● 03.17.18

● Links 17/3/2018: Varnish 6, Wine 3.4

Posted in News Roundup at 12:37 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Every year, Stack Overflow conducts its developer survey and shares its results with the public for analysis. Expanding its reach, this year over 100,000 developers took part in the 30-minute survey and told how they learn new technologies, which tools they use to get their work done, and what they look for while hunting some job.

• Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing the different findings of the survey with you and telling you how it compares to the past years’ trends. Today, I’ll be telling you about the platforms that were most commonly used by the developers over the past year.

• Running a small business is no easy task. The last thing you need is extra complexity in your IT infrastructure – so why turn to Linux?

• Well, it could (if you’re lucky) actually turn out to be a less complex choice for many tasks, depending on the distribution you select. And, critically, Linux is free; at least if you don’t figure in support costs. That’s an overhead ticked off the list.

Server

• One of the main advantages of embracing containers is “lightweight virtualization.” Since each container is just a thin layer around the containerized processes, the user gains enormous efficiencies, for example by increasing the container density per host, or by spinning containers up and down at a very fast pace.

• However, as the troubleshooting story in the article will show, this lightweight virtualization comes at the cost of sharing the underlying kernel among all containers, and in some circumstances, this can lead to surprising and undesirable effects that container users typically don’t think about.

• This troubleshooting tale is rather involved. I’ve started from the basics and worked up to the more complex material in the hope that readers at all levels can get value out of it.

• It’s that time of March again, and Varnish 6.0.0 is here.

Kernel Space

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation recently unveiled ACRN (pronounced “acorn”), a new open source embedded reference hypervisor project that aims to make it easier for enterprise leaders to build an Internet of Things (IoT)-specific hypervisor.

• The project, further detailed in a press release, could help fast track enterprise IoT projects by giving developers a readily-available option for such an embedded hypervisor. It will also provide a reference framework for building a hypervisor that prioritizes real-time data and workload security in IoT projects, the release said.

• Today, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept NATS as an incubation-level hosted project, alongside Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, CNI, Envoy, Jaeger, Notary, TUF, Rook and Vitess.

• The P4 Language Consortium is becoming a project of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and, by extension, a project of the Linux Foundation to which the ONF belongs. The P4 Consortium has been a non-profit organization dedicated to writing the P4 programming language since 2013.

• P4 describe how packets are forwarded by networking devices such as switches, routers, and network interface cards (NICs). P4 takes software-defined networking (SDN) to the next level by bringing programmability to the forwarding plane.

• “Linux Foundation is thrilled to welcome the P4 community,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at Linux Foundation. “Networking is a major focus at the foundation and the addition of the thriving P4 community combined with Linux Foundation Networking Projects in similar domains will drive innovation in networking to the next level.”

• The Linux Foundation announced the ACRN embedded reference hypervisor project at the Embedded Linux Conference earlier this week. ACRN is an open-source framework consisting of two components: a hypervisor and device model, including rich I/O mediators. The small-footprint hypervisor was designed with real-time and safety-critical requirements in mind, and is based on significant contributions from Intel.

• In just 2 weeks, you could be one of 2,000 architects, developers, and thought leaders from over 300 companies coming together to drive the future of networking integration, acceleration and deployment.

Graphics Stack

• Since the introduction of the AMDGPU DC display code (formerly known as DAL) in Linux 4.15, this modern display stack has just been enabled by default for newer Radeon Vega and Raven Ridge devices. With Linux 4.17 that is changing with AMDGPU DC being enabled by default across the board for supported GPUs.

• Building off the earlier DRM-Next material for Linux 4.17, Alex Deucher minutes ago sent in another round of feature updates for targeting this next kernel cycle. This latest batch has continued code refactoring around PowerPlay, support for fetching the video RAM type from the video BIOS, allowing the TTM memory manager to drop its backing store when not needed, DC bandwidth calculation updates, enabling DC backlight control for pre-DCE11 GPUs, various display code fixes, and other bug fixes.

• Michel Dänzer of AMD issued bug-fix updates on Thursday for the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-amdgpu DDX drivers.

• Just two weeks after the AMDGPU 18.0 X.Org driver release as the first version under their new year-based versioning scheme, the 18.0.1 bug-fix release is out. The xf86-video-amdgpu 18.0.1 DDX update fixes a potential infinite loop after a xorg-server reset in some configurations, Xorg crashing when multiple primary screens are configured, and using the TearFree feature could trigger Pixman library debugging spew.

• While waiting for Mesa 18.0, the Mesa 17.3.7 point release will soon hit stable users of this open-source, user-space graphics stack.

• Daniel Schürmann continues hacking on the sub-group patch-set for the RADV Vulkan driver to expose this important feature of the recent Vulkan 1.1 release.

Applications

• As the digital age progresses, the amount of data we produce each year is snowballing. There was a time when we could fit all of our personal digital data on a few floppy disks, but many of us now have hundreds of gigabytes, or even terabytes, of photos, videos, music, and documents that we need to backup and protect. Backing up our data locally is essential, but any good backup plan should also include off-site backups. “The Cloud” has promised us unlimited, cheap storage where we can save our ever-growing data. Online cloud backups should be a part of your overall backup plan, but it’s crucial that your data is secure, encrypted, and backed up automatically. Here are a few online backup tools that aim to make cloud backups easy for desktop Linux users.

• Lector a new open-source Qt-based ebook app for Linux desktops.

• It supports most common DRM-free ebook files, including EPUB, MOBI, and AZW, as well as comic book files in the CBZ or CBR format.

• In both visuals and in features Lector is something of a page-turner; a desktop ebook reader you can absolutely judge by its cover.

• So join me as I take a closer look at its features.

• Roundcube 1.3.5 was released today and with it, I’ve released version 1.3.5 of my fr_FEM (French gender-neutral) locale.

• This latest version is actually the first one that can be used with a production version of Roundcube: the first versions I released were based on the latest commit in the master branch at the time instead of an actual release. Not sure why I did that.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 3.4 is now available.

• The latest bi-weekly release of Wine is now available for running your favorite or necessary Windows programs/games on Linux and macOS.

• Wine 3.4 is this latest release and it’s significant for continuing to land the “WineVulkan” code. This does include the latest Wine Vulkan patches as of yesterday including the first bits of apps/games working and integration with the X11 driver.

Games

• During a recent livestream, the DayZ [Steam] developers mentioned Linux and a few people went wild. Sadly, they meant this in relation to dedicated servers, but the door remains open.

• That’s right, The 25th Ward: The Silver Case [GOG, Steam] the follow up title to The Silver Case which gained Linux support in an update to the remastered version last year. This time around, we saw day-1 support.

• Like the previous game, The 25th Ward: The Silver Case is actually a remaster made with completely rebuilt HD assets and this is the first time the game has been available outside of Japan, it also includes new content not found in the original release.

• Chris Wilson of Intel’s Linux graphics driver team posted a big set of 36 patches on Wednesday for their DRM kernel driver.

• The 36 patches conclude with supporting per-context user requests for GPU frequency control. Basically it’s for allowing games or applications — like multimedia programs — to opt-in to trying to select/request their GPU frequency rather than leaving it up to the driver. In performance-sensitive situations like games or video playback, this may be beneficial for delivering a more desirable experience if the application/engine has the logic for better determining how fast/slow of a GPU it can get by with for processing.

• It seems Croteam will be doing a talk at GDC this year and it sounds like it’s going to be quite interesting, with it being centred around getting games to perform smoothly. The talk will be presented by the Croteam CTO, Alen Ladavac.

• The sweet and relaxing animal sim RPG Cattails [Steam, Official Site] just had a big update, with a highly requested feature to let you build up your own colony.

• Kerbal Space Program: Making History Expansion [GOG, Steam] is the first expansion for the amusing rocket-building sandbox game and it adds some pretty decent content.

• It’s certainly no secret I’m impressed with Starmancer [Kickstarter], the Dwarf Fortress inspired space station sim. It has a Linux demo and the funding is still coming in, the stretch goals they’ve reached sound fantastic.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This week saw many positive changes for Discover, and I feel that it’s really coming into its own. Discover rumbles inexorably along toward the finish line of becoming the most-loved Linux app store!

• The Qt Company has some new software development releases available in time for weekend testing.

• First up is the Qt Creator 4.6 Release Candidate. Qt Creator 4.6 has been working on better C++17 feature support, Clang-Tidy and Clazy warnings are now integrated into the diagnostic messages for the C++ editor, new filters, and improvements to the model editor.

• LibAlkimia is a base library that contains support for financial applications based on the Qt C++ framework.

• One of its main features is the encapsulation of The GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library (GMP) and so providing a simple object to be used representing monetary values in the form of rational numbers. All the mathematical details are hidden inside the AlkValue object.

• Elisa is a music player developed by the KDE community that strives to be simple and nice to use. We also recognize that we need a flexible product to account for the different workflows and use-cases of our users.

• We focus on a very good integration with the Plasma desktop of the KDE community without compromising the support for other platforms (other Linux desktop environments, Windows and Android).

• We are creating a reliable product that is a joy to use and respects our users privacy. As such, we will prefer to support online services where users are in control of their data.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.28 “Chongqing” is here, with many new features and fixes. According to the release notes, “the release incorporates 25832 changes, made by approximately 838 contributors.” The new version includes personal organization improvements, new Boxes features, such as automatic downloading of operating systems, and much more.

