● 05.28.18

● Links 28/5/2018: Linux 4.17 RC7, Fedora 26 EOL Soon

Posted in News Roundup at 3:48 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The One Netbook One Mix Yoga mini PC will ship with Windows 10 when it hits the streets in the coming weeks, but since I’ve been testing a pre-production prototype sent to me by the folks at Geekbuying (who are taking pre-orders for $460), I figured I’d see how it handles the recently-released Ubuntu 18.04 Linux operating system.

• For the most part it was smooth sailing, but there was one major issue: the Ubuntu didn’t recognize the little computer’s audio hardware out of the box. So while the keyboard, optical touch pointer, touchscreen, and digital pen all worked out of the box, audio did not.

• Linux is an Operating System (more specifically a kernel) that provides an interface between the computer hardware and the user. Like Microsoft Windows and OS X, Linux provides a platform to the users, enabling them to carry out their daily chores on their beloved computer. And in case you dual-booted or installed Linux on your computer or are just curious to know how Linux can make your life easier, then, you are at the right place.

• Yes, you could use a flavour of Linux on cheaper hardware, but then you trade the great Mac graphical interface with the ones available to Linux.

• You can fight me in the comments, but deep down you know I’m right.

• MacOS comes with Bash, and many of the tools those familiar with Linux would expect to have by default in their favourite distribution, including basics like “whois”, which aren’t installed in Windows by default.

• The original assumed vision of the Chromebook platform was a laptop and operating system capable of running only the Chrome web browser. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you wanted to stay on the web at all times.

• Today, the best new Chromebooks can runs apps from three additional operating systems.

• Not only do Chromebooks run apps, but they run more apps without dual- or multi-booting than any other computing platform. Chromebooks can run apps from Android, Linux and Windows concurrently in the same session.

• I bought my old Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon (1st gen.) when I entered grad school for my Master’s program, in 2012. And after six years, the Thinkpad still ran well, but it was getting old, so I figured it was time for a change. I went back and forth about what kind of system should replace my laptop. I don’t travel that much, so I figured a desktop would be better. And I could get a bigger screen.

• After going back and forth on the decision, I decided to get a laptop. I don’t often travel with a laptop, but when I do, I prefer to use my primary system so I don’t have to keep things synced. Of course, I wanted my system to run Linux. Purism is aimed at the Linux laptop market, and I wanted to support that. So I bought a Librem 13.

• I’ve had it now for about a week, and I love it now. But I’ll be honest, I didn’t love it right out of the box. I’d like to note two issues for folks who are thinking about getting a Librem laptop, so you aren’t surprised like I was.

• While Dell is mostly known as a Windows PC manufacturer, the company is also a big proponent of Linux. Its “Developer Edition” models can be configured with Ubuntu, for instance. Of course, despite this branding, non-developers can buy them too. The XPS 13 “Developer Edition” in particular is a svelte machine that should make many home Linux users very happy.

• In addition to home users, Dell manufactures solid business-class mobile workstations, and the company recently announced four such Linux-powered models. These Precision “Developer Edition” laptops run Ubuntu and are RHEL certified. One of these notebooks, the Precision 3530, is available today, while the other three will be available soon.

• It’s been a little over a year since Dell updated its Precision mobile workstation line, which is notable for its inclusion of the Ubuntu flavor of Linux as an operating system option alongside Windows 10. But last week, the company refreshed the laptop lineup without much fanfare, starting with the entry-level Precision 3530.

Server

• IT organizations strive to deliver business value by increasing productivity and delivering services faster while remaining flexible enough to incorporate innovations like cloud, containers, and configuration automation. Modern workloads, whether they run on bare metal, virtual machines, containers, or private or public clouds, are expected to be portable and scalable. Supporting all this requires a modern, secure platform.

• The most direct route to innovation is not always a straight line. With the growing adoption of private and public clouds, multiple architectures, and virtualization, today’s data center is like a globe, with varying infrastructure choices bringing it dimension and depth. And just as a pilot depends on air traffic controllers to provide continuous updates, your digital transformation journey should be guided by a trusted operating system like Linux to provide continuously updated technology and the most efficient and secure access to innovations like cloud, containers, and configuration automation.

• Linux operating system (OS) is used by many users both at home and at the office: it is running on personal computers, mobile devices, and web server systems on-premise, hosted or in the cloud. So, why so many Linux addicts? Free, open-source and with a community of enthusiastic supporters and experts, Linux is the choice of many for private and commercial purposes, as it allows total control and customization capabilities.

• KB Kookmin has decided to continue its controversial partnership with IBM, which offered heavy discounts to supply its mainframe system for use in the bank’s banking application system.

• The monetary value of the deal is estimated at 340 billion won ($310 million). KB Kookmin will hold a board meeting later this week to fix the budget for the system renewal, bank officials said Monday.

Kernel Space

• So this week wasn’t as calm as the previous weeks have been, but despite that I suspect this is the last rc.

• This week we had the whole “spectre v4″ thing, and yes, the fallout from that shows up as part of the patch and commit log. But it’s not actually dominant: the patch is pretty evenly one third arch updates, one third networking updates, and one third “rest”.

• The arch updates are largely – although not exclusively – spectre v4.

• The networking stuff is mostly network drivers, but there’s some core networking too.

• And “the rest” is just that – misc drivers (rdma, gpu, other), documentation, some vfs, vm, bpf, tooling..

• The bulk of it is really pretty trivial one-liners, and nothing looks particularly scary. Let’s see how next week looks, but if nothing really happens I suspect we can make do without an rc8.

• Shortlog appended as usual. Go out and test.

• While this past week for kernel development has been busier than in prior weeks, Linus Torvalds today released Linux 4.17-rc7 and feels the official/stable release might be ready next week.

Graphics Stack

• Of the hundreds of projects for this year’s Google Summer of Code, there are many interesting GSoC 2018 projects but one of those that I am most excited for is Vulkan-Virgl for getting this modern API supported with hardware acceleration by guest virtual machines.

• As implied by the name, this effort is based upon the Virgl project started by David Airlie and originally tasked with getting OpenGL acceleration to guest VMs using a fully open-source Linux driver stack. Virgl has been in good shape for a while now with OpenGL, while this summer the hope is to get the Vulkan API support going for opening up VMs to using this high-performance graphics and compute API.

• There’s been another weekly-ish public code push to the AMDVLK open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver stack and this time around it’s heavy on feature work.

• There has been a fair amount of changes pertaining to half-float (FP16) support including support for the AMD_gpu_shader_half_float extension, prepping for VK_AMD_gpu_shader_half_float_fetch, FP16 interpolation intrinsics and register settings, and more.

• We have been covering the Linux driver upbringing of “Vega M” for the Vega/Polaris graphics found in select newer Intel “Kabylake G” processors. The code is still in flight before it will work in all released versions of the Linux driver components, but for those willing to build the code or rely upon third party repositories, Vega M is now working on Linux.

• As I have covered in various past articles, the open-source driver support for Radeon Vega M is queued into DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 4.18 kernel cycle, Mesa 18.1 albeit with new hardware I always recommend using the latest Git (current Mesa 18.2), and there are also binary GPU microcode files needed too.

• DXVK [GitHub] advances so quickly it’s really quite incredible, it had a release only a few days ago and here we are with another.

• No big new features with this release, as it’s mainly to clean up some issues. Two regressions were fixed from the previous release with World of Warcraft, Far Cry 3 and Nier: Automata.

• Less than one week after releasing DXVK 0.52, the DXVK 0.53 release is now available for running Direct3D 11 games/applications over Vulkan.

Benchmarks

• Here is a look at twelve different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards while testing was done using the newest available graphics drivers and using an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS installation.

