● 03.25.18

● Links 25/3/2018: digiKam 5.9.0, Slax 9.4 RC1

Posted in News Roundup at 6:23 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• Zstd compression continues becoming more widely adopted from Ubuntu looking at Zstd-compressed packages to compressing the Linux kernel image to now the OpenZFS file-system soon having support for Facebook’s Zstandard compression algorithm.

• Zstd support for OpenZFS has been in the works for months while one of the involved developers, Alan Jude, has tweeted that the Zstd compression will be available soon.

Graphics Stack

• The DXVK project that is implementing Direct3D 11 atop of Vulkan for the benefit of Wine gamers is out this weekend with a new release.

• DXVK continues rapidly advancing in allowing more D3D11 games on Wine to run with better performance than Wine’s stock D3D11-to-OpenGL translation layer. The latest release this Sunday is DXVK 0.40.

• As a more modern and feature alternative to the DriConf configuration program for tweaking Mesa driver settings, a few months back we featured ADRICONF as the Advanced DRI Configuration. Recently this GUI program has picked up a few more features.

• The author of ADRICONF, Jean Hertel, wrote into Phoronix this weekend to share some of the recent development work. Most notably, there is now initial support for PRIME multi-GPU setups within the program. The basics should be in there but the developer is willing to receive bug reports about any missing features and is encouraging those with PRIME laptops/systems to give ADRICONF a whirl to see how it does.

Benchmarks

• Our latest benchmarking of the near-final Linux 4.16 kernel is checking on the performance of two Intel systems going back to the days of Linux 3.17, the oldest kernel that would successfully boot with the Ubuntu 18.04 user-space. Every major kernel release was tested as we see how the Linux kernel performance has evolved on these Haswell and Gulftown systems since October 2014.

Applications

• You don’t need to have need to use it to appreciate how the focused, clean design and sumptuously simple workflow work together to benefit users.

• So it’s somewhat sad to report that Peek is discontinuing support for its Snap app.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Roguelikes. The term is everywhere these days, and every bit as played-out as “zombies” or “the Dark Souls of…”. We see it so much on game descriptions that we’re sick of it.

• Mass Transit is an excellent addition to an already excellent game, adding fresh new possibilities to the sweet concept or urban simulation. It does not detract from the original in any way, and you gain a lot of new stuff that makes it worth replaying old scenarios all over again. The extra transport services alone are more than enough to justify this beefy DLC, but there are also other, less noticeable improvements all over the place, which make Cities: Skylines ever better.

• I am very pleased, and I like the trend in the quality and cheerful colorfulness of the game’s DLC. Normally, I’m opposed to payment salami tactics, but I have nothing against expansions packs, as long as they bring generous and genuine novelty into the game. So far, I’ve been three times lucky, with After Dark, Snowfall and now Mass Transit doing a splendid job. Cities: Skylines keeps evolving, and it really is a great title. If you like the genre, look no further. Extremely recommended.

• It is 2018 and Atari is back in the console game. Didn’t think I’d be typing that one even after they announced the Ataribox last summer. Now, the re-branded Atari VCS was supposed to launch back in December 2017, but was delayed for a “number of factors” however, the company plans to be much more open about the console’s development process in the coming months. While the console probably won’t be releasing anytime soon, Atari Connect COO Michael Arzt was on-site at GDC this week to answer questions about the console. Granted, what he could say was relatively limited, but it did give us some idea of where things are in production. “Delaying the release gave us a chance to go back and look at everything again, and we found a few other things we wanted to change as well,” Arzt said. He didn’t go into detail about the delay or what else would be changing, after all, that’s old news.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Following the release of 5.8.0 published in January, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.9.0 of the digiKam Software Collection. In this last version of 5.x, we has focused all developements to close bugs.

• DigiKam 5.9.0 is now available for this KDE-aligned open-source photo management software.

• The digiKam 5.9 release features many fixes to its XMP sidecar support, fixes to its MySQL support, improvements to face management, and many other small enhancements throughout.

• Check out what KDE contributors have been up to this week in the world of Usability & Productivity! The KDE Applications 18.04 feature freeze happened this week, so there was a burst of energy to get in some last-minute new features for core KDE apps, among other welcome changes:

• With the upcoming release of Leap 15.0 and current snapshots of Tumbleweed, the rolling release variant, openSUSE users get a important updates to both QtWebKit and QtWebEngine.

• Last November I reported that running KDE Partition Manager as non-root user is slowly shaping up. Instead of running the whole application as root, KAuth lets us run GUI parts as unprivileged user and some non-GUI helper running as root.

