● 02.21.18

● Links 21/2/2018: Apper 1.0, New Fedora ISOs

Posted in News Roundup at 5:30 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I’ve been using Linux as my desktop operating system for 20 years now. When I first started using the open source operating system, pretty much everything was a challenge. Back then, I wore that as a badge of honor. I could use Linux! There was something special about saying that in a crowd of fellow geeks and nerds. It brought respect. Not only could I install the operating system, I could get it on line, and do just about anything I needed to do. Of course, back then, much of what had to be done began in the terminal window. Without that particular tool, I don’t think I would have been able to function within Linux.

• The proof is on the group’s Twitter profile via a video demonstrating what appears to be a KDE desktop environment (one of several graphical UIs for Linux).

Desktop

• Another great advantage of open source software: you can run it off of a flash drive before installing it. And I have to admit that I loved Linux Lite’s out-of-the-box feel, so much so that I reconsidered installing my number two selection: LXLE, which is designed for underpowered older machines. According to a label on the bottom of my Toughbook, this pre-Linux laptop was decommissioned in 2005, making it well over ten years old. And so I replaced the RAM, installed Linux Lite, and after a short period, I was back to living a Linux laptop lifestyle while waiting for my charger.

• There’s no denying the usefulness of a wiki, even to a non-geek. You can do so much with one—write notes and drafts, collaborate on projects, build complete websites. And so much more.

• I’ve used more than a few wikis over the years, either for my own work or at various contract and full-time gigs I’ve held. While traditional wikis are fine, I really like the idea of desktop wikis. They’re small, easy to install and maintain, and even easier to use. And, as you’ve probably guessed, there are a number a desktop wikis available for Linux.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• The Linux kernel grows at an amazing pace, each kernel release adds more functionality, more drivers and hence more kernel modules. I recently wondered what the trend was for kernel module growth per release, so I performed module builds on kernels v2.6.24 through to v4.16-rc2 for x86-64 to get a better idea of growth rates…

• Right now to make most use of the Steam Controller on Linux you need to be using the Steam client while there have been independent user-space programs like SC-Controller to enable Steam Controller functionality without the Steam client running. A new and independent effort is a Linux kernel driver for the Steam Controller.

• Through reverse-engineering, Rodrigo Rivas Costa has been developing a kernel driver for the Valve Steam Controller. This driver supports both USB cable and USB wireless adapters for the Steam Controller. This driver is being developed as a proper HID kernel driver so it should work with all existing Linux programs and doesn’t require the use of the proprietary Steam client.

Graphics Stack

• Last year we covered the work on the project “Chai” as an open-source, reverse-engineered driver for Mali T700 series. After a hiatus, the lead developer is back working on the project.

• The developer on the project was previously just known as “Cafe Beverage”, but this developer has come out today as Alyssa Rosenzweig.

• Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst joined Red Hat at the end of last year where his current task is on NIR intermediate representation support for Nouveau as part of bringing SPIR-V compute support to this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver.

• For Mesa 18.0 is the initial Intel shader cache support for archiving compiled GLSL shaders on-disk to speed up the load times of subsequent game loads and other benefits. For the Mesa 18.0 release the functionality isn’t enabled by default but it will be for Mesa 18.1.

• Xorgproto debuted earlier this month as a centralized package of all X.Org protocol headers that used to be versioned and developed independently. Given the slower development now of the xorg-server and lots of the protocols being intertwined, they are now all bundled together. Tuesday marked the 2018.3 release with the new additions for Keith Packard’s SteamVR Linux infrastructure work.

• Xorgproto 2018.3 offers up the protocol changes for the X.Org Server work that Keith Packard has been doing on improving the virtual reality head-mounted display (VR HMD) support for Linux systems, particularly around SteamVR. The X.Org protocol changes needed are supporting RandR leasing of outputs and also non-desktop monitor handling, so the VR HMD won’t be treated as a conventional display and the Linux desktop systems then attempt to make use of it thinking it’s just another HDMI/DP display.

• While the newly-released Raven Ridge APUs could make for nice HTPC systems given the number of compatible mini-ITX/micro-ATX motherboards and these 65 Watt APUs offering Zen CPU cores with Vega graphics, besides the current problematic Raven Ridge graphics support, there are still some broader AMDGPU DC audio problems for newer graphics cards.

• Phoronix reader Fred wrote in today to call attention to the AMDGPU DC audio situation. While AMDGPU DC was merged in Linux 4.15 and provides HDMI/DP audio support to the past few generations of Radeon GPUs on this new display code stack, not all audio formats play nicely.

Applications

• There is a package unsurprisingly called funny-manpages and it adds some witty entries to the man pages.

• The open source Nginx 1.13.9 web server debuted today, providing support for a new HTTP/2 standard feature known as Server Push.

• The HTTP/2 web standard was completed three years ago in February 2015, with Nginx ahead of the curve in terms of HTTP/2 standard adoption. The NGINX Plus R7 release in September 2015 featured the first commercially supported enterprise-grade support provided by Nginx for HTTP/2.

• Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 162.

• Watching movies and playing music is one of the primary entertainment purposes served by our computers. So, when you move to a new operating system, it makes perfect sense if you look for useful media players. In the past, we’ve already told you about the best video players for Linux and, in this article, we’ll be telling you about the best music players for Linux-based operating systems. Let’s take a look at them:

• Today, we introduce a somewhat new podcast application that is simple and yet delivers efficiently across all 3 desktop platforms.

• CPod, (formerly known as Cumulonimbus), is an electron-based podcast app player for audiobook and podcast lovers.

• Apper the package/apps manager based on PackageKit has got it’s 1.0.0 version on it’s 10th birthday!

• VidCutter is an open-source cross-platform video editor with which you can quickly trim and join video clips. It is Python and Qt5-based, uses FFmpeg for its encoding and decoding operations, and it supports all the popular video formats not excluding FLV, MP4, AVI, and MOV.

• VidCutter boasts a customizable User Interface that you can personalize using themes and a plethora of settings that you can tweak to make your video editing environment more appealing.

Proprietary

• The Tusk Evernote client is now available as a Snap.

• We spotlighted the unofficial Evernote app last year, finding that it added to and improved on the standard Evernote web app in a number of ways.

Instructionals/Technical

• Our philosophy was always to go py2 ￫py2/py3 ￫ py3 because we just could not realistically do a big bang in production, an intuition that was proven right in surprising ways. This meant that 2to3 was a non starter which I think is probably common. We tried a while to use 2to3 to detect Python 3 compatibility issues but quickly found that untenable too. Basically it suggests changes that will break your code in Python 2. No good.

Games

• The focus for development has remained on OpenVR support for the most part and it is slowly finding use within the community.

• With the release of Godot 3.0 the OpenVR module can now be downloaded directly from the asset library.

• It comes with support for OpenVR on 64-bit Windows and on Linux. We’ll add more platforms as testing is rounded off. On Linux it is important that Godot is started from the Steam runtime or it will not find Steam VR.

• With the recent release of Godot 3.0 there is an OpenVR module, but that’s just the beginning of this open-source 3D game engine in supporting virtual reality.

• Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus [Steam, Official Site] has just been announced by Bulwark Studios and Kasedo Games, it’s due this year with Linux support. They aren’t giving any solid release date other than “late 2018″, so hopefully more about it will be revealed soon.

• As Magos Dominus Faustinius, in Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus, you will be taking control of The Adeptus Mechanicus (also known as Cult Mechanicus or Cult of the Machine), one of the most technologically advanced armies in the Imperium. There’s not a great deal about the gameplay, but what I do know is that it will be a turn-based strategy game in some form.