• With the Phoronix.com 14th birthday coming up in two weeks as well as marking the 10th birthday of the initial Phoronix Test Suite release, a lot of exciting benchmarks are coming in the days to come. For kicking off the latest of some large comparisons to come are some fresh graphics card benchmarks using the newest and continuously evolving open-source Radeon graphics drivers as well as the latest NVIDIA 396 Linux driver, which is also exciting due to the roll-out of their new LLVM-based SPIR-V compiler.

Applications

• In this article, we’ll focus on how you can browse the internet from Linux command line using text-based browsers. Text browsers are browsers that only render the text contents of a web page, leaving out all the graphical content including CSS and Javascript. This makes these browsers faster and consume less bandwidth. On the downside, however, the browsing experience is quite dull as no images & videos are displayed unlike conventional web browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome. We’ll take a look at 4 text-based browsers on Ubuntu 18.04 terminal.

• Hosted Weblate provides also free hosting for free software projects. The hosting requests queue has grown too long and waited for more than month, so it’s time to process it and include new projects. I hope that gives you have good motivation to spend Christmas break by translating free software.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The current VR landscape is fragmented and quite a mess with the lack of standardization and wide variety of hardware capabilities at this point, though fortunately the forthcoming OpenXR standard coming out of The Khronos Group for a standard API for application developers as well as a standard device layer / abstraction interface will clear this up when released later in 2018. But for now we have some interesting remarks from an open-source developer that has been engaging in this area and doing his best with the current VR scene.

• Earlier in the week I shared news of the success in the effort to get the PlayStation VR head-mounted display working on Linux and running with SteamVR / Dota 2. Due to the current messy landscape between VR HMDs, it was quite a feat.

• SC Controller [GitHub], the rather great driver and user interface for working with the Steam Controller (and now many others) outside of Steam recently added Bluetooth support.

• For fans of monster taming RPGs, you might want to take a look at Siralim 3 [Steam] which is now available in Early Access.

• What makes Siralim 3 interesting, is just how deep the mechanics of the game go. There’s over 700 monsters to fight and tame with their own lore, you can explore randomly generated dungeons, it has rich end-game content and you can practically play it forever without running out of things to do. There no level-cap and plenty of new features since the previous game.

• Changeover: Decisions caught my eye recently as a new release on Steam. It contains elements of a platformer, a visual novel and horror to create a bit of a weird mix.

• Here’s a cheap bit of fun for you. SLICE is a phyisics-based puzzle game where you slice up objects and hope for the best.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The Jade Desktop Environment is a new effort at delivering another Linux desktop option.

• The Jade Desktop is built on Python, HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript for delivering a new Linux desktop experience primarily built atop of web technologies but using GTK with WebKit2 for the tool-kit. Jade is licensed under the GNU GPLv2.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Plasma 5.13 is (going to be) a very nice release. It builds on the solid foundation that is the LTS edition, and adds cool, smart touches. The emphasis is on seamless integration of elements, which is what separates professionals from amateurs. It’s all around how the WHOLE desktop behaves, and not individual programs in isolation. And Plasma is making great strides, offering a polished version of an already mature and handsome product, with extra focus on fonts, media and browser connectivity and good performance.

• There are some rough patches. Apart from the obvious beta issues, those goes without saying, KDE Connect ought to be a true multi-phone product, the network stack really needs to be spotless, and that means full Microsoft Windows inter-operability, Spectacle should allow for configurable shadows and alpha channel, and I want to see if the decorative backend has been cleaned up, i.e. can you search and install new themes and icons without encountering useless errors and inconsistencies.

• But all in all, I’m quite impressed. The changes are big and noticeable, and above all, meaningful. You don’t just get features for the sake of it, you get things that improve the quality and consistency of the desktop, that maximize fun and productivity, and there’s deep thought in orchestrating it all together. It ain’t just a random bunch of options that happen to work. I like seeing patterns in things, and I’m happy when there’s functional harmony. This spring season of distro testing hasn’t been fun, and Plasma 5.13 is balm for my weary wrists, so hurting from all that angry typing. More than worth a spin, and highly recommended. Full steam on, Tuxers.

• Here’s some more Usability and Productivity! This week a ton of bugs got stamped out, some of them serious and long-standing. There’s also a lot more goodness that’s in the works, but not quite finished yet, so stay tuned for next week…

• Hi! My name’s Răzvan Rădulescu, I’m from Romania. I’ve had an interest in drawing since I was little. Unfortunately Romania is one of those countries that can crush creativity at a very early stage. At the time I was also interested in computers and started learning programming by myself, finally ended up doing physics in college and about three years ago I started playing with the idea of digital drawing and painting. The first two years have been painting on and off different things to get the hang of it, but about a year ago I decided to think about this path as more than just a hobby.

• Between the 23rd and 25th of March, KDE Connect developers gathered in Verse’s offices in Barcelona to work together for a weekend. It was the first meeting KDE Connect had in a while, and it was very productive!

• It’s been some time since the sprint, and the work carried out there has already started to trickle down into our devices. Nevertheless, we wanted to shed some light on our accomplishments, and encourage everyone to participate.

• Holding discussions and making decisions is much easier in person. We kicked off the sprint by going through our backlog of ideas to decide what was worth implementing. That helped us set the focus for the sprint and resume some blocked tasks.

• The week was totally involved in developing QML APIs similar to WebExtension APIs.

• Every few months there is a review about Plasma by dedoimedo and one critic point is that screenshots include the shadow. As I’m rather annoyed of these complaints about this I’m now doing a blog post to explain the situation so that in future this can be skipped.

• Shadows in the screenshots are not a bug, but an intended feature. It was implemented by me in 2010 on request by Nuno Pinheiro, our Oxygen god. Before screenshots did not support shadows and looked really, really bad as the window decorations are round and contained black corners. Shadows were part of the design and that was completely lacking. So we came up with a rather decent solution on how to screenshot the window with shadows included. I first mentioned this new effect in this blog post from August 2010.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• We are getting midterm of the GNOME 3.30 development cycle and many things already happened in the Games world. I will spare the user facing news for later as today I want to tell you about development features we desperatly needed as maintainers: tests and continuous integration.

• TL;DR: GLib, Meson, Flatpak and GitLab CI make writing and running tests super easy!

• An anonymous entity just pledged to donate $1 million to the GNOME foundation over the next two years. Any guesses who could be this anonymous donor?

• It’s been four months since I announced Epiphany Technology Preview — which I’ve been using as my main browser ever since — and five months since I announced the availability of a stable channel via Flatpak. For the most part, it’s been a good experience. Having the latest upstream development code for everything is wonderful and makes testing very easy. Any user can painlessly download and install either the latest stable version or the bleeding-edge development version on any Linux system, regardless of host dependencies, either via a couple clicks in GNOME Software or one command in the terminal. GNOME Software keeps it updated, so I always have a recent version. Thanks to this, I’m often noticing problems shortly after they’re introduced, rather than six months later, as was so often the case for me in the past. Plus, other developers can no longer complain that there’s a problem with my local environment when I report a bug they can’t reproduce, because Epiphany Technology Preview is a canonical distribution environment, a ground truth of sorts.

• Before jumping right into the Five or More implementation plan and details, I would like to keep you updated with the progress made thus far.

• I started working on some project-related tasks during the community bonding period, to cover up for the upcoming exam and research session and any other time frame in which I might not be as active as I would like to. Also, during this period, I had a previously announced one week trip, which kept me from working more on the project.

• [...]

• Then, I intend to create a basic Vala app and window based on the template generated by GNOME Builder, only using the UI file that already exists in the Five or More repository. If everything goes as planned, I will start adding one component at a time in the short run, starting with the application menu, the callbacks for the UI buttons, the preferences window, the score and the preview widgets, and lastly, the game area.

