● 03.31.18

● Links 31/3/2018: Wine 3.5, KDE Connect Updates, Raspberry Pi Targeted by SUSE, Mozilla Turns 20

Posted in News Roundup at 6:30 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Google’s Chromebooks accounted for 59.6% of mobile computing shipments in the kindergarten through 12th grade market in the fourth quarter of 2017, according to Futuresource Consulting. By comparison, Windows accounted for 25.6% and iOS comprised 10.6% of shipments.

• Among the reasons tech giants are scrambling to get their gadgets into schools: It’s a big business opportunity. The education technology market is expected to reach $252 billion by 2020, according to a report published by education-focused technology conference host EdTechXGlobal and advisory firm IBIS Capital. But there’s potential upside even after students leave the classroom and turn into fully-fledged consumers, too. “It gets people using your technology young,” says Avi Greengart, research director for consumer platforms and devices for GlobalData. “The hope is that they stick with it.”

• I’ve been wanting to make another list of the apps on my workstation since the last one but I couldn’t because I was switching between my Linux Mint and Ubuntu PCs on an almost daily basis. Now, I have settled on using one PC to work and let go of the other so I can dive right into the topic.

• My distro of choice is – you guessed it, Ubuntu. I run 17.10 and am waiting to see what 18.04 will officially bring when it is released in April. “Why 17.10 and not 16.04 LTS?“, I hear you ask. Well, I have always been one to test Ubuntu’s builds and it includes the new shell, so heaven yeah!

• It wouldn’t be resourceful to list every single installation on my PC so my list will regard the apps that I use the most, especially for my web development and writing jobs. For my design gigs, I mainly use a Mac and easy-to-use online tools whenever I’m away from home.

• As many team members have been travelling to negotiate hardware supplies or participate in community events lately, we are taking this opportunity to give you an update on Librem laptop operations this month, while regular posts about the Librem phone are expected to resume in a week or two.

• Purism announces that its Librem laptop orders are now shipping within a week—in other words, on average, the company now can fulfill orders within five business days. See the Purism blog for more information on this milestone.

Server

• The world of IT architecture has been on a long and complex journey over the last 60 years and the rate of change is showing no signs of slowing.

• This journey is commonly split into five stages, each one with its own specific technology drivers, underpinned by the exponential increase in processing power and decline in the cost of computer technology, more commonly known as Moore’s Law.

• That’s not to say each stage has resided in isolation. There has been plenty of crossover throughout the years, with some businesses – and indeed industries – being slower than others to move on from legacy technologies.

• While this wasn’t such an issue in the past, today’s rapid rate of innovation and unprecedented levels of competition mean businesses simply can’t afford to stand still.

• CIOs don’t want to debate cloud adoption any more: They want to talk cloud optimization, as Jeff Budge, VP at OneNeck IT Solutions, recently noted. Analyst outlooks and research reports back this up, showing rapid growth for public cloud and hybrid cloud in the months and years ahead.

• As you explain cloud – and your own cloud decisions – to others in the organization, you’ll want some data points for context. So we’ve highlighted a few studies that help tell the public and hybrid cloud story for 2018 and answer some relevant questions: Where does cloud land on a CIO’s priorities list? Is it living up to its cost-savings promise? How much work is shifting to the public cloud? Dig in for more.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Like clockwork, a new release of Kubernetes comes out every quarter. And with the arrival of Spring comes Kubernetes 1.10. Stability, Security, Networking and Storage are front of center of the new release. This week we dig into the 1.10 release and highlight some of the features that we believe will have the biggest impact on customers being able to deploy more applications on Kubernetes (and ultimately OpenShift).

Kernel Space

• One of several new drivers slated for Linux 4.17 is PXRC for the Phoenix RC flight controller adapters.

• This is a flight controller modeled after that’s used by radio control airplanes/helicopters/drones. Phoenix RC makes a PC flight simulator and for going with that software they have this controller. While there doesn’t appear to be a Linux port of the Phoenix RC software that has been around for years, with Linux 4.17 at least their RC flight controllers will now work under Linux if you want to use it as an input device for another game, etc.

• LightNVM patches are called for pulling into the Linux kernel’s block layer that would land for the Linux 4.17 kernel and provide Open-Channel 2.0 support.

• The Open-Channel SSD 2.0 specification was ratified in January by the LightNVM group. As a reminder, LightNVM / Open-Channel is a specification for extending the NVMe specification whereby the solid-state drive exposes its internal parallelism and lets the host operating system determine data placement and I/O scheduling rather than the SSD itself. Open-Channel SSDs aim for better I/O isolation, predictable latency, and better drive management.

• The Linux 4.16 kernel is hopefully being released this Sunday, marking the end to another busy kernel development cycle. We have already written dozens of articles about changes to be found with Linux 4.16 and benchmarks, while here is a quick recap of what makes Linux 4.16 special.

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation launched a deep learning initiative this week designed to create a “neutral space for harmonization and acceleration” of AI, machine learning and deep learning technologies. The initial focus will be an AI standardization effort.

• The open source project called LF Deep Learning Foundation seeks to make the emerging AI technologies widely available to data scientists and developers, the group said during this week’s Open Networking Summit in Los Angeles.

• Founding members include several Chinese technology giants that are pouring huge sums into AI research as part of a national strategy to dominate AI. They are: China’s search giant Baidu; networking giant Huawei (SHE: 002502); Tencent, often referred to as China’s Facebook; and telecommunications equipment vendor ZTE (SHE: 000063).

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the addition of 35 Silver members and three Associate members. Linux Foundation members help support development of the greatest shared technology resources in history, while accelerating their own innovation through open source leadership and participation.

• Ripple has just announced a collaboration with Hyperledger, an open source initiative, which is a very important step in establishing their long vision of the Internet of Value. They announced proudly about being a part of the Blockchain revolution.

• Hyperledger is an industry-wide open source initiative to advance Blockchain technology, governed by the Linux Foundation. Hyperledger also tweeted the same stating, 14 organizations from India to Switzerland, BVIs to Spain are investing in open blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.

• The Linux Foundation recently introduced the Disaggregated Network Operating System (DANOS) project, with a code release slated for the second half of this year.

• DANOS is based upon AT&T’s “dNOS” software framework, which the company first unveiled last year. It was developed in an effort to accelerate the adoption and use of white boxes in the infrastructure of service providers. In January, the company announced it was open sourcing its dNOS project through the Linux Foundation. DANOS is the same project under a different name. It serves as an operating system for the white boxes that compose a network.

• The Linux Foundation has launched the LF Deep Learning Foundation, an umbrella organization that will support and sustain open source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning while striving to make these critical new technologies available to developers and data scientists everywhere.

• Founding members of LF Deep Learning include Amdocs, AT&T, B.Yond, Baidu, Huawei, Nokia, Tech Mahindra, Tencent, Univa, and ZTE. With LF Deep Learning, members are working to create a neutral space where makers and sustainers of tools and infrastructure can interact and harmonize their efforts and accelerate the broad adoption of deep learning technologies.

• As this week’s Open Network Summit wraps, The Linux Foundation adds 35 new Silver members and three associate members to its growing rank.

• Besides joining the Foundation, several of the new members have joined Linux Foundation projects like Automotive Grade Linux, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, EdgeX Foundry, Hyperledger, LF Networking and other projects.

• Building on significant momentum in the networking space, the Linux Foundation’s networking arm is getting even more ambitious, announcing a move to harmonize its open source networking efforts with those of adjacent ecosystems including containers and cloud-native efforts, edge computing, network operating systems for white boxes and AI/deep learning.

• The LF Networking Fund (LFN) today made a series of announcements including the launch of DANOS, an open network operating system for white boxes and switches that brings together existing projects such as Free Range Routing and dNOS, and creates an “uber” operating system for white boxes that should speed their commercialization, said Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking for the Linux Foundation.

• AT&T on Sunday detailed its plans to use open hardware designs as the carrier virtualizes its network on the road to 5G.

• The company said it will deploy more than 60,000 “white box” routers in cell towers across the U.S. over the next several years — a transition from traditional proprietary routers to open hardware that can be upgraded more quickly.

• “White box represents a radical realignment of the traditional service provider model,” said Andre Fuetsch, CTO and president of AT&T Labs, in a statement. “We’re no longer constrained by the capabilities of proprietary silicon and feature roadmaps of traditional vendors. We’re writing open hardware specifications for these machines, and developing the open source software that powers these boxes.”

Graphics Stack

• While Mesa 17.3 started out very buggy, the developers have slowly been getting it into shape. If you are waiting to upgrade to the newly-released Mesa 18.0 until it further stabilizes with some point releases, Mesa 17.3.8 will be released in the days ahead as the latest and greatest off last quarter’s driver code-base.

• Igalia’s Juan Suarez Romero has put out the release candidate of Mesa 17.3.8, which at the moment contains 18 patches over the huge 17.3.7 release that recently shipped with more than 50 fixes.

• Another minor update to Mir has arrived ahead of next month’s Ubuntu 18.04 LTS “Bionic Beaver” release.

• Mir 0.31.1 takes care of some warnings emitted now by GCC 8, a few minor fixes, and then is mostly focused on Wayland fixes.

• It looks like we’re getting quite close to finally having OpenGL 4.6 in mainline Mesa.

• Igalia developers that have been assisting the Intel OTC crew on OpenGL 4.6 support for the i965 GL driver have landed their latest round of SPIR-V patches. Solely left blocking OpenGL 4.6 for Intel (and RadeonSI) has been the ARB_gl_spirv / ARB_spirv_extensions OpenGL extensions for allowing the SPIR-V IR to be ingested by the OpenGL drivers for greater cross-operability with Vulkan. These latest patches now in Mesa 18.1-devel are landing i965 SPIR-V bits.

Benchmarks

• With the Ubuntu 18.04 “Bionic Beaver” release fast approaching and it being the latest Long-Term Support release, the latest benchmarking at Phoronix has been looking at how the Ubuntu LTS performance has evolved going as far back as the Ubuntu 10.04.0 LTS “Lucid Lynx” release. On three systems where supported Ubuntu 10.04 / 12.04 / 14.04 / 16.04 / 18.04 were tested each time.

• This week Raspbian OS, the official Debian-based operating system of the Raspberry Pi, finally upgraded to the Linux 4.14 LTS kernel. Considering that Raspbian was previously on Linux 4.9, it’s quite the kernel upgrade, and I decided to run some before/after benchmarks.

• Going from Linux 4.9 to 4.14 means the Raspbian maintainers need to carry less out-of-tree patches for the Raspberry Pi since in this timeframe more of their work has been upstreamed to the Linux kernel. Plus there’s been a whole array of improvements to the mainline Linux kernel in this timeframe. Some users have been hopeful of performance improvements being part of that, so I decided to run some improvements.

• Here are our latest Linux RAID benchmarks using the very new Linux 4.16 kernel while using two high-end Samsung 960 EVO 500GB NVMe solid-state drives with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Using MDADM Linux soft RAID were EXT4, F2FS, and XFS while Btrfs RAID0/RAID1 was also tested using that file-system’s integrated/native RAID capabilities.

Applications

• No, the title for this post is not a mistake. I’m not referring to the gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits or the shark-shaped magnetic Linux emblem that you might have stuck to your car. The “fish” that I’m referring to is a Linux shell and one that’s been around since 2005. Even so, it’s a shell that a lot of Linux users may not be familiar with.

• The primary reason is that fish isn’t generally installed by default. In fact, on some distributions, the repository that provides it is one your system probably doesn’t access. If you type “which fish” and your system responds simply with another prompt, you might be missing out on an interesting alternative shell. And, if your apt-get or yum command can’t find what you’re looking for, you will probably have to use commands like those shown below to get fish loaded onto your system.

Instructionals/Technical

• The other day I was searching for Vim editor cheatsheets on the web. A quick google search brought me so many links to download the cheatsheets. While going through the links one by one, a particular URL caught my attention. I Followed the link to find out what it is. Oh dear! It was a quite good tool. Say hello to Zeal, an offline documentation browser for software developers.

• The grep command is used to find patterns in files. This tutorial shows some of the most common grep command examples that would be specifically beneficial for software developers.

• Back in the bad old days, setting up basic HTTPS with a certificate authority cost as much as several hundred dollars per year, and the process was difficult and error-prone to set up. Now we have Let’s Encrypt for free, and the whole thing takes just a few minutes.

• If you’re a developer, you know Git. Most likely, you use Git on a regular basis. And you probably know Linux as well. In fact, you probably develop with Linux (as Linux is one of the most popular development platforms in the world). If you’re a Git user on Linux, you might be using the command line to interact with the service.

• However if you could have an outstanding GUI tool for that purpose, you’d probably use it to make your work a bit more efficient. One such tool is the cross platform Gitkraken. With Gitkraken you can easily interact with your Git account, without having to use the command line.

• Read more

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 3.5 is now available.

• Wine 3.5 is now available as the latest bi-weekly release for this popular program to run Windows games/programs on Linux.

• Wine 3.5 continues the recent theme of enabling Vulkan support. Wine 3.5 most notably on this front introduces their new basic Vulkan loader. This means Wine users no longer need to manually install the LunarG SDK for Windows in order to have Vulkan support but rather this custom-developed loader library is shipped by default. This implementation though doesn’t support multiple drivers and notably doesn’t include support for Vulkan layers, so those needing such features will still want to manually install LunarG’s SDK.

• The Wine development team has just put out Wine 3.5, continuing to advance their official Vulkan support.

Games

• If you are looking for some deep technical content to watch this weekend, the video recordings from this month’s Game Developers Conference 2018 (GDC 18) are now available.

• I’m not surprised they did this, since currently no one is announcing new machines and the whole Steam Machine idea from Valve never really gained any steam. While it didn’t really do the big splash many were hoping, it has done quite a lot of good for Linux gaming overall. As a result of the initial push from Valve, many developers and game engines have moved into doing regular Linux support. This is important, because many of the barriers involved in getting games on Linux have been removed.

