● 05.09.18

● Links 9/5/2018: Firefox 60 and CrossOver 17.5

Posted in News Roundup at 3:10 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• At Google I/O, Google announced it was bringing Linux to Chrome OS. Wait? What’s that you say? Chrome OS is Linux? Why, yes.

• Chrome OS started as a spin off of Ubuntu Linux. It then migrated to Gentoo Linux and evolved into Google’s own take on the vanilla Linux kernel. But it’s interface remained the Chrome web browser UI to this day.

• True, you could run Debian, Ubuntu, and Kali Linux with Chrome OS — with the open-source Crouton program in a chroot container. Or, you could run Gallium OS, a third-party, Xubuntu Chromebook-specific Linux variant. But, neither were for the faint of heart or the weak in technical skills.

• For much of Chrome OS’ early history, the operating system was seen as a glorified web browser. As the OS has matured, that view has become unwarranted: Chrome OS has since added offline capability and Android app support to significantly expand its feature set. Google’s next big step is to entice developers by introducing Linux app support, available in preview form on the Google Pixelbook.

• Linux support for Chromebooks is still in the early stages over at Google — which is one of the reasons why it’s only coming to the Pixelbook for now. Chrome OS also won’t offer Linux app support as a default; instead, users will have to go and manually enable it before they can take advantage of the feature.

• Google has confirmed that it’s bringing support for Linux apps to Chrome OS, which means you’ll be able to code on a Chromebook using Android Studio, an IDE like Eclipse, edit images using tools like GIMP, or run thousands of other apps.

• We’ve known this was coming for a while thanks to code commits and even early versions of the feature going live in the Chrome OS Dev channel. But now it’s official.

• During the Google I/O 2018 event today, Google made it official that it will soon allow Linux apps to run on Chromebooks alongside Chrome OS apps and Android apps.

• We already told you last week that a new Linux Apps feature was spotted in the latest Chrome OS Dev release, and when turned on it lets users run native Linux apps like they would be running their favorite GNU/Linux distribution inside Chrome OS, the Linux-based operating system that powers all Chromebooks.

• But today Google made everything official and announced at Google I/O 2018 that all Chromebooks will soon be able to run Linux apps. While the Pixelbook appears to be the first to get the support for Linux apps, Google said that more Chromebooks should receive the new feature in the coming months.

• Alongside a plethora of other announcements in kicking off Google’s 2018 I/O event, following recent rumors and indications in their dev channel, Google has officially confirmed support for “Linux Apps” on Chrome OS.

• Google has begun the roll out of allowing Linux applications to run on Chrome OS natively by means of a Debian-based virtual machine. Other Linux distribution support is expected in the future and the initial support is for Google’s high-end Pixelbook.

• It’s official: Google is adding support for Linux apps to Chromebooks.

• Confirming the long-rumoured news in a blogpost during its annual developer conference Google says the move will ‘equip developers’ with the tools they need for their ‘next coding project’.

• The feature will work by running Linux apps in a custom Linux virtual machine that “starts in seconds and integrates completely with Chromebook features“.

Server

• “You are now Certified Kubernetes.” With this comment, Docker for Windows and Docker for Mac passed the Kubernetes conformance tests. Kubernetes has been available in Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows since January, having first being announced at DockerCon EU last year. But why is this important to the many of you who are using Docker for Windows and Docker for Mac?

• Kubernetes is designed to be a platform that others can build upon. As with any similar project, the risk is that different distributions vary enough that applications aren’t really portable. The Kubernetes project has always been aware of that risk – and this led directly to forming the Conformance Working Group. The group owns a test suite that anyone distributing Kubernetes can run, and submit the results for to attain official certification. This test suite checks that Kubernetes behaves like, well, Kubernetes; that the various APIs are exposed correctly and that applications built using the core APIs will run successfully. In fact, our enterprise container platform, Docker Enterprise Edition, achieved certification using the same test suite You can find more about the test suite at https://github.com/cncf/k8s-conformance.

Kernel Space

• Kent Overstreet who has been spending the past few years working on the Bcachefs file-system born out of the BCache block cache technology is now starting work on upstreaming the code to the mainline kernel.

• For facilitating an easier review process, he begun by sending out the patches for the on-disk data structures and ioctl interface exposed to user-space. This is just over one thousand lines of code while the entire file-system implementation is more than fifty thousand lines of new code.

Graphics Stack

• While the current generation Raspberry Pi boards with their VideoCore IV graphics processor only supports OpenGL ES 2.0 and is generally quite slow, there is an experimental/work-in-progress Vulkan driver being worked on.

• This is not to be confused with the next-gen VC5 driver stack (now known as “V3D”) where Eric Anholt of Broadcom plans on Vulkan support via the BCMV driver as well as OpenCL plans and more for this much more capable Broadcom VideoCore graphics hardware we hope to find out of future Raspberry Pi generations. But a developer has been quietly working on a Vulkan driver for current-gen VC4-based Raspberry Pi boards.

• Ben Skeggs of Red Hat today published initial open-source Nouveau driver support for the NVIDIA GV100 “Volta” graphics hardware.

• This provides the initial GV100 series Volta support for this open-source, reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux graphics driver. NVIDIA’s official but proprietary driver has already supported the available Volta hardware to date.

• The GV100 series support landed this morning in the Nouveau tree across the span of many commits. A lot of the Volta bring-up appears to be compatible with existing Pascal code-paths.

• While ROCm 1.7.2 is the latest stable release for this Radeon GPU compute stack, there are 1.8.0 beta packages available for testing.

• A few days ago AMD developers quietly made available ROCm 1.8 beta packages for Ubuntu 16.04 and RHEL/CentOS 7.4.

Applications

• ThetaPad is a modern hierarchical cross-platform note-taking application that also serves as an efficient personal wiki and data managing application.

• It features a clutter-free UI with a typical note-taking app layout consisting of a search field, note creation and editing function icons, and a file tree view.

• ThetaPad tree-based notes hierarchy allows users to manage their content in a clean and properly structured way without losing sight of the location of their files.

• Piwigo is an open source project which allows you to create your own photo gallery on the web and upload photos and create new albums. The platform includes some powerful features built-in, such as albums, tags, watermark, geolocation, calendars, system notifications, access control levels, themes and statistics.

• Piwigo has a huge amount of available plugins (over 200) and a great collection of themes. It is also translated in more than 50 languages. Its core functions are written in PHP programming language and requires a RDBMS database backend, such as MySQL database.

• Today, we are going to learn about Orbital Apps or ORB (Open Runnable Bundle) apps, a collection of free, cross-platform, open source applications. All ORB apps are portable. You can either install them on your Linux system or on your USB drive, so that you you can use the same app on any system. There is no need of root privileges, and there are no dependencies. All required dependencies are included in the apps. Just copy the ORB apps to your USB drive and plug it on any Linux system, and start using them in no time. All settings and configurations, and data of the apps will be stored on the USB drive. Since there is no need to install the apps on the local drive, we can run the apps either in online or offline computers. That means we don’t need Internet to download any dependencies.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• CodeWeavers has rolled out their newest version of their Wine-based commercial software for running Windows programs on Linux and macOS systems.