• This is something of a frequently asked question, as it comes up every once in a while. The pkg-config documentation is fairly terse, and even pkgconf hasn’t improved on that.

Distributions

Reviews

• SwagArch sounds like an interesting concept. The aesthetic side of things is reasonable, although brown as a color and a dark theme make for a tricky choice. The fonts are pretty good overall. But the visual element is the least of the distro’s problems. SwagArch 18.02 didn’t deliver the basics, and that’s what made Dedoimedo sad.

• Network support plus the clock issue, horrible package management and broken programs, those are things that must work perfectly. Without them, the system has no value. So you do get multimedia support and a few unique apps, however that cannot balance out all the woes and problems that I encountered. All in all, Swag needs a lot more work. Also, it will have a tough time competing with Manjaro and Antergos, which are already established and fairly robust Arch spins. Lastly, it needs to narrow down its focus. The overall integration of elements is pretty weak. Eclectic, jumbled, not really tested. 2/10 for now. Let’s see how it evolves.

New Releases

• We’re excited to announce the release of Zorin OS 12.3. This version focuses on strenghtening the fundamentals of the operating system that contribute towards Zorin OS’s unique user experience: simplicity, security, and functionality.

• OSMC’s March update is ready with a wide range of improvements and fixes to keep your OSMC device running in tip-top shape. We’ve released this update slightly earlier in the month than usual to add support for the new Raspberry Pi 3 B+.

Red Hat Family

• Kavit Majithia is joined in the studio at MWC18 by Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat. Discussion topics included Red Hat’s $250 million acquisition of CoreOS and the challenges facing the open-source software market.

• Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst at #MWC 2018 Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, has revealed at Mobile World Congress 2018 that why telecom operators are looking for open source software platforms.

• The US-based open source technology company shared details why Japan’s NTT Docomo and ARSAT, a government-owned telco in Argentina, are using Red Hat.

Finance

Fedora

• As part of Anokha Tech Fest, a 2 day FOSS workshop was hosted in Amrita School of Engineering on 22nd and 23rd of February along with a Fedora Release party on the second day. Around 40 people from various years and disciplines attended the event to learn about Linux, Open source and Fedora in general.

• Episode 003 of the Fedora Podcast is now available. In Episode 003 features developer and software architect Langdon White from the Fedora Modularity team. Langdon also leads the Fedora Modularity objective. Langdon is a passionate technical leader with a proven success record architecting and implementing high-impact software systems. In the podcast, Langdon defines Modularity in the Fedora context, explains the issues that can be solved with it, as well as describing the process to help with this important project. You can read more about the Fedora Modularity objective over in their Pagure project.

• On February 27th, the Fedora Community in Nicaragua ran a Release Party for the F27 Release. The activity took place in a salon of Hotel Mansión Teodolinda in Managua. This is our first activity of the year. This event was late in the Fedora Development Schedule because the Fedora 28 release is coming soon this year, but we need to keep the community active and keep promoting the Fedora Four Foundations in Nicaragua. The event schedule was…

Debian Family

• Having grown up on the internet long before the average connection speed made music streaming services viable, streaming has always struck me as wasteful. And I know that doesn’t make much sense—it’s not like there’s a limited amount of bandwidth to go around! But if I’m going to listen to the same audio file five times, why not just download it once and listen to it forever? Particularly if I want to listen to it while airborne and avoid the horrors of plane wifi. Or if I want to remove NSFW graphics that seem to frequently accompany mixes I enjoy.

• With these changes, after building a package, you just need to type dput (in the correct directory of course) to sign and upload it.

• In my journey to find an internship opportunity through Google Summer of Code, I wanted to give input about the relationship between a mentor and an intern/apprentice. My time as a service manager in the automotive repair industry gave me insight into the design of these relationships.

Derivatives

• TeX Live 2017 has been frozen and we have entered into the preparation phase for the release of TeX Live 2018. Time to update also the Debian packages to the current status.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Ubuntu minimal image has been reduced in size for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver release. Ubuntu devs have reduced the images to just 28MB.

• Ahead of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS next month the Mir developers are working to release Mir version 0.31.

• The focus of the upcoming Mir 0.31 release is on MirAL version 2.0 and Wayland XDG-Shell support. MirAL 2.0 takes a ABI/API cleansing for this Mir abstraction layer to assist in writing code for Mir. This does result in some simplification for users of MirAL.

• This is the fifth (and final) blog post in this series about creating your first robot with ROS and Ubuntu Core. In the previous post we discussed methods of control, did a little math, and wrote the ROS driver for our robot. But it still required several nodes to be running at once, and sharing it with the world involved uploading your source code somewhere and convincing people to install ROS, build your package, and use it. Today we’re going to simplify both of those issues by discussing ROS launch files, and packaging everything we’ve written as a snap that can be installed by your friends with a few keystrokes, even without knowing anything about ROS.

• We’ve had a busy few weeks, and so this email is a roll up of what’s been going on in Desktopland. Last week we had a team sprint in Budapest where we got to work side by side with our teammates and colleagues across Canonical. Feature Freeze has now passed and we’re working on fixing as many bugs as we can. We still have some additional features to land, and so we will be requesting Feature Freeze Exceptions for those. Meanwhile, here’s a recap of what’s been going on:

• On the Monday of the project teams gathering in Dublin a now somewhat familiar gathering of developers and operators got together to discuss upgrades – specifically fast forward upgrades but discussion over the day drifted into rolling upgrades and how to minimize downtime in supporting components as well. This discussion has been a regular feature over the last 18 months at PTG’s, Forums and Ops Meetups.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint’s GNOME/GTK-derived Cinnamon Desktop Environment will soon be able to launch applications faster.

• Developers of Linux Mint were recently investigating why application launching on Cinnamon felt slower than with desktops / window managers on MATE and Xfce. With a basic test they were able to confirm their feelings and went to work on figuring out the slowdowns.

Devices/Embedded

• NXP’s “EdgeScale” suite of secure edge computing device management tools help deploy and manage Linux devices running on LSx QorIQ Layerscape SoCs, and connects them to cloud services.

• NXP has added an EdgeScale suite of secure edge computing tools and services to its Linux-based Layerscape SDK for six of its networking oriented LSx QorIQ Layerscape SoCs. These include the quad-core, 1.6GHz Cortex-A53 QorIQ LS1043A, which last year received Ubuntu Core support, as well as the octa-core, Cortex-A72 LS2088a (see farther below).

• In honor of Pi Day, Chaim Gartenberg and I cooked up a tiny little Raspberry Pi project for yesterday’s episode of Circuit Breaker Live.

• We started with a simple concept: a button that says “Why?” when you press it, in honor of our favorite podcast. So we knew we’d need a button, some sound files, a little bit of Python code, and, of course, a Raspberry Pi.

• A new Pi is $35, but we found an old Raspberry Pi 2 in my desk drawer, which was up to the task. (Newer Pis have built-in Wi-Fi and faster processors, but for our simple button project we didn’t need internet or extra horsepower.)

• Aaeon’s automotive-focused “VPC-5600S” networked video recorder PC runs Linux or Windows on 7th Gen Core chips and offers dual hot-swappable SATA trays and 6x to 10x GbE ports, with 4x to 8x of those supporting PoE.

• Aaeon has launched a rugged VPC-5600S network video recorder (NVR) embedded computer with up to 10x Gigabit Ethernet ports, of which up to 8x support Power-over-Ethernet (PoE). Together with the Linux and Windows supported Intel 7th Gen “Kaby Lake” CPUs, the capability enables users to “receive the highest quality images from multiple sources without any danger of data loss,” says Aaeon. With the additional four USB 3.0 ports, the VPC-5600S can support up to 14x high-grade surveillance cameras, says the Asus-owned company.

• FCO’s Linux-ready “SmartMod” box PC offers a 7th Gen Intel Core CPU, SATA and mSATA, 5x USB, 6x serial, 3x mini-PCIe, dual display support, and 6x GbE ports, four of which have PoE.

Tizen

• Whats happening in the world of Tizen Smartphones? Well, not really that much of late, but that’s probably another post for another time.

• For the last year we have kept a close eye on the Tizen App ecosystem and today we bring you the Top 20 Apps downloaded from the Tizen Store during February 2018 for the Samsung Z1, Z2, Z3, and Z4 mobiles. New entries in the Top 20 are 99 Apps, Hill Driver, Balloon shoot, Music Press MX Music Player, and Jio TV. The rest are the usual suspects. Anyone that has been following this list knows not much really changes from month to month at the moment on the store.

Android

• Download managers are designed to give users great control over their downloads. Some manager apps can accelerate download speeds by downloading from multiple sources at a time. A stock Android download manager usually comes pre-installed on devices by default. But, these default download managers might provide slow downloading speeds and, generally, do not have advanced features like queuing or resuming paused downloads.

• The good news is that the next version of Google’s Android smartphone software, Android P, has a feature to shrink your photos to half the size of an ordinary JPEG. The bad news is that it’s not guaranteed every phone will actually be able to use it.

Free Software/Open Source

• Univa is looking to the open source community to help evolve its Navops Launch platform for enterprises migrating high-performance computing (HPC) workloads to the cloud. The open source efforts will run under the Project Tortuga banner, with access available through an Apache 2.0 license model.

• Rob LaLonde, general manager and vice president for Navops at Univa, explained that the open source plan will focus on general purpose cluster and cloud management frameworks. This includes the ability to automate the deployment of clusters in local on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid-cloud configurations. These will be applicable to applications like HPC, big data frameworks, Kubernetes, machine learning, and deep learning environments.

