● 04.19.18

● Links 19/4/2018: Mesa 17.3.9 and 18.0.1, Trisquel 8.0 LTS Flidas, Elections for openSUSE Board

Posted in News Roundup at 9:56 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Clearly, Linux is everywhere. In this article, we not even touched on “fun” everyday uses such as smart TVs, Roku sticks, Nest thermostats, Kindle e-readers, and all the rest.

• And even though we’ve only listed eight unusual uses, the wide variety of the examples will hopefully give you an appreciation for how widespread the operating system is.

• First, keep the great ideas coming—we all want to continue making Linux Journal 2.0 something special, and we need this community to do it.

Desktop

• Every now and then, for one reason or another, I am sat in front of a Linux-powered computer with the graphical user interface disabled, instead using an old-school text-only mode.

• After years of using Thinkpads, I went for a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu. Although I had bought devices with Linux pre-installed and laptops for friends as well, this was going to be my first own laptop coming with Ubuntu straight from the factory.

• Most of us are doing a lot on the web anyway. There’s not much difference between a web-application running on a server somewhere or a desktop application running on a server in the building. Thin clients just won’t die as much as haters wish.

Server

• Google unveiled an open source tool that targets container security issues tied to the granting of privileged access to a Docker-based container. Docker containers are by default not granted privileged access to root content, though that does limit their agility.

• Analysts have noted that the privileged and root access issues remain a sticking point for securing container deployments.

Kernel Space

• As the 4.17 merge window opened, it seemed possible that the kernel lockdown patch set could be merged at last. That was before the linux-kernel mailing list got its hands on the issue. What resulted was not one of the kernel community’s finest moments. But it did result in a couple of evident conclusions: kernel lockdown will almost certainly not be merged for 4.17, but something that looks very much like it is highly likely to be accepted in a subsequent merge window.

• As a reminder: the purpose of the lockdown patches is to enforce a distinction between running as root and the ability to run code in kernel mode. Proponents of UEFI secure boot maintain that this separation is necessary; otherwise the promise of secure boot (that the system will only run trusted code in kernel mode) cannot be kept. Closing off the paths by which a privileged attacker could run arbitrary code in kernel mode requires disabling a number of features in the kernel; see the above-linked article for the details. Most users will never miss the disabled features, but there are always exceptions.

• [...]

• One other aspect of this issue that came up briefly is the fear that, if Linux looks like a tool that can be used to compromise secure-boot systems running Windows, that Microsoft might blacklist the signing key and render Linux unbootable on most x86 hardware. David Howells expressed this worry, for example. Greg Kroah-Hartman said, though, that he has researched this claim numerous times and it has turned out to be an “urban myth”.

• The Linux network stack does not lack for features; it also performs well enough for most uses. At the highest network speeds, though, any overhead at all is too much; that has driven the most demanding users toward specialized, user-space networking implementations that can outperform the kernel for highly constrained tasks. The express data path (XDP) development effort is an attempt to win those users back, with some apparent success so far. With the posting of the AF_XDP patch set by Björn Töpel, another piece of the XDP puzzle is coming into focus.

• As of this writing, 5,392 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 4.17 release. The 4.17 merge window is thus off to a good start, but it is far from complete. The changes pulled thus far cover a wide part of the core kernel as well as the networking, driver, and filesystem subsystems.

• A “simple” utility to make a system beep is hardly the first place one would check for security flaws, but the strange case of the “Holey Beep” should perhaps lead to some rethinking. A Debian advisory for the beep utility, which was followed by another for Debian LTS, led to a seemingly satirical site publicizing the bug (and giving it the “Holey Beep” name). But that site also exploits a new flaw in the GNU patch program—and the increased scrutiny on beep has led to more problems being found.

Linux Foundation

• By 2020, 50 billion devices will be online. That projection was made by researchers at Cisco, and it was a key point in Amber Case’s Embedded Linux Conference keynote address, titled “Calm Technology: Design for the Next 50 Years” which is nowavailable for replay.

• On Tuesday, we created Xen 4.11 RC1 and will release a new release candidate every FRIDAY, until we declare a release candidate as the final candidate and cut the Xen 4.11 release. We will also hold a Test Day every TUESDAY for the release candidate that was released the week prior to the Test Day starting from RC1. Note that RC’s are announced on the following mailing lists: xen-announce, xen-devel and xen-users. This means we will have Test Days on April 24th, May 1st, 8th, 15th and 22nd. Your testing is still valuable on other days, so please feel free to send Test Reports as outlined below at any time.

• The first release candidate of the upcoming Xen 4.11 virtualization hypervisor release is now available.

• The Xen Project has put out Xen 4.11 as their first of several release candidates while also announcing weekly “test days” through the remainder of April and the month of May.

• 18F’s use of Cloud Foundry encourages progress within other countries’ digital transformation offices, as the team shares technological advancements with fellow government workers around the globe to provide the best possible experience for citizens worldwide.

• The Eclipse and Linux foundations are offering new projects for developers working on Internet of Things (IoT) projects.

• Eclipse is introducing Mita, a language for embedded IoT. Linux has announced an open source reference hypervisor project designed for IoT device development.

Graphics Stack

• Following last week’s release of Wayland 1.15 / Weston 4.0, the development gates are once again open for new feature activity to land for Wayland and the reference Weston compositor. Weston has alrea

• For those still using the Mesa 3D release that debuted in Q4’2017, the Mesa 17.3.9 point release is now available while it’s the last planned update for the series.

• Mesa 17.3.9 has about two dozen fixes affecting the Intel drivers, RADV / RadeonSI, GLSL / SPIR-V / NIR, and other minor fixes/improvements. The list of Mesa 17.3.9 fixes can be found via this morning’s release announcement.

• AMD’s Huang Rui has posted a set of 20 patches providing “GFXOFF” support for the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager Linux kernel driver.

• GFXOFF is a new graphics processor feature that allows for powering off the graphics engine when it would otherwise be idle with no graphics workload. Obviously, this would equate to a potentially significant power savings with that engine being able to be shut-off.

• Earlier this month with the Vulkan 1.1.72 specification update was the new VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing extension that is quickly being well received by developers.

• The VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing extension allows for creating large descriptor sets made up of all their combined resources and selecting those resources via dynamic indexes in a shader.

• One of the most common Linux hardware questions I’ve received dozens of times in the past few weeks alone has been over the support for “RX Vega M” Vega-based graphics processors found on select newer Intel Kabylake CPUs. It appears RadeonSI at least should now support these Radeon graphics on Intel CPUs.

• In addition to Mesa 17.3.9 being released today, Mesa 18.0.1 also rolled out the door as the first point release to last quarter’s Mesa 18.0 series.

• Mesa 18.0.1 features improvements to its Meson build system support, several RADV Vulkan driver fixes, various fixes to the Gallium3D Nine (D3D9) state tracker, various Intel driver fixes, several core Mesa improvements, and then the other random smothering of fixes collected over the past few weeks.

Benchmarks

• With the RADV Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver continuing to be advanced by Valve and other independent developers while AMD continues with open-source code drops of their official AMDVLK Vulkan driver, it’s been a friendly open-source Radeon Vulkan driver performance and feature/extension battle since that official AMD Vulkan driver was opened up at the end of last year. With new AMDVLK/XGL/PAL code drops happening about weekly and RADV continuing to receive new feature/performance work every few days, both drivers continue maturing gracefully as shown by our latest performance benchmarks.

• With the recent release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 one of the prominent changes is HAMMER2 now being considered stable for most use-cases. I’ve been running some benchmarks of this file-system compared to alternatives on other operating systems and have some FreeBSD / Linux reference points to share.

• Complementing my earlier HAMMER vs. HAMMER2 benchmarks, I ran a set of I/O tests on TrueOS and FreeBSD 11.1 as well as Ubuntu and Clear Linux. All tests were done using the same Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake system with 256GB Toshiba RD400 NVMe SSD, same default CPU clock frequencies, etc.

• Besides the fresh BSD/Linux disk performance tests, some other tests I ran on various BSDs and Linux distributions this week was looking at the performance impact of Intel Meltdown CPU vulnerability mitigation on each of them, namely the performance impact of using kernel page-table isolation.

• On DragonFlyBSD 5.2, TrueOS 18.03, Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, and Clear Linux I ran tests when the mitigation was enabled and then again when it was off for seeing the performance impact.

Applications

• Some people code HTML/CSS oldskool in software like Atom, Notepadqq, or even nano/vi, but others enjoy using what’s called a WYSIWYG editor, which stands for What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get.

• KompoZer, is a free cross-platform WYSIWYG editor worth looking at despite the fact that it has not been updated for a very long time. Note though that KompoZer lacks support for features like HTML5 or CSS3 that were introduced after the last version of the HTML editor was released.

• As is the case with a lot, but not all, of software in GNU/Linux systems that people use, KompoZer is technically multi-platform, but I would say that the GNU/Linux and MacOS user share dominate the Windows one, from my experience.

• Calamares is a distribution-independent (Linux) system installer. Outside of the “big five” distro’s, many smaller “boutique” distro’s need an installer, and Calamares is a highly configurable one that they can use. There’s a few dozen distro’s that I know of that use it (although I’ve only actually installed maybe six of them).

• Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 166.

Instructionals/Technical

• Back in 1996 I learned how to install software on my spanking new Linux before really understanding the topography of the filesystem. This turned out to be a problem, not so much for programs, because they would just magically work even though I hadn’t a clue of where the actual executable files landed. The problem was the documentation.

• You see, back then, Linux was not the intuitive, user-friendly system it is today. You had to read a lot. You had to know things about the frequency rate of your CRT monitor and the ins and outs of your noisy dial-up modem, among hundreds of other things. I soon realized I would need to spend some time getting a handle on how the directories were organized and what all their exotic names like etc/ (not a for miscellaneous files), usr/ (not for user files), and bin/ (not a trash can) meant.

• This tutorial will help you get up to speed faster than I did.

Games

• Croteam is finally starting to give out some basic details on their next game, now called Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass.

• [...]

• Given their history with Linux support, I’ve no doubt it will be on Linux and it will likely be using their newer Fusion engine with Vulkan support.

• Croteam today released a trailer for their upcoming game Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass.

• This Serious Sam 4 title will be formally introduced this June at the E3 gaming conference, but for now is the trailer and announcement that more details will be announced soon.

• Feeling brave? Point and click horror game Without Escape might test that a little and it’s heading to Linux.

• Without Escape is inspired by first-person adventure games like Myst which used pre-rendered backgrounds and full-motion video, only Without Escape is going down with the horror theme with an “oppressive atmosphere”.

• With the ‘Rise of the Tomb Raider’ Linux release date set for April 19, Feral Interactive has finally shared more details on the sort of system needed to run it.