• The primary benefit for Linux users of the newly-minted CrossOver 17.5.0 is support for the latest Microsoft Office 365 as well as better support for Microsoft Office 2016. The Office 2016 support has seen a number of bug fixes for better stability and less crashes.

• A new version of the commercial and cross-platform Wine graphical frontend CrossOver has been released today for both GNU/Linux and macOS operating system with a couple of improvements.

• Designed from the offset to make it easier for GNU/Linux and macOS users to run applications built for the Microsoft Windows operating system on their computers, CrossOver is a well-designed graphical user interface (GUI) to the popular and open-source Wine program. It’s compatible with both GNU/Linux and macOS platforms.

Games

• The latest sprawling RPG from Obsidian Entertainment has been released with day-1 Linux support. Here’s a few thoughts on what you can expect.

• Like your war games? The Humble War Gamez Bundle might tickle your fancy with a couple of decent Linux games included.

• Not exactly amazing compared to previous Humble Indie Bundles (I really would love to see them more often), but for those of you short on cash and looking for something new, this bundle still has three good Linux games.

• EVERSPACE, the Unreal Engine 4 powered, Kickstarter-backed single-player space-themed combat game has rolled out official Linux support today.

• EVERSPACE is the space game that last year was hitting Linux GPU driver issues in their porting process, but fortunately those problems have since been resolved. The game has been in beta/unofficially on Linux for a while now but today’s v1.2.3 patch release marks the title being promoted to officially supported on Linux.

• The excellent dungeon crawler Hand of Fate 2 [Steam, GOG] has a big free update that’s now live featuring the Goblin faction.

• Coffee Crisis [Steam] from developer Mega Cat Studios was originally released for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and now it’s updated and out on PC with Linux support. It was actually funded on Kickstarter back in 2016, where the developer gained over $15K in funding. I’ll be honest, I had never heard of it until the developer emailed it to us recently!

• If there’s one thing I can’t get enough of, it’s shooters. Gloriously bloody shooters that like me tear through enemies and Apocryph [Steam] has plenty of that. Inspired by the likes of Hexen, Heretic, Painkiller and Strife which is clear from the style as well as the gameplay.

• Canadian developer EggNut is hoping to secure funding for their cinematic pixel art adventure game Backbone, which does look and sound pretty interesting.

• It will feature a “smell-based” stealth feature (mask your scent in a garbage bin for example) as well as action elements, where you will be tasked with solving cases, interrogating witnesses along with a healthy dose of exploration in a dystopian Vancouver.

• Tiny Bubbles [Steam, Official Site] is a fresh puzzle game about filling soap bubbles with colours and getting them to pop, it’s surprisingly good.

• Heat Guardian [Official Site, Steam], a hardcore top-down shooter set in a freezing world is set to release for Windows soon. Turns out it’s going to come to Linux too!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Starting with this release, there are official builds available for Linux and Windows platforms.

• In addition to nightly Linux Flatpak builds, there is now also AppImage for stable releases.

• For Windows, there are 32 and 64-bit installers, which now includes both standard and portable versions.

• State of macOS port is currently in bad shape, so there won’t be any macOS builds until the situation changes.

• Technically single/double-click setting is not part of the “Mouse” settings. When the user changes the setting from the “Mouse” settings, it also affects other input devices like touchpad because the option is related to the “Dolphin”. Solution plan for the bugs consist of 3 main parts.

• From the 25th to the 29th of April, 5 members of our team had a sprint in Paris to focus on the future of Kdenlive. And it was fantastic! We met for the first time in person, made friends and worked a lot! But let’s start with the beginning. We were warmly welcomed by Mathieu at the Carrefour Numérique, part of the Cité des Sciences in Paris.

• On the first day after a brief introduction, the team started working on the vision of the project, defining objectives, discussing technical issues and schedules and by the end of the day came up with a roadmap (see below) with a clear set of short, mid and long term goals post the refactoring release.

• Hi everyone, I’m Demetrio, a student of University of Milano-Bicocca, who has been contributing to WikiToLearn since 2017. I found this community very helpful and friendly, they have worked immediately to make me feel important by giving me resources and primary tasks to do. They included me in their official meetings so I felt motivated: this has been the main reason I am still happy to contribute to this great project.

• I can’t believe I was selected for the Google Summer of Code program for working on Krita. The proyect I’ll be working this summer is on optimizing Krita’s brush mask to work with AVX instructions. These instructions will be coded using the Vc library, a “zero overhead C++ types for parallel computing” that enables to efficiently transform the mask’s generator code to SIMD instructions for vectorization.

• Brush masks is a core process in the painting task as it creates the shape it will be imprinted in the canvas. This, depending on brush settings, can be done as much as thousends of times per second. Having this optimized will greatly improve painting enjoyment keeping the brush stroke responsive on bigger sizes.

• The Skrooge Team announces the release 2.12.0 version of its popular Personal Finances Manager based on KDE Frameworks.

• We have released Qt 5.11.0 RC today. It is still online delivery only and you can get it via online installer as an update to existing installation or just doing fresh installation & selecting 5.11 rc from ‘preview’ section.

• While there have been several Qt5 tool-kit releases where they have arrived late, the upcoming Qt 5.11 might be released one week ahead of schedule.

• The Qt Company today announced the Qt 5.11 release candidate. Their new target for the actual release is 22 May and they might forego doing a second release candidate if testing pans out well for this RC1 release.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Last November we had a small hackfest in London, focused on GNOME Shell design. We explored various themes during the hackfest and came up with a bunch of initial designs, which we’ve subsequently been developing. The main area of recent work has been the login and unlock experience. The rest of this post gives an overview of the design that we’ve come up with.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Two key announcements made today at Red Hat Summit show that the really big companies are starting to embrace open source to drive hybrid cloud adoption and spur innovation.

• IBM and Red Hat are throwing official support behind a platform hack its customers had been stitching together themselves.

• The combination will tie together IBM’s Cloud Private platform and middleware services with Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform. Those IBM platform and services will also be part of Red Hat’s Certified Containers program. The combo will allow customers to build and deploy containerized applications on a single, integrated container platform with a single view into that enterprise data.

• The tagline of this week’s Red Hat Summit in San Francisco is, “If you are interested in open-source, you should be here.” It looks like IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. took the advice to heart.

• This week, Red Hat – the open source software giant – is hosting its 14th annual Red Hat Summit in its 25th year, at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

• The event has attracted a record number 7,000 attendees, made up of enterprise customers from around the world.

• Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, opened the summit this morning, stating that “enterprises are now seeing the power of open source like never before, because of the challenges they are facing with digital transformation efforts”.

• For the past several years, Red Hat has emphasized the interplay of IT’s four footprints, from physical servers and virtual machines to private and public clouds. A single environment is unlikely to scale and adapt to meet the needs of the modern enterprise, from competitive dynamics to evolving customer demands. Hybrid cloud, where workloads and resources span these deployment options, is now a critical component for digital transformation, as is consistency. CIOs need to know that their applications and services will respond consistently in a certain way, every time, everywhere.

• Earlier this year, Red Hat acquired CoreOS, a trailblazing company in the area of containerized and cloud-native infrastructure. Today at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, we’re sharing more details of how that acquisition will benefit existing CoreOS customers, Red Hat customers, and the cloud-native ecosystem as a whole.