• Univa, a leading innovator in on-premise and hybrid cloud workload management solutions for enterprise HPC customers, announced the contribution of its Navops Launch (née Unicloud) product to the open source community as Project Tortuga under an Apache 2.0 license to help proliferate the transition of enterprise HPC workloads to the cloud.

• People use smartphones for lots of different reasons. Some folks like to browse the web. Some like to listen to music. Some like to spend infinite money on bad mobile games. And some people even still like to make phone calls. But one of the biggest selling points of a modern phone is the quality of its camera. Gone are the dark ages of blurry flip-phone images. Phones these days can take pictures professional enough to be screened in theaters or advertised in subway stops. And manufacturers are always looking to get an edge on the competition.

• Private Internet Access, a company best known for its VPN Service of the same name, announced today that it started the process of releasing all of its software as open source.

• The company plans to release all of its client-side programs, extensions and libraries as open source over the course of the next six month period.

• Today marks the start of an exciting shift over here at Private Internet Access. As long-time supporters of the Free and Open Source Software community, we have started the process of open sourcing our software, and over the next six months we will be releasing the source code for all our client-side applications, as well as libraries and extensions.

• Popular VPN provider Private Internet Access has unveiled plans to make all of their VPN software open source. In the coming six months the company plans to release the source code to all of their client-side apps and well as various other extensions.

• Private Internet Access made the announcement in a blog posting on the company website in which they announced the opening of a repository with the source code of their Google Chrome extension. That repository can be accessed via GitHub now. More will become available on an ad-hoc basis over the coming months.

• Minister of Science, Energy and Technology, Dr. Andrew Wheatley today outlined the Government of Jamaica’s intention to pursue greater use of Open Source Software as part of its thrust to transform ICT within government while at the same time reducing the attendant costs associated with the use of proprietary software.

• Guided by recommendations outlined in an Open Source Policy Framework report which was completed in late 2016, Minister Wheatley stated that “It is clear that there are huge benefits to be gained from greater use of open source software by developing countries like Jamaica and we intend to take a more active approach to incorporation of these types of software across government.”

• Minister Wheatley in speaking about recurrent enterprise agreements with Microsoft, IBM and other proprietary software vendors said “ for a very long time we have been confined by the strictures and high costs of the license regimes of proprietary software offerings and we will now, in keeping with goals of our Vision 2030 plan, make the move to unleash the innovative capacity of our country by leading the way in the adoption of open source platforms”

• In the world of distributed systems, hosting and scaling dedicated game servers for online, multiplayer games presents some unique challenges. And while the game development industry has created a myriad of proprietary solutions, Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto open-source, common standard for building complex workloads and distributed systems across multiple clouds and bare metal servers. So today, we’re excited to announce Agones (Greek for “contest” or “gathering”), a new open-source project that uses Kubernetes to host and scale dedicated game servers.

• Fuchsia first popped up on the tech world’s radar in mid-2016, when an unannounced open source project from Google appeared on the GitHub repository. According to initial inspection by the technology press, it was designed to be a “universal” operating system, capable of running on everything from low-power smartwatches to powerful desktops. That potentially includes phones, tablets, laptops, car electronics, connected appliances, smarthome hardware, and more.

• Move over musicians, AI is here. Google’s ‘NSynth’ neural network is designed to take existing sounds and combine them using a complex, machine learning algorithm. The result? Thousands of new musical sounds, and an instrument you can play them on.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Stand by for FPR6 Security Parity Release 1 due to the usual turmoil following Pwn2Own, in which the mighty typically fall and this year Firefox did. We track these advisories and always plan to have a patched build of TenFourFox ready and parallel with Mozilla’s official chemspill release; I have already backported the patch and tested it internally.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Red Hat’s David Malcom has outlined some of the usability improvements coming with the imminent release of GCC 8.

• The free software community encompasses the globe, and we strive to make the LibrePlanet conference reflect that. That’s why we livestream the proceedings of the conference, and encourage you to participate remotely by both watching and participating in the discussion via IRC.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Italian 3D printing company Felfil has made available its Felfil Evo filament extruder, initially the subject of a Kickstarter back in 2015. The extruder is available in basic (€299, $369), complete (€599, $738), and assembled (€719, $886) versions.

• Dr. Tarek Loubani spent some time working in hospitals in the Gaza Strip during the worst of the chaos and violence that is unfortunately still going on there. Due to a long-standing blockade, medical supplies were scarce in the region – so scarce that doctors could often not find a stethoscope when they needed one. So Dr. Loubani came up with his own solution – he 3D printed a stethoscope, for about 30 cents.

• Joshua Pearce, a prolific engineer at Michigan Tech, has been working on developing an affordable metal 3D printing technology. The project involves hacking a CNC router kit and an metal inert gas (MIG) welder to create a low-cost GMAW metal 3D printer.

• One of the most outspoken advocates of open source philosophy in the 3D printing industry is Dr. Joshua M. Pearce, Associate Professor, Materials Science & Engineering and Electrical & Computer Engineering for Michigan Technological University (Michigan Tech).

Programming/Development

• HHVM 3.25 is released! This release contains new features, bug fixes, performance improvements, and supporting work for future improvements. Packages have been published in the usual places.

• Facebook developers working on the HHVM Hack/PHP language stack have released version 3.25 of the HipHop Virtual Machine.

• HHVM 3.25′s PHP support now defaults to PHP7 rather than the PHP5 mode, which is now in an unsupported state. As expressed previously, Facebook will be focusing more on their Hack language support than PHP7 thanks to all the upstream improvements with PHP 7 especially on the performance front. But the large compatibility with PHP7 will happen to continue at least for the time being. With HHVM 3.25 includes support for PHP7 Throwable/Error/Exception hierarchy, changes to visibility modifiers, and other compatibility work.

• Developer Q&A site Stack Overflow performs an annual survey to find out more about the programmer community, and the latest set of results has just been published.

• Programmers can be potentially identified from the low-level machine-code instructions in their software executables by AI-powered tools.

• That’s according to boffins from Princeton University, Shiftleft, Drexel University, Sophos, and Braunschweig University of Technology, who have described how stylometry can be applied to binary files.

• That’s kinda bad news for people who wish to develop software, such as privacy-protecting apps, anonymously, as this technology can be used to potentially unmask them. It’s also kinda good news for crimefighters trying to identify malware authors.

• Every year in New York City, a few thousand young men come to town, dress up like Santa Claus, and do a pub crawl. One year during this SantaCon event, I was walking on the sidewalk and minding my own business, when I saw an extraordinary scene. There was a man dressed up in a red hat and red jacket, and he was talking to a homeless man who was sitting in a wheelchair. The homeless man asked Santa Claus, “Can you spare some change?” Santa dug into his pocket and brought out a $5 bill. He hesitated, then gave it to the homeless man. The homeless man put the bill in his pocket.

• In an instant, something went wrong. Santa yelled at the homeless man, “I gave you $5. I wanted to give you one dollar, but five is the smallest I had, so you oughtta be grateful. This is your lucky day, man. You should at least say thank you!”

• [...]

• I still get angry at people on the internet. It happened to me recently, when someone posted a comment on a video I published about Python co-routines. It had taken me months of research and preparation to create this video, and then a newcomer commented, “I want to master python what should I do.”

Standards/Consortia

• The growing adoption of software-defined networking over the past several years has given a boost to makers of networking white boxes. The separation of the network operating system, control plane and network tasks from the underlying proprietary hardware meant that organizations could run that software on white-box switches and servers that are less expensive than those systems from the likes of Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

• Network virtualization technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network-functions virtualization (NFV) have proven to be a particular boon for hyperscale cloud providers like Google and Facebook and telecommunications companies like AT&T and Verizon, which are pushing increasingly massive amounts of traffic through their growing infrastructures. Being able to use less expensive and easily manageable white boxes from original design manufacturers (ODMs) has helped these organizations keep costs down even as demand rises.

Leftovers

• Most of us tackle our email inboxes in different ways, ways that (we think) are unique to us.

• Me: I keep my email neatly organised using labels, groups and filters. It is both superficially efficient, but somewhat practical too. Depending on the source, sender or topic some email will end up read sooner than others — hopefully in the right order!

• Others — and I bet there’ll be more than a couple among you reading this — simply cannot bear the thought of having unread email left loitering about. Their aim: fastidiously work their way down to inbox zen aka zero, treating their unread mail as a to-do list of sorts in the process.

• At least four people died Thursday when a pedestrian bridge collapsed near Florida International University, Miami-Dade County Fire Chief Dave Downey said.

• At least eight cars were crushed under the bridge and at least nine people were transported to hospitals for treatment, authorities said.

• “The most important thing we can do right now is pray for the individuals who ended up in the hospital, for their full recovery, and pray for the family members who lost loved ones,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott said Thursday night.

• This is a catastrophe. It was totally unnecessary. It was preventable. Multiple people had to make multiple unsound judgments to make it happen. They need to rot in jail if not to be killed. The bridge would have worked as planned if it were made of steel only, not concrete. The bridge would have worked as planned if the reinforcements had been suspended and anchored properly. Instead, lives have been lost, useful technology will be forever linked to disaster, and the life-saving passage across a busy road will be delayed a year or more. How many more will have to die because of this crime?

