites can risk expensive lawsuits for nothing more than forgetting to file a form. As we’ve written before, because the safe harbor already requires websites to submit and post accurate contact information for infringement complaints, there’s no good reason for agent registrations to expire. We’re also afraid that it will disproportionately affect small businesses, nonprofits, and hobbyists, who are least able to have a cadre of lawyers at the ready to meet bureaucratic requirements.

• We should all know by now that Facebook’s reliability to handle copyright takedown requests is… not great. Like far too many internet platforms these days, the site typically puts its thumbs heavily on the scales such that the everyday user gets far less preference than large purported rights holders. I say “purported” because, of course, many bogus takedown requests get issued all the time. It’s one of the reasons that relying on these platforms, when they have shown no willingness to have any sort of spine on copyright matters, is such a mistake.

• But few cases are as egregious as that of Leo Saldanha, a well-known environmental activist in India. When I tell you that Saldanha had a Facebook post taken down over a copyright notice, you must certainly be thinking that it had something to do with environmental activism. Nope! Actually, Saldanha wrote an all-text mini-review of an Indian film, Padmaavat, which was taken down after the distributor for the film claimed the post infringed on its copyrights. Here is the entirety of his post that was taken down.

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