● 03.24.18

● Links 24/3/2018: GNOME 3.30 Schedule, LibreSSL 2.7.1

Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• If you own an old PlayStation 3, the original “fat” one before it slimmed down, then Sony could owe you up to $65. Unfortunately, there are a few hurdles to jump through, and you only have until April 15, 2018 to stake your claim for compensation.

Kernel Space

• In the longer-term, CIP is looking toward IEC-62443 security certification. That is an ambitious goal and CIP can’t get there by itself, but the project is working on documentation, test cases, and tools that will hopefully help with an eventual certification effort. Another issue that must be on the radar of any project like this is the year-2038 problem, which currently puts a hard limit on how long a Linux system can be supported. CIP is working with kernel and libc developers to push solutions forward in this area.

• It’s been a while since last having anything new to report with the mainline Linux kernel’s livepatching infrastructure, but some improvements are in the works.

• Petr Mladek of SUSE has been picking up the work started by Joe Lawrence at Red Hat for atomic replace functionality for the kernel livepatches in working towards cumulative patch support.

Graphics Stack

• Karol Herbst, who is a long-time Nouveau contributor who joined Red Hat at the end of last year, along with other hat-wearing Linux developers continue working on Nouveau compute support for this open-source NVIDIA driver.

• Karol has been ironing out the Nouveau NIR support that is a critical element to get SPIR-V support going for the Nouveau driver, which is the common IR to Vulkan and OpenCL. Meanwhile there is also the work to get SPIR-V support for Gallium3D’s Clover state tracker.

Benchmarks

• When having the Microsoft Windows 10 Professional x64 installation on the Core i7 8700K “Coffee Lake” system this week I also took the opportunity to run some fresh OpenGL benchmarks on Windows compared to Linux.

• Due to the UHD Graphics 630 not being too practical for Linux gamers, for this quick round of benchmarking were just some standard OpenGL games and tests across all supported platforms. The latest drivers were used on each platform, including a secondary run on Ubuntu when switching to the Linux 4.16 Git kernel.

Applications

• Corebird is a native GTK+ Twitter client for Linux desktop. It is free and open source, and written mainly in C & Vala. We downloaded the latest official release and put our hands on the software. This is our experience is far.

• When it comes to RAW image editing on Linux, Darktable is what most often is talked about for its photography workflow and RAW image processing features. But another open-source alternative for RAW image processing is out with its latest release, RawTherapee.

• I have created a new low-volume lvfs-announce mailing list for the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, which will only be used to make announcements about new features and planned downtime.

• After a particularly long cycle of over 10 months, the GStreamer community had accumulated a lot of improvements that are now widely available in the 1.14 release. The release notes contain a good explanation of everything the community has produced, but I’d like to highlight some of the contributions from Collabora’s engineers that we’re particularly proud of.

• Digital audio is so ubiquitous that we rarely stop to think or wonder how the gears turn underneath our all-pervasive apps for entertainment. Today we’ll look at one specific piece of the machinery: latency.

• Let’s say you’re making a video of someone’s birthday party with an app on your phone. Once the recording starts, you don’t care when the app starts writing it to disk—as long as everything is there in the end.

• However, if you’re having a Skype call with your friend, it matters a whole lot how long it takes for the video to reach the other end and vice versa. It’s impossible to have a conversation if the lag (latency) is too high.

Proprietary

• Slack just updated its privacy policy and tools, and one of the changes may give some users pause. Under the new rules, Slack customers who pay for certain premium services will be able to download all the data from their workspace–both public and private–apparently without informing members of the community. Which is to say: Information from both private messages and room chats are fair game if the owner of the Slack wants it.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• CodeWeavers’ Józef Kucia has sent out a set of patches today against Winevulkan in shifting around some code in preparing to allow for the eventual Direct3D 12 support that’s implemented on top of Vulkan by the external VKD3D library.

• Wine Vulkan has been rapidly advancing in recent weeks for allowing Vulkan API support within Wine using an ICD approach to make it easy to run Vulkan games on Wine like Wolfenstein or Doom as well as projects like DXVK for implementing high-performance Direct3D 11 atop Vulkan.

Games

• For those in need of a good story game with turn-based battles and RPG elements, Ash of Gods: Redemption [GOG, Steam] is now out with day-1 Linux support.

• The developer sadly hasn’t yet responded to our emails, but thankfully GOG sent over a copy today. BTRE will be taking a proper look at it once he’s had plenty of time with it. Sounds like a very interesting game, so I look forward to reading his thoughts.

• Doom 2016 supports Vulkan and at GDC this year developers from id Software talked a little about it, including how easy a Linux version could have been.

• In response to this question from Alon Or-bach (Samsung): “One of the hot topics around Vulkan in terms of cross-platform and how much benefit do you find of having one API that’s targetting both mobile and desktop platforms”.

• Back in February was the exciting AMD Raven Ridge desktop APU launch with the Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics. Sadly, however, the Raven Ridge Linux support still appears to be a bit problematic but there have been improvements in recent weeks.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• But sometimes, we find it difficult to choose which terminal emulator to work with, depending on our preferences. In this overview, we shall cover one exciting terminal emulator for Linux called Tilix.

• Tlix (previously called Terminix – name changed due to a trademark issue) is a tiling terminal emulator that uses GTK+ 3 widget called VTE (Virtual Terminal Emulator). It is developed using GTK 3 with aims of conforming to GNOME HIG (Human Interface Guidelines).

• Additionally, this application has been tested on GNOME and Unity desktops, although users have also tested it successfully on various other Linux desktops environments.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This will be the first release after the KDE frameworks port and many things have been fixed in those 16 months…

• This week we landed a significant visual improvement for Discover: the app lists have been re-implemented using a new “cards” style in Kirigami. This was a lovely collaboration between Marco Martin, Aleix Pol, and myself. And best of all, this pretty “cards”-style list is also available to other Kirigami apps!

