● 06.15.18

● Links 15/6/2018: HP Chromebook X2 With GNU/Linux Software, Apple Admits and Closes a Back Door (‘Loophole’)

Posted in News Roundup at 12:21 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux is widely thought of as the first choice in operating systems for important servers, but it may not be the right choice for all applications.

• The decision to use any modern edition of that operating system, generally spoken as RHEL with a silent H, is usually based on a need for component stability, paid technical support, and long-term version support, said Red Hat’s Ron Pacheco, director of global product management.

• Customers have other options for data center operating systems. RHEL wouldn’t always be appropriate for edge devices, functions-as-a-service, and highly specialized applications, Pacheco noted.

Desktop

• We first heard of Chrome OS gaining Linux app support back in February. Google officially confirmed during Google I/O 2018 that the Pixelbook would be the first Chromebook with Linux app support, but since then the Samsung Chromebook Plus has joined in on the fun. Tonight, a device that we expected to eventually gain Linux app support finally got support for it: the HP Chromebook X2.

• Following Google’s addition of Linux app support for Chrome OS and its own Pixelbook shortly after this year’s Google I/O conference which took place last month, the same Linux treatment has now been given to the new HP Chromebook X2. The aforementioned device was released in April as the first Chrome OS notebook to be wrapped in a 2-in-1 format, boasting stylus support and a metal unibody design. The recent implementation of Linux apps is primarily aimed at developers and presently it can only be acquired by switching to the Canary channel.

• Google recently announced that Chrome OS devices will soon get support for Linux apps starting with the company’s own Pixelbook, after which Chromebooks from other manufacturers will also get the same treatment. Samsung’s Chromebook Plus was the first device from another manufacturer to get support for Linux apps, and now, HP’s Chromebook X2 has joined the league.

• Support for running Linux apps is becoming a thing among Chromebook fans, and it looks like each day new Chrome OS devices are getting Linux app support.

• During the Google I/O annual developer conference last month, Google announced it is working to bring support for Linux apps in future versions of its Linux-based Chrome OS operating system for Chromebooks, and the first Chromebook to receive support for running Linux applications is, of course, Google’s Pixelbook.

• Switching to an open source OS could involve a learning curve, but the community, customisation and lack of cost should be enough to make up for it.

• Brace yourself for laptops with 128GB of RAM because they’re coming. Today, Lenovo announced its ThinkPad P52, which, along with that massive amount of memory, also features up to 6TB of storage, up to a 4K, 15.6-inch display, an eighth-gen Intel hexacore processor, and an Nvidia Quadro P3200 graphics card.

Server

• Container technology is being increasingly used by organizations as a way to deploy applications and micro-services. The promise of containers is improved agility and portability, while potentially also reducing the attack surface. Though container technology can be helpful for security, it can also have its own set of risks.

• In a panel session at the recent Kubecon + CloudNativeCon EU event titled “Modern App Security Requires Containers” — moderated by eSecurity Planet — security experts from Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project and Google debated what’s wrong and what’s right with container security.

• Docker CEO Steve Singh kicked off his company’s DockerCon 18 conference here today, offering the assembled crowd of container enthusiasts a clear vision of where Docker is going.

• For Docker Inc, the company behind the eponymous container system, a lot is at stake. This is the first DockerCon where the founder of the company, Solomon Hykes is not present. Hykes left Docker in March, as the company direction has increasingly focused on enterprise adoption and commercial market growth.

• Kubernetes is often touted as the Linux of the cloud world, and that comparison is fair when you consider its widespread adoption. But, with great power comes great responsibility and, as the home of Kubernetes, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) shoulders many responsibilities, including learning from the mistakes of other open source projects while not losing sight of the main goal. The rapid global growth of CNCF also means increased responsibility in terms of cultural diversity and creating a welcoming environment.

• Docker has expanded its commercial container platform software, Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) to manage containerized applications across multiple cloud services.

• The idea with this release is to better help enterprise customers manage their applications across the entire development and deployment lifecycle, said Jenny Fong, Docker director of product marketing. “While containers help make applications more portable, the management of the containers is not the same,” Fong said.

• Docker EE provides a management layer for containers, addressing needs around security and governance, and the company is now extending this management into the cloud.

Audiocasts/Shows

• This show was recorded in front of a live studio audience at FOSS Talk Live on Saturday 9th June 2018! We take you on a 40 year journey through our time trumpet and contribute to some open source projects for the first time and discuss the outcomes.

• We take a look at Ubuntu’s data collection and talk about how it effects you. I also comment on some goings on in the Linux YouTube community and look at the new EzeeLinux web server.

Kernel Space

• At the 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM), Jaegeuk Kim described some current issues for flash storage, especially with regard to Android. Kim is the F2FS developer and maintainer, and the filesystem-track session was ostensibly about that filesystem. In the end, though, the talk did not focus on F2FS and instead ranged over a number of problem areas for Android flash storage.

• He started by noting that Universal Flash Storage (UFS) devices have high read/write speeds, but can also have high latency for some operations. For example, ext4 will issue a discard command but a UFS device might take ten seconds to process it. That leads the user to think that Android is broken, he said.

• At the 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM), Boaz Harrosh presented his zero-copy user-mode filesystem (ZUFS). It is both a filesystem in its own right and a framework similar to FUSE for implementing filesystems in user space. It is geared toward extremely low latency and high performance, particularly for systems using persistent memory.

• Harrosh began by saying that the idea behind his talk is to hopefully entice others into helping out with ZUFS. There are lots of “big iron machines” these days, some with extremely fast I/O paths (e.g. NVMe over fabrics with throughput higher than memory). “For some reason” there may be a need to run a filesystem in user space but the current interface is slow because “everyone is copy happy”, he said.

• At the 2017 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM), Amir Goldstein presented his work on adding a superblock watch mechanism to provide a scalable way to notify applications of changes in a filesystem. At the 2018 edition of LSFMM, he was back to discuss adding NTFS-like change journals to the kernel in support of backup solutions of various sorts. As a second topic for the session, he also wanted to discuss doing more performance-regression testing for filesystems.

• Goldstein said he is working on getting the superblock watch feature merged. It works well and is used in production by his employer, CTERA Networks, but there is a need to get information about filesystem changes even after a crash. Jan Kara suggested that what was wanted was an indication of which files had changed since the last time the filesystem changes were queried; Goldstein agreed.

• The kernel’s staging tree is meant to be a path by which substandard code can attract increased developer attention, be improved, and eventually find its way into the mainline kernel. Not every module graduates from staging; some are simply removed after it becomes clear that nobody cares about them. It is rare, though, for a project that is actively developed and widely used to be removed from the staging tree, but that may be about to happen with the Lustre filesystem.

• The staging tree was created almost exactly ten years ago as a response to the ongoing problem of out-of-tree drivers that had many users but which lacked the code quality to get into the kernel. By giving such code a toehold, it was hoped, the staging tree would help it to mature more quickly; in the process, it would also provide a relatively safe place for aspiring kernel developers to get their hands dirty fixing up the code. By some measures, staging has been a great success: it has seen nearly 50,000 commits contributed by a large community of developers, and a number of drivers have, indeed, shaped up and moved into the mainline. The “ccree” TrustZone CryptoCell driver graduated from staging in 4.17, for example, and the visorbus driver moved to the mainline in 4.16.

• The 4.17 kernel appears to be on track for a June 3 release, barring an unlikely last-minute surprise. So the time has come for the usual look at some development statistics for this cycle. While 4.17 is a normal cycle for the most part, it does have one characteristic of note: it is the third kernel release ever to be smaller (in terms of lines of code) than its predecessor.

• The 4.17 kernel, as of just after 4.17-rc7, has brought in 13,453 non-merge changesets from 1,696 developers. Of those developers, 256 made their first contribution to the kernel in this cycle; that is the smallest number of first-time developers since 4.8 (which had 237). The changeset count is nearly equal to 4.16 (which had 13,630), but the developer count is down from the 1,774 seen in the previous cycle.

• There has been a lot of work in recent years to use BPF to push policy decisions into the kernel. But sometimes, it seems, what is really wanted is a way for a BPF program to punt a decision back to user space. That is the objective behind this patch set giving the secure computing (seccomp) mechanism a way to pass complex decisions to a user-space helper program.

• Seccomp, in its most flexible mode, allows user space to load a BPF program (still “classic” BPF, not the newer “extended” BPF) that has the opportunity to review every system call made by the controlled process. This program can choose to allow a call to proceed, or it can intervene by forcing a failure return or the immediate death of the process. These seccomp filters are known to be challenging to write for a number of reasons, even when the desired policy is simple.

• Tycho Andersen, the author of the “seccomp trap to user space” patch set, sees a number of situations where the current mechanism falls short. His scenarios include allowing a container to load modules, create device nodes, or mount filesystems — with rigid controls applied. For example, creation of a /dev/null device would be allowed, but new block devices (or almost anything else) would not. Policies to allow this kind of action can be complex and site-specific; they are not something that would be easily implemented in a BPF program. But it might be possible to write something in user space that could handle decisions like these.

• In addition to the secondary power management updates sent in on Wednesday for the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window, a set of ACPI updates were also submitted.

• With this ACPI update that was already merged there is updates to the ACPICA code, debugger updates, and other routine work. Arguably the most user-facing change though is allowing Linux respond to the “Windows 2017.2″ _OSI string. That Windows 2017.2 operating system interface string is what’s used by Windows 10 Version 1709 in the latest buids of Windows.