• The moment many have been waiting for, Feral Interactive have just announced that Rise of the Tomb Raider for Linux will release tomorrow, April 19th. As a reminder, this title will be using Vulkan.

• After announcing earlier that it will launch the Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration action-adventure game on the Linux platform, Feral Interactive now revealed the official system requirements for playing the video game on your Linux PC.

• Feral Interactive will officially launch the Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration video game for the Linux platform tomorrow, April 19, 2018, so the UK-based video games publisher just revealed a few moments ago on Twitter the official system requirements for playing the game on your Linux gaming rigs.

• UK-based video games publisher Feral Interactive announced on Wednesday that it plans to launch the Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration action-adventure video game on the Linux platform on April 19, 2018.

• Feral Interactive already released their macOS port of Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration on April 12, 2018, and it promised to launch the Linux port too in the coming weeks. Well, the wait is now almost over and Linux gamers will be able to play the famous video game on their favorite GNU/Linux distributions on April 19.

• Feral Interactive has just announced they will be launching Rise of the Tomb Raider for Linux tomorrow, 19 April.

• Feral has tweeted that this Vulkan-powered Linux game port will be released on Thursday.

• System requirements have yet to be revealed, but of course we’ll certainly be interested in seeing what they recommend and will certainly be delivering many Radeon/NVIDIA Linux gaming benchmarks of this game on launch day.

• I’m pretty excited for Monster Crown, the new monster taming game with inspirations taken from Pokemon and other monster capturing related games. The Kickstarter has done very well and there’s now a Linux demo for backers.

• I recently came across the side-scrolling action game Heckpoint [Official Site, Steam] and I fell a little in love, the good news is that it’s coming to Linux. What’s interesting about it, is that quite literally everything you see can be destroyed. It’s like an even more insane version of Broforce and that makes me happy.

• I haven’t actually been following it closely, something I aim to fix as it seems like a game I would enjoy. The developer has been testing Linux early-on in the development of it too, with them sharing a shot of it running on Linux back in 2016. They’ve recently put up a new gameplay teaser and they re-confirmed to me that Linux will indeed be a same-day release—heck, their Tweet even has a “#linuxgames” tag in it.

• Those waiting for the awesome new Linux port of RUINER from GOG will be happy, as it just landed with a discount too. If you pick it up now you can get 50% off.

• Just be aware the current Linux build available on GOG is not their usual installer, but instead a rather large (14GB) tar.gz file. I understand that their normal installer package is coming as well.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• With the rise of streaming services bringing easy access to media, owning your own music and movies is at a seemingly all-time low. In my case, it wasn’t until recently that I started recollecting local music files again once I started caring more about the quality of music that I was listening to.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.29.1 is the first development snapshot of the forthcoming GNOME 3.30 desktop environment, which is dubbed “Almeria” after the host city of the GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) 2018 event later this year, and it brings a few updated core components and apps, but without any significant changes.

• “There are actually not very many changes to GNOME modules themselves, because not many maintainers provided updated tarballs, but there are new versions for a few applications and libraries,” said Michael Catanzaro on behalf of the GNOME Release Team. “Notably, GNOME Shell was not updated in this release, which is a bit sad.”

Distributions

Gentoo Family

• In portage-2.3.30, portage’s python API provides an asyncio event loop policy via a DefaultEventLoopPolicy class.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• The release of openSUSE Leap 15 is scheduled to be release during the first day of this year’s openSUSE Conference in Prague, Czech Republic on May 25.

• The package submission deadline for non-bug fix package updates is April 24 as Leap enters the release candidate phase. The scheduled release for Leap 15 is May 25 at 12:00 UTC.

• Leap has been using a rolling development model for building Leap 15 beta versions. Bug fixes and new packages have been released via snapshots to users testing the beta versions. The snapshots for the test version will stop and maintenance and security updates for Leap 15’s release will begin next month. Linux professionals and anyone looking to use Leap 15 are encouraged to test the beta versions as there is still snapshots being released and announced on the openSUSE Factory Mailing List. A list of items to test is available here.

• openSUSE Leap 15 is scheduled for release May 25, 2018. Leap 15 “shares a common core with SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15 sources and has thousands of community packages on top to meet the needs of professional and semi-professional users and their workloads.”

• The ballots for Elections to fill the three seats on the openSUSE Board are open until April 27.

Slackware Family

• Hi folks, and welcome to the third ever Slackware Mass Rebuild (and the longest ChangeLog entry in project history). There were two primary motivations for rebuilding everything in the main tree. The first was to switch to the new C++ ABI. The second was to get rid of all the .la files in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Really, having .la files installed has been mostly obsolete since things began to use pkg-config instead, …

Red Hat Family

• Oracle Enterprise Linux 7 Update 5 is now available for download for the x86_64 (64-bit) hardware architecture and brings with it Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) Release 4 kernel (kernel-uek-4.1.12-112.16.4.el7uek) and a Red Hat Enterprise Linux compatible kernel (kernel-3.10.0-862.el7). Oracle noted that fact that Oracle Enterprise Linux 7.5 remains compatible with apps that have already been certified for the Oracle Linux 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

• “Oracle Linux maintains user space compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which is independent of the kernel version that underlies the operating system. Existing applications in user space will continue to run unmodified on Oracle Linux 7 Update 5 with the UEK Release 4 and no re-certifications are needed for applications already certified with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 or Oracle Linux 7,” said Avi Miller, Product Management Director, Oracle Linux.

• Tuesday was a very busy release day for Oracle folks as in addition to shipping an updated Solaris 11.4 beta and Oracle Linux 7 Update 5, their compiler folks also announced the GraalVM 1.0 virtual machine release.

• GraalVM is the latest virtual machine project out of Oracle and aims to be a “universal VM for a polyglot world” and one that can “run programs faster anywhere.”

• The next online DevNation Live Tech Talk is Thursday, April 19th at 12pm EDT. The topic is “Enterprise Node.js on Red Hat OpenShift” presented by Lance Ball, and hosted by Burr Sutter. The popularity of JavaScript on the front end and the JSON format for data has led to a “JavaScript Everywhere” movement with Node.js at the center. Node.js offers developers an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that is perfect for high concurrency, low-latency applications that run across distributed devices. Its reactive architecture makes it an ideal technology for containerized microservices architectures you’ve been hearing so much about.

• ITWC President Fawn Annan gets to the point with Red Hat’s general manager for Canada. Villeneuve speaks about building the open source technology firm in the country, the unique differences when dealing with the Quebec market, and how he fosters a positive culture in the workplace. Plus, he dishes on how his experience in journey hockey taught him how to build a successful sales team.

• Open source software has long been seen as a movement towards collaborative development. In a conversation with BusinessLine, Chris Wright, Vice-President & CTO at RedHat, talks about some of the challenges the open source community is facing and why it is important to set expectations right when it comes to promoting open source software. Edited excerpts:

Finance

Fedora

• Long time we did not had any meetup at Pune, Maharashtra, India, so we decided to get started again. Details about this meetup are available at Fedora Wiki page.

• Planning for meetup started 1 month before. Initially Ompragash proposed to have meetup.com account for Fedora Pune to get more awareness. Later dropped this plan, since this is not only Fedora Pune level topic but applicable for all Fedora events.

• Used DNF to remove duplicate rpms, reinstalled the new kernel and libwbclient, and corrected GNOME’s right-click behaviour, and all is well.

Debian Family

• I have been extremely proud to have served as the Debian Project Leader since my election in early 2017. During this time I’ve learned a great deal about the inner workings of the Project as well as about myself. I have grown as a person thanks to all manner of new interactions and fresh experiences.

• I believe is a privilege simply to be a Debian Developer, let alone to be selected as their representative. It was therefore an even greater honour to learn that I have been re-elected by the community for another year. I profoundly and wholeheartedly thank everyone for placing their trust in me for another term.

Derivatives

• Elive’s latest beta, 2.9.90, was released a couple of weeks ago. According to the description, this is the last beta before the official release of version 3.0.

• I have been waiting for Elive for quite a long time. My first contact with it was through a live CD of version 2.0 Topaz in 2010, when I had recently migrated to Linux. I was truly impressed by the beauty and polish of the distro. I never installed it, though. I was put off by the fact that it was the only distro that could not be installed unless one paid for an installing module. Back then, I assumed that free software had to be “gratis”.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The latest GNOME 3.28 desktop environment release contained a major memory leak in the GNOME Shell user interface component, but it was quickly addressed so that it won’t affect users considering the fact that most Linux OSes distribute the latest GNOME desktop packages once the first point release is available, in this case GNOME 3.28.1.

• As Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) is shipping with the latest GNOME 3.28 desktop environment by default, it was apparent that it will include all the upstream patches released by the GNOME Project to address any memory leaks. Canonical already successfully tested the new patches, but it needs to get wider testing and feedback as soon as possible before the final release on April 26.

• Every year the Eclipse Foundation along with other sponsors conduct an online survey of the IoT market looking at what technologies are being used and how. The 2018 edition of that survey has just been made available and I thought it would be a great idea to look at some of the overarching trends.

• [...]

• The IoT OS of choice is Linux

• According to the 2018 respondents, the overwhelming choice for their IoT operating system (OS) is Linux with a commanding 71%, the top 3 choices being Raspbian, Ubuntu, or Debian. Interestingly all of these systems are closely related with Raspbian and Ubuntu both being somewhat based on Debian. What may be more interesting is that all 3 of these distributions can run Snaps, the next-generation packaging format designed from the ground up with security, robustness, and upgradeability in mind – all key aspects for anyone looking to create or use IoT devices.

• The official Ubuntu 18.04 LTS ‘Bionic Beaver’ t-shirt has been added to Caonical’s online shop. The dark grey shirt carries the bionic beaver mascot in orange.

• My name is Mads Rosendahl (MadsRH) and I’m from Denmark. My dayjob has two sides, half the time I work as a teacher at a school of music and the other half I work in PR (no, not pull requests ) where I do things like brochures, ads, website graphics, etc.

• I’m no saint – I use OSX, Windows and Linux.

• I got involved with Ubuntu back when everything was brown – around 7.10. When I read about Ubuntu, Linux and how Mark Shuttleworth fits into the story, a fire was lit inside me and I wanted to give something back to this brilliant project. In the beginning I set out to make peoples desktops brown and pretty by posting wallpaper suggestions to the artwork mailing list.

• Because I can’t write any code, I mostly piggyback on awesome people in the community, like when I worked on the very first slideshow in Ubiquity installer with Dylan McCall.

• I attended UDS in Dallas back in 2009 (an amazing experience!) and have had to take a long break from contributing. This theme work is my first contribution since then.

• Ubuntu Bionic 18.04 now has 1.14.0 in the repositories, and very likely will have 1.14.0 for the lifecycle of 18.04 from April of 2018 through April of 2023, as soon as it is released.

