● 02.15.18

● Links 15/2/2018: GNOME 3.28 Beta, Rust 1.24

Posted in News Roundup at 6:18 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• SELinux provides great filesystem separation for your container runtimes, but you need to be careful when running multiple container runtimes on the same machine at the same time, and also careful to clean up any content left on a host when you remove a container.

• OK, so we’ll always need some servers.

• But with the rise of virtual machines (VM)s and container technologies such as Docker, combined with DevOps and cloud orchestration to automatically manage ever-larger numbers of server applications, serverless computing is becoming real.

• Kubernetes makes management of complex environments easy, but to ensure availability it’s crucial to have operational insight into the Kubernetes components and all applications running on the cluster. I believe monitoring is the backbone of a good production environment.

• Applications running in containers and orchestrated by Kubernetes are highly automated and dynamic, and so, when it comes to monitoring applications in these environments, traditional server-based monitoring tools designed for static services are not sufficient.

• A technology developed by YouTube to shard large MySQL databases across multiple servers, Vitess, has become the 16th hosted project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

• Vitess was created for “people who love MySQL for its functionality, but have chosen not to use it because it does not scale well,” said Sugu Sougoumarane, one of the creators of Vitess who is now co-founder and chief technology officer at PlanetScale Data, a still-stealth startup centered around Vitess, in an interview with The New Stack.

• Sandeep Lahane has been been quietly building his container security startup Deepfence since 2016. On Feb. 13, Deepfence emerged from its stealth mode, announcing the company’s Security as a Microservice technology for container security.

• The Deepfence approach uses what the company refers to a a lightweight sidecar container, which runs alongside an organization’s existing Docker and Kubernetes container deployments. Deepfence’s technology makes use of artificial intelligence (AI) as well as policy driven rules, to help detect potential threats and enforce workload isolation.

• Software defined storage (SDS) decouples storage software from the underlying storage devices. It does this by creating a virtualized software management layer that operates above the storage hardware.

• While that definition may reasonably straight forward, many players in the data storage industry debate the specifics and details of what, exactly, is the true definition of SDS.

Kernel Space

• If you check the processes running on your Linux systems, you might be curious about one called “kerneloops”. And that’s “kernel oops”, not “kerne loops” just in case you didn’t parse that correctly. Put very bluntly, an “oops” is a deviation from correct behavior on the part of the Linux kernel. Did you do something wrong? Probably not. But something did. And the process that did something wrong has probably at least just been summarily knocked off the CPU. At worst, the kernel may have panicked and abruptly shut the system down.

• Linux tries to be useful for a wide variety of use cases, but there are some situations where it may not be appropriate; safety-critical deployments with tight timing constraints would be near the top of the list for many people. On the other hand, systems that can run safety-critical code in a provably correct manner tend to be restricted in functionality and often have to be dedicated to a single task. In a linux.conf.au 2018 talk, Gernot Heiser presented work that is being done with the seL4 microkernel system to safely support complex systems in a provably safe manner.

• The world contains an increasing number of “cyberphysical systems” implementing various types of safety-critical functionality. Fly-by-wire systems for aircraft and factory automation systems are a couple of examples. These systems are subject to an expensive safety-assurance process with costs that scale linearly (at least) with each line of code. When one considers that an Airbus A380 jetliner contains around 120 million lines of code, one can understand that developing that code can be a costly business.

• The initial panic over the Meltdown and Spectre processor vulnerabilities has faded, and work on mitigations in the kernel has slowed since our mid-January report. That work has not stopped, though. Fully equipping the kernel to protect systems from these vulnerabilities is a task that may well require years. Read on for an update on the current status of that work.

• As of this writing, just over 6,700 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 4.16 development cycle. Given that there are a number of significant trees yet to be pulled, the early indications are that 4.16 will be yet another busy development cycle. What follows is a summary of the significant changes merged in the first half of this merge window.

• The more things change, the more they stay the same. That may sound cliché, but it’s still as true for the firmware that boots your operating system as it was in 2001 when Linux Journal first published Eric Biederman’s “About LinuxBIOS”. LinuxBoot is the latest incarnation of an idea that has persisted for around two decades now: use Linux as your bootstrap.

• On most systems, firmware exists to put the hardware in a state where an operating system can take over. In some cases, the firmware and OS are closely intertwined and may even be the same binary; however, Linux-based systems generally have a firmware component that initializes hardware before loading the Linux kernel itself. This may include initialization of DRAM, storage and networking interfaces, as well as performing security-related functions prior to starting Linux. To provide some perspective, this pre-Linux setup could be done in 100 or so instructions in 1999; now it’s more than a billion.

• This release (rc1 now) is without dramatic changes and game-changing improvements.

• We have again invested our time and love to make cal(1) more usable. The most visible change is possibility to specify calendar system.

Graphics Stack

• wayland-protocols 1.13 is now available.

• Jonas Ådahl on Wednesday announced Wayland-Protocols 1.13, the collection of stable and unstable protocols to Wayland.

• The single major change to Wayland Protocols 1.13 is the introduction of the input-timestamps protocol. This protocol extension is for providing high resolution timestamps for input events.

• Open-source Intel driver developer Francisco Jerez has sent out a set of 15 patches implementing a new version of the EXT_shader_framebuffer_fetch OpenGL extension.

• EXT_shader_framebuffer_fetch in its current form on the OpenGL registry is for OpenGL ES 2.0+ and allows a fragment shader to read existing frame-buffer data as input. This is intended to allow for more advanced compositing operations.

• Last October well known open-source AMD driver developer Marek Olšák began work on OpenGL compatibility profile support for Mesa. This work is about OpenGL 3.1 with ARB_compatibility support, something generally relevant for workstation OpenGL users and one of the few remaining advantages of AMD’s current proprietary OpenGL driver.

• AMD developers working on their official, cross-platform XGL/AMDVLK driver code have pushed out another batch of changes for benefiting their official AMD Vulkan Linux driver.

• The first noted change is “enhance GFX9 support”, in other words, the Vega GPU support should be in better shape but they didn’t provide any specifics. This is good news considering my latest AMDVLK vs. RADV Vulkan driver testing from this weekend still showed several areas where the AMDVLK driver was lagging behind RADV in Radeon RX Vega 64 performance or even not working for some games.

• There’s been a lot of activity in xorg-server Git the past few days, making it look like the developers may be trying to wrap up the very long X.Org Server 1.20 cycle. The latest major feature work landing is GLXVND.

• GLXVND is the feature work spearheaded last year by NVIDIA for what is effectively “server-side GLVND”, or taking their OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library approach from the user-space OpenGL drivers and applying the same concept to allowing multiple GLX modules to happily co-exist on the same running X.Org Server.

Benchmarks

• Yesterday I posted the initial Ryzen 5 2400G Vega 11 Linux graphics benchmarks while for your viewing please today — as well as this morning’s 21-way Intel/AMD CPU Linux comparison that featured these new Raven Ridge APUs — the results now completed are initial OpenGL and Vulkan performance figures for the Vega 8 graphics found on the Ryzen 3 2200G.

• Yesterday I posted some initial Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 2400G Raven Ridge APU when looking at the Vega 11 graphics, but for those curious about the CPU performance potential of the Ryzen 5 2400G and its ~$100 Ryzen 3 2200G sibling, here are our first CPU benchmarks of these long-awaited AMD APUs. These two current Raven Ridge desktop APUs are compared to a total of 21 different Intel and AMD processors dating back to older Kaveri APUs and FX CPUs and Ivy Bridge on the Intel side.

• Phoronix Test Suite 7.8.0-Folldal is now officially available as the first quarterly update to our open-source benchmarking software of 2018 and the last major release prior to the big Phoronix Test Suite 8.0 milestone slated for this summer.

Applications

• Pacaur is unmaintained and the developer stepped back for unknown reason. Pacaur still works, however the Arch developers are suggesting to use another AUR package helper programs. I have already tried a few AUR helpers such as Packer, Yay, and Yaourt. Today we will see yet another AUR helper that I just came across. Say hello to Trizen, a lightweight AUR package manager written in Perl.

• Earlier this week, someone asked me what Free software and open source software programs I really love. I thought I’d share that here, too.

• As I started to go through my favorite programs, I realized it was quite long. So I’m trying to keep the list short here, just the programs I use the most:

• I’ll start with Linux. I first installed Linux in 1993, when I was still an undergraduate university student. When I heard about Linux, a free version of Unix that I could run on my 386 computer at home, I immediately wanted to try it out. My first Linux distribution was Softlanding Linux System (SLS) 1.03, with Linux kernel 0.99 alpha patch level 11. That required a whopping 2MB of RAM, or 4MB if you wanted to compile programs, and 8MB to run X windows.

• While I was working on yet-another-crash without a backtrace, I realized that we could just generate automatic backtraces upon crashes and tell people about it. This is how I ended up writing a debug tool for GIMP, popping-up a dialog with a nice text encouraging to report bugs. You’ll notice that the main text is non-technical. The goal is not to display non-understandable error messages which nobody will understand. All the technical part is in the below section and is just to be copied by a single button click and reported to us verbatim.

• Weblate 2.19 has been released today. The biggest improvement are probably addons to customize translation workflow, but there are some other enhancements as well.

Proprietary

• Master PDF Editor is a powerful multi-purpose editor for easily and professionally viewing, scanning, creating, and modifying PDF documents.

• It features OCR functionality alongside the ability to add digital signatures to PDF files, to encrypt them, split a source document into multiple documents, and to merge several files into one, among other functions.

Instructionals/Technical

• Master the file manager of Kubuntu. Like everyone using Windows masters Explorer, then in using Kubuntu, you should master Dolphin. This 4th article explains the Kubuntu file manager to enable you find your files & folders, opening files, sorting and grouping by type, and finally accessing partitions and drives you have.

Wine or Emulation

• The first baby steps towards implementing Direct3D 12 in Wine are now present in the Git code-base for this week’s Wine 3.2 release but it won’t be anything remotely usable for a while.