• Lufthansa Technik, a provider of aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul services for commercial airlines as well as head of state and VIP jets, has moved to a hybrid cloud infrastructure based on Red Hat’s enterprise-grade open source technologies running on Microsoft’s Azure public cloud.

• Lufthansa Technik deployed a platform named AVIATAR aimed at avoiding service interruptions and helping airlines to better organize and schedule maintenance events while avoiding service interruptions.

Fedora

• A week and a half ago I spent a few days in Geneva and gave a presentation about ostree and Flatpak at the CERN Computing Seminar. I started by briefly introducing Endless to give some context of the problems we’re trying to solve and how we’re using ostree and Flatpak for that, then proceeded to talk more in detail about these technologies. In the end, there were several questions, and I was happy to learn afterwards that among the audience there were some of the people working at the CVMFS project: a software distribution service to help deploy data-processing infrastructure and tools. I don’t know the full details about the project’s implementation, but from the problems they’re trying to solve it seems like ostree (or more specifically libostree) could perhaps be used to replace part of the core, which would leverage all the niceties of using a complex Open Source project (more eyeballs looking into bugs, more testing, etc.). I also think more use-cases could be found in the organization, so I hope my talk was a small seed to help introduce these projects at CERN in the medium/long term. The presentation has been recorded if you’re interested.

• Fedora 28 Atomic Host is available now, as part of the Fedora 28 release! This release brings various exciting features to enhance your experience with Atomic Host. Highlighted features include: automatic update check, Podman, unified OSTree repo, system container using SELinux policy from the host, official AMIs available in more AWS EC2 regions, and continued multi-arch support.

Debian Family

• Debian Project’s Salvatore Bonaccorso announced today the availability of a new kernel patch for both Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” and Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” operating system series to patch two security vulnerabilities and address some regressions.

• One of the security vulnerabilities patched by this new kernel update was discovered by Andy Lutomirski in Linux kernel’s KVM (Kernel-based virtual machine) implementation, which could allow an unprivileged KVM guest user to escalate their privileges or crash the guest operating system (CVE-2018-1087).

• We received our first HPE gen10 systems, a bunch of DL360, and experienced a few caveats while setting up Debian/stretch.

• Autodeb is a new service that will attempt to automatically update Debian packages to newer upstream versions or to backport them. Resulting packages will be distributed in apt repositories.

• I am happy to annnounce that I will be developing this new service as part of Google Summer of Code 2018 with Lucas Nussbaum as a mentor.

• The program is currently nearing the end of the “Community Bonding” period, where mentors and their mentees discuss on the details of the projects and try to set objectives.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Cosmic CANIMAL [1] is now open for development, with the syncs from unstable done and built. The development version starts with only a few changes:

• Canonical’s Matthias Klose announced on Tuesday that the upcoming Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) operating system is now officially open for development.

• Now that Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth dubbed Ubuntu 18.10 as the “Cosmic Cuttlefish,” it’s time for the development cycle to kick off officially, and it looks like there’s some under-the-hood change to start with, including the final GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 8.1.0 release, as well as the transition to ncurses.

• In October 2016, Zenkit was released as an app designed to help you ‘organise anything’, enabling companies to digitise all of their business processes in a single app. It’s innovative approach to presenting data has since garnered worldwide attention, and high demand for desktop apps led to the release of apps for Windows, macOS, and some Linux distributions in February this year.

• This week, Zenkit has been released as a snap – the universal Linux packaging format – fulfilling the team’s desire to make Zenkit a platform and device agnostic tool.

• Canonical’s Ubuntu distribution for Linux has earned a reputation for being user-friendly, with editions aimed at desktop, server, cloud, and IoT users. This changelog tracks updates to Ubuntu across its release cycle, including its LTS (long term support) releases.

• Canonical produces new Ubuntu releases every six months and supports them with free security updates and bug fixes for at least nine months. New LTS releases arrive every two years and are supported for five years.

• Ubuntu 18.04 was released last month, and for the most part, it is a solid release. As per usual, version 18.04 was given a silly name — Bionic Beaver. Canonical follows an alphabetic naming convention, where two words are used that start with that same letter. The first word tends to be an adjective or other descriptive word, while the second word is always an animal. And yes, it is all a bit silly.

• Ubuntu 18.04 is a huge update, but I say that mostly in the best sense of big updates. It brings a ton of new stuff, both under the hood and on the desktop, without creating too much disruption to your workflows. The one exception to that is HUD users, who may want to stick with the version of Unity still in the Ubuntu repos.

• Canonical generally takes a conservative approach to LTS updates. Existing 16.04 users will not be prompted to upgrade to 18.04 until the first point release is out, and usually that happens around June or July (but it depends on bugs and patches). I would also expect to see Windows Update make it easy to integrate 18.04 into hypervisor on a similar timeline. But if you’re already on 17.10 and don’t want to wait—and for the average user, I don’t see any reason to wait—you can update now by following Canonical’s directions. The best Ubuntu offering in years will be waiting for you either way.

• With Mark Shuttleworth yesterday having announced the Cosmic Cuttlefish, the development cycle for Ubuntu 18.10 is formally open.

• Matthias Klose opened up the Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic cycle and syncs from Debian unstable are now done as well as importing GCC 8.1.0 but not yet making it the default. Around June or July is when they plan on shifting the default C/C++ compiler from GCC 7.3 to the recently released GCC 8.1 and then rebuilding the package archives. GCC 8 brings many features and improvements that will be great for Ubuntu 18.10.

• It was this time last year that Microsoft announced that it was bringing Ubuntu to the Windows Store (now the Microsoft Store), along with other Linux distributions. If you check out the app in the Store now though, you’ll find that it only works on x64 devices, meaning that you can’t run it on any of the new Windows 10 on ARM PCs.

• That’s all about to change though. In a session at Microsoft’s Build 2018 developer conference today called Windows 10 on ARM for Developers, the company showed off Ubuntu running on an ARM PC, with the app coming from the Microsoft Store. It will finally support ARM64 PCs, although x86 devices are still out of luck.

• With Ubuntu 18.04 LTS out of the way for the development teams, Ubuntu 18.10 marks the beginning of the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Shuttleworth also outlined that he wants the next cycle to heavily focus on improving the security situation, which is probably a good goal in a world which is seeing growing cyber attacks, with Linux having seen triple the number of malware threats in the last few years.

• The next incarnation of Ubuntu, version 18.10, will be known as Cosmic Cuttlefish, with the focus set to be on making the operating system more secure.

• The new name was announced by Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, who hinted at what would happen on the journey to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (the next Long Term Support release, which happens every two years, and gives users who stay on it five years’ worth of support).

• Shuttleworth stated that he was starting to value security above any other feature of the distro, underlining its overarching importance in every aspect of an OS. His broad vision is to improve the confidence users have in the “security of their systems and their data”.

• Brief: Project management app Zenkit is now available as a Snap application for Linux desktop.

• Zenkit – in case you did not know – is a collaboration tool for managing projects and tasks for work just like Trello. And, recently, Zenkit released a “snap” on Snapcraft which enables you to use Zenkit on any Linux distribution without having to worry about updates and stability.