Flavours and Variants

• Four years after the debut of Trisquel 7.0 and a year and a half since the 8.0 Alpha, Trisquel 8.0.0 is now available for this Linux distribution that’s endorsed by the Free Software Foundation.

• Along with gNewSense, PureOS, and a few others, Trisquel is among the few Linux distributions approved by the Free Software Foundation for meeting their free software requirements. Trisquel 8.0 continues this trend in being “100%” committed to free software.

• Just as we release Trisquel 8.0, the development of the next version begins! Following the naming suggestions thread I’ve picked Etiona, which sounds good and has the fewest search results.

• We currently do our development in a rented dedicated server in France, and although it is functional it has many performance and setup issues. It has 32 gigs of RAM, which may sound like plenty but stays below the sweet spot where you can create big enough ramdisks to compile large packages without having to ever write to disk during the build process, greatly improving performance. It also has only 8 cores and rather slow disks. The good news is that the FSF has generously decided to host a much larger dedicated build server for us, which will allow us to scale up operations. The new machine will have fast replicated disks, lots of RAM and two 12 core CPUs.

• Along with renewing the hardware, we need to revamp the software build infrastructure. Currently the development server runs a GitLab instance, Jenkins and pbuilder-based build jails. This combination was a big improvement from the custom made scripts of early releases, but it has some downsides that have been removed by sbuild. Sbuild is lighter and faster and has better crash recovery and reporting.

• Trisquel 8.0, codename “Flidas” is finally here! This release will be supported with security updates until April 2021. The first thing to acknowledge is that this arrival has been severely delayed, to the point where the next upstream release (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS) will soon be published. The good news is that the development of Trisquel 9.0 will start right away, and it should come out closer to the usual release schedule of “6 months after upstream release”.

• But this is not to say that we shouldn’t be excited about Trisquel 8.0, quite the contrary! It comes with many improvements over Trisquel 7.0, and its core components (kernel, graphics drivers, web browser and e-mail client) are fully up to date and will receive continuous upgrades during Flidas’ lifetime. Trisquel 8.0 has benefited from extensive testing, as many people have been using the development versions as their main operating system for some time. On top of that, the Free Software Foundation has been using it to run the Libreplanet conference since last year, and it has been powering all of its new server infrastructure as well!

Devices/Embedded

• The resulting system is flexible and has the potential to integrate all household devices. This design is also capable of seamless integration into any home environment due to its open source software and modular design. However, there are still many areas of this solution that need to be evaluated, such as security, more connectivity options to made this solution more scalable, power management for the CE module, stability, and an adaptive user interface.

• We’ve sifted through the options to find the best Raspberry Pi kits on the market. Our top picks include something for everyone, whether you want to build a simple secondary PC or dive right into advanced maker-style projects.

• IEI’s Linux-ready “IBX-660” is a rugged, storage-oriented embedded computer with a Bay Trail Atom, 4x removable SATA bays, 2x GbE ports, 4x USB, HDMI, mini-PCIe, and -40 to 50°C support.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Attacks against neural networks have recently been flagged as one of the biggest dangers in our modern world where AI systems are increasingly getting embedded in many technologies we use and depend on daily.

• Adversaries can sometimes tamper with them even if they don’t know much about them, and “breaking” the system could result in very dangerous consequences.

• [...]

• The library is written in Python, as it is the most commonly used programming language for developing, testing and deploying Deep Neural Networks.

• On Tuesday at the RSA conference in San Francisco, IBM announced the launch of the Adversarial Robustness Toolbox to support developers and users of AI that may become the victims of attacks against AI systems including Deep Neural Networks (DNNs).

• According to the tech giant, threat actors may be able to exploit weaknesses in AI systems through very subtle means. Simple, small, and often undetectable alterations in content including images, video, and audio recordings can be crafted to confuse AI systems, even without a deep knowledge of the AI or DNN a cyberattack is targeting.

• IBM is releasing an open-source software library to combat against adversarial attacks in deep neural networks (DNNs). DNNs are machine learning models that are capable of recognizing patterns.

• First unveiled at SpringOne Platform in December, riff is still an early project. It emerged from the Spring Cloud Data Flow, a data integration project to run Java code as microservices created under Pivotal’s open source Java-focused Spring framework.

• “Riff is the next step in that evolution,” says Jürgen Leschner, a riff organiser who works at Pivotal. Instead of running microservices that persist in containers, serverless models hide the containers from the developers and operations teams entirely. Instead, when a developer calls a software function, the container orchestration system (in riff’s case, Kubernetes) spins one up and then kills it off silently.

• [...]

• The benefits of open source serverless

• What do these open source serverless options bring to the party? Unless you’re using them to slurp services on the AWS platform and minimise container fees by weeding out idle compute power, why bother?

• Efficiency for developers is one driver, says Leschner. “Developers don’t have to worry about building the connectors and boilerplate stuff into their code. They can package a simpler project and the boilerplate is already in the platform.”

• The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was approved by the EU Parliament on April 14, 2016, and will be enforced beginning May 25, 2018. The GDPR replaces the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC which was designed “to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe, to protect and empower all EU citizens data privacy and to reshape the way organizations across the region approach data privacy.”

• The aim of the GDPR is to protect the personal data of individuals in the EU in an increasingly data-driven world.

• Managing an open source project is challenging work, and the challenges grow as a project grows. Eventually, a project may need to meet different requirements and span multiple repositories. These problems aren’t technical, but they are important to solve to scale a technical project. Business process management methodologies such as agile and kanban bring a method to the madness. Developers and managers can make realistic decisions for estimating deadlines and team bandwidth with an organized development focus.

• Car manufacturers, like most companies, navigate a narrow lane between the benefits of using free and open-source software and the perceived or real importance of hiding their trade secrets. Many are using free software in some of the myriad software components that make up a modern car, and even work in consortia to develop free software. At the recent LibrePlanet conference, free-software advocate Jeremiah Foster covered progress in the automotive sector and made an impassioned case for more free software in their embedded systems. Foster has worked in automotive free software for many years and has played a leading role in the GENIVI Alliance, which is dedicated to incorporating free software into in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems. He is currently the community manager for the GENIVI Alliance.

• First, Foster talked about the importance of software in modern vehicles. He pointed out that software increasingly becomes the differentiator used to market cars. Horsepower no longer sells these vehicles, Foster says—features do. He claims that some companies even sell the car at cost (the old “razor/blades” or “printer/ink” business model) and make their money on aftermarket apps and features. Companies are finding it effective to get hardware from other manufacturers while improving the user experience through their software. Some of these features contribute to safety (such as alerts that help you drive within the lane or parallel park), and some may be critical, such dashboard icons that warn the driver of electrical system problems or low brake fluid.

• We asked Lumina Networks’ CEO Andrew Coward, how companies can make best use of open source. “Open source is not a spectator sport,” says Andrew. “Sitting around and waiting for somebody to show up and deliver the equivalent of your existing vendor’s offering is not the right approach. So we work best when our customers are very engaged. And really, it’s all about how you automate things.”

• Riot is a free and open source decentralized instant messaging application that can be considered an alternative to Slack. We take a look at features of Riot, installation procedure and usage.

• It’s surprising that many Linux users and open source projects use a proprietary messaging service like Slack. Even we at It’s FOSS use Slack for our internal communication which I don’t like. This is why I came up with the proposal of using an open source alternative to Slack, called Riot.

• For the past few months, I’ve been contributing to a new group messaging app called Fractal. Its aim is to be so good that we can maybe, eventually, finally replace IRC as the primary communication channel for GNOME development.

Events

• This is a report of the first day of the Rust loves GNOME Hackfest that we are having in Madrid at the moment. During the first day we had a round of introductions and starting outlining the state of the art.

• I’m in Madrid since Monday, at the third GNOME+Rust hackfest! The OpenShine folks are kindly letting us use their offices, on the seventh floor of a building by the Cuatro Caminos roundabout.

• I am very, very thankful that this time everyone seems to be working on developing gnome-class. It’s a difficult project for me, and more brainpower is definitely welcome — all the indirection, type conversion, GObject obscurity, and procedural macro shenanigans definitely take a toll on oneself.

• I use to joke that the last week before foss-north is the worst – everything is done, all that is left is the stress.

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship conference will be taking place in Copenhagen from May 2-4. It will cover Kubernetes, Prometheus OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, and other key technologies in cloud native computing.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google has rolled out Chrome 66 to its stable channel for Linux desktop users as well as other supported desktop/mobile operating systems.

• People searching for a Google Chrome ad blocking extension have to choose from dozens of similarly named extensions. Only few of these are legitimate, most are forks of open source ad blockers trying to attract users with misleading extension names and descriptions. What are these up to? Thanks to Andrey Meshkov we now know what many people already suspected: these extensions are malicious. He found obfuscated code hidden carefully within a manipulated jQuery library that accepted commands from a remote server.

• Video that plays without audio, or that a user has tapped or clicked on, will still play. On mobile, autoplaying videos will be allowed on sites that have been added as a bookmark to the home screen, while desktop sites that a user frequently actively watches video on will be allowed to autoplay videos with sound as ranked by the firm’s new Media Engagement Index (MEI).

Mozilla

• Just when you think you’ve got a handle on this web stuff, things change. The latest mixup? Apps vs Web Apps. An app should be an app no matter what, but there is a difference between the two. Let’s find out what it is.

• Please meet our newest Friend of Add-ons, Viswaprasanth Ks! Viswa began contributing to Mozilla in January 2013, when he met regional community members while participating in a Firefox OS hackathon in Bangalore, India. Since then, he has been a member of the Firefox Student Ambassador Board, a Sr. Firefox OS app reviewer, and a Mozilla Rep and Tech Speaker.

• In early 2017, Viswa began developing extensions for Firefox using the WebExtensions API. From the start, Viswa wanted to invite his community to learn this framework and create extensions with him. At community events, he would speak about extension development and help participants build their first extensions. These presentations served as a starting point for creating the Activate campaign “Build Your Own Extension.” Viswa quickly became a leader in developing the campaign and testing iterations with a variety of different audiences. In late 2017, he collaborated with community members Santosh Viswanatham and Trishul Goel to re-launch the campaign with a new event flow and more learning resources for new developers.

• This is the second video in our four part series around creators, virtual reality, and the open web. As we laid out in the opening post of this series, virtual reality is more than a technology, and it is far more than mere eye-candy. VR is an immensely powerful tool that is honed and developed every day. In the hands of a creator, that tool has the potential to transport audiences into new worlds and provide new perspectives.