Health/Nutrition

• The Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) this week launched a campaign to ask the University of California to drop its pursuit of a patent on the prostrate cancer drug Xtandi in India in order to make it affordable for patients. Xtandi sells at “exorbitant” rates in the United States, they said, a seeming violation of the licensing guidelines of the publicly funded University of California system which guarantees an “appropriate” return on taxpayer investments.

• Political and economic shifts have modified the post-war world order, and global health governance has to adapt to this new environment, speakers said at an academic event in Geneva this week. Among the changes: with the decline of United States funding for global health, new actors such as China and India could take leadership roles, they said.

Security

• Canonical published two security advisories on Thursday to announce the availability of Spectre mitigations for the ARM64 (AArch64) hardware architecture on its Ubuntu 17.10 and Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS systems.

• In January, Canonical released several kernel updates for Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) and other supported Ubuntu releases with software mitigations against the Spectre and Meltdown security vulnerabilities. These patches were first released for 64-bit (amd64) architectures, and then for 32-bit (i386), PPC64el, and s390x systems.

• Today, the company announced the availability of new kernel updates that address both the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities for the ARM64 (AArch64) hardware architecture, patching the Raspberry Pi 2 kernel for Ubuntu 17.10, as well as its derivatives.

• The Red Hat community has patiently awaited a retpoline kernel implementation that remediates CVE-2017-5715 (Spectre v2) and closes all Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that have captured headlines this year.

• Red Hat’s initial fixes rely upon microcode updates for v2 remediation, a decision that leaves the vast majority of AMD64-capable processors in an exploitable state. Intel’s new microcode has proven especially problematic; it performs badly and the January 2018 versions were plagued with stability issues that crashed many systems. It is a poor solution to a pressing problem.

• t’s not the first time an image has been used to give a victim malware, but it may be the first time it’s been used so narrowly. According to the security firm Imperva, their StickyDB database management system (DBMS) honeypot has uncovered an attack that places malware, which cryptomines Monero, on PostgreSQL DBMS servers. Its attack vector? An image of Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson.

• Now, you might ask, “How many PostgreSQL DBMS servers are out there on the internet to be attacked?” The answer: “More than you’d expect.” A Shodan search revealed almost 710,000 PostgreSQL servers ready to be hacked. It appears there are so many of them because it’s way too easy, especially on Amazon Web Services (AWS), to set up PostgreSQL servers without security.

• The debate whether law enforcement agencies should be given exclusive access to iOS-powered Apple devices started when the FBI was unable to unlock San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone. Eventually, FBI found other ways to get inside Apple’s secured digital fortress, through an Israel-based company called Cellebrite.

• In the latest news, we have come across about a new iPhone unlocking device called GrayKey that can be used by law enforcement guys to harvest passcode of an iPhone and other iOS-powered devices such as iPads and iPods.

• A list for protecting yourself and others from the most common and easiest-to-pull-off security crimes.

• I spend a lot of time giving information security advice, such as why RMF (Risk Management Framework) is too top-heavy for implementing risk management practices in small or R&D-focused organizations, what the right Apache SSL settings really are or how static analysis can help improve C code. What I’m asked for the most though isn’t any of those things; it’s the everyday stuff that even non-technical people can do to protect themselves from the looming but nebulous threat of an information security accident.

Defence/Aggression

• So many girls being kidnapped at once seemed like an anomaly, but four years later, more girls have been reported missing following a Boko Haram attack on a town in Nigeria. On February 19, Boko Haram militants stormed the town of Dapchi, and following the attack, parents compiled a list of 110 girls missing from a school in the town, as reported by the Associated Press. Boko Haram is a religious extremist group that believes Nigeria is run by “nonbelievers” too closely aligned with the West.

• In this op-ed, Salvadoran Estefani Alarcon explains how those outside of the United States have been impacted by MS-13, with some even being forced to move from home.

• In 13 years of running my blog I have never been exposed to such a tirade of abuse as I have for refusing to accept without evidence that Russia is the only possible culprit for the Salisbury attack. The abuse has mostly been on twitter, and much of the most venomous stuff has come from corporate and state media “journalists”. I suppose I am a standing rebuke to them for merely being stenographers to power and never doing any actual research, but that hardly explains the visceral levels of hatred exhibited.

• Today they are all terrifically happy and sharing amongst themselves a lengthy twitter thread by a Blairite and chemist called Clyde Davis in which they all say I am “owned” and my article disproven. There are two remarkable things about this thread.

• The first remarkable thing is the remarkably high percentage of those who are sharing it with commendations who are mainstream media journalists. Last I saw was George Monbiot five minutes ago, but there are dozens. I suppose it is important to them as validating their decision to support uncritically the government line without doing any actual journalism.

• Over the last year and a half, Americans have been bombarded with the Gish Gallop claims of Russiagate. In that time, the most reckless comments have been made against the Russians in service of using that country as a scapegoat for problems in the United States that were coming to a head, which were the real reasons for Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016. It has even gotten to the point where irrational hatred against Russia is becoming normalized, with the usual organizations that like to warn of the pernicious consequences of bigotry silent.Acceptable Bigotry and Scapegoating of Russia

• I have now received confirmation from a well placed FCO source that Porton Down scientists are not able to identify the nerve gas as being of Russian manufacture, and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so. Porton Down would only sign up to the formulation “of a type developed by Russia” after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed as a compromise formulation. The Russians were allegedly researching, in the “Novichok” programme a generation of nerve agents which could be produced from commercially available precursors such as insecticides and fertilisers. This substance is a “novichok” in that sense. It is of that type. Just as I am typing on a laptop of a type developed by the United States, though this one was made in China.

• To anybody with a Whitehall background this has been obvious for several days. The government has never said the nerve agent was made in Russia, or that it can only be made in Russia. The exact formulation “of a type developed by Russia” was used by Theresa May in parliament, used by the UK at the UN Security Council, used by Boris Johnson on the BBC yesterday and, most tellingly of all, “of a type developed by Russia” is the precise phrase used in the joint communique issued by the UK, USA, France and Germany yesterday:

• When the same extremely careful phrasing is never deviated from, you know it is the result of a very delicate Whitehall compromise. My FCO source, like me, remembers the extreme pressure put on FCO staff and other civil servants to sign off the dirty dossier on Iraqi WMD, some of which pressure I recount in my memoir Murder in Samarkand. She volunteered the comparison to what is happening now, particularly at Porton Down, with no prompting from me.

• The nerve agent that poisoned the Russian spy Sergei Skripal was planted in his daughter’s suitcase before she left Moscow, intelligence agencies now believe.

• Senior sources have told the Telegraph they are convinced the Novichok nerve agent was hidden in the luggage of Yulia Skripal, the double agent’s 33-year-old daughter.

• As a group of Vietnam War veterans and peace activists travel back to Vietnam to mark the 50th anniversary of the My Lai massacre, Amy Goodman and Juan González speak with three members of the delegation: Vietnam veteran Paul Cox, who later co-founded the Veterans for Peace chapter in San Francisco; Susan Schnall, former Navy nurse who was court-martialed for opposing the Vietnam War; and longtime activist Ron Carver, who has organized an exhibit honoring the GI antiwar movement at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• “With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know [sic] all of Adrian’s friends and acquittances that he is dead,” Lamo’s father wrote on Facebook . “A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son.”

• UK’s The Mirror reports a coroner for Sedgwick County, where Lamo lived, has confirmed his death. A cause of death has not been disclosed. Lamo was 37 years old.

• HACKER Adrian Lamo who turned Chelsea Manning in to the FBI, has died according to a Facebook post by a family member.

• Adrian Lamo, the prolific hacker who turned Chelsea Manning in to the FBI, has died according to a Facebook post by a family member.

• In the post Adrian’s father Mario Lamo wrote: “With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian’s friends and acquaintances that he is dead. A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son.”

• The coroner for Sedgwick County, where Lamo lived, confirmed his death, but provided no further details.

• Adrian Lamo became a controversial figure in the hacker community after he tipped off authorities after about Chelsea Manning providing the controversial combat video that became ‘Collateral Murder’ and 260,000 classified diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

• The hacker is best known for high-profile hacks of companies like Microsoft, and later for turning in Chelsea Manning to the FBI after receiving leaked documents from her.

• Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker best known for passing on information that led to the arrest of Chelsea Manning, has died aged 37.

• In online messaging conversations, Manning confided in him, describing confidential military material Manning had sent to Wikileaks.

• Hacker Adrian Lamo, who exposed Army whistleblower Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning, died today at the age of 37.

• Lamo’s father Mario announced the news in a Facebook post. A cause of death was not immediately clear.

• Known as the “Homeless Hacker,” Lamo led a transient lifestyle. But while his living arrangements weren’t fancy, his hacking skills were legendary.

• Lamo first came to prominence in 2002, when he broke into The New York Times‘ internal computer network, added his name to the internal database of expert sources and used the paper’s LexisNexis account to conduct research on high-profile subjects.

• More recently, however, Lamo was known for alerting the Army after whistleblower Chelsea Manning confided in him about leaking classified material to WikiLeaks. Lamo said he acted out of a sense of “duty,” but later expressed some regret for the decision, although he stood by it in later interviews. “A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone,” wrote Lamo’s father on Facebook.

• A neighbor who found his body said he had been dead for some time.

• Called the “world’s most hated hacker” by some at the time, Lamo also said: “Had I done nothing, I would always have been left wondering whether the hundreds of thousands of documents that had been leaked to unknown third parties would end up costing lives, either directly or indirectly.”