Flavours and Variants

• Xubuntu is a variant of Ubuntu without GNOME as its default desktop environment. It comes with XFCE desktop environment, and X-F-C-E just pronounced as it is, is not an abbreviated word at all.

Devices/Embedded

• B&R’s “Edge Controller” is built on its “Automation PC 910” embedded computer with modular PCIe expansion. It features a hardened Linux stack on a Xeon E3 with a hypervisor for enabling an RTOS to run fieldbus controller applications.

• Austrian embedded firm B&R has unveiled a version of its Automation PC 910 embedded computer called the Edge Controller. This “single device to acquire data, evaluate it and send it to the cloud” can be used for general industrial applications, as well as for “big data analysis and machine learning,” says B&R.

• Beagleboard.org has announced a free BeagleBone webinar series from May 10 through July 26, with different episodes targeting Linux users, embedded developers, web developers, robotics hackers, and educators.

Android

• Qualcomm announced today that it’s working with Google to get Android P to more devices, sooner. The chipmaker had early access to the new OS version, allowing it to optimize its Snapdragon 845, 660, and 636 processors “to ensure readiness for OEMs to upgrade to Android P at the time of launch.”

• A year and a half after Google announced that its stripped down, IoT-oriented Brillo version of Android was being recast as Android Things, the platform has emerged from Developer Preview as Android Things 1.0. The good news is that Google is offering customers free automated updates for three years, which should save money while improving security and reliability. The bad news is that Android Things is more proprietary than the mostly open source Android.

• Google will continue to support the Raspberry Pi 3 and Technexion’s i.MX7-based Pico i.MX7D module as official Android Things development platforms. However, you can’t use them for production, as they “do not meet Google’s security requirements for key and ID attestation and verified boot, and may not receive stability and security updates,” says Google.

Free Software/Open Source

• The reality is that developers need to use components, should use components and want to use components. But this reality necessitates both more education surrounding the risk of components, and the tools and technology that allow developers to continue to use components, but in a secure way that doesn’t slow them down.

• Cloning is nothing but the copying of the contents of a server hard disk to a storage medium (another disk) or to an image file. Disk cloning is quite useful in modern data centers for:

• Standards body ETSI has been a critical contributor to the spread of virtualization and SDN in telco networks. It is the home of several initiatives which have turned into key foundations of the new software-driven telecoms network, notably NFV (Network Functions Virtualization), OSM (Open Source MANO or management and orchestration) and MEC (Multi-access Edge Compute). However, as open source methods become increasingly important to operators via initiatives like OpenStack and the Open Networking Foundation, some argue that the processes of the traditional standards body are outdated and too slow. Even in areas where ETSI has done the groundwork, nimbler and wider open ecosystems are often taking up the baton. The Linux Foundation-hosted ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol) has attracted broader…

• Open source has upended the secluded lives of the classic software engineer, with introverts now required to interact even more with the community as part of the job becomes increasingly people orientated.

• “People think of [open source] as a software development methodology, and it is. But fundamentally it’s a social phenomenon. … [The] social aspect of this for an introvert like myself is at the same time a little scary, but also it’s super exciting because it is people who are driving this industry,” stated Dirk Hohndel (pictured), vice president and chief open source officer at VMware Inc.

• All open source community members care about the “four freedoms” – the permission given in advance to use, study, improve and share software in source and deployable forms. Some do so as an ethical imperative, while others do so as a matter of pragmatism related to their use of the code. But everyone in a community expects to be able to take the code and do what they want with it, without needing to get any further permission from anyone.

• They expect to be able to contribute in good faith. There may be rules about who can contribute when and how, but they will be reasonable and apply equally to everyone. Contributing isn’t a matter of (just) philanthropy; one of the important benefits of community-maintained code is sharing the ongoing maintenance.

• They also expect all the interactions of the community to be transparent. Where there are leadership roles, they expect them to be filled by the most appropriate willing person, probably chosen by voting where there’s a choice of candidates. In an open source community, participants expect reasoned fairness.

Events

• The statement by Cathy Davidson of the MacArthur Foundation that “65% of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet” has resonated so deeply because it adds urgency to what should be obvious, especially considering the rapid, technology-driven changes we’ve seen in the workforce over the past 10 years.

• All signs indicate that future job skills will be vastly different from what students are taught in schools, and the World Mentoring Academy is trying to close those gaps. In his Lightning Talk, “Mentoring and Creative Spaces,” at the 16th annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), Michael Williams describes one of the Academy’s projects: exposing students to skills of the future by interviewing professional astronauts, activists, journalists, spies, authors, chefs, athletes, government officials, and others about their jobs.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Facebook has been in the news a lot lately. It started with the announcement that over 87 million Facebook users had their personal information shared with the private firm Cambridge Analytica without their knowledge. Since then, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has testified twice in front of the US Congress and people all around the world have been talking about Facebook’s data practices. We took this opportunity to survey people on how they felt about Facebook these days. 47,000 people responded to our survey. The data is interesting and open for your exploration.

• The top takeaways? Most people (76%) say they are very concerned about the safety of their personal information online. Yet few people (24%) reported making changes to their Facebook accounts following the recent news of privacy concerns around Facebook. The majority of people who responded to our survey (65%) see themselves — rather than companies or the government — as being most responsible for protecting their personal information online. And very few people (only 12%) said they would consider paying for Facebook, even a version of Facebook that doesn’t make money by collecting and selling personal data.

• We know many Firefox users love web extensions, and we do, too. Today we’re announcing the winners of our Firefox Quantum Extensions Challenge.

• The results are in for the Firefox Quantum Extensions Challenge! We were thrilled to see so many creative, helpful, and delightful submission entries.

• David is a Mozillian living the UK and active in a lot of different Mozilla projects. In his day job he is building an Open Source Fitness platform. You might have seen him at the past few MozFests in London. Last year he did a great job wrangling the Privacy&Security space.

• Firefox 60.0 is out this morning and it’s quite a big update while also being Mozilla’s newest ESR release for extended support.

• Among the many changes to find with Firefox 60 is the new Policy Engine and Group Policy support for better integrating Firefox within enterprise deployments. The new policy engine supports the Windows Group Policy as well as a cross-platform JSON file for defining the policy. Firefox 60.0 also features the new Web Authentication API with support for devices like the Yubikey for dealing with passwords/authentication.

• Firefox 60 is here, and the Quantum lineage continues apace. The parallel processing prowess of Quantum CSS is now available on Firefox for Android, and work continues on WebRender, which modernizes the whole idea of what it means to draw a web page. But we’re not just spreading the love on internals. Firefox 60 boasts a number of web platform and developer-facing improvements as well.

• Browsers are key to how everyone in your company works, but how often do you think about them? A memory-hungry browser can slow your systems to a crawl, killing productivity across your org. Replacing it with a fast, lightweight browser is an easy win for IT.

• Last fall, Mozilla launched Firefox Quantum, an all-new browser based on an advanced rendering engine that bests every other browser and uses less memory. Independent tests proved its blazing-fast performance and miserly memory usage, and Wired wrote that “Firefox Quantum is the browser built for 2017”.