• After another 4 months of development, KAuth support is mostly done. There are still a few things that need to be finished, some cleaning up, fixing bugs but major refactoring is complete. Unlike other KDE Applications, KDE Partition Manager uses root for almost any operation, so the way it uses KAuth is quite different from e.g. Kate where the only task the helper has to do is to copy the file to its destination. KDE Partition Manager might need to execute a lot of different commands to do some task (e.g. move/resize partition) and we don’t want user to authenticate 20 times during partitioning operation.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Friday [sic. Monday], 2018-03-26 is the Fedora 28 Gnome 3.28 Test Day! As part of changes Gnome 3.28 in Fedora 28, we need your help to test if everything runs smoothly!

• GNOME contributor Yussuf Khalil has managed to uncover and resolve a bug in Clutter that was hurting GNOME’s performance.

• The developer has begun analyzing GNOME performance issues and one of the first things he uncovered were frequent spikes in GNOME’s frametimes at regular intervals. He ended up finding out that the frequent spikes were caused by showing the seconds on the clock within GNOME Shell.

• Fans of free, open source desktop environments will be pleased to hear the GNOME 3.30 release date has been set.

• Serving as the next major stable update to the GNOME desktop environment, GNOME 3.30 is scheduled for release on September 6, 2018.

• Of course, before it gets there there’ll be a slate of alpha, beta and release candidate builds to sample, all tagged under the guise of GNOME 3.29.

• For more details on this cycle’s release, freeze and finalisation dates you can shuffle your eyes over the GNOME release schedule.

Distributions

Slackware Family

• While it has been requested for some time, i found it surprised that finally Patrick agreed to : support of HTTP/2. Patrick added jansson and nghttp2 as new dependencies and then recompiled curl and httpd to add HTTP/2 support. HTTP/2 has been published as a standard in May 2015 as RFC 7540.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

Derivatives

• The first release candidate of the Debian-based Slax Linux distribution is now available.

• Slax has been working on its first major update for 2018 since this lightweight Linux distribution was revived last year and switched from a Slackware base to Debian as well as moving from KDE to Fluxbox+Compton. As their second major release off this new OS base, Slax 9.4 RC1 is hot off the press tonight.

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• So, I’ve taken a look at a number if distributions so far, like Linux Mint, Manjaro and KDE Neon, but I figured I should show another distribution that I’d highly recommend for users who are new to GNU/Linux systems; Elementary OS.

• If you’re a seasoned poweruser, you’ll likely find Elementary OS to be rather boring, closed off, and annoying. However, I have installed Elementary OS on friends machines who are not very computer friendly, and they have had no problems for years now, without a single complaint.

• Loki is based on Ubuntu 16.04, and so reaps the benefits of the Ubuntu repositories.

• As with the original Mini, the Mini 2 will come in standard and Mini Pro editions when they become available in June, with similar or lower price tags to their predecessors. The Mini 2 ships with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of solid-state storage, whereas the Mini Pro 2 doubles the RAM and boosts storage capacity to a 120GB SSD. While the Mini 2 is a mere $4 more than the first Mini ($299 versus $294), the $349 Mini Pro 2 is actually $45 cheaper than the previous version.

• If you are looking for a tiny Linux PC and happen to be a Linux Mint user, the MintBox Mini 2 is now available.

• The MintBox Mini 2 basically comes down to a CompuLab Fitlet2 preloaded with this Ubuntu-derived Linux distribution. See our CompuLab Fitlet2 review from earlier this month: it’s a phenomenal little Linux-friendly PC. It’s low-power, passively-cooled, and built extremely well like we have always seen out of CompuLab.

Devices/Embedded

Android

• For years, we’ve complained about Android permissions being far too lax compared to iOS, but nothing quite prepares you for finding out that one of the most popular apps in the world has been tracking and storing your call and text history—but only if you were using an Android device.

Free Software/Open Source

• In the identity management arena there are a number of open source solutions that could qualify here. Of course, the most well known is OpenLDAP™, but there are others such as Samba and FreeIPA. Each of these solutions comes with their own set of strengths and challenges, so let’s take a look at what these are.

• The new webOS Open Source Edition (OSE) GitHub account contains 85 different repositories that use the Apache 2.0 License to make code change and distribution easier. To build an image of webOS OSE, you can clone the build-webos repository, which is a top-level repo that aggregates the various layers of code required to build a complete image.

Events

• LibrePlanet started as the annual meeting of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) membership. Ten years later, that meeting has transformed into a vibrant two-day conference that brings together hundreds of new and longtime members of the free software community from all parts of the world.

• This year’s conference kicked off on Saturday, March 24th with a keynote by Deb Nicholson, a free software policy expert and Community Outreach Director for the Open Invention Network, who posited the question: how do we make free software last forever? How does our community bring in, welcome, and train the new young people who will keep the flame of the free software movement alive? And, how do we create a technological future that bears more resemblance to the techno-utopia of Wakanda (the homeland of the film Black Panther’s titular character) than to the techno-dystopias imagined in cyberpunk narratives? Videos of this talk and others will be available soon, at the LibrePlanet GNU MediaGoblin page.