• The developer of Nirvana Pilot Yume [Steam, Official Site] sent word to us today that their mix of a ‘steamy’ visual novel racing game hybrid is now on Linux.

• Shotgun Farmers [Steam] really is a sweet FPS, I consider it a hidden gem since it doesn’t have a huge following. It’s been updated again with even smarter AI.

• A release I didn’t actually cover was Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy [GOG, Steam], the revamp of the 2003 3rd person action-adventure game. Since release, it’s had a lot of patches to keep improving it and now they’ve even released their official mod tools.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Users of Kubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark can now upgrade via our backports PPA to the 2nd bugfix release (5.12.2) of the Plasma 5.12 LTS release series from KDE.

• Likewise, testers of our development release 18.04 Bionic Beaver will receive the update imminently.

• The full changelog of fixes for 5.12.2 can be found here.

• So. KDE neon 5.12 is a reasonable distro. It is MUCH better than Kubuntu Aardvark but not as sweet as my 2017 favorite, Zesty Zebra. That said, it had none of the horrible problems that I saw in the 17.10 release. It’s fast, there were no real errors, you get multimedia playback out of the box, reasonable smartphone and network support, and the bleeding edge of what Plasma can deliver.

• On the other hand, there are some really life-sapping annoyances in the system, which do not belong in year 2018, or even 2008 for that matter. Better hardware support is needed. The decorations need a cleanup. The software arsenal is thin. Discover needs a miracle. Overall, neon behaves like a developer-focused system, and it has that rough, test-commit feel about it. It does try to balance the best of all worlds – an LTS base combined with the latest Plasma, but that’s no excuse for sloppy work or bugs.

• It can do better, and we have the most splendid Kubuntu 17.04 as the golden benchmark from now on until the end of times, we few, we happy few, we band of geeks, for he who tests with me together, shall be my code brother, may his git ne’er be so vile, and the persons of all genders now in bed shall feel themselves accursed, and hold their VR sets cheap … I think you get the idea. I got carried away. Let’s summarize. KDE neon 5.12, fresh, cool, sleek, needs more apps, better package management, better overall peripheral support. But there’s a lot of potential and hope, and I think we will see cool things in Plasma this year. 7.5/10. Worth checking.

• It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a shiny stable-yet-bleeding-edge KDE Plasma distro!

• Since Calamares has to run all over the place, and is used in derivatives of all of the “Big Five” Linux distributions, I regularly switch distro’s as a development platform. Also because I inevitably blow up the VM while running Calamares, or because an update renders the system useless. At FOSDEM I had the pleasure of chatting with the folks from the SUSE stand about OpenQA and OBS.

• At the heart of every 3D application is geometry. Qt 3D-based 3D applications are no different and require the user to either generate geometry or provide asset files for Qt 3D to load. This blog post demonstrates how Blender and its Python API could be used to write an exporter that generates geometry for Qt 3D.

• KDE has received a $200,000 donation from the Pineapple Fund: “With this donation, the Pineapple Fund recognizes that KDE as a community creates software which benefits the general public, advances the use of Free Software on all kinds of platforms, and protects users’ privacy by putting first-class and easy to use tools in the hands of the people at zero cost.”

• The City Lights demo is an example of Qt 3D being put to novel use to implement a deferred rendering pipeline.

• We’ve just rolled out a significant and welcome policy change to KDE’s Bugzilla bug tracker: Everyone with an account may now edit any bug without prior permission. This means that every KDE Bugzilla user can now be a bug triager anytime they want!

• A new beta of Kdenlive the popular open source video editor is available for testing. The beta is based on a ‘refactored’ codebase and available as an App Image.

• There is an experimental branch of KDE’s KWin window manager / compositor with support for Vulkan compositing.

• Over the past week Fredrik Höglund has begun work on KWin Vulkan support so this low-level, high-performance graphics API could be used for compositing rather than OpenGL. So far he charted out a lot of the fundamental Vulkan code and the necessary infrastructure work along with some basic features like for being able to render window shadows and porting some other window effects over to Vulkan.

Distributions

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• AWS customers that are running SAP workloads on Suse Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications — a leading platform for SAP Hana and SAP S/4Hana — will get integrated and streamlined support from AWS and Suse under the agreement.

• AWS customers will be able to buy the Suse Linux Enterprise on demand, so they will pay only for what they use.

• “This isn’t an evolution, but a further support statement that showcases how this new relationship better enables AWS and Suse to deliver SAP solutions on AWS,” said Tom Hammond-Doel, AWS global alliance director.

Red Hat Family

• Part of Red Hat’s Open Source Stories initiative, CO.LAB is the latest Red Hat effort to highlight and share stories about how openness can be a catalyst for change. Red Hat has championed communities – both big and small – as we strive to build innovative technologies. And now, with Open Source Stories, we are sharing what happens when people defy convention and say to the world: “Take this. Build on it. Make it better.”

• The discipline of capacity management for Kubernetes/OpenShift clusters is just beginning. The intention of this article and the previous two of this series, was to provide some insight and some advice on how to approach capacity management. I believe that over time we will see better tools being created to simplify these tasks.

• Based on a July 2017 study sponsored by Red Hat…

• David Egts, chief technologist for Red Hat’s public sector, has said federal information technology leaders should take responsibility in ensuring the security of their agencies’ public cloud platforms.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today introduced Red Hat Decision Manager 7, a decision management platform that simplifies the development and deployment of rules-based applications and services. Red Hat Decision Manager 7 is the next generation of the company’s business rules management offering, Red Hat JBoss BRMS, and is designed to enable organizations to quickly build applications that automate business decisions.

• In August 2017, we polled a selection of Red Hat customers to learn more about their motivations for adopting business automation technologies and how they are using them, as well as the role these technologies play in respondents’ digital transformation initiatives.

• A special report produced by RTInsights in collaboration with Red Hat.

• [...]

• Worldwide IoT spending is projected to surpass $1 trillion in 2020, with annual growth of 15 percent over the next several years, according to market researcher IDC. IoT solution development benefits from a wide variety of advances across IT including the cloud, big data, mobile, social, and open source.

Finance

Fedora

• The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated 27 Live ISOs, carrying the 4.15.3-300 kernel.

Debian Family

• Software Heritage is the project for which I’ve been working during the past two and a half years now. The grand vision of the project is to build the universal software archive, which will collect, preserve and share the Software Commons.

• Today, we’ve announced that Software Heritage is archiving the contents of Debian daily. I’m reposting this article on my blog as it will probably be of interest to readers of Planet Debian.

• TL;DR: Software Heritage now archives all source packages of Debian as well as its security archive daily. Everything is ready for archival of other Debian derivatives as well. Keep on reading to get details of the work that made this possible.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• UBports devs announced today on Twitter that Canonical sent them a few old Ubuntu Phone devices to continue the development of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.

• Now that Canonical has ceased the development of its revolutionary Unity 8 user interface for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system used on smartphones from Meizu and BQ, the company decided to donate several devices to the UBports community.

• UBports is recreating Ubuntu Touch, maintaining, updating, and modifying its code to offer the world a free and open source mobile operating system for those who want to use something else than Android, iOS, and what else is still out there.

• Last year Canonical announced work on a new text-based server installer for Ubuntu. It’s come a long way over the past year and will be the default server installer with 18.04 LTS.

• Their new server installer dubbed “Subiquity” (Server Ubiquity, their default graphical desktop installer is named Ubiquity) is a bit more differentiating than the Debian text-based installer that Ubuntu Server has defaulted to up to this point.