• Brief: Popular open source digital painting application Krita has a new release with improvement on the vector tools. Have a look at the new features and installation procedure of Krita 4.0.

• Expanding your team’s software development capacity is something that most managers will encounter at some point in their careers. There are several ways to do this – three of the most common options are hiring new employees, using a service company, or incorporating onsite contractors. Regardless of which route you choose to go, software certifications are an effective tool to help you identify the right resources. Qt certifications are a case in point.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.29.x is an unstable development series intended for testing and hacking purposes. GNOME uses odd minor version numbers to indicate development status, so this unstable 3.29.x series will become the official 3.30 stable release. There are many ways you can get involved.

• Following this month’s successful launch of GNOME 3.28, the release team has now assembled the schedule for the GNOME 3.30.0 release and the 3.29 development milestones.

• GNOME 3.29.1 is the first step towards GNOME 3.30 and will be released on 19 April followed by GNOME 3.29.92 a month later on 24 May. For June is then GNOME 3.29.3 and GNOME 3.29.4 on 19 July.

• The GNOME Project announced today the availability of the official release schedule for the next major release of their widely-used GNOME desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.

• While most of the Linux community hasn’t yet managed to install the recently released GNOME 3.28 desktop environment on their favorite GNU/Linux distributions, the GNOME developers are already focusing on the next major release, GNOME 3.30, which was slated for release this fall on September 6, 2018.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Public details are still scarce about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, but it’s looking like the alpha release might not be too far out.

• Generally it’s been three to four years between major releases of Red Hat Enterpriser Linux, with the RHEL 7 release being back in June of 2014 for reference. Major versions of RHEL are also generally introduced when the current stable series is up to around its fifth point release (and surprise surprise, RHEL 7.5 is in beta). Long story short, it would be incredibly odd if we at least didn’t start seeing public alpha/beta releases this year.

Finance

Fedora

• I’ve had a little adventure with my Fedora Atomic Workstation this morning and almost missed a meeting because I couldn’t get to a desktop session.

• As the subject says, we’re now on Telegram and on Matrix now! If you’d like to contribute to Fedora, come speak to us! Spread the word!

Debian Family

• After installing Debian on Turris Omnia there are a few more steps needed to make use of the network switch.

• The Armada 385 CPU provides three network interfaces. Two are connected to the switch (but only one of them is used to “talk” to the switch), and one is routed directly to the WAN port.

• First up is news on Debconf 2018 which will be held in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Apparently, the CFP or Call for Proposals was made just a few days ago and I probably forgot to share about it. Registration has also been opened now.

• The only thing most people have to figure out is how to get a system-generated certificate, make sure to have an expiry date, I usually have a year, make it at least 6 months as you would need to put up your proposal for contention and let the content-team decide it on the proposal merit. This may at some point move from alioth to salsa as the alioth service is going away.

• The best advice I can give is to put your proposal in and keep reworking/polishing it till the end date for applications is near. At the same time do not over commit yourself. From a very Indian perspective and somebody who has been to one debconf, you can think of the debconf as a kind of ‘khumb‘ Mela or gathering as you will. You can definitely network with all the topics and people you care for, but the most rewarding are those talks which were totally unplanned for. Also it does get crazy sometime so it’s nice if you are able to have some sane time for yourself even if it just a 5-10 minute walk.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• One of the subtle changes that seemed to have been made during the Ubuntu 18.04 development cycle is automatic suspend now being enabled by default on desktop systems.

• Automatic suspend is flipped on with Ubuntu 18.04 desktop after a twenty minute delay of being idle, at least on several systems I’ve been running the daily Bionic Beaver with this month.

• Along with a sneak preview of our official Bionic mascot, it’s a short update this week as we’re all heads-down in bug fixing mode. There are a couple of links to check out if you’re interested in what sort of data we want to collect about hardware and setup, with links to the source.

Flavours and Variants

• Based on the Compulab Fitlet2, the new Mini is just as small as the original MintBox Mini and the MintBox Mini Pro but with much better specifications, better performance and a few more features.

Devices/Embedded

• The “Orange Pi 4G-IOT” SBC that runs Android 6.0 on a quad -A53 MediaTek MT6737 SoC, and offers a 40-pin header, WiFi, Bluetooth, FM, GPS, a 4G LTE radio, and fingerprint sensor support.

• Shenzhen Xunlong open spec Orange Pi 4G-IOT SBC, which just launched for $45 on AliExpress, is the most wireless savvy Orange Pi to date. The open-spec SBC includes an unnamed, 4G LTE radio module with mini-SIM card slot, as well as a combo module that includes WiFi, Bluetooth, FM, and GPS. There is also support for a fingerprint sensor.

• OSOP’s $179 and up “Raspberry Boom” Raspberry Pi HAT add-on detects infrasound from volcanoes, explosions, and rockets. A $299 and up Shake and Boom HAT adds a seismograph.

• Panama-based OSOP, which found Kickstarter success with its Raspberry Shake seismograph add-on board for the Raspberry Pi, has now returned with a Raspberry Boom add-on board and infrasound sensor that detects inaudible sound. The same Kickstarter campaign is also selling a new Raspberry Shake and Boom product that combines the Boom with the seismograph capabilities of the Shake. Both products can tap into OSOPs large citizen science network to detect real-time events around the world.