• From March 8th to 11th, 2018 the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) took place in beautiful Pasadena for the third year in a row, previous edition were held in hotels near LAX. This was the 16th edition of the conference -hence the #Scale16x hashtag that flooded social media those days- and my personal 8th.

• I’ve been saying it for a while now that I think that the conference is just getting better by every year, but this year I heard several comments that this is one of the best and most important community driven conferences in the world. Rough estimations tell that there were around 3,000 attendees this year.

• As a long time tradition now, the Fedora community held some activities in the conference, as well as a booth in the exhibition floor. This year, I had the privilege and pleasure of promoting Fedora, answer question from people that showed interest in (or are already users of) Fedora or simply saluting people that stopped by. I have to say that it pleasantly surprised me the growing number of spanish-speaking people that attended this year. I was accompanied in booth duty with long time Fedora contributors -but above all great Friends- Perry Rivera, Scott Williams and my newest Fedora friend Michael Singh. Unofficialy, but always willing to help, RedHat’s Tom ‘Spot’ Callaway was also supporting our booth and we always appreciate it and thank him for his work.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 7 beta 1 is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). I chose to push this out a little faster than usual since there are a few important upgrades and I won’t have as much time to work on the browser over the next couple weeks, so you get to play with it early.

• Mozilla intends to add basic ad filtering capabilities to its Firefox browser later this year, according to its recently updated roadmap.

• The move follows from what Asa Dotzler, Firefox roadmap and community leader at Mozilla, describes as changes that are making the web experience worse.

• “Trackers, intrusive ads and other dark patterns threaten to drive people away from the open web and that’s not good for people browsing or publishing,” he says in Firefox roadmap update made on Thursday.

• “Over the next year or so, Firefox will take a stand against tracking, intrusive ads, and other dark patterns on the web by blocking the worst content and more clearly communicating the privacy and other protections the browser offers.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the winners of the 2017 Free Software Awards at a ceremony held during the LibrePlanet 2018 conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). FSF president Richard M. Stallman presented the Award for Projects of Social Benefit and the Award for the Advancement of Free Software.

• The Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented to a project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, to intentionally and significantly benefit society. This award stresses the use of free software in service to humanity.

• This year, Public Lab received the award, which was accepted by Liz Barry, Public Lab co-founder, organizer, and director of community development, and Jeff Warren, Public Lab co-founder and research director, on behalf of the entire Public Lab community.

Programming/Development

• The last release of DocKnot (my program for maintaining various bits of package documentation) had a bug in one of the new tests on Windows systems. This release fixes only that bug, mostly to make the automated CPAN testers stop mailing me. (Such an excellent service.)

Leftovers

Security

Defence/Aggression

• Cambridge Analytica executives aggressively sought the backing of rich GOP donors, who they believed would help the company “effectively corner the market” in the United States, internal records show. To win them over, executives sought to craft personal appeals drawn from information housed in the company’s extensive database of American voters.

• In my reporting on U.S.-Israeli policy, I have tracked numerous episodes in which the United States and/or Israel made moves that seemed to indicate preparations for war against Iran. Each time—in 2007, in 2008, and again in 2011—those moves, presented in corporate media as presaging attacks on Tehran, were actually bluffs aimed at putting pressure on the Iranian government.

• But the strong likelihood that Donald Trump will now choose John Bolton as his next national security advisor creates a prospect of war with Iran that is very real. Bolton is no ordinary neoconservative hawk. He has been obsessed for many years with going to war against the Islamic Republic, calling repeatedly for bombing Iran in his regular appearances on Fox News, without the slightest indication that he understands the consequences of such a policy.

• His is not merely a rhetorical stance: Bolton actively conspired during his tenure as the Bush administration’s policymaker on Iran from 2002 through 2004 to establish the political conditions necessary for the administration to carry out military action.

• Iran should strengthen ties with Russia and China to counter a tougher U.S. stance expected after President Donald Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as National Security Adviser, a senior Parliament member of Iran was quoted as saying on Saturday.

• Some commentators see Mr. Bolton’s nomination as another nail in the coffin of the Obama-era agreement between Iran and world powers to limit Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, already cast into grave doubt by Mr. Trump himself. “Americans are pushing for harder policies towards the Islamic Republic of Iran and we need to strengthen our view towards the East, especially China and Russia,” Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, told ISNA news agency.

• President Trump has tapped John Bolton to become his next national security adviser, replacing H.R. McMaster. Bolton is known for his ultra-hawkish views. He has openly backed war against Iran and North Korea, and was a prominent supporter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Just three weeks ago, Bolton wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal titled “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First.” In 2015, while the Obama administration was negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, Bolton wrote a piece titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” We speak to longtime investigative reporter Gareth Porter. His new piece for The American Conservative is titled “The Untold Story of John Bolton’s Campaign for War with Iran.”

• Following a failed attempt by three senators to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war against Yemen, the State Department announced a sale of 6,700 missiles to Saudi Arabia, Ann Wright reports.