• As you are aware, last year Canonical decided to stop the development of its futuristic Unity 8 desktop for Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS. Days after their sad announcement a few community members appeared interested in taking over the development of Unity 8, the most promising one being Yunit.

• However, the Yunit project didn’t manage to improve Unity 8 for desktops in the last few months as much as the community would have wanted, and, after a long battle, they decided to pass the baton to UBports team, which is announcing the initial build for devs and an official website for Unity 8.

• Linux is attracting a growing number of users to its enormous selection of distribution systems. These ‘distros’ are operating systems with the Linux kernel at their foundation and a variety of software built on top to create a desktop environment tailored to the needs of users.

• Ubuntu and Linux Mint are among the most popular flavours of these.

• Ubuntu’s name derives from a Southern Africa philosophy that can loosely be defined as “humanity to others”, a spirit its founders wanted to harness in a complete operating system that is both free and highly customisable.

• Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu and built as a user-friendly alternative with full out-of-the-box multimedia support. By some measures, Linux Mint has surpassed the popularity of its progenitor, but Ubuntu retains a loyal following of its own.

• Canonical has apparently partnered with Rigado, a private company that provides Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) modules and custom IoT gateways for them, as well as for Wi-Fi, LoRa, and Thread wireless technologies, to deploy its slimmed-down Ubuntu Core operating system across Rigado’s Edge Connectivity gateway solutions.

• “Rigado’s enterprise-grade, easily configurable IoT gateways will offer Ubuntu Core’s secure and open architecture for companies globally to deploy and manage their commercial IoT applications, such as asset tracking and connected guest experiences,” says Canonical.

• Lots of companies want to collect data about their users. This is a good thing, generally; being data-driven is important, and it’s jolly hard to know where best to focus your efforts if you don’t know what your people are like. However, this sort of data collection also gives people a sense of disquiet; what are you going to do with that data about me? How do I get you to stop using it? What conclusions are you drawing from it? I’ve spoken about this sense of disquiet in the past, and you can watch (or read) that talk for a lot more detail about how and why people don’t like it.

• So, what can we do about it? As I said, being data-driven is a good thing, and you can’t be data-driven if you haven’t got any data to be driven by. How do we enable people to collect data about you without compromising your privacy?

• Well, there are some ways. Before I dive into them, though, a couple of brief asides: there are some people who believe that you shouldn’t be allowed to collect any data on your users whatsoever; that the mere act of wanting to do so is in itself a compromise of privacy. This is not addressed to those people. What I want is a way that both sides can get what they want: companies and projects can be data-driven, and users don’t get their privacy compromised. If what you want is that companies are banned from collecting anything… this is not for you. Most people are basically OK with the idea of data collection, they just don’t want to be victimised by it, now or in the future, and it’s that property that we want to protect.

• Similarly, if you’re a company who wants to know everything about each individual one of your users so you can sell that data for money, or exploit it on a user-by-user basis, this isn’t for you either. Stop doing that.

Devices/Embedded

• For Purism, the company that sells quality computers using a Linux-based operating system and are intended to protect user’s privacy and freedom, designing a convergent Linux phone is a long-term goal to unify the mobile experience across various devices.

• Purism’s François Téchené shares some initial details on how the company plans to use convergence for their short and long-term design goals of Librem 5, the Linux smartphone that raised more than $2 million on Kickstarter last year, saying they’re looking to unify the human experience across different device you might own.

• Microchip unveiled an open source, mainline Linux ready “SAMA5D27 SOM” module based on a SiP implementation of its Cortex-A5-based SAMA5D27 SoC with 128MB RAM. The 40 x 38mm module is also available with a SOM1-EK1 dev board.

• Long before it was acquired by Microchip Technology, Atmel has been producing a line of Linux-focused, Cortex-A5 based SAMA5 SoCs, but the only Atmel-branded SAMA5 boards were its open-spec Xplained development boards developed with Newark Element14. The SAMA5 family was always a side business to Atmel’s MCU line, with very little integration between the two. With its ATSAMA5D27-SOM1 (SAMA5D27 SOM1) module, which uses a system-in-package (SiP) implementation of Microchip’s SAMA5D27 SoC, Microchip is starting to bridge the gap between the SAMA5 product line and its much larger RTOS/MCU business.

• The makers of the Gemini PDA plan to begin shipping the first units of their handheld computer to their crowdfunding campaign backers any day now. And while the folks at Planet Computer have been calling the Gemini PDA a dual OS device (with Android and Linux support) from the get go, it turns out the first units will actually just ship with Android.

• B&O and HiFiBerry have launched an open source, DIY “Beocreate 4” add-on for the Raspberry Pi that turns vintage speakers into digitally amplified, wireless-enabled smart speakers with the help of a 180-Watt 4-channel amplifier, a DSP, and a DAC.

• Bang & Olufsen has collaborated with HiFiBerry to create the open source, $189 Beocreate 4 channel amplifier kit. The 180 x 140 x 30mm DSP/DAC/amplifier board pairs with your BYO Raspberry Pi 3 with a goal of upcycling vintage passive speakers.

• Mentor announced a “Mentor Embedded IoT Framework” platform that builds on top of Mentor Embedded Linux with cloud-based IoT cloud services ranging from device authentication and provisioning to monitoring and diagnostics.

• Mentor’s Mentor Embedded IoT Framework (MEIF) extends its Yocto Project based Mentor Embedded Linux (MEL) and Nucleus RTOS development platforms to provide cloud services for IoT device management. The platform mediates between these platforms and cloud service backends, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Eclipse IoT, Microsoft Azure, and Siemens MindSphere.

Android

• We’ve heard of Android in the car, but how about Android on a scooter? Well, a French company, Archos, which primarily focuses on urban mobility, has today announced the ‘world’s first Android-powered electric scooter’. Dubbed the Citee Connect, the new urban transportation option will have an Android phone embedded into its handlebars.

Free Software/Open Source

• I sat down to write a post about my students’ experiences this term contributing to open source, and apparently I’ve written this before (and almost exactly a year ago to the day!) The thing about teaching is that it’s cyclic, so you’ll have to forgive me as I give a similar lecture here today.

• I’m teaching two classes on open source development right now, two sections in an introductory course, and another two in a follow-up intermediate course. The students are just starting to get some releases submitted, and I’ve been going through their blogs, pull requests, videos (apparently this generation likes making videos, which is something new for me), tweets, and the like. I learn a lot from my students, and I wanted to share some of what I’m seeing.

Events

• The next OpenStack Summit takes place again in Vancouver (BC, Canada), May 21-25, 2018. The “Vote for Presentations” period started. All proposals are up for community votes. The deadline for your vote is will end February 25 at 11:59pm PST (February 26th at 8:59am CET)

• The first-ever INDEX community event, happening now in San Francisco, is an open developer conference featuring sessions on topics including artificial intelligence, machine learning, analytics, cloud native, containers, APIs, languages, and more.

• 2017 was a fantastic year for the Che project, with more contributors, more commits, and more usage – this solidified Che’s position as the leading developer workspace server and browser IDE. Eclipse Che users logged over 7 million hours of public Che usage (plus more in private installs). We’ll discuss the growing cloud development market, Che’s position in it, and the exciting changes we’re planning for 2018.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Iridium is a web browser based on Chromium project. It has been customized to not share your data and thus keeping your privacy intact.

Mozilla

• When the Firefox team released Quantum in November 2017, they boasted it was “over twice as fast as Firefox from 6 months ago”, and Linux Journal readers generally agreed, going as far as to name it their favorite web browser. A direct response to Google Chrome, Firefox Quantum also boasts decreased RAM usage and a more streamlined user interface.