Android

• First, you got to register on Xiaomi’s website, and request for the permission to unlock the device. That’s already bad enough: why should I ask for the permission to use the device I own as I am pleased to? Anyway, I did that. The procedure includes receiving an SMS. Again, more bad: why should I give-up such a privacy thing as my phone number? Anyway, I did it, and received the code to activate my website account. Then I started the unlock program in a virtualbox Windows XP VM (yeah right… I wasn’t expecting something better anyway…), and then, the program tells me that I need to add my Xiaomi’s account in the phone. Of course, it then sends a web request to Xiaomi’s server. I’m already not happy with all of this, but that’s not it. After all of these privacy breaches, the unlock APP tells me that I need to wait 72 hours to get my phone to account association to be activated. Since I wont be available in the middle of the week, for me, that means waiting until next week-end to do that. Silly…

• Tired of downloading games only to realize they suck? Google Play Instant might mean never doing that again.

Free Software/Open Source

• Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons) continues making progress on their goal to have working and upstream open-source video encode/decode support for the Allwinner VPU.

• Last year, Mastodon made splashes as an open source Twitter competitor but you can also use it as a Facebook alternative. Apart from all the differences in terms of privacy, character length, what really sets Mastodon apart is the “instance” feature. You can think of the service as a series of connected nodes (instances) and your account belongs to a particular instance.

• The whole interface is divided into 4 card-like columns. If you use this service as an alternative to Facebook, it might seem confusing but you might get a hang of it with time. Mastodon.social is the most popular instance, so you can start with it.

Events

• We will also be manning a booth there, where you can try out our Librem laptops and see one of our i.MX 6 phone prototype development boards for the Librem 5. Come and say hi! We’ll be happy to meet old friends and new Free Software enthusiasts, veterans and newcomers, and to answer any questions attendees may have for us.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• It’s probably not top of Mark Zuckerberg’s worry list this week but Mozilla Corporation, developer of the Firefox browser, is officially unhappy with Facebook.

• The next SEO experiment I’d like to discuss results for is the MDN “Competitive Content Analysis” experiment. In this experiment, performed through December into early January, involved selecting two of the top search terms that resulted in MDN being included in search results—one of them where MDN is highly-placed but not at #1, and one where MDN is listed far down in the search results despite having good content available.

• The result is a comparison of the quality of our content and our SEO against other sites that document these technology areas. With that information in hand, we can look at the competition’s content and make decisions as to what changes to make to MDN to help bring us up in the search rankings.

• Online, your attention is priceless. That’s why every site in the universe wants permission to send you notifications about new stuff. It can be distracting at best and annoying at worst. The latest version of Firefox for desktop lets you block those requests and many others.

CMS

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Licensing/Legal

• A revised set of guidelines and recommendations on the use of the open source licence EUPL v1.2 published by the Commission on 19 May 2017 will be developed, involving the DIGIT unit B.3 (Reusable Solutions) and the JRC 1.4 (Joint Research Centre – Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer). The existing licence wizard will be updated. New ways of promoting public administrations’ use of open source will be investigated and planned (such as hackathons or app challenges on open source software). The target date for the release of this set of guidelines on the use of the European Public Licence EUPL v1.2, including a modified Licence Wizard, is planned Q2 2018.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Just launched on Kickstarter is the AR2 6 axis robot aluminum parts kit operated by an Arduino microcontroller. The robot was created by Chris Annin, an automation engineer who has worked in the investment casting industry for more than 20 years.

• “I have a passion for robotics. I’ve always wondered why robots have to cost more than $30K and I wanted to bring a lower cost option to the table to afford the rest of us the opportunity to experience and play with 6 axis robots,” he explains.

Programming/Development

• The end of upstream Python 2.7 support will be January 1, 2020 (2020-01-01) and the Fedora Project is working out what to do with it. As Fedora 29 would be released in 2019-11 and would get 1.5 years of support, the last release which would be considered supportable would be the upcoming release of Fedora 28. This is why the current Python maintainers are looking to orphan python2. They have made a list of the packages that would be affected by this and have started a discussion on the Fedora development lists, but people who only see notes of this from blogs or LWN posts may not have seen it yet.

• So: both OOP and functional computation can be completely compatible (and should be!). There is no reason to munge state in objects, and there is no reason to invent “monads” in FP. We just have to realize that “computers are simulators” and figure out what to simulate.

• The most important goal is to keep the course fair for students who do honest work. Instructors must assign grades that accurately reflect performance. A student who grapples with a problem — becoming a stronger programmer in the process — should never receive a lower grade than one who copies and pastes.

• [...]

• University administrators should communicate their support. Instructors should know that, not only will they suffer no retaliation, but that the university encourages them to enforce university policies. This might require administrators to acknowledge the inconvenient truth of widespread plagiarism.

• If you’re into centralized logging, you are probably familiar with the ELK Stack: Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana. Just in case you’re not, ELK (or Elastic Stack, as it’s being renamed these days) is a package of three open-source components, each responsible for a different task or stage in a data pipeline.

• Logstash is responsible for aggregating the data from your different data sources and processing it before sending it off for indexing and storage in Elasticsearch. This is a key role. How you process your log data directly impacts your analysis work. If your logs are not structured correctly and you have not configured Logstash correctly, your logs will not be parsed in a way that enables you to query and visualize them in Kibana.

• Learning a programming language is not hard. In fact, if you’re experienced, you can learn the basics in under 24 hours. So if you’re in the market for a new lingua franca, such as to bolster your hirability, what you choose next might be influenced by your current language of choice.

Leftovers

• Software is not a good, the Court of Appeal in London, England, has ruled.

• More specifically, software is not a “good” as defined in the Commercial Agents EU Regulations, said the civil court in a ruling that overturns an earlier decision granting reseller The Software Incubator Ltd a cool £475,000.

• Back in 2016, a UK High Court tussle between TSI and software behemoth CA Technologies (the artists formerly known as Computer Associates) resulted in the court declaring that software is a good, as defined, and ordering the £475k payout.

• TSI had been contracted to CA to plug its release automation software in Blighty – until the latter scrapped the deal in 2013 when TSI inked a similar UK “consultancy” agreement with rival outfit Intigua.