• Right now everybody’s talking about the right way to make the products that we love meet our individual needs AND respect our privacy.

• At Mozilla, striking this balance has been our bread and butter for more than two decades. With today’s release of Firefox, we’re bringing you more features and tools that allow you to personalize your browser without sacrificing your privacy.

• Mozilla is continuing to fight for net neutrality — in the courts, alongside Americans, and, today, by joining the Red Alert protest.

• The Red Alert protest raises awareness about net neutrality’s importance, and the means for keeping it intact: In mid-May, the Senate will vote on a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to overturn the FCC’s net neutrality repeal. We’re partnering with organizations like Consumer Reports, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Reddit to encourage Americans to call Congress in support of net neutrality.

OpenStack

• SUSE’s OpenStack Cloud 8 made its debut last week. This is the “first release to integrate the best of SUSE OpenStack Cloud and HPE OpenStack technology, which was acquired by SUSE last year”. Other enhancements include “greater flexibility for customers with full support for OpenStack Ironic”, “expanded interoperability with new support for VMware NSX-V”, “enhanced scalability to support large deployments” and more.

• Market trends show that due to long application life-cycles and the high cost of change, enterprises will be dealing with a mix of bare-metal, virtualized, and containerized applications for many years to come. This is true even as greenfield investment moves to a more container-focused approach.

• Red Hat® OpenStack® Platform provides a solution to the problem of managing large scale infrastructure which is not immediately solved by containers or the systems that orchestrate them.

• In the OpenStack world, everything can be automated. If you want to provision a VM, a storage volume, a new subnet or a firewall rule, all these tasks can be achieved using an easy to use UI or with a command line interface, leveraging Openstack API’s. All these infrastructure needs might require a ticket, some internal processing, and could take weeks. Now such provisioning could all be done with a script or a playbook, and could be completely automated.

• Unit tests are used to verify that individual units of source code work according to a defined specification (spec). While this may sound complicated to understand, in short it means that we try to verify that each part of our source code works as expected, without having to run the full program they belong to.

• All OpenStack projects come with their own set of unit tests, for example, this is the unit test folder for the oslo.config project. Those tests are executed when a new patch is proposed for review, to ensure that existing (or new) functionality is not broken with the new code. For example, if you check this review, you can see that one of the continuous integration jobs executed is “openstack-tox-py27”, which runs unit tests using Python 2.7.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 6.0.4, which represents the bleeding edge in terms of features, and as such is targeted at early adopters, tech-savvy and power users.

• For mainstream users and enterprise deployments, TDF provides the alternative download of LibreOffice 5.4.6.

• The Document Foundation announced today the release and immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance update to the latest stable LibreOffice 6.0 open-source office suite.

• LibreOffice 6.0.4 comes five weeks after version 6.0.3 to address a total of 88 bugs that affected various of the office suite’s components, including Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math, and others. Details about the changes implemented in this new release can be found here and here.

• However, the Document Foundation still recommends LibreOffice 6.0 only to early adopters, as well as power, tech-savvy users as it contains bleeding edge features that need more thorough testing before it can be validated for deployments in production environments, so version 6.0.4 is here to make the office suite more stable and reliable.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Intel and Packet teamed up to give open source and commercial software projects free access to Intel Optane infrastructure technology.

• Optane is an NVMe-based solid-state drive built on top of new persistent memory technology from Intel and Micron. It enables web browsers to launch up to five-times faster than a hard disk drive, according to Intel.

• Windows Notepad users, rejoice! Microsoft’s text editing app, which has been shipping with Windows since version 1.0 in 1985, has finally been taught how to handle line endings in text files created on Linux, Unix, Mac OS, and macOS devices.

• “This has been a major annoyance for developers, IT Pros, administrators, and end users throughout the community,” Microsoft acknowledged in a blog post today, without touching on why the issue was allowed to fester for more than three decades.

• Notepad’s line feed limitations may not inspire the same level of partisan bickering as the tabs vs. spaces debate or the possibility that semicolons may become mandatory in JavaScript.

BSD

• DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has just pushed out DragonFly’s Spectre mitigation code as well as fixing “CVE-2018-8897″ which is what might be the recently rumored “Spectre-NG” vulnerabilities.

• Matthew Dillon was very quick to be the first major BSD player pushing out patches for Spectre and Meltdown back in January, beating the other BSDs by a significant amount of time to getting mitigated for these CPU vulnerabilities.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• I’ve setup continuous integration testing for all branches and pull requests at https://travis-ci.org/LibreDWG/libredwg/builds for GNU/Linux, and at https://ci.appveyor.com/project/rurban/libredwg for windows, which also generates binaries (a dll) automatically.

Licensing/Legal

• The use of open source software (OSS) — where the source code is made available under an open source licence — has become ubiquitous across many industries, especially for companies operating in the tech sector. But the use of OSS comes with a set of risks that businesses, including emerging and high growth companies, must understand.

• If you are a software developer, you will know all about open source software (OSS). OSS is software whose source code is publicly available to be used, adapted, modified and re-licensed, usually free of charge. Because it is unusual for software developers to give away their source code, some people think OSS is released without being subject to licence terms. In fact, most (although not all) OSS is licensed under one of a variety of public licences, the most commonly used of which is the General Public Licence (GPL) which exists in multiple versions.

• Most software developers nowadays will make use of some OSS for the obvious reason that it avoids them having to re-invent the proverbial wheel and that makes it particularly attractive to startups. It is unlikely to cause you problems if you use OSS in internal products, although the question of OSS may arise if the company is acquired. Where, however, it is used in your proprietary software which is licensed to or hosted by third parties, the situation becomes more complex.

• Software Freedom Conservancy is excited to announce that Backdrop CMS has joined as its newest member project. Backdrop CMS is a lightweight content management system for small to medium sized businesses and non-profits.

• Backdrop CMS best serves the kinds of organizations that need complex functionality, on a budget. Smaller organizations deserve a tool built especially for their changing and particular needs. Backdrop CMS is committed to providing that service by leveraging the flexibility and collaborative nature of free and open source software.

• Conservancy, a public charity focused on ethical technology, is home to over forty member projects dedicated to developing and promoting free and open source software. Conservancy acts as a corporate umbrella, allowing member projects to operate as charitable initiatives without having to manage their own corporate structure and administrative services.

Programming/Development

• Typemock, the leader in unit testing solutions, today announced the launch of Isolator++ for Linux. For over a decade, Typemock has been the smart way for developers to unit test .NET and C/C++ on Windows, and with this new release, developers will be able to easily unit test their code on Linux as well.

Standards/Consortia

• For those interested in Vulkan development, later this month on the 22nd of May, Khronos is running another “Vulkanised” event.

Leftovers

• The Coalition Government’s approach to the R&D Tax Incentive in last night’s Federal Budget mirrors its approach to every other sector or section of society: take from the poor, give to the rich.

• The changes that were announced will hit start-ups when they are at their most vulnerable: at the stage when they have yet to start generating revenue.

• At the other end, the R&D expenditure threshold — the maximum amount of R&D expenditure eligible for concessional R&D tax offsets — has been increased from $100 million to $150 million annually. That will only benefit big companies, most of whom are established.