• Why was Linux created? So that the young Linus Torvalds could use his computer hardware better and with fewer restrictions. Fast forward to 2018 and the Linux kernel (together with GNU,) is the most popular Operating System used on servers and by data administrators, among other clientele.

• You can breeze through Wikipedia’s record of Linux’s history for details on how events unfolded as well as milestones in the project’s development over the years.

• Are there any details you know that I shouldn’t have left out? Feel free to drop your two cents in the comments section below.

• While it’s now becoming possible to run real Linux apps on Chrome OS, for those that have been dreaming of a real and pleasant GNU/Linux desktop experience on an ARM-powered laptop without much hackery, that soon may finally be a reality.

• Intel open-source developers today posted the set of patches for adding support for upcoming Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake processors for the Linux kernel’s Direct Rendering Manager driver.

• The patches out today add Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake graphics support to the i915 kernel DRM driver. There isn’t yet patches for libdrm and Mesa, but given how simple these additions are, those patches should be out soon.

Linux Foundation

• Join us August 29-31, in Vancouver, BC, for 250+ sessions covering a wide array of topics including Linux Systems, Cloud Native Applications, Blockchain, AI, Networking, Cloud Infrastructure, Open Source Leadership, Program Office Management and more. Arrive early for new bonus content on August 28 including co-located events, tutorials, labs, workshops, and lightning talks.

Graphics Stack

• The Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons) developers working on the Cedrus open-source, reverse-engineered Allwinner video decode driver have posted their patches for enabling H.264 video decoding.

• Earlier versions of their Sunxi-Cedrus driver patches had just supported MPEG-2 with other codecs to be tackled, but hitting the kernel mailing list this week were their patches for enabling H.264 decoding on Allwinner hardware.

• The performance of the Intel Core i7-8809G “Kabylake G” processor with onboard Radeon “Vega M” graphics are looking quite good under Linux now that the support has been squared away.

• Earlier this month AMD’s Marek Olšák posted RadeonSI patches for a scissor workaround affecting GFX9/Vega GPUs including Raven Ridge, which were based upon a RADV driver workaround already merged that helped affected games by up to ~11%. A revised version of that patch is now in Mesa 18.2 Git.

• This post does not describe a configuration system. If that’s all you care about, read this post here and go be angry at someone else. Anyway, with that out of the way let’s get started.

• For a long time, libinput has supported model quirks (first added in Apr 2015). These model quirks are bitflags applied to some devices so we can enable special behaviours in the code. Model flags can be very specific (“this is a Lenovo x230 Touchpad”) or generic (“This is a trackball”) and it just depends on what the specific behaviour is that we need. The x230 touchpad for example has a custom pointer acceleration but trackballs are marked so they get some config options mice don’t have/need.

Benchmarks

• It has been some months since last delivering any benchmarks of Nouveau, the open-source, community-driven for NVIDIA GPUs. The reason for not having any Nouveau benchmarks recently has largely been due to lack of major progress, at least on the GeForce desktop GPU side, while NVIDIA has continued to contribute on the Tegra side. For those wondering how the current performance is of this driver that started out more than a decade ago via reverse-engineering, here are some benchmarks of the latest open-source Nouveau and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers on Ubuntu.

Applications

• Corgi is a command-line tool that helps with your repetitive command usages by organizing them into reusable snippet. It was inspired by Pet and aims to advance Pet’s command-level usage to a workflow level.

• The current version of v0.2.2 features a number of useful snippet tools. Let’s have a look:

• Create a snippet – Corgi provides an interactive CLI interface to create snippets, and you can start by running corgi new. You can also create snippets from command history and define template fields in snippet

• PulseEffects, the audio effects tool for PulseAudio, was updated to version 4.0 recently, with subsequent bug-fix releases to version 4.0.4, introducing new features like an option to change the number of its PulseAudio equalizer bands, or use a custom color for the spectrum, among others.

• PulseEffects allows using multiple audio input and output effects on your system (which needs to use PulseAudio), including reverberation, stereo enhancer, limiter, auto volume, as well as a 30-band system-wide equalizer.

• The application was updated to version 4.0.0 about 10 days ago, and since then there were 4 bug-fix releases, but the 4.x versions weren’t available on FlatHub until recently (the current version on Flathub is 4.0.2 so it’s 2 bug-fix versions behind).

• Today, SMS (Short Message Service) has become more popular, it widely used all over the world in huge amounts for various business processes such as SMS Marketing, apart from the conventional communication platform. An SMS gateway allows a computer system to send or receive SMS to or from a telecommunications network, thus to or from mobile phones of clients.

• When I first started at the non-profit where I work, one of the problems people had was rampant spam on their email boxes. The email addresses we use are pretty old (+10 years) and over time they have been added to all the possible spam lists there are.

• That would not be a real problem if our email hosting company did not have very bad spam filters. They are a worker’s coop and charge us next to nothing for hosting our emails, but sadly they lack the resources to run a real bayesian-based spam filtering solution like SpamAssassin. “Luckily” for us, it seems that a lot of ISPs and email hosting enterprises also tend to have pretty bad spam filtering on the email boxes they provide and there were a few programs out there to fix this.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• If you are using the Nouveau Gallium3D driver there is now the possibility of having much better performance with the Dolphin emulator.

• Some Nouveau Gallium3D patches were posted today for benefiting the Dolphin video game console emulator that targets the Nintendo GameCube and Wii. These patches improve the performance of integer multiplication for this aging open-source NVIDIA driver and can help out the Dolphin emulator in areas of fragment-heavy scenes by as much as 50%.

• The problem with Notepad++ is that it is exclusive to Windows platform and the developer has repeatedly refused to develop it for Linux. This is why Linux users had to settle for Notepad++ alternatives.

• Good news is that Notepad++ is now (unofficially) available as a Snap package for Linux user. Though this Notepad++ Linux application is not natively developed for Linux platform and is actually runs on Wine, it’s now a command (or click) away for you.

• Improvements are underway for Wine benchmarking to help ensure this open-source program for running Windows apps/games on Linux and other operating systems continues without introducing performance regressions and for being able to quantitatively verify expected performance improvements around its Direct3D/OpenGL/Vulkan code-paths, among other areas of Wine.

Games

• Here’s your chance to boost your collect of awesome Linux games, by building your own bundle and saving even more money.

• The Long Dark, a pretty decent game that has both a story mode and a fully fledged survival mode just got a huge update.

• Firstly, for those who felt the story mode was a bit too linear—they’ve listened. They’re reworking the first two episodes to be more open, to fit in with the third unreleased episode which they said was going to be more open anyway.

• Anyone remember OneShot [Steam]? A surreal puzzle adventure game that has been long delayed for Linux now actually has a Linux version in development.

• The free-to-play vehicular combat MMO has shown hints that Vulkan support has a work in progress for some time now. It’s still not officially supported but, with some tinkering, you can see how it’s coming along for yourself.

• The first proper DLC for the excellent Hand of Fate 2 is now out with Outlands and Outsiders, giving you more of a challenge.

• As a big fan of Hand of Fate 2, I can’t wait to dive in again and check out some of this new content in the DLC.

• That’s right, we’re teaming up with GOG once more to give you a chance at getting a fantastic DRM free Linux game.

• It seems Endless Loop Studios is jumping on the Battle Royale hype train, although they’re going about it in their own way with Battle Royale Tycoon. Yes—it’s even infecting tycoon style games now.

• Hexologic is a new puzzle game that claims to have a new fun spin on Sudoku-like rules, it just recently added Linux support too. While the initial release at the end of last month was only for Windows, they quickly worked to bring it to Linux with the latest update.

• Who needs serious hours of game-play when you could spend your minutes waiting for the bus playing something casual. No commitments to make, No stories to follow. Just start the game and have some fun. Here we have made a list of the top Arcade Games that you must try.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• It might sound a bit weird that I’m now talking about something that took place two years ago, but I just realized that while the call to participate in the survey for the KDE Mission was published on the Dot, the results have so far not received their own article.

• People who have participated in the survey but don’t read the Community list might have missed the results, which would be a pity. Therefore, I’d like to offer a bit of a retrospective on how the survey came to be and what came out of it.

• Hi! It’s been quite a while since the first blog post. I’ve been working on the new redesign of the Keyboard KCM, and in this post I’m going to show you the progress I’ve made so far.

• Since last time, I’ve been mainly focusing on working improving the infrastructure. One of the goals of this project was to make configuring the input methods (like fcitx, ibus, …) in the System Settings easier. I decided to start with fcitx, since we know the developer of it (Xuetian Weng), and thus easier to ask when there is a question/problem.

• Krita is a free and open source advanced painting software for cross platform. The development team has just announced a new maintenance release Krita 4.0.4. It brings several bug fixes and stability improvements. Here are the major improvements of Krita 4.0.4.

• Hi! GSoC student here :]. This first weeks coding for Krita have been so busy I forgot to write about them. So I’ll start to sum everything up in short posts about each step of the project implementation process.

• Back in May we said that KDE Plasma 5.13 was shaping up to be one heck of a release — now that it’s out, I think I can say we were right.

• And to demo the key changes arriving in this update of the popular, resource-efficient desktop environment is a spiffy official release video.