• Dems are criticizing Trump’s National Security Advisor pick, not because he’s a warmonger who was one of the original members of the Project for a New American Century, but because he’s allegedly too soft on Russia, Caitlin Johnstone explains.

• As so many of us have been dreading, PNAC’s favorite bloodthirsty child killer John Bolton has been added to the Trump administration. And as many half-jokingly predicted, Democrats seized on this opportunity to accuse Bolton of being a Kremlin agent.

• President Trump’s shocking decision to appoint arch-neocon John Bolton to be his National Security Advisor has us wondering whether the old discredited GW Bush policy of “pre-emptive” war is back on the menu. Not only did Bolton help lie us into the Iraq war…he still thinks it was a really good idea! He has published articles calling for US pre-emptive strikes on Iran and North Korea and even called once for a US attack on Cuba! For a president who campaigned on how stupid all the foreign wars have been, he is sure picking a strange cabinet.

• Austin’s bomber revealed many things. Despite being inexperienced and not terribly bright, he terrorized a major city, stretched police resources to their limit, significantly disrupted commerce and grabbed worldwide headlines. He doubtless also caused the CEOs at UPS and Fedex to have nightmares.

• [...]

• The immutable vulnerability cannot be eliminated by military means. We cannot patrol below every power line and bridge. No border wall will matter, just another target. Besides, our principal enemies are internal, not an alien invasion. The Austin bomber was not a Russian. Nor was Timothy McVeigh or the perpetrators at Parkland HS or at the Pulse nightclub or at the Mandalay hotel Las Vegas or at Sandy Hook Elementary, all terrorist attacks by white male Americans with no criminal record who probably considered themselves Christians.

• There is no military means to fully guarantee our security. It is statistically irrefutable that having guns increases one’s likelihood of getting shot. Our safety will instead be primarily dependent on how we treat others, as human beings and as a nation.

• My school gets multiple shooting threats a year and does nothing to help prevent this. My mom worries about me and begs me to become a recluse under the shield of online schooling and I have deeply considered it. Every day I think about how the likelihood of my school being next is uncomfortably grand. I think about how easy it is to get a gun and how my school never locks its doors. How many angry students, staff, and strangers there are. The most heartbreaking part is that no one ever calls that thinking far-fetched because every single student in America has had similar thoughts traverse their mind at some point.

• In one 24-hour news cycle, President Donald Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, appointed the war and torture-backing CIA chief Mike Pompeo to replace him, and then tapped Gina Haspel—who covered up CIA torture in Thailand—to replace Pompeo.

• While the media descended on that circus, many missed that the White House quietly convened high-level representatives of 20 countries ostensibly to “brainstorm” about the crisis in Gaza, where Israel’s repeated military incursions and blockade have devastated the territory’s infrastructure, health and water systems.

• The gathering, which took place on March 13, was less splashy than the Tillerson-Pompeo-Haspel saga. But it spoke volumes about dangerous new drifts in U.S. foreign policy.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Some may question whether a courtroom is the best place to create policies to address global warming and climate change. But in a broken political system dominated by tit for tat Twitter attacks, it might be the only place left in America where actual adults can address these issues calmly and maturely. The cities of San Francisco and Oakland have sued 5 major oil companies — Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP — claiming they knew decades ago that their operations were causing average global temperatures to increase, and that they kept their knowledge private, putting millions of people at risk. In particular, those who live in the San Francisco Bay Area are likely to suffer damages as a result of rising ocean levels that threaten to put large swaths of land adjacent to the Bay underwater.

• [...]

• Daniel Farber, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says “Most or all of the major oil corporations have now acknowledged the reality of climate change and the need for government action (though who knows how serious they are about that). So it would be hard for them to take a contrary view in this litigation. Getting them to say the same thing in court will be kind of a victory for the plaintiffs even if nothing else goes their way,” according to the Scientific American story. Maybe baby steps are the best we can hope for at this juncture.

Finance

• Education costs have risen at a pace triple that of housing in the same period. A recent Rolling Stone report called student debt “America’s next financial black hole.” As it ominously observed, the system is rigged: “You can’t get out of the debt. Since most young people find themselves unable to make their full payments early on, they often find themselves perpetually paying down interest only, never touching the principal.”

• As the tidal wave of open-source money disrupts the entire stack from computing infrastructure to software developers, alpha geeks and pure entrepreneurs are getting in on the ground floor of what they believe will be the primary currency of the future.

• Shahmir Sanni, who worked for the official Vote Leave campaign, today breaks cover to raise concerns that the group behind the knife-edge 2016 vote in favour of Brexit – including key figures now working for Theresa May in Downing Street – may have broken the law by flouting referendum spending rules and then attempting to destroy evidence.