Health/Nutrition

• In Texas, the Associated Press reports that Hurricane Harvey released far more toxins into the environment than initially reported, when it brought unprecedented flooding to the Texas Gulf Coast last summer. AP reporters catalogued more than 100 Harvey-related toxic releases, most of which were never made public, including spills of carcinogenic compounds like benzene and vinyl chloride, and the release of nearly half a billion gallons of industrial wastewater mixed with stormwater from one chemical plant in Baytown alone. The AP reports Texas investigators have looked into 89 incidents and have yet to announce any enforcement actions.

Security

• The latest in our Windows versus Linux benchmarking is looking at the relative performance impact on both Linux and Windows of their Spectre and Meltdown mitigation techniques. This round of tests were done on Windows 10 Pro, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and Clear Linux when having an up-to-date system on each OS where there is Spectre/Meltdown protection and then repeating the same benchmarks after reverting/disabling the security functionality.

• Dropbox’s position, however reasonable in many of its aspects, is woefully deficient, because the company reserves the right to invoke DMCA 1201 and/or CFAA and other tools that give companies the power to choose who can say true things abour mistakes they’ve made.

• This is not normal. Before DRM in embedded software and cloud connectivity, became routine there were no restrictions on who could utter true words about defects in a product. [...]

• Attackers also modified the local cron jobs to trigger a “watchd0g” Bash script every three minutes, a script that checked to see if the Monero miner was still active and restarted XMRig’s process whenever it was down.

• GitHub says its security scan for old vulnerabilities in JavaScript and Ruby libraries has turned up over four million bugs and sparked a major clean-up by project owners.

• The massive bug-find total was reached within a month of the initiative’s launch in November, when GitHub began scanning for known vulnerabilities in certain popular open-source libraries and notifying project owners that they should be using an updated version.

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has begun a process of performing third-party security audits for its projects, with the first completed audit coming from the Envoy proxy project.

• The Envoy proxy project was created by ride-sharing company Lyft and officially joined the CNCF in September 2017. Envoy is a service mesh reverse proxy technology that is used to help scale micro-services data traffic.

• OpenSSH 7.7p1 is almost ready for release, so we would appreciate testing on as many platforms and systems as possible. This is a bugfix release.

• Spoiler alert: If application security isn’t dead yet, its days are numbered. OK, this is an over-exaggeration, but fear not, application security engineers — the work you do is actually becoming more important than ever, and your budget will soon reflect this. Application security will never die, but it will have to morph to succeed.

• The number of such attacks surged an estimated 10,100 percent in the biggest Nordic economy in the fourth quarter, about double the jump globally, according to Symantec Corp.’s 2018 Internet Security Threat Report.

Defence/Aggression

• March 20th marks the 15th anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq which plunged the country into a brutal occupation leading to sectarian civil war, terrorism and a death toll of hundreds of thousands.

• Yet in Britain the anniversary marks another year of impunity for the ministers who authorised the invasion. This lack of accountability for crimes committed abroad is a British disease with a very long history.

• With the announcement that John Bolton will be the new White House national security adviser, Sputnik News reviewed how some experts and analysts have responded to the war hawk’s return to a high-profile US government post and what his history of belligerence might mean for the future of US foreign policy.

• As public support for the Vietnam War waned, and as all LBJ could do about it was send more troops, he would periodically announce, for the flimsiest of reasons, that victory was at last in sight; that “there was light at the end of the tunnel.” From that time on, it has been impossible to use that expression without irony.

• But for that still living memory, we might now be hearing a lot about light at the end of the tunnel from Democratic Party and liberal pundits intent on putting Donald Trump behind us – first, because the law is closing in on that temperamentally unsuited, defiantly ignorant, morally impaired, and recklessly dangerous Commander-in-Chief; and then because it is likely that, in the November midterm election, the more odious duopoly party, the GOP, will be swept away in a “blue wave.”

• [...]

• If Trump goes, his Vice President, Mike Pence, takes over; and his administration, chock full of miscreants as pernicious and vile as the Donald himself stays intact – or no less intact than it currently is with Trump purging it of everyone he deems insufficiently servile, and with the rats who work for him, fearing what he has in store, deserting the sinking ship.

• Trump is an opportunist with noxious attitudes and base instincts, but no settled convictions. He has been pushing a reactionary line lately because he needs the Republican Party to govern, and that is what that wretched party’s leaders demand of him.

• The UK government has been accused of using secretive export rules to hide the true extent of arms exports to Middle East states with dire human rights records, Middle East Eye can reveal.

• Figures seen exclusively by MEE reveal a more than 20 percent increase in the use of opaque “open licences” to approve arms sales to states in the Middle East and North Africa, in a move that avoids public scrutiny and keeps the value of arms and their quantities secret.

• Arms exports are worth $8.3bn a year to the UK economy, and defence firms have used standard open licenses to approve more than $4.2bn in arms to the Middle East since senior ministers vowed to expand UK arms exports after the Brexit vote in June 2016.

• The new figures, compiled for MEE by Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), show that the government has also overseen a 22 percent rise in the use of secretive open licences to boost arms export to the Middle East and North Africa, including assault rifles to Turkey in 2016 – as a rights crackdown intensified in the country – and acoustic riot control devices to Egypt in 2015.

• Figures for open arms export licences show the number of open arms export licences rose from 189 to 230 from 2013 to 2017, while the number of individual items approved under these licensees soared to 4,315 from 1,201.

• UK governments – Conservative and Labour – have been colluding for decades with two sets of Islamist actors which have strong connections with each other.