• At a speedy 2 minutes 22 seconds long, the official clip offers a concise overview of the what’s new in Plasma 5.13, from its new-look system settings and nifty browser integration, to the redesigned lock and login screens and improved ‘Discover’ software tool.

• Hi everybody, it has been a month since I started working on WikiToLearn PWA for Google Summer of Code program and many things happened! WTL frontend needed some improvements in terms of usability and functionalities. Course needed a way to update their metadata: title and chapters order for example So I implemented a work-in-progress EDIT MODE, as you can see below. You can drag chapters, insert new ones and/or modify course title.

• We have released Qt 3D Studio 2.0 RC2 today. It is available as both commercial and open source versions from online and offline installers.

• Qt 3D Studio 2.0 has a whole new 3D engine built on top of Qt 3D, a new timeline built from ground up with Qt based on the new timeline code in upcoming Qt Design Studio. Also there are a lot of improvements to the designer user experience, interactions in the 3D edit view and visualisation of lights and cameras being most notable ones. And of course we have numerous bug fixes.

• The second release candidate of the revamped Qt 3D Studio 2.0 is now available for testing.

• Qt developers have had a very busy week with the Qt Contributors’ Summit where they talked of early Qt 6.0 plans, releasing the inaugural Qt for Python, and also updating Qt 5.9 and Qt Creator 4.6. The latest is now their second test release of the upcoming Qt 3D Studio 2.0.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• If you’re planning to volunteer at GUADEC this year and be part of the selfless redshirt team (we’ve got 100% survival rate so far!), please register before the end of this week so that we have a better idea of which t-shirt sizes to order. If you can’t register soon, you can still volunteer even if you register on site!

• GStreamer is a popular open-source pipeline-based multimedia framework that has been in development since 2001. That’s 17 years of constant development, triaging, bug fixes, feature additions, packaging, and testing. Adopting a Jenkins-based Continuous Integration (CI) setup in August 2013, GStreamer and its dependencies are now built multiple times a day with each commit. Prior to that, the multimedia project used a build bot hosted by Collabora and Fluendo. At the time of this writing, GStreamer is built for the Linux (Fedora & Debian), macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS platforms. A very popular deployment target for GStreamer are embedded devices, but they are not targeted in the current CI setup.This meant additional manpower, effort, and testing outside of the automated tests for every release of GStreamer to validate on embedded boards. To rectify this, a goal was devised to integrate embedded devices into the CI.

Distributions

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Released last month, openSUSE Leap 15 is based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 operating system series and introduces numerous new features and improvements over the previous versions. These include a new disk partitioner in the installer, the ability to migrate OpenSuSE Leap 15 installations to SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15, and integration with the Kopano open-source groupware application suite.

• openSUSE Leap 15 also ships with a Firewalld as the default firewall management tool, a brand-new look that’s closely aligned with SUSE Linux Enterprise, new classic “transactional server” and “server” system roles providing read-only root filesystem and transactional updates, and much more. Now, openSUSE Leap 15 was launched officially for ARM64 (AArch64) and ARMv7 devices, such as Raspberry Pi, BeagleBoard, Arndale Board, CuBox-i, and OLinuXino.

• Makers can leverage openSUSE Leap 15 images for aarch64 and Armv7 on Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded devices. Since openSUSE Leap 15 shares a common core SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15 sources, makers who find success with a project or device can more comfortably transition to an enterprise product in the future should certifications become a requirement. Currently, the only IoT platform supported by SLE is the Raspberry Pi 3. However, there is no current supported migration from Leap 15 to SLE 15 with the Raspberry Pi. The barrier to entry in the IoT/embedded markets are lowered when a developer starts a project with Leap 15. Plus, the many supported arm boards can help developers circumnavigate future obstacles that might hinder project’s growth in a developing market.

Slackware Family

• About 14h ago, 10:32 PM GMT+7 (Western Indonesian Time), me (and several other people who forked SBo’s repository at GitHub) received a DMCA Takedown notice due to a company (Steinberg) filed a complaint to more than 200 open source repositories in GitHub that uses several of their header files (namely aeffect.h and aeffectx.h). We used that files in one of our scripts (jack-tools) which was changed over a year ago by the maintainer. At that time, it was OK to use their header files (although it has been unmaintained since 2013), but some time ago, Steinberg has made an announcement about dropping their support for VST 2 and focusing on VST 3 only. This drives the DMCA takedown action which affects SBo repositories in GitHub.

• The admins have discussed this matter last night and we came to a solution of fixing this issue permanently by removing the related commit and all the history for this script in master and 14.2 branch. This is not a trivial action as the commits involved were 11867 since 2017-02-04. Ponce did the initial testing and David did the final touch, including pushing an unexpected public update including with the mass re-base on master and 14.2 branch (Thanks David).

Red Hat Family

• The decision to use any modern edition of that operating system, generally spoken as RHEL with a silent H, is usually based on a need for component stability, paid technical support, and long-term version support, said Red Hat’s Ron Pacheco, director of global product management.

• The reasons why we have gathered here are many. A few weeks ago, my CentOS distro went dead. With the new kernel containing Spectre patches, it refused to load the Realtek Wireless drivers into memory. Moreover, patches also prevent manual compilation. This makes the distro useless, as it has no network connection. Then, in my CentOS 7.4 upgrade article – which was flawless, including the network piece, go figure – I wondered about the use of new, modern 4.x kernels in CentOS. Sounds like we have a real incentive here.

• In this tutorial, I will attempt to install and use the latest mainline kernel (4.16 when I typed this). The benefits should be many. I’ve seen improved performance, responsiveness and battery life in newer kernels compared to the 3.x branch. The Realtek Wireless woes of the disconnect kind (like a Spielberg movie) were also fixed in kernel 4.8.7 onwards, so that’s another thing. Lastly, this would make CentOS a lean, mean and modern beast. Bravely onwards!

• [...]

• Now, I can breathe with relief, as I’ve delivered on my promise, and I gave you a full solution to the CentOS 7.4 Realtek issues post upgrade. I do not like to end articles on a cliffhanger, and definitely not carry the solution over to a follow-up article, but in this rare case, it was necessary. The mainline kernel upgrade is a topic of its own.

• The kernel installation worked fine, and thereafter, we seem to have gained on many fronts. The network issues are fully resolved, we can compile again, the performance seems improved despite worse figures in the system monitor, battery life and stability are not impaired in any way, and the CentOS box has fresh new life, wrapped in modern features and latest software. And none of this was meant to be in the first place, because CentOS is a server distro. Well, I hope you are happy. The one outstanding mission – Plasma 5. Once we have that, we can proudly claim to have created the ultimate Linux distro hybrid monster. Take care.

Finance

Fedora

• To little surprise given that Fedora Linux always strives to ship with a bleeding-edge GNU toolchain, for the Fedora 29 release this fall they are planning to make use of the yet-to-be-released Binutils 2.31.

• Since the release of Linux 4.17 almost two weeks ago, I haven’t heard of any horror stories, Linux 4.17 continues running excellent on all of my test systems, the 4.17.1 point release was quite small, and more distributions are gearing up to ship this latest kernel release.

Debian Family

• Microsoft had to emit a hasty update for its R Open analysis tool after developers found the open-source package was not playing nice with some Linux systems.

• The issue was brought to light earlier this week by developer Norbert Preining, who found that the Debian GNU/Linux version of Open R – Microsoft’s open-source implementation of the R statistics and data science tool – was causing headaches when it was installed on some systems.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The latest Mesa 18.1.1 graphics stack is now available to install on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

• Mesa 18.1.1 is the first point release update in the Mesa 18.1.x series, which debuted back in May with Mesa 18.1.0.

• The Mesa 18.1.x series touts plenty of improvements, including better Vulkan and OpenGL performance, updated Tegra, Nouveau, and Intel drivers, as well as support for the OpenGL 4.5 API.

• I generally am not trying to shoot for terse blog posts. That being said, my position at work is getting increasingly untenable since we’re in a position of being physically unable to accomplish our mission goals prior to funding running out at 11:59:59 PM Eastern Time on September 30th. Conflicting imperatives were set and frankly we’re starting to hit the point that neither are getting accomplished regardless of how many warm bodies we’re throwing at the problem. It isn’t good either when my co-workers who have any military experience are sounding out KBR, Academi, and Perspecta.

Devices/Embedded

• I’m a big fan of DIY projects and think that there is a lot of value in doing something yourself instead of relying on some third party. I mow my own lawn, change my own oil and do most of my own home repairs, and because of my background in system administration, you’ll find all sorts of DIY servers at my house too. In the old days, geeks like me would have stacks of loud power-hungry desktop computers around and use them to learn about Linux and networking, but these days, VMs and cloud services have taken their place for most people. I still like running my own servers though, and thanks to the advent of these tiny, cheap computers like the Raspberry Pi series, I’ve been able to replace all of my home services with a lot of different small, cheap, low-power computers.

• DFI’s “KS-156AL” industrial touch-panel PC runs Linux or Windows on Apollo Lake and features a 15.6-inch, 1366 x 768 touchscreen with IP65 protection and shock and vibration resistance.