• GNOME in North America (this isn’t official, but it’s the name we’re proposing for the event in North America that is a consolidation of the Boston Summit and the West Coast Summit)

Distributions

• It seems more and more small distributions are facing a had time. Recently we saw the crisis at Void Linux. Now we have two more small Linux distributions calling it quit, albeit temporarily.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• This year openSUSE conference was held in Prague and, thanks to both my employer and openSUSE conference organizers, I’ve been able to spend almost a full day there.

• I’ve headed to Prague with a Fleet Commander talk accepted and, as openSUSE Leap 15.0 was released Yesterday, also with the idea to show an unattended (“express”) installation of the “as fresh as possible” Leap 15.0 happening on GNOME Boxes.

• The conference was not so big, which helped to easy spot some old friends (Fridrich Strba, seriously? Meeting you after almost 7 years … I have no words to describe my happiness on seeing you there!), some known faces (as Scott, with whom I just meet at conferences :-)) and also meet some people who either helped me a lot in the past (here I can mention the whole autoyast team who gave me some big support when I was writing down the autoinst.xml for libosinfo, which provides the support to do openSUSE’s express installations via GNOME Boxes) or who have some interest in some of the work I’ve been doing (as Richard Brown who’s a well-know figure around SUSE/openSUSE community, a GNOME Boxes user and also an enthusiastic supporter of our work done in libosiinfo/osinfo-db).

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, a major global player in open source solutions, is planning to expand its outreach programme to create human resources with skills required for its clients.

• Red Hat Academy, an arm of Red Hat, runs about 250 academies in various educational institutions in the country. “We have 1,000 such academies across the world. Of this, 500 are in the Asia-Pacific region,” Shirish Pandey, APAC Lead for Red Hat Academy, told BusinessLine.

• The academy offers open source and Linux curriculum programmes in engineering colleges.

• Thailand-based Ascend Money has selected open source solutions provider Red Hat to carry out and accelerate electronic payments across Southeast Asian region.

• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat Ansible Automation, and Red Hat Satellite help address technical debt, enable more agile and rapid deployment of payment services

Fedora

• As readers may be aware, Fedora 28 recently released to great acclaim. That means Fedora 26 hits its End of Life (EOL) status on June 1, 2018. Read more here about what this means, and what steps you can take with your older Fedora systems.

• After June 1, packages in the Fedora 26 repositories no longer receive any security, bugfix, or enhancement updates. Furthermore, at that point the community adds no new packages to the F26 collection.

• Ansible, while being agent-less, is not interpreter-less and requires a working Python installation on the target machine. Up until Ansible 2.3 the minimum Python version was 2.4, which is available in EL5. Starting with Ansible 2.4 this requirement has been bumped to Python 2.6 to accommodate future compatibility with Python 3. Sadly Python 2.6 is not easily available for EL5 and people who want/need to manage such old systems with Ansible have to find a new way to do so.

• First, I think it’s actually not possible to effectively manage a RHEL5 (or any other legacy/EOL system). Running ad-hoc changes in a mostly controlled manner – yes, but not fully manage them. Just imagine how much cruft might have been collected on a system that was first released in 2007 (that’s as old as Debian 4.0 Etch). To properly manage a system you need to be aware of its whole lifecycle, and that’s simply not the case here. But this is not the main reason I wanted to write this post.

Debian Family

• Debian is moving away from Gnome2::VFS. This obsolete module will be removed from next release of Debian.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• What is new in Ashtabula?

Flavours and Variants

• Pop!_OS is an Ubuntu-based distribution from System76, a Colorado-based company that sells computers with Linux pre-installed. The first release of Pop!_OS, version 17.10, was interesting and provided a very nice experience, but mostly involved pulling what System76 felt was the best bits from various upstream sources and combining them into a cohesive whole. While Pop!_OS 17.10 was fairly conservative, Pop!_OS 18.04 LTS provides some major new features, some of which are quite interesting. For example: GRUB has been replaced with systemd-boot and a tool called kernelstub, and there is a recovery partition, so a USB flash drive is no longer needed to rescue a system (at least in theory, the recovery partition is still a work in progress).

Devices/Embedded

• Gone are the days when prototyping your electronic gadget required you to fiddle with the breadboard. Dirty design, unsteady wire connections and having to do too much to get simple stuff working. Arduino has solved all of that today.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• If by chance you happen to have an Intel DG41WV motherboard, it’s now supported by mainline Coreboot so you can free the system down to the BIOS.

• The DG41WV motherboard comes from the LGA-775 days with an Intel G41 Eaglelake chipset back when DDR3-1066 was great, motherboards topped out with 4GB of RAM, four USB 2.0 ports were suitable, and motherboard PCBs were much less fashionable. The DG41WV was a micro-ATX board and a decent choice for the times to pair with a CPU like the Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad.

• All the attention geographical information systems (GIS) have gotten in recent years may make you think they are something new. In fact, geospatial data helped play a major role more than 160 years ago in identifying the source of the deadly London cholera outbreak of 1854. Dr. John Snow, a local physician, suspected that contaminated drinking water was the source of the disease. During the investigation, he plotted a density map of cholera cases and interviewed residents in the affected neighborhood to learned about their water use habits. His analysis showed a high number of incidents near a communal water pump.

• Neural machine translation (NMT) often figures prominently during SlatorCon events, and SlatorCon London held at Nobu Hotel in London Shoreditch on May 17, 2018 was no exception. In his presentation for the event, Jean Senellart, Global CTO of event partner Systran, discussed an aspect of NMT that he found both exciting and scary at the same time: the race for open source.

• Senellart briefly went through the history of 50-year old machine translation company Systran, a company that experienced and was directly involved in production-level deployments of all MT technologies—from rules-based MT to statistical MT to NMT.

• Tron-(TRX)-Opensource-Wallet-DApp-Is-Being-Developed-by-19-year-old-Expert

• A 19-year-old German developer has been the one in charge of creating Tron’s Opensource Wallet DApp. The name of this genius is Marius Gill, and has been programming since he was just 13 years old.

• The wallet DApp has been launched back in March, 2018, and is a result of the so called Project Genesis. The intention behind it was to encourage the crypto community to bring something new to the cryptocurrency ecosystem – which is in constant development and has great talents.

• A lot of big software vendors in the market including Microsoft are concerned that the source code of their program is not accessible by third parties. The implication of this is that the ability to develop applications and fix detected errors are vested in the hands of specific developers.

• This is not so with open source software where everyone has access to the source code of a program. Therefore, anyone who knows how to write code can modify, supplement or enhance such program according to their taste.

• Several popular programs such as Firefox or VLC player make use of open source licenses. They function on operating systems such as Windows, Mac,and Linux. Currently, over 300,000 software products have been designed for diverse tasks and purposes.

• While ReactOS 0.4.8 came out just a month ago, ReactOS 0.4.9 is approaching and currently at the release candidate phase.

• As of this weekend, ReactOS 0.4.9-RC23 is now available as the latest testing build towards ReactOS 0.4.9.

• Although your phone is probably the biggest threat to your privacy, your web browser is a close second. In the interest of providing you targeted ads, the web is littered with technology that attempts to track each site you go to via a combination of cookies and JavaScript snippets. These trackers aren’t just a privacy threat, they are also a security threat. Because of how ubiquitous these ad networks are, attackers have figured out ways to infiltrate some of them and make them serve up even more malicious code.

• The good news is that a series of privacy plugins work well with Firefox under Linux. They show up as part of the standard list of approved add-ons and will help protect you against these kinds of threats. Many different privacy plugins exist, but instead of covering them all, in this article, I highlight some of my personal favorites—the ones I install on all of my browsers. Although I discuss these plugins in the context of Firefox, many of them also are available for other Linux browsers. Because all of these plugins are standard Firefox add-ons, you can install them through your regular Firefox add-on search panel.