• As Lin Clark emphasizes in her article about Rust and WebAssembly: the goal of WebAssembly is not to replace JavaScript, but to be an awesome tool to use with JavaScript. Lots of amazing work has been done to simplify crossing the language boundary between JavaScript and WebAssembly, and you can read all about that in Alex Crichton’s post on wasm-bindgen. This post focuses on a different type of JavaScript/Rust integration: package ecosystem and developer workflows.

• These updates are going to shift format slightly. I’m going to start by highlighting the status of some of the projects the Firefox Performance Team (the front-end team working to make Firefox snappy AF), and then go into the grab-bag list of improvements that we’ve seen landing in the tree.

• cargo src is a new tool for exploring your Rust code. It is a cargo plugin which runs locally and lets you navigate your project in a web browser. It has syntax highlighting, jump to definition, type on hover, semantic search, find uses, find impls, and more.

• As the Firefox data engineering teams we provide core tools for using data to other teams. This spans from collection through Firefox Telemetry, storage & processing in our Data Platform to making data available in Data Tools.

• [...]

• Most centrally, the Telemetry portal is now the main entry point to our tools, documentation and other resources. When working with Firefox data you will find all the important tools linked from there.

• The web should be open to everyone, a place for unbridled innovation, education, and creative expression. That’s why Firefox fights for Net Neutrality, promotes online privacy rights, and supports open-source tech around the globe. We strive to make the online community a better place. We also know people everywhere work tirelessly to improve their own communities. In this series, we’re profiling businesses that work to make the world better—and use Firefox to support a healthy, open, and safe internet.

• After spending some quality time comparing the actual experience of using Chrome, Safari, and Firefox across a variety of websites, I’m confident in saying browser benchmarks are profoundly uninformative. The truth is that performance differences are not substantial enough to be noticed. If anything, you’re most likely to clash with “only works in Chrome” incompatibilities, but that’s kind of the whole reason for me to avoid Chrome: someone has to keep using the alternatives so as to give them a reason to exist.

BSD

• The usage of LLVM as part of the graphics driver stack continues to be picked up now especially in the Vulkan/SPIR-V world.

• With the new NVIDIA 396 driver series there is their new “NVVM” compiler stack for SPIR-V, the IR used by Vulkan and OpenCL and now can be consumed by OpenGL 4.6 too.

• I’ve been using OpenBSD on servers for years as a web developer, but never had a chance to dive in to system administration before. If you appreciate the simplicity of OpenBSD and you have to give it a try on your desktop.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• You’re talking about very — about specific manifestations, and in some cases in ways that presuppose a weak solution.

• What is data privacy? The term implies that if a company collects data about you, it should somehow protect that data. But I don’t think that’s the issue. I think the problem is that it collects data about you period. We shouldn’t let them do that.

• I won’t let them collect data about me. I refuse to use the ones that would know who I am. There are unfortunately some areas where I can’t avoid that. I can’t avoid even for a domestic flight giving the information of who I am. That’s wrong. You shouldn’t have to identify yourself if you’re not crossing a border and having your passport checked.

• With prescriptions, pharmacies sell the information about who gets what sort of prescription. There are companies that find this out about people. But they don’t get much of a chance to show me ads because I don’t use any sites in a way that lets them know who I am and show ads accordingly.

• So I think the problem is fundamental. Companies are collecting data about people. We shouldn’t let them do that. The data that is collected will be abused. That’s not an absolute certainty, but it’s a practical, extreme likelihood, which is enough to make collection a problem.

• A database about people can be misused in four ways. First, the organization that collects the data can misuse the data. Second, rogue employees can misuse the data. Third, unrelated parties can steal the data and misuse it. That happens frequently, too. And fourth, the state can collect the data and do really horrible things with it, like put people in prison camps. Which is what happened famously in World War II in the United States. And the data can also enable, as it did in World War II, Nazis to find Jews to kill.

• In China, for example, any data can be misused horribly. But in the U.S. also, you’re looking at a CIA torturer being nominated to head the CIA, and we can’t assume that she will be rejected. So when you put this together with the state spying that Snowden told us about, and with the Patriot Act that allows the FBI to take almost any database of personal data without even talking to a court. And what you see is, for companies to have data about you is dangerous.

• And I’m not interested in discussing the privacy policies that these companies have. First of all, privacy policies are written so that they appear to promise you some sort of respect for privacy, while in fact having such loopholes that the company can do anything at all. But second, the privacy policy of the company doesn’t do anything to stop the FBI from taking all that data every week. Anytime anybody starts collecting some data, if the FBI thinks it’s interesting, it will grab that data.

• And we also know that the FBI and other such agencies are inclined to label protesters as terrorists. So that way they can use laws that were ostensibly adopted to protect us from terrorists to threaten a much larger number of us than any terrorist could.

Public Services/Government

• The German federal government is moving to an open source, self-hosted cloud platform from Nextcloud for file sync and sharing and collaboration, in order to protect the data of its citizens.

• The Federal Information Technology Center (ITZBund), which takes care of IT services for the entire federal government, has been running a pilot of 5000 users with Nextcloud since October 2016 and after a successful tender this will now be rolled out everywhere.

• Nextcloud has revealed its new three-year contract which will consist of supplying the German federal government with its private, on-premises cloud platform.

• The German federal government has chosen local private cloud and open-source file-sync operator Nextcloud as its collaboration and file-sharing platform for 300,000 government users.

• Nextcloud arrived on Germany’s tech scene in 2016 after Frank Karlitschek, co-founder of the open source infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud program OwnCloud, forked the software to create a more open-source model.

• It’s not hidden that apart from costing tons of money, the use of proprietary software also brings along hidden security caveats. These are the two primary reasons why the usage of open source software is being pushed in public agencies all around the world, especially in European countries.

• Just yesterday, we told you about German government’s decision to go ahead with an open source solution for creating its private cloud. The government announced a partnership with Nextcloud, which is a popular open source solutions provider.

• In another encouraging development for the open source enthusiasts, the Israeli government has decided to open source its software code. As a result, the released code will be available to public and free to reuse.

Programming/Development

• Hi there. I’m Bill “LtRandolph” Clark, and I’m the engineering manager for the Champions team on LoL. I’ve worked on several different teams on League over the past years, but one focus has been consistent: I’m obsessed with tech debt. I want to find it, I want to understand it, and where possible, I want to fix it.

• When engineers talk about any existing piece of technology – for example League of Legends patch 8.4 – we often talk about tech debt. I define tech debt as code or data that future developers will pay a cost for. Countless blog posts, articles, and definitions have been written about this scourge of software development. This post will focus on types of tech debt I’ve seen during my time working at Riot, and a model for discussing it that we’re starting to use internally. If you only take away one lesson from this article, I hope you remember the “contagion” metric discussed below.

• Once upon a time, one of us (Lacey) had spent more than an hour staring at the table in the Python docs that describes date and time formatting strings. I was having a hard time understanding one specific piece of the puzzle as I was trying to write the code to translate a datetime string from an API into a Python datetime object, so I asked for help.

• Intel tonight announced they are open-sourcing their nGraph compiler code, which serves as a framework-neutral deep neural network model compiler.

• Intel claims with nGraph and Xeon Scalable hardware that researchers can obtain up to 10x performance improvements over previous TensorFlow integrations, as one example. Besides TensorFlow, nGraph also supports PyTorch, MXNet, Neon, Caffe2, and CNTK while also planning to support other frameworks moving forward.

• An iOS developer has apparently received a cease and desist notice from Oracle over the use of the word “JavaScript” in the title of their app. The developer, Tyanya Software, shared the notice on perennial internet soapbox Reddit to seek advice on how to fight the order.

• [...]

• If user reviews are any indication, the app is not even particularly good, with reviewers stating things such as “Not ready for production,” “Does not work as advertised,” and “Waste of money, don’t buy this.” The last update to the app was in 2014, which the changelog notes was only an upgrade to add support for iOS 8. The app developer is at least honest about the intent behind the unwieldy name for the app, saying in a Reddit comment that “we game the App Store ranking by adding all the keywords to the app name.”

• While Oracle has a duty to protect their trademarks, this type of legal bludgeoning underscores a historical problem that has been left unaddressed for too long: JavaScript is a terrible name for the thing being described.

• It has nothing to do with Java, an actual product developed by Sun (now owned by Oracle). JavaScript was developed at Mozilla, and the name was changed during beta releases of Netscape Navigator 2.0 from “LiveScript” to “JavaScript.” It has, for some time, caused confusion among casual web users about the difference between Java and JavaScript. Given that ECMAScript is also a trademarked term, it seems best to revert to calling the language “LiveScript” to undercut trademark-related legal posturing.

• [...]

• Oracle declined to comment on this story.

• The new PyPI has been launched. Browser traffic and API calls (including “pip install”) have been redirected from the old pypi.python.org to the new site. The old PyPI will shut down on April 30. LWN covered the new PyPI last week.

• The release of pip 10.0 has been announced. Some highlights of this release include the removal of Python 2.6 support, limited PEP 518 support (with more to come), a new “pip config” command, and other improvements.

• The Python Package Index (PyPI) is the principal repository of libraries for the Python programming language, serving more than 170 million downloads each week. Fifteen years after PyPI launched, a new edition is in beta at pypi.org, with features like better search, a refreshed layout, and Markdown README files (and with some old features removed, like viewing GPG package signatures). Starting April 16, users visiting the site or running pip install will be seamlessly redirected to the new site. Two weeks after that, the legacy site is expected to be shut down and the team will turn toward new features; in the meantime, it is worth a look at what the new PyPI brings to the table.

• I don’t know how many of our readers are research scientists, data analysts, etc. but today, we introduce an IDE that is ideal for Python development and it goes by the name of Spyder.

• Spyder is an Open Source IDE written in Python for Python development with a focus on research, data analysis, and scientific package creation. It boasts a well-planned User Interface with interactive options, customizable layouts, and toggle-able sections.

• Its features include a multi-language editor with automatic code completion, real-time code analysis, go-to definitions, etc. It also contains a history log, developer tools, a documentation viewer, a variable explorer, and an interactive console, among other perks.

Leftovers

Science

• “In a sense, it’s flattering that Hollywood is interested in CRISPR technology enough to make it the premise of a movie,” Liu says. It’s even more flattering for scientists who are fans of the people in those movies. “If The Rock is really interested in learning more about CRISPR, you can tell him to reach out to me,” Liu adds. “I’m happy to give him a CRISPR lecture.”

Hardware

• Facebook is following the footsteps of its fellow tech giants and planning to build its own chips. This move comes in the wake of recent efforts from Google, Apple, and Amazon reduce their reliance on Intel and Qualcomm.

• The postings didn’t make it clear what kind of use Facebook wants to put the chips to other than the broad umbrella of artificial intelligence. A job listing references “expertise to build custom solutions targeted at multiple verticals including AI/ML,” indicating that the chip work could focus on a processor for artificial intelligence tasks.