• In the first group are the major state sponsors of Islamist terrorism, the two most important of which are key British allies with whom London has long-standing strategic partnerships – Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The second group includes extremist private movements and organisations whom Britain has worked alongside and sometimes trained and financed, in order to promote specific foreign policy objectives. The roots of this lie in divide and rule policies under colonialism but collusion of this type took off in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when Britain, along with the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, covertly supported the resistance to defeat the Soviet occupation of the country. After the jihad in Afghanistan, Britain had private dealings of one kind or another with militants in various organisations, including Pakistan’s Harkat ul-Ansar, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), all of which had strong links to Bin Laden’s al-Qaida. Covert actions have been undertaken with these and other forces in Central Asia, North Africa and Eastern Europe.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.

• There is both good as well bad things in humans and we are solely responsible which side we choose. It is a proven fact that people tend to choose bad over good for reasons better known to psychologists.

• Recently, a joke about Assange and Zuckerberg are making rounds over social media and it is definitely a hard-hitting message to our narrow thinking.

• The joke is all about how people declared Julian Assange as the criminal for exposing the inner workings of governments, military, and trade deals around the world and he claims himself as a political refugee and he did it for to expose the flaws in the government. But Mark Zuckerberg, who is the man behind Facebook, is said to be giving away all our information to corporations for money and people call him as Man of the year.

• Ex-Ecuadorian President and RT show host Rafael Correa sits down with prominent Spanish judge and WikiLeaks lawyer Baltasar Garzon. The two of them talk transnational, corporate “neocolonialism” and the fight against corruption.

• [...]

• Correa stresses that fighting corruption has often been used in Latin America to target political opponents, and Garzon agrees. “Justice has become extremely prejudiced and biased against all those people who, in one form or another, were supporters of the previous government,” the lawyer says, recalling former Argentinian President Cristina Kirchner whose tenure was marred by several corruption scandals.

Finance

• The number of creditors attending the meeting has dwindled over time: the first one reportedly drew more than 100 people, but the most recent one earlier this month drew fewer than 30, according to the estimates of one attendee.

• That does not mean the Mt. Gox case has gotten any less strange — just the opposite. By definition, bankruptcy occurs when an entity cannot pay its debts. But as of this writing, Mt. Gox has enough assets to pay off its claims with more than $1.4 billion worth of bitcoins left over. The trouble is figuring out what to do with them.

• American journalism has long maintained a sort of egalitarian myth about itself. While our country’s free press requires no formal training or licensing, an honest history of the profession shows very distinct hierarchies, from the vaunted Runyonesque blue-collar beat reporter to legendary insiders, like Washington uber-columnist Scotty Reston, who act as handmaidens to the powerful. And it is no coincidence that arguably the nation’s two preeminent newspapers—the New York Times and Wall Street Journal—stand apart as the most rarefied of perches in our nation’s news ecosystem. It’s at these outlets that these class distinctions are the most glaring—and most problematic.

• Just how elite these papers have become was the subject of a new study from Jonathan Wai and Kaja Perina, a researcher at Case Western Reserve University and the editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, respectively. The two have just published a survey in the Journal of Expertise (3/18) that looked at the educational backgrounds of hundreds of Times and Journal staffers, comparing them to the elite individuals these papers routinely cover. The survey reveals how the staffs of the Times and Journal are starkly different than typical journalists. The findings also tell us a lot about how reporters and editors from these two news organizations cover the powerful, as well as why their coverage often falls short of holding the powerful to account.

• The deal collapsed when the DUP saw a leaked version of it. The party was incensed that by aligning Northern Ireland to the single market and customs union, it would necessarily mean the North being treated differently to the rest of the UK, and that checks would be required along the Irish Sea.

• Gazprom does not recognize legitimacy of the fine imposed on the company by the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine, and prepares a lawsuit to appeal to the International arbitration, the Russian gas holding said in a statement.

• According to the company, Gazprom does not recognize the legitimacy of the fine and considers Ukraine’s actions a violation of its rights, including those guaranteed by the Russian-Ukrainian intergovernmental agreement on the encouragement and mutual protection of investments from November 27, 1998.

• Gazprom has already sent a notice to Ukraine about the Ukrainian side violating its obligations to protect investment and is currently preparing a lawsuit to appeal to International arbitration, the company said.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A major new investigation has just been published into Trump’s business partnerships in India and the conflicts of interest these deals pose for the White House. The new cover story for The New Republic is titled “Political Corruption and the Art of the Deal.” In it, journalist Anjali Kamat notes the Trump Organization has entered into more deals in India than in any other foreign country. These deals, she writes, are worth an estimated $1.5 billion and produced royalties of up to $11 million between 2014 and 2017. During her year-long investigation, Kamat traced Trump’s India partners’ long history of facing lawsuits, police inquiries and government investigations that contain evidence of potential bribery, fraud, intimidation, illegal land acquisition, tax evasion and money laundering.

• Downing Street has been accused of ‘outing’ a gay Brexit campaigner in a row over referendum tactics.

• In an explosive statement last night, Shahmir Sanni said his family in Pakistan was unaware of his sexuality and instructed a law firm to take action.

• He said a statement made by Theresa May’s close aide Stephen Parkinson had put family members at risk.

• Mr Sanni was set to blow the whistle over claims Brexit eers breached electoral rules during the Vote Leave campaign.

• In response, Mr Parkinson, one of the Prime Minister’s closest advisers, gave a comment in which he said he had been in an 18-month relationship with Mr Sanni before splitting “amicably” in September 2017.

• [...] The Senate Intelligence Committee released its long-awaited election infrastructure defense recommendations. Senate leaders got behind a revised version of the Secure Elections Act. And late Thursday night, the Senate passed the omnibus spending bill, which includes $380 million for securing digital election systems. [...]

Censorship/Free Speech

• Last week the Tenth Circuit refused to let New Mexico’s anti-SLAPP statute be used in federal court in diversity cases. The relatively good news about the decision is that it is premised heavily on the specific language of New Mexico’s statute and may not be easily extensible to other states’ anti-SLAPP laws. This focus on the specific language is also why, as the decision acknowledges, it is inconsistent with holdings in other circuits, such as the Ninth. But the bad news is that the decision still takes the teeth out of New Mexico’s statute and will invite those who would abuse judicial process in order to chill speech to bring actions that can get into the New Mexico federal courts.

