● 02.17.19

● Links 17/2/2019: Compiz 0.9.14.0, Geary 0.13.0, GNU FreeDink 109.6, Debian 9.8, Texinfo 6.6

Posted in News Roundup at 1:51 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• A few weeks ago I pointed out a new feature targeted for Chrome OS 74: A native way to backup and restore Linux apps and data on Chromebooks that support Project Crostini. Since then, the Chromium team has made a big push to nail down the functionality in advance of the Chrome OS 74 feature freeze date, which is February 22: Aside from the code to support backups and restores, there was a slew of interface work done this week.

Server

• While most instances of Kubernetes today are deployed on virtual machines running in the cloud or on-premises, there is a growing number of instances of Kubernetes being deployed on bare-metal servers.

• The two primary reasons for opting to deploy Kubernetes on a bare- metal server over a virtual machine usually are performance and reliance on hardware accelerators. In the first instance, an application deployed at the network edge might be too latency-sensitive to tolerate the overhead created by a virtual machine. AT&T, for example, is working with Mirantis to deploy Kubernetes on bare-metal servers to drive 5G wireless networking services.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Queued for mainlining with the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle is initial support for Bitmain SoCs. Bitmain is the Chinese company that started out designing ASICs for Bitcoin mining with the Antminer and other products. The company has also been venturing into designs for artificial intelligence and deep learning.

• With the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel will be initial support for Bitmain’s BM1880 System-on-a-Chip as well as the “Sophon Edge” developer board.

Linux Foundation

• The IT arm of South Korean technical school large Samsung proclaimed it had developed technology to hurry up blockchain transactions, the corporate confirmed in an exceedingly promulgation on Feb fourteen. Presenting at the continued IBM suppose 2019 conference in point of entry, Samsung SDS aforesaid its new technology, Nexledger Accelerator, had already passed testing with Hyperledger material.

• “In order to boost dealing process speed, that could be a key thought in applying blockchain technology, Samsung SDS has developed its own Nexledger Accelerator, which may be applied to Hyperledger material,” the promulgation explained:

• During IBM THINK 2019, IBM’s annual conference focused on technology and business, Samsung SDS announced it is continuing its collaboration with IBM in support of advancing Hyperledger Fabric, an open source cross-industry blockchain technology, with recent code contributions, research, and a new white paper. As a contributor to Hyperledger Fabric, Samsung SDS is working to improve fabric capabilities and actively contributing its new “Accelerator” code to the open source community. The new code is expected to significantly improve Hyperledger Fabric performance for specific use cases.

• IBM has made its blockchain platform available out of the IBM data centre in Melbourne, allowing customers to run their applications on the company’s cloud and abide by data sovereignty requirements.

• Mapzen, an open source mapping platform praised in civic tech circles and used in certain local government projects, is back.

• More accurately, it never really left. The project officially shut down a year ago, but since it was open-source, people kept using it.

• Now, the Linux Foundation — a vanguard of open-sourcing — is taking on Mapzen as a project, giving current and prospective Mapzen users more clarity about who owns the intellectual property and how they can use it.

• The Open Mainframe Project (OMP) has announced that Zowe, an open source software framework for the mainframe, is now production-ready less than 6 months after launching.

• Hosted by The Linux Foundation, the Open Mainframe Project is comprised of business and academic leaders within the mainframe community that collaborate to develop shared tool sets and resources. OMP launched Zowe, an open source project based on z/OS, last August to serve as an integration platform for the next generation of tools for administration, management and development on z/OS mainframes.

• Hosted by The Linux Foundation, the Open Mainframe Project is comprised of business and academic leaders within the mainframe community that collaborates to develop shared toolsets and resources. OMP launched Zowe, the first-ever open source project based on z/OS, last August to serve as an integration platform for the next generation of tools for administration, management and development on z/OS mainframes.

• Zowe 1.0 consists of core technologies enabling modern interfaces for web applications on z/OS, a new command line interface and expansion of platform REST API capabilities. This makes the z/OS environment more “cloud-like” and aims to improve integration in h

• Hosted by The Linux Foundation, the Open Mainframe Project is comprised of business and academic leaders within the mainframe community that collaborate to develop shared tool sets and resources. OMP launched Zowe, the first-ever open source project based on z/OS, last August to serve as an integration platform for the next generation of tools for administration, management and development on z/OS mainframes.