• To date, there has been little effort to build frameworks that ensure ethical usage of our internet activity for commercial purposes. However, new research from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) suggests that the guidelines used to manage human remains in archaeological exhibitions could be used as a framework to regulate the growing DAI industry, and make the commercial use of digital remains more ethical.

Health/Nutrition

• Pharma companies generally like to give the impression that their business is a win-win kind of thing: you get better, they get sales. But sometimes the mask slips, and the real strategy that lies behind the benevolent exterior is revealed. For example, back in 2014 we wrote about the CEO of Bayer, one of the biggest drug companies in the world, openly admitting it developed medicines for rich patients in the West that can pay high prices, not for those in places like India that need them just as much, but can’t afford them.

Security

• A survey of over 2,000 IT pros shows that fear of data breaches is increasing investments in DevSecOps tools, particularly automated security tools and oversight of open source software.

• Despite 22 recommendation created by the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England and NHS Improvement to help the NHS improve its cyber defences, the PAC noted it was “alarmed” that these measures had not yet been implemented.

• The four bipartisan legislative proposals aim to elevate the Department of Energy’s efforts on cyber response and engagement and to create new programs to address grid and pipeline security.

• A business email compromise (BEC) scam is a highly targeted attack designed to convince finance departments or C-suite executives to sign off on fraudulent invoices.

• Several manufacturers make these types keys, and they all basically work the same way. They adhere to an industry standard called Universal 2nd Factor, or U2F. The standard weds hardware-based authentication with public key cryptography—a set of tools that’s extremely difficult to compromise. These U2F keys simplify the process of securely accessing online services like Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Windows, and Mac OS. They also support password managers like Lastpass, Dashlane and Keepass. U2F keys can even be used to unlock your Mac or Windows PC from the home screen.

• Most alarming, the skins in question were on the official Minecraft site, meaning the unwary might have been duped into thinking they were somehow okayed by Microsoft or the developers.

• Around 50,000 players were infected, and in some cases the malware wiped system drives and corrupted backups.

Defence/Aggression

• Iraq is ramping up prosecutions of thousands of people accused of supporting the Islamic State, handing death sentences to workers, wives and fighters.

• I was the Iraq bureau chief for Reuters when Namir, 22, and Saeed, 40, were shot dead by a U.S. Apache helicopter on the streets of Baghdad on July 12, 2007, along with 10 other people. The attack grabbed global attention when WikiLeaks released classified U.S. military footage of the incident in 2010. The video, titled “Collateral Murder,” was viewed millions of times.

• I had planned to be in Iraq for the 10th anniversary, to apologise to Namir and Saeed’s families. Instead, unable to cope as the day approached, I was admitted to the Psychological Trauma Recovery Services inpatient unit at Melbourne’s Austin Health. It was my second admission to the facility, known as Ward 17, in less than a year.

• Knack and Syrian Archive reveal today that Belgian companies have violated EU sanctions against Syria, according to the summons of an upcoming lawsuit.

• Based on information found through the UN Comtrade database, freedom of information requests, and confirmed by the Belgian Customs, we can reveal that a criminal case regarding exports of chemicals to Syria has been opened in Antwerp Criminal Court. This case is brought by the Belgian Customs against three Flemish companies, one managing director and one manager, according to court press judge Roland Cassiers citing the summons.

• Since EU sanctions from September 2013 made export licences compulsory for the export of isopropanol to Syria in concentrations of 95% or higher, Syrian Archive and Knack can report that Belgian companies exported 96 tonnes of isopropanol, a sarin precursor, to Syria between 2014 and 2016.

• Social media has emerged as a key battleground in the U.S. and Russian media campaign to promote their sharply divergent accounts of chemical weapons in Syria.

• The intelligence assessments presented over the weekend by the United States and France to justify missiles strikes against Syria for its alleged use of chemical weapons in a Damascus suburb relied to an unusual degree on information gleaned from open source material and social media. Russia, meanwhile, is mustering an army of internet trolls to shift blame for the chemical weapons attack.

• Magda Rubio had just launched her campaign for mayor of a small city in northern Mexico, when a chilling voice came through her cell phone. “Drop out,” the caller warned, “or be killed.”

• “It was 04:00 when the police came beating at my door. ‘Open up! Open up!’ they were shouting,” recalls Denizhan Eren, a 23-year-old college student.

• “As soon as I opened the door, they yelled ‘Lie down!’ They had huge guns and they were wearing balaclavas.”

• Denizhan is one of a number of students from Turkey’s prestigious Bogazici University who have been detained in Istanbul in recent weeks.

• In total 31 students have been detained. While 10 have been freed, eight have been released pending trial and another 13 students are still being held in pre-trial detention.

• In the spring of 2003 when the US and UK commenced their illegal invasion of Iraq, there was no Wikileaks, a free man called Julian Assange was someone no one had heard of, alt-media did not exist and nor did social media as it is understood today.

• In a short 15 years a lot has changed. Independent online media has become a global force and social media allows people to share information and opinions with an ease, scope and impact that was previously unthinkable. News channels like CGTV, RT, Press-TV and Telesur have changed both the online, cable and satellite tv landscape and perhaps most importantly, since 2006 Julian Assange’s Wikileaks has brought to light, information that was never intended to see the light of day – all of which has exposed the lies, manipulation and violence behind the governments taking the world to illegal war after illegal war.

• A survey by FAIR of the top 100 papers in the US by circulation found not a single editorial board opposed to Trump’s April 13 airstrikes on Syria. Twenty supported the strikes, while six were ambiguous as to whether or not the bombing was advisable. The remaining 74 issued no opinion about Trump’s latest escalation of the Syrian war.

• This is fairly consistent with editorial support for Trump’s April 2017 airstrikes against the Syrian government, which saw only one editorial out of 47 oppose the bombing (FAIR.org, 4/11/17). The single paper of dissent from last year, the Houston Chronicle, didn’t publish an editorial on last week’s bombing.

• Seven of the top 10 newspapers by circulation—USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Newsday and Washington Post—supported the airstrikes. The New York Daily News and San Jose Mercury News offered no opinion, while the New York Times (4/13/18) was ambiguous—mostly lamenting the lack of congressional approval, but not saying that this meant the strikes were illegal or unwise. “Legislation should…set limits on a president’s ability to wage war against states like Syria,” is the Times’ conclusion. A complete list of editorials on the airstrikes can be viewed here.

• Around the world, people are getting sicker, and more and more are dying from entirely preventable causes. We have the answers to why, we just don’t have the will to stop it. In the first of a two part series, Dr Lissa Johnson looks at the greatest cause of global illness and death.

• The Lancet recently published an article identifying the single most important action that health professionals can take to promote “health for all”. The article’s recommendations draw on the findings of the World Health Assembly (WHA), the decision-making body of the World Health Organisation (WHO), which has pinpointed the most pervasive cause of ill-health worldwide.

• However, scarcely a mainstream health professional in the Western world has heeded the advice of The Lancet or the WHA, which is curious. The Lancet is described by its publisher as the world’s leading independent medical journal. The paper’s author, David McCoy, is Professor of Global Public Health at Queen Mary University London, ranked as one of the top universities in the UK. The WHA is widely regarded as the highest health policy-setting body in the world.

• The 2019 budget request for U.S. Special Operations Command — $13.6 billion — is 10% higher than the 2018 level and is the largest budget request ever submitted by US SOCOM.

• U.S. special operations forces, which are currently deployed in 90 countries, have more than doubled in size from 33,000 personnel in 2001 to around 70,000 personnel in early 2018. Next year’s budget, if approved, would make them larger still.

• Well-placed FCO sources tell me it remains the case that senior civil servants in both the FCO and Home Office remain very sceptical of Russian guilt in the Skripal case. It remains the case that Porton Down scientists have identified the chemical as a “novichok-style” nerve agent but still cannot tie its production to Russia – there are many other possibilities. The effort to identify the actual perpetrator is making no headway, with the police having eliminated by alibi the Russian air passenger on the same flight as Julia Skripal identified as suspicious by MI5 purely on grounds of the brevity of their stay.

• The Trump administration delivered several dozen military strikes against Syria purportedly aimed at chemical production and storage facilities. It was an act the international community feared might lead to overt war in Syria between the US, Iran and Russia, but it came off a bit better: the strike seems to have been carefully calibrated, involved care to avoid casualties and seemed largely symbolic in nature. The strikes did not meaningfully change facts on the ground.

• What sense can we make out of all these strategic events in Syria? We encounter a baffling array of players: Syrian troops, Syrian insurgents, jihadis of varying ideologies, Iranians, Russians, Americans, Israelis, Turks, Saudis, Qataris, Emiratis, Shi’ite militias, Iraqis, Kurds, Hizballah—all locked in a deadly dance. But as complex as it may be, this seven-year bloody conflict still continues to pose the very same long-term fundamental questions to US policy in Syria and the region. These questions demand an answer.

• Genene Jones, a Texas nurse long suspected of more than a dozen child murders decades ago but convicted of only one, allegedly confessed. The newly uncovered evidence emerged in a hearing today in which Jones attempted to have five murder charges against her dismissed.

• It’s been four years since the hectic “Euromaidan” protest movement culminated in a coup that deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Though civil war grinds on in the eastern half of the country, Ukraine has wandered in and out of American news cycles since the dramatic change of government in Kiev.

• But a more recent development has implications that are rarely explored in American media, despite what it could mean for broader U.S. international relations. Ukraine is vying to take its place as NATO’s newest member state, a move that could seriously escalate tensions between Washington and Moscow beyond their current high point.

• “It’s safe to say that Russia would be, and has been, opposed to NATO membership for Ukraine,” James Carden, former advisor to the State Department’s U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, said in an email exchange.

• Neighboring states such as Ukraine and Georgia, Carden added, “are red lines for Russia and we should take them at their word.”

• The lessons from last weekend’s strike on Syria by the United States of America and two of its allies do not bode well for the future of democracy or the future of peace, says Inder Comar.

• [...]

• Checks and balances are swept away. And the strike now sets further precedent for unilateral executive authority to attack or invade another country based. It is one person, and one person alone, who commands American military might, without scrutiny or later accountability.

• Technically, North and South Korea are still at war, and have been for more than six decades—but an “absolutely earth-shaking” new report on Tuesday indicates the conflict may soon be coming to an end.

• Citing an anonymous South Korean diplomatic official, Munhwa Ilbo—a South Korean daily newspaper—reported that the neighboring countries are hashing out a statement that could officially bring the war to an end later this month, when North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in are set to meet in person for the first time.

• North and South Korea are in talks to announce a permanent end to the officially declared military conflict between the two countries, daily newspaper Munhwa Ilbo reported Tuesday, citing an unnamed South Korean official.