• Hitting Wine Git today were the first meaningful D3D12 commits to the mainline code-base.

Games

• A quick release announcement here for one I missed, you can now destroy the land of the Fairies as the Dungeons 3 – Once Upon A Time DLC is now available.

• Dystopia [Official Site], a free cyberpunk mod for Half-Life 2 that’s now around 13 years old has officially added Linux support along with a small update.

• Stellaris: Apocalypse [Steam] is set to be a pretty big expansion, with lots of goodies to come for Stellaris fans. It’s releasing soon, so Paradox has an overview video up.

• As a reminder, it will release on February 22nd. As usual for Paradox games, it will also see a big patch release full of fixes and new features free for existing owners.

• If you’re like me and you love the idea of Battle Royale games, yet you’re finding none of them on Linux, Islands of Nyne [Official Site] might be one to keep an eye on.

• Another day, another big sale is going on. Today is the turn of Valve as they’re doing a big Lunar New Year sale.

• We are happy to announce Mozilla’s latest tool for creating VR content, Unity 3D WebVR Assets. It is free to download and available now on the Unity Asset Store. This tool allows creators to publish VR experiences created in Unity and shared on the open Web, with the power of a URL or link. These experiences can then be viewed with any WebVR-enabled browser such as Firefox (using the Oculus Rift or HTC VIVE) and Microsoft Edge (using a Windows Mixed Reality headset).

• We are happy to announce our latest tool by Mozilla, Unity WebVR Assets. It is free to download and available now on the Unity Asset Store. This tool allows creators to publish and share VR experiences they created in Unity on the open web, with a simple URL or link. These experiences can then be viewed with any WebVR enabled browser such as Firefox (using the Oculus Rift or HTC VIVE) and Microsoft Edge (using a Windows Mixed Reality headset).

• The zombie survival game in Early Access continues to mature and get new features. Its previous vehicle beta has been updated and the next build will feature even more improvements.

• Continuing on from my previous articles on how to get both Doom 3 and Quake 4 running on modern Linux systems, I felt the time was right to look at Prey, another id Tech 4 based game with a native Linux port. One of the few games developed on the engine not to be directly related to id Software, it did not take me long to discover that the main issue people were likely to run into with Prey had nothing to do with the game itself.

• I do absolutely love watching space colony sim Maia [itch.io, Steam, Official Site] evolve. This latest release is probably the best I’ve played and it’s really coming together nicely now.

• As promised by the developer, Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight, a popular action platformer is now officially available on Linux.

• The game is set on board a Soviet space station in Lunar orbit, here people performed experiments on Russian space dogs, as they seemed to experience extreme cognitive enhancement while in space. Naturally it all goes to hell and the dogs end up taking over. You’re the only Human left, it’s up to you to take back the station.

• If you’re in the mood for an MMO that isn’t PvP, Dead Maze [Steam] might be exactly what you need. It’s a players vs zombies cooperative MMO and it’s free to play.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• After the initial release of Plasma 5.12 was made available for Artful 17.10 via our backports PPA last week, we are pleased to say the the PPA has now been updated to the 1st bugfix release 5.12.1.

• The full changelog for 5.12.1 can be found here.

• Including fixes and polish for Discover and the desktop.

• Also included is an update to the latest KDE Frameworks 5.43.

• Upgrade instructions and caveats are as per last week’s blog post, which can be found here.

• The Kubuntu team wishes users a happy experience with the excellent 5.12 LTS desktop, and thanks the KDE/Plasma team for such a wonderful desktop to package.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.28 is the next major update to the widely-used Linux desktop environment, which is now used by default in the popular Ubuntu operating system. It promises many new features, as well as a wide range of enhancements, especially under the hood as most of the components were ported to the Meson build system.

• Most importantly, the beta was delayed because the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment is now using BuildStream project’s build sandbox, which ensures a reliable build process regardless of the dependencies you might have installed on your GNU/Linux operating system.

• We haven’t written about any themes since 2018 began so I think it is about time that happened. That’s why I’m happy to let you in on another beautiful theme you might not have known yet – ArcMPD.

• ArcMPD is a fork of the fan favorite Arc GTK theme and its inspiration is even implied in its name. Unlike Arc GTK theme, however, it features a more transparent header, sidebar; and window control buttons reminiscent of Apple’s OS X.

• Most of the portals in use are implemented by a module called xdg-desktop-portal, with backend implementations for Gtk+ and KDE. Many of the portals in it, such as the important file chooser portal relies on a lowlevel portal called the document portal. It is a combined dbus and fuse service that controls access to files with fine-grained per-application permissions.

• It is easy to see how this makes it easier for newcomers to participate. There are no longer pages upon pages of instructions on how to set up a build environment and so on. All that is required is to clone one Git repo and start building. The build system will take care of all the rest.

Distributions

• Solus Project’s Joshua Strobl posted today more details about the upcoming Solus 4 desktop operating system and some of the new features that will be integrated. These include a revamped Software Center with the latest Linux Driver Management for better hardware driver support, Hotspot support, Budgie 10.4.1, MATE 1.20, and an experimental Wayland session for the GNOME edition.

• “Wayland will not be the default for Solus Budgie or Solus GNOME, however GNOME users will be able to install a separate session package if they wish to test and experiment with Wayland support,” says Joshua Strobl. “During my testing, I have not found the quality of the GNOME + Wayland to be sufficient enough to be provided as a default experience for our users.”

New Releases

• this is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.19 – Core Update 118. It comes with a number of security and bug fixes as well as some new features. Please note the that we are dropping support for some add-ons.

Red Hat Family

• David Egts, chief technologist for Red Hat’s public sector, told MeriTalk in an interview published Wednesday that lift and shift, augment with new layers and rewrite are three approaches government agencies and companies can adopt to modernize aging applications.

• Egts said the effectiveness of the approaches depends on the application, contextual factors and business and that agencies should work with system integrators that help execute those three app migration approaches.

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

• With great joy we are finally offically announcing the Debian MiniDebConf which will take place in Hamburg (Germany) from May 16 to 20, with three days of Debcamp style hacking, followed by two days of talks, workshops and more hacking. And then, Monday the 21st is also a holiday in Germany, so you might choose to extend your stay by a day! (Though there will not be an official schedule for the 21st.)

• I think the lamest part of my current job is that we heavily rely on multifunction printers. We need to print a high volume of complicated documents on demand. You know, 1500 copies of a color booklet printed on 11×17 paper folded in 3 stapled in the middle kind of stuff.

• Pardon my French, but printers suck big time. The printer market is an oligopoly clusterfuck and it seems it keeps getting worse (looking at you, Fuji-Xerox merger). None of the drivers support Linux properly, all the printers are big piles of proprietary code and somehow the corporations selling them keep adding features no one needs.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The information Canonical’s Ubuntu Desktop engineers need to improve certain aspects of the Linux-based operating system about includes users’ setups, installed software, Ubuntu flavor and version, network connectivity, CPU family, RAM, disk size, screen resolution, GPU vendor and model, as well as OEM manufacturer.

• In addition, the company says that it needs to know your location, yet it promises to not store IP addresses of users. Other information that would be collected includes total installation time, automatic login info, selected disk layout, LivePatch enablement, and if you choose to install updates or third-party software during installation.

• Will Cooke, Canonical’s Director of Ubuntu Desktop, has announced plans to collect more diagnostics data from Ubuntu installations. This would involve collecting system hardware/software details during the installation process and be uploaded to Ubuntu servers, but users could opt-out of said survey.

• Ubuntu wants to collect data on users’ systems to ‘help improve Ubuntu’. The diagnostic data collection will be opt-out, and enabled by default for all new installs of Ubuntu 18.04.

• Ubuntu 18.04 has a new ‘minimal install’ option in the installer which lets you choose whether you want a full-fat Ubuntu install, or a semi-skim version with fewer ubuntu packages preinstalled.

• I’m happy to announce that MAAS 2.4.0 alpha 1 and python-libmaas 0.6.0 have now been released and are available for Ubuntu Bionic.

• Ubuntu developers are in the process of landing Mesa 18.0 within the “Bionic Beaver” archive for the upcoming 18.04 LTS distribution release. In the process they are also enabling GLVND for allowing the Mesa and NVIDIA proprietary drivers more happily co-exist on the same system.

Flavours and Variants

• I wrote an article a while ago about how KDE was being removed as an official flavour of Linux Mint past 18.3, and so I thought perhaps a quick review of 18.3 KDE was in order. Linux Mint 18.3 KDE is based on Ubuntu 16.06 LTS.

Devices/Embedded

• Technologic’s rugged, open-spec “TS-4100” COM/SBC hybrid runs Linux on an i.MX6 UL, and offers a microSD slot, 4GB eMMC, a micro-USB OTG port, optional WiFi/BT and baseboard, and an FPGA with a programmable ZPU core for offloading real-time tasks.

• Technologic Systems has begun sampling its first i.MX6 UL (UltraLite) based board, which is also its first computer-on-module that can double as an SBC. The 75 x 55mm TS-4100 module features a microSD slot, onboard eMMC, a micro-USB OTG port with power support, and optional WiFi and Bluetooth. Like most Technologic boards, such as the popular, i.MX6-based TS-4900 module, it offers long-term support and -40 to 85°C support, and ships with schematics and open source Linux images (Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian Jesse).

Android

• Anderson credits Nokia’s rise in value to its two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, there’s the core Networks business – which, despite a recent slowdown, has done well and could see a boost from ensuing 5G rollouts – and, on the other, the company’s lucrative and fast-growing tech licensing operation.

• [...]

• Nokia Technologies, the company’s patent licensing business, has become a major revenue source for Nokia, which has even turned to third party litigation specialists to help secure a portfolio of patents dating back to the company’s heyday (Nokia ranked 9th on Brand Finance’s list in 2008).