• The Open Mainframe Project has announced that after six months of development Zowe is now production ready. Zowe is an open-source mainframe framework that strengthens integrations with modern enterprise applications.

• By providing interoperability and offering new web technologies, Zowe is designed to enable developers to use familiar open-source tools to access mainframe resources and services.

• The acclaimed Sony Pictures Imageworks contributed the software tool used to curate the best of Sony Pictures movies. The movies such as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Alice in Wonderland, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to a major open source community.

• Sony Pictures used OpenColorIO for managing color during the process of production. OpenColorIO has become the second project of the software in the Academy Software Foundation. The foundation is an industry association across the industry the the Open Source Linux Foundation is working on.

• The acclaimed Sony Pictures Imageworks contributed the software tool used to curate the best of Sony Pictures movies. The movies such as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Alice in Wonderland, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to a significant open source community.

• The OpenColorIO tool from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is now available as an open-source program.

Graphics Stack

• A set of 38 patches have been sent out that wire in support for the VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8, VK_AMD_gpu_shader_half_float, VK_AMD_gpu_shader_int16, and VK_KHR_8bit_storage extensions to the RADV driver within Mesa.

• Rhys Perry who started contributing to the Nouveau driver stack has been working on this 8-bit and 16-bit arithmetic support for the Radeon Vulkan “RADV” driver. These 8-bit / 16-bit extensions work for AMD Volcanic Islands GPUs and newer. However, the half-floats support needs LLVM 8.0 or newer due to bugs on LLVM 7.

• The latest addition to AMD’s open-source Linux kernel driver is supporting BACO on Vega 12.

• With the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle, BACO is enabled for Vega 10 and Vega 20. BACO is short for Bus Active, Chip Off as a low-power mode whereby most of the GPU is shut-off during idle periods in order to drastically cut the power consumption of the graphics card. BACO is also known as AMD ZeroCore Power mode.

• The previously mentioned work on improving ETC2 support for older generations of Intel graphics has now been mainlined for Mesa 19.1.

• This work for the ETC2 texture compression is improving the “fake” support for Intel Gen 7 class graphics, the Ivybridge and Haswell era graphics. This work was done by Igalia to address the lack of native ETC2 coverage on these several year old chips. Following this improved implementation for the fake ETC2 support is also wiring up OES_copy_image support for this extension. ETC2 is the lossy texture compression mandated since OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 4.3.

• The newest addition to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for open-source 3D on Qualcomm graphics hardware is enabling OpenGL compute support for A6xx series hardware.

• Freedreno already ships compute support for Adreno A5xx hardware while now for Mesa 19.1 the support has landed for the latest-generation A6xx hardware.

Benchmarks

• If you are in the market for an AMD Ryzen Threadripper or AMD EPYC heatsink that fits within 4U height requirements, the Noctua NH-U9 TR4-SP3 is still easily the best option available. I’m now running the NH-U9 TR4-SP3 in five different EPYC/Threadripper systems in the racks and they work out splendid.

• I’ve already covered the NH-U9 TR4-SP3 multiple times before, but with having picked up another one of these coolers this past week and being satisfied with the results, just wanted to give another shout-out to Noctua and pass along the latest thermal results. For this latest build, the NH-U9 TR4-SP3 is cooling an EPYC 7351P 16-core / 32-thread CPU that tops out at 3.9GHz.

Applications

• Compiz 0.9.14.0 has been officially released today.

• Major changes in this release include:

• - Development has switched from Bazaar (back) to Git [1]. - CCSM has been ported to PyGObject, GTK 3 and Python 3. - compizconfig-python has been ported from Pyrex to Cython. - Restored the Color Filter plugin by porting it to the new plugin API. - Added support for loading configuration from multiple files. - Docks and splashscreens now appear focused. - Fixed build errors with GCC 8. - Removed KDE (4.x) support code. - Compiz now needs cmake ≥ 3.10.0 and pkg-config ≥ 0.29.1 to build. - gtk-window-decorator now needs libmetacity ≥ 3.22.0 to build.