Events

• And that is the ultimate fraud: to make the world believe we are harmless little boys, so repressed that we can’t communicate properly. We’re so sorry we’re awkward, it’s because we’re all somewhat on the autism spectrum. Isn’t that, after all, a convenient affliction for people that would not dare to confront the oppression they are creating? It’s too easy to hide behind such a real and serious condition that does affect people in our community, but also truly autistic people that simply cannot make it in the fast-moving world the magical rain man is creating. But the real con is hacking power and political control away from traditional institutions, seen as too slow-moving to really accomplish the “change” that is “needed”. We are creating an inextricable technocracy that no one will understand, not even us “experts”. Instead of serving the people, the machine is at the mercy of markets and powerful oligarchs.

• A recurring pattern at Kubernetes conferences is the KubeCon chant where Kelsey Hightower reluctantly engages the crowd in a pep chant:

• When I say ‘Kube!’, you say ‘Con!’

• ‘Kube!’ ‘Con!’ ‘Kube!’ ‘Con!’ ‘Kube!’ ‘Con!’

• Cube Con indeed…

• I wish I had some wise parting thoughts of where to go from here or how to change this. The tide seems so strong that all I can do is observe and tell stories. My hope is that the people that need to hear this will take it the right way, but I somehow doubt it. With chance, it might just become irrelevant and everything will fix itself, but somehow I fear things will get worse before they get better.

• I’m heading back to my friends in Scotland to speak at the JBoss User Group (JBug) Scotland next month. It’s a fun group of people who really seem to enjoy working with open source and JBoss software stacks.

• First off, on June 6th there will be a wonderful tech talk on application modernization and migration. This is followed by the JBug Scotland hosting a hands-on workshop. Come and get hands-on experience in a workshop showcasing application development in the cloud using containers, JBoss middleware, services, business logic, and APIs.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• At the beginning of the month I came back from my last few weeks of parental leave (thanks Mozilla!). While I was away Sarah Clements took over some Firefox Quantum release criteria work and I’m pleased to see that she managed to tackle everything well by herself.

• Some of the major changes she made was to separate the Quantum criteria page into 32-bit and 64-bit. This simplifies the graphs and allows release stakeholders to see more clearly how one specific architecture is doing.

• While Wayland support depends upon EGL and there has been EGL support within Mesa and the other graphics drivers on Linux for a number of years now, Firefox developers are still hesitant about shipping EGL support by default for Firefox on X11.

• A Phoronix reader pointed out a bug report to us where Firefox developers are still apprehensive over using EGL by default for Firefox on Linux/X11, even though Mesa’s EGL support has been relatively solid for years. There’s a belief that the EGL performance is worse off than GLX, but at least some upstream Mesa developers don’t believe that to be the case plus the fact most modern drivers relying upon GLAMOR with EGL/OpenGL for 2D acceleration.

SaaS/Back End

• Except they clearly don’t, given Red Hat’s OpenShift revenue, which keeps rising. Either those customers are blind to Beda’s argument (similar to those made by another competitor, Canonical, over the years), or they don’t agree with the accusations. Or maybe, just maybe, they don’t care.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• For fans of the GNU Emacs feature-packed text editor, Emacs 26.1 is out this US Memorial Day.

• Emacs 26.1 features a basic limited concurrency implementation by making use of Lisp threads. Another notable change is Emacs on X11 now using double-buffering to reduce screen flickering scenarios.

• Besides the limited form of Lisp threads concurrency and double buffering, Emacs 26.1 also now can optionally display the line numbers in the buffer, redesigned Flymake, a new single-line horizontal scrolling mode, a systemd user unit file is shipped as part of the package, and there is support for 24-bit colors on capable text terminals.

• We are happy to announce the release of GNU Bison 3.0.5, a bug fix release.

• For those still making use of the venerable Ada programming language, the latest development code for GCC 9 of the GNU Compiler Collection has been seeing a number of Ada front-end improvements this week.

• This strongly-typed, object-oriented programming language, that’s quite proven compared to Rust and other attention-getting languages these days, has seen a surprising number of fixes and improvements landing this week into mainline GCC 9. The Ada work in GCC 9 besides various fixes have included some performance improvements, addressing some spurious errors, support for C99/C++ standard boolean types, minor documentation updates, Windows updates, and moe.

Public Services/Government

• FOSSID, the world’s largest database for scanning open source code and snippets, today announced it is being awarded a grant of 2 Million SEK (US $250,000) to integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies into its database and code-scanning tools. The grant is being awarded by Vinnova, Sweden’sgovernment agency focused on research and innovation.

• The FOSSID AI For Open Source Auditing Project will combine the largest and highest performing knowledge base of open source on the market to dramatically cut costs in the software auditing process, reduce risks for tech companies and accelerate overall innovation.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Whether or not you personally agree with all the ideals of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), you’ve got to give them credit: they don’t mess around. They started by laying the groundwork for a free and open source operating system, then once that dream was realized, started pushing the idea of replacing proprietary BIOS firmware with an open alternative such as Libreboot. But apparently, even that’s not enough, as there’s still more freedom to be had. We’re playing 4D Libre Chess now, folks.

• [...]

• Luckily, the FSF has just awarded the Zerocat Chipflasher their “Respects Your Freedom” certification, meaning every element of the product is released under a free license for your hacking enjoyment.

Programming/Development

• Data science is an emerging, multidisciplinary field of scientific methods, processes, algorithm development and technology to extract knowledge or insights in ingenious ways from structured or unstructured data.

• At the heart of data science is data. Buckets loads of it, streaming in and stored in enterprise data warehouses. According to IBM, globally, we currently generate over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day. This data ranges from molecular biology to social media activity, astronomy, climate monitoring to health care. Large data sets are now generated by almost every activity in science, society, and commerce. There’s much to learn by mining that data, finding patterns and making predictions from this data. Data science is ultimately about asking interesting questions, and then finding answers using data that add value.

• Have you heard about behavior-driven development (BDD) and wondered what all the buzz is about? Maybe you’ve caught team members talking in “gherkin” and felt left out of the conversation. Or perhaps you’re a Pythonista looking for a better way to test your code. Whatever the circumstance, learning about BDD can help you and your team achieve better collaboration and test automation, and Python’s behave framework is a great place to start.

• [...]

• The main benefits of BDD are good collaboration and automation. Everyone can contribute to behavior development, not just programmers. Expected behaviors are defined and understood from the beginning of the process. Tests can be automated together with the features they cover. Each test covers a singular, unique behavior in order to avoid duplication. And, finally, existing steps can be reused by new behavior specs, creating a snowball effect.

Leftovers

• Most Indians are tied to their screens though they probably don’t see the extent of their dependence. About 45 per cent of respondents to a recent survey by TOI said they spent more than four hours a day on their phones. If you take away seven hours of sleep and seven hours at a job, that’s almost 40 per cent of your free time spent on a phone. As many as 76 per cent say their phone is the last thing they check just before they go to bed. It’s also the first thing 53 per cent of respondents look at in the morning, even before they use the toilet or brush their teeth. Close to 55,000 readers participated in the TOI survey conducted online.

• Yoneshige, now 29, realized the perilous situation of Japanese media when he was writing for an airline news website while still in middle and high school. The industry is too heavily staffed and doesn’t make enough money, he says.

Science

• Bean loved being an astronaut. He may have loved being an artist more.

Hardware

• Dabney was destined to work in tech early on. He learned about electronics while in the US Marine Corps, and took on tech roles at Bank of America and HP soon after leaving the military. His most fateful move, though, was when he joined Ampex in 1961. That gave him early experience with display technology and led him to meet Bushnell, who joined in 1969. They envisioned launching a pizza place with a coin-operated computer gaming system, and… well, you know the rest.

Health/Nutrition

• Some 90 percent of people in the world who need assistive technology – such as glasses, walkers, or hearing aids – cannot access it, with the worst deficiency in developing countries. Today, World Health Organization members agreed on a resolution to improve access to those technologies, with overwhelming support. The WHO is instructed to provide support to countries and prepare a global report by 2021. Member states are requested to promote innovation and find ways to reduce prices.