• In this case, there had been litigation pending in New Mexico state court. That litigation was then removed to federal court on the basis of “diversity jurisdiction.” Diversity jurisdiction arises when the parties in the litigation are from separate states and the amount in controversy is more than $75,000 and the issue in dispute is solely a question of state law. Federal courts ordinarily can’t hear cases that only involve state law, but because of the concern that it could be unfair for an out-of-state litigant to have to be heard in a foreign state court, diversity jurisdiction can allow a case that would have been heard in state court to be heard by the federal one for the area instead.

• At the same time, we don’t want it to be unfair for the other party to now have to litigate in federal court if being there means it would lose some of the protection of local state law. We also don’t want litigants to be too eager to get into federal court if being there could confer an advantage they would not have had if the case were instead being heard in state court. These two policy goals underpin what is commonly known as the “Erie doctrine,” named after a 1938 US Supreme Court case that is still followed today.

• The Erie doctrine is why a case removed to federal court will still use state law to decide the matter. But sometimes it’s hard to figure out how much state law needs to be used. Federal courts have their own procedural rules, for instance, and so they are not likely to use procedural state rules to govern their proceedings. They only will use substantive state law. But it turns out that figuring out which a law is, procedural or substantive, is anything but straightforward, and that is the question at the heart of this Tenth Circuit case: was New Mexico’s anti-SLAPP law procedural, in which case the federal court did not have to follow it, or substantive, in which case it did? And unfortunately in this case, Los Lobos Renewable Power LLP v. Americulture, Inc., the Tenth Circuit decided it was “hardly a challenging endeavor” to decide that it was only procedural.

• No kidding. Along with shady/dangerous/marginally illegal stuff they want to ban videos of making ammunition. I make ammunition, almost all the centre-fire ammunition I’ve ever fired I made. I teach others about it. YouTube wants to ban that.

• Craigslist said Friday (March 23) it shut down its personal ads section as concerns grew over unintended consequences of a law approved by Congress which could hold websites liable for promoting sex trafficking.

• The move by Craigslist suggested that websites may shutter or censor some content to avoid prosecution under the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) approved by Congress this week and awaiting President Donald Trump’s signature.

• The tech industry was initially united against this legislative effort, but the Internet Association, a trade group representing major tech firms, reversed its position under pressure from Facebook, which was facing additional regulatory pressure from the Russia investigation, WIRED reported in December. Reddit is also a member of Internet Association, as is Google, which lobbied heavily against earlier versions of the legislation.

• Although the Personals section on Craigslist appears to be visually intact for now, clicking any associated link will reveal that the section is shut down due the FOSTA bill (HR 1865) just approved by the Senate. The bill holds websites accountable for the actions of its users, forcing sites to censor individuals else face criminal and civil liability. To avoid any legal and/or financial woes, Craigslist is merely shutting down the Personals section rather than dealing with censorship and possibly jeopardizing its other services.

• Calling all cinema buffs: the 24th edition of the Mediterranean Film Festival of Tetouan will kickoff this Saturday, March 24 through Saturday, March 31, taking on questions of artistic freedom, power, and cinematic censorship in film production and distribution.

• Under the theme of “Cinema and Freedom,” the festival features free screenings and roundtable discussions with artists, scholars, and filmmakers to discuss film reading and analysis, directing, screenplay writing, which are open to the public. The festival also includes an acting workshop called “Studio,” and a scriptwriting and directing workshop called “Méditalents,” both aimed at young talent from 18 to 30 years old.

• Based in Wuyi, in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang just south of Shanghai, she had just received a call from the police. They were asking questions about a post her son, a law student in Canada, had put up on Weibo — they said it wasn’t good and it would be better if Zhang deleted it.

• Just a day earlier, China’s legislature had voted — almost unanimously — to scrap presidential term limits, paving the way for President Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely. After weeks of extensive censorship, where everything from Xi’s name to the words “immortality” and “lifelong” were banned, Zhang wanted to see if retweeting a picture would draw the ire of censors.

• So that afternoon he set up an anonymous account on Weibo, posted a cartoon of Xi encased in glass and draped in a communist flag, and then retweeted it from his own account.

Privacy/Surveillance

• As many car insurances companies do, my car insurance company provides a satellite device that can be put inside your car to provide its location at any time in any place.

• By installing such device in your car, the car insurance profiles your conduct, of course, but it could also help the police in finding your car if it gets stolen and you will probably get a nice discount over the insurance price (even up to 40%!). Long story short: I got one.

• Often such companies also provide an “App” for smartphones to easily track your car when you are away or to monitor your partner…mine (the company!) does.

• Then I downloaded my company’s application for Android, but unluckily it needs the Google Play Services to run. I am a FLOSS evangelist and, as such, I try to use FLOSS apps only and without gapps.

• Dolphins in the NSA Dragnet by Kyle Rankin: as I mentioned in “NSA: Linux Journal is an ‘extremist forum’ and its readers get flagged for extra surveillance”, the NSA has been flagging certain Internet traffic as extremist based on specific patterns.

• In the fallout from the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica data mining scandal, Julian Assange has reminded his followers that it is highly unwise to trust all their personal data to a “megalomaniac” who calls his users “dumb f**ks.”

• READ MORE: Musk v Facebook: SpaceX chief deletes account

• Assange recalled an exchange with an unnamed friend immediately after the beta version of the social media giant was launched in 2003. He spoke of how Mark Zuckerberg was surprised that the first “dumb f**ck” users immediately trusted the newly-launched platform with their private data.