• Also, some bugs have been fixed. See NEWS [2] for a list of them.

• The tarball for the new release can be downloaded at [3]. Please report any bugs you have found to our bug tracker [4].

• I would like to thank Alberts Muktupāvels, Marco Trevisan, Auboyneau Vincent, Samuel Thibault, Colomban Wendling, Eleni Maria Stea and other people who have contributed to this release.

• While Ubuntu may no longer be using Compiz by default as the compositing window manager, the Compiz project is still alive as marked by today’s Compiz 0.9.14.0 release.

• Compiz 0.9.14.0 is the first release for the project in over two years and features the Compiz Config Settings Manager (CCSM) being ported to GTK3 and Python 3, restored the color filter plug-in, support for loading configuration data from multiple files, focus fixes for docks, fixes for building with the GCC 8 compiler, dropping the KDE4 support code, and a variety of other bug fixes and improvements.

• The desktop environment with its bundle of programs sharing a common graphical user interface (GUI) remains a firm favorite with users. Not surprising really given that a good desktop environment makes computing fun and simple. The graphical desktop environment has become so ingrained in almost everyone’s computer activities that it might seem the command line will wither away. Yet, there is still an important role to play for the powerful command-line interface (CLI).

• As part of the Image team at GREYC lab (CRNS, ENSICAEN, University of Caen), I implemented the “fill by line art” algorithm in GIMP, also known as “Smart Colorization“. You may know this algorithm in G’Mic (developed by the same team), so when they proposed me to work with them, I wanted to implement this algorithm in GIMP core. Thus it became my first assignment.

• Geary 0.13.0 has been released.

• Geary 0.13 is out today as a big step-up for this GNOME e-mail client for the Linux desktop.

• The Geary 0.13 release features a new UI for creating/managing email accounts, there is finally integration with GNOME Online Accounts, improvements for displaying conversations, better UI/UX work around composing new messages, various bug fixes, security fixes, and other enhancements.

• This is a major new release, featuring a number of new features — including a new user interface for creating and managing email accounts, integration with GNOME Online Accounts (which also provides OAuth login support for some services), improvements in displaying conversations, composing new messages, interacting with other email apps, reporting problems as they occur, and number of important bug fixes, server compatibility fixes, and security fixes.

• This latest version is now available for installation from Flathub. See the Geary web site for installation details and other installation options: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary

• Note to maintainers: This version now uses meson for a build system and has a number of updated dependencies. Please see meson.build for details.

• Wine 4.2 debuted on Friday and now the latest Wine-Staging release is available that continues carrying hundreds of extra patches re-based atop upstream Wine to provide various experimental/testing fixes and other feature additions not yet ready for mainline Wine.

• Wine-Staging for a while has been carrying above 800 patches and at times even above 900, but with Wine-Staging 4.2 they have now managed to strike below the 800 patch level. It’s not that they are dropping patches, but a lot of the Wine-Staging work has now been deemed ready for mainline and thus merged to the upstream code-base. A number of patches around the Windows Codecs, NTDLL, BCrypt, WineD3D, and other patches have been mainlined thus now coming in at a 798 patch delta.

• A plotting tool is computer software which helps to analyze and visualize data, often of a scientific nature. Using this type of software, users can generate plots of functions, data and data fits. Software of this nature typically includes additional functionality, such as data analysis functions including curve fitting.

• A good plotting tool is very important for generating professional looking graphics for inclusion in academic papers. However, plotting tools are not just useful for academics, engineers, and scientists. Many users will need to plot graphs for other purposes such as presentations.

• Fortunately, Linux is well endowed with plotting software. There are some heavyweight commercial Linux applications which include plotting functionality. These include MATLAB, Maple, and Mathematica. Without access to their source code, you have limited understanding of how the software functions, and how to change it. The license costs are also very expensive. And we are fervent advocates of open source software. The purpose of this article is to help promote open source plotting tools that are available.