• A “screenshot” is created when you capture what’s on your computer screen, so you can save it as a reference, put it in a document, or send it as an image file for others to see exactly what you see.

• As you may already know, last Friday – February 16nd – we held a new Testday event, for Firefox 59 Beta 10.

• Thank you Mohammed Adam, Abhishek Haridass, Fahima Zulfath A. and Surentharan.R.A. from India QA Community team for helping us make Mozilla a better place.

• There are an awful lot of bugs filed against Firefox and all it’s components in the course of a release. Keeping on top of that is hard and some teams have adopted some policies to help with that (for example see: design-decision-needed).

• Having a consistent approach to bugs across the organisation makes it a little easier for everyone to get a feel for what’s going.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Last week, we talked with The Document Foundation’s marketing assistant Mike Saunders about the 1 million downloads milestone reached by the major LibreOffice 6.0 release in only two weeks after its launch, who told us that the team is already working on the next version, LibreOffice 6.1, due for release in August.

• LibreOffice 6.1 will be the first major update to the 6.x series of the office suite and will add yet another layer of new features and improvements to the open-source and cross-platform office suite used by millions of computer users worldwide, and we’d like you to be the first to know about them.

CMS

• February sees Open Source turn 20 years old. Or the OSI definition at least. According to the OSI, the term was coined in Palo Alto by nanotechnologist Christine Peterson during a meeting on February 3rd, 1998 shortly after the announcement of the release of Netscape’s source code.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• The Linux Foundation announced a new open source project, Akraino, intended to create an open source software stack supporting high-availability cloud services optimised for edge computing systems and applications. AT&T is backing the new project with code designed for carrier-scale edge computing applications running in virtual machines and containers to support reliability and performance requirements. The Akraino community, now forming, expects to release its open source project code in the second quarter.

Public Services/Government

• By identifying global trends and local needs, EOH is able to proactively source and secure capabilities that will assist with the adoption of the digital revolution. LSD’s offerings across Linux, automation, devops and containers is a great technology fit for EOH to lead open source in the market.

Licensing/Legal

• Continuously tracking your application’s dependencies for vulnerabilities and efficiently addressing them is no simple feat. In addition, this is a problem shared by all, and is not an area most companies would consider their core competency. Therefore, it is a great opportunity for the right set of tools to help tackle this concern.

• The use of Open Source Software (OSS) has become widespread. The latest statistics show that 78% of companies run OSS, and a number of mainstream software and hardware products are based on the OSS model – for example Android, Skype [sic], Firefox, Amazon Kindle, Tivo and BT Home Hub.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• The work involved sex trafficking cases in Latin America, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Select students in Marshall’s Open Source Intelligence Exchange program worked to provide open source intelligence collection and analysis for law enforcement and other clients. Open source refers to data collection from publicly available sources.

Open Access/Content

• The move toward “open access” to research and scholarship, far from being a modern digital-age creation, has roots in the West that date back to medieval times, writes a Stanford education scholar. John Willinsky’s new book explains how learning has long benefited from efforts to increase its circulation.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Over the past decade, open source software has been one of the biggest catalysts in the tech world. Today, the power of open source, the freedom it enables, and the communities that it generates are gaining traction in the hardware world too. For these reasons, RISC-V is gaining huge popularity. Here is an introduction to RISC-V and the opportunities it opens.

Programming/Development

• You’re a programmer who wants to test your python code on multiple different Python environments. What would you do? Install a specific python version and test your code and then uninstall that version and again install another different version and test code? No, wait! It is completely unnecessary. Say hello to Pyenv , an useful utility to manage multiple Python versions, simultaneously. It made the python version management easier than ever. It is used to install, uninstall and switch to multiple different versions of Python.

• As the world’s largest repository of open source projects, GitHub is in a unique position to witness what developers are up to. GitHub staff recently sifted through the site’s 2017’s data in order to identify top open source trends they predict will thrive in 2018.

• New languages, and improvements on existing ones, are mushrooming throughout the develoment landscape. Mozilla’s Rust, Apple’s Swift, Jetbrains’s Kotlin, and many other languages provide developers with a new range of choices for speed, safety, convenience, portability, and power.

• Why now? One big reason is new tools for building languages—specifically, compilers. And chief among them is LLVM (Low-Level Virtual Machine), an open source project originally developed by Swift language creator Chris Lattner as a research project at the University of Illinois.

• In recent years, it has become increasingly important to develop software that minimizes security vulnerabilities. Memory management bugs are a common cause of these vulnerabilities. To that end, the Mozilla community has spent the last several years building the Rust language and ecosystem which focuses primarily on eliminating those bugs. And Rust is available in Fedora today, along with a few applications in Fedora 27 and higher, as seen below.

• This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

• Google Summer of Code gives students an opportunity to make a substantive contribution to Open Source projects with the motto “Flip bits not burgers” has recruited more mentoring organizations than ever for its 13th year.

• The first thing I needed in my journey to learn COBOL was an IDE. I am a big supporter of coding in an integrated development environment (IDE). I like being able to write, test and run code all in one place. Also, I find the support features that an IDE provides, such as visual code structure analysis, code completion and inline syntax checking, allow me to program and debug efficiently.

• While Python 3 has been around now for a decade, most Linux distributions are still working towards moving away from Python 2 and that includes Intel’s Clear Linux distribution.

• Like with Ubuntu, Fedora, and others moving away their base packages from any Python 2 dependencies and moving them to Python 3, Clear Linux developers are working on the same. Arjan van de Ven of Intel provided an update on their Python 3 transitioning. By the end of 2018, but hopefully within the next six months, they hope to be at a point where their performance-oriented Linux distribution is “fully and only Python 3.”

Leftovers

• KFC said it first became aware of a problem in the software around a new computer ordering and delivery system on Friday.

• [...]

• The new regime is built around software developed by QSL, which is meant to ensure efficient delivery.

• Last week, KFC switched its delivery contract to DHL, which blamed “operational issues” for the supply disruption.

• [...]

• The distribution network uses software developed by the firm Quick Service Logistics (QSL).

Science

• Lead magnesium niobate (PMN) is a prototypical “relaxor” material, used in a wide variety of applications, from ultrasound to sonar. Researchers have now used state-of-the-art microscopy techniques to see exactly how atoms are arranged in PMN – and it’s not what anyone expected.

• “This work gives us information we can use to better understand how and why PMN behaves the way it does – and possibly other relaxor materials as well,” says James LeBeau, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of a paper on the work.

• AI could reboot industries and make the economy more productive; it’s already infusing many of the products we use daily. But a new report by more than 20 researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, OpenAI, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation warns that the same technology creates new opportunities for criminals, political operatives, and oppressive governments—so much so that some AI research may need to be kept secret.

• Every year since 2001 we’ve picked what we call the 10 Breakthrough Technologies. People often ask, what exactly do you mean by “breakthrough”? It’s a reasonable question—some of our picks haven’t yet reached widespread use, while others may be on the cusp of becoming commercially available. What we’re really looking for is a technology, or perhaps even a collection of technologies, that will have a profound effect on our lives.

Health/Nutrition

• Importance Dietary modification remains key to successful weight loss. Yet, no one dietary strategy is consistently superior to others for the general population. Previous research suggests genotype or insulin-glucose dynamics may modify the effects of diets.

• Objective To determine the effect of a healthy low-fat (HLF) diet vs a healthy low-carbohydrate (HLC) diet on weight change and if genotype pattern or insulin secretion are related to the dietary effects on weight loss.

• The UK Supreme Court last week heard patent case Warner Lambert v Generics, which concerns the drug pregabalin and the question of plausibility.