• Adrian Lamo, the computer hacker who passed on information that led to the arrest of Chelsea Manning, has died aged 37.

• His father Mario broke the news of his son’s death on Facebook.

• “With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian’s friends and acquaintances that he is dead. A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son,” Mario Lamo wrote in a post to the 2600: The Hacker Quarterly Facebook Group.

• Earlier this month Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney for Cook County, Illinois, which covers Chicago, released six years’ worth of raw data regarding felony prosecutions in her office. It was a simple yet profound act of good governance, and one that is all too rare among the nation’s elected prosecutors. Foxx asserted that “for too long, the work of the criminal justice system has been largely a mystery. That lack of openness undermines the legitimacy of the criminal justice system.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• More than 50 state bills that would criminalize protest, deter political participation, and curtail freedom of association have been introduced across the country in the past two years. These bills are a direct reaction from politicians and corporations to the tactics of some of the most effective protesters in recent history, including Black Lives Matter and the water protectors challenging construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock.

• If they succeed, these legislative moves will suppress dissent and undercut marginalized groups voicing concerns that disrupt current power dynamics.

• Efforts vary from state to state, but they have one thing in common: they would punish public participation and mischaracterize advocacy protected by the First Amendment.

Finance

• Multinational US technology companies like Google and Facebook will have to pay a 3% turnover tax in the EU, according to a draft proposal from the European Commission.

• Services that will be taxed are digital advertising, which would capture both providers of users’ data like Google, and companies offering ad space on their websites, like popular social media such as Facebook.

• The tax would be also be levied on online platforms offering “intermediation services,” a concept under which the Commission includes gig economy firms such as Airbnb and Uber. Digital market places, including Amazon, would also be within the scope of the levy.

• In the first effort to measure the cost of Cook County’s error-ridden assessment system under Assessor Joseph Berrios, a new study estimates that at least $2.2 billion in property taxes was shifted from undervalued Chicago homes onto overvalued ones between 2011 and 2015.

• Because the county’s assessment system is skewed in favor of high-priced homes, the errors amount to a staggering transfer of wealth that benefited Chicago’s most affluent homeowners at the expense of people who own lower-priced homes.

• The study, released Thursday by the Municipal Finance Center at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, was conducted by Professor Christopher Berry, a critic of the assessor’s office who testified at a County Board hearing in July about flaws in the county’s assessment system.

• A deal was signed giving all public employees in West Virginia a 5 percent pay raise, after a nine-day work stoppage by teachers and school staffers that shut down every school in the state. More than 20,000 teachers and 13,000 staffers walked out February 22, mainly over healthcare costs, despite the fact that they had no legal right to strike.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Laoxie had joined the ranks of the wangluo shuijun, or “internet water army.” China has innumerable organized groups of these unscrupulous paid posters, ready to inundate the [I]nternet for whoever is willing to cough up cash.

• [...]

• “Believe it or not, paid posters are extremely good at swaying public opinion,” says Laoxie, adding that others often follow water armies’ lead. “In many cases, lots of people don’t know anything about the celebrity, but when they see negative comments, they will jump on the bandwagon.”

• In 2002, the University of Houston built an online American Digital History site with a page on the 1924 convention. “Newspapers called the convention a ‘Klanbake,’ as pro-Klan and anti-Klan Democratic delegates wrangled bitterly over the party platform,” it declared, echoing Maeder’s language. Wikipedia’s entry for the 1924 Democratic convention added mention of the term — in its first sentence — in 2005, inserting a citation to the University of Houston article four years later. From there, “Klanbake” sneaked into scholarly histories, popular accounts and journalism on the right, left and center.

• And so a single, offhand historical footnote began to snowball in authority. On social media, that snowball became a weapon.

• The candidates for the presidency in Russia’s election this Sunday are now in the home stretch. Not much has changed in the past several weeks as regards the standings of each in the polls of voter sympathies. Vladimir Putin holds the lead, way out in front, with nearly 70% of voters saying they will cast their votes for him. The candidate of the Communist Party, Pavel Grudinin, has held on to second place, at just over 7% despite suffering some severe setbacks over revelations of his bank accounts held abroad. And third place, with just over 5% goes to the nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the LDPR.

• [...]

• One distinguishing feature of the debates was the absence of the President, who chose to neither participate in person, nor to send a proxy.

• As it turned out, the absence of Putin from these debates was entirely justified by the utterly unruly behavior and scandals at times during the series. Moreover, had the President or his representative been present he would have been the subject of attack from all seven challengers in unison, a very unfair situation for him and not very enlightening for the electorate.

• At the same time, it is very clear that those managing the incumbent’s campaign were exploiting every legal means to dominate, indeed to overwhelm all his opponents taken together with high quality viewer and listener time singing his praises and arguing for more of the same in the coming six years. These legal means included the delivery of his annual address to the Federal Assembly, the Russian equivalent to the State of the Union address of the American President, in the midst of the electoral campaign, on March 1. This gave Vladimir Putin two hours on all the airwaves to set out what is in effect a program for his next term.

• Another device used to put the President before the electorate in a privileged manner was the launch in the past week of two new, sophisticated and full-length documentary films about Vladimir Putin. One, entitled “World Order 2018” features the popular talk show host Vladimir Solovyov as Putin’s interlocutor or interviewer.

• But it is fair to criticize a movie for being a perfect example of a movie genre that consistently ignores the most essential themes of the American Frontier. “Hostiles” succeeds brilliantly as the latest addition to a very long list of movies that focus laser-like attention on hostile Frontier characters, rather than on the consequences of Frontier hostility.

• The American Frontier was not, as Hollywood formerly portrayed it, merely a canvas background prop for a violent soap box drama starring Cowboys & Indians – or, as more recently re-imagined, an ethnic melodrama featuring white Bad Guys versus Noble Indian resistance.

• Nor can the American Frontier be considered a particularly hostile place without expunging from history the slaughter-grounds of Cannae, Verdun, Stalingrad, or even America’s own Gettysburg – each of which produced more bloated corpses than any number of Wild Wests. In an encyclopedia of human violence, the massacres at the Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee would be relegated to a footnote.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Some of the biggest names in the U.S. entertainment industry have expressed a recent interest in a topic that’s seemingly far away from their core business: shutting down online prostitution. Disney, for instance, recently wrote to key U.S. senators expressing their support for SESTA, a bill that was originally aimed at sex traffickers. For its part, 20th Century Fox told the same senators that anyone doing business online “has a civic responsibility to help stem illicit and illegal activity.”

• Late last year, the bill the entertainment companies supported morphed from SESTA into FOSTA, and then into a kind of Frankenstein bill that combines the worst aspects of both. The bill still does nothing to catch or punish traffickers, or provide help to victims of sex trafficking.

• The U.S. Senate is poised to pass legislation that is intended to stop the internet from being used for sex trafficking — a worthy goal aimed at addressing a serious problem. However, the legislation known as the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or FOSTA, could harm the very people that it is intended to protect. The legislation also threatens the vibrancy of the internet as the world’s most significant marketplace of ideas, and it will inhibit its growth as a place of creativity and innovation.

• Proposals to address sex trafficking should not make workers in the sex trade more susceptible to violence and exploitation. FOSTA threatens the lives and safety of sex workers — people who are disproportionately LGBTQ and people of color. The legislation does this through a dangerously broad definition of “promotion of prostitution,” which is not limited to trafficking and could sweep in any trading of sex for money or other goods. The bill also creates a new, vaguely defined federal crime for the facilitation of prostitution which could result in a prison sentence of up to 10 years. FOSTA’s definition of “facilitation” is so open to interpretation that it could include critical harm reduction and anti-violence tactics that sex workers depend on to survive.

• Last month, Artspace Jackson Flats, an artists’ live-work facility in East Minneapolis, demanded that several works depicting nudes be removed from “Beauty in Every BODY,” an exhibition organized around the theme of body positivity curated by artist-in-residence Kristin Harsma.

• In response to the censorship, NCAC sent a letter to Artspace pointing out that if simple nudity was routinely considered grounds for excluding artwork from public exhibition, vast swathes of art, including many masterpieces, would be off limits.

• While the Egyptian government is notorious for censoring websites and platforms on national security grounds, there are no laws in force that explicitly dictate what is and is not permissible in online censorship. But if the draft law is approved, that will soon change. Article 7 of the anti-cybercrime law would give investigative authorities the right to “order the censorship of websites” whenever “evidence arises that a website broadcasting from inside or outside the state has published any phrases, photos or films, or any promotional material or the like which constitute a crime, as set forth in this law, and poses a threat to national security or compromises national security or the national economy.” Orders issued under Article 7 would need to be approved by a judge within 72 hours of being filed.

• The Advox Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in Internet rights around the world.

• Egyptian parliamentarians will soon review a draft anti-cybercrime law that could codify internet censorship practices into national law.

• While the Egyptian government is notorious for censoring websites and platforms on national security grounds, there are no laws in force that explicitly dictate what is and is not permissible in the realm of online censorship. But if the draft law is approved, that will soon change.

• Over the past four months, I’ve watched with dismay as the new Facebook algorithms have pretty much strangled the Brian Keene Facebook Page.