• Classified documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently to target bitcoin users around the world — and wielded at least one mysterious source of information to “help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins,” according to a top-secret passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013. The data source appears to have leveraged the NSA’s ability to harvest and analyze raw, global internet traffic while also exploiting an unnamed software program that purported to offer anonymity to users, according to other documents.

• Dutch voters have narrowly rejected a law that would give spy agencies the power to carry out mass tapping of Internet traffic delivering a setback to Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s government.

• A few years back, you might recall that there was a period of immense government and media hyperventilation over allegations that Chinese hardware vendor Huawei spied on an American consumers. Story after story engaged in hysterical hand-wringing over this threat, most of them ignoring that Chinese gear and components are everywhere, including in American products. So the government conducted an 18 month investigation into those allegations and found that there was no evidence whatsoever to support allegations that Huawei spies on Americans via its products.

• As we’ve been discussing all week, a lot of people are reacting to the wrong thing in the whole Facebook / Cambridge Analytica mess. The problem was not that Facebook had an open API — but that its users were unaware of what was happening with their own data. Unfortunately, many, many people (including the press and politicians) are running with the narrative that Facebook failed to “protect” data. And, just as we warned, the coming “solutions” won’t help matters, but will actually make them worse.

• Zuckerberg doesn’t want to testify

• In the wake of the ongoing Cambridge Analytica debacle, Facebook has now been sued in federal court in San Francisco and San Jose. These new cases claim violations of federal securities laws, unfair competition, and negligence, among other allegations.

• “This isn’t going to cut it,” David Cicilline, a Democratic U.S. representative from Rhode Island, said in a Facebook post responding to the CEO’s statement. “Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify before Congress.”

• If I win, I can show the world a voter file with 5,000 data points the company compiled. I can show others where that information came from, how to request the information for yourself, and how to opt-out. If I win, everybody wins.

• The sleazy way in which Cambridge Analytica was able to scrape Facebook’s vast collection of private information is not the real story here. Neither is the existence of these creepy little consultancies which promise to combine big data holdings with psychographic analysis to help political candidates manipulate voters.

• The real question is whether we are ready, collectively, to draw a line under surveillance capitalism itself, and start taking back a measure of control.

• Nordea funds have been barred from buying Facebook shares for three months, but retain the right to sell them.

• Aral Balkan, privacy activist and developer of the Better anti-tracking tool, doesn’t think we’ll smarten up and ditch Facebook. “People are still more worried that a third-party company like Cambridge Analytica used Facebook’s data instead of what they should actually be worried about: that Facebook had that data to begin with,” he says

• “Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have the same business model,” says Balkan. “If Cambridge Analytica can sway elections and referenda with a relatively small subset of Facebook’s data, imagine what Facebook can and does do with the full set.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Moreover, interior dashcam footage shows the driver looking down for nearly five seconds just before the accident—so she likely would have missed Herzberg no matter how good the illumination on the road was.

• Some of those workers, who had careers with IBM spanning decades, saw their jobs either given to “less-experienced and lower-paid workers” or sent overseas.

• Two days after an Uber SUV fatally struck the 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, while traveling in autonomous mode, friends of the victim have argued that the ride-share company should face consequences and criticized government officials for encouraging car companies to test the vehicles on the state’s public roads.

• A Nevada high school student was suspended for using profanity in a passionate message to his Congressman on gun control.

• On March 14, students across the country joined a walkout to demand stricter gun laws following the Parkland shooting that claimed 17 lives. Among the protesters was Noah C., a high school junior who called the office of U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei with a passionate message.

• “Members of Congress who haven’t acted on gun control reforms,” Noah C. told a staffer in the congressman’s office, “need to get off their fucking asses and do something to keep us safe.”

• Noah was one of many students at the walkout who exercised their First Amendment right to use strong language in messages to their local representatives. But instead of seriously addressing the valid concerns of a young constituent, Amodei’s office decided to escalate the situation by reporting the call to Robert McQueen High School, where Noah is a junior. Within hours, Noah — who had never faced a detention or any academic issues — found himself suspended.

• The move sets a dangerous precedent, considering Noah’s impassioned plea for gun control legislation did not occur during school or at a school-sanctioned or -sponsored event. That’s why the ACLU of Nevada is stepping in to defend him. Noah’s suspension is an unconstitutional attack on his First Amendment rights, which could have a chilling effect on others who might want to contact their representative. We urge the school to reverse its suspension and Amodei to withdraw his complaint.

• Unfortunately, McQueen High School has a history of trying to tamp down on Noah’s speech.

• The law enforcement “tool” unconstitutionally restricted people’s freedom without a shred of due process.

• Peter Arellano’s life changed when a Los Angeles Police Department officer handed him a piece of paper informing him that he was now subject to a “gang injunction.” He could no longer visit his neighbors in their homes, drive to church with his family, ride his bike through the local park, or even stand in his own front yard with his father or brother. If he violated these terms, he could be arrested and jailed. Arellano, who has never been convicted of any crime, had effectively been placed on house arrest.

• Gang injunctions are ineffective policing tools that primarily serve to criminalize young Black and Latino men. Nonetheless, Los Angeles has been operating a massive gang injunction program for decades. Like nearly 9,000 other Angelenos, Arellano was subjected to an injunction solely based on an LAPD officer’s opinion, a whim that was approved by a city attorney, that he was a gang member. He never got to challenge the allegation or even know what evidence was used against him. This decision to radically limit his freedom didn’t involve a court.

• Gang injunctions represent a radical departure from constitutional due process. To obtain a gang injunction, a prosecutor files a civil “nuisance abatement” lawsuit against a particular gang, claiming that its conduct harms the community. The gang, which is not a formal organization and has no legal representation, does not appear at trial. With no one to argue against the need for an injunction, it is granted by default.