• The Delaware jury award of $2.54 billion to Merck from 2016 has been overturned after Chief Judge Stark found the patent on a drug used to treat hepatitis C was invalid

Security

• Just when you thought Windows 10 Mobile is dead, here’s Microsoft rolling out a new cumulative update for the platform as part of its February patching cycle.

• Windows 10 cumulative update KB4074592, which is also released on PCs running the Creators Update (version 1703) – phones have never received the Fall Creators Update, comes with little changes for mobile devices, though it does something that many users might notice.

• Microsoft doesn’t provide a separate change log for mobile and PC, so the release notes that you can find at the end of the article include all the improvements and security fixes that Microsoft included in KB4074592 for both platforms.

• Debian 7 Wheezy LTS period ends on May 31st and some companies asked Freexian if they could get security support past this date. Since about half of the current team of paid LTS contributors is willing to continue to provide security updates for Wheezy, I have started to work on making this possible.

• …remember to turn off your mobile device or leave it at home, you never know when it might ring or become part of a demonstration.

• A user was able to gain access to our LDAP database and has published the email addresses and names, as well as apparent password hashes, of anyone who has signed up to identity.mageia.org. However, the published hashes do not match those on record, and all capitalisation has been removed, so it is not clear that the actual passwords have been compromised. All of the passwords have since been reset as a security precaution. New rules have been added to prevent access to the LDAP server. The sysadmins are investigating how the fields were read, as the configuration should have specifically prevented this.

• The passwords stored by the Mageia LDAP server are hashed and salted, meaning that the full decryption of the password, if they have actually been leaked, into a human-usable format would require significant computing power for safe and complex passwords.

• While Elon Musk was busy planning how to launch his Tesla Roadster into the depths of space last month, a hacker was silently using Tesla’s computing power to mine an unknown amount of cryptocurrency.

• The unidentified attackers found their way in through cracks in Tesla’s cloud environment, according to a report issued by RedLock security on February 20. The miners were able to gain access via an unprotected Tesla Kubernete console—an open source system that manages applications. Included on this console were the access credentials to Tesla’s Amazon Web Service. Once they obtained access to the console, the attackers were able to run scripts that allowed them to stealthily mine cryptocurrency.

• InSpec is one of three open-source projects supported by Seattle’s Chef, alongside the flagship Chef project and Habitat. Like many enterprise technology startups, Chef is banking on attracting users of those projects to its commercial product, Chef Automate, which helps companies deploy applications across cloud services and on-premises infrastructure.

• Besides x86_64, we have seen Spectre mitigation work happen recently for ARM, POWER, and IBM s390, but no prominent MIPS activity to report until now.

• The Spectre Variant Two vulnerability affects P5600 and P6600 chips while as part of their mitigation strategy is a new LLVM patch that was just merged and introduces a -mindirect-jump=hazard switch. This is different from the Variant Two mitigation technique on x86 of Retpolines.

Defence/Aggression

• But he was asked to work in the plants that give materials for H-bombs, and as he said to his deputy when he decided not to do that, he said they have A-bombs. Now they’re building H-bombs, which he knew as he told me would be a thousand times more powerful than the A-bombs that triggered it. He said they’ll go right through the alphabet til they have Z-bombs they said.

• In the intervening 15 years, U.S. policy failures have resulted in ever-spreading violence and chaos that affect hundreds of millions of people in at least a dozen countries. The U.S. has utterly failed to bring any of its neo-imperial wars to a stable or peaceful end. And yet the U.S. imperial project sails on, seemingly blind to its consistently catastrophic results.

• Instead, U.S. civilian and military leaders shamelessly blame their victims for the violence and chaos they have unleashed on them, and endlessly repackage the same old war propaganda to justify record military budgets and threaten new wars.

• But they never hold themselves or each other accountable for their catastrophic failures or the carnage and human misery they inflict. So they have made no genuine effort to remedy any of the systemic problems, weaknesses and contradictions of U.S. imperialism that Michael Mann identified in 2003 or that other critical analysts like Noam Chomsky, Gabriel Kolko, William Blum and Richard Barnet have described for decades.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• More than five years ago, on two different continents and only days apart, an Australian woman and an Australian man entered indefinite detention.

• For the woman, a defense lawyer at the International Criminal Court, being arrested was a relatively brief but harrowing affair, punctuated by armed men, dark rooms and aggressive interrogation. For the man, a co-founder of WikiLeaks, detention continues, though some might say voluntarily.

• The lawyer, Melinda Taylor, would go on to represent the man, Julian Assange.

• Ms. Taylor, now 42, has earned a reputation for defending the rights of individuals condemned by the court of public opinion before they have set foot inside an actual courtroom. Her clients have included Mr. Assange and Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, a son of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the deposed Libyan strongman.

• In what has to be one of the more spectacularly craptastic court decisions in recent history, last week the UK’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court upheld an outstanding warrant for Julian Assange which stemmed from a 2010 Swedish investigation that has since been closed. Despite public outcry, two UN rulings in favor of Assange’s freedom, and the fact that it recently came to light that the UK encouraged Sweden to keep the investigation open despite the Swedish prosecutor’s desire to close it in 2012, it appears that the UK is still taking its marching orders from Washington regardless of the implications. Of course there’s no evidence (yet) showing that the US directly interfered in the court case and I could be astrosurfing better than an Intercept journalist high on a government prescription of shill-lax. But unlike Micah Lee, this story has some worthwhile evidence to back up its claim including the fact that the magistrate who denied Julian Assange his freedom and the ability to receive adequate health care last week is none other than Baroness Emma Arbuthnot, wife of Lord James Arbuthnot— the former chairman of Parliament’s Defence Select Committee.

• Journalist Randy Credico also pointed out that James Arbuthnot and his cronies acquired a massive defense contract with the UK government through a little known group called SC Strategy which is headed up by none other than the former Chief of M16, Sir John McLeod Scarlett, and the former Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Lord Alexander Carlile. In 2015, The Guardian reported that the elusive firm’s only known client at the time was Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund which perhaps isn’t all that surprising since that the Financial Times reported last year that Qatar, via the wealth fund, bought up a piece of Heathrow airport, the Shard skyscraper, a “portion” of the Canary Wharf financial district, and Harrods department stores. Apparently Qatar also bailed out Barclays bank because the only thing more comforting than one of the largest terrorist hotspots in the world investing about forty billion euros in your country is knowing that your country’s former Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation is in bed with them.

• Tuesday’s New York Times featured a humdrum personal profile of its own reporter, Maggie Haberman, whose only point of interest was an offensive comparison the White House reporter made between Michael Bloomberg’s 2001 run for mayor of New York City and Donald Trump’s run for president in 2016. In both cases, “an unprecedented form of terror in an election” resulted in an unlikely result. One was an Islamist terrorist attack that murdered over 3000 people; the other, some embarrassing campaign emails that may have damaged Clinton’s prospects over Trump. Same thing, really, right?

• A recent report in The Intercept says that California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher claimed to have told White House Chief of Staff John Kelly about a meeting he had last August with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In the meeting, Rohrabacher told The Intercept, Assange provided definitive proof—to him and his traveling companion, Charles Johnson—that Russia was not the source of Democratic Party communications leaked during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• High temperature records for Roanoke from the 1930s are very much in danger of being challenged or even toppled the next couple of days.

• Last summer, Ryan Coonerty, a county supervisor in Santa Cruz, got word that the neighboring county of San Mateo was about to take a bold step in adapting to climate change. Rising seas are already eroding San Mateo’s coast, and the county will need to spend billions of dollars on new sea walls and other infrastructure to protect itself in the years to come. So in July, San Mateo, along with Marin County and the city of Imperial Beach, sued 37 fossil fuel companies, arguing that they should help pay for the damage their products cause.