• Like Tesla, the American seeds major needs to move away from GM products to more sustainable technologies, and go patent-free to spur innovation.

Security

• For those unfamiliar with the term, Hacker Summer Camp is the combination of DEF CON, Black Hat USA, and BSides Las Vegas that takes place in the hot Las Vegas sun every summer, along with all the associated parties and side events. It’s the largest gathering of hackers, information security professionals and enthusiasts, and has been growing for 25 years. In this post, I’ll present my views on how to get the most out of your 2018 trip to the desert, along with tips & points from some of my friends.

• Josh and Kurt talk about the NTSB report from the fatal Uber crash and what happened with Amazon’s Alexa recording then emailing a private conversation. IT decisions now have real world consequences like never before.

• Veterans have also fallen victim of non-targeted cyber intrusions. Cyber criminals routinely attempt to steal personal health records to sell on the dark web, given how valuable such records are. As an example of a non-targeted cyber attack, the Conficker worm infected 104 medical devices at a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital in Florida in 2012 simply because a vender [sic] updated the devices with a thumb drive that had unknowingly been infected.

• It seems the deeper I went, the more interesting I found the content, and this post grew and grew. Hopefully it will help to shortcut your own journey down this path, and enlighten you to a whole new area of interesting things to hack!

• SHB is a small invitational gathering of people studying various aspects of the human side of security, organized each year by Alessandro Acquisti, Ross Anderson, and myself. The 50 or so people in the room include psychologists, economists, computer security researchers, sociologists, political scientists, neuroscientists, designers, lawyers, philosophers, anthropologists, business school professors, and a smattering of others. It’s not just an interdisciplinary event; most of the people here are individually interdisciplinary.

• This week only, Cisco reported about the malware called VPNFilter which is assumed to have targeted around 500,000 routers to create a massive botnet. It’s believed that the malware, having a resemblance to BlackEnergy malware, could have its roots originating in Russia.

• Fiat Chrysler America is recalling 4.8 million vehicles in the US to fix a software bug that could lock the vehicle’s cruise control.

• Until it’s fixed, owners of some Ram pickups, Jeep SUVs, and other Chrysler and Dodge vehicles are being warned against using cruise control.

Defence/Aggression

• Donald Trump launched his presidency with the killing of nine children. Only a week after taking office, the reality star turned commander-in-chief ordered a made-for-TV raid in the dead of night that saw Navy SEALs storming a rural village in Yemen. A leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was said to be hiding out there.

• “A fierce gunfight turned into an intense aerial bombardment,” the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported. By dawn, 14 militants had been killed – along with 25 civilians, among them the 8-year-old daughter of extremist preacher Anwar al-Awlaqi. Awlaqi and his 16-year-old son had already been killed in separate US drone strikes in 2011.

• [...]

• The resolution was first put forward to vote in the Senate in March, but was defeated. Nevertheless, Sanders intends to bring back the measure for another vote, according to his spokesperson Josh Miller-Lewis .

• “The resolution is concerned specifically with the lack of authorisation for US military support for the Saudi-led war against the Houthis,” he told me in an email exchange.

• Ending the Saudi-led war should be a priority for anyone who values human life. Since 2014, weddings, funerals and street markets have all been bombed by the Saudi coalition. Yemenis are besieged and mortared by Houthi militants, too, but they are killed, overwhelmingly, by the other side, which drops bombs that the US and Europe provide.

• By the end of 2017, according to the United Nations, more than 5,200 civilians had been killed as a result of a war with no clear point or end in sight; tens of thousands more face death from starvation or cholera.

• An “off the cuff-remark” by a former chief of Mossad, Israeli Intelligence agency, prompted the American CIA to send an emergency team to Pakistan to learn if a major conflict between India and Pakistan was imminent in 90s.

• In a recent interview with a magazine and in his book “Head of the Mossad”, Shabtai Shavit has shared his views on a variety of issues.

• According to Shavit, In 1990, during a meeting with chief of CIA’s analysis department at a restaurant in the Israeli capital he made the remarks about India-Pakistan issues.

• Heavy fighting in Yemen between pro-government forces and Shiite rebels has killed more than 150 people in the last four days, Yemeni officials and witnesses said on Sunday.

• Government forces have been trying to seize rebel-held areas along the western coast, while an allied Saudi-led coalition has been targeting the rebels with airstrikes in the northwestern Saada province, a rebel stronghold.

• Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said on Sunday that he does not believe North Korea’s claims that it is willing to denuclearize.

• “These folks are not going to get rid of all their nuclear weapons,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

• Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was on the stomp in San Francisco last weekend to promote his new memoir, My Country, My Life. He was met by a group of highly organized young protesters who were interested in a few facts that the former Israeli PM did not include in his new memoir.

• “Ehud Barak gave the order to kill 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza, with 344 children dead,” called out Lauren Holtzman, a member for Jewish Voice for Peace and one of those arrested at the event. “He declared the siege on Gaza, limiting food, medicine and water.” Holtzman was referencing Barak’s responsibility as Israeli Defense Minister for Operation Cast Lead, the Jewish State’s bloody 2008-09 assault on Gaza.

• WILL the new Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle speak out against human rights violations caused by drone attacks, more so, because as a newly-wedded bride, she can imagine better how horrible it must be to have one’s wedding party bombed, the bride herself, killed? Body parts scattered… To paraphrase a HRW report title, for A Wedding to Become a Funeral? Will her feminist empathy extend to female victims of drone attacks? To say, six-year old Paliko (same age as Markle’s bridesmaid), who was brought to the hospital still wearing her party dress, whose family members had all been killed when a US air patrol had mistaken traditional gunfire to celebrate Pashtun weddings, as enemy fire? Most unlikely. For, the murder of civilians is built into the USA’s so-called ‘war on terror’ and, as Binoy Kampark writes, Markle is not there to inflict change upon the institution of monarchy, but to be changed by it. And, Grenfell Tower will perhaps be too close to home.

• Israeli tank shelling killed three members of the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, medical officials said, after weeks of border protests that have drawn lethal army fire.

• [...]

• Islamic Jihad operates with a measure of independence from Hamas, the Islamist group that has controlled Gaza since 2007 and fought three wars against Israel.

• Hostilities over the frontier have soared since Palestinians began mass-demonstrations on March 30, which Israel deems to be cover for attempts to breach the border fence.

• At least 115 Palestinians have been killed and thousands hurt by army gunfire in the protests, drawing foreign censure.

• On May 13, 1998, at 15:45 hours, India secretly conducted a series of underground nuclear tests with five bombs in Pokhran, Rajasthan. Although this was not the first time the country was testing its nuclear weapons (the first successful test took place in 1974 under the codename “Smiling Buddha”), this one was certainly the most memorable if one takes into consideration the sheer effect it had on its states and neighbouring countries.

• Pokhran-II (AKA Operation Shakti-98) was the name assigned to the series of tests that comprised one fusion bomb and four fission bombs. On May 13, 1998, shortly after the detonation of all five warheads, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee declared India a full-fledged nuclear state.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• His lawyer For the last eight years, the UK has refused to either confirm or deny that they have received an extradition request from the US. told CNN: “The concern from day one until the present is that if Julian Assange walks out of the Embassy, he will be extradited to face what the executive director of the ACLU described as an ‘unprecedented and unconstitutional’ prosecution under the US Espionage Act.”

• Meanwhile, Ecuador’s newly elected president, Lenín Moreno, is under US pressure to expel Mr Assange, having described him as an “inherited problem” and “more than a nuisance” in January.

• [...]

• Swedish prosecutors dropped the case last year, but maintain the right to resume the investigation if Assange leaves the embassy.

• In addition, could be arrested and extradition to the United States.