• DFI’s Linux-friendly, 15.6-inch KS-156AL panel PC is based on its AL171 mini-ITX board, which was announced a year ago along with the similar AL173 which is otherwise identical except for the addition of wide-range power. The KS-156AL was recently announced along with a similarly Intel Apollo Lake based, 7-inch KS070-AL panel PC. The 7-inch KS070-AL is supported only with Windows, although it’s based on a 3.5-inch, “coming soon” AL551 SBC that also supports Ubuntu. The two systems are designed for factory automation, transportation, and other embedded applications.

• Kontron’s KBox B-201 embedded PC runs Yocto-based Linux or Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSB on 7th Gen Intel Core “Kaby Lake” processors. The rugged system stands out with its compact, 190 x 190 x 60mm, 2 kg footprint, its “silent” (<= 34 dBA) fan, and its multiple storage and mounting options. The Mini-ITX based computer is designed for “image processing tasks, plant data collection, as well as manufacturing executive systems (MES) in the automation pyramid,” says Kontron.

Android

• It’s a known thing that Samsung is working on a foldable smartphone. Last year, news surfaced that the device that’s likely to be called Galaxy X and it would feature a 7.3-inch OLED display.

• Now, The Korea Herald has dropped the details about the price tag of the ambitious device Samsung hasn’t been able to release in years due to production issues. Samsung’s foldable smartphone could cost around $1850 (2 million won).

• If you’re moving to Android from another platform, the switch can be a little daunting. Some things may work in a familiar way, but there are so many other things that are different. Here’s everything you need to know about making the switch.

Free Software/Open Source

• Knowing how successful the original version of Talon for Twitter was, it might not be a surprise that its revamped Material Design version is currently the top paid social app. There is clearly a demand for third-party Twitter apps that look good, a demand that developer Luke Klinker knows extends to other developers and tinkerers.

• That might be why Klinker announced that the current version of Talon will be open source from now on.

• Tomorrow is the GIF’s 31st anniversary — exciting, right? Those animated images have truly changed the world. All kidding aside, it is pretty amazing that the file format came to be way back in 1987!

• To celebrate tomorrow’s milestone, Google releases a new open source tool today. Called “GIF for CLI,” it can convert a Graphics Interchange Format image into ASCII art for terminal. You can see such an example in the image above.

• For IoT development, new survey data shows enterprise IT teams are getting more comfortable with open source software.

• Databricks announced a new open source project called MLflow for open source machine learning at the Spark Summit this month.

• The company exists to focus on cloud-based big data processing using the open source Apache Spark cluster computing framework.

• The company’s chief technologist Matei Zaharia says that the team built its machine learning (ML) approach to address the problems that people typically voice when it comes to ML.

• Rufus Pollock’s new book The Open Revolution: rewriting the rules of the information age, reimagines ownership in a digital age and its implications from the power of tech monopolies to control how we think and vote , to unaffordable medicines, to growing inequality. Get the book and find out more at openrevolution.net. – Cory

• The key to efficient data processing is handling rows of data in batches, rather than one row at a time. Older, file-oriented databases utilized the latter method, to their detriment. When SQL relational databases came on the scene, they provided a query grammar that was set-based, declarative and much more efficient. That was an improvement that’s stuck with us.

• Bitfi, a global payments technology company working to enable businesses and consumers to participate in the digital currency economy, today announced Bitfi Knox Wallet – the first unhackable, open source hardware wallet with an accompanying dashboard that features wireless setup and support for many popular cryptocurrencies and crypto assets, including Monero, a fully decentralized private cryptocurrency that has previously never had a hardware wallet solution.

• Sculpt for The Curious (TC) is the second incarnation of the general-purpose operating system pursued by the developers of the Genode OS Framework. It comes in the form of a ready-to-use system image that can be booted directly from a USB thumb drive. In contrast to earlier versions, Sculpt TC features a graphical user interface for the interactive management of storage devices and networking. The main administrative interface remains text-based. It allows the user to “sculpt” the system live into shape, and introspect the system’s state at any time.

Events

• Back in the summer of 1999, 10 programmers from around the globe congregated in a room in Calgary, Alberta, to work on the obscure open source operating system known as OpenBSD. This was, in fact, the first ever recorded hackathon – a portmanteau of the words ‘hack’ and ‘marathon’ – anywhere in the world. Since…

• As an initiative to give back to the open source community, Fynd, the unique fashion e-commerce portal had launched gofynd.io, a few months ago. This project enabled the engineers of the fashion e-commerce portal to learn new technologies, improve the core infrastructure and enhance the Fynd platform. However, Fynd wanted to streamline the open sourcing process for which, the fashion e-commerce portal introduced Fynd Hackxagon—Open Source Challenge. The tech team open-sourced 13 projects in a day that were later made available in the Fynd GitHub public account.

• The South African open source, Linux, and Postgres community will be treated to two conferences in October – LinuxConf on 8 October and PostgresConf on 9 October.

• LinuxConf is a one-day conference in Johannesburg aimed at the Linux and open source community.

• Topics covered at LinuxConf will include Linux Kernel and OS, Linux distributions, virtualisation, system administration, open source applications, networking, and development environments.

• PostgresConf is aimed at the database administration and developer community, where they will exchange ideas and learn about the features and upcoming trends within PostgreSQL.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla is reported to be working on a browser that works on voice commands instead of standard inputs obtained from mouse and keyboard.

• The project has been named ‘Scout’; the voice-controlled web browser would focus on accessibility and would allow users to surf the web without using a touchscreen and other conventionally used input systems.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Version 2.5 of the GNU Scientific Library (GSL) is now available. GSL provides a large collection of routines for numerical computing in C.

• This release introduces some new features and fixes several bugs. The full NEWS file entry is appended below.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Evil Mad Scientist Labs sell a bunch of cool open source hardware kits for making plotters — basically, a very precise robot arm that draws with whatever pen or marker you screw into its grip. There’s the Eggbot (for drawing on curved surfaces like eggs, balloons and balls), but there’s also the Axidraw, which works on flat surfaces.

• Axidraw owners have been decorating tees with Axidraws and colored markers, creating some really smashing designs.

Programming/Development

• Python is famous for being a “batteries included” language—its standard library provides a versatile set of modules with the language—but there may be times when some of those batteries have reached their end of life. At the 2018 Python Language Summit, Christian Heimes wanted to suggest a few batteries that may have outlived their usefulness and to discuss how the process of retiring standard library modules should work.

• The “batteries included” phrase for Python came from the now-withdrawn PEP 206 in 2006. That PEP argued that having a rich standard library was an advantage for the language since users did not need to download lots of other modules to get real work done. That argument still holds, but there are some modules that are showing their age and should, perhaps, be unplugged and retired from the standard library.

• If you use Python, there’s a good chance you have heard of IPython, which provides an enhanced read-eval-print loop (REPL) for Python. But there is more to IPython than just a more convenient REPL. Today’s IPython comes with integrated libraries that turn it into an assistant for several advanced computing tasks. We will look at two of those tasks, using multiple languages and distributed computing, in this article.

• IPython offers convenient access to documentation, integration with matplotlib, persistent history, and many other features that greatly ease interactive work with Python. IPython also comes with a collection of “magic” commands that alter the effect of single lines or blocks of code; for example, you can time your code simply by typing %%time at the prompt before entering your Python statements. All of these features also work when using the Jupyter notebook with the IPython kernel, so you can freely switch between the terminal and the browser-based interface while using the same commands.

• One of my goals when writing talks is to produce content with a long shelf life. Because I’m one of those weird people that prefers to write new talks for new events, I feel like it’d be a waste of effort if my talks didn’t at least age well. So how do things measure up if I look back on one of my oldest?

• Now let’s look at a somewhat different option: the Tornado framework. Tornado is, for the most part, as bare-bones as Flask, but with a major difference: Tornado is built specifically to handle asynchronous processes. That special sauce isn’t terribly useful in the app we’re building in this series, but we’ll see where we can use it and how it works in a more general situation.

• Let’s continue the pattern we set in the first two articles and start by tackling the setup and config.

Leftovers

Science

• The European Commission appointed 52 experts today to a new High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, and also launched the AI Alliance, an online forum to facilitate broad participation in dialogue on the burgeoning technology.

• According to a Commission press release, the multi-stakeholder High-Level Expert Group on AI, composed of members from academia, industry and civil society, is tasked to support the implementation of the EU Communication on Artificial Intelligence, make recommendations to inform policy and digital strategy, and develop ethical guidelines for AI.

• That said, you’re not naive about things. When asked about general media coverage of science, 42 percent said it was too sensationalist, and the biggest complaint in a separate question was that unproven tech gets too much coverage (36 percent of respondents). You like knowing about science so much that a third of you complained that most media coverage is too superficial; only two percent said it’s good. “Other” answers in complaints about the media were dominated by “everything option but good”-style answers (e.g, “Complete unmitigated garbage” and “It’s pretty much shit, to be honest”).

Health/Nutrition

• Faced with a longstanding lack of progress at the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization on the protection of genetic resources and traditional knowledge, some developing countries are examining the possibility of moving outside the multilateral system toward a plurilateral agreement with like-minded countries. During an international conference last week, panellists pondered the prospects of such an option.

• Illinois lawmakers have asked state child welfare officials to explain why they routinely fail to find better homes for hundreds of children in psychiatric hospitals, leaving them trapped for weeks and sometimes months.

• State Sen. Julie Morrison, a Democrat from Deerfield, called for a public hearing after a ProPublica Illinois investigation last week revealed that children in the care of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services are confined to psychiatric hospitals after physicians have cleared them for release.