• Sanni claims that a donation of £625,000 was made by Vote Leave to an independent referendum campaign organisation called BeLeave. Sanni says that the money, which was then channeled to a Canadian digital services firm, AggregateIQ, that has links to the controversial Cambridge Analytica, violated election regulations. The donation was sanctioned by the most senior figures in Vote Leave, including campaign director Dominic Cummings and CEO Matthew Elliott

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Jeremy Corbyn faces the most serious revolt by his own MPs since the failed coup of 2016 as senior figures publicly accuse him today of condoning antisemitism, while at the same time purging his inner circle of passionate pro-Europeans.

• MPs broke cover throughout on Saturday to demand that Corbyn appears before them on Monday evening to explain himself on both issues at the weekly meeting of the parliamentary party. One senior MP in an influential position said she expected an ugly atmosphere: “He has managed to combine antisemitism with an attack on Remainers in one weekend. This is about our identity as a progressive, tolerant, pro-European party. I am in complete despair.”

• Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour party, said he was wrong to support in 2012 an artist who had painted a mural in London that Corbyn is now calling anti-Semitic.

• Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet has been shuffled more times than a Vegas blackjack dealer’s pack of cards.

• What is more extraordinary than some of those Corbyn has ditched is those he hasn’t.

• Owen Smith, the erstwhile leadership candidate, was the latest to be dropped for making remarks on Brexit which reflect the views of millions of Labour voters.

• Smith has been very harshly treated by a man who was supposed to be a leading light in the Remain campaign but has since revealed himself to be a committed Brexiteer.

• At the request of Spanish authorities, Finland will launch an extradition process targeting deposed Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont, although officials say his whereabouts are unknown.

• Carles Puigdemont, wanted in Spain for sedition, is held by German police as he tries to reach Belgium.

• The Justice Department’s trial to block AT&T’s $85 billion merger with Time Warner kicked off this past week in Washington, D.C., and it’s expected to be the most influential antitrust showdown in decades.

• It’s also an unusual fight for the Justice Department because it challenges a so-called vertical merger—a merger between companies that operate in the same industry but aren’t direct competitors—for the first time in decades.

• In this Legal Speak episode, Law.com editor Jenna Greene and D.C. reporter Cogan Schneier make sense of what’s been happening in court. Plus, Jenna asks antitrust lawyer David Balto, a former policy director for the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, to explain the legal strategies on each side and why the case matters beyond Big Media.

• Trump’s term began with a controversy where he claimed the largest crowd ever… That was not the truth. His crowd was way smaller than Obama’s, way smaller than the march of the women and way smaller than the march of the students who are mad as Hell about being shot up in schools.

• In the days and weeks following the 2016 presidential elections, reports surfaced about how a small British political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, might have played a pivotal role in Donald Trump’s surprise victory. The company claimed to have formulated algorithms to influence American voters using individually targeted political advertisements. It reportedly generated personality profiles of millions of individual citizens by collecting up to 5000 data points on each person. Then Cambridge Analytica used these “psychographic” tools to send voters carefully crafted online messages about candidates or hot-button political issues.

• Although political consultants have long used “microtargeting” techniques for zeroing in on particular ethnic, religious, age, or income groups, Cambridge Analytica’s approach is unusual: The company relies upon individuals’ personal data that is harvested from social media apps like Facebook. In the US, such activities are entirely legal. Some described Cambridge Analytica’s tools as “mind-reading software” and a “weaponized AI [artificial intelligence] propaganda machine.” However, corporate media outlets such as CNN and the Wall Street Journal often portrayed the company in glowing terms.

• Cambridge Analytica is once again in the headlines–but under somewhat different circumstances. Late last week, whistleblower Christopher Wylie went public, explaining how he played an instrumental role in collecting millions of Facebook profiles for Cambridge Analytica. This revelation is significant because until investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr published her exposé in The Guardian, Cambridge Analytica’s then-CEO Alexander Nix had adamantly denied using Facebook data. And although Facebook officials knew that Cambridge Analytica had previously gathered data on millions of users, they did not prohibit the company from advertising until last Friday, as the scandal erupted. To make matters worse, the UK’s Channel 4 released undercover footage early this week in which Cambridge Analytica executives boast about using dirty tricks–bribes, entrapment, and “beautiful girls” to mention a few.

• Cambridge Analytica stands accused of using ‘unattributable and untrackable’ advertising to get Donald Trump elected, of illegally accessing 50 million Facebook profiles, and of much more besides. The controversial data company also has friends in high places, from Tory party donors to the British military.

• But openDemocracy has now discovered that Cambridge Analytica’s establishment links run even deeper, leading to one of the most senior figures in Northern Irish unionism – a PR man who has represented everyone from British Airways to Russian oligarchs – and raising questions once more about who gave the DUP a secretive £435,000 donation for its Brexit campaign.

• Former Ulster Unionist MP David Burnside has been one of the most influential PR figures in Britain for decades, a Tory donor with links to senior figures in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. We have now learned that Burnside also works for Vincent Tchenguiz, a property tycoon who was the largest shareholder in Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, for almost a decade.