• To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 14 excellent plotting tools. Many of the applications are very mature. For example, gnuplot has been in development since the mid-1980s.

• The choice of plotting software may depend on which programming language you prefer. For example, if your leaning towards Python, matplotlib is an ideal candidate as it’s written in, and designed specifically for Python. Whereas, if you’re keen on the R programming language, you’ll probably prefer ggplot2, which is one of the most popular R packages. With good reason, it offers a powerful model of graphics that removes a lot of the difficulty in making complex multi-players graphics. R does come with “base graphics” which are the traditional plotting functions distributed with R. But gpplot2 takes graphics to the next level.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• This is the first official announcement for the new 109.x line with updated technologies (SDL2, OpenGL), WebAssembly support and many fixes and improvements.

• Of the many free software projects under the GNU umbrella, there aren’t many games. One of the only titles is GNU FreeDink, which is out this weekend with its newest update after several active weeks of development.

• More FPS news for you this weekend, with the single-player Ravenfield having another great update out with lots of new toys.

• Early Access build 13 is up and with it comes two huge new maps with River Delta and Citadel, so it now has a total of nine large battles to engage in.

• Shotgun Farmers, by far one of the most unique FPS games I’ve played in a long time is due to leave Early Access soon.

• While the developer, Megastorm Games, isn’t giving an exact date just yet they have made it clear it will be next month. To go along with the news, a small update was released adding in some adjustments to the maps along with support for character emotes.

• Valve have pushed out a Steam Play beta update with Proton 3.16-7 now available for testing. Lots of fixes!

• Not quite the huge upgrade many were expecting, most people thought Valve would be pushing ahead with a major update of Wine but this release still seems like a very nice update overall

• Firstly, they’ve updated DXVK to 0.96 and FAudio to 19.02. This should hopefully mean quite a number of games will see improvements and begin working. Additionally, there has been some controller improvements, with Unity specifically mentioned for games like Subnautica and INSIDE.

• LIONPLEX’s first game looks like a fantastic pickup for anyone who enjoys a wide variety of action-platformers. Neon Krieger Yamato gives you eight playable characters to play as through a wide variety of genres. The genre blending on display is impressive, and uses platformers alongside combat-centric puzzles to bring back touches of the past with its pixel art and also using more detailed art than one would normally see in the early ’90s.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Last year, I decided to do a thorough analysis of the KDE and Gnome application stacks, separately, to figure out how complete these two desktop environments really are. I looked at the different application categories, weighed the major advantages and flaws in the popular software, examined some unique entries, and then also talked about what’s missing, the obstacles that keep these environments from being fully independent and 100% user ready, so to speak.

• I’d like to examine Xfce next. After all, this is the third most popular Linux desktop environment, barring forks of the other two, and so it merits its own moment of spotlight. But at the same time, Xfce has never really deliberately prided itself at what it can do and offer. It’s always hung to the back, sort of shying away from publicity, being modest and frugal in all aspects. So when you think about Xfce, you don’t normally think about the application stack. You could say it’s a lightweight, simple desktop, but can you name five pure Xfce programs? Aha. Let’s see.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• A few months ago while I was scratching Latte Dock limits an idea came and haunted my thoughts. How Latte could give the colors freedom for panels and windows that an Android phone already provides? Questions like this arose and solutions appeared suddenly in many different places, but an important and concrete dream prevail in the end.

• Sunday mornings mean another weekly recap of the KDE improvements made, thanks to the great analysis by KDE developer Nathan Graham. While Plasma 5.15 was released this week, the KDE developers are already hard at work on KDE Plasma 5.16.

• The System Settings Window Decorations page has been completely rewritten, bringing it into greater conformance with the modern visual style and fixing a huge number of bugs in the process (Valerio Pilo, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)…

Distributions

New Releases

• There is a new, small tool available for Sparkers: Sparky Online.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• “We have had multiple situations with respect to security breaches in the last couple of years, albeit all the open source companies worked together to address the instances. As the source code is freely available even if something goes wrong, SUSE work closely with open source software vendors to mitigate the risk”, Ronald de Jong, President of -Sales, SUSE said in an interview with ET CIO.