• Spoilers suck, sure, but this is the internet and some things cannot be avoided. Still, for those that produce content, there are better and worse ways to handle the issue of spoilers. Some large entertainment groups try to sue over spoilers, but it rarely works. Others settle for mere DMCA takedowns. Most entertainment groups, meanwhile, don’t do a damn thing about spoilers, because that’s the correct course of action.

• Still, even with that wide spectrum of past responses, sending legal threats to journalists over spoilers, such as the Lucha Underground wrestling show has done, is a new one for me. The legal threats rest on the NDAs the audience has to sign before attending a show.

• Law professor Danielle Citron — best known at Techdirt for her attacks on Section 230 immunity — has written a paper attacking Google, Facebook, etc., but not for the reasons you might think. Her paper [PDF] points out policy changes that have been made by several tech companies not in response to users or US government activity, but to get out ahead of increasing regulatory pressure in Europe. In the recent past, these platforms routinely defended the rights of everyone around the world to engage in free speech, even if that meant offending local governments. Now, with the internet headed towards enforced Balkanization backed by hefty fines, US companies are now routinely engaging in preemptive censorship of content perfectly legal in the US (and arguably legal elsewhere).

• You see, Cohen is also at the center of the whole Stormy Daniels mess. If you somehow have been under a giant rock for the past month or so, Cohen has admitted to paying $130,000 to Daniels (real name: Stephanie Clifford). As multiple places have reported, Daniels was apparently paid the money as part of an agreement to buy her silence over an affair she had with Donald Trump a decade or so ago. There are a huge list of important questions around all of this, including whether the whole thing violated campaign finance laws (which it very likely did).

• A big part of the fight is over whether or not Daniels can really tell her story. We’ve noted that Trump lawyers are threatening to go to court to stop CBS from airing an interview, while Daniels’ lawyers have argued that the agreement is not valid as Trump never signed it — while also offering to pay back the $130,000 to break the agreement (which… uh… is not exactly how it works). And I won’t even get into the hilariously meaningless “private” temporary restraining order that Cohen went to an arbitration firm to get, without even notifying Daniels.

• 189 members of the National Assembly reportedly voted in favour of the regulation of the distribution of online content, with 35 against and no abstentions.

• While government said that this move will help protect children from sexually explicit material, curb hate speech and revenge porn, opposing Members of Parliament (MPs) have reportedly criticised the legislation as a bid to regulate the internet.

• The next step is for the bill to come before the National Council of Provinces for its approval before it can be sent to President Cyril Ramaphosa to be signed into law. There has still not been any formal statement from the National Assembly or the Film and Publications Board.

• Law professor Danielle Citron — best known at Techdirt for her attacks on Section 230 immunity — has written a paper attacking Google, Facebook, etc., but not for the reasons you might think. Her paper [PDF] points out policy changes that have been made by several tech companies not in response to users or US government activity, but to get out ahead of increasing regulatory pressure in Europe. In the recent past, these platforms routinely defended the rights of everyone around the world to engage in free speech, even if that meant offending local governments. Now, with the internet headed towards enforced Balkanization backed by hefty fines, US companies are now routinely engaging in preemptive censorship of content perfectly legal in the US (and arguably legal elsewhere).

• In recent months, we have seen a dramatic and troubling rise in anti-Semitism across the globe. Even more alarming, it has spread after being promoted by leaders of far-right parties. Just this week, Vladimir Putin absurdly suggested that Jews could be behind his government’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. election. Comments like these make clear that the world needs to be vigilant against anti-Semitic rhetoric and actions, and to strengthen democratic institutions around the world. That’s why we are deeply concerned by Poland’s new Holocaust censorship law. We are calling on President Andrzej Duda, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and the National Assembly to repeal the law.

• A French court ruled Thursday that Facebook failed to fulfil its contractual obligations by closing without prior notice the account of a user who posted a photo of a famous 19th century nude painting.

• But the Paris civil court also refused to order the company to restore the account or pay damages as requested by the user, a primary school teacher and art lover. The court said no damages were warranted because he didn’t prove any harm suffered due to the account’s closure and there was no need to order the account reopened because he was able to set up a new account immediately.

• A French court on Thursday dismissed a case brought by a French teacher who wanted to sue the US social media giant over his claims that his page was censored when he posted a nude painting by Gustave Courbet.

• The Paris appeal court in December 2016 upheld a ruling that Facebook could be sued under French and not Californian law.

• Conservatives have fretted for months that Google, Twitter and Facebook use their power to stifle politically charged content. Now it’s a judge’s turn to weigh in.

• Google is seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit by a nonprofit maker of informational online videos called Prager University, which accuses the Alphabet Inc. unit of illegally restricting access on YouTube to its conservative messages.

• Silicon Valley’s social media giants are under attack from both the left and the right for not doing enough to police hate speech, terrorist propaganda and Russian election meddling. At the same time, conservatives including U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have questioned whether the increasing use of filters to restrict content has gone too far and threatens speech that isn’t dangerous.

• State Rep. Michelle DuBois of Brockton says the sign is “tone deaf” and “patriarchal,” and wants it changed to include the general’s first name or taken down.

• [...]

• There are all sorts of benign words in our language that sound like words unfit for polite company. And they offer us an opportunity to teach snickering kids about Civil War history or outer space – and about showing respect for others while avoiding making fools of ourselves.

• We will never erase casual immaturity from our culture, but we can make it a trigger for knowledge and understanding, if we put down the erasers and take up the challenge.

• Code-repository GitHub has raised the alarm about a pending European copyright proposal could force it to implement automated filtering systems – referred to by detractors as “censorship machines” – that would hinder developers working with free and open source software.

• The proposal, part of Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive from 2016, has been working its way through the legislative process.

• In a blog post on Wednesday GitHub explained that the shakeup was designed to address the perception that there’s a “value gap” between the money streaming-media platforms make from uploaded content and what content creators actually get paid.

• Our founders could not have foreseen the current political climate, one in which the media is constantly mocked and derided by government officials and their supporters, but this may be why they placed the freedom of the press so prominently in the Bill of Rights – to prevent the media from being censored or scorned.

• The First Amendment grants us the rights that we take for granted everyday: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

• [...]

• People deserve to have a working knowledge of the world around them, and the freedom of the press allows someone, every day, to become informed.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the new nominee to direct the NSA, faced questions Thursday from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about how he would lead the spy agency. One committee member, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), asked the nominee if he and his agency could avoid the mistakes of the past, and refuse to participate in any new, proposed spying programs that would skirt the law and violate Americans’ constitutional rights.

• “In 2001, then-President Bush directed the NSA to conduct an illegal, warrantless wiretapping program. Neither the public nor the full intelligence committee learned about this program until it was revealed in the press,” Wyden said. Wyden, who was a member of the committee in 2001, said he personally learned about the NSA surveillance program—which bypassed judicial review required from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—by reading about it in the newspaper.

• They use cameras to capture images of people and then run the photos through an algorithm that can compare them against a database of images.

• It is unclear when the face-scanning system was installed. The people familiar with the Garden’s use of the technology, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about it, said they did not know how many events at the Garden in recent months have used it or how the data has been handled.

• [...]

• “I should know if I am being subject to facial recognition if I am going into any business, including a stadium,” he said. “Even if you are just running my face against a list of people who have been banned from the premises and doing nothing else with it. I want to know. I have a right to know.”

• Supposedly completely of its own volition, Maryland’s court system has decided to extend extra rights to law enforcement officers. Going to bat for opacity, the Maryland Judiciary has made it harder for the public to find out what officers are doing (or how often they’re being sued). This comes against a backdrop where more sunlight would seem essential, what with several Baltimore police officers facing corruption charges in a wide-ranging investigation that has already netted a handful of convictions and guilty pleas.

• Maryland’s Judiciary on Friday defended a decision to remove the names of police officers and other law enforcement authorities from the state’s searchable public online court database, saying the change was made in response to “safety concerns raised by law enforcement.”

• The change took effect Thursday, following a decision by a judicial rules committee last June. Officers’ names no longer appear on cases they were involved with, and searches using an officer’s name cannot be performed.

• The judiciary did not answer questions about removing officers’ names but said in a statement that it reflected a balance of “the public’s interest in access to court information with our equally important obligation to protect personal identifying information about potential misuse.”

• Berkeley’s City Council voted unanimously this week to pass the Surveillance Technology and Community Safety Ordinance into law. (This is an earlier draft of the ordinance. We’ll update this link when the approved version is published.) Berkeley joins Santa Clara County (which adopted a similar law in June of 2016) in showing the way for the rest of California. In addition to considerable and unopposed spoken support during the public comment portion of the hearing, Mayor Jesse Arreguín reported that he and the City Council had received almost 200 letters and emails asking for the law to be adopted.

• EFF has long supported this ordinance. During this week’s public comment, Jason Kelley spoke not only as EFF’s digital strategist but as a local resident and community member. He shared that “my friends and I—many of whom live here—are concerned that surveillance tech might be purchased and used without proper oversight.”

• The ordinance, part of a nationwide effort to require community control of police surveillance, will address the concerns Kelley and so many in the community share. The new law will require that before acquiring surveillance technology, city departments submit use policies and acquisition reports detailing what will be acquired and how it works. These reports must also outline potential impacts on civil liberties and civil rights as well as steps to ensure adequate security measures safeguarding the data collected or generated.