• There are two diametrically opposed Brexit narratives, in what is now widely described as a ‘cultural war’ dividing the nation. The first story presents Britain as exceptional and plucky, but currently under the yoke of the risk averse European Union matriarch. We Brits, with the help of the brotherly United States, can overthrow this oppressive other, reboot our economy and find our way to the sunlit uplands.

• The same week as developers were launching yet another political attack on the great crested newt, Sir Oliver Letwin registered a new company, The Red Tape Initiative (RTI), at Companies House. The new think tank would reopen the debate about the great crested newt, housing developments, the European birds and habitats directives and their implementation.

• But what was the RTI? The private company was registered by Letwin with Lord (Jonathan) Marland, who made a fortune in the insurance company acquisitions game, and a chap called Nick Tyrone. The firm was registered to a shared workspace in Victoria, London.

• It was described by Politico as “the other UK Brexit department”.

• There were big changes in the hard Brexit world recently with the announcement that Shanker Singham, a key advisor to senior Brexiteers in the British government, has left their favourite think tank, the Legatum Institute. But while Singham has departed the controversial organisation, the public is still being kept in the dark about his influence on the UK government.

• As head of Legatum’s trade commission, Singham, an advocate of a hard Brexit, has had “unparalleled access” to Brexit minister David Davis, including at least five meetings with officials from Davis’s Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) in the year to August 2017.

• But DExEU has refused openDemocracy’s repeated Freedom of Information requests for minutes, agendas and other information about these high-level meetings. Politicians from across the party spectrum have called for government to release all the details of dealings with think tanks and pro-Brexit lobbyists.

• Singham’s access to Brexiteers in the UK government had raised eyebrows. In November, the Mail on Sunday named the former US trade advisor as being involved in a letter sent by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove urging Theresa May to take a tougher stance on Brexit.

• For the past year, studies have piled up showing large proportions of EU citizens in the UK – from doctors and tech workers to academics – were considering leaving the country. In the meantime, the issue of EU citizens’ rights in the UK has become a politically charged topic and consequently remained unresolved since the referendum in June 2016. This has taken its toll.

• New data released on 22 February by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that net EU migration decreased to 90,000 over the last year. This is 75,000 lower than the previous year. In fact, it is a five year low. It also shows that 130,000 EU citizens left the UK – the most since 2008.

• Beneath the endless madness of the Today in Tangerine Satan (TITS) show, aided and abetted by the Radically Regressive and Reactionary Republicans (the R4 Party), it’s easy to forget that the Inauthentic Opposition Party (IOP, also known as the Democratic Party) installed the malignant presidential apprentice in the White House in the first place. The deplorable, dollar-drenched Democrats (the 4D party) seated moronic mogul Donald Trump in the Oval Office in at least ten key ways:

• 1. By governing in accord with the wishes of the wealthy Few under the neoliberal, fake-progressive Goldman Sachs-and Citibank-captive Barack Obama. The demoralized and demobilized the majority-progressive working-class base on which the Democrats depended to win the 2016 election.

• 20th Century Europe however clings onto the 21st Century like a desperate man grasping at a life belt. Imperialism (the white man) and the Cold War (white hysteria) don’t want to drown in time. Neither does the United States of Europe (the EU). The 21st Century however can’t carry their weight. If the 21st Century doesn’t kick them away it’ll drown too. If the 21st Century wants to be born it must reject them. And it is doing so.

• The immigrants and the elections are doing so. Because they’re the midwife to the new European child – whatever it is. Make no doubt about it though: the immigrants are civilizing Europe. And the elections are undermining Europe.

• The bulk of the European 20th Century was shaped by the Communists, the Fascists and the Christian Democrats. They’re all gone now and in the vacuum there’s nothing but farce. But there’s the outline of something different.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The growth of working-class opposition is the real target of the media firestorm over Facebook’s alleged data lapse. The aim of the press campaign is to create the climate for the introduction of even more explicit censorship measures.

• [...]

• He then went on to say that Facebook now employs “15,000 people working on security and content review,” and that this number would rise to 20,000 by the end of the year.

• This amazing admission means that, based on the company’s employee headcount of 25,000 at the beginning of this year, most of the company’s employees are engaged in reviewing and censoring user content. From a company nominally dedicated to helping users share information and learn about the world, Facebook is being transformed into an instrument of police repression and censorship.

• In an essay calling the budget “petty” and “barbaric,” the brilliant novelist, poet, farmer and Kentucky native Wendell Berry wrote, “This destruction would amount to an act of censorship, for the knowledge made available by the Press belongs to the people of Kentucky, to readers now and to come. It is a part of our commonwealth, which the governor and the government are entrusted to protect, not destroy.”

• Feminist activists are preparing to sue China’s biggest social media platforms for deleting their organization’s account, the group’s founder said on Saturday, March 24.