• Aragami is a stealth game I’m pretty fond of and the developer announced a new story expansion recently with Aragami: Nightfall.

• Interested in an adventure game with a horror theme? The Long Reach [Humble Store, GOG, Steam] promises to be an interesting experience. I say promises but—guess what? Yet another Unity engine game to have partially messed up input on Linux.

• For those who like your racing games to be a bit on the silly side, Foreveracers [Steam] is now out on Steam and it’s pretty good.

• For those who love your 2D RPGs, you might want to check out Void Monsters: Spring City Tales [Steam] which recently added Linux support.

• Long Gone Days [Steam, Official Site] seems like an interesting game, one that combines a character-driven RPG with a shooter and a visual novel, but sadly they have no ETA on the Linux version.

• Dead Drop Studios has just released the survival horror games Outbreak [Humble Store, Steam] & Outbreak: The New Nightmare [Humble Store, Steam] on Linux, their next game Outbreak: The Nightmare Chronicles is also now coming to Linux.

• The strategy game Sudden Strike 4 [GOG, Steam] is to get another DLC with ‘Finland – Winter Storm’ that’s due for release on May 25th.

• Blade Symphony [Steam, Humble Store], a game where you need to prove you’re the world’s greatest swordsman is coming to Linux with the Blade Symphony: Harmonious Prelude update next month on April 12th.

• Dying Light [Steam, Humble Store] is easily one of my favourite Zombie games ever made, Techland did well with it and they’ve continued adding free content.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• As most you already know as an XFCE environment installation comes with QupZilla web browser. The QupZilla web browser is a lightweight multiplatform web browser written in Qt Framework and using its web rendering engine QtWebEngine. If you using Fedora 28 the you can get the Falkon web browser. The wikipedia tell us about Falkon browser “(formerly QupZilla[3]) is a free and open-source web browser, intended for general users. Falkon is licensed under GPLv3.” The Falkon browser working well with Yahoo.

• After I shared the link to the KDE Connect Development Telegram group almost 20 people joined within 24 hours. I certainly did not expect such a interest in KDE Connect. When I joined the project about a year ago the hardest part for me was setting up a proper development workflow, meaning configuring, building, installing and debugging the application and interacting with git and Phabricator. To ease your start in KDE Connect development I would like to give you the guide I wish I had back then.

• I will show you how to fetch the project, build, run and debug it using KDevelop. It’s an IDE by the KDE Community designed with KDE projects in mind. In theory you can use any IDE you like, if you figure out how to configure it properly.

• In my first post about KDE Connect I told you about the album cover art on Android. Thanks to Matthijs it now also works when the cover art is a local file, for example when you are using VLC. It already worked when the cover art was a remote URL, for example with Spotify. The cover art is now also shown in the media control notification and added to the Android media session.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Some good news: the (rather large) GNOME Shell memory leak we spotlighted last week is in the process of being fixed.

• GNOME developers have spent the past week or so trying to identify the root of the issue, which causes system memory usage to increase each minute GNOME Shell is used.

• Following our report hundreds of GNOME Shell users across various Linux distros took to internet forums and social media to confirm the memory creep issue exists on their systems.

• It’s been a couple of weeks now since GNOME 3.28 was realeased. I´ve already written some about the new features in Maps for 3.28. But already now there´s some exiting news looking forward. The first is not related to code or features of Maps itself. But the project has been migrated to GNOME´s Gitlab instance (along with other projects now that mass-migration of the remaining projects from Cgit and Bugzilla is going on). I think this will simplify newcomer contributions and bug reporting quite a bit. Also the code review interface for the merge requests looks pretty nice.

• The other big news is that Maps is now built using Meson. Even though the amount of compiled code (the private C library we use for interfacing with things like libxml2 and libfolks, which doesn´t natively support GIR bindings) is quite small, I still think build times are noticeably quicker now. I decided to remove support for building using Autotools right away, since we had some shell:ish magic going with installing our icons where shell sub process ran cut to parse file names into path destinations based on splitting on underscore characters. So I took the opportunity to clean this up and move the icons into suitable directory structures directly in the repo. I didn´t think it was worth the effort to “back-port” this the Autotools build system, so from now on master can now only be built with Meson (ofcourse on the stable “gnome_3_28” branch building is done the old way using Autotools).

• Hidden away in the farthest corner of the planet, its slopes covered in mist and darkness and its peaks lost in the clouds, stands the formidable Mount GNOME. Perched atop the mountain is a castle as menacing as the mountain itself – its towering walls made of stones as cold as death, and the wind howling through the courtyard like a dozen witches screaming for blood.

• Living inside the imposing blackness are a group of feral savages, of whom very little is known to the world outside. The deathly walls of the castle bear testimony to their skull-crushing barbarism, and their vile customs have laid waste to the surrounding slopes and valleys. Mortally fearful of invoking their mad wrath, no human traveller has dared to come near the vicinity of their territory. Shrouded in anonymity, they draw their name from the impregnable mountain that they inhabit – they are the GNOME people.

• Last week, when I upgraded to GNOME 3.28, I was sad to notice an extremely annoying bug in Mutter/GNOME Shell: every once in a while, a micro-stuttering happened. This was in additions to another bug that was disappointing me for quite a while: the tiling/maximize/unmaximize animations were not working on Wayland too.

Distributions

• I’ve always been quite a fan of minimalist/light distros. They have ability to work on many computers where others do not come. One of my recent discoveries is 4MLinux, a much smaller distro, almost a miniature of what we are accustomed to see, but able to do amazing things.

• Securing your network is an incredibly challenging task, one that’s made even more difficult by software that adds yet another layer of complexity on top. And let’s face it, most firewall tools are the stuff of user nightmare. That’s why, when a firewall tool strips away some of that complexity, it deserves attention.

• One such tool is IPFire, an open source Linux distribution geared specifically for the task of firewalls. This particular distribution is hardened, secure, easy to operate, and ready to serve enterprise, small-to-medium businesses, and even home users. IPFire was designed for users new to firewalling, so it places a premium on user-friendliness.

Arch Family

• Before I introduce you to these applications, let me explain what they are and why you may find them useful.

• Both of these applications are designed to help you install packages on Arch and Arch-based Linux distros (both from the repos and from the Arch User Repository). They are also designed to fix some system errors. Both of them run in the terminal and both give you access to complex commands with the tap of a key.

• In terms of usability, they stand somewhere between using pacman (Arch’s package manager, generally used from the terminal) and Pamac (the graphical frontend for pacman).

• For some, pacman (and other terminal package managers) are difficult to use because they don’t know all of the possible commands. The man is a couple keyboard strokes away, but it can be difficult to understand at times. On the other hand, when you use Pamac, you might have to search through a number of menus to find what you are looking for.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• openSUSE’s rolling distribution Tumbleweed produces high-quality snapshots and a new rating tool for the snapshots has labeled two out of the last four snapshots as stable.

• The past two snapshots are still pending a rating as it takes about a week after the snapshot release to develop a rating. This blog will cover the last two snapshots that are pending and list some of the new software that arrived in the snapshots.

• The most recent snapshot, 20180326, had several new packages including python-packaging 17.1 and python-setuptools 39.0.1. The python-packaging 17.1 dropped support for python 2.6, 3.2, and 3.3. The update version python-setuptools from 38.5.2 to 39.0.1 now vendors its own direct dependencies and no longer relies on the dependencies as vendored by pkg_resources. The C library for reading, creating, and modifying zip archive, libzip 1.5.0, enabled more functionality by updating dependencies and simplified the licence by the use of a standard cryptographic library instead of custom Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) implementation. IRC client hexchat 2.14.1 made some changes to the preferences so the window can be scroll-able. GNOME’s messaging program empathy reverted back to version 3.12.14 and gnome-documents 3.28.0 updated translations and replaced pkgconfig(libgepub) with pkgconfig(libgepub-0.6). The Linux Kernel 4.15.13 became available in the snapshot, which added the Intel Total Memory Encryption feature, and YaST had several packages updated including autoyast2 4.0.44, which can properly abort when probing devices fails during installation.

• SUSE has released a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3 (SLES) for the popular Raspberry Pi, which comes with full commercial support for enterprise customers.

• The release upgrades an unsupported version of SLES SP2 Raspberry Pi image released at 2016 SUSECON, which offered enterprises an alternative to Raspbian OS with an OS that uses the SUSE Linux Enterprise kernel for Arm.

• Raspberry Pi chief Eben Upton was very pleased with SUSE’s experimental release, because it was first the major 64-bit OS to support the Raspberry Pi’s wireless networking and Bluetooth.

• Yet today that is exactly what is happening in an increasing number of businesses, which are finding ways to tailor the versatile but sub-$40 Raspberry Pi computer to their needs.

• The growing use of Pi boards by business has led SUSE to begin offering commercial support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for Arm running on the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3 (SLES) has been released for the diminutive Raspberry Pi computer.

• SLES is aimed at enterprise users of the open-source operating system, restricting itself to a major version update every three or four years, with more minor service packs hitting every 18 months or so.

• Longer term support makes the product an attractive one for users less keen to live at the bleeding edge of an ill-advised apt-get command on a rival distro.

• The elections for the openSUSE Board have been postponed until April 15.

• The postponement will extend Phase 1 of the elections and give candidates more time to campaign and engage with the community. The voting phase (Phase 2) will start April 15.

Red Hat Family

• Like so many people, Red Hat was the first Linux I saw and the first Linux I installed on my own hardware. Ever since then, as several friends donned red fedoras, Red Hat sounded like a great place to work, and in the meantime the company became the gold standard for succeeding because of open source values. In other words, the chance to join Red Hat represented one of my dream jobs. Still, I was passionate about my Kubernetes work at my previous employer, and I knew I’d miss the experience and many of my colleagues there. Fortunately, I didn’t have to miss them for long.

• OpenShift Container Platform 3.9 is generally available today! As always, release notes, downloads, and other information are available on the Red Hat OpenShift customer portal. OCP 3.9 contains our usual nods to enhanced security and usability, including new central auditing capabilities, console time-outs, and improved service catalog workflows. CRI-O, an OCI-compliant implementation of the Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface, is also available in this release as a fully-supported option. For a full walkthrough of what’s new in OCP 3.9, check out the latest OpenShift Commons briefing.

• Some of the biggest technology innovations over the past few years have led to monumental leaps forward in the art of collaboration, yet the fact remains that nothing can take the place of good, old-fashioned, in-person interactions. Indeed, it’s somewhat ironic that the very innovations that allow teams to bridge long distances between each other — the cloud, for instance, or mobile applications — were created by people sitting in a room talking and working through ideas.

• Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO, provides insight to its next generation of cloud technology and what makes the company unique from other competitors. Our approach is radically different, says Whitehurst.

• Wee Luen joins us from Qlik, where he was the managing director for ASEAN. Prior to Qlik, Wee Luen was responsible for the Fusion Middleware portfolio in Singapore and Brunei at Oracle. He also has experience working in Singapore’s public sector, having spent the first years of his career on whole-of-government project conceptualization and implementations.

• Twenty-five years ago the world looked very different; a gallon of gas averaged $1.16 in the U.S.; the first Beanie Babies were introduced; Jurassic Park was the top-grossing movie in the world; Nelson Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; Buckingham Palace opened its doors to the public for the first time; and CERN released the source code for the world wide web. And a small businessman met a geek at a tech conference and Red Hat, Inc. was born.

• From the time Red Hat Summit begins you can find hands-on labs, general sessions, panel discussions, demos in our partner pavillion (Hybrid Cloud section), and more throughout the week. You’ll also hear from Red Hat OpenStack Platform customers on their successes during some of the keynote presentations. Need an open, massively scalable storage solution for your cloud infrastructure? We’ll also have sessions dedicated to our Red Hat Ceph Storage product.

• March is Women’s History Month and Red Hat hosted events around the globe all month long in celebration. Diversity and inclusion are among our key values and we hope through events such as these we are able to make a positive contribution to the next generation of women leaders in the open source community and throughout the tech industry.

• Red Hat has long been a champion of promoting diversity in technology and in open source and is a strong advocate of celebrating the accomplishments of women — both on our team and throughout the industry. That’s why we are excited to share that two Red Hatters were recently recognized for their outstanding contributions in the field of IT.

• Red Hat has now spent 25 years developing and supporting Linux and other related open-source projects. Originally started by Bob Young and Marc Ewing in a small residential room, it has now grown to have annual revenue of US$2.9 billion and 11,400 employees, making it the largest open-source based company in the world.

Finance

Fedora

• The Fedora 28 Beta RC3 compose [1] is considered as GOLD and is going to be shipped live on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2018.

• Last week Fedora 28′s beta was delayed due to open blocker bugs but fortunately the developers managed to get the issues squared away.

• At today’s release meeting, they all agreed Fedora 28 Beta is now a “GO” for releasing. The F28 Beta will now be shipped next Tuesday, 3 April.

• The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated 27 Live ISOs, carrying the 4.15.12-301 kernel.

• Fedora 28 is on the horizon. This will mark the 10-release anniversary of anaconda’s new UI.

• Back in November 2012, when I joined Red Hat, the team was knee-deep in the midst of Fedora 18 Beta, as well as RHEL-7.0. It was a mad scramble, because this was it — Fedora 18 and RHEL-7.0 were the releases where the new UI for anaconda would debut, and that bugzilla treadmill was on fire from the speed with which users and QE reported bugs. “Things are a little crazy right now,” said everyone on the team as they welcomed me.

• Today we tested the new version of Fedora 28 Beta. I installed this version of the old Fedora 27 and I tried to use different environments (in this order): XFCE, LXDE and LXQT. I have received some errors from the xorg service since the motherboard has an Intel graphics card. I used a Hdmi 1 to DVI cable and that made me an area on the home screen without resizing correctly.

• There are more reasons why to run applications as flatpaks. Someone wants to have the latest versions as soon as possible. For me as a user of Fedora which provides up-to-date versions of apps this is not a big motivation. Someone wants to run apps more securely. Again I usually trust software provided by Fedora and Flatpak sandbox is still not as strictly enforced as it should ideally be.