Science

• Jim’s final lecture at CMU is full of his trademark insights and humor, covering the five mostly CMU computing pioneers who influenced his career. You should watch the whole hour-long video, but below the fold I have transcribed a few tastes [...]

• He said ‘The most important thing to get right is the network.’ And that turned out to be completely true. The part of the system that we did, called the Andrew File System, which Satya was one of the inventors of, is still running thirty years later, which is amazing for a piece of software. It received a national award for being a great piece of software. [...]

Security

• We want the technology developed at ShiftLeft to benefit open security projects and the security research community as much as possible.

• The first vulnerability resides in the VBScript Engine included in all currently supported versions of Windows. A so-called use-after-free flaw involving the way the engine handles computer memory allows attackers to execute code of their choice that runs with the same system privileges chosen by the logged-in user. When targeted users are logged in with administrative rights, attackers who exploit the bug can take complete control of the system. In the event users are logged in with more limited rights, attackers may still be able to escalate privileges by exploiting a separate vulnerability.

• 7-Zip is a free open-source archiver with a high compression ratio. The program is under the License of GNU LGPL & BSD 3-clause and can be used both by home and enterprise users. “You can use 7-Zip on any computer, including a computer in a commercial organization. You don’t need to register or pay for 7-Zip,” its website says.

• Besides kernels being addressed for the newly-disclosed CVE-2018-8897 vulnerability, users of Xen para-virtualization should also run a patched Xen system right away.

• Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, and some implementations of Xen have a design flaw that could allow attackers to, at best, crash Intel and AMD-powered computers.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange has been held incommunicado inside Ecuador’s embassy in London for more than one month. His full period of confinement without charge—a crime under international law—stands at 2,710 days.

• Ecuador blocked Assange’s phone and Internet access on March 28, depriving him of all visitors, after a meeting in Quito one day earlier with the US military’s Southern Command. Ecuador stated that Twitter posts by Assange on Catalonia and the Skripal affair had “put at risk” Ecuador’s relations with the United Kingdom, the European Union and “other nations.”

• The circumstances of Assange’s political asylum in central London resemble a prison cell. Less than 200 metres from Harrods, conditions at 3 Hans Court fully conform to those of “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” outlawed under the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Here a few common words that have special meaning in context of responding to oil and chemical spills in the ocean.

Finance

• Support is already in place with payment processors including Stripe and Braintree. The Zuora billing service is also signed up, as are invoice services FreshBooks, Intuit, Sage, Wave, and Xero. Fiserv will also be added soon. All a business needs to do is embed a payment action in Outlook and send it to the customer.

• It is no accident that much of the United States remains segregated. Decades of slavery, Jim Crow laws, discriminatory lending practices, and intentional policy choices at the federal, state, and local level — most of which were enacted within the last 80 years — helped make it so.

• The Fair Housing Act, passed in 1968, just a week after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, was meant to address the decades of discrimination that led to such segregation. The FHA made it illegal to discriminate against anyone buying or renting a house because of their race, color, religion, sex, or national origin (it’s since been amended to include family status and disability, too). But it also sought to replace segregation in America with “truly integrated and balanced living patterns” by requiring agencies to “affirmatively” further fair housing in all programs related to housing.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• First Eric Schneiderman was investigating Cy Vance Jr. Now Cy Vance Jr. is investigating Eric Schneiderman.

• Vance, the Manhattan district attorney, is examining reports that Schneiderman struck or assaulted several women, said Danny Frost, a spokesman for the office. Those allegations, reported late Monday in the New Yorker, led to Schneiderman’s abrupt resignation as New York’s attorney general on Monday night.

• In January of 2017, the country was still reeling—as indeed we continue to reel—from the election of Donald Trump. Corporate news media were full of allegations of Russian hacking—of the election and, at one point we were told, the electrical grid in Vermont. Barack Obama signed off on something called the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, the point of which was to aim communications at people overseas to “countermessage” the ideas of “terrorists,” as defined of course by the state. And a website launched, purporting to serve as a “watchlist” on professors deemed guilty of advancing leftist propaganda in the classroom. The feeling in the air led CounterSpin to speak with Ellen Schrecker, retired professor of American history at Yeshiva University and the author of a number of books, including Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America and No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism in the Universities.

• I agree that it’s dangerous to be under that degree of self-delusion; none of these ideas are remotely taboo; they’re the kind of things that are said routinely in outlets like, to pick one at random, the New York Times.

• Take a piece that ran in the New York Times Sunday Review last month (4/20/18), headlined “Why Men Quit and Women Don’t.” Looking at the differences in male and female drop-out rates in the Boston Marathon, the article presents “a whole range of theories on why women out-endured men in Boston — body fat composition, decision-making tendencies, pain tolerance, even childbirth.” Lindsey Crouse, a senior staff editor for the Times‘ Op-Docs feature, quotes psychologist and TedTalk podcaster Adam Grant: “There’s a biological and social tendency for women to tend toward caregiving…. Women are more likely to reach out to runners next to them and offer support and seek support.” Was anyone scandalized to find this discussion of biological gender differences in the Times?

• [...]

• I guess it’s not hard to see either the psychological appeal or the marketing advantages of pretending that your absolutely commonplace, widely publicized ideas are brave truths that have to be circulated via samizdat. But if you know what it actually feels like to have an idea that can’t be discussed in broad daylight, try suggesting that the wealth of billionaires ought to be confiscated to feed the hungry and house the homeless.

• If you live in Wales, are aged 11-18 and want to take part in the Welsh Youth Parliament you will not be allowed to disclose your party affiliation.

• The Welsh Government announced the end to their consultation in November 2017 and have decided on the particulars surrounding the Welsh Youth Parliament, despite never publishing the results of the consultation.

• We’ve written about paywalls for many, many years — often in fairly critical terms. It’s not that we think that paywalls are somehow “bad,” but that (1) for most publications, they won’t actually work and (2) they are quite frequently counterproductive. In addition, we believe that there are both societal and business advantages to having certain information be available for free. Paywalls are (once again) getting attention, and there it’s worth discussing this latest round of interest and why it’s misguided. First, the general opinion from media folks on paywalls is pretty nicely summarized by Megan McArdle’s recent story (possibly paywalled…) entitled “Farewell to Free Journalism.” The key thesis is that the online ad market has basically disappeared, and thus, paywalls are the only option. The first part of the argument is correct: the online ad market has almost entirely disappeared. Non-publishers don’t quite understand how massively online advertising rates have declined — whether it’s due to greater and greater supply or Google and Facebook (the usual targets) sucking up all the ad revenue with their superior targeting.

• But, just as a data point: ad revenue here at Techdirt is now on the order of about 5% of what it was six or seven years ago. Not down 5%. Down 95%. That… makes it impossible to survive if you’re just supported by ads. Thankfully we’re not tied solely to that revenue, though the decline certainly hurts (speaking of which: feel free to support us directly). At this point, we barely even consider ad revenue when we look at how the company makes money.

• So, if you believe that there are only two revenue models for media: advertising or subscription, it’s not hard to see how many publications are jumping over to the paywall (subscription) model. The problem is that just because one business model doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean that the other will.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Press freedom is hanging by a thread in Britain. Tomorrow, the House of Commons will vote on the Data Protection Bill, and Labour MPs have added amendments to it that would effectively end 300 years of press freedom in this country.