• It is important to talk about Android at Linux conferences like linux.conf.au, Peter Serwylo said to start his talk. Android is deployed on millions or billions of devices, but it does suffer from some problems that F-Droid, an alternative Android app store, tries to address. The title of his talk noted that F-Droid is private, secure, free, and open, all of which are desirable traits for many in our community.

• Serwylo got interested in Android because it was running on the first smart device he ever owned. He chose Android because he was getting interested in free software and recognized that Android was a well-supported version of Linux that was available on lots of different devices. But he found that the Android experience was not quite the “Linux experience that you are used to”.

Free Software/Open Source

• Dave Page of EnterpriseDB talks about the challenges of organising the Postgres community and why Oracle’s cloud does not feature in his firm’s plans

• The past six months have seen cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum go from rounding errors in the global economy to center stage at mainstream banking conferences. Much of the current fervor concerns the skyrocketing valuations of cryptocurrencies and tokens, and using them as an investment. All this has an interesting backstory—one with roots in an open organization effort attempted two years ago: The DAO.

Events

• Karen Sandler has been giving conference talks about free software and open medical devices for the better part of a decade at this point. LWN briefly covered a 2010 LinuxCon talk and a 2012 linux.conf.au (LCA) talk; her talk at LCA 2012 was her first full-length keynote, she said. In this year’s edition, she reviewed her history (including her love for LCA based in part on that 2012 visit) and gave an update on the status of the source code for the device she has implanted on her heart.

• Sandler is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC); she is also a lawyer, but “I do all of my legal work for good now”, she said with a chuckle. She does pro bono work for FSF and the GNOME Foundation, for example. She asked how many in the audience had attended LCA 2012 in Ballarat, which turned out to be around one-third (interestingly, the number of first-time attendees was nearly the same).

Web Browsers

Chrome

• On February 15, Google Chrome will start blocking ads on intrusive sites, and mainstream ad companies aren’t particularly upset about it. In fact, they helped Google make this happen.

• Google first dropped the word about Chrome’s upcoming ad-blocker in June last year, set for early 2018 release. A couple of months later, an implementation of the tool was introduced in Chrome Canary. Now, the official launch date of the much-awaited ad filtering tool has arrived.

• Starting today, Google Chrome will begin removing ads from sites that don’t follow the Better Ads Standards. For more info on how Chrome’s ad filtering will work, see the Chromium blog.

Mozilla

• In an attempt to fill the shoes of Ehsan’s excellent Quantum Flow Newsletters1, I’ve started to keep track of interesting performance bugs that have been tackled over the past little while.

• I don’t expect I’ll be able to put together such excellent essays on performance issues in Firefox, but I can certainly try to help to raise the profile of folks helping to make Firefox faster.

• Late last year, the Test Pilot team welcomed a new engineering program manager, Marnie Pasciuto-Wood. In this post, Marnie talks about what it’s been like joining Mozilla and what keeps her busy and inspired outside of work.

• In the physical world, we don’t wear our ID on our foreheads. This is convenient because we can walk around with a reasonable expectation of privacy and let our curiosity take us to interesting places. That shoe store you sauntered into because they had a pair that caught your eye has no idea who you are, where you live, or anything about you. More importantly, any attempt by that shoe store to have an employee follow you around would not only be impractical, but would be met with some serious side-eye from potential customers.

• CSS Grid is a great layout tool for content-driven websites that include long passages of text, and it has tremendous value for a variety of traditional UI layouts as well. In this article I’ll show you how to use CSS Grid to improve application layouts that need to respond and adapt to user interactions and changing conditions, and always have your panels scroll properly.

• We are happy to let you know that Friday, February 16th, we are organizing Firefox 59 Beta 10 Testday. We’ll be focusing our testing on Find Toolbar and Search Suggestions.

• Well, well, remember when I told you – the more desperate Mozilla gets vis-a-vis its market share, the more aggressive they will get with pushing “quality” content onto its users? I did, I did. Well, the bonfires of the Mr. Robot fiasco have hardly cooled, and now there’s a new drama developing. Mozilla will start rolling a pilot that tests sponsored stories in the Pocket recommendations section on the New Tab page.

• Since I’m usually a blithely cheerful chap, I’m actively looking for stories to sour my mood, and so I was excited (this is sales lingo, we will get to that) to read this announcement. After all, writing about how everything is peachy and efficient and good in the tech world is boring, we need these little burdocks of greed to make things complicated. After me, pioneers.

• [...]

• Actually, it does not take a wizard to figure things out. Just look what happened in the past five years, ever since the mobile world exploded. For instance, thinking wildly about some rather common examples, Windows 7 to Windows 10, and the amount of pesky, online and telemetry stuff. Just compare Skype 7.40, the last classic version. and the toy factory moronity that is Skype 8. Windows Control Panel to Windows Settings. Gnome 2 to Gnome 3. Oh, Firefox 3.6 to Firefox whatever.

• What you see is that menus get deeper and deeper and deeper and more obfuscated, with focus on aesthetic minimalism (mobile) that goes directly against user intuition and efficiency. You need more and more actions and mouse clicks to achieve the same results you could half a decade before. Now imagine what will happen in five or even ten years. Consider yourself lucky you were there to witness the early days of the Internet, when it was still all naive and innocent and not just pure money.

• [...]

• Some people may assume that I have a personal problem with Mozilla and Firefox. Not really. It’s just I don’t like hypocrisy, and I do not like being herded toward the pen that reads IDIOTS. I fully understand that Mozilla needs quiche. Fine, state it upfront. Don’t veil it in bullshit. The words privacy, freedom and similar slogans mean nothing when you put them side by side with sponsored stories. You want money, start charging money for your browser. There’s nothing wrong with that. And I would gladly pay for a high-quality product – and when needed, I do.

• I also wish that we had alternatives – the more the merrier. Alas, the exact opposite is happening. As time goes by, it will become even more difficult to have (supposedly free) products that really cater to their users. The profit slope is a one-way direction. Once you make a margin, you need to make more margin and more margin and more margin. It never stops.

• Firefox is a completely different product than it was a decade ago. It’s now a big boy, trying to compete in the big arena. There’s no room for niceties anymore. The only thing you can do is try to prepare for the inevitable day when this salesy nonsense becomes too much, so when you do switch, you try to do it elegantly and smartly. I cannot guarantee there’s actually going to be a nice and peaceful browser for you out there when that moment comes, so if you want to sleep all relaxed, don’t. The old Internet is dying, and the future does not belong to you and me or anyone willing to read this entire article without skipping words. The best you can do is play the game, so at the very least, you will be a rich idealist one day rather than a poor user. Or better yet, a rich loser rather than a poor user.

• As you already know from our discourse topic, we have created an Onboarding Screening Team.

• The scope of this team is to help on evaluating the new applications to the Reps program by helping the Reps Council on this process.

• The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.24.0. Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.

• A fairly notable update to the Rust programming language compiler and its components is available today.

• With Rust 1.24 first up is a preview release of rustfmt, an official utility for formatting Rust code. Rustfmt applies a standard style of formatting to existing Rustlang code and is similar to the other LLVM-based code formatters.

SaaS/Back End

• Apache CloudStack 4.11 was released this week after 8 months of development. According to Rohit Yadav, Apache CloudStack v4.11 Release Manager, “v4.11 brings several important structural changes such as better support for systemd and Java 8, migration to embedded Jetty, and a new and optimized Debian 9 based systemvm template.” See the release notes for more info.

• Oracle uses the open-source OpenStack cloud platform as the basis for its cloud services. Oracle has been actively involved in OpenStack since at least 2014, when it announced support for OpenStack on both Oracle Linux and Solaris-based systems.

• Oracle announced an impressive cloud computing initiative this week; it was very nicely packaged. But the company initially did not even take the cloud seriously, and was very slow to realize that this cloud thing was going to be massively disruptive.

Databases

• Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) is used across the globe in industries ranging from the life and physical sciences to media and entertainment, but the software’s origins can be traced back over two decades to a team at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and a project known as the Storage Resource Broker (SRB).

• ArangoDB, a leading provider of native multi-model NoSQL database solutions, today announced the latest findings of its open source NoSQL performance benchmark series. To enable vendors to respond to the results and contribute improvements, ArangoDB has published the necessary scripts required to repeat the benchmark. The goal of the benchmark is to measure the performance of each database system when there is no cache used. The benchmark is completely open source and therefore driven by community input.

• Following the recent announcement that the global software firm is open source, Altibase says it “directly challenges” the other companies by providing equal functionality at a much lower cost. Customers will save money by not having to buy in-memory and disk-resident databases separately, says Altibase. It can easily replace or supplement Oracle as well.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• On January 31, we released LibreOffice 6.0 (shortly followed up by 6.0.1). So what has happened in the last two weeks? Let’s look at some statistics…

Funding

• Google announced the projects and organizations accepted for 2018′s Google Summer of Code. There are 212 mentor organizations this year (see the website for the list). Student applications will be accepted March 12, 2018 at 16:00 UTC to Tuesday, March 27, 2018 at 16:00 UTC. See the Student Guide for more info.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Today isn’t just Valentines day, but also I love Free Software Day! I’ve been using (and contributing) Free Software for years now and don’t want anything else. Even when I’ve given non-Free Software another chance, every time I was glad when I returned to Free Software.

• A big thank you goes out to all developers, sysadmins, network guru’s, translators, bugsquashers and all other contributors.

• A small selection of tools/libraries/projects/organizations I’m thankful for this year: debian, ubuntu, terminator, mate, vi(m), firefox, thunderbird, postgresql, apache, kvm, libvirt, bash, openssh, nextcloud, workrave, audacious, vlc, mtp (Media Transfer Protocol), ext2/ext3/ext4/btrfs, mdadm, postfix, the linux kernel, fosdem, fsfe, eff, bitsoffreedom, ccc and kodi.