• Given the sensitive nature of their work, lawyers need to take particular care when communicating online. One way to address this — quite reasonable, in theory — is to create a dedicated system with strong security built in. That’s the route being taken by Germany’s Federal Bar Association (Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer — BRAK) with its “besondere elektronisches Anwaltspostfach” (special electronic mailbox for lawyers, or beA). However, the reality has not matched the theory, and beA has been plagued with serious security problems.

• Authorities haven’t described the document. Winner’s arrest was announced the same day The Intercept reported on a classified NSA report on Russian hackers and the 2016 election.

• Just thinking about the prosecution here in Georgia of Reality Winner for a National Security Agency leak triggers “major flashbacks” for Thomas Drake.

• Seven years ago, Drake – a former senior NSA official — walked out of federal court a free man after the government, on the eve of his trial, dropped 10 charges accusing him of leaking classified information about fraud, waste and abuse in NSA surveillance programs to The Baltimore Sun.

• A federal judge has postponed the trial of a woman charged with leaking U.S. secrets to a news outlet.

• Former National Security Agency contractor Reality Winner is now scheduled to stand trial Oct. 15. Her trial was to start next week before U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Epps ordered the change Thursday.

• The delay allows more time for pretrial motions. Also pending is a ruling by the judge on whether Winner’s confession to FBI agents can be used as evidence.

• Winner worked for the national security contractor Pluribus International at Fort Gordon in Georgia when she was charged last June with mailing a classified U.S. report to an unidentified news organization.

• Authorities haven’t described the document. Winner’s arrest was announced the same day The Intercept reported on a classified NSA report on Russian hackers and the 2016 election.

• Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. LEARN MORE Have a confidential news tip? Get in touch with our reporters.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Legislators across the country are starting to rethink laws that tie driving privileges to the ability to pay fines, as evidence mounts that those laws disproportionately hurt poor and minority motorists.

• That’s beginning to happen, too, in Illinois, where state lawmakers introduced a bill last month — after a similar bill last year was unsuccessful — to end license suspensions for unpaid parking tickets.

• The legislation likely will face its biggest opposition from the City of Chicago, which generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually from tickets and uses the threat of license suspensions as leverage against indebted drivers. Ticket debt sends thousands of motorists into bankruptcy each year, ProPublica Illinois reported last month.

• Under Trump, asylum seekers are being illegally locked up without due process.

• Ansly Damus has been locked up for one year, four months, and counting. Held behind bars by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he has not been outside for more than a year. His crime? In October 2016, Damus fled violent, political persecution in Haiti. When he arrived in the U.S., he presented himself to immigration authorities and applied for asylum. He passed his “credible fear” interview. And then a judge granted him asylum — not once, but twice.

• Damus committed no crime, and yet the U.S. government has put him behind bars. He’s not alone — thousands of other asylum seekers are also being held in jails across the country.

• As you’ve probably heard, with the latest in the neverending rotating cast of characters that makes up the current Trump administration, a set of dominoes has been knocked over with the tweeted firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the nomination of CIA boss (and former Congressional Rep/longtime defender of surveillance and torture) Mike Pompeo to replace him. While Pompeo was a vocal supporter of the CIA’s torture program, he didn’t actually have any hand in running it. Instead, that distinction goes to Gina Haspel, whom Trump has nominated to take Pompeo’s place. Haspel not only oversaw the CIA’s torture program, she was also directly involved with the destruction of the video tapes showing the torture procedures. The still classified 6,700 page Senate report on the program apparently contains a lot of details about the program that Haspel ran. Annabelle Timsit has helpfully pulled together some details of what is currently known from the heavily redacted declassified executive summary (you may recall we spent years writing about the fight to just release that summary). What’s stunning is that the program that Haspel oversaw so disgusted CIA employees that some were at the “point of tears and choking up” and multiple people on site asked to be moved to other locations if the CIA was going to continue these torture techniques.

• These asylum seekers fled violence and persecution abroad, only to be illegally jailed in the United States.

• The Trump administration’s decision to indefinitely lock up asylum-seekers, instead of releasing them on humanitarian parole while their cases are decided, is ruining lives across the country. It’s estimated that more than 1,000 asylum seekers have been denied release in the five ICE districts named in our lawsuit alone.

• Before arriving at the U.S. border, our clients led lives that were strikingly different from one another. These men and women represent five different countries; some are teenagers and some are grandparents. Before they were “asylum seekers,” they were teachers, software engineers, drivers, and students.

• But at some point, all of them encountered a level of danger so great that it forced them to flee their homes and countries. They arrived to the United States looking for safety.

• Racial bias in policing reared its head in North Carolina when officers used excessive force on a Black man for jaywalking.

• Johnnie Rush, a Black resident of Asheville, North Carolina, was brutalized by police simply for jaywalking late at night. His story is yet another in the seemingly endless, endemic tragedy of police violence against people of color. Unlike many of those, it was all caught on video.

• Rush was walking home after a 13-hour shift washing dishes at a local restaurant when he was approached by two white police officers. It was after midnight, and one of the officers told Rush that he failed to use the crosswalk.

• It almost seems like half a lifetime ago, but only a half-decade has passed since James Clapper lied to Ron Wyden about the NSA’s domestic collections. Wyden pointedly asked Clapper during an intelligence committee hearing whether or not the NSA was collecting “any type of data at all” on American citizens. Clapper gave two answers, both untrue: “No, sir” and “Not wittingly.”

• A couple of months later, the first Snowden leak — detailing massive amounts of call data being captured in the Section 215 dragnet — undid Clapper’s careful, under-oath lies. Since then, nothing has happened. The DOJ refused to investigate Clapper for lying to his oversight. Clapper exited office a few years later, becoming a go-to national security expert for a variety of news programs. He has since offered a variety of excuses for lying, but none of them are particularly good.

• As the CIA begins to defend its possible next director, civil liberties groups are urging the Senate to halt Gina Haspel’s nomination “until all the records on her past involvement in the CIA torture program are declassified and released to the public,” according to a Friday letter sent to Capitol Hill and provided to The Daily Beast.

• The letter, part of an emerging strategy to fight Haspel that The Daily Beast reported Wednesday, highlights the lack of clarity—mostly the result of aggressive CIA classification—over aspects of Haspel’s time overseeing torture at a “black site” secret prison in Thailand in 2002. The version seen by The Daily Beast, a draft, was signed by 29 civil-liberties groups, including the ACLU, Reprieve, Physicians for Human Rights and the Sunlight Foundation, though more may sign on.

• The UN has decided it’s possibly Facebook’s fault things are going so badly in Myanmar. Muslims have been fleeing the country in droves thanks to Myanmar security forces engaging in widespread acts of violence (including rape) against them, urged on by hardline nationalist monks.

• For all intents and purposes, Facebook is Myanmar’s internet. Loosening of restrictions on social media access has resulted in a large portion of the population getting all their news (along with all the hate speech the UN is complaining about) via the social media giant. The UN is looking into genocide accusations but has decided to speak up against Facebook first.

• A chief federal judge in Chicago has handed down a scathing opinion calling ATF stash house stings an “ends justifies the means” evil that needs to be “relegated to the dark corridors of our past.” The opinion shuts the door on two defendants hoping to show the ATF’s fake robberies of fake stash houses filled with fake drugs were racially-biased, but it does show even without the taint of bias, the sting operations are exploitative and useless.

• For the FBI, the longstanding failure to diversify its ranks is nothing short of “a huge operational risk,” according to one senior official, something that compromises the agency’s ability to understand communities at risk, penetrate criminal enterprises, and identify emerging national security threats.

• Indeed, 10 months before being fired as director of the FBI by President Trump, James Comey called the situation a “crisis.”

• “Slowly but steadily over the last decade or more, the percentage of special agents in the FBI who are white has been growing,” Comey said in a speech at Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black school in Daytona Beach, Florida. “I’ve got nothing against white people — especially tall, awkward, male white people — but that is a crisis for reasons that you get, and that I’ve worked very hard to make sure the entire FBI understands.”

• Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams said this week that “implicit bias” likely played some role in the fact that disproportionate numbers of pedestrian tickets written by his officers in recent years went to blacks.

• ProPublica and the Florida Times-Union in 2017 reported that 55 percent of pedestrian tickets written over a recent five-year period were issued to blacks despite the fact they made up just 29 percent of the local population.

• Williams and his office said at the time that blacks had not been targeted in the enforcement of pedestrian violations.

• The Times-Union had reporters at the forum this week in Jacksonville during which Williams made his statement about implicit bias.

• Buzzfeed has obtained files the NYPD never wanted the public to see. This isn’t the result of a protracted public records battle, but rather the work of an anonymous whistleblower. Presumably, those further up the chain of command are already familiar with the department’s disinterest in holding officers accountable, so there’s no whistleblowing outlet there. Also, presumably, the Civilian Complaint Review Board’s hands are tied and it cannot hand out disciplinary reports for officers never formally disciplined. So, leak it is. And what a leak it is.

• Secret files obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal that from 2011 to 2015 at least 319 New York Police Department employees who committed offenses serious enough to merit firing were allowed to keep their jobs.

• Many of the officers lied, cheated, stole, or assaulted New York City residents. At least fifty employees lied on official reports, under oath, or during an internal affairs investigation. Thirty-eight were found guilty by a police tribunal of excessive force, getting into a fight, or firing their gun unnecessarily. Fifty-seven were guilty of driving under the influence. Seventy-one were guilty of ticket-fixing. One officer, Jarrett Dill, threatened to kill someone. Another, Roberson Tunis, sexually harassed and inappropriately touched a fellow officer. Some were guilty of lesser offenses, like mouthing off to a supervisor.