• In April 2017 CNN reported that the US has was seeking to arrest Mr Assange, whom intelligence agencies believe Russia used to distribute hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 presidential election. Ms Taylor added: “For the last eight years, the UK has refused to either confirm or deny that they have received an extradition request from the US.

• The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board call for urgent action to be taken around the world to defend WikiLeaks’ editor Julian Assange. After fighting for close to eight years against relentless persecution by the US government and its allies, the Australian-born journalist is now in tremendous danger of falling into their clutches.

• The American ruling class and its counterparts internationally are hostile to WikiLeaks and its editor because he published leaked information that exposed before the world their war crimes, anti-democratic intrigues and corruption. The US government is determined to silence Assange and intimidate all principled journalists and whistleblowers by hauling him before a show trial and convicting him of fraudulent charges of “espionage.” Assange now faces the risk of lengthy imprisonment, or even the death sentence, for revealing the truth.

• Julian Assange was perhaps the most instrumental individual not named Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton during the U.S. presidential election of 2016. The organization he leads, WikiLeaks, released thousands of unredacted, unaltered emails belonging to Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and the greater Democratic National Committee near the end of the campaign cycle. Verified by DKIM, or DomainKeys Indentified Mail, the emails are indisputably legitimate, as far as the IETF or Internet Engineering Task Force, an international body responsible for certifying what technologies and protocols can be considered internet standard, is concerned. The emails were extremely embarrassing and damaged the Clinton campaign, at least to some extent, according to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.

• Whether one believes that Assange and WikiLeaks were in collusion with Russian agents is immaterial; he is sought after by U.S. officials for publishing the sensitive information and for many other subversive activities.

• It is an open secret that the United States contemptuously considers the sovereign states, the independent nations, of Latin America as its ‘backyard,’ and frequently exerts enormous pressure on Latin American countries to do its bidding, to the extent of effecting changes in the government by means both peaceful and violent. This arrogant superpower is now pressuring your small country to evict Mr. Julian Assange from your embassy and render this valourous warrior for truth and justice to the British – who are hand-in-glove with the Americans.

• The government and people of Ecuador surely realize that when your country so courageously granted asylum to Mr. Assange, she served as a model for Latin America – nay, for 195 countries and 7.6 billion people. In granting asylum to Assange, Little Ecuador set an extraordinary example: for she not only protected the world’s pre-eminent cyber freedom-fighter, she stood up to a most terrifying tyranny that is neither subject to any checks and balances nor pays the slightest heed to the Rule of Law.

• US intelligence claims that WikiLeaks acted on behalf of Russia as part of a campaign to prop up the candidacy of Donald Trump and undermine that of Hillary Clinton. The offer was flatly rejected by Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who said Assange would only be interviewed if he is in US custody.

• “The US has no intention of interviewing Julian Assange except under duress, possibly after a long period of solitary confinement, the kind that Chelsea Manning endured,” journalist Max Blumenthal told RT, referring to the whistleblower, whose leak to WikiLeaks of classified US material exposing abuses in Iraq lead to her nearly seven-year confinement. Schiff is “the de facto grand inquisitor of the Russiagate investigation”, he said, so he presumably speaks for the entire US intelligence community.

• No WikiLeaks people were publicly accused of having a hand in the supposed hacking of the DNC computer network and that the narrative of the hacking itself is on a very shaky foundation, Blumenthal remarked.

• “They don’t want to interrupt their narrative with what could be facts very similar to the case of the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The DNC has never handed over its servers to any US intelligence or law enforcement agency and has likely destroyed those servers,” he said. “It seems like the US does not want to know what’s in them just as the US only wants to know what Assange has to say only after he has been sufficiently held and intimidated.”

• Blumenthal says Assange is rightfully afraid of leaving the Ecuador embassy because of his claim that he would then be grabbed by the UK law enforcement and extradited to the US under a classified indictment – the existence of which neither Washington nor London will confirm. If put in US custody, he is likely to become the first person prosecuted in America for what is essentially a journalist revealing classified information, he added.

• A few months back I started having bizarre interactions on social media of a kind I’d never experienced previously. Suddenly, whenever I’d write about President Trump’s nonstop warmongering and capitulations to longstanding neoconservative agendas like implementing aggressive new cold war escalations against Russia along multiple fronts, the illegal occupation of Syria with the stated goal of effecting regime change, increasing troop presence in Afghanistan, unprecedented civilian deaths in drone strikes, facilitating the slaughter of civilians in Yemen, or the administration’s open regime change policy against Iran, I’d get all these weird accounts telling me things like “Trust the plan” and “This is the Art of the Deal, Trump is playing 4-D chess”, and saying I should research something called “QAnon” or “Q”.

• It happens literally every time I write anything critical of this administration; a deluge of commenters telling me in effect, “Shush. Calm down. This is nothing. What looks like Trump facilitating longtime establishment agendas just like his predecessors is actually brilliant strategic maneuvering.” Every single time, without a single solitary exception.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has announced that he is ready to testify in the investigation into Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. Sputnik spoke with Assange’s long-term associate Randy Credico about the development.

• In an interview with Sputnik, Credico said that he conveyed Assange’s message to the Adam Schiff, but he doubts that the congressman will actually go to London to meet with Assange.

• [...]

• He went on to say that there needs to be more pressure from the international community because Britain and the US are acting in a very unlawful way and are in violation of international law.

• Recently there were rumors that Ecuador may soon stop providing asylum to Julian Assange. However, Credico said that if that were to happen, the president of Ecuador would face an extreme backlash from other leaders in the region and from citizens across South America.

• Courage is very proud to announce the launch of the CourageSound podcast, which will start this Friday 1 June with a discussion of the case of Reality Winner. CourageSound will broadcast every two weeks on Radio Vendetta, with archives made available to listen back later.

• Why a podcast? 2018 is shaping up to be a busy year with huge implications for our community. We want to bring you information about the big cases, the campaigns and the debates that are dominating our work. We’ll give you detailed takes on all of this, with discussions and interviews with those who know the issues best.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• After the usual off-season (January and February), the Chinese plug-in vehicle (PEV) market is back at full charge, with 71,000 units registered in April, up 129% year over year (YoY). Overall, 2018 sales have more than doubled compared to the same period last year.

• Consequently, the record 3.7% PEV share of April pulled the 2018 share to 2.3%, already above the 2.1% of 2017, and with sales expected to pick up significantly as the year advances, the 2018 PEV share should end north of the 3% threshold, with December possibly reaching 6%.

• To answer the above question I analyzed 24 different models that are currently available in the US with either a traditional internal combustion engine version or regular hybrid and a plug-in hybrid and/or full battery electric version. Using sales data from GoodCarBadCar.net and InsideEVs.com, I analyzed March 2018 and Q1 2018 sales data. For simplicity in presenting the data, in most of the charts that follow, I only used the sales numbers for the month of March. (See notes at end on intent of this analysis, approach to price comparisons, models that were not included, etc.)

Finance

• Tourists also complain that some payment systems only work with Swedish credit cards, excluding foreign consumers.

• But one job in the digital economy falls predominantly to women. It’s an oft-overlooked position, drawing on both marketing and editorial skills, that has become increasingly critical both to business success and online discourse. The pay is poor, and the respect can be limited. Take a look at the job posting for any social media manager. You’ll discover the same bias in its language, in reverse: a bias for sourcing female candidates.

• U.S. trade negotiators bothered by the lackluster performance of American exports should focus on a rule change that was meant to simplify tax filing. Instead, it enabled American corporations to avoid paying hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes to the U.S. and abroad by laundering real economic activity through tax havens.

• The patents are important because they provide a clue as to how the credit card industry is working furiously behind the scenes to get ahead of the curve on blockchain.

• Using the technology may or may not usher in the broad use of cryptocurrency over, say, U.S. dollars.