• The investigation found that, between 2015 and 2017, children and teens collectively spent more than 27,000 days stuck in psychiatric hospitals instead of in more appropriate placements, including residential treatment centers or foster homes. And the number of psychiatric admissions that went beyond medical necessity has surged, jumping from 88 in 2014 to 301 last year, an increase the department said it cannot explain.

Security

• Docker images are packages that typically include a pre-configured application running on top of an operating system. By downloading them from Docker Hub, administrators can save huge amounts of set-up time. Last July and August one or more people used the Docker Hub account docker123321 to upload three publicly available images that contained surreptitious code for mining cryptocurrencies. In September, a GitHub user complained one of the images contained a backdoor.

• The way we use technology to construct products and services is constantly evolving, at a rate that is difficult to comprehend. Regrettably, the predominant approach used to secure design methodology is preventative, which means we are designing stateful security in a stateless world. The way we design, implement, and instrument security has not kept pace with modern product engineering techniques such as continuous delivery and complex distributed systems. We typically design security controls for Day Zero of a production release, failing to evolve the state of our controls from Day 1 to Day (N).

• This problem is also rooted in the lack of feedback loops between modern software-based architectures and security controls. Iterative build practices constantly push product updates, creating immutable environments and applying complex blue-green deployments and dependencies on ever-changing third-party microservices. As a result, modern products and services are changing every day, even as security drifts into the unknown.

• Once upon a time, when we worried about security, we worried about our software. These days, it’s our hardware, our CPUs, with problems like Meltdown and Spectre, which are out to get us. The latest Intel revelation, Lazy FP state restore, can theoretically pull data from your programs, including encryption software, from your computer regardless of your operating system.

• Like its forebears, this is a speculative execution vulnerability. In an interview, Red Hat Computer Architect Jon Masters explained: “It affects Intel designs similar to variant 3-a of the previous stuff, but it’s NOT Meltdown.” Still, “It allows the floating point registers to be leaked from another process, but alas that means the same registers as used for crypto, etc.” Lazy State does not affect AMD processors.

• A new security vulnerability has been found in Intel’s family of Core processors, along similar lines of the major Spectre bug that has been making headlines all year. Thankfully, this one appears to be less severe – and is already patched in modern versions of Windows and Linux.

• The freshly-discovered hole is known as the ‘Lazy FP state restore’ bug, and like Spectre, it is a speculative execution side channel attack. Just a few weeks back, we were told to expect further spins on speculative execution attack vectors, and it seems this is one.

• Intel explains: “Systems using Intel Core-based microprocessors may potentially allow a local process to infer data utilizing Lazy FP state restore from another process through a speculative execution side channel.”

• Intel yesterday announced yet another security vulnerability with its Core-based microprocessors. According to ZDNet, Lazy FP state restore “can theoretically pull data from your programs, including encryption software, from your computer regardless of your operating system.” Note that Lazy State does not affect AMD processors.

• A series of [cracks] perpetrated against so-called “smart meter” installations over the past several years may have cost a single U.S. electric utility hundreds of millions of dollars annually, the FBI said in a cyber intelligence bulletin obtained by KrebsOnSecurity. The law enforcement agency said this is the first known report of criminals compromising the hi-tech meters, and that it expects this type of fraud to spread across the country as more utilities deploy smart grid technology.

• A few months ago, during my keynote at Black Hat Europe, I was discussing how we should be limiting the amount of trust when building computer systems. Recently, a new technology from Intel has been gaining popularity among both developers and researchers, a technology which promises a big step towards such trust-minimizing systems. I’m talking about Intel SGX, of course.

Defence/Aggression

• Scads of analysts and pundits have weighed in on the Trump-Kim summit talks in Singapore, parsing the brief agreement and presidential tweets for signs of just how strongly it actually commits North Korea to total, verifiable “denuclearization.”

• Most of them are missing the point. The real threat to U.S., Korean, and Japanese security of late has come not from North Korean nukes, but from threats by President Donald Trump and his closest advisers to launch a regional war to preempt any further North Korean progress on warhead and missile technology. Some experts were giving even odds of a U.S.-initiated war as recently as a few months ago.

• So even if the spectacle in Singapore was more theater than substance, even if the president’s effusive praise for a totalitarian leader was hard to swallow, we should applaud Trump for belatedly making good on his 2016 campaign promise to sit down with Kim Jong-un over a hamburger in search of peace.

• Throughout most of 2017, the Trump administration instead issued a steady stream of pronouncements warning that it was ready to go to war to stop Pyongyang from perfecting long-range missiles capable of hitting the United States with nuclear weapons.

• Drones continue to proliferate among US police forces. Drone manufacturer DJI has partnered with Axon, maker of police body cameras, to sell drones directly to police departments.

• A federal judge today allowed an American journalist based in Syria to challenge his alleged placement on a US kill list, the Washington Post reported today.

• The green light gives Bilal Abdul Kareem, a journalist operating in Syria, the ability to seek answers as to whether he is included on a US kill list.

• US government lawyers asked the US Judge Rosemary Collyer of the District Columbia to dismiss the case, claiming that Kareem is not able to evidence his case based on the secrecy involved in targeted killing decision making in the US military and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

• “Due process is not merely an old and dusty procedural obligation … It is a living, breathing concept that protects US persons from overreaching government action even, perhaps, on an occasion of war,” Collyer said in her ruling.

• Yemen has seen decades of war, first with the 1960s civil war that ended North Yemen’s monarchy. Fighting between Marxist South Yemen and the north followed. Yemen unified in 1990, but resentment persisted under 22 years of kleptocratic rule by Ali Abdullah Saleh.

• Saleh served as a somewhat-trusted U.S. ally in the wake of the 2000 al-Qaida bombing of the USS Cole as it refueled off Yemen’s port city of Aden, killing 17 sailors. He allowed American forces to deploy to Yemen and conduct drone strikes on suspected al-Qaida militants, which also killed civilians. However, many Americans long suspected duplicity on the part of Saleh, who once described the challenge of navigating Yemen’s complicated tribal politics as “dancing on the heads of snakes.”

• Sangh affiliates Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal have been classified as militant religious outfits in the recently updated World Factbook, published by the US’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

• On MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, the host was aghast (6/12/18) that the US says it will halt the annual war games it conducts with South Korea on North Korea’s doorstep, because doing so is “an absolute jackpot for the North Korean dictator,” “one of the things he wants most on earth,” and now Washington “has just given them that for free, for nothing.”

• Maddow implied that Trump has taken this step out of fealty to Russia, and complained that pausing war games that threaten North Korea benefits Russia and China. She twice called the Kim/Trump summit a “wedding,” twice said that the two leaders “love” each other two times, and referred to Kim as Trump’s “best friend.” In other words, de-escalation is for wimps, and what’s needed is toughness, even if it risks nuclear war.

• Not once did Maddow demonstrate the slightest concern with avoiding war. The message of her segment is that the US should subject all 25 million people in North Korea to the threat of nuclear annihilation until its leaders do what the US says, a threat that necessarily extends to the rest of East Asia, since it would be decimated in any nuclear exchange, to say nothing of the likely devastating effects on the rest of the world.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Ken Loach is one of the world’s most respected film directors. His career began at the BBC in 1963 and consists of a body of work demonstrating socialist convictions and a deeply felt sympathy for the working class.

• Notable works include Up the Junction, Cathy Come Home, Kes, Days of Hope and A Question of Leadership. He dealt with the Spanish Civil War in Land And Freedom and the struggle against Britain’s oppression of Ireland in The Wind That Shakes The Barley—for which he won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006. He won a second Palme d’Or for I, Daniel Blake in 2016.

• The persecution of Julian Assange must end. To force him to remain in the Ecuadorian Embassy for fear of extradition to the USA is clearly political.

• He is right to be fearful. In the current febrile atmosphere people in the US have called for his execution.

• Thousands of Wikileaks supporters worldwide will hold protests at U.K and U.S Embassies on June 19th, 2018 to demand that the Governments of Australia, United States and United Kingdom pardon Assange and free the publisher from any potential indictment or charges in the U.S.

• The Protestors and Activists for Human Rights, and Justice, are demanding that Australia, Britain and the U.S. abide by the U.N. ruling to immediately free and compensate Julian Assange. The U.N. has ruled that Assange is being illegally detained.

• We are living through very dark days for democracy and freedom of expression. Voices of reason and calm are being relentlessly smeared and bullied whilst courageous whistleblowers such as Julian Assange are subjected to increasingly coercive attempts to silence them.

• It is essential that all of us who value democracy and free speech stand up in defence of Assange and demand that this scandalous and shameful State-led harassment is brought to an end.

• Our freedom to speak truth to power, oppose immoral and illegitimate wars, and to campaign for truth and accountability, is being lost at frightening speed. Halting this democratic decay starts with demanding freedom for Julian Assange.

• Assange reasoned that the key structure that generated bad governance was conspiracy. To fight the conspiracies behind corrupt governments, he advocated a strategy to expose the conspirators and the conspiracies through a systematic use of leaks.

• His subversive proposal was to build a website for whistleblowers where they could upload their information in safety and from where it could be collectively analysed by citizen journalists. The name he gave his whistleblower-enabling website was WikiLeaks.