Public Services/Government

• When the Defense Digital Service team launched Code.mil in February 2017, the goal was to propel the Department of Defense into the open source software community.

• The team set up a repository on GitHub, got to work on a licensing agreement and by mid-March the first open-sourced project was posted.

• But where there was excitement among the DoD engineering community, there also was a slight problem — the guidance on how to release code as code open source just wasn’t very accessible or clear.

Licensing/Legal

• Simon was co-host of FLOSS Weekly 471, which featured the ScanCode Toolkit. ScanCode analyses a source package and lists what licenses are found in it. The toolkit can be used as part of a larger solution and together with the new AboutCode Manager provides open source compliance staff with an easy way to know what licenses they are actually dealing with.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• An apparent linux.conf.au tradition is to dedicate a keynote slot to somebody who is applying open-source principles to make the world better in an area other than software development. LCA 2018 was no exception; professor Matthew Todd took the stage to present his work on open-source drug discovery. The market for pharmaceuticals has failed in a number of ways to come up with necessary drugs at reasonable prices; perhaps some of those failures can be addressed through a community effort.

• Todd started by noting that he must normally begin his talks by selling open source to a room that is hostile to the idea; that tends not to be a problem at LCA. The chemistry community, he said, is playing catch-up, trying to mimic some of the things that the open-source community has done. The first step was to apply these principles to basic research before moving on to drug discovery; the latter proved to be harder, since it’s typically a process that is shrouded in secrecy.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Only months after debuting the Freedom U540, the world’s first Linux-compatible processor based on the open-source RISC-V chip architecture, RISC-V chipmaker SiFive has surprised the open-source community again by unveiling a full development board built around the ISA.

• Called the HiFive Unleashed, the new development board is built around SiFive’s Freedom U540, which is based on the company’s U54-MC Coreplex. The chip is a 64-bit, 4+1 multicore processor that fully supports Linux, as well as other operating systems such as FreeBSD and Unix. The development board itself features a 8GB of DDR4 with ECC, a gigabit ethernet port, 32 MB of quad SPI flash memory, a MicroSD card slot, and an FPGA mezzanine card (FMC) connector for allowing peripherals and other expansion devices to be attached to the board.

• Digital transformation and the proliferation of big data are driving a renaissance in software development, requiring new advancements in hardware and processors. With a range of needs from a variety of users and platforms, standard instruction set architectures are no longer fulfilling all use cases as the demand for flexibility and improved performance increases.

• “The world is dominated by two instruction set architectures. … Both are great, but … they’re owned by their respective companies. RISC-V is a third entrant into this world … it’s completely open source,” said Martin Fink (pictured, right), chief technology officer of Western Digital Corp. Through the RISC-V initiative, Fink and Dave Tang (pictured, left), senior vice president of corporate marketing at Western Digital, are working to provide an instruction set that can be freely shared to encourage innovation.

Programming/Development

• The popular interpreted language Python shares a mode of interaction with many other languages, from Lisp to APL to Julia: the REPL (read-eval-print-loop) allows the user to experiment with and explore their code, while maintaining a workspace of global variables and functions. This is in contrast with languages such as Fortran and C, which must be compiled and run as complete programs (a mode of operation available to the REPL-enabled languages as well). But using a REPL is a solitary task; one can write a program to share based on their explorations, but the REPL session itself not easily shareable. So REPLs have gotten more sophisticated over time, evolving into shareable notebooks, such as what IPython, and its more recent descendant, Jupyter, have. Here we look at Jupyter: its history, notebooks, and how it enables better collaboration in languages well beyond its Python roots.

• I’m not sure what the industry-wide solution is. I’m not sure whether companies that lack junior devs are unbalanced or smart. The reality is that most software developers don’t stay one place very long, so maybe it doesn’t make sense to invest a lot in training someone? Or maybe the industry should ask itself why people keep hopping jobs? Maybe it’s because a lot of them suck, or for a lot of us it’s the only way to advance our salary. I can either wait for a stupid, meaningless yearly “performance review” to bump me up 1% or take my resume and interview elsewhere and get 10% or more.

• It’s not just a sign that an individual company is broken, it’s a sign the entire industry is broken.

Standards/Consortia

• Just like with the recent expiry of the MP3 patents and AC3, the last of the MPEG-2 patents have now expired.

Leftovers

• I suspect you don’t need me to tell you that your nervousness is well-founded: the statistics on car accidents and phone use are incontrovertible. In 2015, approximately 3,477 people were killed, and 391,000 were injured, in car crashes caused by “distracted driving”.

• Ever since 2003, when one of the two companies making tasers bought out the other, there has effectively been a taser monopoly. If you’ve ever seen a police officer carrying a taser, that taser was almost certainly manufactured by the publicly traded company formerly known as Taser International, now named Axon Enterprise, Inc.

• Billionaire investor Peter Thiel is relocating his home and personal investment firms to Los Angeles from San Francisco and scaling back his involvement in the tech industry, people familiar with his thinking said, marking a rupture between Silicon Valley and its most prominent conservative.

Science

• “It’s mind-boggling,” said John Holdren, Obama’s science adviser for eight years who has since resumed his career as a professor of environmental policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “It’s vital for the president to get the best science advice, and right now, he isn’t getting that. His decisions are being made without the benefit of science.”

• Engineers at Purdue University and GlobalFoundries have gotten today’s most advanced transistors to vibrate at frequencies that could make 5G phones and other gadgets smaller and more energy efficient. The feat could also improve CPU clocks, make wearable radars, and one day form the basis of a new kind of computing. They presented their results today at the IEEE International Solid-States Circuits Conference, in San Francisco.

Health/Nutrition

• The thousands of U.S. military personnel and private contractors whose health was compromised by the dense black smoke of burn pits – and who were then denied proper treatment – may finally be vindicated by a recent court ruling.

• A judge under the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office for Workers’ Compensation Programs decreed last month that open-air burn pits — where thousands of chemicals were released into the air after trash and other waste were incinerated at American military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan — are connected to lung disease, Fox News has learned.

• The decision marks a victory for the nearly 64,000 active service members and retirees who have put their names on a Burn Pit Registry created by the Veterans Administration, bringing them one step closer to getting adequate medical coverage, something that has never been guaranteed. Private contractors who were also exposed to the burn pit toxins also have been denied coverage.

Security

• The flaw, which resided in the Windows version of the messaging app, allowed attackers to disguise the names of attached files, researchers from security firm Kaspersky Lab said in a blog post. By using the text-formatting standard known as Unicode, attackers were able to cause characters in file names to appear from right to left, instead of the left-to-right order that’s normal for most Western languages.

• SSA believed this change would make it more difficult for thieves to “guess” someone’s SSN by looking at other public information available for that person. However, now that an SSN is not tied to additional data points, such as a location or year of birth, it becomes harder for financial institutions, health care providers, and others to verify that the person using the SSN is in fact the person to whom it was issued.

• In other words: Thieves now target SSNs issued after this change as they know your 6-year-old niece or your 4-year-old son will not have an established credit file.

• The bug in the automatic updater (turd polisher) for the Windows desktop app has a ruddy great hole in it that will let dodgy DLLs through.

• The bug itself didn’t expose anything too sensitive. No passwords, social security numbers, or credit card data was exposed. But it did expose customers’ email addresses, their billing account numbers, and the phone’s IMSI numbers, standardized unique number that identifies subscribers. Just by knowing (or guessing) customer’s phone numbers, hackers could get their target’s data.

• Once they had that, they could impersonate them with T-Mobile’s customer support staff and steal their phone numbers. This is how it works: a criminal calls T-Mobile, pretends to be you, convinces the customer rep to issue a new SIM card for your number, the criminal activates it, and they take control of your number.

• Salon explains what’s going on in a new FAQ. “How does Salon make money by using my processing power?” the FAQ says. “We intend to use a small percentage of your spare processing power to contribute to the advancement of technological discovery, evolution, and innovation. For our beta program, we’ll start by applying your processing power to help support the evolution and growth of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.”

• As we’ve been discussing, the rise of stealth cryptocurrency miners embedded on websites has become a notable problem. In some instances, websites are being hacked and embedded with stealth cryptocurrency miners that quickly gobble up visitors’ CPU cycles without their knowledge. That’s what happened to Showtime recently when two different domains were found to be utilizing the Coinhive miner to hijack visitor broswers without users being informed. Recent reports indicate that thousands of government websites have also been hijacked and repurposed in this fashion via malware.

• But numerous websites are also now exploring such miners voluntarily as an alternative revenue stream. One major problem however: many aren’t telling site visitors this is even happening. And since some implementations of such miners can hijack massive amounts of CPU processing power while sipping a non-insubstantial amount of electricity, that’s a problem.

• When bad things happen, bad laws are sure to follow. The state of Georgia has been through some tumultuous times, electorally-speaking. After a presidential election plagued with hacking allegations, the Georgia Secretary of State plunged ahead with allegations of his own. He accused the DHS of performing ad hoc penetration testing on his office’s firewall. At no point was he informed the DHS might try to breach his system and the DHS, for its part, was less than responsive when questioned about its activities. It promised to get back to the Secretary of State but did not confirm or deny hacking attempts the state had previously opted out of.

• To make matter worse, there appeared to be evidence the state’s voting systems had been compromised. A misconfigured server left voter records exposed, resulting in a lawsuit against state election officials. Somehow, due to malice or stupidity, a server containing key evidence needed in the lawsuit was mysteriously wiped clean, just days after the lawsuit was filed.

• In yet another milestone on the path to encrypting the web, Let’s Encrypt has now issued over 50 million active certificates. Depending on your definition of “website,” this suggests that Let’s Encrypt is protecting between about 23 million and 66 million websites with HTTPS (more on that below). Whatever the number, it’s growing every day as more and more webmasters and hosting providers use Let’s Encrypt to provide HTTPS on their websites by default.

• Linux systems could be a risk from malware on USB memory sticks, according to security researchers.