• But it does have the potential to greatly lower the cost of doing business for the finance industry. And that means more profits for the credit card issuers.

• A Mastercard patent application disclosed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office outlines the means by which a computer node can connect with and authenticate elements of a particular blockchain.

• Quite how the EU and the UK will be governed post-Brexit remains controversial. One of the main arguments put forward by the Brexiteers in the UK for ‘leaving Europe’ was that the EU had embarked on an inevitable journey towards a fully-fledged federal state, that there was little that could be done to alter this course, and that the UK wanted nothing to do with it. So, the only reasonable response was to withdraw from the whole enterprise and restore the sovereignty of the British state.

• But two issues immediately arise in this context. First, was the EU on a journey towards a federal state (or had it, for all intents and purposes, already arrived there)? And secondly, is the UK state still an entity that could reasonably be described as unitary – a state capable of being governed from a single centre of sovereign power, namely the Westminster parliament?

• This second issue, of course, has been debated for a long time, particularly after the various rounds of UK domestic devolution since 2010 and the emergence of mayoral-based governmental forms in several UK cities since. But it will arise acutely again in the near future – post-Brexit -– because the issue will then move from arguments about the governance of the EU’s internal market and the UKs relationship to that framework, to how the UK’s own internal market will be governed. What are going to be the commercial and legal principles and relationships between the various constituent elements of the UK internal market?

• Something is missing in the lives of today’s adolescents: that magical coming-of-age feeling when a whole world opened up.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Facebook introduced new disclosure rules for political advertisements this week designed to block bad actors from meddling in elections. But in the meantime, the rules are blocking legitimate candidates from buying Facebook ads — and at least one congressional candidate in Mississippi says it could tip the election toward his opponent.

• The rules that Facebook implemented in the United States this week require anyone wishing to buy a political ad to verify their identity. To do so, Facebook mails a card to their physical location containing an authorization code. Only after the candidate or advocacy group enters that authorization code on Facebook can they purchase political ads.

Censorship/Free Speech

• “We will soon arrest all those involved in making and uploading the videos”, Khongsai added. He also warned that the admins of WhatsApp groups would be liable to equal punishment with that of internet trolls if they fail to prevent such inflammatory messages from spreading in time.

• PRJA spokesperson asserted that Erendro has been an outspoken critic against government’s fail policies and high handedness. For the same reason, the BJP also recently filed a defamation case against Erendro, he added.

• Jammu and Kashmir Police have a new task at hand — identify the ‘keypad jihadis’ who spew venom on social networking sites to try and create a law and order situation in the state by spreading rumours on the [I]nternet or giving communal colour to any event.

• The police have registered cases against five Twitter handles and filed complaints with service providers against such misleading posts on Facebook and WhatsApp so that necessary action is taken at the earliest, officials have said.

• In a report presented to President Vladimir Putin, Internet Ombudsman Dmitry Marinichev says there should be an investigation into the actions of telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor after it tried to block Telegram last month. Millions of innocent IP addresses were caught up in the dragnet, a result of Roscomnadzor not carrying out a damage assessment, Marinichev says.

• In its latest Transparency Report, covering government demands for customer and device data in the second half of 2017, Apple said that it will soon enumerate government app takedown requests.

• “Starting with the Transparency Report period July 1 – December 31 2018, Apple will report on Government requests to take down Apps from the App Store in instances related to alleged violations of legal and/or policy provisions,” Apple’s report declared.

• With the rise of cloud computing over a decade ago, law enforcement authorities recognized the value of data stored in cloud-oriented services. Tech companies, to signal the limits of their ability to deny lawful demands for data and encourage government moderation, began publishing transparency reports.

• Civil rights leaders on Monday, May 28 demanded that Google CEO Gundar Pichai rescind Google’s racial censorship policy. Google rejected two YouTube promotional videos for the forthcoming book, Black Lives Do Matter, by noted author and political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson. Google called the promo for the book “dangerous and derogatory.” It claimed that it violated its standards against inciting hate and violence.

• The book is a social and historical analysis of racial stereotypes and racial injustice and violence against African-Americans published by a respected African-American owned publisher, Middle Passage Press. Hutchinson and other civil rights leaders charged that Google’s policy of racial censorship of African-American issues sets a dangerous precedent and is an overreaction to the backlash it got from Trump and conservatives to its firing of right-wing engineer/writer James Damore in August 2017.

• THE DECISION BY an Australian city council earlier this month to remove the words “Taiwan” and colors resembling those of the ROC flag from fish artwork on a bull statue in the city of Rockhampton in Central Queensland by Taiwanese-born high schoolers proves a telling incident regarding how governments which conduct a great deal of trade with China treat Taiwan, when push comes to shove. In particular, the incident proves to have had surprisingly high implications, seeing the removal of the fish occurred due to pressure from the Chinese vice consul of the Chinese embassy in Brisbane, Zhou Li.

• [...]

• Yet, of course, this will always happen because, at the end of the day, China will always prove more militarily, politically, and economically powerful than Taiwan and it usually easier to avoid standing up for Taiwan in order to avoid controversy. This continues to be Taiwan’s uphill struggle in the international world, then–it will always be easier and less controversial to try and avoid the issue.

• Kenyan singer, rapper, drummer and entrepreneur Muthoni Drummer Queen has called out on artists to join in on the conversation and the movement against censorship, creative rights and KFCB’s Mandate.

• Muthoni made the appeal while attending a talk held at Ukweli Café on Saturday the 26th of May prompted by Kenya Film Classification Board (KFCB) move to ban films and censor the creative industry.

• The extent to which state media in Swaziland is censored to control people’s understanding of what is going on in the kingdom, has been revealed by UNESCO.

• The news agenda is manipulated in favour of absolute monarch King Mswati III. No opposition to the government is allowed on the airways and media practitioners in state-run media are civil servants first and journalists second, it reported.

• In Swaziland all radio stations except one that does not report news is state-controlled. The largest of two TV stations in Swaziland is also state-controlled.

• Madmind Studio has provided an update rolling back the earlier promise of a uncensored patch for Agony and revealing the content that will be cut in the final version of the game.

• For the most part, Agony will not censor almost anything of what players are expecting to see in the final package, including gore, brutal sex scenes, homosexual sex scenes, genital physics, eye gouging, heart plucking, children’s heads exploding, and much more.

• Unlike the past, the media is not banned; the circulation of newspapers is blocked or tv channels are put off air. Had restrictions come under any black law one could have at least fought a legal battle. But, when it comes from ‘hidden sources’. What do you do?

• The announcement this month that Spotify had instituted a new policy to deal with “hate content and hateful conduct” led some to ask: “Where will this end?” Its first decision was to remove the music of the singer R Kelly, serially accused of various sexual misdemeanours, from its promoted playlists. Rival streaming services have followed Spotify’s lead. R Kelly faces no criminal charges and has accused the streaming service of acting on “false and unproven allegations”.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Under UK election law, registered ‘third party’ or ‘non party’ campaigners can legally ask for copies of local electoral rolls. Thomas Borwick’s company, Voter Consultancy Ltd (VCL), made by far the most requests for the electoral roll in 2016 and 2017, according to new data released to openDemocracy following a series of Freedom of Information requests. VCL also made requests for the electoral roll in 2014 and 2015, openDemocracy discovered.

• Voter Consultancy is one of around 30 organisations included in the UK Information Commissioner’s ongoing investigation into the use of data during the Brexit campaign. Another data analytics company run by Borwick, Kanto, produced an election app that was used by Cambridge Analytica.

• Kanto is currently working with anti-abortion activists in Ireland ahead of Friday’s referendum. A separate openDemocracy investigation published today has found that other Irish anti-abortion campaigners acquired the electoral roll in a number of Irish counties.

• Data experts and voting reform campaigners have questioned why British political groups should have access to so much personal information about individual voters, warning that these details could potentially be used alongside data from social media and other sources for targeted online political advertising.