• It has been a while since we published the original image life-cycle guidelines SUSE Image Life Cycle for Public Cloud Deployments. Much has been learned since, technology has progressed, and the life-cycle of products has changed. Therefore, it is time to refresh things, update our guidance, and clarify items that have led to questions over the years. This new document serves as the guideline going forward starting February 15th, 2019 and supersedes the original guideline. Any images with a date stamp later than v20190215 fall under the new guideline. The same basic principal as in the original guideline applies, the image life-cycle is aligned with the product life-cycle of the product in the image. Meaning a SLES image generally aligns with the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server life-cycle and a SUSE Manager image generally aligns with the SUSE Manager life-cycle.

Fedora

• While the Linux kernel has shipped Cgroups V2 as stable since early 2016, on Fedora and most other Linux distributions it hasn’t been enabled by default over the original control groups “Cgroups” implementation. But come Fedora 31 later this year, they are now planning to make it the default.

• Enabling Cgroups V2 by default will allow systemd and the various Linux container technologies along with libvirt and friends to make use of the new features and improvements over the original Cgroups like offering a unified hierarchy. The new implementation also provides better consistency, purpose-driven flexibility, and other design improvements over the original control groups. It’s taken a while for CGroups V2 to become the default due to interface changes compared to V1 and all of the important containers/tooling needing to be adapted to make use of it.

• The Fedora Project Mirrorlist system has evolved multiple times in the last 10 years. Originally written by Matt Domsch it underwent an update and rewrite by Adrian Reber, et al a couple of years ago. For many years Fedora used a server layout where the front end web servers would proxy the data over VPN to dedicated mirrorlist servers. While this made sense when systems were a bit slower compared to VPN latency, it had become more troublesome over the last couple of years.

Debian Family

• The Debian project is pleased to announce the eighth update of its stable distribution Debian 9 (codename “stretch”). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.

• Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 9 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old “stretch” media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror.

• Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages, and most such updates are included in the point release.

• The Debian Project announced today the general availability of the eighth point release to the Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system series.

• Coming only a month after the Debian GNU/Linux 9.7 emergency release that, which included only an important security update for the APT package manager, the Debian GNU/Linux 9.8 point release is here as an up-to-date install media that contains numerous security and bug fixes, offering users a way to install the Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system series without having to download hundreds of updates from the official software repositories.

• Debian 9.8 – the latest update to Debian Stretch – was released yesterday. Updated installation media can be found at the Debian CD Netnstall page, for example, at As part of the testing, I was using a very old i686 laptop which powers down at random intervals because the battery is old. It tends to suspend almost immediately. I found that the power management settings for the Cinnamon desktop were hart to find: using a Mate disktop allowed me to find the appropriate settings in the Debian menu layout much more easily Kudos to Steve McIntyre and Andy Simpkins (amongst others) for such a good job producing and testing the Debian CDs

• Got myself a XPS 13” 9380 that Dell just released as “Developer Edition” with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS pre-installed. They just released it on January 2019.

• Ubuntu didn’t last long though. I prefer OS X Mojave than any of the Ubuntu installations. It’s okay though, it’s just not for me.

• I was assigned 20 hours of work by Freexian’s Debian LTS initiative and carried over 5 hours from December. I worked 24 hours and so will carry over 1 hour.

• I prepared another stable update for Linux 3.16 (3.16.63), but did not upload a new release yet.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical, the company behind the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, has announced the general availability of Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS. This is the second such point release since Ubuntu 18.04 was launched in April last year.

• If you currently run Ubuntu 18.04 and want to use the new software, there’s no need to download the newly spun ISO images, instead just apply any available updates from the update manager. You shouldn’t notice anything different as these point releases are really just about bundling newer security patches so you don’t have to install them manually on a clean installation.

• Canonical has finally released the second point release of its Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver LTS operating system. Ubuntu 18.04.2 follows Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, which arrived last year in July.

• As expected, this version has been made available for Desktop, Server, and Cloud platforms, along with different official flavors like Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, and Xubuntu.