• The bug affects users running the KDE Plasma desktop environment, which is widely used in GNU/Linux distributions. The issue was discovered in soliduiserver/deviceserviceaction.cpp in KDE Plasma Workspace before 5.12.0.

• While we are past the Linux 4.16 merge window, more Spectre and Meltdown related improvements and changes are still being allowed into the kernel, similar to all the KPTI/Retpoline work that landed late in Linux 4.15. On Wednesday was another big batch of KPTI and Spectre work that has already been merged.

• Britain has formally blamed Russia for the NotPetya ransomware attack in June last year, with Foreign Office Minister Lord Ahmad saying the decision “underlines the fact that the UK and its allies will not tolerate malicious cyber activity”.

• “Outlook attempts to open the pre-configured message on receipt of the email. You read that right – not viewing, not previewing, but upon receipt. That means there’s a potential for an attacker to exploit this merely by sending an email.”

• In recent days, Satori has started infecting routers manufactured by Dasan Networks of South Korea. The number of daily infected routers is about 13,700, with about 82 percent of them located in Vietnam, a researcher from China-based Netlab 360 told Ars. Queries on the Shodan search index of Internet-connected devices show there are a total of more than 40,000 routers made by Dasan. The company has yet to respond to an advisory published in December that documented the code-execution vulnerability Satori is exploiting, making it possible that most or all of the devices will eventually become part of the botnet.

Defence/Aggression

• North Korea, like virtually every country on earth, is using the Olympics this week as an opportunity for political theater, and this has greatly upset many in US media. Ostensibly this is because North Korea, marching with South Korea in the opening ceremonies and sending a squadron of cheerleaders to the Winter Games, is getting a pass on human rights abuses. But if one scratches the surface of the widespread outrage, it’s clear the real objection is that North and South Korea are having bilateral peace talks without the permission of—much less the participation of—the United States. Atlantic: Can North Korea Be Stopped?

• Several signals point to a possible military strike on Venezuela, with high-ranking officials and influential politicians making clear that it is a distinct possibility.

• Speaking at his alma mater, the University of Texas, on February 1, Secretary of State Tillerson suggested a potential military coup in in the country. Tillerson then visited allied Latin American countries urging regime change and more economic sanctions on Venezuela. Tillerson is also reportedly considering banning the processing or sale of Venezuelan oil in the United States and is discouraging other countries from buying Venezuelan oil.

• For weeks following its stolen election, the corrupt right-wing, neo-fascist government of Juan Orlando Hernández’s in Honduras has been terrorizing its people. Street protests and spontaneous blockades have been met by extreme violence. Dozens have already died on the frontlines and many more have been arrested and brutalized in detention, while often being held incommunicado.

• By many accounts, the Koreans – North and South – have prevailed over the disruptive desires of the United States, coming together in a series of very public actions, clearly meant to turn down the political heat generated by President Donald Trump and the U.S. pressure for military action. This pressure can be seen as a continuation of President Barack Obama’s “Asia Pivot,” a policy that called for full U.S. dominance in the region, including by containing China and the new emerging regional powers through a set of expansive, coordinated, and aggressive military alliances with Japan and other Pacific Rim countries.

• Back in October, 2016 I wrote an analysis entitled “Are Humans Natural-Born Killers?” It described and commented on research on the origins of human violence published in the science journal Nature. The conclusion offered in the article is that humans come from an evolutionary line that has the capability for violent behavior genetically built into it. It is a reasonable hypothesis. As just about every serious historian knows, the human propensity for lethal violence goes back as far as the evidence can take us — so far that there can be little doubt that this trait is inherited from our pre-human ancestors.

• In Syria, U.S. airstrikes and artillery fire last week reportedly killed scores of Russian mercenaries who had joined a failed assault on a base held by U.S. and Kurdish forces in Deir ez-Zor. Bloomberg reports that more than 200 soldiers-for-hire fighting on behalf of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad were killed in the fighting, including many Russians. Meanwhile, some of the fiercest fighting in the 7-year-old conflict continues to rage in the northern city of Afrin, the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta and other parts of Syria. The United Nations special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, warned Wednesday that civilians have been killed on a “horrific scale,” with more than 1,000 killed in the first week of February alone.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• I’ve written many times about the importance of basing preservation on a realistic threat model. The motivation for the Data Refuge movement, and its predecessor in Canada, was the threat that a government would use its power to destroy information in its custody. Clearly, Data Refuge’s ingest goal of getting a copy into non-governmental hands is an essential first step. But it does not address the threats to preservation that are unique to government information, namely their legal powers over these non-governmental hands. The history of US information on paper in the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) shows that the federal government is very willing to use their powers:

• Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., met with Assange in Ecuador’s British Embassy in August and said afterward that Assange can prove Russia didn’t hack Democratic emails during the 2016 election, as U.S. spy agencies allege.

• But Rohrabacher has been blown off repeatedly, and despite months of effort hasn’t been able to arrange a meeting or phone call with Trump.

• One theory of President Donald Trump’s campaign collusion holds that longtime Trump pal Roger Stone worked with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to release Democrats’ hacked emails during the 2016 presidential campaign.

• A new leak of private Assange messages pours cold water on that idea.

• The co-founder of the Fusion GPS research firm told the US House Intelligence Committee that Nigel Farage had allegedly provided Julian Assange with a “thumb drive.” The British politician has called the claims “nonsense.”

• Julian Assange’s supporters are questioning the integrity of the judge who upheld his UK arrest warrant, accusing her of being influenced by the British authorities and the secret service.

• Earlier this week, Judge Emma Arbuthnot rejected arguments presented by Assange’s legal team over why he breached bail conditions by seeking political refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012.

• When concessions were finally made to interview him in the Ecuadorean embassy on his Swedish sojourn, nothing of substance emerged. What did, however, lurk with sinister force was the role played by British authorities to prolong the matter.

• The Ecuadorian embassy in London cut off Julian Assange’s internet access in October of 2016, but the WikiLeaks Twitter account kept posting about leak drops uninterrupted. The embassy’s action made headlines all across mainstream media. It is common knowledge for anyone who was paying attention to WikiLeaks during that time. The Intercept’s editors are unquestionably aware of this.

• They are aware of this, and yet they allowed an article to be published about allegedly leaked Direct Messages on Twitter which continuously, pervasively and fundamentally assumes that the WikiLeaks account is controlled by Assange and Assange only. The account is referred to as “Assange” throughout the entire article.

• “Throughout this article,” the latest establishment effort at undermining public opinion of WikiLeaks states, “The Intercept assumes that the WikiLeaks account is controlled by Julian Assange himself, as is widely understood, and that he is the author of the messages, referring to himself in the third person majestic plural, as he often does.”

• [...]

• But The Intercept couldn’t allow its readership to view these remarks as potentially belonging to one of WikiLeaks’ staff members, the personal shortcomings of a talented and indispensable asset to the team whose bigotry can be made harmless to WikiLeaks’ greater mission by the guidance of its leadership. They knowingly and deliberately pinned attribution onto the face of the organization, knowing that Assange couldn’t directly deny it without giving away more information about the account, and they did that with the intention of harming WikiLeaks’ public reputation.

• WikiLeaks operates by bringing truth to the people. That is its entire mission. The unelected transnational Orwellian empire which stands the most to lose from their releases understands that the less people like and trust WikiLeaks, the less damage they can do to the ecocidal, omnicidal oligarchy that is driving our species toward extinction. By attempting to paint Assange as an evil Nazi, they are minimizing the impact the next leak drop will have on the public, thereby neutering WikiLeaks by that much.

• The FOIA litigation intiated by our newspaper has become central to the case argued today before a London court, providing factual information on a pattern of disputable destruction of documents, questionable legal advice from the UK authorities and the great secrecy surrounding the possible contact between the UK and the US on the Assange and WikiLeaks case

• The messages were exchanged over the course of more than two years from May 2015 through November 2017, and while they cover a wide range of issues from Assange’s thoughts on Russian politics to his disdain for 2016 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, they do not delve into some of the most pressing questions about WikiLeaks’ involvement with the campaign of President Donald Trump. The group was in contact with the campaign at various points leading up to the November 2016 election, and was responsible for leaks of the Clinton campaign’s internal emails and speech transcripts.

• The messages were leaked by a former WikiLeaks volunteer known as Hazelpress. He articulated his reasoning for the disclosure to The Intercept.

• “Security Intelligence Consultancy” SC Strategy Ltd has only three directors. One is the husband of the judge in yesterday’s Assange ruling. One is the former Head of MI6, Sir John Scarlett, who is synonymous with crooked security operations and personally wrote the notorious dossier of lies on Iraqi WMD, thus causing the subsequent deaths of millions of people. One is Lord Carlile, who was notably close to protected Establishment paedophiles Greville Janner and Cyril Smith. Is the British Establishment not endlessly fascinating?

• The corporate media has published no information about “Lady” Arbuthnot’s background and sinister links at all, despite the fact it is uniformly carrying her jibes at Assange as a major story. There can be no clearer example of the fact that it is the corporate media which, deliberately and systematically, spreads fake news, while bloggers get out the actual facts via social media.

• A British court has refused to withdraw an arrest warrant against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange for not showing up for a bail hearing on 29 June 2012, meaning he will have to continue residing in the Ecuadorian embassy in London or risk arrest by leaving.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Twenty-one dolphins that were apparently attacked by another species of dolphin have died after washing up on a beach in northern Mexico, authorities said.

• Environmental activists launched a frantic operation to try to save the dolphins after a group of 54 washed up on a rocky beach in Bahia de la Paz, in Mexico’s Baja California peninsula.

• They managed to get 33 of the short-beaked common dolphins back in the water alive, but the rest died on the beach, the Mexican environmental protection authority, Profepa, said in a statement.

• Yes, it is going to making ten rubber duck colonies on the beaches of Port Willunga, Australia using several thousand rubber ducks, which the scientists counted first, obviously. Each colony had a different number of fake ducks.