Finance

• Blockchain is the digital and decentralized ledger that records all transactions. (See the “Blockchain Simplified” video for more information.) Every time someone buys digital coins on a decentralized exchange, sells coins, transfers coins, or buys a good or service with virtual coins, a ledger records that transaction, often in an encrypted fashion, to protect it from cybercriminals. These transactions are also recorded and processed without a third-party provider, which is usually a bank.

• The usual civil service metaphor for Brexit is of a series of rocks. Each time you pick one up, all these horrible slimy things crawl out from under it – things you’d never have thought were remotely connected to Brexit. This is an article about the horrible slimy things under the rock named ‘aviation’.

• European aviation is fundamentally a British success story. It’s one of the best pieces of evidence for how Britain made the single market work for its services economy and helped make life better for passengers all over the continent in the process. But that success is now a hostage of Brexit. If the hard Brexiters in Cabinet get their way, Britain will turn back the clock on the last 30 years of development.

• This is how the system works. Aviation is governed by a series of treaties. The foundation text is the 1944 Chicago convention, which gave nation states sovereignty over their airspace. You can only fly to another country once you’ve signed an agreement with them. There’s no WTO option or fallback system. You either sign a treaty or you’re out in the cold.

• The British charity Oxfam has been hit with dozens more misconduct allegations involving a slew of countries, in the days since The Times of London revealed Oxfam tried to cover up sex crimes by senior aid workers in Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake. On Monday, Oxfam released its own internal report into the sex scandal, in which Oxfam senior aid workers, including the country director, hired prostitutes at Oxfam properties and then tried to cover it up. Prostitution is illegal in Haiti, but Oxfam refused to report the activity of its aid workers to Haitian police. Oxfam’s internal report also includes claims that three Oxfam staff members physically threatened a witness during the charity’s internal investigation. Haiti has threatened to expel Oxfam from the country. This is Haiti’s external cooperation minister, Aviol Fleurant.

• For 200 years, Remington has been one of the most famous names in guns, supplying arms to soldiers in the civil war, both world wars and to generations of gun enthusiasts. Now it has met its match: the gun-friendly presidency of Donald Trump.

• After a golden era of sales under Barack Obama, America’s gun manufacturers are in trouble. Sales have tumbled, leaving the companies with too much stock on their hands and falling revenues. The crunch claimed its biggest victim this week when Remington filed for bankruptcy.

• Peter Humphrey was jailed in Qingpu Prison just outside of Shanghai for two and a half years before he was deported from China. While he was incarcerated, the British fraud investigator – who (along with his wife, a fellow instigator) was convicted by a Shanghai court for “illegally acquiring personal information” on Chinese nationals – worked. He and his fellow prisoners were paid meager wages to make packaging parts for companies that you have heard of: H&M, international fashion chain, C&A and consumer products company, 3M.

• People who can’t afford to pay bills face arrest and jailing because of powerful money-hungry debt collectors.

• Denise Zencka, a mother of three in Indiana, had to file for bankruptcy because she couldn’t afford to repay her bills for treatment for thyroid cancer. And because she was unable to work, she had to stay with her parents in Florida while she recovered. She didn’t know that during that time, at the request of a debt collector seeking to collect outstanding medical bills, a small claims court judge had issued three warrants for her arrest. When she returned to Indiana, she was arrested by local sheriff’s deputies for the private debt she owed. Once at the jail, and being too sick to climb the stairs to the women’s section, she was held in a men’s mental health unit. Its glass walls allowed the male prisoners to watch everything she did, including using the toilet.

• As in Zencka’s case, and in thousands of other similar cases around the country, courts are issuing arrest warrants and serving as taxpayer-funded tools of the multi-billion-dollar debt collection industry.

• Debtors’ prisons were abolished by Congress in 1833. They are often thought to be a relic of the Dickensian past. In reality, private debt collectors are using the courts to get debtors arrested and to terrorize them into paying, even when a debt is in dispute or when the debtor has no ability to pay.

• Tens of thousands of arrest warrants are issued annually for people who fail to appear in court to deal with unpaid civil debt judgments. In investigating this issue for the new ACLU report, “A Pound of Flesh,” we examined more than 1,000 cases in 26 states, in which civil court judges issued arrest warrants for debtors. The debtors were often unaware that they had been sued. In many cases, they had not received notice to show up in court.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Russian police have reportedly arrested a man who has claimed to be a worker at a so-called troll factory in St. Petersburg, Russia, hours after he gave interviews to foreign journalists and lifted the lid on a secretive organization the U.S. Department of Justice last week accused of trying to undermine the 2016 presidential election.

• Stephen Spielberg’s film The Post is still running in theaters, lauding the Washington Post, Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee as fearless exposers of official secrets about government wrongdoing. But previously overlooked evidence now reveals for the first time how the Washington Post missed the most serious leak in newspaper history, and as a result history itself took a serious wrong turn. Consequently, this is a story that was also missed by Spielberg, and missed by Alan Pakula in his 1976 film about The Washington Post’s role in Watergate, All The President’s Men.

• After special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians for an intensive, elaborate effort to interfere with the 2016 elections, President Donald Trump reacted as he has before — with bluster and bellicosity, at everyone but Russia.

• This week on “Trump, Inc.,” we’re exploring the president’s, well, persistent weirdness around Russia: Why has Trump been so quiet about Russia and its interference?

• Billy Graham was a preacher man equally intent on saving souls and soliciting financial support for his ministry. His success at the former is not subject to proof and his success at the latter is unrivaled. He preached to millions on every ice-free continent and led many to his chosen messiah.

• When Graham succumbed to various ailments this week at the age of 99 he left behind an organization that is said to have touched more people than any other Christian ministry in history, with property, assets and a name-brand worth hundreds of millions. The address lists of contributors alone comprise a mother lode for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, now headed by his son and namesake, William Franklin Graham, III.

• Graham also left behind a United States government in which religion plays a far greater role than before he intruded into politics in the 1950s. The shift from secular governance to “In God We Trust” can be laid squarely at this minister’s feet.

• Last week, we wrote about the Mueller indictment of 13 Russians and three Russian organizations for fraud in trying to sow discord among Americans and potentially influence the election by trolling them on social media. If you haven’t read the indictment yet, I recommend doing so — or at least reading Garrett Graff’s impressive attempt at basically turning the indictment into one hell of a narrative story. The key point I raised in that article was that the efforts the Russians undertook to appear to be American shows how difficult-to-impossible it would be to demand that the various internet platforms magically block such trolling attempts in the future.

• But, there’s a larger issue here that seems worth exploring as well. Among the various attacks aimed at social media companies (mainly Facebook) it feels that many are using this as yet another excuse to demand more regulation of these platforms or to poke more holes in Section 230 of the CDA.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The development of Vietnam’s Internet infrastructure has outpaced the government’s ability to regulate and control it. The best it can do is restrict access to certain sites. It has also deployed an army of people to closely monitor public sentiment on social media. In December, Vietnam unveiled a new, 10,000-strong military cyber unit to combat “wrong” views online, a move that was apparently modeled on the Chinese route of controlling the Internet.

• That’s a pretty amazing story, which certainly could be true. After all, just a few years later there was the famous NY Times article about how companies were courting state Attorneys General to attack their competitors (which later came up again, when the MPAA — after reading that NY Times article — decided to use that strategy to go after Google). And Blumenthal had a long history as Attorney General of grandstanding about tech companies.