• Pro-independence groups yesterday urged the government to tackle what they said was Hon Hai Group chairman Terry Gou’s (郭台銘) censorship of media, after a system operator partly owned by Gou cut off Formosa TV’s (FTV) channels on Friday.

• The Taiwan Society and other groups told a news conference in Taipei that they object to Gou’s attempt to monopolize the media, given his massive investments in China, and they called on the National Communications Commission (NCC) to work harder to defend press freedom.

• FTV is the nation’s only TV station not tainted by Chinese influence, Union of Taiwan Teachers (UTT) executive director Hsiao Hsiao-ling (蕭曉玲) said, calling on the Democratic Progressive Party administration to treat the issue as a national security crisis.

• As China has been working steadily toward its aim of unification, Taiwan should not allow those close to the Chinese government to deprive Taiwanese of “their right to know,” Northern Taiwan Society secretary-general Pan Wei-yu (潘威佑) said.

• A group of Christian college students has released a survey that suggests censorship of student publications is not uncommon at American Christian schools, with student editors alleging faculty and administrators wield broad editorial control over campus newspapers and sometimes kill stories before publication.

• Administrators at Christian colleges have a legal right to control their schools’ newspapers, and argue they do so to safeguard the values that define their institutions.

• Thanks to its politically provocative subject matter, Lost in Fumes, a documentary made by a 22-year-old on a minuscule budget of $12,800 (HK$100,000), has become Hong Kong’s hottest ticket in the past six months. But because of that same subject matter, no commercial film exhibitor in the city has been willing to touch it. The documentary follows the post-election comedown of Hong Kong university student-turned-pro-democracy activist Edward Leung, an eloquent former rising star of local politics who has been threatened with prison over his participation in a protest that became a riot. The film’s fate has renewed fears in Hong Kong’s entertainment sector about the continued erosion of freedom of speech — a trend that has included self-censorship among the city’s establishment as much as outright suppression.

• Lost in Fumes is the second documentary feature from recent college graduate Nora Lam. Since November, it has been playing to packed houses at Hong Kong’s Art Centre, at colleges and universities and in impromptu underground community screenings. But Leung’s political stance — which falls somewhat outside the local mainstream and is viewed by the ruling Communist Party in Beijing as a serious threat to its sovereignty over Hong Kong — has meant that most local business leaders would rather run a mile to avoid being associated with the film for fear of social or political reprisal.

Privacy/Surveillance

• It may have taken them 15 days to respond, but the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) today told Computer Business Review that while the US National Security Agency (NSA)’s cryptography ciphers “Simon and Speck” had indeed been rejected by the organisation, while they were probably dead, they were not yet buried.

• The NSA had become embroiled in a heated public dispute over the ciphers in late April. It had put them forward as potential international cryptographic standards, but run into a hailstorm of opposition from ISO experts.

• SIMON and SPECK were made public by the NSA in 2013 and are optimised for low-cost processors like Internet of Things (IoT) devices, but fears that they were back-doored, and claims that the NSA refused to answer questions about the choice of matrices in Simon’s key schedule, saw them nixed by ISO delegates.

• (Two block ciphers suitable for lightweight cryptography are currently recognised by ISO under ISO/IEC 29192-2:2012: Orange Labs-developed PRESENT: a lightweight block cipher with a block size of 64 bits and a key size of 80 or 128 bits and Sony-developed CLEFIA: a lightweight block cipher with a block size of 128 bits and a key size of 128, 192 or 256 bits.)

• Ring customers can already share footage from their doorbell cameras—with police, with friends, and most anywhere online. A company blog post, for example, lists “The 8 Scariest Videos Caught by Ring,” and user-submitted footage (or “Customer Stories”) is heavily promoted on Ring’s website. The company even provides a how-to guide for downloading and sharing videos across social media.

• Two Danish ISPs have won their long-running battle to prevent the identities of alleged pirates being handed over to copyright trolls. With the trolls’ activities being described as “mafia-like”, ISPs Telenor and Telia argued that IP address logs should only be used in serious criminal cases. In a ruling handed down Monday, one of Denmark’s highest courts agreed, stopping the copyright trolls in their tracks.

• The NSA and U.S. Cyber Command have a new, state-of-the-art facility to call home.

• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the company will exclude North America from GDPR protections but has noted that the company plans to roll out its own separate adjustments to users in other regions.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Recognizing the concerns of Georgia’s cybersecurity sector, Gov. Nathan Deal has vetoed a bill that would have threatened independent research and empowered dangerous “hack back” measures.

• S.B. 315 would have created the new crime of “unauthorized access” without any requirement that the defendant have fraudulent intent. This could have given prosecutors the discretion to target independent security researchers who uncover security vulnerabilities, even when they have no criminal motives and intend to disclose the problems ethically. The bill also included a dangerous exemption for “active defense measures.”

• “After careful review and consideration of this legislation, including feedback from other stakeholders, I have concluded more discussion is required before enacting this cybersecurity legislation,” Gov. Deal wrote in his veto message.

• The CIA is deflecting attempts to get to the bottom of Haspel’s record. But the defenses of that record don’t hold water.

• As we approach the confirmation hearing on Wednesday for Gina Haspel, Donald Trump’s pick to head the CIA, the agency continues to hide from the American public virtually all information about her role in torture and the destruction of evidence documenting it.

• According to The Washington Post, Haspel even sought to withdraw her nomination out of concern about questions that she and the CIA have long avoided. Later reporting has suggested that Haspel’s withdrawal was motivated by concern that the White House wouldn’t fully back her in light of documents showing her unquestioning complicity in torture. As public scrutiny mounts, CNN reports that the Trump administration is already getting a Plan B nominee, Susan Gordon, the deputy director of national intelligence, ready if the Haspel nomination fails.

• Although Haspel decided to move forward with the confirmation process after persuasion by White House officials, there is no indication that she has any intention of coming clean about her history helping lead the CIA’s Bush-era torture program. Instead, the CIA is doubling down on a propaganda campaign on Haspel’s behalf, pushing what several senators have called a “superficial narrative” that “does a great disservice to the American people” by denying them basic information about a person poised to assume one of the most powerful roles in the country. According to the Washington Post, “documents that haven’t been made public, show that Haspel was an enthusiastic supporter of what the CIA was doing.” Those are documents that the American people need to see.

• We fully expect that Haspel will try to deflect attempts to get to the bottom of her record by relying on tired defenses that have no basis in law or history. Here is the truth behind some of the defenses we can expect to hear this week from torture defenders.

• Putting Haspel in charge of the CIA would undo attempts by the agency — and the nation — to repudiate torture. The message this would send to the CIA workforce is simple: Engage in war crimes, in crimes against humanity, and you’ll get promoted. Don’t worry about the law. Don’t worry about ethics. Don’t worry about morality or the fact that torture doesn’t even work. Go ahead and do it anyway. We’ll cover for you. And you can destroy the evidence, too.