• Ahead of a summit next week between North Korean premier Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, lawmakers from the neighboring states were thought to be negotiating the details of a joint statement that could outline an end to the confrontation.

• Kim and Moon could also discuss returning the heavily fortified demilitarized zone separating them to its original state, the newspaper said.

• [...]

• Pyongyang and Seoul have technically been at war since the 1950-1953 Korean conflict ended with a truce — and not a peace treaty. Geopolitical tensions have occasionally flared up since the armistice, although to date both countries have managed to avoid another devastating conflict.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Today’s outage marks the first time since the island has suffered a total electrical failure since the Category 4 storm hit on September 20 – leaving many of Puerto Rico’s 40,000 electric customers without reliable power.

• How’d they get that way? As an invaluable article in IEEE Spectrum points out, tax incentives in the 1970s induced mainland US companies to build factories in the southern part of the island, so Prepa built generating facilities there. In 1996 the tax break expired and the factories left. So today, 70 percent of Puerto Rico’s population lives in the north, around San Juan, and 70 percent of the power generation is in the south. A fragile grid connects the two via tough, mountainous terrain. Scattered rural populations have always had a tenuous connection to that grid. Meanwhile Prepa, hamstrung by billions of dollars of debt, austerity measures, and possible corruption slacked off on maintenance. Hurricane Maria sliced Puerto Rico’s broken-down grid in half.

Finance

• “Prison breaks in Iceland usually mean someone just fled to get drunk,” he said. “The underworlds are tiny and it is extremely difficult to hide, let alone flee the country.”

• The sharing economy is booming, disrupting conventional ways of doing business, creating new jobs, and new headaches for policymakers. China is promoting the sharing economy as a national strategy, as explained during the annual United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) electronic commerce event this week, and illustrated by DiDi Chuxing, a leading Chinese mobile-based transportation platform.

• Memo, an on-chain social network developed on the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) blockchain, has launched in alpha testing this week. Developed on the Bitcoin BCH network, the application allows the recording and storage of data on the blockchain through its front-end protocol, tied to individual BCH addresses and keys.

• Using OP_RETURN transactions, users can tether specific information to their profile, in the makings of what could be one of the first social networks for BCH. According to the developer behind Memo, the application aims to create an ‘uncensorable’ way to store data and transactional information, contrary to the model used by online social networks.

• That’s not my Brexit…

• …the promised Free Trade Agreements are all too far away.

• That’s my Brexit!

• That one there.

• The one which cannot actually happen.

• Bitcoin has received an unexpected boost from Christine Lagarde, after the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) detailed the global benefits of cryptocurrency.

• Ms Lagarde wrote in a blogpost that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin could enable fast and inexpensive transactions, while the underlying blockchain technology could make financial markets safer.

• The price of the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency returned above $8,000 following the publication of Ms Lagarde’s comments, though it is unclear if the gains are directly attributable to the news.

• Every year at this time, US taxpayers (who bother to read news) are treated to a parade of stories about taxes and tax policy. We learn about the citizens who work multiple jobs and pay their taxes, while falling farther and farther behind in an economy that clearly exists to redistribute wealth upwards. We also learn about corporations, the real “welfare queens,” which have used the courts and legislatures to legally avoid paying their fair share of taxes, while demanding subsidies, tax breaks, and the dismantling of labor unions.

• Under the current administration, we are witnessing the deathblows to the economic and social policies of the New Deal, FDR’s plan to save capitalism after the Crash of 29, which created the greatest economic expansion in the world, and with it the largest expansion of civil rights in US history. Tax policy was a core element of this transformation. After a false start or two, the New Deal became wildly successful. Besides the implementation of Social Security through a payroll tax structure, he raised taxes on the highest brackets and decreased or eliminated them on the lowest. He also adopted new monetary policy; FDR moved the US to fiat currency and running deficits. It worked for a long time.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• In Cuba, the National Assembly is meeting today to elect a successor for President Raúl Castro, who has announced he’s stepping down this week. The Assembly is widely expected to choose the current vice president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, to be Cuba’s next leader. Raúl Castro is the younger brother of Fidel Castro, who led Cuba for decades following the 1959 revolution. The transition will mark the first time in more than six decades that Cuba will be led by someone outside the Castro family.

• New York City comic and ex-radio host Randy Credico says that longtime Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone sent him “scary,” obscenity-filled emails — including one threatening his dog — after he went public disputing Stone’s claim that Credico was his “backchannel” to WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign.

• In a new interview on the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery,” Credico shared with co-hosts Daniel Klaidman and Michael Isikoff email messages he said he had received from Stone in just the last few days.

• In a potentially major setback for President Trump, a federal judge has rejected efforts from the president to be given first access to documents seized by the FBI last week during raids on the properties of Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, who is being investigated for possible bank and wire fraud. Monday’s court hearing pitted the president against his own Justice Department. Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas McKay urged the judge to reject the president’s request. McKay said, “Just because he has a powerful client doesn’t mean he should get special treatment.” The FBI seized 10 boxes of documents and as many as a dozen electronic devices from Cohen. According to press accounts, the Trump administration now views the probe into Cohen as a more serious threat to the president than special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Meanwhile, on Monday, Cohen’s attorneys were forced to reveal Fox News host Sean Hannity was also one of Cohen’s other legal clients. Just last week, Hannity slammed the FBI for raiding Cohen’s office and home, but he never disclosed his ties to Cohen. We speak to Marcy Wheeler, independent journalist who covers national security and civil liberties. She runs the website EmptyWheel.net.

• In July 2017, a group of nine Chinese students and faculty from Huazhong University of Science and Technology participating in a summer program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) formed a Chinese Communist Party branch on the third floor of Hopkins Hall, a campus dormitory.

• [...]

• After the students’ arrival in Illinois, their home university asked the group to set up a temporary party branch and requested that the students hold a viewing party to watch the 19th party plenum in October, the major party planning conference held every five years. (The plenum was the subject of a major global propaganda push, with Chinese embassies and consulates reaching out to Chinese community organizations around the world, asking them to organize events for their members.)

• A significant proportion of Labour MPs are actively seeking to cause their own party to do badly in forthcoming local elections, with the aim of damaging the leader of that party. To that end they have attacked Jeremy Corbyn relentlessly in a six week crescendo, in parliament and in the entirely neo-liberal owned corporate media, over the Skripal case, over Syria, and over crazy allegations of anti-semitism, again and again and again.

• [...]

• That it is “undemocratic” for party members to select their candidates freely at each election, and it is “democratic” for MP’s to have the guaranteed candidacy for forty years irrespective of their behaviour, is a nonsensical argument, but one to which the neo-liberal media fiercely clings as axiomatic. Meanwhile in the SNP, all MPs have to put themselves forward to party members equally with other candidates for selection at every election. This seems perfectly normal. Indeed every serious democratic system elects people for a fixed term. Labour members do not elect their constituency chairman for life, so why should they elect their parliamentary candidate for life? Why do we keep having general elections rather than voters elect the MP for life?

Censorship/Free Speech

• Germany’s ridiculous hate speech law continues to wreak havoc in the stupidest ways possible. Giving social media companies 24 hours to remove poorly-defined “offensive” content has resulted in proactive removals targeting anything marginally questionable. Official complaints aren’t much better. Government demands for removal have been no less idiotic than proactive deletions by Facebook and Twitter.

• It’s a bad law. The only way bad laws can be followed is badly. Facebook is dealing with something new, thanks to its adherence to its own content policies. It’s an argument over deleted content, but the push/pull tension has been reversed.

• Consequently, when Roskomnadzor blocked 15.8 million Amazon- and Google-owned IPs it also knocked banking services and retail shopping platforms offline.

• That shows the lengths to which the government censors are willing to go to block access to the app, which has refused to cave to the demands of state intelligence officials even after a court approved a ban on the service.

• A massive wave of action to block messaging service Telegram resulted in widespread collateral damage yesterday after Russian authorities ordered millions of IP addresses blocked across the country. But the efforts have only lit a fire under Telegram founder Pavel Durov, who has pledged to donate millions of dollars in bitcoin to VPN providers as part of his “Digital Resistance”.

• Russian authorities are attempting to crush messaging platform Telegram. After refusing to hand over its encryption keys so that users can be spied on, last week a court ordered the service to be blocked. Yesterday broad action was taken, with ISPs blocking more than 1.8 million Telegram-utilized IP addresses belonging to Google and Amazon.

• Russia’s war on encryption and privacy has reached an entirely new level of ridiculous. We’ve noted for a while how Putin’s government has been escalating its war on encrypted services and VPNs in the misguided hope of keeping citizens from dodging government surveillance. But things escalated dramatically when the Russian government demanded that encrypted messaging app Telegram hand over its encryption keys to the FSB. After Telegram refused, a Russian court banned the app entirely last Friday, and the Russian government began trying to actually implement it this week.

• It’s not going particularly well.

• Telegram tried to mitigate the ban by moving some of its essential infrastructure to third-party cloud services. But Russian telecom regulator Roskomnadzor responded by blocking upwards of 16 million IP addresses, many belonging to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

• Diehard supporters of President Rodrigo Duterte or so-called DDS have raised their concerns about Facebook’s recent initiative to partner with fact-checkers and prohibit fake news (as verified by the fact-checkers) from being posted or shared on its social media platform. Some DDS bloggers and even some members of mainstream media have called the initiative censorship.

• But is it really?

• Censorship, according to Wikipedia, is the suppression of speech or information. The basis could be many things but usually it is for content that is found objectionable or harmful by the government or the community.

• App developers won’t be able to use Google to get around internet censorship anymore. The Google App Engine is discontinuing a practice called domain-fronting, which let services use Google’s network to get around state-level internet blocks.

• A recent change in Google’s network architecture means the trick no longer works. First spotted by Tor developers on April 13th, the change has been rolling out across Google services and threatens to disrupt services for a number of anti-censorship tools, including Signal, GreatFire.org and Psiphon’s VPN services.

• Prominent journalists, editors, columnists and media persons on Wednesday issued a joint-statement to express their concerns and condemn “the ongoing curbs on freedom of expression in Pakistan”.

• The statement was endorsed by prominent journalists and editors including Daily Times Editor Raza Rumi, Daily Times correspondent Marvi Sirmed, BBC Urdu Editor Haroon Rashid, columnist and TV anchor Hamid Mir, columnist Ibn Abdur Rehman, journalist Ahmed Noorani among several others.

• Over fifty working journalists, editors, columnists, media persons and media freedom organisation representatives on Wednesday expressed serious concern over the ongoing curbs on freedom of expression in the country.

• Condemning the ongoing censorship fiasco in a declaration, the journalists said that beginning with a crackdown against selected media groups and banning the broadcast of various channels, there was now an enhanced pressure on media houses to refrain from covering certain rights-based movements.