• But, for all the fascinating reporting in the piece, what’s troubling is that Thompson and Vogelstein get some very basic facts wrong — and, unfortunately, one of those basic facts is a core peg used to hold up the story. Specifically, the article incorrectly points to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as being a major hindrance to Facebook improving its platform. Here’s how the law incorrectly described in a longer paragraph explaining why Facebook “ignored” the “problem” of “fake news”…

• There is evidence to support a claim that the mission to censor criticism of China is moving into the American workplace. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese have been students in the United States, and many move into jobs for American companies after graduation. But as China acquires American companies, existing and newly hired Chinese employees may feel both emboldened and pressured to incorporate a culture of censorship into the new entity.

• Last year I gave a publicly listed American company a series of seminars on Chinese business, social, legal, and cultural norms and expectations. The audiences were primarily American-born employees, although many Chinese employees attended the sessions, as well. Some were relatively new hires; a few had been in the United States for years. The reason for the seminars? The company is being acquired by a Chinese company in an acquisition that requires CFIUS approval. (For legal reasons, the company names will be withheld here.)

• A new law in Poland that threatens those who say that Poles played any part in the Holocaust with up to three years in prison will create an atmosphere of “inner censorship” for the country’s historians, reminiscent of its communist past, critics have warned.

• Poland has been internationally condemned over the law, which some historians say attempts to whitewash broad swathes of Polish history.

• A federal court judge has barred California’s legislation requiring that subscription entertainment database sites remove an actor’s age, if requested by the actor.

• U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria issued the ruling on Tuesday. IMDb filed a lawsuit in November of 2016, attempting to invalidate AB 1687. IMDb — a subsidiary of Amazon — had contended in its suit that the law, which applies only to subscription sites such as IMDb Pro, was unconstitutional.

• The defendants are Secretary of State Xavier Becerra and SAG-AFTRA, which joined the suit as a defendant after campaigning vigorously for the law in 2016.

• Everyone knows about censorship that has been perpetuated throughout history: the USSR, the Nazis, South African Apartheid, Chairman Mao’s China, the Kim Jung family in North Korea, etc. The United States is certainly not innocent in this regard either — the early 1900s race riots, Civil Rights-era violence, the systematic extermination of native populations, and much, much more has been downplayed and sometimes completely omitted from American history.

• The decision of one of government parastatals, to start monitoring the activities of its employees on the social media is spreading fears of censorship of the media and its practitioners.

• Germany’s new law, targeting hate speech and other unpleasantness online, is off to a roaring start. Instead of cleaning up the internet for German consumption, the law has been instrumental in targeting innocuous posts by politicians and taking down satirical content. The law is a bludgeon with hefty fines attached. This has forced American tech companies to be proactive, targeting innocuous content and satire before the German government comes around with its hand out.

• It took only 72 hours for the new law (Netzwerkdurchsezungsgesetz, or NetzDG) to start censoring content that didn’t violate the law. Some German officials have expressed concern, but the government as a whole seems content to let more censorship of lawful content occur before the law is given a second look. The things critics of the law said would happen have happened. And yet the law remains in full effect.

• From the 1920s through the early ’50s, most entertainment in Memphis was at the mercy of a guy named Lloyd T. Binford, the chairman of the city’s Board of Censors. Binford banned scores of movies from being shown in Memphis simply because he personally found them distasteful and even refused to allow the staging of plays featuring a racially diverse cast.

• In the 1970s, an over-jealous federal prosecutor pressed obscenity charges against the makers of X-rated films. Roughly a decade later, city leaders tried to shut down topless nightclubs with an anti-nudity ordinance that was later ruled unconstitutional.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The government’s antipathy towards FOIA requesters is well-documented. Our last president declared his White House to be the Openest Place on Earth. This was followed by a clampdown on FOIA responses, huge increases in withheld documents, and a war on whistleblowers. The Trump Administration has made no such promises. Good thing, too, as the uncontrollable mouth running the country would make these promises impossible to keep. We’re living in a halcyon era of unprecedented, if inadvertent, government transparency. Whatever multitudinous leakers won’t provide, the president will hand over himself via Twitter or televised interviews.

• Late last year, Trump handed plaintiffs in two FOIA lawsuits a gift when he undercut an FBI Glomar response (“neither confirm nor deny”) by confirming FBI investigations (and FISA court involvement) in domestic surveillance. Trump has done it again, thanks to approving the release of the Nunes memo. Again, FOIA requesters seeking information about FBI domestic surveillance have been handed a gift by the Commander in Chief, as Politico reports.

• Picture this: You’re driving home from work, contemplating what to make for dinner, and as you idle at a red light near your neighborhood pizzeria, an ad offering $5 off a pepperoni pie pops up on your dashboard screen.

• Are you annoyed that your car’s trying to sell you something, or pleasantly persuaded? Telenav Inc., a company developing in-car advertising software, is betting you won’t mind much. Car companies—looking to earn some extra money—hope so, too.

• With more and more people attacking online trolls, one common refrain is that we should do away with anonymity online. There’s this false belief that forcing everyone to use their “real name” online will somehow stop trolling and create better behavior. Of course, at the very same time, lots of people seem to be blaming online social media platforms for nefarious activity and trollish activity including “fake news.” And Facebook is a prime target — which is a bit ironic, given that Facebook already has a “real names” policy. On Facebook you’re not allowed to use a pseudonym, but are expected to use your real name. And yet, trolling still takes place. Indeed, as we’ve written for the better part of a decade, the focus on attacking anonymity online is misplaced. We think that platforms like Facebook and Google that use a real names policy are making a mistake, because enabling anonymous or pseudononymous speech is quite important in enabling people to speak freely on a variety of subjects. Separately, as studies have shown, forcing people to use real names doesn’t stop anti-social behavior.

• All that is background for an interesting, and possibly surprising, ruling in a local German court, finding that Facebook’s real names policy violates local data protection rules. I can’t read the original ruling since my understanding of German is quite limited — but it appears to have found that requiring real names is “a covert way” of obtaining someone’s name which raises questions for privacy and data protection. The case was brought by VZBZ, which is the Federation of German Consumer Organizations. Facebook says it will appeal the ruling, so it’s hardly final.

• Just yesterday we heard about an Android 9.0 feature that would prevent idle background apps from accessing the camera. The move could prevent unauthorized use of the device’s camera to record video clips of the user’s environment.

• There are lots of ways companies can deal with those who cheat in online video games. We have seen developers and publishers sue those who cheat, we have seen national governments criminalize this kind of cheating, and we even got to see Rockstar’s attempt to force cheaters to only play with other cheaters. While these sorts of efforts vary wildly, the common response from game publishers is to be entirely too ham-fisted in keeping cheaters out of online games. This results in all sorts of problems, ranging from punishing players who weren’t actually cheating to creating all kinds of collateral damage.

• Facebook’s definition of protection isn’t quite up to snuff. Last week, some Facebook users began seeing a new option in their settings simply labeled “Protect.” Clicking on that link in the company’s navigation bar will redirect Facebook users to the “Onavo Protect – VPN Security” app’s listing on the App Store. There, they’re informed that “Onavo Protect helps keep you and your data safe when you browse and share information on the web.” You’re also informed that the “app helps keep your details secure when you login to websites or enter personal information such as bank accounts and credit card numbers.” [source: imgur.com]

• Having already released the memo purportedly showing surveillance abuses committed by the FBI, the legislators behind the release are now getting around to asking for documents to back up the memo’s assertions. Bob Goodlatte and Devin Nunes have both asked the FISA court for the paperwork they probably should have looked at before writing and releasing the memo.