• African Matabele ants dress the wounds of comrades injured during hunting raids and nurse them back to health, according to an “astonishing” discovery reported Wednesday.

• After collecting their wounded from the battlefield and carrying them back home, nestmates become medics, massing around patients for “intense licking” of open wounds, according to a study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

• This behaviour reduces the fatality rate from about 80 percent of injured soldiers to a mere 10 percent, researchers observed.

Finance

• For the entire year of 2017, Uber sustained a loss of $4.46 billion on sales of $7.36 billion.

• The company’s global workforce stood at 556,000 in December, up 66pc from a year earlier, it said when it reported its quarterly earnings in February, and 130,000 of those were created in 2017. It had more than 12,500 corporate job vacancies – roles outside of its warehouses – as of Monday.

• In the past five years, Amazon increased lobbying spending by more than 400 percent, a rate of change that far exceeds rivals’. It lobbied more government agencies than any other tech company, pressed its case on as many issues as Google, and outspent everyone in the industry except for the search giant, the data show.

• Amazon.com Inc. is pushing to turn its nascent medical-products business into a major supplier to U.S. hospitals and outpatient clinics that could compete with distributors of items ranging from gauze to hip implants.

• Japan sees Brexit as an act of economic and political self-harm that will reduce the United Kingdom’s influence on the world stage, says a former British ambassador to Tokyo.

• Sir David Warren, who served in the post from 2008 to 2012, argued it was time for plain speaking on the impact of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. He regarded the potential effect on UK-Japan relations as “grave”.

• Born as a fiercely independent agency meant to protect citizens, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has quickly been subsumed into the Trump administration. Banks, student-loan agencies and payday lenders are the winners.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Facebook hired Campbell Brown as its head of news partnerships on January 6th, 2017. At the time, Brown wrote that she would “help news organizations and journalists work more closely and more effectively with Facebook.” In a post that is no longer public, she wrote: “I will be working directly with our partners to help them understand how Facebook can expand the reach of their journalism, and contribute value to their businesses.”

• According to a study by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Trump was the focus of 41 percent of American news coverage in his first 100 days in office. That’s three times the amount of coverage showered on previous presidents. This laser-eyed focus on Trump has left little room for other crucial stories.

• Conservative Republicans have been angling for years to zero out funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides federal support for local PBS and National Public Radio stations. Prodded years ago by conservative columnist George Will, who asked “What about the cultural institutions? Conservatives have considerable grievances against the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the national endowments for the arts and the humanities. What’s their future?” To which House Speaker Newt Gingrich replied: “I personally would privatize them all.”

• Bannon seems to view the Democrats less as the opposition party than figures of fun. “The Democrats don’t matter,” he had said to me over our lunch. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

• ProPublica has developed a browser plugin for Chrome and Firefox that automatically collects ads when you are on Facebook and allows you to classify the ads collected as “political” or “not political”.

• The political ads are sent to ProPublica’s database, along with the ad-targeting information. The ad-targeting information categories are usually things such as an age bracket, gender, a general geographic location and interest in a topic. You can see the information Facebook is using to show you ads by looking at the “adverts” menu in the Facebook settings.

• The intelligence community’s warnings during Tuesday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearings contradict President Trump, who has repeatedly cast doubt on whether Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election. Trump is currently under investigation for allegedly colluding with Russia ahead of the presidential election.

• In the span of about six hours yesterday, The New York Times announced the hiring of Quinn Norton as a tech columnist and then apparently fired her. The Times claims that their decision to “go their separate ways” was guided by “new information,” revealed through a social-media maelstrom, about slurs Norton had used on Twitter and about her friendship with someone called weev.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Harassment of journalists has increased since last June. Some journalists who were abroad have preferred to stay there. Some have been forced to resign from what are regarded as “enemy” media. Others, according to our information, have chosen to censor themselves or to withdraw altogether from what was the only space left for free speech – social networks.

• Jakarta, Jubi/RSF – After the BBC’s Indonesia editor was expelled from the country’s easternmost Papua region last weekend over a tweet, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) again urges the Indonesian authorities to allow journalists to report freely in the troubled region, which continues to be an information black hole.

• The National Assembly passed amendments to five articles of the Cambodian constitution that tighten restrictions on voting rights and freedom of association and require every Cambodian citizen to “respect the constitution” and “defend the motherland.” Article 34 was changed to allow new restrictions on the right to vote, while Article 42 now gives the government authority to take action against political parties if they do not “place the country and nation’s interest first,” an amendment designed to target opposition parties. Article 53, which now states that Cambodia cannot interfere in the internal affairs of other countries since it opposes foreign interference in its own affairs, also appears to target the CNRP, which regularly appealed to donors and the United Nations to put pressure on the Cambodian government to hold free and fair elections and impose sanctions.

• The Parisian court thought that this policy was incredibly inconvenient for the billions of claimants who don’t happen to live in California, so it upheld the decision against Facebook, requiring the company to respect the earlier finding’s authority and pay up.

• The new German law that compels social media companies to remove hate speech and other illegal content can lead to unaccountable, overbroad censorship and should be promptly reversed, Human Rights Watch said today. The law sets a dangerous precedent for other governments looking to restrict speech online by forcing companies to censor on the government’s behalf.

• The government spent £600,000 on the tool, which was trained by its designers, ASI Data Science to recognise content related to IS, which would then be flagged up to a human who would decide if it should pass or not.

• As entertainment companies and Internet services spar over the boundaries of copyright law, the EFF is urging the US Copyright Office to keep “copyright’s safe harbors safe.” In a petition just filed with the office, the EFF warns that innovation will be stymied if Congress goes ahead with a plan to introduce proactive ‘piracy’ filters at the expense of the DMCA’s current safe harbor provisions.

• Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods maker of brands from Dove to Persil, on Monday threatened social media companies with an advertising boycott if they failed to tackle abusive content.

• Germany’s NetzDG (Network Enforcement Act), which requires social media networks to remove offensive content, could result in extensive censorship and should, therefore, be reversed, an international rights watchdog said Wednesday.

• “They are how we make sense of our lives,” says the assistant teaching professor of filmmaking and associate director of the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers University–Camden. “Stories help us organize our thoughts, and to document and hand down our history. They have the ability to move masses, to make real change.”

• The drive to censor the Internet took another step this week with a public statement by Keith Weed, the chief marketing officer for the London-based multinational Unilever, threatening to withdraw advertising from social media platforms if they fail to suppress “toxic content.”

• Weed reportedly told an annual leadership meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau in Palm Desert, California that the company “will not invest in platforms or environments” that “create divisions in society, and promote anger or hate.” He added, “We will prioritize investing only in responsible platforms that are committed to creating a positive impact in society.”

• We’ve had ongoing discussions on this site about the ham-fisted website censorship policy that Russia has undertaken over the past few years. While the country was never one to embrace free and open speech and communication to the same degree as Western nations, recent times have seen a severe uptick in outright censorship with a variety of excuses rolled out for public consumption: copyright laws, stifling political opposition, and the protection of the privacy of public figures. The funnel point for all of this censorship is Russian agency Rozcomnadzor, itself the subject of corruption allegations, with a track record for racking up collateral damage numbers that would make any nation’s army blush.

• Through it all, there have been suggestions that entire sites with massive global followings would be blocked. YouTube and Twitter were previously found to be in the crosshairs of the Russian government, but nothing immediately came of the threat. Now, however, both YouTube and Instagram may face a very real choice: bow to the censorship demands of Rozcomnadzor or face full site-blocks in Russia. And, perhaps most strangely, this has all come to a head over a Russian billionaire’s win in court to block the publication of photos and videos showing him on a yacht with what is reportedly an escort.

• After publicized accounts from dozens of tourists that the popular travel website TripAdvisor had deleted postings describing their harrowing experiences, nominees for the Federal Trade Commission vowed to investigate the company if they are confirmed in the coming weeks.

• Questioned this week by members of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, including U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), all four nominees — Republican and Democrat —- said if confirmed they would commit to looking into the impact that the conduct of TripAdvisor and other travel rating websites have on the traveling public.

• The Supreme Court has held that the Administrative Court was wrong to exclude a Wikileaks cable from evidence. The underlying judicial review proceedings in R (Bancoult No.3) v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs [2018] UK SC 3 concerned a challenge by the Chagos Refugees Group (CRG) to the British Government’s decision to establish a marine protected area around the Chagos islands, preventing Chagossians from continuing their commercial fishing businesses in the region. However, the issues raised are of wider application.

• At the heart of the case was a leaked cable from the US Embassy in London to the US State Department in Washington summarising a conversation between British and US officials regarding the reasons for establishing the protected area. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) argued that the cable formed part of the US Embassy’s diplomatic archive, which was protected by the 1961 Vienna Convention, and was therefore inadmissible.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Equally notable are the experts Facebook did not consult. Although Facebook says it spent 18 months developing the app, Common Sense Media and Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, two large nonprofits in the field, say they weren’t informed about it until weeks or days before the app’s debut.

• Facebook has suffered a setback in a court case between the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband – vzbv) and the social network.

• The District Court of Berlin ruledthat several of Facebook’s default settings violated users’ right to privacy due to a lack of consent by the users. Also, the court found that German users are not obliged to use their real names for their Facebook profiles. On the other hand, the judges permitted Facebook’s claim that the service is ‘free, and always will be’.

• VZBV asked the court to rule upon 26 asserted breaches of data protection, privacy, competition and civil law. 14 of the claims were granted and 12 denied. For the sake of brevity, this Kat will focus on the most interesting aspects of the 37 page judgment.

• This batch of cases is directed at the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar Act, 2016; the Aadhaar project from 2009 to 2016; parts of the project which are not covered by the Act; authorities’ attempts to make Aadhaar compulsory when not defined by the law; the government’s push to link Aadhaar numbers with SIM cards, bank accounts and PANs; and the move to make Aadhaar mandatory for availing benefits and subsidies.