• New developments need new policies. We have some or the other kind of censorship in all media today, be it newspapers, television news, movies and even posters and billboards on the road. There is a valid and well thought out reason behind it. Most of the people believe what gets reported without putting any second thoughts on it. So it is possible that people’s reactions are directed in a certain way by the media and that is exactly the reason why censorship exists.

• Now look at social media. The reach of social media is more than any other form of media today. But, there is no censorship. Anybody is allowed to post anything whether it is true or false, good or bad. No controls exist, no questions are asked and there is zero accountability. Are we surprised then by what happened in the Cambridge Analytica case? The way people reacted to the Kathua and Asifa rape cases in India? Weren’t these bound to happen?

• If there’s one thing Republicans love more than pretending they’re being victimized by liberal elites, it’s raising money off this inaccurate claim — a tendency demonstrated clearly during recent congressional hearings on the activities of Facebook. During these hearings, Republican members of Congress elevated various overinflated right-wing grievances against social media companies (such as claims of anti-abortion censorship and anti-Christian bias) in order to pressure the platform into allowing greater promotion of inflammatory or inaccurate content. In particular, they seized on pro-Trump YouTubers Diamond and Silk, who have actively lied about Facebook censoring them and then used the attention to raise money. As close watchers of the anti-abortion movement know, this tactic of crying censorship to garner attention and raise funds is a favorite of anti-choice actors. Here are a few that have recently employed this practice:

• Last Monday, we launched our class action campaign against GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft). Until May 25th (the day complaints will be brought to the CNIL – the French Data Protection Authority), anyone living in France can join us on gafam.laquadrature.net. These first steps will, over the long term, pave the way to steadily counter the world they are trying to force on us.

• Michael Briguglio sought to belittle the Front Against Censorship by calling it a “front for censorship” in an article bearing the same title (April 16).

• For starters, Briguglio might not be aware that the Front Against Censorship resisted the Media and Defamation Bill when it was first introduced and that it was the Front which negotiated the substantial changes that turned this Bill into one of the most liberal statutes in Europe.

• Thanks to the Front’s efforts, criminal libel was removed, the proposed doubling of damages for civil libel was scrapped, garnishees are no longer possible and the final nail in the coffin of the artistic censorship regime was hammered with the removal of obscene libel.

• The Latvian National Electronic Mass Media Council (NEPLP) has been informed about this but does not see a reason to intervene in this situation.

• NEPLP spokesman Kalvis Gavars told LETA that Fox is a TV channel in Spain’s jurisdiction and its programs are rebroadcast in Latvia’s territory, which means that the translation issues have to be dealt with between the holder of the programs’ rights and the translators, while the quality of the translations is outside the National Electronic Mass Media Council’s area of competence.

• [...]

• Anda Rozukalne, a media expert and associate professor at Riga Stradins University, said that Russia uses any channels and tools, including translation, to distort information wherever it can.

• She admitted, however, that under the current regulation NEPLP is unable to reverse an intermediary’s requirements regarding the TV channel’s content.

• Chinese authorities have permanently shut down jokes and parody application Neihan Duanzhi. The operation is part of the Toutiao news aggregation group, that is backed by Bytedance Technology.

• Zhang Yiming, Toutiao’s CEO published a letter of apology. He said that he was “sincerely sorry for publishing a product that collided with core Socialist values.” The app had some 17 million users, and was alleged to have carried material that was vulgar or pornographic.

• The widening net of Chinese censors have put tech on notice. Jokes and gay content are disappearing from the web. It’s a fresh sign that Beijing is policing beyond political discourse. For the $26 billion microblog Weibo and peers, appeasing both users and regulators will get harder.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Almost three years ago, the global domain name authority ICANN chartered a working group to consider how to build a replacement for the WHOIS database, a publicly-accessible record of registered domain names. Because it includes the personal information of millions of domain name registrants with no built-in protections for their privacy, the legacy WHOIS system exposes registrants to the risk that their information will be misused by spammers, identity thieves, doxxers, and censors.

• But at the same time, the public availability of the information contained in the WHOIS database has become taken for granted, not only by its regular users, but by a secondary industry that repackages and sells access to its data, providing services like bulk searches and reverse lookups for clients as diverse as marketers, anti-abuse experts, trademark attorneys, and law enforcement authorities.

• The working group tasked with replacing this outdated system, formally known as the Next Generation gTLD RDS to Replace WHOIS PDP Working Group did not get far. Despite holding 90 minute weekly working meetings for more than two years, deep divisions within the group have resulted in glacial progress, even as the urgency of its work has increased. A key privacy advocate within that Working Group, EFF Pioneer Award winner Stephanie Perrin, ended up resigning from the group in frustration this March, saying “I believe this process is fundamentally flawed and does not reflect well on the multi-stakeholder model.”

• Thanks to a $94,000 grant from the National Security Agency’s (NSA) GenCyber program, the National Cyber Warrior Academy (NCWA) at the University of North Georgia (UNG) will again host area high school students whose career interests lie in cyber operations or security.

• The 87 million Facebook accounts harvested by Cambridge Analytica (CA) in a massive data breach were probably just the tip of the iceberg.

• That’s the written testimony CA’s former Business Development Director Brittany Kaiser gave to Britain’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (DCMSC) on Tuesday. She told British lawmakers, who are conducting an inquiry into fake news and the Facebook data scandal, that CA used numerous questionnaires to gather data.

• These quizzes, Kaiser said, were in addition to the now infamous Thisisyourdigitallife personality quiz CA conducted with University of Cambridge psychology professor Aleksandr Kogan’s firm Global Science Research to harvest information from 87 million Facebook accounts.

• While numerous concerns had been raised over the uninformed data collection of over 87 million Facebook users, the actual number of people affected may be far more.

• The CA data breach came to light when the company’s former director of research Christopher Wylie took charge and went into Edward Snowden-mode to break the news. It resulted in Facebook losing loads of money and its CEO testifying before the US Congress.

• The embattled political data firm Cambridge Analytica quietly sought to develop its own virtual currency in recent months through a so-called initial coin offering, a novel fund-raising method that has come under growing scrutiny by financial regulators around the world.

• The offering was part of a broader, but still very private push that the firm was making into the nascent world of cryptocurrencies over the last year.

• Much like its acquisition of Facebook data to build psychological profiles of voters, the new business line pushed the firm into murky ethical and legal situations. Documents and emails obtained by The New York Times show that Cambridge Analytica’s efforts to help promote another group’s digital token, the Dragon Coin, associated the firm with a famous gangster in Macau who has gone by the nickname Broken Tooth.

• A lot of bad things happening today on the web are tied to a single name: Cambridge Analytica. The firm–and Facebook–was first criticised for obtaining and using data of 87 million users to build psychological profiles for political campaigns.

• Just recently, the company’s former employee Brittany Kaiser, who’s the latest whistleblower in town, revealed that the Facebook data leak might be far more in numbers.

• If you want to know the reason I’m not on WhatsApp with its other 1.5 billion users, the answer is Telegram. To people unfamiliar with it, I like to describe Telegram as simply WhatsApp without any of the icky data sharing with Facebook. It has been my favorite, most reliable messaging client, and its platform-agnostic design means I can access my messages across iPhones, Android devices, and desktop browsers. I’m a big fan of Telegram, which is part of why its present ban in its native Russia troubles me.

• Telegram got its start, and its initial funding, under the premise of providing a messaging tool that was shielded from the inquisitive glare of Russian spy agencies. Its effectiveness in pursuing that original goal has been demonstrated this month with the ruling by a Russian court that Telegram should be banned in the country, owing to the app’s makers refusing to hand over encryption keys to the Russian government.

• Appearing for the Unique Identity Authority of India, senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi told a CJI-headed Constitution bench that a campaign had been unleashed that Aadhaar should’ve been like smart cards, a Europe-based commercial venture. “If Aadhaar succeeds, smart cards will be out of business. Google does not want it. Smart card lobby does not want Aadhaar to succeed. That’s why these allegations are being made,” he said.

• The Princeton team developed what it calls Oblivious DNS (ODNS), which protects user data not only by encrypting it, but also by separating what different nodes in the DNS chain are aware of, making it much harder, if not impossible, to snoop on users.

• And they’ve done it all without requiring a single change to the structure of DNS.

• In a blog post, Facebook’s product management director, David Baser, wrote that the company tracked users and non-users across websites and apps for three main reasons: [...]

• Facebook is about to start pushing European users to speed through giving consent for its new GDPR privacy law compliance changes. It will ask people to review how Facebook applies data from the web to target them with ads, and surface the sensitive profile info they share. Facebook will also allow European and Canadian users to turn on facial recognition after six years of the feature being blocked there. But with a design that encourages rapidly hitting the “Agree” button, a lack of granular controls, a laughably cheatable parental consent request for teens and an aesthetic overhaul of Download Your Information that doesn’t make it any easier to switch social networks, Facebook shows it’s still hungry for your data.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, has been the driving force behind the accord. He has argued for months that the tech industry needs “a digital Geneva convention that will commit governments to protecting civilians from nation-state attacks in times of peace”.

• According to the PUL, the killing of Tyron has increased the level of fear in the journalism community in Liberia and has further strengthened the case for self-censorship in the traditional journalism sphere in Liberia.

• But the record of Commonwealth countries concerning the rising number of killings of journalists points to a failure by authorities in some member states to protect the lives of journalists targeted for their work. UN statistics show that in all but a few cases the killers are shielded from facing justice by a climate of judicial impunity. Where is the ‘rule of law’ in that?

• “Hey @Uber your driver was taking me to the airport. He said he was going to ‘take me to a hotel’ and got off the highway. We got to a stop light. I started yelling ‘let me out of the f—ing car’ and he wouldn’t unlock the doors,” she tweeted.

• [...]

• Leong called another Uber to take her to the airport.

• For more than seven months, the Trump administration has been unlawfully detaining an American citizen in Iraq. Rather than charge him with a crime or set him free, the government wants to transfer him, involuntarily, to a third country. The ACLU is going to court on Thursday to stop the transfer and fight the government’s dangerous claims that it has the authority to violate an American’s constitutional rights.

• The Trump administration claims that the citizen, who was detained in September by Kurdish forces in Syria and transferred to U.S. custody, is a fighter for ISIS — an allegation he denies. The ACLU began representing him in January after a federal court ordered the government to allow us unmonitored access to him. This came after the government insisted, over several months, that it did not need to respect the man’s wishes to challenge his detention or to speak with a lawyer.

• Julian first reached out to myself and a colleague of mine, the Australian human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, in around September 2010. This was just before WikiLeaks was about to publish the Iraq war logs. Julian was in London, preparing that release, which came several months later, at the end of November. He was working with the Guardian and a group of other international newspapers.