• The GDPR grace period ends today. Experts take their best guesses on when data protection authorities will strike – and what kind of organizations will be first to feel the sting of the EU privacy law.

• Alarm bells are ringing. The grace period is over. As of today, supervisory authorities are officially free to lay down enforcement action for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Now come the real questions: who gets hit first, for what, how hard, and when does the hammer drop?

• Schrems argues that the companies are using a strategy of “forced consent” to continue processing the individuals’ personal data — when in fact the law requires that users be given a free choice unless a consent is strictly necessary for provision of the service. (And, well, Facebook claims its core product is social networking — rather than farming people’s personal data for ad targeting.)

• Across four complaints, related to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Google’s Android operating system, European consumer rights organisation Noyb argues that the companies have forced users into agreeing to new terms of service, in breach of the requirement in the law that such consent should be freely given.

• Microsoft staff based overseas will have access to servers in Australia where top-secret government data is stored on the company’s Azure cloud service.

• In an open letter and petition led by two groups, the Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC) and MomsRising, the campaigners urged Zuckerberg to use his “enormous reach and influence to promote children’s wellbeing.”

• The issue isn’t only that internet users are crammed into environments that can bring out the worst in us, or that so much power has concentrated into a tiny number of hands that control giant cloud computers. A bigger problem is that we are all carrying around devices that are suitable for mass behaviour modification. For example, with old-fashioned advertising, you could measure whether a product did better after an ad was run, but now companies are measuring whether individuals change their behaviours as they browse, and the feeds for each person are constantly tweaked to get the desired result. In short, your behaviour has been turned into a product – and corporate and political clients are lining up to modify it.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Hong Kong’s role in a pan-Asia secret rendition programme run by US and British intelligence services should be scrutinised as part of a top-level inquiry, a former British cabinet member has said.

• The call from former foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind came as it emerged a prominent human rights barrister retained to pursue legal action against the Hong Kong government over an alleged role in the CIA and MI6-led rendition programme – which included cloak-and-dagger operations in Malaysia and Thailand – was no longer involved in the case.

• [...]

• It involved the 12-day detention at Hong Kong International Airport of Libyan national Sami al-Saadi, his wife and their four young children, followed by their forced repatriation – also via Thailand – to the Tripoli torture cells of the Gaddafi regime.

• This month’s apology to Belhaj, for what British Prime Minister Theresa May described as their “appalling treatment”, came six years after the UK government paid al-Saadi £2.2 million in compensation for his ordeal which began in Hong Kong.

• Now Gina Haspel has been sworn in as the CIA’s first female director, it is time the government speak out on a matter in which it has kept silent for over a decade.

• President Donald Trump’s pick of the 61-year-old Russian specialist who spent her career in the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine service, to take over the top position of the agency sparked a fierce debate ahead of Senate voting over Ms Haspel’s role involving torture techniques she used for the interrogation of terror suspects in the post-9/11 era.

• The latest big setback for the crusade against Inauguration Day protesters could be its death knell.

• The president swears in the new CIA director, a person in direct violation of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. The Supreme Court has long held that punishments involving torture are forbidden under the Eighth Amendment.

• In the Senate, the Republican chairman called the new CIA director the most qualified person the president could have chosen. Fact: The new director played a key role in the destruction of interrogation videotapes showing the torture of detainees, both at the “black site” she oversaw and other secret agency locations.

• Crimes against International Law are committed by man (or woman) — not by abstract entities.

• As a general rule, when Dick Cheney favors a foreign policy position it’s best to be on the opposite side if you value liberty over war and authoritarianism. The former vice president’s enthusiastic endorsement of not only Gina Haspel as CIA director but of the torture program she oversaw should tell us all we need to know about Haspel.

• Saying that Haspel would make a great CIA director, Cheney dismissed concerns over the CIA’s torture program. Asked in a television interview last week about the program, Cheney said, “if it were my call, I’d do it again.”

• Sadly, the majority of the US Senate agreed with Cheney that putting a torturer in charge of the CIA was a good idea. Only two Republicans – Senators Paul and Flake – voted against Haspel. And just to confirm that there really is only one political party in Washington, it was the “yes” vote of crossover Democrats that provided the margin of victory. Americans should really be ashamed of those sent to Washington to represent us.

• The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is planning to issue its ruling regarding suspicions that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operated a secret prison for terror suspects in Lithuania between 2005 and 2006.

• The Strasbourg court is scheduled to deliver its judgement at a public hearing at 11 a.m. Vilnius time next Thursday, May 31.

• The complaint against Lithuania was brought by Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia who is now held at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay.

• The 47-year-old man, who is suspected of involvement in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, claims that he was held in a secret CIA detention facility in Lithuania in 2005 and 2006 and that his treatment amounted to torture.

• I was appalled to see the Gazette’s irresponsible reporting of Gina Haspel’s confirmation as CIA chief on the front page on May 18 (“Haspel becomes 1st female CIA chief”).

• The headline frames her confirmation as the “1st female” in her position, as if the confirmation of a war criminal — who refuses to admit that torture is immoral — is some kind of achievement for the feminist movement. It is morally repugnant to elect and then celebrate someone like Haspel, no matter their gender.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

Intellectual Monopolies

• Was the group’s website hacked? Is it the wrong website address? Are we under attack by space lizards? Are WIPO committee members paying attention to the documents they approve (and the dangers the human race is facing)?

• The US Patent and Trademark Office has published a patent filed by Intel that describes an automated method to verify a block record for a digital ledger. The patent titled “Technology for secure partitioning and updating of a distributed digital ledger” suggests a method to securely partition a DLS so that some or all of the scalability issues faced by a monolithic, unpartitioned DLS are avoided.

• Intel’s patent explains the automated block record verification as follows.

• The system involves a first validation node (FVN) which receives a block record from a second validation node (SVN). The block record will include a digital signature. Once a block record is received, the FVN will automatically obtain a node identifier for the SVN, based on the digital signature. The first validator node will use the node identifier for the SVN to determine whether the SVN belongs to a validation group that comprises the FVN. The FVN will also use an attestation service to determine whether the node identifier for the SVN belongs to a node with a trusted processor. The FVN will determine whether the digital signature for the block record was created with a private key that corresponds to the node identifier for the SVN.

• Samsung must pay Apple $539 million for infringing five patents with Android phones it sold in 2010 and 2011, a jury decided Thursday in a legal fight that dates back seven years.

• It took nine years of policy development, two different draft policies and various rounds of public consultation, to finally see Cabinet give the nod to the new Intellectual Property (IP) policy in South Africa.

• [...]

• This involved a series of activities on the draft IP policy as well as its predecessor, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) draft consultative framework for IP, the sources said. UNCTAD and UNDP organised two national stakeholder consultations, in 2016 and 2017, on the policy document. The process also was said to involve other organisations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Copyrights

• UK Internet users are no stranger to website blocking. Many of the world’s largest pirate sites, including The Pirate Bay, are inaccessible due to court orders. But does this mean that piracy has been eradicated as well? A look at the most visited websites in the UK suggests that there is still a long way to go.

• That story seems simple in outline. A Belgian named Fabian starts trading in passwords to porn sites in the 1990s. Next decade, he purchases a relatively small company in Montreal which offers porn online for free; it faithfully complies with DMCA takedown requests, but they have no hope of keeping up with the firehose of uploads. He applies modern data science, A/B testing, SEO, etc., and his business grows from “substantial” to “enormous.”

• The latest MPAA tax filing shows that the revenue generated by the anti-piracy group has fallen after a few years of modest growth. The decrease is the result of lower membership fees paid by the major Hollywood studios, which resulted in a significant loss. The filing further reveals that the MPAA’s former CEO Chris Dodd earned $3.4 million during his final year.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.