• Mozilla, the developer of Firefox — the default browser in Fedora — recently announced the new Facebook Container Extension. This extension is designed to give Firefox users better control of their data on Facebook. Specifically, the new extension limits Facebook’s ability to track your activity using third-party cookies. If you want to use Facebook, but limit the data shared with other websites, this extension might be worth a look.

Debian Family

• We’re getting close to a new release of Policy. Just this week Adam Borowski stepped up to get a patch written for #881431 – thanks for getting things moving along!

• This is to make people aware and inform about an ongoing effort to replace Indicators in Debian (most people know the concept from Ubuntu) by a more generically developed and actively maintained fork: Ayatana Indicators.

• The Debian project has used a cryptographic keyring for most of its authentication for over twenty years. Recently, we have taken on the study of the social implications that can be learned from how it’s shaped, and its inner movements. Our aim is not just to document, but to understand what it means. We don’t want to keep it as an academic-only exercise. I want to share some of our insights in this session.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• With a spring 2018 release date, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS “Bionic Beaver” brings a new set of features to Linux computing. You might be unsure about whether to update. Well, here are several reasons why you should upgrade Ubuntu to version 18.04 on your current Linux PC or laptop.

• This week we’ve been writing Go and created a macro keyboard. We’re joined by Michael Tunnel from TuxDigital to discuss KDE Plasma, bring you some command line love and go over your feedback.

• It’s Season 11 Episode 04 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Michael Tunnell are connected and speaking to your brain.

Devices/Embedded

• Computer systems, and more specifically software and data networks, have been driving the way the world has evolved recently. Software is now everywhere: in cars, trains and planes, in your house, in businesses and in industry….Smartphones are taking over our lives

• Since 2007, software has also taken control in our personal lives: smartphones have become our companions of life. They empower us with new abilities. They help us find information quickly, they help us with directions, they help us to communicate quickly and at a low cost with other people anywhere in the world.

• The digital age we’re presently living in is a “far west quest”. The few who understand how things work are releasing products which often gain quick and massive adoption: people who were born before 1998 can remember a world where Facebook and Google didn’t exist.

• Phytec is prepping three PhyCore COMs based on NXP’s Cortex-A53 based i.MX8M, its -A53 and -A72 equipped i.MX8 Quad, and its -A35 based i.MX8X. Also up: an SBC based on the i.MX8M module.

• Phytec has posted product pages for three PhyCore modules, all of which support Linux and offer a -40 to 85°C temperature range. The three modules, which employ three different flavors of i.MX8, include a phyCORE-i.MX 8X COM, which is the first product we’ve seen that uses the dual- or quad-core Cortex-A35 i.MX8X.

• Intrinsyc announced a Mini-ITX development kit for a wireless-enabled “Open-X 8M SOM” module that runs Linux or Android 8.0 on a quad-core i.MX8M SoC.

• Intrinsyc announced the Open-X 8M SOM a month ago and has now followed up with a Mini-ITX form factor Open-X 8M Development Kit built around the module. The kit includes a GbE port, dual USB 3.0 ports, M2 expansion, and more.

• In 2015, Google introduced Android Auto, a system that allows users to project certain apps from their Android smartphones onto a car’s infotainment display. Android Auto’s driver-friendly interface, with larger touchscreen buttons and voice commands, aims to make it easier and safer for drivers to control navigation, music, podcasts, radio, phone calls, and more while keeping their eyes on the road. Android Auto can also run as an app on an Android smartphone, enabling owners of older-model vehicles without modern head unit displays to take advantage of these features.

• Every year for the past 6 years we have attended Mobile World Congress alongside our community, bringing Sailfish OS to so many people’s attention by showing off new devices running the OS. We host press events packed with journalists, to illustrate to everyone how this duopoly of mobile operating systems is playing out and there is room for change. This year was no different and we brought in many new believers into the world of the only independent and alternative mobile operating system.

• There were articles and event coverage on publishers like Engadget, Techcrunch, NDTV and many more major websites and publications that wrote about our adventure, latest news and how we are on our path to capture different parts of a market which is thirsty for what we have to provide.

• Palm is staging a comeback and America’s largest wireless provider, Verizon, will lend a helping hand. Back in August 2017, TCL (Palm’s parent organisation) Marketing Manager Stefan Streit had revealed that new Palm devices would be announced in early 2018. Now citing a “trusted source”, Android Police reports that TCL will launch a Palm-branded smartphone on Verizon later this year.

• When working on my home network, users were reporting internet issues when I was not available to provide support, but a running theme was slow gaming. I suspected it was issues with the gaming networks such as PSN and over usage (streaming and gaming at the same time).

• When users persisted that it was the internet, I set up a raspberry pi to frequently perform speed tests and log the results. As expected net speed on the connection was less than 50 mbits per second, the raspberry Pi would not be a bottleneck. After running for a few days, each time there was an issue, I was able to check the logs and diagnose any issues, which usually correlated with PSN being slow.

• Although it did the job I needed, I wanted to open it up so other users could check the results without me giving them access to the server, hence I wrote the Web Pi to output the content to a browser, and gradually added more features.

• Back in school, there was an HP plotter well hidden in a closet in the science department. I got to play with it for a while and always wanted to have one of my own. Fast forward many, many years. Stepper motors are easily available, I am back into doing stuff with electronics and micro-controllers, and I recently saw someone creating displays with engraved acrylic. This triggered me to finally build my own plotter.

Android

• I’m not going to dive deep and rant about all the “courageous” paths taken by Apple that I didn’t like. I’m not going to discuss why Apple ditched the 3.5mm headphone jack or why it chose to push proprietary connectors and standards. However, since this article is all about notches and Android device manufacturers are hellbent on copying Apple, changes brought in iPhone X can’t be ignored.

• ZTE is now offering the first Android Go smartphone based on the Snapdragon mobile platform. The ZTE Tempo Go “offers a 5.0-inch 854 x 480 display, quad-core 1.1GHz Snapdragon 210 chipset, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage, microSD slot, 5MP rear camera, 2MP front shooter, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.2, and a 2200mAh battery” and sells for $79.

Free Software/Open Source

• Further technical and API details can be found on Securelist. The software is open-sourced under GNU General Public License v3.0 and available with no warranty from the developers.

• Kaspersky Lab’s GitHub account also includes another tool, created and shared by Kaspersky Lab researchers in 2017. Named BitScout, it was created by principal security researcher, Vitaly Kamluk, and can remotely collect vital forensic data such as malware samples without risk of contamination or loss. Further information on BitScout can be found here.

• Paul Lipton, VP, industry standards and open source at CA Technologies, says open-source utilization and contribution has become “far more acceptable” as part of the overall planning and design of customer solutions.

• “When open source is properly managed as enterprise microservices at the API level – and properly secured and monitored – it can reduce costs and increase the business’ flexibility in building digital assets,” he tells Channelnomics.

• “This enables the organization to focus more software-development resources on the agile development of innovative enterprise services, enabling the business to differentiate from competitors and compete with maximum effectiveness.”

• ‘Agile’ and DevOps are an essential foundation for digital transformation, he notes. “Open source communities frequently embrace agile methodologies and innovation, making properly vetted open-source projects a good fit as part of the enterprise’s overall commitment to agile and DevOps.”

• Alex Pujols, senior systems engineering manager within Cisco’s Global Partner Organization, says nearly 80 percent of companies today are using open-source software in their environments, meaning there is “an unprecedented opportunity” for the channel around coupling open-source software with the vendor’s technology solutions.

• CenturyLink is preparing to contribute part of its NFVi orchestration process to the open source community, even though the operator isn’t yet ready to join ONAP, which is the largest orchestration open source project.

• Adam Dunstan, vice president of SDN/NFV Engineering for CenturyLink Inc. (NYSE: CTL), explained in a presentation here and in an interview that his team has taken a bit of service logic out of an Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) module and repackaged it as part of its NFV orchestration process, calling it Victor, and now intends to release that into open source. Once the legal details are sorted, the contribution will likely go into ONAP — which CenturyLink has contributed to before. (See ONAP Adds Verizon, Claims De Facto Title.)

• Because CenturyLink is charting its own path and develop its own tooling, however, the company likely won’t be plunking down the dollars required to formally join ONAP anytime soon, Dunstan says. (See CenturyLink Touting New MVP.)

• ActivityPub is a federated social network protocol used to connect together decentralized Web sites running software such as Mastodon, Kroeg, and soon, MediaGoblin. How does ActivityPub work? What is the future of the standard and related work? What are Decentralized Identifiers, Capabilities, the “Web Of Trust,” and why should you care? What are the lessons learned about standardization processes themselves, what roles and responsibilities should standards organizations play, and how can we make sure they have the right incentive structures?

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

• In those 20 years, a lot has changed. Major technology shifts are now driven by open aource technologies: big data (Hadoop, Spark), AI (TensorFlow, Caffe), and containers (Docker, Kubernetes) are all open source projects. Massive companies including Google, Facebook, and even Lyft regularly release open source tools for the world to use. Microsoft—a company that once described Linux as a cancer—now embraces the concept. And commercial open source is not just a niche idea operated at the fringes of the technology landscape but a common and successful business model for companies to adopt.

• Kaspersky’s KLara tool has been made open source in an effort to help security professionals search related malware samples more easily and efficiently with distributed Yara rules.

• At this year’s Open Networking Summit, the show floor was buzzing with discussions about the benefits of open source networking, but the MEF says service providers know open source comes with various costs.

• Dan Pitt, SVP of MEF, told FierceTelecom that despite the efforts made by various groups to drive open source, ultimately the service provider’s decision comes down to implementing solutions that fit their unique needs.

• Yoda.2 is a wise and powerful personal assistant tool that is accessible directly from the terminal. The open-source project was released last year by software developer Man Parvesh Singh Randhawa.

• Today, Ontology, a new generation public blockchain infrastructure project and a distributed trust collaboration platform, officially announced the release of its first open source projects on GitHub, and with it the beginning of the Ontology developer community. Developers across the world are invited to join the Ontology project and together invest in the development of public blockchain infrastructure.

Events

• First was a Neuroinformatics infrastructure interoperability workshop at McGill, my second trip to Montreal this year. Well outside my wheelhouse, but there’s a fair amount of interest in that community in git-annex/datalad. This was a roll with the acronyms, and try to draw parallels to things I know affair. Also excellent sushi and a bonus Secure Scuttlebutt meetup.

• Then LibrePlanet. A unique and super special conference, that utterly flew by this year. This is my sixth LibrePlanet and I enjoy it more each time. Highlights for me were Bassam’s photogrammetry workshop, Karen receiving the Free Software award, and Seth’s thought-provoking talk on “incompossibilities” especially as applied to social networks. And some epic dinner conversations in central square.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Twenty years ago, Netscape Communications was desperate. It was the darling of the first wave of internet companies for its ability to let you surf the web, but Microsoft had crushed its business prospects by giving away a web browser for free.

• So Netscape did something that was radical for the time: On March 31, 1998, it gave away the source code behind its Netscape Communicator browser, the once-secret programming instructions that developers used to build the software. The project, called Mozilla, amounted to surrendering the crown jewels.

• This coming Saturday — March 31 — is Mozilla’s 20th anniversary. We’ve accomplished a fair amount in the first 20 years. We aim to accomplish even more in the next 20 years. To do this, we’ve modernized nearly every aspect of Mozilla, from Firefox to the many ways we connect people and technology.

• We’re making our first major addition to the key principles that form the foundation for Mozilla’s work. These principles are set out in the Mozilla Manifesto, which was launched in 2007. The Mozilla Manifesto identifies ten principles that we work to build into Firefox and online life generally. The internet should be a global public resource, open and accessible to all. Individuals should have control of their experience. Safety is critical. Private commercial profit and social benefit should coexist in a healthy fashion. We use these principles regularly to describe Mozilla’s identity and inform our decision-making. You can see the Manifesto here.

• Two weeks ago, Screenshots started shipping with the ability to draw on and re-crop shots. Keep an eye out for the little edit icon on the top-right corner of your ‘My Shots’ page.

• From Friday, March 16 to Sunday, March 18, 2018, thirty-four people met in Mozilla’s Paris office to work on improving MDN’s Browser Compat Data. The amazing results included 221 pull requests that improved the quality of our data and created, prototyped, and improved tools and dashboards.

• Ever wanted to fancy up your Firefox experience but weren’t sure how to do it? Are you familiar with the Add-ons Manager in Firefox? If not, please allow us to introduce you. This Firefox feature can help you discover add-ons that will have you browsing like a power-user in no time.

• After the whole Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal, many companies took measures to protect their clients, including Mozilla, which released a free Firefox add-on to protect the privacy of its users.

• Your privacy is the most important thing in the world, especially when browsing the Internet, so you need to make sure the platforms and websites you visit can be trusted. All of us though Facebook could be trusted, but it proved otherwise, so now you can prevent it from tracking you on the Web if you’re using Firefox.

• Mozilla’s profound open source momentum assisted rewrite rules of tech as twenty years ago Netscape Communications was despairing. It was the favorite of the first wave of internet companies for its capability to let you surf the web but Microsoft had squeezed business likelihood by conferring a web browser for free.

• So Netscape took a step that was radical for the time. On March 31, 1998 it conferred the source code following its Netscape communicator browser, the once undisclosed programming directives that developers utilized to construct the software. The project Mozilla constituted to submit the crown jewels.

• For many years we have sought to lead the way in developing an internet that promotes human dignity, civil discourse, individual expression and collaborative problem-solving. Unfortunately, illegal content online – from hate speech to terrorist content – undermines the overall health of the internet and stifles its empowering nature. In that context, developing policy frameworks and industry best practices for tackling illegal content in a rights-protective manner is one of our key policy objectives.

• The EU – like many other regulatory jurisdictions around the world – is currently considering new measures to ensure effective removal of illegal content from the internet. To that end, the European Commission recently published a policy roadmap on the issue, which included – amongst others – the suggestion that Internet platforms be obliged to implement automated mechanisms to both detect attempted uploads of illegal content and filter any such content on their services.