• It was around the time when there was concern about what might happen in Sweden, where there was an open investigation into sexual allegations that had previously being dropped. It now seemed that Julian might have to answer those allegations. So, Julian required assistance and advice. It was also the time, of course, that Chelsea Manning was arrested, and a US criminal investigation in grand jury had been announced.

• The Bundestag, the German federal parliament, in response to a question from deputy Andrej Hunko (Die Linke), has warned that if the CNI (Spanish security service) spied on president Carles Puigdemont in Germany, that would have been illegal. A legal report from the chamber makes this clear and warns that it could have consequences.

• “Action by sovereign authorities without the consent from the German state entails several legal consequences: foreign secret service operations against the Federal Republic are punishable in accordance with § 99 of the Criminal Code. Spying on foreigners in the Federal Republic fulfils this criteria. The unauthorised collection of data can fulfil the criteria of a misdemeanour or felony according to the Federal Data Protection Act,” the report says.

• Leaked NYPD documents provide a necessary window into the secret world of how the department deals with abusive officers.

• This week, Buzzfeed released a trove of leaked records for 1,800 New York Police Department employees who were charged with misconduct between 2011 and 2015. These records do not make for easy reading, but they are undoubtedly in the public interest.

• For instance, the public has a clear interest in knowing that at least 319 NYPD employees were allowed to keep their jobs, even after committing offenses that NYPD leaders have always assured us were fireable. Those pushing for more police in schools in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, might want to know that three school safety officers found guilty of using excessive force against students were punished with just five lost vacation days. And anyone concerned about false information leading to wrongful convictions might like to know that more than 100 employees accused of “lying on official reports, under oath, or during an internal affairs investigation” were punished with as little as a few days of lost vacation.

• Much of this information would have been made publicly available up until recently. But in 2016 the NYPD suddenly decided, after decades of posting so-called police “personnel orders,” that doing so violated section 50-a of the New York State Civil Rights Law, which limits the release of certain police personnel records. The law says that personnel records used to evaluate an officer’s performance toward continued employment or promotion are confidential, and it’s constantly and increasingly used as a tool by the police establishment to thwart police accountability and transparency statewide.

• In a victory for the immigrant rights movement, the Supreme Court has struck down a law requiring the mandatory deportation of lawful permanent residents who are convicted of some crimes, saying the law was unconstitutionally vague. Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch sided with the liberal justices, writing, “Vague laws invite arbitrary power.” The case centered on a Filipino man named James Garcia Dimaya, who had been a lawful permanent resident of the United States since 1992. After being convicted of residential burglary, the Obama administration sought to deport him for having committed an “aggravated felony” under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling will mean that lower-level offenses are less likely to trigger the automatic deportation of lawful permanent residents.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• For a few months now we’ve been noting how a “broadband deployment advisory panel” (BDAC) the FCC created to “solve the digital divide” has been plagued by scandal, resignation, and accusations of corruption. The panel was created last year to purportedly advise the Trump FCC on the best approach(es) to improving broadband cost and availability. But it didn’t take long for reports to emerge that the panel was little more than a who’s who of entrenched telecom industry interests, and since its creation its been plagued by a steady stream of disgruntled departures.

• While giant ISPs like Comcast (and the politicians and regulators paid to love them) have been very successful framing net neutrality as a partisan issue to sow dissent and stall policy progress and consensus, the reality is that net neutrality continues to have overwhelming, bipartisan support. Survey after survey have shown that the overwhelming majority of Americans support net neutrality, and for most people preventing natural monopolies from being bullies (at least until somebody has the courage to embrace policies that encourage broadband competition) is a no brainer.

• This week another survey highlighted how opposition to Ajit Pai and the Trump FCC’s net neutrality repeal is overwhelming. According to a new study out of the University of Maryland (pdf), 86% of the country opposes the FCC’s decision to roll back net neutrality protections at ISP lobbyist behest. And again that opposition is bipartisan, with 82% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats opposing the FCC’s obnoxiously-named “restoring internet freedom” repeal.

DRM

• The latest round of opposition comments in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) exemption process shows which government entities oppose user freedom.

• Back during the last round of the DMCA anti-circumvention exemptions process, we wrote about the DRM Drones who were opposing exemptions. These companies, along with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), were trying to stifle the work of activists working to claw back a bit of freedom in the face of the DMCA’s draconian provisions. A few years later, and it’s a new round of the exemptions process, with perhaps some new faces, but the same old problem.

• As we’ve often said, Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is not about copyright, it’s about control. And these opposition comments truly demonstrate that that is the case. The DMCA is allegedly meant to aid in copyright enforcement, but goes about its task in the worst way possible, creating legal penalties for circumventing DRM. By itself, DRM is harmful to users, who all have the right to control their own computing. Adding legal penalties only compounds the harm of DRM. Even if DRM were an effective tool for enforcing copyright (and if copyright were not already extremely excessive), it is unethical to place such onerous control over users.

• So what does the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), or the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for that matter, care about enforcing copyright? The reality is that they don’t, but they realize the nefarious power of DRM to lock down and control users for any purpose, using copyright as an excuse. Like the EPA, the FDA and the FAA are also trying to use DRM to enforce the laws and regulations they are tasked with upholding. The cause the FDA and FAA have chosen to champion is the ability to force users to buy particular feedstock for 3D printers.

Intellectual Monopolies

• She specifically mentioned Microsoft’s Azure IP protection platform as providing a good potential option when the company faces NPE assertions and needs to counter. She also suggested that her firm has a similar partnership with ITRI, a government backed R&D lab.

• [...]

• TSMC, the world’s largest chip foundry, seems to be an exception that proves the rule when it comes to tight patent budgets in Taiwan. Donald McKenna, director of R&D legal division, stated that as the biggest player in its market, TSMC does not have to watch its portfolio spend as cautiously as some others. This is in part because in a cutthroat market, patents are seen as a key ingredient to keeping TSMC competitive. It is no surprise, then, to see TSMC appear once again in the top 10 recipients of US patent grants. McKenna says this strategy underlines TSMC top management’s solid grasp of IP value.

• The US Navy faces two processes: one for installing software without a license and another for using ship designs with patents.

• [...]

• In parallel, the US Navy was also denounced by the FastShip company, which claims more than 6.5 million dollars in damages for using the helmet design patented by this firm without paying any kind of rights.

• This second case has had tragic experiences for this company, which patented a new design for the hull of ships that increased its buoyancy and reduced friction with water, which in addition to the US Navy says that its intellectual property was also stolen by Lockheed Martin, one of the main military contractors of the United States.

• There are no provisions relating to patents, which is unsurprising as the existing European patent system is not administered by the European Union. The European Patent Office (EPO) is a separate international body; therefore, UK patent protection will continue to be available through the EPO regardless of how Brexit proceeds.

• TIPO expects at least 10 hearings to be held this year to help determine whether the Patent Act should be amended (ie, the number of invalidation cases filed for hearings this year may affect the duration of the pilot programme and any future amendments to the Patent Act).

• According to the director of TIPO Patent Division III, with inquiries to suitable patent invalidation case parties docketed, no hearings have yet been scheduled as they require the consent of both parties.

Trademarks

• Legislation that amends Mexico’s trade mark opposition system is expected to improve the still-new system but Mexico’s IP practitioners say many issues remain, reports Ellie Mertens

• Legislation that amended Mexico’s trade mark opposition system passed Congress on April 3, and is on schedule to come into force in June.

• In respect of families of marks, the Bridgestone decision tells us that mere evidence of use is insufficient. First, use must be made of trade marks sharing common elements, which consumers may regard as belonging to a family. On the facts of this case, the evidence of use – where there were only two marks – was insufficient to substantiate the existence of a family. Second, over and above demonstrating use, the evidence must show that the common elements take consumers home to the same source. The opponents in this case had failed to identify themselves to consumers as constituting a single source. At the end of the day, it is the average consumer who will decide whether there exists a family of marks in the marketplace, and steps should be taken to educate the public of such matters.

Copyrights

• The initial testers include an unspecified mix of creators, publishers and shows, but the feature should be available “more broadly” in the near future.

• Hollywood continues to expand its blocking efforts around the globe. Most recently, several major studios including Disney Enterprises and Warner Bros obtained a blocking order against the popular torrent site Rarbg in India. More than twenty ISPs must block the site, while the Government is instructed to help enforce the measures.

• There are a lot of arguments to be made against subsidizing movie/TV studios. The best argument is this: the payouts to visiting studios rarely pay off for local taxpayers. Politicians love the side benefits — rubbing elbows with producers, actors, and other studio personnel — but there’s nothing to be gained financially by paying a studio to film in your town. In one case, a city was promised 3,600 additional jobs. In reality, only 200 jobs materialized, all but 14 of those temporary construction work.

• Then there’s the argument against using public funding to prop up an out-of-town industry. If there are extra tax dollars around, they’re better spent locally, where they’ll do the most good. Subsidizing businesses is always problematic. It skews incentives and allows governments to play favorites using the public’s money.

• But the worst argument someone can make against subsidies is this one: subsidies should be content-based. Two members of the clergy and a state politician are bent out of shape because a subsidized TV series shoot resulted in the depiction of a historical figure in compromising positions.

• Another day, another story of copyright gone stupid. This time it involves Major League Baseball, which is no stranger to stupid copyright arguments. Going back fifteen years, we wrote about Major League Baseball claiming that other websites couldn’t even describe professional baseball games. There was a legal fight over this and MLB lost. A decade ago, MLB was shutting down fan pages for doing crazy things like “using a logo” of their favorite sports team. And, of course, like all major professional sports leagues, MLB has long engaged in copyfraud by claiming that “any account of this game, without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is prohibited”, which is just false. MLB has also made up ridiculous rules about how much reporters can post online at times, restricting things that they have no right to actually restrict.

• The latest seems particularly stupid. Following on some sort of silly spat in which a guy named Kevin Clancy at Barstool Sports (the same brainiacs who wanted to sue the NFL for having sorta, not really, similar merchandise) got pissed off at a popular Twitter account called @PitchingNinja run by a guy named Rob Friedman, who would tweet out GIFs and videos of interesting pitches from MLB games. Apparently, the dudebro Clancy from Barstool sports pointed out that Friedman was violating the made up rules that MLB has on how much someone is allowed to share on social media, leading a ton of Clancy’s fans to “report” Friedman. Twitter shut down Friedman’s account — leading said dudebro, Clancy, to celebrate.

• The Swedish Pirate Party is calling on Justice Minister Morgan Johansson to put a halt to the wave of threatening piracy letters that have swept the country in recent months. The party likens the so-called copyright trolling campaigns to extortion and wants local courts to raise the evidence bar.

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