• What started out as normal security research soon became a nightmare for Shafer. His uncovering of poor security practices in the dental industry — particularly the lack of attention paid to keeping HIPAA information secured — led to his house being raided by FBI agents. The FBI raided his house again after he blogged about the first raid. The FBI justified its harassment of Shafer with vague theories about his connection to infamous black hat hacker TheDarkOverlord. To do this, the FBI had to gloss over — if not outright omit — the warnings Shafer had sent to victims of TheDarkOverlord, as well as the information on the hacker Shafer had sent to law enforcement agencies including the FBI.

• Blogging about his interactions with the FBI led to the judge presiding over his criminal trial to revoke his release and jail him for exercising his First Amendment rights. This was ultimately reversed by a federal judge who agreed Shafer was allowed to call FBI agents “stupid” and blog about his treatment by the federal agency. (He was not to reveal personal info about FBI agents, however.)

• National Geographic has long had a negative reputation for exoticizing people of color, and failing to challenge colonialism and its legacies. The magazine (now owned by Murdoch, but scheduled to be sold to Disney) addresses this history in its new issue (4/18); and most are crediting them with trying, anyway. Though, as sociologist Victor Ray assesses in a Washington Post op-ed (3/16/18), the magazine rather steps on its message with a cover story on mixed-race twins that traffics in the same sort of “curiosity and surprise” racial clichés the magazine says it’s interrogating, along with a lazy social science that presents racism as a matter of individual attitudes, and overstates progress toward equality.

• Predictive policing software — developed by Palantir and deployed secretly by the New Orleans Police Department for nearly six years — is at the center of a criminal prosecution. The Verge first reported the NOPD’s secret use of Palantir’s software a few weeks ago, something only the department and the mayor knew anything about.

• Statistics show that many people who have been incarcerated return to prison, often because of an inability to pay fees and fines associated with criminal offenses. As Sarah van Gelder reported in a February 2018 YES! Magazine article, research from the Columbia University Justice Lab found a 50% increase in people on probation returning to jail due to financial non-compliance. The people caught up in the criminal justice system are likely to be low-income and cannot afford fines after being released, placing them in a vicious cycle of recidivism. As Alexes Harris reported in a 2016 study, the average fee for a felony conviction is $1,300. To pay these fees, individuals must find steady jobs from employers who are willing to employ them despite their criminal record. If unable to find satisfactory employment, ex-convicts may turn to illegal activities resulting in recidivism. In some states, the inability to pay a fine is a parole- or probation violation, which can result in an arrest warrant, again reinstating the cycle of imprisonment.

• In May and June 2013, when New Orleans’ murder rate was the sixth-highest in the United States, the Orleans Parish district attorney handed down two landmark racketeering indictments against dozens of men accused of membership in two violent Central City drug trafficking gangs, 3NG and the 110ers. Members of both gangs stood accused of committing 25 murders as well as several attempted killings and armed robberies.

• Subsequent investigations by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and local agencies produced further RICO indictments, including that of a 22-year-old man named Evans “Easy” Lewis, a member of a gang called the 39ers who was accused of participating in a drug distribution ring and several murders.

• Maryam Mombeini, age 55, was stopped by Iranian airport security and told that she could not leave the country with her two sons, Ashifa Kassam reported for the Guardian in March, 2018. Maryam’s entire family holds dual citizenship in Canada and Iran. Her husband, Kavous Seyed-Emami, who founded the Persian Heritage Wildlife Foundation, was arrested in January under the suspicion that he and several of his coworkers were spies for the CIA and Mossad, the national intelligence agency of Israel. Iranian government officials assert that Kavous, age 63, committed suicide in prison two weeks after his arrest. The day after Iran refused to allow Maryam Mobeini to leave the country, the Canadian government called on Iran to allow her to do so.

• The widow of an Iranian-Canadian environmentalist who died in a Tehran prison under disputed circumstances has been barred from leaving the country, according to one of her sons.

• The family – all of whom are dual citizens of Iran and Canada – were boarding a Lufthansa flight for Canada on Wednesday when Maryam Mombeini, 55, was stopped by security forces and told she was forbidden from leaving the country.

• Soon after, her son posted a photo online showing himself and his brother seated in the plane without their mother. “Enough is enough,” Ramin Seyed-Emami wrote on Instagram, noting that both he and his brother would not “stay silent for one second until we are reunited with our mom”.

• A Bahraini minor was sentenced to six months in prison on Sunday for allegedly taking part in an ‘illegal gathering’ – a charge commonly used to jail anti-regime protesters.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• One of the most high-stakes antitrust battles in recent memory is about to unfold in court, as AT&T argues its case for buying Time Warner, despite objections from the Justice Department. If approved, the purchase will create an outsized media behemoth that combines AT&T’s 25 million paid TV subscribers with media giants like HBO, CNN, and Warner Bros. movie studios. This, the Justice Department argues, is a company so large that it could stifle competition. Meanwhile, AT&T insists that the merger is critical if it has any hope of competing in a marketplace increasingly driven by streaming media. Both sides are making their opening statements in a DC court today. Here’s what to watch for during the trial.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• An often heard motivation for people to illegally download or stream content is the long gap between a movie’s theatrical release and its debut through other channels. New research shows that for digital downloads this gap is shrinking rapidly. But is that enough?

• Search engines such as Google and Bing should be forced to de-list pirate sites from search results to enhance Australia’s site-blocking regime. That’s the call from entertainment companies including Village Roadshow and Foxtel, who have responded to a government consultation on the efficacy and future standing of the country’s leading anti-piracy mechanism.

• Investors are about to decide whether it matters that the most popular music streaming service doesn’t make any money.

• Last year the Superior Court of Justice of the City of Mexico responded to a copyright complaint filed by a TV company by banning all imports and sales of Roku devices. After a temporary suspension of the decision, the ban soon returned and the company and various sales outlets have been fighting ever since. New rulings mean that the controversial restrictions will continue, at least for now.

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