• At least two dozen of these employees worked in schools. Andrew Bailey was found guilty of touching a female student on the thigh and kissing her on the cheek while she was sitting in his car. In a school parking lot, while he was supposed to be on duty, Lester Robinson kissed a woman, removed his shirt, and began to remove his pants. And Juan Garcia, while off duty, illegally sold prescription medication to an undercover officer.

• Recently, I visited Alabama with the Faith and Politics Institute for Congressman John Lewis’ Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage. We visited civil rights monuments in Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama, before heading to Selma to commemorate Bloody Sunday. As we reflected on the rights that were so bravely fought for on that Sunday decades ago, we recognized that the fight continues on across the country. In Michigan, we’re taking the fight to the ballot and aiming to ensure all can vote. We want to make voting more accessible, secure, and fair for all Michiganders.

• Earlier this year, the ACLU of Michigan, along with the NAACP and League of Women Voters, launched the Promote the Vote, a ballot measure campaign that would secure the right to vote for all eligible voters in Michigan. This initiative would amend the state constitution to allow voters to register at any time — up to and including on Election Day; automatically register voters; require post-election audits; expand access to absentee ballots; allow for straight-ticket party voting; and ensure those in the military get their ballots with enough time to vote. Our goal is to put the amendment on the ballot this November.

• Today I was at an office party and the conversation turned to race, specifically the incidence of unarmed Afro-American men and boys who are shot by police. Apparently the idea that white people (even in other countries) might treat non-white people badly offends some people, so we had a man try to explain that Afro-Americans commit more crime and therefore are more likely to get shot. This part of the discussion isn’t even noteworthy, it’s the sort of thing that happens all the time.

• I and another man pointed out that crime is correlated with poverty and racism causes non-white people to be disproportionately poor. We also pointed out that US police seem capable of arresting proven violent white criminals without shooting them (he cited arrests of Mafia members I cited mass murderers like the one who shot up the cinema). This part of the discussion isn’t particularly noteworthy either. Usually when someone tries explaining some racist ideas and gets firm disagreement they back down. But not this time.

• The next step was the issue of whether black people are inherently violent. He cited all of Africa as evidence. There’s a meme that you shouldn’t accuse someone of being racist, it’s apparently very offensive. I find racism very offensive and speak the truth about it. So all the following discussion was peppered with him complaining about how offended he was and me not caring (stop saying racist things if you don’t want me to call you racist).

• Next was an appeal to “statistics” and “facts”. He said that he was only citing statistics and facts, clearly not understanding that saying “Africans are violent” is not a statistic. I told him to get his phone and Google for some statistics as he hadn’t cited any. I thought that might make him just go away, it was clear that we were long past the possibility of agreeing on these issues. I don’t go to parties seeking out such arguments, in fact I’d rather avoid such people altogether if possible.

• [...]

• As I was getting ready to leave the man said that he thought he didn’t explain things well because he was tipsy. I disagree, I think he explained some things very well. When someone goes to such extraordinary lengths to criticise all black people after a discussion of white cops killing unarmed black people I think it shows their character. But I did offer some friendly advice, “don’t drink with people you work with or for or any other people you want to impress”, I suggested that maybe quitting alcohol altogether is the right thing to do if this is what it causes. But he still thought it was wrong of me to call him racist, and I still don’t care. Alcohol doesn’t make anyone suddenly think that black people are inherently dangerous (even when unarmed) and therefore deserving of being shot by police (disregarding the fact that police can take members of the Mafia alive). But it does make people less inhibited about sharing such views even when it’s clear that they don’t have an accepting audience.

• [...]

• I think the fact that this debate happened says something about Australian and British culture. This man apparently hadn’t had people push back on such ideas before.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Earlier this year, California introduced new net neutrality legislation as part of similar efforts across more than half the states in the nation. At the time, we noted how the EFF wasn’t a particular fan of California’s proposal, arguing that the wording of the effort left the law open to challenges by the FCC, which has (at AT&T and Comcast behest) promised to block states that actually try to protect consumers in the wake of its unpopular net neutrality repeal. But a new California proposal has no such Achilles heel, goes notably further than the first effort, and now has the EFF’s full support.

• California state senator Scott Wiener this week introduced SB 822, a much tougher, more comprehensive proposal that would prohibit not only the blocking and throttling of websites and services by ISPs, but would ban “paid prioritization” deals that would allow deep-pocketed content companies (like, say, ESPN) from buying an unfair advantage against smaller competitors and startups. The bill also takes aim at the kind of interconnection shenanigans and double dipping that resulted in Netflix performance issues back in 2014, while leaving the door open to reasonable network management practices.

• “The [California] bill prohibits ISPs from blocking, speeding up or slowing down websites, applications, and services; charging online companies for access to an ISP’s customers and blocking those that do not pay; and from entering into deals with online companies to put them in a fast lane to the ISP’s customers,” van Schewick wrote today.

• Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) consulted with van Schewick on technical matters before introducing the legislation text yesterday. The bill has 14 other coauthors from the state Assembly and Senate.

• The two main aspects of curation in this space are selection, and adding value by enhancing metadata, both human activities that don’t scale.

• [...]

• Preservation happens in three phases; ingest, preservation and dissemination:

• Last fall, the Department of Justice announced it would be suing to block AT&T’s $86 billion acquisition of Time Warner. According to the DOJ, it sued to block the lawsuit to protect consumers, arguing that the deal would likely make it harder for streaming competitors to license the content they need to compete with AT&T (especially HBO programming). Consumer advocates have long argued that AT&T (with its decade of well-documented and often comedic anti-consumer behavior in tow) would simply use its greater leverage and power to hamstring competition and jack up rates for consumers (especially with net neutrality dying).

• While some have argued that the DOJ is simply following antitrust protocol, others (including AT&T lawyers) think the lawsuit is driven by other motivations.

• That’s not a hard case to make given the Trump administration’s anti-consumer, anti-innovation, and anti-competition tendencies on other fronts (like net neutrality). Trump’s pick to head the DOJ’s antitrust division, Makan Delrahim, was also on record, before joining the DOJ, stating he saw no real problems with the deal. Meanwhile Trump’s disdain for Time Warner-owned CNN is also well established, and reports have indicated that Trump pal Rupert Murdoch spent much of last year trying to scuttle the deal for competitive reasons (Muroch has also approached AT&T twice about buying CNN).

• It’s become quite fashionable these days to gripe about the Internet. Even some of its staunchest allies in Congress have been getting cranky. Naturally there are going to be growing pains as humanity adapts to the unprecedented ability for billions of people to communicate with each other easily, cheaply, and immediately for the first time in world history. But this communications revolution has also brought some extraordinary benefits that we glibly risk when we forget about them and instead only focus the challenges. This glass is way more than half full but, if we’re not careful to protect it, soon it will be empty.

DRM

• In all of our conversations about video game piracy and the DRM that studios and publishers use to try to stave it off, the common refrain from those within in the industry and others is that these cracking groups are nearly nihilism personified. Nothing is sacred to these people, goes the mantra, and they care nothing for the gaming industry at all. If the gaming industry is destroyed, it will be because of these pirate-y pirates simply not giving a damn.

• This notion is belied by the story of Crackshell, makers of indie spinoff of the Serious Sam franchise called Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour, and Voksi, an individual that runs a game-cracking ring. Voksi has been featured in our pages before as one of the few people out there who has been able to consistently defeat the Denuvo DRM, helping propel the software’s precipitous fall from grace. If a game developer and a game-cracker seem to be natural enemies, it will come as a surprise to you that they have recently teamed up to try to resurrect Bogus Detour from the bin of failure.

Intellectual Monopolies

• In a few days it will be time for the next meeting (the 35th one in fact) of the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore. Between the 19th and the 23rd of March, the members of the Intergovernmental Committee will convene in Geneva to discuss issues related to the protection of traditional knowledge, genetic resources and traditional cultural expressions. (This body is a WIPO Intergovernmental Committee with the mandate to conduct text-based negotiations for the adoption of legal instruments for the protection

Copyrights

• We’ve made the point for a long time that, on a long enough timeline, pretty much everybody is a pirate. The point is that the way copyright laws have evolved alongside such useful tools as the internet makes knowing whether common sense actions are actually copyright infringement an incredibly dicey riddle to solve. Often times without even trying, members of the public engage in infringing activities, up to and including the President of the United States.

• And, it appears, up to and including entire branches of the United States military, though claims of accidental infringement in this case would appear to be rather silly. Bitmanagement, a German software company that produces virtual reality software, is accusing the US Navy of what can only be described as massive levels of copyright infringement.

• Today the Marrakesh Treaty Implementation Bill was introduced into Congress by Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Bob Corker (R-TN), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Kamala Harris (D-CA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and Patrick Leahy (D-VT). The bill implements the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled, a landmark treaty that was adopted by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) in June 2013, and has since been ratified by 37 other countries. The treaty is notable in that it is the first WIPO treaty passed primarily for a disadvantaged class of users, rather than for the benefit of copyright holders.

• When passed, the bill will allow those who are blind, visually impaired, or otherwise reading disabled (for example, being unable to pick up and turn the pages of a book) to make free use of written works in accessible formats such as braille, large print, or audiobook. Although similar provisions were already part of U.S. law, the amendments made by this bill slightly broadens the class of beneficiaries who were eligible for access to such works.

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