• The global positioning system can locate you within 5 to 10 meters anywhere on Earth—as long as your receiver is in the line of sight of multiple satellites. Getting location information indoors is tricky. A team at the University of Utah has now put the solution underfoot: A suite of sensors and circuits mounted to a boot can determine position with an accuracy of about 5 meters, indoors or out, without GPS.

• The navigation system, installed in a very hefty prototype boot, could help rescue workers navigate inside buildings, and show firefighters where their team members are. It might also be integrated with virtual or augmented reality games. The Utah researchers presented their GPS-free navigation system on Tuesday at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

• Remember that whole Apple vs. FBI fight from early 2016? The government wanted to force Apple to develop what’s essentially a backdoor into iOS that only Apple and/or government officials would control to get into the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino’s shooters.

• Fast forward to more modern times, and we have six top US intelligence chiefs saying they do not trust devices made by Chinese smartphone makers Huawei and ZTE because they could be used to spy on US citizens. In other words, they believe the Chinese government would hold backdoors into these devices that would allow them to quietly collect data from millions of people.

• [...]

• The thing with backdoors is that, if they exist, security researchers or hackers would eventually find them.

• So essentially the app is providing a form of non-malicious [sic] spyware that feeds Facebook’s already bulging data coffers. Not something many users of VPNs would expect or want.

• Yet the Onavo app also tracks data that it shares with Facebook and others, “including the applications installed on your device, your use of those applications, the websites you visit and the amount of data you use,” according to its own privacy policies.

• Experian is basically a private spy agency. Their website boasts about how they can:

• Know who your customers are regardless of channel or device Know where and how to reach your customers with optimal messages Create and deliver exceptional experiences every time

• Is that third objective, an “exceptional experience”, what you were hoping for with their dating site honey trap? You are out of luck: you are not the customer, you are the product.

• Daniel Pocock (via planet.debian.org) points out what tracking services online dating services expose you to. This certainly is an issue, and of course to be expected by a free service (you are the product – advertisers are the customer). Oh, and in case you forgot already: some sites employ fake profiles to retain you as long as possible on their site… But I’d like to point out how deeply flawed online dating is. It is surprising that some people meet successfully there; and I am not surprised that so many dates turn out to not work: they earn money if you remain single, and waste time on their site, not if you are successful.

• I am clearly not an expert on online dating, because I am happily married. I met my wife in a very classic setting: offline, in my extended social circle. The motivation for this post is that I am concerned about seeing people waste their time. If you want to improve your life, eliminate apps and websites that are just distraction! And these days, we see more online/app distraction than ever. Smartphone zombie apocalpyse.

• [...]

• And you can find many more reports on “Generation Tinder” and its hard time to find partners because of inflated expectations. It is also because these apps and online services make you unhappy, and that makes you unattractive.

• Instead, I suggest you extend your offline social circle.

• For example, I used to go dancing a lot. Not the “drunken, and too loud music to talk” kind, but ballroom. Not only this can drastically improve your social and communication skills (in particular, non-verbal communication, but also just being natural rather than nervous), but it also provides great opportunities to meet new people with a shared interest. And quite a lot of my friends in dancing got married to a partner they first met at a dance.

• Agents in contemporary societies are faced continually with choices regarding engagement with technological artifacts. They can choose to engage or decline engagement after considering the costs and benefits in each case. However, certain aspects of the surveillance society may be irresistible in a number of ways, so that refusal to engage with them is not a realistic option. The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), particularly as embedded in “smart city” initiatives, helps to make surveillance technologies potentially irresistible. After laying the conceptual groundwork for discussing irresistible bargains, this essay offers a two-part normative critique, focusing on the asymmetrical power relations engendered by smart cities as well as harms inflicted on the self.

• The court in Rome ruled in the youngster’s favour, telling his mother she would be fined if she continued posting pictures of him. She will also face a financial penalty if she fails to remove historic news, videos and images of him.

Civil Rights/Policing

• But because the term itself is politically dishonest and misrepresentative, and because its intent is to vilify, disparage, and intimidate, as well as to incite and justify violence against women, it is dangerous and indeed qualifies as a form of hate speech. While women have tried to point out that this would be the end result of “TERF” before, they were, as usual, dismissed. We now have undeniable proof that painting women with this brush leads to real, physical violence. If you didn’t believe us before, you now have no excuse.

• [...] unclear is the extent to which social media and social interactions influence millennials willingness to engage both online and in-person. Even so, the results of this study indicate millennials are open to using social media for social causes, and perhaps increasing engagement off-line too.

• A pair of researchers from Toronto’s storied Citizen Lab (previously) have written an eye-opening editorial and call to action on the ways that repressive states have used the internet to attack dissidents, human rights advocates and political oppositions — and how the information security community and tech companies have left these people vulnerable.

• For several years, we have conducted research on targeted attacks against civil society and activists in Iran and elsewhere. From these experiences, one lesson in particular stands outs: human rights defenders and journalists are a canary in the coal mine for the attacks used to steal military secrets, coerce perceived foreign adversaries, and undermine critical infrastructure. Despite this chilling predicament, those at-risk populations are afforded substantially less opportunities to protect themselves and are often relegated to the margins of conversations about cyber security. This inequity is to the detriment of everyone, and must change if we want to improve the Internet for all communities.`

• Fifty years after the federal Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in lending, African Americans and Latinos continue to be routinely denied conventional mortgage loans at rates far higher than their white counterparts.

• This modern-day redlining persisted in 61 metro areas even when controlling for applicants’ income, loan amount and neighborhood, according to millions of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records analyzed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

• The yearlong analysis, based on 31 million records, relied on techniques used by leading academics, the Federal Reserve and Department of Justice to identify lending disparities.

• It found a pattern of troubling denials for people of color across the country, including in major metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis and San Antonio. African Americans faced the most resistance in Southern cities – Mobile, Alabama; Greenville, North Carolina; and Gainesville, Florida – and Latinos in Iowa City, Iowa.

• An incarcerated immigrant woman, who alleged sexual harassment and assault by a corrections officer, said she was thrown in solitary confinement for 60 hours and was told she would not be released until she publicly recanted her accusations.

• Laura Monterrosa is a 23 year old immigrant from El Salvador detained at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a private prison operated by CoreCivic (formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America).

• Grassroots Leadership, a Texas-based immigrant rights group advocating on behalf of Monterrosa, said she was isolated between 11:00 PM on Friday, February 9, and 11:00 AM on Monday, February 12. She was threatened with more isolation if she didn’t publicly state she was not sexually abused by staff.

• “This should not be happening in America,” said Claudia Muñoz, immigration programs director at Grassroots Leadership. “Here you have a woman who came forward to report rampant sexual abuse inside of a federal facility. Instead of protecting her and ensuring the abuse stops, ICE is now putting Laura in solitary confinement with the expressed intent of tearing her down so she will do as they say.”

• Amid heightened concern about Russian election meddling, the FBI on Tuesday warned U.S. universities about Chinese intelligence operatives active on their campuses, adding that many academics display “a level of naiveté” about the level of infiltration.

• FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate intelligence committee that China has aggressively placed operatives at universities, “whether its professors, scientists, students,” and the bureau must monitor them from its 56 field offices across the nation.

• ICE has been instructed to make the nation safer by deporting the “worst of the worst.” The nation will be made secure again, said the DHS, pointing to its report declaring three-quarters of those convicted for terrorism offenses were “foreign-born.” Of course, to reach this ratio, the DHS had to count people the US government had extradited to the US to face trial for terrorism attacks committed in foreign countries, but whatever. The point is: foreigners are dangerous and ICE is going to remove them. An ongoing “challenge” for ICE has been finding enough dangerous immigrants to deport, so it’s had to change its strategy a bit.

• So, if we’re trying to root out would-be terrorists and MS-13 gang members and undocumented immigrants with long domestic criminal rap sheets, why is ICE targeting people for their First Amendment activities? That’s what one rights activist wants to know, and he’s taking ICE to court to force it to explain itself. Kevin Gosztola of ShadowProof has more details.

• In national assault on immigrants’ rights, ICE believes no population is off the table. U.S. law and courts say otherwise.

• In a recent span of 10 days, four courts issued decisions that could literally save lives.

• Our clients live across the United States, but all have been swept up in ICE’s aggressive new campaign to target communities previously considered low-priority for immigration enforcement, with ICE attempting to deport them as quickly as possible. Since July 2017, we have challenged this bully tactic in federal district courts across the country, filing cases on behalf of communities of Iraqis in Michigan, Indonesians in New Hampshire, Somalis in Florida, Cambodians in Southern California, and Indonesians in New Jersey.

• Between Jan. 25 and Feb. 2, judges across the country temporarily blocked the deportations of the four latter cases. The Iraqis, whose case was the first to be filed in June 2017, have already received a nationwide stay. For varying reasons, all these communities previously enjoyed a reprieve from deportation, in some cases for decades. However, with the change in administration, a target was placed on their backs. As Thomas Homan, ICE’s acting director, declared at a December press conference, “The president has made it clear in his executive orders: There’s no population off the table.”

• San Francisco, California—Face recognition—fast becoming law enforcement’s surveillance tool of choice—is being implemented with little oversight or privacy protections, leading to faulty systems that will disproportionately impact people of color and may implicate innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit, says an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) report released today.

• Face recognition is rapidly creeping into modern life, and face recognition systems will one day be capable of capturing the faces of people, often without their knowledge, walking down the street, entering stores, standing in line at the airport, attending sporting events, driving their cars, and utilizing public spaces. Researchers at the Georgetown Law School estimated that one in every two American adults—117 million people—are already in law enforcement face recognition systems.

• This kind of surveillance will have a chilling effect on Americans’ willingness to exercise their rights to speak out and be politically engaged, the report says. Law enforcement has already used face recognition at political protests, and may soon use face recognition with body-worn cameras, to identify people in the dark, and to project what someone might look like from a police sketch or even a small sample of DNA.