• On its face www.mozilla.org doesn’t look like it’d be a complex application to write, maintain, or run. But when you throw over 100 million unique visitors per week at any site it can complicate things quickly. Add to that translations of the content into over 100 languages and you can start to get the idea of where it might get interesting. So we take every opportunity to simplify and reduce hosting complexity and cost we can get. This is the place from which the idea to switch to using SQLite for our database needs in production was born.

• Last Friday, March 23rd we held a Testday event, for Firefox 60 Beta 6.

• Thank you all for helping us make Mozilla a better place!

• From India team: Surentharan R.A and Suren, Aditya Anand, Baranitharan, ILANKHATIR, Nivetha and Fahima Zulfath A.

• Today, Mozilla joined 115 companies in filing a friend of the court brief with the United States Supreme Court to demonstrate our continued opposition to the U.S. travel ban in State of Washington v. Trump.

• As we’ve said from the outset, this travel ban threatens the free flow of ideas and innovation across borders that is an essential part of our DNA as a technology company. It also puts in jeopardy our mission to protect and advance the internet as a global public resource that is open and accessible to all.

• In a similar filing with the lower circuit court, we outlined these objections along with broader concerns about the disturbing way in which the executive order at the heart of this case erodes trust in U.S. immigration law. We cannot afford to have such a dangerous precedent set that could damage the international cooperation required to develop and maintain the open internet.

• Netscape Communications made two important announcements on January 23rd, 1998:

• First, that the Netscape Communicator product would be available free of charge;

• Second, that the source code for Communicator would also be free.

• On March 31st, the first developer release of the source code to Communicator was made available.

• But what now? For the product to grow and mature and continue to be useful and innovative, the various changes made by disparate developers across the web must be collated, organized, and brought together as a cohesive whole.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 6.0 was released at the end of January while already is a fair amount of new features over the past two months that have started up building for the next release of this open-source office suite, LibreOffice 6.1.

• LibreOffice 6.1 is expected to be released by mid-August while for that to happen an alpha release is slated for the end of April, a beta at the end of May, and the release candidates beginning in early July.

CMS

• Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you most certainly have heard of WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platforms around that also happens to be 100% open source. WordPress powers 27% of the web from personal to corporate to even government sites (Whitehouse.gov for one).

• In a 2008 interview, Linux Journal’s Katherine Druckman asked WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, “You frequently have reiterated your commitment to open-source ideals and GPL licensing. How has this commitment factored into the development of your company, Automattic? How do you use open-source technology to achieve your goals?”

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• The future of any philosophical movement is in its youth membership. The average age of a member of our movement, however, is at least the age of the movement itself. Thanks to “open”-washing, prospective members likely have a preconceived notion of software freedom that is less than optimal for the perpetuating the movement. How easy is it for a modern user to join us? How do so-called “millennials” and the like, who characteristically grew up with (mostly proprietary) software, perceive the imposition of ethical issues on their favorite practical tools — and what is the best way to introduce them? Are older members, or older ways of thinking, holding the movement back from spreading like wildfire? Are our methods too focused on developers and technophiles, and poor at converting mere mortals? In this discussion, we will not only ask ourselves these difficult questions, but also discuss concrete, actionable solutions.

• A recent Snyk’s survey also revealed that over 16% of developers don’t update dependencies and less than 50% use tools to alert themselves to known vulnerabilities.

• According to Derek Weeks, vice president at open source governance and DevSecOps automation company, Sonatype, this is set to change. Authorities around the world are starting to get tough on developers who fail to protect the public from data theft and misuse resulting from their less-than-stringent application of vulnerability fixes.

BSD

• We are excited to announce the release of pfSense® software version 2.4.3, now available for new installations and upgrades!

• pfSense software version 2.4.3 brings security patches, several new features, support for new Netgate hardware models, and stability fixes for issues present in previous pfSense 2.4.x branch releases.

• The TrueOS team is pleased to announce the availability of a new STABLE release of the TrueOS project (version 18.03). This is a special release due to the security issues impacting the computing world since the beginning of 2018. In particular, mitigating the “Meltdown” and “Spectre” system exploits make it necessary to update the entire package ecosystem for TrueOS. This release does not replace the scheduled June STABLE update, but provides the necessary and expected security updates for the STABLE release branch of TrueOS, even though this is part-way through our normal release cycle.

• One of the many new features of OpenBSD 6.3 is the possibility to dump USB traffic to userland via bpf(4). This can be done with tcpdump(8) by specifying a USB bus as interface:

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The use of free software in the research and development of technology in the educational field is essential for a better society with more solid values. Mexico has initiated the development and use of free software, thanks to the creation of free software labs in higher education institutions. In this talk, we will discuss the creation of these labs, and the positive impact it has generated.

• When you think of free software, what things come to mind? Freedom, obviously, but what others? A shared community? An open culture? Within free software culture, there is a perception and expectation of openness and collaboration within the community: all are welcome to the table, and your contributions speak for you. When you get outside the community by enough, however, the answer changes. Contemptuous, confusing, elitist, and abrasive are words that some outsiders use to describe free software communities. Some go out of their way to avoid the communities we’ve worked so hard to build. Why?

• The ambition of the Software Heritage project is to collect, preserve, and share the entire body of free software that is published on the Internet in source code form, together with its development history.

• Since its public announcement in 2016, the project has assembled the largest collection of freely available software source code for about 4 billion unique source code files and 900 million commits, coming from more than 60 million projects.

• Initially focused on the collection and preservation goals — which were at the time urgent, due to the recurrent disappearances of development forges — Software Heritage has since rolled out several mechanisms to peruse its archive, making progress on the sharing goal.

• In this talk, we will review the status of the Software Heritage project, emphasizing how users and developers can, today, benefit from the availability of a great public library of source code.

• Software dependencies. Software citation. Scientific reproducibility. Preservation of legacy software. These phrases bring to mind times we need to communicate about free software. From people who write software to people who organize and provide documentation of software, to end users searching for software, we all need to unambiguously refer to software in its complexity.

• We are representing two different initiatives actively building the semantic web of free software by sourcing software metadata, and creating mappings and links to software artifacts. Morane is the metadata lead for Software Heritage, an initiative striving to become the Library of Alexandria for software by collecting all publicly available software in source code form, together with its development history. Kat is metadata lead for Wikidata for Digital Preservation, a collaboration between the Wikidata community and the digital preservation community. Together, we are working to ensure that our approaches to solve the software metadata challenge are interoperable.

Public Services/Government

• Despite open government’s best intentions to prioritise collaboration, government bodies consistently duplicate each other’s effort. Collaborating as effectively as open communities is much harder than you’d think.

• A number of us “open technologists” have drafted a paper describing the challenges government faces, along with our vision for how to address these. It is being presented as part of Australia’s updated Open Government National Action Plan.

• This presentation will review some of the policies that governments have adopted over the years regarding the production of free software. Historically, the free software community has focused on news items about larger users of free software, including a program in Munich. We now live in a world where everyone uses free software at least some of the time, and a large number of companies, even Microsoft, have even created policies on how they are participating. We are just starting to see governments considering their role in free software beyond consumers. In this talk, we will review some of the existing policies by both national and state governments that are embracing free licensing, and we will look at some recent proposed/enacted policies and laws. We will also briefly discuss the role that copyleft and permissive licenses can play in those policies, and what governments should consider when choosing a license.

Licensing/Legal

• We want software creators to use the GPL and its cousin licenses. We also know that people make mistakes in the process, or don’t even try because they’ve heard it’s “too complicated.” Just as we do when we develop software, we would do well to study these failures and use them as opportunities to improve the usability of the GPL. This talk aims to start that process by identifying some known problems and considering some possible solutions. (None of these solutions are a new version of the license!)

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• We have recently started a new Science category on It’s FOSS. We covered how open source approach is impacting Science in the last article. In this open science article, we discuss NASA‘s actively growing efforts that involve their dynamic role in boosting scientific research by encouraging open source practices.

• [...]

• Uniquely named “code.nasa.gov“, NASA now has precisely 365 scientific software available as open source via GitHub as of the time of this post. So if you are a developer who loves coding, you can study each one of them every day for a year’s time!

• Even if you are not a developer, you can still browse through the fantastic collection of open source packages enlisted on the portal!

• One of the interesting open source packages listed here is the source code of Apollo 11‘s guidance computer. The Apollo 11 spaceflight took the first two humans to the Moon, namely, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin ! If you want to know more about Edwin Aldrin, you might want to pay a visit here.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Researchers from Adam Feinberg’s lab at Carnegie Mellon University have developed an open-source 3D bioprinter that can be built affordably using a modified desktop 3D printer. The large-volume extruder (LVE) component of the bioprinter can be 3D printed.

• Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed an open-source, low-cost 3D bioprinter. They have published a paper in HardwareX with the complete instructions for the installation of a syringe-based large volume extruder (LVE) on a desktop FDM 3D printer.

• The LVE allows users to print artificial human tissues at a high resolution and scale. It is designed to print a range of materials, including biopolymers, hydrogels, pastes and epoxies.

• Adam Feinberg, one of the authors of the paper and a Biomedical Engineering Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon, said “The LVE 3D bioprinter allows us to print much larger tissue scaffolds, at the scale of an entire human heart, with high quality.”

Programming/Development

• Traditional and agile planning methods both focus on developing strategies to lead teams to succeed in today’s competitive landscape; however, their approaches are quite distinct. If you’re transitioning from traditional to agile planning, it’s important to understand their substantially different mindsets and leadership styles.

Reviews

• By profession, I’m a software developer. Aside from a preferred editor, what matters most to a developer is the use of a Source Code Manager (SCM). So, when a new product comes along featuring my favorite SCM, Git, I had no choice but to spend some time using it.

• When working with AWS, it’s common to have a number of separate accounts run by different teams for different projects. Gaining an understanding of how those accounts are configured is best accomplished by visually displaying the resources of the account and how these resources can communicate. This complements a traditional asset inventory.

• Duo built CloudMapper to generate interactive network diagrams of AWS accounts and released it as open source on Github.

Leftovers

• More than a week after an Uber vehicle driving in autonomous mode killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona — the first pedestrian death by a self-driving car — we still don’t know what exactly went wrong. Video of the crash shows that the pedestrian, Elaine Herzberg, walked in front of a moving vehicle. But the vehicle didn’t appear to react, and there are many unanswered questions as to why it did not. Did the car’s Velodyne Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) or other sensors get enough signal to detect her? Did Uber’s decision to scale down to a single LIDAR sensor from the seven LIDAR sensors on earlier vehicle models, which created more LIDAR blindspots, play a role? Where the vehicle’s LIDAR sensors disabled? Did the fact that she was a pedestrian walking a bicycle confuse any of the car’s vision systems? Did the vehicle in fact slow down?

• By building up their own flood protections, some communities have ensured they would be less affected by future floods, while their neighbors would fare worse.

Science

• There are at least two recorded cases of something called smartphone blindness. The New England Journal of Medicine notes that both patients had been reading their phones in bed, on their sides, faces half-hidden, in the dark. “We hypothesized that the symptoms were due to differential bleaching of photo-­pigment, with the viewing eye becoming light-adapted.” Differential bleaching of the eyes! Fortunately, smartphone blindness of this kind is transient.

• We had floppy disks long before we had CDs, DVDs, or USB thumb drives. Here’s the evolution of the portable media that changed everything about personal computing.

• In the fall of 1977, I experimented with a newfangled PC: a Radio Shack TRS-80. For data storage, it used—I kid you not—a cassette tape player. Tape had a long history with computing; I had used the IBM 2420 9-track tape system on IBM 360/370 mainframes to load software and back up data. Magnetic tape was common for storage in pre-personal computing days, but it had two main annoyances: It held only tiny amounts of data, and it was slower than a slug on a cold spring morning. For those of us excited about technology, there had to be something better. And there was: the floppy disk.

• In the philosophy department the other day we were discussing race-based sexual preferences. As well as considering the cases in which this is ethically problematic, we were trying to determine cases in which it might be okay.

Health/Nutrition

• Critics also attacked what they regarded as the slow pace of WTR research. The WTR was merely “a confidence game” designed to placate the public but stall real research, according to Louis Slesin, editor of the trade publication Microwave News. “By dangling a huge amount of money in front of the cash-starved [scientific] community,” Slesin argued, “Carlo guaranteed silent obedience. Anyone who dared complain risked being cut off from his millions.” Carlo denies the allegation.

• This week, following three days of live-broadcast peer review sessions, experts concluded that a pair of federal studies show “clear evidence” that cell phone radiation caused heart cancer in male rats. This substantially changes the debate on whether cell phone use is a cancer risk. Up until this point, the federal government and cell phone manufacturers operated on the assumption that cell phones cannot by their very nature cause cancer, because they emit non-ionizing radiation. Whereas ionizing radiation—the kind associated with x-rays, CT scans, and nuclear power plants, among others—definitely causes cancer at high enough doses, non-ionizing radiation was believed to not emit enough energy to break chemical bonds. That meant it couldn’t damage DNA, and therefore couldn’t lead to mutations that cause cancer. But the pair of studies by the US National Toxicology Program found “clear evidence” that exposure to radiation caused heart tumors in male rats, and found “some evidence” that it caused tumors in the brains of male rats. (Both are positive results; the NTP uses the labels “clear evidence,” “some evidence,” “equivocal evidence” and “no evidence” when making conclusions.)

• On Wednesday, President Trump fired Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin and said he’d replace him with White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson, a rear admiral in the Navy. Dr. Jackson has no experience running a large agency. The Department of Veterans Affairs is the federal government’s second-largest department, with 360,000 employees. Shulkin had been facing criticism for various ethics violations, including using taxpayer money to pay for his wife’s airfare during a trip to Europe last summer. But Shulkin says he’s actually being ousted because of his opposition to privatizing the VA, which runs 1,700 hospitals and clinics. The push to privatize the VA has been led by a group called Concerned Veterans for America, which is funded by the billionaire conservative Koch brothers. We speak to Suzanne Gordon, an award-winning healthcare journalist. Her forthcoming book is titled “Wounds of War: Veterans’ Healthcare in the Era of Privatization.”