• Described in the media as a “seasoned intelligence veteran,” Haspel has been at the CIA for 33 years, both at headquarters and in senior positions overseas. Now the deputy director, she has tried hard to stay out of the public eye. Former CIA Director Michael Pompeo has lauded her “uncanny ability to get things done and inspire those around her.”

• Gina Haspel’s nomination to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency raises a slew of questions for the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding her record on torturewhen she sits down before the committee on Wednesday.

• Her confirmation hearings will no doubt raise questions of legality and ethics. With respect to torture, some have argued that Haspel’s and other’s motivation in overseeing torture and then covering it up may simply be sadism.

• But—especially given how little we know about Haspel’s record — it’s possible that there’s an even more insidious motive in the U.S. government for practicing torture: To produce the rigged case for more war. Examining this possibility is made all the more urgent as Trump has put in place what clearly appears to be a war cabinet. My recent questioning at the State Department failed to produce a condemnation of waterboarding by spokesperson Heather Nauert.

• Haspel’s hearing on Wednesday gives increased urgency to highlighting her record on torture and how torture has been “exploited.” That is, how torture was used to create “intelligence” for select policies, including the initiation of war.

• Leave it to Donald Trump, besieged by denunciations of his torturous behavior toward women, to have nominated a female torturer to head the Central Intelligence Agency. It was a move clearly designed to prove that a woman can be as crudely barbaric as this deeply misogynistic president. When it comes to bullying, Gina Haspel, whose confirmation hearing begins Wednesday, is the real deal, and The Donald is a pussycat by comparison. Whom has he ever waterboarded? Haspel has done that and a lot worse. Haspel is Trump’s ideal feminist, a point tweeted on May 5 by White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders:

• “There is no one more qualified to be the first woman to lead the CIA than 30+ year CIA veteran Gina Haspel. Any Democrat who claims to support women’s empowerment and our national security but opposes her nomination is a total hypocrite.”

• They call her “Bloody Gina,” and for some of her buddies in the torture wing of the CIA and their supporters in Congress, that is meant as

• The Connecticut Legislature has sent a bill to the governor’s desk that seeks to end having victims of domestic violence arrested along with their abusers because they fight back during the course of an assault.

• For years, Connecticut’s domestic violence victims have been at risk of “dual arrests” — instances in which police arrest both the victim and the perpetrator of domestic violence. The state has a dual arrest rate of about 18 percent in “intimate partner” incidents, a ProPublica analysis in early 2017 found. The average for the rest of the country hovers at about 2 percent.

• The rates were much higher in certain communities. Using data from the Connecticut Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, ProPublica reported that in Windsor, a town of 29,044, dual arrests accounted for 35 percent of intimate partner arrests in 2015. In Ansonia, a city of 19,020, the rate was 37 percent.

• As marijuana is slowly, but steadily, being legalized, complications have arisen. First, the federal government still considers it illegal, although it has chosen to take a mostly-hands off approach to state-level legalization. Second, law enforcement agencies are seeing a very lucrative field of drug enforcement being slowly closed off. This isn’t sitting well with agencies that rely heavily on pot busts to show their effectiveness and secure funding.

• There’s something else being adversely affected: the employment of a few hundred law enforcement “officers.” Won’t someone think of the poor drug dogs forced out onto the streets/put to death as marijuana legalization cruelly takes their reason for existence away? That’s the breathless parade of horribles being offered by law enforcement officers in Illinois — another state looking to legalize weed.

• Jose Rodriguez, the CIA official who ordered CIA officers to destroy a cache of videotapes that had documented the treatment of two terror suspects, says he told Gina Haspel what he intended to do. President Trump’s pick to head the CIA said she had no idea he planned to act without approval from senior officials.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• If you missed it, large ISPs like Verizon, with the help of the Trump administration and GOP, worked to quickly kill FCC privacy protections before they could take effect last year. Those rules were arguably modest by any measure, simply requiring that ISPs transparently disclose what data is being collected and who it’s being sold to, while providing users working opt out tools (or opt in tools if dealing with sensitive consumer financial data). Those rules, you’ll recall, were only proposed after ISPs repeatedly made it clear they were utterly unwilling and unable to self-regulate on the privacy front.

• ISPs like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast were given ample leeway on privacy for years. Our reward was covert efforts to track users around the internet without telling them, and repeated efforts to charge users more if they wanted to protect their own privacy. Large ISPs had every opportunity to avoid regulation and self-regulate. They showed us repeatedly this was beyond their capabilities. Limited broadband competition routinely protected them from any repercussions, and revolving-door regulators have now completed the circle of dysfunction.

• The cable company Americans love to hate is about to go supernova. Comcast acquired NBC Universal back in 2011, giving the company unprecedented control of not only the conduit into the house, but also the information and news being sent over those wires. And while regulators affixed some flimsy conditions to the deal, Comcast managed to ignore many of them, a major reason why regulators moved to block Comcast’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable a few years ago.

• Because we’re unwilling to learn much of anything from history, Comcast’s now on the verge of growing significantly larger. The company recently unveiled a $30 billion plan to acquire European pay TV giant Sky.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Romance novelists have risen en masse to defend their right to use the word “cocky”, after one writer moved to trademark the adjective.

• Faleena Hopkins is the self-published author of a series of books about the “Cocker Brothers” (“Six bad boy brothers you’ll want to marry or hide under you [sic] bed”), each of which features the word “cocky” in the title: Cocky Romantic, Cocky Biker, Cocky Cowboy. On Saturday, author Bianca Sommerland posted a YouTube video sharing allegations that Hopkins had written to authors whose books also had titles including the word “cocky”, informing them that she had been granted the official registered trademark of the adjective in relation to romance books, and asking them to rename their novels or face legal action.

Copyrights

• In announcing their new post, Ed Klaris and Alexia Bedat state: “An update to our article reviewing US and European law/recent developments in link liability in both the copyright and defamation contexts and providing a checklist of questions an attorney (or editor) ought to ask before deciding, prepublication, whether a proposed link may lead to liability in the US and/or the EU. Updates include the recent Goldman v. Breitbart decision in which a Federal Judge concluded that embedding a Tweet can be copyright infringement.”

• [...]

• Understanding hyperlinking liability in the European Union, as well as the United States, is thus a prerequisite, both for media companies and the lawyers advising them. Until recently, the act of linking to material that is either copyrighted or defamatory in the United States did not, on its own, carry liability. In February 2018, however, the Southern District of New York handed down an opinion altering the status quo of copyright infringement. At the time of writing, in the Second Circuit, embedding a tweet, without any actual copying, violates the Copyright Act. This development makes the framework of link liability in United States potentially as complicated as the legal framework developed in Europe over the course of the last five years.

• The RIAA is not willing to let ISP Grande Communications off the hook easily. The music group has asked a Texas federal court for permission to file an amended complaint based on new evidence, arguing that the Internet provider profited from its decision not to terminate pirating subscribers.

• The European Commission is expanding its plans for proposed automated censorship: from only having concerned copyright infringements, which is bad enough and cannot nearly be determined by a machine, the automated censorship is also going to suppress any speech with the wrong political opinion. The political term for the wrong political opinion is “terrorist propaganda”, which typically just means “a narrative from regimes that we’re not allied with right this very moment”.

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