• With never more than a handful of volunteers, WikiLeaks became the most famous news organisation in the world, with its leaks affecting politics globally. It published confidential records of one of Iceland’s top banks, revealing its role in Iceland’s financial collapse, the Collateral Murder video, the Iraq War logs, the Afghan War Diary, the Cablegate cables — major stories followed one after the other with breathtaking rapidity. The achievements of the tiny band of WikiLeaks hactivists between 2006 and 2010 constitute the most extraordinary episode in the history of citizen journalism.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Oceans Unmanned collaborated with drone companies DJI and DARTdrones to launch the freeFLY Drone Program, in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. According to Oceans Unmanned’s press release, their mission here is clear: to use this affordable and sophisticated aerial support to save the lives of whales who have become dangerously entangled.

Finance

• Pakistani authorities believe citizens invested $8bn in Dubai’s property market over 4 years, possibly to evade taxes.

• Italy will not ratify the European Union’s free trade agreement with Canada because it does not ensure sufficient protection for the country’s specialty foods, new Agriculture Minister Gian Marco Centinaio said in a newspaper interview on Thursday.

• Centinaio belongs to the far-right League party that this month formed a government coalition with the anti-establishment Five Star Movement following an inconclusive election in March.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Marcel is part of a group called the Orange Generation, which considers itself a gun violence prevention — not a gun control — advocacy organization. The group favors a more moderate approach to gun reform; it doesn’t argue for any kind of bans, Marcel said, but still wants common sense gun reform. He explained that the group uses what could reasonably get passed in the state of Texas as a litmus test for measures it considers.

• The Senate confirmed Christopher Krebs in a voice vote Tuesday to serve at the helm of Homeland Security’s National Protection and Programs Directorate, or NPPD, roughly four months after Trump nominated him to the post.

• In the role, Krebs will be responsible for overseeing the security of federal civilian networks and spearheading the federal government’s efforts to protect critical infrastructure from cyber and physical threats. NPPD is also newly responsible for helping states secure their digital voting systems, in the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

• Australia has formally agreed to a deal to help build a 4,000km (2,500 mile) internet cable to the Solomon Islands.

• It may not have been the most ridiculous thing he said.

• The obligation of our lawmakers to declare war is not merely a constitutional but a moral responsibility.

• Comcast had previously hinted that it was waiting to see the outcome of AT&T’s own merger battle with the DOJ before making its own bid for Fox. Comcast and many analysts believe that the comically broad nature of AT&T’s court victory (based on a pinhole narrow reading of the markets by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, who clearly has never heard of things like zero rating or net neutrality), means the precedent set will likely result in a DOJ that’s more hesitant to intervene in potentially problematic merger moving forward.

• That’s especially true of vertical integration mergers, where modern U.S. antitrust law tends to be ill-equipped to handle some of the more complex new media anti-competitive concerns that pop up. Combined with the death of ISP privacy rules and the neutering of net neutrality, we’re creating a brave new landscape where there’s very little to stop giants like Comcast and AT&T from using their last mile monopolies–combined with massive ownership of content needed to compete with these giants–as anti-competitive bludgeons against consumers and competitors alike.

• For example, there’s now nothing of note preventing AT&T and Comcast from exempting its own content (like HBO or a regional sports game) from arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps, while penalizing those who use a competitor’s service (Netflix, or the next Netflix). Similarly, there’s nothing stopping Comcast or Verizon from arbitrarily throttling competitors at interconnection points, driving up the cost for competitors to access their broadband subscribers. There’s an ocean of creative ways to hamstring competitors the government is now largely helpless to effectively police, and as the AT&T court win shows, the ISP claim that this isn’t a problem because antitrust will save us all clearly isn’t a valid argument.

• The Office of Technology Assessment existed in Congress from 1972 until 1995, when it was defunded by the Newt Gingrich-led “Contract with America” team. The purpose was to actually spend time to analyze technology issues and to provide Congress with objective analysis of the impact of technology and the policies that Congress was proposing. Remember how back when there was the big SOPA debate and folks in Congress kept talking about how they weren’t nerds and needed to hear from the nerds? Right: the OTA was supposed to be those nerds, but it hasn’t existed in nearly two decades — even though it still exists in law. It just isn’t funded.

• Rep. Mark Takano (in 2014 it was Rush Holt) thought that maybe we should finally give at least a little bit of money to test bringing back OTA and to help better advise Congress. While some would complain about Congress spending any money, this money was to better inform Congress so it stopped making bad regulations related to technology, which costs a hell of a lot more than the $2.5 million Takano’s amendment proposed. Also, without OTA, Congress is much more reliant on very biased lobbyists, rather than a truly independent government organization.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The law requiring Swiss ISPs to censor parts of the Internet, in order to prevent Swiss people from accessing foreign gambling sites and services, has been working its way through the Swiss legislature for some time. It was challenged by Switzerland’s powerful democracy, where 50,000 citizens can challenge any new law in a country-wide referendum. This is what happened to the Internet censorship law, and where you would think it would face an Internet generation who understand that you don’t meddle with the Internet lightly.

• New research published last month in the peer-reviewed journal New Media & Society highlights how pro-ED groups continue to evade attempts at moderation. The study also found that sites like Pinterest and Instagram sometimes suggest more pro-ED content to users via their recommendation algorithms. It isn’t an isolated problem—researchers have found that recommendation engines on platforms like YouTube also suggest problematic content, like conspiracy theories. But unlike fake news, users who share pro-eating disorder content could be suffering from a serious illness like anorexia or bulimia. Companies need to weigh not just the content itself, but also the effect that removing it might have on the vulnerable people who share it.

• Roger Ver, one of the first to invest in bitcoin startups, has recently tweeted out saying that he would “donate $250K USD to the charity of Reddit’s choice if they simply appoint mods that allow people to actually discuss Bitcoin on /r/Bitcoin”.

• Like most big screen romantic comedies, “Karma,” Egyptian director Khaled Youssef’s latest film, has a happy ending. After a 24-hour controversy, Egypt’s General Authority for Censorship announced on June 12 that the film could be screened in cinemas during the Eid al-Fitr holiday, backpedaling from its earlier ban issued the preceding day.

• Youssef, known for tackling controversial issues in his films, took to Twitter to announce the lifting of the ban and approval to hold screenings as scheduled, beginning June 14, without scenes being cut. The director, also a member of parliament, thanked the country’s “sovereign bodies” — the legislature and the Ministry of Culture — which pushed for the ban to be rescinded.

• It only took few hours before the Egyptian director of “Karma” movie, Khaled Yousef, to announce that the censorship authorities reversed their decision to ban his movie screening from cinemas during Eid. Now the authorities have reversed their decision for a special screening.

• [...]

• While the actual reasons behind the ban are not clear yet, the General Authority for Censorship announced at first that the ban resulted of the filmmakers’ failure to obtain the necessary licenses for public screenings, however, the film team discharged the allegations saying they was obtained in April.

• Some critics attributed the ban to the controversial topics introduced in the movie, some suggested the political hidden side presented and others said the main song of the movie might be the reason behind of its ban, as it includes ideas might be interpreted as opposed to the regime.

• If you want to make sure people see or hear something, ban people from seeing or hearing something. That predates the internet, as any former teenager who ever hid under the covers listening to “Louie Louie” with the volume down can surely attest.

• We are talking about a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. If censorship didn’t work then on something as inconsequential as a pop song, you can imagine how ineffective it would be now on something as important as sexual assault.

• The Petaluma community took aim at a principal Tuesday night after a student’s microphone was cut during her graduation speech.

• They spoke out that the problem is not just censorship, but the school turning a blind eye to sex assault.

• “My sophomore year I was sexually assaulted at Petaluma High School in the band room,” Bailey Walston said.

• “Gone With the Wind”

Privacy/Surveillance

• Facebook has more data on us than we can imagine. The app can track your location, name, friends, job and one day it could also track your eye movements.

• The social media giant could build a technology that can detect your eye movement and emotions in future.

• Facebook in a 229-word documented answers to the questions asked at the US Congress hearings denied that it is currently building any such software but it holds two patents titled “Dynamic eye tracking calibration” and the other “Techniques for emotion detection and content delivery” – for the eye-tracking and emotion detection technology.

• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has denied that the company is building eye-tracking software in a written document of answers to Congress. He said that if the company ever did build out the technology, it would take privacy of user into account.

• According to reports, the company holds at least two patents for detecting eye movements and emotions, , which it said “is one way that we could potentially reduce consumer friction and add security for people when they log into Oculus or access Oculus content,” but claims they are to protect their intellectual property.

• A couple of months ago, we wrote about an important case at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the region’s highest court. The final judgment is expected to rule on whether the Privacy Shield framework for transferring EU personal data to the US is legal under EU data protection law. Many expect the CJEU to throw out Privacy Shield, which does little to address the earlier criticisms of the preceding US-EU agreement: the Safe Harbor framework, struck down by the same court in 2015. However, that’s not the only problem that Privacy Shield is facing. One of the European Parliament’s powerful committees, which helps determine policy related to civil liberties, has just issued a call to the European Commission to suspend the Privacy Shield agreement unless the US tries harder…

• The FBI lost control of the “going dark” narrative. Part of it unraveled thanks to outside vendors. Two vendors — Cellebrite and Grayshift — announced they could crack any iPhone made. This shot holes in the FBI’s theory that locked phones stayed locked forever and thereafter were only useful for hammering legislators over the head with until they cranked out an anti-encryption law.