• Nunes has asked for “transcripts of relevant FISC hearings” related to the FISA warrants predicated largely on assertions made in Steele dossier. Goodlatte has asked applications and orders for the same warrants. The FISA court has replied with two letters stating basically the same thing: thanks for the weird (and inappropriate) question, but maybe take this up the FBI.

• One of Winner’s lawyers tells NewsChannel 6 there will be a hearing on February 27th.

• During that hearing, her lawyers are expected to question one of the FBI investigators who worked the case when Winner was arrested.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In the coming decades, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies are going to transform many aspects of our world. Much of this change will be positive; the potential for benefits in areas as diverse as health, transportation and urban planning, art, science, and cross-cultural understanding are enormous. We’ve already seen things go horribly wrong with simple machine learning systems; but increasingly sophisticated AI will usher in a world that is strange and different from the one we’re used to, and there are serious risks if this technology is used for the wrong ends.

• Today EFF is co-releasing a report with a number of academic and civil society organizations1 on the risks from malicious uses of AI and the steps that should be taken to mitigate them in advance.

• In 1987, police detectives — who’d later be made famous by David Simon, creator of “The Wire” — used flimsy evidence to pin a burglary, rape and murder case on James Thompson and James Owens. They were both sentenced to life in prison. Then, 20 years later, DNA evidence cleared them of the rape and unraveled the state’s theory of the crime. But instead of exonerating the two men, prosecutors pushed them to plead guilty to the crime in exchange for immediate freedom.

• It shouldn’t take an appeals court to reach this conclusion, but that’s the route taken most frequently by people challenging their convictions. Former sheriff’s deputy Matthew Corder doesn’t want to serve time after being convicted of depriving Derek Baize of his constitutional rights, and so we’ve ended up at the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. (h/t Sixth Circuit Blog)

• This all stems from a “contempt of cop” incident. Baize returned home one night to find Deputy Corder parked in his parking spot in front of his home. Baize asked what was going on, only to be told to “mind his own business.” Baize then asked the deputy to move his car so Baize could park in front of his house. The deputy said he’d move his car “when he was ready.”

• Nonplussed by the behavior of this supposed public servant, Baize told the deputy to “fuck off.” Deputy Corder asked for clarification. Baize responded: “I did not stutter. I said ‘fuck off.’” Baize then walked into his house. Corder claimed he yelled for Baize to stop. Baize said he didn’t hear this. It really doesn’t matter. Citizens are under no legal obligation to engage in conversations with law enforcement officers. The deputy’s testimony indicates Baize wasn’t committing any crime nor was he wanted for a suspected criminal act when he walked away from the yelling deputy.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The good news is that billions of people got access to amazing technologies, many of which were free to use. The bad news is that it became much harder for startups, creators, and other groups to grow their internet presence without worrying about centralized platforms changing the rules on them, taking away their audiences and profits. This in turn stifled innovation, making the internet less interesting and dynamic. Centralization has also created broader societal tensions, which we see in the debates over subjects like fake news, state sponsored bots, “no platforming” of users, EU privacy laws, and algorithmic biases. These debates will only intensify in the coming years.

• [...]

• We saw the value of decentralized systems in the first era of the internet. Hopefully we’ll get to see it again in the next.

• We contacted the specialist first thing in the morning, and he had no idea why the domain was suspended; he said he would contact the .sm registry but with one complication: the San Marino .sm registry office was now closed so it might take until the next day for them to respond to the email! Because their office was closed, he said all he could do is put the ticket in the queue of the team on the next support shift—that’s right, the same team out of Ireland we originally contacted. Because their office hours mirrored the San Marino office hours, he assured us they would get to it first thing in the morning their time.

• The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is expected to publish on Thursday its December order overturning the landmark Obama-era net neutrality rules, two sources briefed on the matter said Tuesday.

• The formal publication in the Federal Register, a government website, means state attorneys general and advocacy groups will be able to sue in a bid to block the order from taking effect.

• The Republican-led FCC in December voted 3-2 to overturn rules barring service providers from blocking, slowing access to or charging more for certain content. The White House Office of Management and Budget still must sign off on some aspects of the FCC reversal before it takes legal effect.

• Large ISP lobbyists, the FCC and agency head Ajit Pai are going to be rather busy for the foreseeable future. In the wake of the agency’s extremely unpopular net neutrality repeal, consumer groups note that 26 states (27 including a new effort in Kansas) have now taken action to protect net neutrality themselves — with more efforts on the way. The efforts range from attempts to pass state-level net neutrality rules banning anti-competitive behavior, to executive orders modifying state procurement rules to prohibit ISPs that violate net neutrality from getting state money or securing state contracts.

DRM

• Every three years, EFF’s lawyers spend weeks huddling in their offices, composing carefully worded pleas we hope will persuade the Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress to grant Americans a modest, temporary permission to use our own property in ways that are already legal.

• Yeah, we think that’s weird, too. But it’s been than way ever since 1998, when Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, whose Section 1201 established a ban on tampering with “access controls for copyrighted works” (also known as “Digital Rights Management” or “DRM”). It doesn’t matter if you want to do something absolutely legitimate, something that there is no law against — if you have to bypass DRM to do it, it’s not allowed.

• What’s more, if someone wants to provide you with a tool to get around the DRM, they could face up to five years in prison and a $500,000 fine, for a first offense, even if the tool is only ever used to accomplish legal, legitimate ends.

• One of the reasons Microsoft is pushing so aggressively for developers to bring their apps and games to the Microsoft Store on Windows 10 is that with the UWP approach, they can target more than one platform at the same time, including PCs, mobile phones, tablets, Xbox, and HoloLens.

Intellectual Monopolies

• In preparing for the Evil Twin Debate on the DTSA, David Levine (Elon) and Chris Seaman (Washington & Lee) were kind enough to share a draft of their empirical study of cases arising under the first year of the Defend Trade Secrets Act. Now that the article is forthcoming in Wake Forest Law Review and on SSRN, it only makes sense to share their latest draft.

Copyrights

• A new bill has been tabled in Sweden that triples the maximum prison sentence for infringement of the copyright monopoly, such as using ordinary BitTorrent, to a maximum of six years in prison.

• Typical imprisonment time for crimes varies across the world, so talking in terms of prison years becomes apples and oranges. In order to understand the perceived severity of a crime, and the harm this bill does to society, we need to compare it to another crime in the same jurisdiction.

• And in this particular jurisdiction, the maximum penalty for copyright infringement becomes as harsh as the maximum penalty for involuntary manslaughter, if this new crazy bill passes — which it very well might. (The maximum sentence in question is six years in prison, which is a light sentence by US standards, but among the harshest in Europe and the Nordics.)

• In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and profoundly changed the relationship of Americans to their property.

• Section 1201 of the DMCA bans the bypassing of “access controls” for copyrighted works. Originally, this meant that even though you owned your DVD player, and even though it was legal to bring DVDs home with you from your European holidays, you weren’t allowed to change your DVD player so that it would play those out-of-region DVDs. DVDs were copyrighted works, the region-checking code was an access control, and so even though you owned the DVD, and you owned the DVD player, and even though you were allowed to watch the disc, you weren’t allowed to modify your DVD player to play your DVD (which you were allowed to watch).

• Experts were really worried about this: law professors, technologists and security experts saw that soon we’d have software—that is, copyrighted works—in all kinds of devices, from cars to printer cartridges to voting machines to medical implants to thermostats. If Congress banned tinkering with the software in the things you owned, it would tempt companies to use that software to create “private laws” that took away your rights to use your property in the way you saw fit. For example, it’s legal to use third party ink in your HP printer, but once HP changed its printers to reject third-party ink, they could argue that anything you did to change them back was a violation of the DMCA.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.