• Some in the Trump administration saw me as an obstacle to privatization.

Security

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced on March 29 that it is adding the Open Policy Agent (OPA) and the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) projects to its hosted projects roster.

• OPA and SPIFFE extend the security capabilities available to cloud and container workloads, helping to fill perceived gaps in existing security controls. CNCF is home to the Kubernetes container orchestration platform, as well as a growing list of open-source projects that help to facilitate and secure cloud native computing.

• Etcd, a key-value store and a core component of Kubernetes clusters, is used to store highly sensitive configuration data but is also easily left unprotected, as a developer recently found.

• Puerto Rican software developer Giovanni Collazo was looking into etcd, first developed by CoreOS, and realized that before version 2.1, released in July 2015, it didn’t support any type of authentication. Even after it was added, this feature was kept off by default for backward compatibility reasons.

• A similar approach was taken by MongoDB developers in the past and resulted in thousands of insecure deployments on the internet that were abused by hackers. So, Collazo set out to see if etcd’s design decisions had a similar effect.

• A quick search on Shodan, a search engine for devices and services, revealed 2,284 etcd servers that were directly accessible from the internet through their RESTful APIs.

• Noscript is maturing nicely. It is not the all-can-do tool that we had in Firefox before the 57th release, but it is adequate and suitable for most people, and it provides the necessary protection, and more importantly, the necessary quiet you want when browsing the net. Silent, static pages so you can focus on reading and not having your senses assailed any which Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 way. But I guess most people will focus on the security side of things.

• I am using the addon across multiple profiles and systems, and I have not observed any big breakages or bugs. Occasional tiny issues crop here and there, and then vanish a day later. The one that I do remember was a temporary issue with XSS for a brief while, but other than that, it seems to work in a very similar fashion to the old Noscript. Performance is also comparable. And then, there’s still more room for improvements and new stuff, which I’m sure will be coming. Hopefully, this was a pleasant read. Take care.

• Despite the full-throated objections of the cybersecurity community, the Georgia legislature has passed a bill that would open independent researchers who identify vulnerabilities in computer systems to prosecution and up to a year in jail.

• EFF calls upon Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal to veto S.B. 315 as soon as it lands on his desk.

• For months, advocates such as Electronic Frontiers Georgia, have descended on the state Capitol to oppose S.B. 315, which would create a new crime of “unauthorized access” to computer systems. While lawmakers did make a major concession by exempting terms of service violations under the measure—an exception we’ve been asking Congress for years to carve out of the federal Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (CFAA)—the bill stills fall short of ensuring that researchers aren’t targeted by overzealous prosecutors. This has too often been the case under CFAA.

• If you’re one of the millions of the 150 million MyFitnessPal users, bad news: hackers have your email address, your user name, and your hashed password.

• Digital data thefts are on the rise and sports apparel merchant Under Armour has become the latest victim of the crime. The Baltimore (USA) based company has disclosed that there was a massive data breach into its food and nutrition app and website, MyFitnessPal, system earlier this year. An unauthorized party gained access to the system and was able to acquire data of about 150 million users.

Defence/Aggression

• The history of the left in the United States is a history of betrayal.

• That is, they “stole” things like “academic journals, theses, dissertations, and electronic books” — you know, the stuff that professors routinely publish as part of their work. The stuff that they desperately want as many people to read as possible, since that’s how ideas spread, and academic credit is assigned. So rather than some “massive cyber theft” on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is this not actually a bunch of people making copies of academic materials they and others want to read? We already know that Iranians have a particular hunger for academic knowledge of exactly this kind. An article published in Science in 2016 analyzed who was downloading unauthorized copies of scientific papers from Sci-Hub.

• Rarely has war fever in Washington been deeper and more broad-based. Everybody’s jumping on board – liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, human-rights advocates and neoconservatives. With the 2018 midterms fast approaching, it seems that the only choice voters will have is between a military conflict from column A and one from column B. Which will it be – the clash with Putin that liberals are talking themselves into? Or the showdown with Iran that Bolton has long advocated?

• It’s a choice between cyanide and arsenic. One moment, Trump is threatening “Little Rocket Man” Kim Jong Un with “fire and fury” while, in the next, the New York Times is demanding that he take off the gloves with regard to the Kremlin. The title of a Times editorial on Friday, March 15, said it all: “Finally, Trump Has Something Bad to Say About Russia.”

• It blasted the Orange-Haired One for being slow to impose sanctions in retaliation “for the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election” – still unproven, by the way – and of holding off “for reasons that have never been made completely clear.” This last point was rich considering how often the Times denounces Trump as a “Siberian candidate” that Russia installed in the White House to do its bidding. The editorial slammed Putin as “an authoritarian leader” who “has paid little or no price for his aggressions” in Syria and the Crimea, and it predicted that the Russian president “won’t stop until he knows that the United States will stand up to him and work with its allies to impose stronger financial and diplomatic measures to rein him in.”

• After four separate courts blocked the Trump administration’s ban on transgender people serving in the military, the White House announced a new plan to carry out the ban on March 23. How is this possible? And what does this mean?

• Ambassador Murray, who in the following interview raises compelling questions about who may be responsible for the attacks, other than the Russians, has been the butt of a full-scale cyber attack on his website over many days.

• Meanwhile, the usual suspects in the US and Western corporate press continue to fan the flames of a new cold war with Russia. Indeed, Russia will expel 60 US diplomats and has ordered the shuttering of the US consulate in St. Petersburg, according to an announcement by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Lavrov, who made the announcement in Moscow on Thursday, March 29, summoned US ambassador Jon Huntsman to the Russian Foreign Ministry to confirm the action.

• Dennis J. Bernstein and Randy Credico interviewed Ambassador Murray on March 26th, 2018.

• In April 2004, CNN brought on the editor-in-chief of Al Jazeera, one of a handful of networks then broadcasting from inside the Iraqi city of Fallujah, then under siege from US forces—and the site, we were hearing, of mounting civilian casualties.

• One wag suggested to me that the Bolton appointment should not really come as a surprise, since it fits the recent Washington pattern — if White House chaos can be considered a pattern. For Kremlin leaders, though, White House zig-zags are no laughing matter. Let’s try to put ourselves in their shoes and imagine how the unfolding of recent events may have looked to them.

• On March 1 in his state-of-the-nation address, President Putin revealed several new strategic weapons systems that Russia developed after the Bush/Cheney/Bolton administration abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had been the cornerstone of strategic stability for the previous 30 years. (John Bolton is included in that august company because, as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, he was Vice President Dick Cheney’s enforcer to put the kibosh on the ABM Treaty.)

• You would not know it from the “mainstream media,” but in that same speech Putin offered to “sit down at the negotiating table” and “work together … to ensure global security” — taking into account the strategic parity Moscow claims.

• Referring to what he called “our duty to inform our partners” about Russia’s claimed ability to render ABM systems “useless,” Putin added: “When the time comes, foreign and defense ministry experts will have many opportunities to discuss all these matters with them, if of course our partners so desire.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich in the summer of 2016 remains unsolved, still under investigation by police in Washington, D.C. It is the inspiration for round after round of baseless speculation about the cause of his death, linking it to the leak of thousands of Democratic Party emails that year. And those theories are generating yet another lawsuit.

• This week, Aaron Rich, Seth Rich’s brother, sued Dallas financial adviser Ed Butowsky, a pivotal figure in early coverage of the case, along with a conservative conspiracy theorist and the The Washington Times. The suit alleges that the trio promoted groundless accusations about Aaron Rich’s involvement in the leaks of those emails to Wikileaks.

• The Ecuadorean government confirmed Tuesday that three local journalists were kidnapped while covering violence in the country’s border with Colombia.

• Journalists held a vigil in Ecuador’s capital Quito Tuesday night to demand the freeing of three colleagues who were kidnapped Monday in the town of Mataje, in the country’s northern border with Colombia, as local and international press organizations demanded their release.

• The Committee to Protect Journalists today called for the immediate release of three members of a reporting team from the daily El Comercio newspaper, who were kidnapped yesterday morning in northern Ecuador near the Colombian border.

• A reporter, a photojournalist, and their driver were kidnapped early yesterday morning while reporting in the San Lorenzo canton in the northern Esmeraldas province, which borders southern Colombia, according to news reports and Ecuadoran officials. In a press conference this morning, Ecuadoran Interior Minister César Navas said the government had been in contact with the kidnappers and believed the three El Comercio employees were unharmed and being held across the border in Colombia, but did not offer any other details, citing the ongoing investigation. El Comercio did not identify the crew by name.

• “We are concerned for the safety of the El Comercio journalists and their driver, and urge Ecuadoran and Colombian authorities to act swiftly to ensure their safe and immediate release,” said Natalie Southwick, CPJ’s Central and South America research associate. “Armed actors based in Colombia should recognize the civilian status of journalists, regardless of which side of the border they are on.”

• IN 1846, FIVE DAILY NEWSPAPERS in New York came together to create the Associated Press. At the time, their aim was to share the cost of covering the Mexican-American War. It has since become one of journalism’s longest-standing…

• The Skripal saga and Ecuador’s move to cut Julian Assange’s internet is part of a wider crackdown on freedom of speech and states like Russia which have stood up to the West. It risks evolving into a real war, John Pilger told RT.

• “This is about a war on freedom of speech; this man is being denied the most basic right – freedom of speech. It’s part of a wider war. The wider war is against known enemies, and Russia is one of them, China is another,” investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger said.

• Earlier this week, the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where Assange has been holed up since 2012, cut off all communications for the WikiLeaks founder, blocking his internet access and not allowing any visitors. A source close to WikiLeaks told RT that Ecuador cut Assange’s internet due to his tweet about the arrest of former Catalan leader Carlos Puigdemont in Germany.

• Electronic jammers have been placed inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London to prevent WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange having access to the internet or social media, sources say. The Ecuadorian government took the measure on Tuesday evening, stopping Assange from tweeting, using the internet or phone.

• He has also been refused any visitors to the embassy, where he has been living since June 2012, believing he will be extradited to the US for questioning over the activities of WikiLeaks if he leaves.

• [...]

• The serving Ecuadorian ambassador to Washington DC Francisco Carrion tweeted on Thursday: “The decision of the government of Ecuador to prevent Assange from tweeting is correct.”

• Ecuador on Wednesday said it has stopped Julian Assange’s ability to communicate to the outside world from its London embassy, where the WikiLeaks founder has been holed up since 2012.

• The decision was taken because the Australian had broken a 2017 promise to not interfere in other country’s affairs while in the mission, an Ecuadorian government statement said.

• He recently spoke on social media about a diplomatic crisis between London and Moscow as well as about Catalonian separatism, despite warnings by Ecuador to avoid controversial political subjects.

• As any modern parent knows, the best way to grab the attention of a petulant child is to turn off the internet.

• Ecuador did not cite any examples of this alleged breach.

• Convincing yourself, and the world, that you’re a major political player on the global stage is a tough ask when you’re confined to a back bedroom. It’s an act that Julian Assange has been trying for years – and one which is increasingly starting to have consequences on the WikiLeaks founder.

• Assange also questioned the decision by the UK and more than 20 other countries to expel 150 Russian diplomats they claim are spies.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had the internet connection in his Ecuador Embassy residence cut off after getting in a Twitter debate with British officials about the timing of the expulsion of Russian diplomats over the Skripal case. Assange adviser and Australian barrister Greg Barns spoke to Sputnik about what makes this case so ludicrous.

• The Ecuadorean government has cut off Julian Assange’s internet access in the Ecuadorean Embassy of London, accusing Assange of breaking an agreement not to issue statements that might interfere in the politics of other countries. The suspension of his internet came after Assange challenged Britain’s accusation that Russia was responsible for the poisoning of a Russian spy and his daughter earlier this month. In a statement, the Ecuadorean Embassy said Assange’s social media statements “put at risk the good relations Ecuador maintains with the United Kingdom, with the other states of the European Union, and with other nations.”

• Assange frequently tweets more than a dozen times a day, sharing news stories and comments that often focus on global politics and digital security issues. In recent days, Assange had criticized Germany’s detention of former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont. He wrote that the European arrest warrant system “allows an abusive government to persecute its opponents across the whole of the EU.”

• He also chimed in a decision by the United States and more than a dozen European nations to kick out Russian diplomats on Monday following Moscow’s alleged poisoning of an ex-spy in Britain.

• “The manner of and timing of Russian diplomatic expulsions is poor diplomacy,” he wrote.

• Former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg said the man he views as his mentor, President Trump confidant Roger Stone, was trying to ingratiate himself to the commander in chief when he fueled speculation that he had liaised with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

• “He’s always trying to ingratiate himself to Trump. I don’t care about Trump. It’s irrelevant to me if I have a relationship with him again. Roger does. They have a long relationship,” Nunberg told MSNBC Thursday.

• Mueller is asking questions about Trump ally Roger Stone, who claimed he had connections to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange during the 2016 campaign. Ari Melber lists the unanswered questions surrounding Roger Stone and his role in the Trump-Russia collusion case. Former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg and Roger Stone’s alleged intermediary to Julian Assange join Ari Melber on The Beat.

• These are two incredibly important points. Like previous Black PR campaigns and general anti-Assange propaganda, Ecuador’s decision has the potential to stir up the usual conspiracy theories and mass hysteria which in the past have included: Assange is dead, Assange is missing, or Assange was kidnapped by the CIA. Or aliens. Or both. Buying into this nonsense is not only counterproductive to Julian’s wellbeing and impending freedom (because it’s going to happen, dammit), those in power who fear WikiLeaks’ publications are hoping whistleblowers and leakers will think twice before sending documents to WikiLeaks. So please, keep this in mind during the ensuing days and weeks.

• The Ecuadorian president is being urged to reverse a ban on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange using the internet or receiving visitors.

• Among those signing a letter to Lenin Moreno are actress Pamela Anderson, musician Brian Eno, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and former Greek minister Yanis Varoufakis.

• Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, Brian Eno and other prominent figures demanded Assange be reconnected to the outside world.

• A group of intellectuals, social activists, and artists, have signed an open letter demanding the Ecuadoran government restore Julian Assange’s internet and phone access, allow him visits and respect his right to freedom of expression.

• The Ecuadorian government released a statement on why they had Julian Assange’s embassy internet connection cut off. It said that Assange’s recent behaviour on social media had “put at risk the good relations [Ecuador] maintains with the United Kingdom, with the other states of the European Union, and with other nations.” Basically saying that Assange had broken an agreement not to interfere in the affairs of a foreign state.

• Kim Dotcom [a friend of Assange] instantly surmised that Ecuador had bowed to pressure from Spain in response to Julian’s ardent support for the Catalonian people to have the right to self-determination. Wikileaks confirmed via Twitter that this was the issue in question, narrowing it down to one factually correct Tweet Assange had sent, comparing the arrest of the Catalonian president with a historical arrest by the Gestapo, both at the behest of Spain. It further said that Ecuador had demanded “that he remove” the Tweet that I mentioned.

• I have been at this for nearly a decade and a professional for some 5 years – though it’s a “for the love of the game” kind of occupation as the money sucks. I have staged over 1,000 shows encompassing more than 15,000 performances for others, always insisting on free speech rights for acts, and it has been a true thrill to see open mic acts I used to regularly observe finding their voices, now having moved on to newspaper columns, hosting TV shows, appearing on panel shows and enjoying big gigs like Live At The Apollo.

• Some might roll their eyes at the “open mic” status of my gigs, however it is these rooms that breed the next generations of professionals, comedy philosophers and pundits. Such nights don’t usually carry concerns from acts such as what agents might think, or whether a risqué joke might endanger their career. Comedy is rarely more free, raw and fresh than in an open mic room.

• Of course, there are a lot of still-born efforts at comedy: folk who just don’t have “it” and acts trying to find their voice, hone their skill and commitment. It’s a tough learning curve, but when it works then it’s pure gold.

• [...]

• In 2015 this comic herself felt she had been subjected to censorship at a London gig, and rightly made a furore of the issue. She stated at the time: “I find it very strange that anyone would feel they couldn’t enjoy a comedy show unless they agreed with 100 per cent of the political views of the person performing.” Is that the whiff of hypocrisy in the air? Aye, I reckon.

• “If there is no freedom of speech for Julian Assange, there is no freedom of speech for any of us – regardless of the disparate opinions we hold.”

• A petition calling for the communications ban to be lifted has been signed by over 20,000 people.

• Ecuador has taken what it says is a step to prevent WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange from interfering in other countries’ affairs and cut off his Internet access.

Finance

• For example, for the past few years, the Supreme People’s Court has run a “judgment defaulter’s list” of individuals who have failed (been unable?) to satisfy judgments against them. More than 3 million names were on this list already by the end of 2015, and getting on this list means more than just public shaming; it’s also a “no-fly” list, preventing defaulters from buying airplane tickets, in addition to a “no-high-speed-train” and “no-hotel-stay” list, and also a “no-sending-your-kids-to-paid-schools” list. By mid-2016, about 5 million people had been preventing from buying these services in China as a result of being on the list. This initiative is just the start of a planned “Social Credit System,” [...]

• “When you work 14, 15 hours and go home with $50, it’s not good. It’s not about competition. It’s about survival.”

• Greg Ip gave us another rendition of this old scare story in a Wall Street Journal column (3/28/18). The argument is that the interest paid on US government debt will soon impose an enormous burden on the federal government, choking off spending on important government programs.

• The key part of this story is that interest rates will jump at some point in the not-too-distant future. While this is in fact what the Congressional Budget Office predicts, it is also what it has been predicting ever since the Great Recession, and has consistently been shown wrong.

• The key question is, why would interest rates rise? There are two stories where we see this happening. One is that we start to see an uptick in the inflation rate. In that case, long-term rates would almost certainly rise, since investors would have the option of getting a better return just by holding physical commodities. Of course, the Fed would almost certainly raise interest rates in response to higher inflation, which would more directly cause interest rates to rise. One point about higher inflation that is worth noting, though, is that it reduces the real value of the debt.

• Finnish telecom networks firm Nokia is to cut 353 jobs in Finland after completing mandatory consultations with labour unions.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, the White House doctor, is nominated to replace David Shulkin.

• The Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods’ final day of hearings on Thursday (29 March) was temporarily adjourned after political activist Han Hui Hui was physically removed from the chambers in Parliament.

• Han was seen holding up an image of the cover of the book “Authoritarian Rule of Law – Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore” in the room while Oxford-trained historian Thum Ping Tjin was delivering his testimony.

• The book was written by Jothie Rajah, the first wife of Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam. The minister, who is on the Select Committee, was in the chambers at the time.

• A handful of senior appointments to the European Parliament’s secretariat will be made in the coming months through backroom political deals rather than a transparent recruitment process, according to trade unions and officials within the assembly.

• Six Parliament officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said that eight individuals are allegedly destined to be the successful candidates for the director-level positions within the Parliament’s civil service.

• They said that at least five individuals have been selected by the Parliament’s most powerful civil servant, Secretary-General Klaus Welle, either because he wants them for the job or as a result of deals among the assembly’s largest political groups.

• In an official statement Thursday, the European Commission announced it will cancel all 300,000 domains under the .eu top-level domain that have a UK registrant, following Britain’s eventual departure from the European Union.

• “As of the withdrawal date, undertakings and organizations that are established in the United Kingdom but not in the EU and natural persons who reside in the United Kingdom will no longer be eligible to register .eu domain names,” the document states, adding, “or if they are .eu registrants, to renew .eu domain names registered before the withdrawal date.”

• Going even further, the EC suggested that existing .eu domains might be cancelled the moment Brexit happens – expected to be 366 days from now – with no right of appeal.

• In her story on American election security, ProPublica’s Kate Rabinowitz revealed that many state and local election officials are suffering a funding crisis. Without the money needed to maintain and update electronic voting machines, officials are having to make do with equipment that was manufactured in 2008 or even earlier. By isolating machines from the internet and keeping them in secure locations, officials are able to reduce the threat of widespread hacking, but the machines are plagued with more mundane technical problems that states have been slow to address and could have major consequences for future elections.

• Last October, Gregory Junemann received a brief email from an official at the U.S. Department of Labor effectively firing him and 15 others from a volunteer gig helping the government reduce hazards to workers.

• “Thank you again for your continuing service in providing exceptional guidance on improving the health and safety of our federal workforce,” the email said.

• Junemann, a labor union president, was a member of the Federal Advisory Council on Occupational Safety and Health, first established by President Richard Nixon. It is one of five panels created by law to advise the labor secretary on how to improve health, safety and whistleblower protections in nearly every facet of the workforce.

• Former colleagues say the next national security adviser — whose job is to marshal information and present it to the president fairly — resists input that doesn’t fit his biases and retaliates against people he disagrees with.

• [...]

• The analyst was summoned to Bolton’s office. “He got very red in the face, and shaking his finger at me, and explained to me that I was acting way beyond my position,” the analyst, Christian Westermann, recalled later during a Senate inquiry. Bolton then demanded that Westermann’s supervisor remove him permanently from the biological weapons portfolio, thundering that “he wasn’t going to be told what he could say by a mid-level munchkin.”

• Last week, President Donald Trump named Bolton to be his new national security adviser, a job that would arguably make him the government’s most important arbiter of competing views on foreign policy and a key judge of what intelligence information reaches the president on the most serious threats to national security.

• The nomination — which does not require Senate confirmation — has drawn attention mainly for Bolton’s combative bureaucratic style and the hawkish views he has espoused in three Republican administrations and as a Fox News analyst. Among other ideas, Bolton has advocated overthrowing the Islamic government of Iran, bombing that country’s nuclear facilities, and (just last month) taking preemptive military action against North Korea.

• A levee in the Sny Island Levee Drainage District, in Illinois. The Sny district has pushed their levees several feet higher than what’s allowed under Army Corps rules. The change adds flood protection for residents behind the Sny, while increasing flood risk to neighboring communities. Officials from the district are part of a $230,000 lobbying effort to weaken the Army Corps’ ability to oversee levees. (Whitney Curtis for ProPublica)

• Nearly a year after record Midwestern floods killed at least five people and caused $1.7 billion in damage, a secretive lobbying effort funded by Illinois and Missouri drainage districts is underway to roll back flood regulations, documents show.

• The effort targets the authority of the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the nation’s federal levees — large hills that are typically built or strengthened by the Corps and are subject to its rules, but are managed by local drainage districts. Any time a district wants to permanently raise the height of a levee for more protection, it has to seek approval from the Corps, which considers whether a request would be “injurious to the public interest” before issuing a Section 408 permit.

• A controversial London-based academic with close ties to Nigel Farage has been detained by the FBI upon arrival in the US and issued a subpoena to testify before Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

• Ted Malloch, an American touted last year as a possible candidate to serve as US ambassador to the EU, said he was interrogated by the FBI at Boston’s Logan airport on Wednesday following a flight from London and questioned about his involvement in the Trump campaign.

• In a statement sent to the Guardian, Malloch, who described himself as a policy wonk and defender of Trump, said the FBI also asked him about his relationship with Roger Stone, the Republican strategist, and whether he had ever visited the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has resided for nearly six years.

• It’s good for Edsall to acknowledge this—as FAIR (10/9/15) had to take him to task in 2015 for the tortured logic behind his assertion that “Democrats now depend as much on affluent voters as on low-income voters.”

• But now that Edsall has admitted that the Democrats are not actually “the favorites of the rich,” as his 2015 headline put it, what should the Democrats do about it? He tips his hand is his opening paragraphs, where he glosses “whites without college degrees” with the phrase “many of whom are culturally conservative,” and describes the “white college-educated Democratic electorate” as “a far more culturally liberal constituency.”

• It takes him a while to get to what he’s getting at. “These numbers have powerful ramifications for both Democrats and Republicans preparing for the 2018 and 2020 elections,” he notes about a fifth of the way into the lengthy piece, “strengthen[ing] the case made by Democratic strategists calling for a greater emphasis on policies appealing to working-class voters and a de-emphasis on so-called identity issues.”

• The president’s relationship with adult film star Stormy Daniels is difficult to explain to younger children.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The debate over gun control has reached new heights following the shooting at a high school in Florida. Every mass shooting prompts debate over the Second Amendment and access to guns, but this one, led by students whose classmates were killed, has more momentum than most.

• Youth is wasted on the young, people say, as they note the steady decline in voter participation in younger demographics. This seems to imply more students should be involved in social and political issues, but this particular participation has been met with lots of ridicule and anger. In other words, it’s been greeted with hypocrisy, which is pretty much what we expect in heated political debates.

• Nothing is more heated than the gun control debate. And everyone with an opinion is wrong. But it’s the youth that are the wrongest, and those bemoaning youthful antipathy aren’t responding very well to this sudden display of activism. Gun control-related walkouts have occurred in schools all over the nation, and students expressing their displeasure with their representatives are finding out firsthand how thin-skinned their representatives are.

• A high school student who was suspended for swearing in a conversation with a congressional staffer about gun control is asking for an apology from his school and his congressman.

• On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada sent letters on behalf of 17-year-old Noah Christiansen to request Robert McQueen High School in Reno, Nevada, remove the record of his suspension and apologize to the student. The student’s punishment, they argued, amounted to an infringement on his First Amendment rights and could deter other students from reaching out to their representatives.

• You will recall that conservative commentator Dennis Prager sued YouTube late last year because he didn’t like how the site administered its “restricted mode” relating to several of his Prager University videos. The whole lawsuit was a mess to begin with, resting on Prager’s claims that YouTube violated federal and state laws by silencing his speech as a conservative and falsely advertising YouTube as place for free and open speech. At the same time that YouTube asked the court to toss this canard, Prager sought a preliminary injunction to keep YouTube from operating its own site as it saw fit. In support of its petition to dismiss the suit, YouTube’s Alice Wu offered the court a declaration that more or less showed every single one of Prager’s claims, especially his central claim of censorship of conservatives, to be as wrong as it possibly could be.

• Now, mere weeks later, the court has agreed, penning a full-throated dismissal order that essentially takes Prager’s legal team to task for failing to make anything resembling a valid claim before the court. We’ll start with the court’s response to Prager’s First Amendment claims, which he makes by stating that YouTube is somehow a legally public forum, rather than a privately run website.

• This line of thinking can never be reinforced too often by public officials: the First Amendment is great but only if your speech doesn’t offend someone powerful. (via Adam Steinbaugh)

• A California high school took matters into its own hands — not even waiting to see if powerful people were offended — and memory-holed both its physical and online student publication after a student wrote article about the relationship between art and activism made some parents take to Facebook to complain about “liberal propaganda.”

• The article contained images found via Google searches, including one depicting Trump with a Nazi symbol on his head and another with a cop in Klan hood pointing a gun at a black child meant to represent Travon Martin. The following image comes from the Facebook post that started the backlash against the school.

• More well-intentioned lawmaking is resulting in terrible legislation proposals. France is looking to Germany for guidance for the first time in a long time, thanks to its Prime Minister’s desire to regulate “hate speech” on the internet. Edourd Philippe has apparently overlooked the disastrous roll out of Germany’s hate speech law, which has resulted in a steady stream of embarrassments since its inception.

• A frequent user of the Freedom of Information Act says he is concerned that a new look searchable database will allow ’censorship by the back door’.

• David Watts, who has submitted a number of FoI requests in relation to school performance and policing matters, says a number of responses that were previously published are no longer there.

• And he says the reply to his most recent request, about fixed penalty notices issued by the police, has yet to be published.

• Authorities in the southern Chinese city of Zhuhai have formally arrested a prominent anti-censorship campaigner on subversion charges, after holding him for six months under residential surveillance, his lawyer said on Friday.