• The second unraveling was the FBI’s own unforced error. Supposedly it couldn’t count phones without software and the software it had couldn’t count phones. What the FBI and others claimed was 8,000 uncrackable threats to the safety of the American public was actually a little over 1,000 phones. As for the latent threat posed by these locked devices, that’s still pure speculation until the FBI starts handing over some info on what criminal acts these phones are tied to.

• The FBI will probably be looking to restart its “going dark” campaign, thanks to Apple’s latest effort, which will render Cellebrite and Grayshift’s phone cracking boxes obsolete.

• Supporters have placed a large billboard supporting imprisoned alleged leaker Reality Winner on Washington Road in Columbia County, GA., highlighting the fact that Winner has spent a year in jail without trial or bail, all for allegedly bringing to light information obviously in the public interest. The add brings attention to a case that has largely been ignored in the US press’s incessant coverage of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

• But the judge in Winner’s case, Chief U.S. District Court Judge J. Randal Hall, has issued an order the day after the billboard was put up, demanding attorneys follow court rules barring public statements about the case that they know could “interfere with a fair trial or otherwise prejudice the due administration of justice.” The order threatens the attorneys with being held in contempt of court, which could mean jail or fines, or “other measures.”

• The order comes despite the fact that Reality’s attorneys had nothing to do with the billboard and have had no communications with the group that put it up.

• Chinese spies first contacted Kevin Patrick Mallory on LinkedIn, hoping to lure him into providing important intelligence.

• One Chinese agent claimed to be a corporate headhunter for a firm called Darren and Associates. He then introduced Mallory to his associate, who said he was working for a Chinese think tank, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences—a common cover identity for intelligence officers in the Shanghai State Security Bureau, a sub-branch of China’s Ministry of State Security, an intelligence agency similar to the FBI and CIA combined.

• The patch prevents an iPhone’s USB port from being used for anything but charging an hour after the device has been locked, blocking access to data, Apple said in a statement. The move is already being criticized by some in the law-enforcement community, according to the New York Times.

• Apple is keen on making users its priority, and therefore after banning cryptocurrency mining apps and stopping developers from selling users’ contacts to third parties, Apple has yet again taken a major step towards maintaining high privacy standards for users on their platform.

• Apple has officially banned law enforcement bodies from cracking iPhones and accessing data stored on it by closing a technical loophole which has been exploited over the years by cops.

• Originally the scheme, first rolled out in Connecticut was kept quiet to add that element of surprise to any discoveries, but now with 17 so-called Electronic Storage Detection (ESD) dogs in service around the US, it is their time to shine.

• A similar experiment with two dogs is already in place in the UK.

• Halligan then introduces the animal to new distractions, such as other dogs and playtime. The ones that stay with her for the food pass the test. Out of the 100 or so dogs, only a small handful make it.

• The Committee has called on the European Commission to suspend Privacy Shield until the US complies by 1 September and to keep it suspended until it does. It added that the US authorities should act swiftly to remove certified companies that have misused personal data from the Privacy Shield list.

• WhatsApp on its website said that when a user makes a payment, the mobile messaging app creates the necessary connection between the sender and recipient of the payment, using Facebook infrastructure.

• No-one could have predicted the threats posed by information technology to civil liberties. But my friend Robert G. Kennedy III came close. In April 1989 he wrote Technological Threats To Civil Liberties. From almost 30 years later it is an amazingly perceptive piece. Here are two samples to encourage you to read the whole thing:

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Peter Principle problem arises when the skills that make someone successful at one job level don’t translate to success in the next level. In these cases, organizations must choose whether to reward the top performer with a promotion or to instead promote the worker that has the best skill match with a managerial position. When organizations reward success in one role with a promotion to another, the usual grumbles ensue; the best engineer doesn’t make the best engineering manager, and the best professor doesn’t make the best dean. The same problem may apply to scientists, physicians, lawyers, or in any other profession where technical aptitude doesn’t necessarily translate into managerial skill.

• These threats came in the context of several earlier attacks, sometimes fatal, on humanists and freethinkers in Bangladesh, which IHEU has reported and campaigned on extensively. As detailed in the IHEU Freedom of Thought Report chapter on Bangladesh, these attacks included in 2015 alone the murders of Avijit Roy, Washiqur Rahman, Ananto Bijoy Das, and Shahzahan’s friend Niloy Neel days before the threats to Shahzahan were published.

• Betton was hit several times. He didn’t die, but he doesn’t have much left in working order. He lost part of his gallbladder, colon, and rectum. His liver, pancreas and small intestine all suffered damage. His left leg was broken along with one of his vertebrae.

• The cops immediately set about justifying their extreme tactics. First, they claimed Betton fired at them, but ballistics tests showed Betton’s gun hadn’t been fired. Then they claimed he pointed a gun at them, but did not fire it. This could have easily been proven if any of the task force had bothered to activate their body cameras before breaking Betton’s door down. But the footage shows no cameras were activated until after the task force stopped firing.

• The task force used a regular search warrant, meaning the officers were supposed to knock and announce their presence. Nearly all of them said they followed these stipulations. Video from Betton’s home security camera (which can be seen at the Washington Post) caught all these officers in a lie.

• By the end of this month, Pennsylvania State Police officers will be required to file a report any time they call immigration authorities to the scene of a traffic stop, detailing the circumstances behind the call, the agency said Wednesday.

• This change comes two months after ProPublica and the Philadelphia Inquirer published an investigation about state and local police officers in Pennsylvania helping ICE round up immigrants for deportation, using tactics that raise questions about racial profiling and unlawful arrest.

• The story focused on Pennsylvania state Trooper Luke C. Macke as an extreme example. In 2017, Macke turned over at least 19 undocumented immigrants to ICE after interrogating them about their legal status and detaining them for up to four hours without a warrant.

• In response to the April investigation, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf released a statement calling for “a need for stronger uniform procedures addressing state police requests for assistance from outside agencies, including ICE, especially given the new pressure on state and local agencies from the federal government.”

• Across the U.S., cities and states have wrestled with their relationship with ICE. Some jurisdictions have explicit partnerships with the federal agency to train and deputize their officers to enforce immigration laws. Many others — including the cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — have implemented restrictions against officers questioning people about their immigration status and cooperating with ICE, worried that their agencies may come under civil rights scrutiny and alienate immigrant communities.

• Back when the existential competition between the communist USSR and the capitalist USA was reaching its fevered pitch, the CIA published a report on Communist bloc interrogation techniques — which it denounced as “police tactics which would not be condoned in a democratic country.”

• The 1956 CIA study was commissioned amid Cold War hysteria surrounding reports of the Communists’ seeming ability to “brainwash” prisoners — coaxing them to “confess” to all manner of things that were untrue.

• “The Communists,” the report’s authors explain, “do not look upon these assaults as ‘torture.’” Instead, interrogators, “in a typical legalistic manner,” use methods that allow them to conform to Communist theory which demands that “no force or torture be used in extracting information from prisoners.”

• Johnson was one of over 3,200 people serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for a nonviolent offense.

• I first met Alice Marie Johnson in April 2013. Seeking to tell the stories of the “living dead,” or the over 3,200 people serving life sentences without parole for nonviolent offenses, I wrote to prisoners around the country. I had originally written to Alice’s cellmate, but Alice then wrote to me, and soon we were talking on the phone and emailing. Alice had been sentenced to die in prison for her role in a nonviolent drug conspiracy, her first arrest or conviction. I profiled her story in “A Living Death,” a report we published later that year, and we featured Alice in a national campaign.

• Alice and I stayed in close touch over the years. I also got to know some of the members of her close-knit family who were fighting to bring her home. When Alice’s clemency petition was denied by President Obama without explanation in the final days of his presidency, I was shocked and devastated.

• Alice’s situation seemed hopeless until a video interview she gave with Mic.com in October 2017 went viral. Kim Kardashian saw the video and asked her lawyer, Shawn Holley, what could be done. We assembled a team of lawyers to pursue clemency for Alice: Shawn, me from the ACLU, and Brittany Barnett from the Buried Alive Project. We also brought on attorney Mike Scholl to try to get a sentence reduction through the courts in Memphis. We put in months of work on the clemency case and something amazing happened. Last week, President Trump commuted Alice’s sentence, and she was released after having served almost 22 years in prison.

• The most lasting image from Donald Trump’s historic meeting with Kim Jong Un on June 12 came shortly after the first hand shake; the US president gave a thumbs-up to the young dictator, who smiled back

• Later, Trump praised Kim, calling him “very talented,” and adding that “you see the fervor” in North Koreans’ “love” for their leader. “It was my honor to meet him,” he said.

• America must recognize that Black women are impacted by police violence, too.

• “Put a copy of your driver’s license, registration, and insurance on the dashboard.” That’s what I tell my guy friends when they make their 300-mile road trip for homecoming. “Stay on the sidewalk and keep out of the alley.” That’s what I tell the boys in the neighborhood as they consider a shortcut to the park.

• These are survival tactics that Black men and boys have incorporated into their everyday lives. These are precautions to take so that summer play and fall traditions are not compromised by incidents with the police. Black women — mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, and partners — have offered and echoed this advice (and experienced the trauma that comes from giving this advice) for years.