• On March 8, International Women’s Day, staffers operating the prolific Feminist Voices account on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform found it had been deleted.

• Weibo customer service representatives told them by phone that the account could not be reactivated due to the posting of “sensitive and illegal information”, the group’s founder Lu Pin told Agence France-Presse.

• The next day, the group’s WeChat public account had also disappeared.

• The group has run into trouble before on social media, with their accounts being temporarily suspended and individual posts deleted, but “this time they say it’s a permanent deletion”, Lu said.

• On the one hand, it is rather easy to justify the actions of Reddit when it comes to removing illegal content from its platform. Judging from its recent announcement, the company is taking a zero-tolerance stance toward drugs, firearms, sexual services, stolen goods, and so forth. Most people will gladly agree with this approach, as most of these topics should be avoided due to their illegal nature.

• On the other hand, one has to acknowledge this is censorship in its purest form. Regardless of the illicit nature of the topics mentioned above, there is no reason to prevent people from thinking or talking about them. In fact, this decision by Reddit will push even more people to other platforms which can’t be actively monitored. Whether or not this was a smart decision remains to be determined, for obvious reasons.

• [...]

• It is evident that Reddit is trying to cover all its bases by ensuring the platform cannot be linked to illicit content. At the same time, this approach to internet censorship is not a positive sign for the platform. It seems only a matter of time until other types of content will no longer be found on this platform. Whether or not Reddit will go after cryptocurrencies at some point remains to be determined. Anything seems possible at this point, unfortunately.

• Russia’s recent declaration that it is prepared to operate its own internet should the West cut off access has struck some observers as more Putinesque bellicosity, which indeed it might be. But Moscow’s desire to build a web it can control is the dream of authoritarians everywhere. And not all the authoritarians are in government.

• Regulating the flow of information has been the goal of every tyrant ever since Emperor Qin Shi Huang burned books in 213 B.C., in hopes that later generations would believe history began with his reign. Nowadays one country after another wants the ability to control its own intranet — or at least to throw a kill switch.

• Shutting off the web has proved easier than many imagined. When Hosni Mubarak’s regime ordered Egyptian telecoms to close down their internet service during the Arab Spring of 2011, traffic slowed to just about zero. Nowadays China’s Great Firewall is the best-known effort to restrict what a population can find online, but countries around the world are doing their best to follow Beijing’s example.

• Authoritarian governments regulate online content. The US lets tech companies make similar decisions

• US President Donald Trump’s “fake news” mantra has inspired authoritarian leaders elsewhere to manufacture new laws that can both target legitimate media outlets that are critical of them and further violate the media’s ability to exercise freedom of expression. The Malaysian government has thus far suspended media and blocked websites which have hounded the prime minister over the 1MDB affair, and I believe, has recently launched a website to counter “fake news”. Nonetheless, 1MDB is being investigated in at least six countries for money-laundering and misappropriation of funds and cannot be so easily canned as “fake news”. To start with, a clear definition of “fake news” would be useful. Trump calls any journalism or reporting that he disagrees with “fake news”. As such, the challenge to journalism and freedom of expression could not be more menacing. Let’s hope the definition in the new bill in the Malaysian Parliament next week will be more rigorous. Now, if we are talking about misinformation, spinning, lies and deceit, these have been around in Malaysian society for quite a while. Unfortunately, in recent cases the most serious perpetrators have been the representatives of the Malaysian government itself and not any mischievous sector of the Malaysian citizenry. As Hitler argues in Mein Kampf, the big lie always carries credibility and as history demonstrates, it is usually the state that is capable of the big lie.

• THE United Kingdom is broken and descending deeper into censorship and illiberalism.

• After decades of advocacy in the state Legislature, this generation of Washington’s student journalists claimed their First Amendment rights.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The joint statement comes after talks in the US involving GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming, JFC commander General Sir Christopher Deverell, and US Admiral Mike Rogers, commander of US Cyber Command and director of the NSA.

• Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Android app is allegedly collecting your personal data and sharing it with a third party without your consent. This claim has been made by the French security expert who goes by the name Elliot Anderson on Twitter.

• Elliot made this revelation is a series of tweets and detailed how Narendra Modi Android app starts collecting private data and device information as soon as a user profile is created. The collected data includes your phone operating system, network type, carrier, email, photo, gender, name, etc.

• “Dumb fucks.” That’s how Mark Zuckerberg described users of Facebook for trusting him with their personal data back in 2004. If the last week is anything to go by, he was right.

• Since the Observer reported that the personal data of about 50 million Americans had been harvested from Facebook and improperly shared with the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, it has become increasingly apparent that the social network has been far more lax with its data sharing practices than many users realised.

• As the scandal unfurled over the last seven days, Facebook’s lackluster response has highlighted a fundamental challenge for the company: how can it condemn the practice on which its business model depends?