• Zhen Jianghua was taken away from his home in Zhuhai, Guangdong province, on the night of Sept. 1 on suspicion of “incitement to subvert state power.”

• Initially held under criminal detention in the Zhuhai No. 1 Detention Center, Zhen was later taken to an unknown location by state security police, to be held under “residential surveillance,” where he has been for the past five months.

• So, in the lead up to Congress’ vote on FOSTA/SESTA, we pointed out that a court in Boston was likely on the verge of ruling that Backpage was not protected by CDA 230, because of actions the site had taken. Considering that the publicly stated rationale by nearly everyone supporting FOSTA/SESTA was that it was needed to get around Backpage’s CDA 230 protections, we wondered why Congress couldn’t wait to see how the court ruled. Yesterday, the Judge indeed ruled against a motion to dismiss in the case of one of the plaintiffs (there were three in the case), saying that enough evidence had been presented to get around CDA 230 for the time being. The key issue: whether or not Backpage directly changed the content, making it the content creator, rather than just the service provider.

• The topic of censorship crops up far too much here on Techdirt. Less common are stories about how to circumvent it. The two which follow are great examples of how human ingenuity is able to find unexpected ways to tackle this problem. The first story comes from Spain, and concerns a banned book.

• Shortly after the close of this year’s International Women’s Day, China’s Twitter-like service Sina Weibo shut down Feminist Voices. With 180,000 followers, the group’s social media account was one of the most important advocacy channels for spreading information about women’s issues in China, but in an instant, it was gone. A few hours later, the private messaging app WeChat also shuttered an account for the group. The official reasons for the closures were vague, simply that the accounts had posted content that violated regulations, but the subtext was clear: the country’s highly-monitored media was trying to silence women’s advocates.

• It wasn’t the first time Feminist Voices had been censored. Last year, Weibo issued the group a one-month suspension for posting “inappropriate content”—a move that now appears to have been a warning shot. However, says Leta Hong Fincher, author of Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, “this time the removal is more sinister as there is no indication that the account will be restored.” Days after it went dark, images appeared online of a group of masked women holding a symbolic funeral for the death of Feminist Voices. Yet the group’s founder Lu Pin (now based in the US) wrote on Twitter that she viewed the ritual not as a funeral, but as a “fantastic carnival,” signifying a rebirth, and she pledged to “reclaim the account by every legal avenue.”

• Back in 2016, the Malaysian government pushed for broad censorship of an already tightly-controlled internet. The basis for this push was the government’s inability to stop Malaysian media from reporting on government corruption. This reporting continued on platforms (and with news agencies) the government didn’t directly control. To shut this down, the government decided to strip immunity from media platforms, making them directly responsible for user content. This allowed the government to control the narrative by going after service providers, rather than those publishing inconvenient facts.

• Is an anti-fake news law proposed in Malaysia really designed to protect the country’s citizens, or is it just a way for the government to clamp down on the media and stifle free speech? With elections around the corner and a years-long financial scandal plaguing Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, many within the country’s media, legal fraternity and civil society are worried about the government’s intent in introducing the bill.

• MALAYSIAN PRIME Minister Najib Razak is no stranger to muzzling free expression. His government has used existing laws to prosecute bloggers and journalists for satire and criticism of Mr. Najib, who has been embroiled in an epic corruption scandal. Now the Malaysian cabinet has gone a step further, proposing a law that would impose stiff fines and jail sentences on those who publish what it deems “fake news.” The proposed law is a warning of the danger when governments decide what is true and what is not.

• For years now the narrative du jour in online news circles has been that the news comment section is an irredeemable menace. Outlet after outlet has informed us that they care so much about the integrity of public dialogue online that they’ve decided to ban website visitors from commenting on news articles entirely. Usually, these bans are accompanied by some sanctimonious claim that banning people from speaking on site was done because the outlet in question just really “valued conversation,” or because they’re just ultra-interested in building better relationships.

• In reality, the motivation isn’t quite so noble. Most websites just don’t want to spend the time and money it takes to cultivate a healthy online community, in large part because bean counters can’t monetize or measure the impact of quality discourse. Other outlets don’t like having such a visible area where users can point out errors in news coverage. Most really would prefer we return back to the era of “letters to the editor” where the medium gets to dictate whose voices are deemed important, and whose are not. In that way it’s often part power play, and part laziness.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Last year, there were 10,000 hotel rooms and 2,300 Airbnb properties on offer in Helsinki, where municipal leaders plan to begin work on new regulations in the spring.

• China introduced a strict new cybersecurity law last year that requires foreign and local tech firms to store Chinese data locally and offer technical support to authorities who wish to access it.

• The home-sharing company plans to share guest information, including passports and booking dates, directly with the government. This week, it sent an email to hosts declaring it may disclose their information at any time — those with concerns were given a link to deactivate their listing.

• It’s mostly forgotten now, but for a time, expanding the reach of social networks—making Facebook, Twitter, and others like it as large as possible—was an avowed foreign-policy goal of the United States. That is, at least, what the secretary of state said in the early days of this decade, in a speech at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

• “New technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does,” Hillary Clinton said. “We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it.”

• Facebook began logging the text messages and phone calls of its users before it explicitly notified them of its practice, contradicting the company’s earlier claims that “uploading this information has always been opt-in only”.

• [...]

• Nowhere in the opt-in dialogue was it made clear that text histories would be uploaded to Facebook’s servers and stored indefinitely.

• A day after William Strampel, the former dean of the osteopathic medical school at Michigan State University and the ex-boss of disgraced sexual abuser Larry Nassar, was charged with criminal sexual conduct and willful neglect of duty, the Lansing State Journal reported that MSU spent in excess of $500,000 keeping tabs on the social media activities of Nassar’s victims and many of the journalists reporting on the case in January.

• MSU hired the New York-based public relations firm Weber Shandwick to do more 1,440 hours of work. “The firm billed for work done by 18 different employees, whose hourly rates ranged from $200 to $600 per hour. Five of those employees billed MSU for more than $50,000, including one who billed for $96,900 and another who billed for $120,893,” according to the article.

• One of the largest stories of the past year has been the Larry Nassar story. Nassar, the now disgraced atheltic trainer for multiple entities, including USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University, has been accused by scores of women for sexual abuse and misconduct under the guise of his medical profession. Recently, Nassar’s boss at Michigan State, William Strimpel, who was the university’s dean of the osteopathic medical school, was himself charged with criminal sexual misconduct. Whatever is going on at Michigan State, it hasn’t been good for some time.

• One would imagine that in the wake of the allegations and, in the case of Nassar, conviction, the school would be getting its collective shit together. Instead, MSU has taken on the project of obfuscating what occurred under the school’s watch and, reportedly, paying half-a-million dollars to have an outside firm monitor the social media accounts of Nassar’s accusers and the journalists that have been and are covering the story.

• One of EFF’s strengths is that we bring together technologists, lawyers, activists, and policy wonks. And we’ve been around long enough to know that while good technology is necessary for success, it is rarely sufficient. Good policy and people who will adhere to it are also crucial. People write and maintain code, people run the servers that messaging platforms depend on, and people interface with governments and respond to pressure from them.

• We could never get on board with a tool—even one that made solid technical choices—unless it were developed and had its infrastructure maintained by a trustworthy group with a history of responsible stewardship of the tool. Trusting the underlying technology isn’t enough; we have to be able to trust the people and organizations behind it. Even open source tools that function in a distributed manner, rather than using a central server, have to be backed up by trustworthy developers who address technical problems in a timely manner. Beyond Implementation: Policy Considerations for Secure Messengers

• The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court says it’s fine if the government uses mandated emergency services to perform real-time GPS tracking. It doesn’t go so far as to affirm the constitutionality of the actions, but it achieves the same ends by voting down the appellant’s request for a rehearing.

• What we can glean about the issue at stake comes from the eight-page dissent [PDF] written by judges James L. Dennis and James E. Graves, two of the seven judges who voted for a rehearing. In this case, the government used the defendant’s cellphone provider to engage in real-time tracking. No warrant was obtained despite the government’s shoulder-surfing of incoming GPS location data.

• Facebook don’t want you to know how their algorithm works. That will hardly be a shock to you or anyone else, but it is a serious problem. The algorithm is what Facebook uses to determine what you, or anyone else around the world, will see.

• What it chooses to promote or bury has become increasingly important to our democracy. But Facebook don’t want you to know how it works.

• Facebook Tracking Exposed (FTE) is a browser extension which intends to find out – it lets users compare their timeline posts against the potential chronological content, helping them to understand why some posts have been promoted, and other haven’t. It also allows comparative research, pooling data to help researchers try and reverse engineer the algorithm itself.

• A federal judge dismissed a long-stalled class-action lawsuit against the National Security Agency on Wednesday, writing that a suggestion he was influenced by the “deep state” was no substitute for “well-pleaded” legal arguments.

• U.S. District Judge Richard Leon wrote that conservative legal activist Larry Klayman had not offered a sufficient legal basis for keeping the case active against the NSA’s bulk collection of domestic call records.

• “Instead, Klayman accused this Court of being ‘coopted by the so called ‘Deep State’’ into ruling against him. Unfortunately for plaintiffs, such baseless accusations are no substitute for a well-pleaded complaint,” Leon wrote.

• The U.S. Naval Academy won the National Security Agency‘s recent Cyber Exercise, or NCX, an event where cadets contended with a variety of cyber operations challenges.

• Cadets from all five U.S. military service academies took part in the three-day exercise that challenged participants in the areas of adversary coordinates tracking, space mission kit protection and U.S. infrastructure defense, NSA said Wednesday.

• Given different people’s and community’s security needs, it’s hard to arrive at a consensus of what a “secure” messenger must provide. In this post, we discuss various options for developers to consider when working towards the goal of improving a messenger’s security. A messenger that’s perfectly secure for every single person is unlikely to exist, but there are still steps that developers can take to work towards that goal.

• Messengers in the real world reflect a series of compromises by their creators. Technologists often think of those compromises in terms of what encryption algorithms or protocols are chosen. But the choices that undermine security in practice often lie far away from the encryption engine.

• [...]

• Pushing reliable security updates is of prime importance to security. But automatically accepting new versions of applications means that users might inadvertently download a backdoored update onto this device. Using reproducible builds and binary transparency, users can at least ensure that the same update gets pushed to every user, so that targeted attacks become infeasible. Then, there’s a better chance that the backdooring will get noticed.

• When a messenger allows group messaging, advanced security properties like future secrecy are lost. New protocols aim to fix these holes and give group messaging the security properties that users deserve.

• In the secure messaging community, there’s no consensus on what the best combination of features is, and there may never be. So while there will never be one perfectly secure messenger to rule them all, technical questions and conversations like the ones described above can move us towards better messengers providing more types of security.

• The General Data Protection Regulation is a rule passed by the European Union in 2016, setting new rules for how companies manage and share personal data. In theory, the GDPR only applies to EU citizens’ data, but the global nature of the internet means that nearly every online service is affected, and the regulation has already resulted in significant changes for US users as companies scramble to adapt.

• [...]

• Most importantly, the GDPR gives companies a hard deadline: the new rules go into effect on May 25th, 2018 — so if you’re not following the rules by then, you’re in trouble. The result has been a mad dash to adapt current practices to the new rules and avoid one of those crushing fines.

• Some 60 companies including such leading brands as Subway, Sprint and the NFL are joining forces to help each other follow you around online.

• Adobe, a company better known for Photoshop and PDF files, says the new Device Co-op initiative it is organizing will help companies offer more personalized experiences and make ads less annoying by filtering out products and services you have already bought or will never buy. Under the initiative, Adobe can tell you’re the same person on a home PC, a work laptop, a phone and a tablet by analyzing past sign-ins with member companies.

• Slack has just updated its Terms of Service to let your manager read your private conversations in private channels. Our analog parents would have been shocked and horrified at the very idea that their bosses would open packages and read personal messages that were addressed to them. For our digital children, it’s another shrugworthy part of everyday life.

• Facebook, which is reeling from a scandal over its handling of personal data, on Sunday acknowledged that it had been logging some users’ call and text history but said it had done so only when users of the Android operating system had opted in.

• The company has listed 12 policy-related job openings based in Washington DC as it faces increased scrutiny over its privacy policies after it was reported that Cambridge Analytica had obtained data from up to 50 million Facebook users.

• There’s a lesson here. Software code is not law. It bends to fit local laws. So if we want to stop companies like Facebook from amassing huge profiles on us and selling them to advertisers, the solution is not to delete your account. It is to demand real action from government.

• Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer or its chief product officer Chris Cox will make the trip to Blighty in Zuck’s stead, and will likely offer a little bit more insight around the storm in a teacup that’s brewing around data privacy.

• Now Intellifusion, the Chinese artificial intelligence company behind these devices, is taking them a step further by partnering with mobile carriers and social media platforms such as WeChat and Sina Weibo to send text messages directly to offenders as soon as they are caught jaywalking by the cameras.

• First-tier Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai have already employed AI and facial recognition technology to regulate traffic and identify driver’s who violate road rules, while Shenzhen traffic police began displaying photos of jaywalkers on large LED screens at major intersections starting in April 2017. In other law enforcement applications, police at the Zhengzhou East high speed rail station in Henan province have been equipped with smart glasses with facial recognition software that can identify wanted criminals, while Beijing police are using the world’s first surround-body camera with inbuilt facial recognition technology.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Terms of the settlement were not given. The law firm representing them said Herzberg’s daughter and husband, whose names were not disclosed, will have no further comment on the matter as they consider it resolved.

• Police arrested Stéphane Poussier at his home in Dives-sur-Mer, northwest France, on Sunday after he sent two tweets welcoming the death of Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame.

• [...]

• He could face up to seven years in prison and a fine of 100,000 euros.

• The DOJ alleges that Terry Albury, a Minneapolis-based agent, shared a document on FBI informants with an unnamed reporter for a national media organization. In addition, Albury allegedly leaked a document “relating to threats posed by certain individuals from a particular Middle Eastern country.”