• We haven’t been giving ourselves the same advice, however. And though the Black Lives Matter movement was started by three Black women, we’ve largely been left out of the national narrative on police violence. Police violence impacts Black women and other women of color just as it does Black men. So sadly, we too need survival tactics for our teen girls attending pool parties and our girlfriends eating at the Waffle House.

• These comments mark the administration’s latest attempt to paint this inhumane policy in a decent light. It’s not working.

• In an interview with the LA Times published early Monday morning, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan set out to clarify CBP’s systematic practice of separating children from their parents at the border. Rather than provide real clarification, however, McAleenan’s comments continued the trend of Trump administration officials attempting to justify this unprecedented and horrific policy by spinning the truth and, worse, by making specious claims with little to no basis in fact.

• When asked how CBP was handling family separations, McAleenan at first forcefully denied that an official policy regarding separating children from parents even exists: “We do not have a policy of administrative separation.” But, this is misleading. While the statement is technically true — the administration’s new “zero-tolerance” policy does not explicitly mention family separation — in practice, it is meaningless. Prosecuting every person who crosses the border somewhere other than a port of entry necessitates criminal detention. If a person has children with her, that necessitates taking the children away. As the AP has noted, “while separating families might not be official U.S. policy, it is a direct consequence of Sessions’ zero-tolerance approach.”

• A 64-year-old man, an Albanian with legal US citizenship, was stripped of more than $58,000 in cash by Customs and Border Protection at Cleveland’s Hopkins Airport last year. Rustem Kazazi was headed to Albania with the cash to fix up his family’s old home and possibly buy property there. The CBP claims… well, it really claims nothing, other than its right to Kazazi’s life savings.

• CBP agents thought it was suspicious Kazazi would have so much cash on hand, despite Kazazi also carrying with him documentation of the cash’s origin. That didn’t slow the CBP’s cash-hauling efforts at all. Asset forfeiture allowed the CBP to take Kazazi’s money, say something ominous about violating federal law by not reporting the funds, and never bother charging Kazazi for all the violations the CBP claimed it spotted.

• It is illegal to take more than $10,000 in funds out of the country without reporting it. The problem is there’s nothing in airports suggesting this is the case. Literature at airports, as well as information posted at the TSA’s own website, do little to clarify what must be done if you plan to take money out of the country. Even if you do know what needs to be done, it’s almost impossible to do before boarding a flight. The funds must be reported at the time of the departure. But they must be reported to a customs office, which is rarely conveniently located on airport property and very definitely never in the terminal.

• Attorney General Jeff Sessions cited the Bible on Thursday in defending the Trump administration’s immigration policies — especially those that result in the separation of families — directing his remarks in particular to “church friends.” “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes,” Sessions said. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves. Consistent, fair application of law is in itself a good and moral thing and that protects the weak, it protects the lawful. Our policies that can result in short-term separation of families are not unusual or unjustified.” The Catholic Church and other religious leaders have voiced strong criticism of policies resulting in family separations and recent moves Sessions has made to restrict asylum.

• According to the patent, the AI could measure a user’s walking speed, watch for unusual typos or sense whether a phone is swaying or being held at an unusual angle. This, it suggests, could “predict user state using machine learning” and recognise “uncharacteristic user states”. In short, knowing whether you’re pissed or not.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The ruling (PDF) by US District Judge Richard Leon went entirely in AT&T’s favor. The Department of Justice had sued AT&T to block the merger, but the judge’s ruling, pending a possible appeal, would let AT&T complete the purchase without spinning off any subsidiaries.

• All may not be lost. Several US states have brought in laws enshrining the principles at a state level. The European Union introduced net neutrality laws in 2016.

• In reality, the changes will be difficult to fully enforce as a number of states have brought in their own federal laws which will override the FCC decision. Washington, for example, will see no difference as its law came into effect as the federal one expired. California, New York and Illinois are also set to bring in legislation, thus bringing over half the US population back under net neutrality.

• Additionally, the FCC is facing accusations that it faked a DDoS attack to strengthen its case.

• A pair of Democratic senators are demanding answers from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on a 2017 cyberattack following a media report raising questions about the agency’s official story.

• Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent FCC Chairman Ajit Pai a list of questions about an incident last year during which the agency’s comment-filing website was taken offline after the late-night comedian John Oliver urged his audience to flood it with pro-net neutrality comments.>

• For now nothing changes. In fact, the FCC decision of rolling back net neutrality norms are likely to cause an uproar in the US and because of the federal nature of that country, chances are that many states will come out with their own rules that will enforce net neutrality. And some will sue FCC. In fact, 20 states in the US have already filed a lawsuit to stop the repeal. Several states including Washington, California, Oregon and New Jersey have even enforced norms that enforce the principles of net neutrality within their borders.

• However, companies are likely to drop these self-imposed restrictions; they will just wait until people aren’t paying a lot of attention, said Marc Martin, a former FCC staffer who is now chairman of communications practice at the law firm Perkins Coie. Any changes now, while the spotlight is on net neutrality, could lead to a public relations backlash.

• Companies are likely to start testing the boundaries over the next six months to a year. Expect to see more offers like AT&T’s exemption of its DirecTV Now streaming TV service from customers’ mobile data limits. Rival services like Sling TV and Netflix count video against data caps, essentially making them more expensive to watch.

DRM

• For 12 years, we’ve celebrated IDAD — making, organizing, protesting, and taking action to support the demolition of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) — and 2018 is no different! This year we will continue the fight against DRM and celebrate the work of activists, artists, and technologists who create DRM-free media and technology. You can read more about past IDADs online.

• Russian company Arusoft has released a new version of its DeUHD ripping tool which bypasses AACS 2.1. The new encryption version appeared last month on the UHD Blu-ray discs of Fury and The Patriot and couldn’t be bypassed with existing tools. The new version makes it possible for pirates to rip the discs in question, which happened soon after.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• After the Supreme Court decision in B&B Hardware, Julia Matheson and Cathy Liu of Hogan Lovells examine a case considering whether a court decision can have preclusive effect on a TTAB proceeding

• In March 2015, in a decision that prompted significant anxiety and unease among a large segment of trade mark practitioners, the US Supreme Court ruled that likelihood-of-confusion decisions from the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB)…

Copyrights

• I appeared on CBC Radio’s national flagship news programme As It Happens last night, talking about the EU’s Article 13 proposal to use AI algorithms to spy on and judge everything posted online for potential copyright infringements.

• Technology reporter Cory Doctorow says Canadians should be concerned about an expansive new copyright policy that could soon be adopted in Europe.

• This policy, under Article 13, would ensure that any copyrighted content — audio, video, images, text, code, etc. — couldn’t be uploaded or shared without the proper permissions. European Parliament will vote on the new law on June 20.

• Exactly a year after Canada’s largest telecoms companies executed a warrant against TVAddons founder Adam Lackman, unwelcome visitors have again attended his home. After a court order to pay attorney’s fees of CAD$50,000 went unsettled, bailiffs representing Bell, Rogers, and Videotron turned up at Lackman’s home Wednesday in an effort to seize property.

• Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde no longer has a looming threat of a million euros hanging over his head, the District Court in Helsinki, Finland, has ruled. In addition, the record labels have abandoned their €350,000 damages claim. The Court did order Sunde to pay several thousand euros in costs, arguing that he has some liability, but this will be appealed.

• Every electronic device capable of storing data is just another tool in the pirate’s chest. If you think your phone or mp3 player or hard drive is just something for storing data and perhaps even purchased software, movies, and music, think again. The simple fact you’ve decided to purchase any of these devices pretty much ensures content creators everywhere will go bankrupt.

• The “you must be a pirate” tax is being pitched again. The senseless fee tacked on to blank plastic discs for so many years continues to migrate to electronic devices, including the tiny chips stashed away inside smartphones. Apparently, the Canadian music industry needs something to replace the revenue stream that dried up when people stopped buying blank CDs. Michael Geist, working with documents secured through a public records request, reports the Canadian music industry is looking for a hefty payout from the government.

• It’s understandable that people are getting fatigued from all the various attacks on the internet, but as I’ve noted recently, one of the biggest threats to our open internet is the incredibly bad Copyright Directive that is on the verge of being voted on by the EU Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee. The Directive is horrible on many fronts, and we’ve been highlighting two key ones. First, the dangerous link tax and, second, the mandatory upload censorship filters. Each of these could have major ramifications for how the internet will function.

• Incredibly, both are driven mainly by industry animus towards Google from legacy industries that feel left behind. The link tax is the brainchild of various news publishers, while the upload filters are mainly driven by the recording industry. But, of course, what should be quite obvious at this point is that both of these ideas will only make Google stronger while severely limiting smaller competitors. Google can pay the link tax. Google has already built perhaps the most sophisticated content filtering system (which still sucks). Nearly everyone else cannot. So, these moves don’t hurt Google. They hurt all of Google’s possible competitors (including many European companies).

• The most contentious element is Article 13 of the proposed directive (EU-speak for law). It seeks to make Internet services that host large amounts of user-uploaded material responsible for policing their holdings to prevent copyright infringement. Until now, companies have been able to draw on the safe harbor protection in the EU’s e-commerce law, which online services enjoy when they are “mere conduits.” The new copyright directive would withdraw that protection for any service that “optimizes” content, which includes things like promoting, tagging, curating, or sequencing a site’s contents—most major online services, in other words.

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.