• As the Macro Polo article notes, Google is unlikely to allow any of its AI products or technologies to be sold directly to the authorities for surveillance purposes. But there are plenty of other ways in which advances in AI produced at Google’s new lab could end up making life for Chinese dissidents, and for ordinary citizens in Xinjiang and Tibet, much, much worse. For example, the fierce competition for AI experts is likely to see Google’s Beijing engineers headhunted by local Chinese companies, where knowledge can and will flow unimpeded to government departments. Although arguably Chinese researchers elsewhere — in the US or Europe, for example — might also return home, taking their expertise with them, there’s no doubt that the barriers to doing so are higher in that case.

• So does that mean that Google is wrong to open up a lab in Beijing, when it could simply have expanded its existing AI teams elsewhere? Is this another step toward re-entering China after it shut down operations there in 2010 over the authorities’ insistence that it should censor its search results — which, to its credit, Google refused to do? “AI first” is all very well, but where does “Don’t be evil” fit into that?

• The criminals who flipped Elrod from victim to accomplice, by contrast, have vanished. Ramseyer says he is unaware of any efforts to catch the scammers in Warri, and Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, which did not respond to repeated inquiries, has posted no news of any arrests.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Originally filed last month, the suit was initially dismissed on a technicality over the date of filing, a technicality which according to Mozilla is based on a concern that they had already flagged to the FCC as being problematic.

• This does give Mozilla a quandary, if the FCC decides to dawdle, as it cannot refile until there is the official publication of the repealed original.

• Year-after-year, the dot com domain name base has continued to grow. Verisign, which manages the dot com and dot net registries, reported its fourth quarter financial results on Feb. 8, alongside its’ latest data on the number of registered domains.

• Greens digital rights spokesman Senator Jordon Steele-John (below, right) made the claim on Tuesday after the Opposition joined the Coalition Government to vote against a Greens motion seeking an inquiry into such protections because of public interest.

• At Offline Camp Oregon I had the pleasure of joining with many others to discuss a future of the web that devolves power and control over the physical networks that connect us, and grants it to the communities that these systems serve. With nation-states having become net neutrality’s last line of defense, and with many of those states in regulatory capture by telecoms, it becomes clearer every day that a libre web will require that we establish redundant, alternative physical infrastructure to support it. As long as the telcos own the wires, our traffic is subject to their whims.

• Before she became a theoretical physicist, Stephanie Wehner was a hacker. Like most people in that arena, she taught herself from an early age. At 15, she spent her savings on her first dial-up modem, to use at her parents’ home in Würzburg, Germany. And by 20, she had gained enough street cred to land a job in Amsterdam, at a Dutch Internet provider started by fellow hackers.

• By now it’s pretty apparent that the FCC doesn’t much want to talk about who was behind the numerous bogus comments that flooded the agency’s net neutrality repeal proceeding. When I asked the FCC for help after someone lifted my identity to support repealing the rules, the FCC responded with the policy equivalent of a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Similarly, when New York Attorney General Eric Shneiderman approached the FCC looking for help identifying the culprit (9 requests over 5 months, he said in an open letter), the FCC blocked the investigation.

• Most analysts believe the effort was a ham-fisted attempt to erode trust in the public comment proceeding in order to downplay massive public opposition to the FCC’s plan (a tactic that has mysteriously plagued other government proceedings over the last year). The FCC could pretty quickly clear this all up by providing access to server logs and API key usage details to law enforcement. It’s consistent refusal to do so quickly dismantles agency boss Ajit Pai’s continued, breathless claims that he’s a massive fan of transparency and would run a more transparent operation than his predecessor.

DRM

• In November of last year is when we reported on a Google developer proposing HDCP patches for Intel’s DRM Linux driver. In this case, DRM as in the Direct Rendering Manager but HDCP as in the controversial High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection. HDCP is the digital copy protection for DP/DVI/HDMI for preventing HDCP-encrypted content from being played on unauthorized devices.

• If you’ve been around a while, you probably know that Verizon has an adversarial relationship with openness and competition. The company’s history is rife with attempts to stifle competing emerging technologies that challenged Verizon’s own business interests, from its early attempts to block GPS and tethering apps so users would have to subscribe to inferior and expensive Verizon services, to its attempts to block competing mobile payment services to force users (again) onto Verizon’s own, inferior products. And that’s before you get to Verizon’s attempts to kill net neutrality and keep the broadband industry uncompetitive.

• In the earlier years, Verizon had a horrible tendency to lock down its devices to a crippling and comical degree. But with the rise of net neutrality, competition from carriers like T-Mobile, and open access conditions affixed to certain spectrum purchased by Verizon, the company slowly-but-surely loosened its iron grip on mobile devices. But let’s be clear: the company had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the new, more open future we all currently enjoy, where (by and large) you can install whatever apps you like on your device, and attach most mainstream devices (with some caveats) to Verizon’s network.

• That’s why more than a few eyebrows were raised after Verizon gave CNET the early exclusive news (apparently in the hopes that they’d frame it generously, which they did) that the company will soon be locking down its smartphones as part of a purported effort to “combat theft.” Carriers have been justly criticized (and sued) for doing too little to prevent theft, in part because they profit on both sides of the equation — both when a customer comes crying to Verizon to buy a new phone, and when the user with the stolen phone heads to Verizon to re-activate it on a new line.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• More than 50 organisations representing a range of teachers, students, trainers, researchers, scientists, librarians and others have joined together to call on the European Parliament to improve European copyright reform for education.

• The European Union Council of Ministers today adopted a decision that enables the EU to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty on access to published works for blind and visually impaired readers starting in summer. The copyright exceptions treaty negotiated at the World Intellectual Property Organization and adopted in 2013, went into effect in September 2016 but has been held up in Europe.

• A consortium of media and distribution companies calling itself “FairPlay Canada” is lobbying for Canada to implement a fast-track, extrajudicial website blocking regime in the name of preventing unlawful downloads of copyrighted works. It is currently being considered by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), an agency roughly analogous to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S.

• The proposal is misguided and flawed. We’re still analyzing it, but below are some preliminary thoughts.

• Well, that was incredibly quick. The district court judge hearing the case that Playboy filed against BoingBoing back in November has already dismissed it, though without prejudice, leaving it open for Playboy to try again. The judge noted that, given the facts before the court so far, it wasn’t even necessary to hold a hearing, since BoingBoing was so clearly in the right and Playboy so clearly had no case.

• As some of you may be aware, Safer Internet Day just passed. Started in the EU, the day is supposed to be used to educate the masses on some dangers that are tangentially or directly connected to the internet, such as malware awareness, cyberbullying, or abuses on social media sites. It’s also heavily supported by the Industry Trust for IP Awareness, which is a UK entertainment industry group that chiefly looks to “educate” the public on how super-awesome copyright is in every respect and how piracy and copyright infringement are the work of Satan.

• In a video titled… and I can’t believe I’m going to actually type this… Meet the Malwares, viewers in Australia are “educated” on exactly zero specific malware threats, but they are told that filesharing sites should be avoided completely. And if you’re thinking that there are a ton of other parts of the internet that are far riskier, rest assured that the video insists it’s all about file sharing sites.

• Back in 2016 we wrote about how Landis+Gyr, a large multinational company owned by Toshiba, completely freaked out when it discovered that documents about its smart energy meters, which the city of Seattle had contracted to use, were subject to a FOIA request. As we noted, Landis+Gyr went legal and did so in perhaps the nuttiest way possible. First it demanded the documents be taken down from Muckrock — the platform that makes it easy for journalists and others to file FOIA requests. Then it demanded that Muckrock reveal the details of anyone who might have seen the documents in question. It then sued Muckrock and somehow got a court to issue a temporary restraining order (TRO) against Muckrock for posting these public records.

• In a win for free expression, a court has dismissed a copyright lawsuit against Happy Mutants, LLC, the company behind acclaimed website Boing Boing. The court ruled [PDF] that Playboy’s complaint—which accused Boing Boing of copyright infringement for linking to a collection of centerfolds—had not sufficiently established its copyright claim. Although the decision allows Playboy to try again with a new complaint, it is still a good result for supporters of online journalism and sensible copyright.

• Playboy Entertainment’s lawsuit accused Boing Boing of copyright infringement for reporting on a historical collection of Playboy centerfolds and linking to a third-party site. In a February 2016 post, Boing Boing told its readers that someone had uploaded scans of the photos, noting they were “an amazing collection” reflecting changing standards of what is considered sexy. The post contained links to an imgur.com page and YouTube video—neither of which were created by Boing Boing.

• EFF, together with co-counsel Durie Tangri, filed a motion to dismiss [PDF] on behalf of Boing Boing. We explained that Boing Boing did not contribute to the infringement of any Playboy copyrights by including a link to illustrate its commentary. The motion noted that another judge in the same district had recently dismissed a case where Quentin Tarantino accused Gawker of copyright infringement for linking to a leaked script in its reporting.

• Playboy in November sued Happy Mutants, claiming the company’s site Boing Boing infringed its rights by linking to “Every Playboy Playmate Centerfold Ever.”

• “Some wonderful person uploaded scans of every Playboy Playmate centerfold to imgur,” states the Feb. 29, 2016, post on Boing Boing. “It’s an amazing collection, whether your interests are prurient or lofty. Kind of amazing to see how our standards of hotness, and the art of commercial erotic photography, have changed over time.”

• Boing Boing then linked to the imgur collection and a YouTube video, both of which appear to have since been removed.

• U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin on Wednesday dismissed Playboy’s complaint with leave to amend, asking the magazine to carefully evaluate the contentions made in Happy Mutants’ motion to dismiss before drafting a second amended complaint.

• In short, the website owner argues that there is no evidence that Boing Boing copied or displayed the centerfold photos or that any of its users downloaded the images instead of viewing them.

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