• Albury is accused of sharing a document on assessing confidential human sources — otherwise referred to as informants — and a document “relating to threats posed by certain individuals from a particular Middle Eastern country” with a reporter for a national media organization.

• Less familiar, but just as important, is how AI will transform the workplace. Using AI, managers can gain extraordinary control over their employees. Amazon has patented a wristband that tracks the hand movements of warehouse workers and uses vibrations to nudge them into being more efficient. Workday, a software firm, crunches around 60 factors to predict which employees will leave. Humanyze, a startup, sells smart ID badges that can track employees around the office and reveal how well [sic] they interact with colleagues.

• Facebook Vice President Andrew “Boz” Bosworth is known for being blunt and direct at Facebook’s meetings. His Twitter description calls him “co-inventor of News Feed, Messenger, Groups, and more.” In early 2016, he circulated an internal memo that has been obtained and published by BuzzFeed News. The nature of the memo is explosive and it tries to justify all possible means used for Facebook growth.

• The memo is titled “The Ugly,” and it has remained inside the walls of Facebook prior to this leak. The memo states that the aim of Facebook is to connect people. Hence, all the work done in this process is justified. The existence of this memo becomes even more in the light of ongoing Facebook CA Scandal.

• How is your privacy self-intervention going on? Are you among the ones who support the idea of deleting your Facebook account but ended up on this article through Facebook? I don’t think that anybody really cares if a company is accused of putting user privacy at risk. Because if people did, such companies would have been wiped out of existence.

• Facebook’s latest CA fiasco has pushed the company to its limits. After losing tons of cash, all they are doing now is making big changes to their platform. The company has also said goodbye to their third-party data brokers which provided off-Facebook information about users for more optimized ad targeting.

• “I’ve always thought our ‘open but punitive’ stance was particularly vulnerable to suicide bombers.”

• [...]

• The publication of a June 2016 memo describing the consequences of Facebook’s growth-at-all-costs triggered an emotional conversation at the company today. An internal post reacting to the memo found employees angry and heartbroken that their teammates were sharing internal company discussions with the media. Many called on the company to step up its war on leakers and hire employees with more “integrity.”

• On Thursday evening, BuzzFeed published a memo from Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, a vice president at Facebook who currently leads its hardware efforts. In the memo, Bosworth says that the company’s core function is to connect people, despite consequences that he repeatedly called “ugly.” “That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices,” he wrote. “All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.”

• Listeners know the US government has a shameful history of surveilling and intimidating people engaged in First Amendment-protected acts of public protest or public criticism. Black activists have for decades been victims of campaigns to demonize, harass and discredit them and their movements.

• So when racial justice groups—using the Freedom of Information Act to find out how the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are monitoring protests around police violence and the Movement for Black Lives—turn up a document referred to as the “Race Paper,” which, on receipt, turns out to be completely redacted, with not even the official title visible, it makes for a handy emblem…but just an emblem of a problem that’s far deeper and more worrying.

• Remember that Muslim mass murderer who belonged to an Islamic home-madrassa called INTIFADA, where knife-wielding Shari’a survivalists studied the Qur’an, guns and dangerous chemicals? And how the liberal media fawningly portrayed him as a misunderstood and under-loved young man otherwise full of promise?

• You don’t, because that never happened. But have you heard about of the Christian Texas child-killer from an all-white sect who slaughtered the president of a homeowners’ association and a 17-year-old aspiring neurosurgeon, both on their own doorsteps and in front of their families? Both victims were African-Americans. This same murderer was a suicide bomber who blew himself up before police could arrest him and take him for a hamburger (as they did with Dylann Roof, the young white man who killed nine African-Americans at their church).

• Had killer Mark Anthony Conditt been a brown Muslim, it’s hard to imagine corporate media not at least speculating that hateful ideology was a motive, and using (or at least debating the use of) the term “terrorism” to describe his crimes. But because Conditt was a white, conservative, homophobic Christian, corporate media and police alike have been—ahem—generous in their eulogies. Austin Police Chief Brian Manley even helpfully explained that Conditt never used the word “terrorism” in his 25-minute final recording, which was “the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his own life.”

• On March 27, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry announced that his office would not bring criminal charges against the two police officers who shot and killed Alton Sterling as he lay pinned by them to the ground in front of a convenience store in Baton Rouge.

• Attorney General Landry’s decision is two contradictory things: It is shocking, and it is unsurprising. The decision sends a clear message about policing in America today, and highlights the continuing crisis of accountability when it comes to unlawful use of excessive and deadly force by police.

• In Sacramento, California, hundreds of mourners gathered Thursday for the funeral of Stephon Clark, an unarmed African-American man who was shot by police officers 20 times in his grandmother’s backyard. Among those eulogizing Clark was the Reverend Al Sharpton.

• American exceptionalism – the notion that the United States is unique among nations due to its traditions of democracy and liberty – has always been the foundation of the nation’s claim to moral leadership. As a country founded on ideals that are today are recognized the world over as fundamental principles of international norms, the U.S. utilizes its image as a human rights champion to rally nations to its cause and assert its hegemony around the world.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Since the FCC rushed to give telecom monopolies a sloppy kiss with its net neutrality repeal late last year, more than half the states in the country are now pursuing their own net neutrality rules. Some states (most recently Washington and Oregon) have already passed legislation that effectively takes the FCC rules and encodes them on the State level (in some cases with a few improvements). Other states have signed executive orders that prohibit states from doing business with or subsidizing ISPs that engage in anti-competitive behavior.

• With the FCC’s repeal on shaky legal ground and states now passing even tougher net neutrality rules, ISP lobbyists have truly begun reaping what they’ve sown. And it’s becoming increasingly clear they’re both annoyed and nervous as the true scale of their poor judgement comes into view.

• After the Federal Communications Commission killed federal net neutrality protections last fall, local legislators across the country have stated their support for a free and open internet. But while sending letters to congress and the FCC opposing the changes is well and good, the ACLU argues in a new report published Thursday that creating municipally-owned ISPs is the best way to preserve net neutrality.

• Though cord cutters still only make up 11 percent of US households, the number of steaming-only households increased from just over 5 million in 2013 to 14.1 million in 2017 according to the report. Of these households, the majority have at least two different streaming services, with 32 percent having three or more services.

• Cord cutting isn’t a fad. Millions of people really are changing their habits, and it’s having a profound impact.

• As entertainment streaming has officially become “a thing”, one leading to massive change in the entertainment landscape, many eyes still turn towards the professional sports leagues. That’s because live professional sports is now one of the last big bulwarks against cord-cutting. With that in mind, it’s interesting to watch the major sports leagues experiment in streaming, a process that began roughly five years ago in earnest. While Major League Baseball has long led the way, the other leagues are catching up. The NBA in 2014 negotiated a new broadcast deal with Disney and TNT, one in which the league insisted that streaming options be significantly expanded. In fact, 14% or more NBA games are now nationally televised on those networks, with streaming options that do not require cable.

DRM

Intellectual Monopolies

• The Regeneron patents particularly relate to a method for genetically modifying the antibody variable regions of a mouse cell by replacement of the mouse antibody variable genes with the equivalent human genes. The resulting mouse cells contain a human antibody light chain (VJ) or heavy chain (VDJ) variable region that undergoes natural homologous recombination during B-cell development. The method involves cloning a large (>20 kb) genomic fragment, containing one or more human V, J, (and optionally D) regions, into a targeting vector (LTVEC), introducing this vector into a mouse cell and screening for successful insertion of the human V, D and/or J, using a modification of allele (MOA) assay. The specification includes an example (Example 3) describing in situ replacement of the mouse variable region (VDJ/VJ) genes with their human counterparts.

• The VelocImmune mouse has proved exceedingly commercially valuable to Regeneron over the past few decades. Regeneron has brought a number of therapeutic antibodies to market using the platform and have many others currently undergoing clinical trial. In 2007, Regeneron agreed a six-year US$120 million non-exclusive licence with AstraZenca for use of the technology, under which Regeneron receives royalties on the sale of any products produced using the platform. Astellas Pharma, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Japan, has also agreed a non-exclusive license for use of the VelocImmune technology until 2023.

• This week saw the headline-grabbing multi-billion dollar sell-off by Novartis of its consumer healthcare business. Reflecting the Swiss entity’s desire to focus resources on strengthening its position in higher-priority therapeutic spaces, the deal provides funds that are likely to be used for acquisitions of biotech companies with promising drug pipelines in Novartis’ “core” business areas. And, with many large pharmaceuticals innovators sharing Novartis’ strategy of increased specialisation, there may emerge a broader pattern of “non-core” divestments followed by patent-heavy transactions in the coming years. Novartis sold its 37% share in consumer health concern, JV, for $13 billion.

• Last week, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) held its first public patent auction, which saw a selection of 932 patents go under the gavel. The rights were listed online roughly two weeks prior to the 21st March sale. In the event, the most viewed 36 patents on the website were put up at the live auction in Shandong, of which 28 were sold for 5.03 million RMB ($794,600). The minimum starting bid for each patent was 100,000 RMB ($15,700). The patents cover a variety of fields, including new materials, intelligent manufacturing, advanced biomedical technology, new energy and ecological environmental technology.

• Asian entities have seven of the 10 biggest active US patent portfolios, according to research exclusively compiled for IAM by IP data and analytics platform ktMINE. Korean company Samsung sits at the top of the tree, with 75,595 active assets as of 1st January 2018 – close to 30,000 more than IBM, which had 46,443. Rounding off the top five are Canon, Microsoft and Intel. Between them these five businesses owned over 225,000 active patents on the first day of this year.

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• To get the results, ktMINE technology aggregated each granted patent and application to its corresponding corporate tree in order to create the most up-to-date and complete portfolio. Each entity was designated by the location of its corporate headquarters for supplementary analysis.

• Ocean Tomo and Sinofaith IP Group, co-creators of the Ocean Tomo Bid-Ask™ Market (OTBA), announced today the closing of Lot 64, entitled Document Processing System, to an undisclosed buyer. This lot is comprised of four issued U.S. patents, four non-provisional patent applications and software code.

• Tech giant Intel is seeking to patent a hardware “accelerator” for bitcoin mining chips, a newly-published filing reveals.

• The application for a “Bitcoin Mining Hardware Accelerator With Optimized Message Digest and Message Scheduler Datapath” was published on Thursday, though it was originally submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in September 2016. In the filing, Intel outlines a method by which it could augment the existing bitcoin mining process, consuming less electricity – thereby spending less money – in the process.

• The number of patents related to the Internet of Thing is on an upward swing.

• There are more than 8,500 patent applications mentioning Internet of Things use cases so far, according to an analysis of U.S. patent applications conducted by VDC Research Group.

• Samsung was granted the most patents last year (133) while Intel came in second place (109) and Cisco in third (91). A majority of the IoT patents granted in 2017 were for communications and/or networking technologies.

• Approximately 35% of Qualcomm patents cite Nokia assets, research commissioned by IAM has uncovered. In a deep-dive into the Finnish company’s portfolio, published exclusively for subscribers yesterday, other information revealed by the team of leading IP and technology analysis platforms we asked to do the research included the fact that Nokia’s patents have consistently ranked in the top 10% of grants worldwide in terms of quality, and that Nokia has been on a filing, selling and licensing spree since 2012.

Copyrights

• In its newly released “Industrial Strategy” plan the UK government remains committed to protecting copyright holders. In addition to funding copyright education efforts, it will help to broker voluntary anti-piracy agreements between online services and copyright holders. If these efforts have produced no results by the end of the year, laws may be strengthened.

• Popular media player Roku has surprised users by removing the entire USTVnow service from its platform. Speaking with TorrentFreak, a company spokesperson confirmed that the takedown was in response to an infringement complaint. However, the complaint didn’t come from USTVnow but a “third party” content owner.

• As the article explains, revenues came mostly from payments by readers of the company’s online offerings, which cater for a wide range of tastes — from comics to romance. In total, works are supplied by 6.9 million writers, most of whom are contracted to produce original material for the company. The scale of the operation is similarly large: last year around 11.1 million people paid to use China Literature’s services, up from 8.3 million in 2016.

• Although those are all impressive figures, it’s worth noting one of the key factors driving this business. Tencent is the company behind the WeChat messaging app. Last year, there were 963 million users, so it’s likely that more a billion people now use WeChat’s powerful and wide-ranging platform. That naturally makes selling China Literature’s services much easier.

• As much conversation as gets logged on the topic of copyright infringement, or piracy, you may not have noticed that there are not that many arguments against piracy. Certainly there’s a volume of voices, particularly those coming from the entertainment industry, but those voices are typically making only one of two claims. The first claim is that piracy is morally wrong. This claim typically devolves into something along the lines of “but piracy is theft”, and relies on the intuitive notion that downloading, say, a song hurts the creator of that song by depriving them of income. If there was no income deprivation, there would be no moral wrong. The second claim skips the first part of that equation and simply asserts that piracy harms the entertainment or content industries, depriving them of the income they need in order to create more content. You will notice that, ultimately, there is actually only one argument against piracy: its effect on the income of the content producers.

• Whilst the 2016 Copyright Directive proposal might have lost some momentum since its introduction, the appetite for the modernisation of copyright law is still in the cards in other parts of the world – not the least Down Under.

• Google has banned the term “Kodi” from the autocomplete feature of its search engine. This means that the popular software and related suggestions won’t appear unless users type out the full term. Google has previously taken similar measures against “pirate” related terms and confirms that Kodi is targeted because it’s “closely associated with copyright infringement.”

• Last May, Members of the European Parliament voted to grant EU citizens the right to enjoy legally purchased music and movie subscriptions when they travel to another EU country. It’s hoped the new system will dampen frustrations and reduce Internet piracy. The rules comes into force this Sunday and here’s how they’ll affect you.

• Voss suggests to make the law even harsher than the Commission had proposed, picking up ideas from the failed version of this law already in place in Spain:

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• He thus revealed this project for what it is: An abuse of copyright law to take a side in a big-business battle over who controls our attention online, with blatant disregard for the collateral damage caused to our fundamental rights, independent media and European startups.

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