• In the first few weeks after deleting your account, it can be tempting to try and replace every single element of Facebook with a competing service in order to satisfy your idle thumbs’ desire. But before you do, consider whether you could also use this change to overhaul your relationship with your phone, social media and the internet in general. Do you really need to find an alternative website to keep up with the racist tirades of that one guy you went to school with, or the bitcoin pyramid scheme your brother-in-law has been promoting? Couldn’t you just … not?

• Earlier this month, I interviewed officials from the Department of State and an ethical hacker for AFAR Magazine to get the skinny on what the hell’s actually on a passport’s RFID chip, who can read it and whether it’s being read is anything we need to be worried about. Along the way, I found out a ton about where U.S. Passport books get made, how many of them are out there and the fact that, somehow, people lose an absolute shit-ton of the things every year.

• What’s really stored on your passport’s microchip? Can your passport be hacked? Are foreign spies tracking your every move through your passport? Read on, traveler.

• “We’re looking at a powerful entity that builds fine-grained psychological profiles of over two billion humans, that runs large-scale behavior manipulation experiments, and that aims at developing the best AI technology the world has ever seen. Personally, it really scares me,” Chollet said in a Twitter thread. “If you work in AI, please don’t help them. Don’t play their game. Don’t participate in their research ecosystem. Please show some conscience.”

• Efforts by US law enforcement agencies to gain access to email stored overseas by American companies have been resolved through a piece of legislation tagged onto a massive spending bill which was signed into law by US President Donald Trump.

• Welp. “It is sort of what we anticipated, that there would be a Three Mile Island moment around data sharing that would rock the research community,” Lazer says. “The reality is, academia did not build an infrastructure. Our call for getting our house in order? I’d say it has been inadequately addressed.”

• House Republicans voted Thursday to pass a $1.3 trillion, 2,232-page spending bill. The bill was rushed through so quickly that — quite conveniently — no one actually had time to read it before voting on it. President Trump has signed this bill.

• [...]

• The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act — buried on page 2,201 of the omnibus — fundamentally alters the way in which law enforcement agencies — both in the US and abroad — access data.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Was killed last Sunday by an Uber autonomous car that hit the 49-year-old at approximately 40mph as she was crossing the road in Tempe, Arizona. Police confirmed there was an operator in the Volvo SUV at the time of the collision, and stated that it didn’t appear the car had slowed down.

• The People’s Action Party Policy Forum (PPF) has slammed a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report which described Singapore as a “repressive place” that imposed criminal penalties for peaceful speech.

• The group, an arm of the People’s Action Party that engages Government leaders on policy issues, called the report as a “type of deliberate falsehood” in a written submission to the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods on Friday (Mar 23).

• It said the report is “an example of how false and misleading impressions can be created by a selective presentation of facts, designed to promote an underlying agenda”, which is to change the society in Singapore.

• With respect, we veteran intelligence officers from CIA and other agencies urge you to withdraw the nomination of Gina Haspel for CIA director. From what is already known of her leading role in CIA torture 16 years ago, she has disqualified herself.

• Press freedom advocates are raising awareness about the plight of Justin Brake, a journalist who is facing unprecedented charges in Newfoundland, Canada, more than a year after he covered a protest at a construction site for a controversial dam.

• Brake embedded with Indigenous demonstrators at the Muskrat Falls dam project in Labrador in October 2016. The protesters, who fear contaminants that could flow from the dam, violated an injunction by cutting through a lock on a gate and entering the project site. Brake followed them, livestreaming the action for several days.

• For merely doing his job, the reporter is now fighting criminal and civil charges. Brake could face up to 10 years in prison in addition to fines and mounting legal fees.

• In Hartford, Vermont, last year, U.S. Border Patrol agents boarded a Greyhound bus as it arrived from Boston, asking passengers about their citizenship and checking the IDs of people of color or those with accents. In January, they stopped a man in Indio, California, as he was boarding a Los Angeles-bound bus. In questioning him about his immigration status, they told him his “shoes looked suspicious,” like those of someone who had recently crossed the border.

• Interrogation, searches, demands for identification, and possible detainment are processes people are subjected to as they try to enter the U.S. at ports of entry as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection tries to keep borders secure. Turns out, this broad authority doesn’t end at ports of entry but extends for another 100 miles into the interior, across the entire perimeter of the country.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The semi-private BitTorrent tracker Demonoid recently processed its 10 millionth user registration. While many of its former competitors are no longer around, pushed offline following legal pressure, Demonoid is hoping to return to its roots with an active community of likeminded torrent users.

• Online services are not required by law to write down all details of their repeat infringer policy, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled. The Court affirmed a summary judgment in favor of a website owner, who merely had the details of the policy and actual repeat infringements in his head.

• Following comments this week from Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary, blocking pirate sites could soon be on the country’s anti-piracy agenda. Yoshihide Suga says that the government is considering “all measures” to reduce piracy of manga and anime while supporting the “Cool Japan” initiative designed to promote the country locally and overseas.

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