Flavours and Variants

• Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavor which uses the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE). The project’s goal is to provide a lightweight yet functional Linux distribution based on a rock solid Ubuntu base. Lubuntu specifically targets older machines with lower resources, but also runs great on newer hardware. Along with a simple but usable graphical user interface, Lubuntu comes with a wide variety of applications chosen for their small footprint so you can browse, email, chat, play, and be productive.

Devices/Embedded

• Developers at Auverdion based in Verden, Germany have created the new open source DSP offering users eight inputs and eight outputs with USB Audio Class 2 and wireless control via Wifi and Bluetooth. The aptly named freeDSP-aurora DSP has this week been launched via Kickstarter.

• The new hardware supports macOS, Linux or Windows 10 operating systems and a XMOS XE216-512-TQ128 MCU is used to expose an USB Audio Class 2 compliant interface. The ESP32 MCU controls the operation of the DSP and support for both WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity can support peripherals such as a rotary encoder, display, temperature sensor, PWM controlled fan and IR sensor.

• “The freeDSP-aurora is a cost-effective real-time audio signal processing solution for audio enthusiasts, researchers, and the do-it-yourself community. It is a bare circuit board that can be incorporated into your own projects. It comes with no housing. Easy assembling and simple programmability are the main focus. It is based on Analog Devices’ ADAU1452 DSP chip.”

Android

• After addressing Android support in KF5Notifications another fairly generic task that so far required Android specific code is next: opening files. Due to the security isolation of apps and the way the native “file dialog” works on Android this is quite different from other platforms, which makes application code a bit ugly. This can be fixed in Qt though.

Free Software/Open Source

• The participants of the Free and Open Source Software Conference 2019 commended the efforts of government agencies and academic institutions in supporting free and open source software in the Sultanate.

• It was recommended to strengthen these efforts and raise awareness of this software in various educational institutions and in public and private institutions.

• The participants commended the good organisation of the conference and its success and they called for its continuation every two years to increase awareness of free and open source software and its role in modern digital technologies to keep up with the developments during the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

• They also commended the Oman Free and Open Source Software Platform, which was announced at the opening of the conference.

• Under the theme of “FOSS as Driver for Technology Transfer, Innovation & Entrepreneurship”, the fourth edition of the Free and Open Source Conference FOSSC was launched yesterday at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) Conference Hall under the patronage of Dr. Abdulmounim bin Mansoor Al Hassani, Minister of Information and in the presence of academics, researchers and students along with international guests.

• The two-day conference, the first-of-its-kind in the Mena region, is jointly organised by the Communication and Information Research centre (CIRC) at SQU and the Information Technology Authority (ITA), represented by the Digital Society Development Division to support the Free and Open Source Initiative (FOSS).

• Uber recently introduced AresDB, an open-source real-time analytics engine leveraging an unconventional power source – graphics processing units (GPUs) – for meeting the growing demands of analysis at scale and at the same time unifying, simplifying and improving Uber’s existing solutions.

• Uber’s AI engineering team wants to make deep learning more accessible with the open-source release of Ludwig. The deep learning toolbox based on TensorFlow aims to give users the ability to train and test deep learning models without having to write any code.

• “Ludwig is unique in its ability to help make deep learning easier to understand for non-experts and enable faster model improvement iteration cycles for experienced machine learning developers and researchers alike. By using Ludwig, experts and researchers can simplify the prototyping process and streamline data processing so that they can focus on developing deep learning architectures rather than data wrangling,” the Uber AI team wrote in a post.

• Ride sharing company Uber’s AI department open sourced project Ludwig to get those into deep learning, that don’t necessarily want to write code.

• The toolbox has been in the making for two years and though there are no coding skills required to train a model, experienced users should have ways of influencing the process. It was developed to simplify model building and comparing while keeping it more generic than other well known machine learning libraries such as OpenCV or Facebook’s PyText.

• Uber released a new, open source Deep Learning toolbox called Ludwig, yesterday, to make training and testing of the deep learning models easier for non-experts. “By using Ludwig, experts and researchers can simplify the prototyping process and streamline data processing so that they can focus on developing deep learning architectures rather than data wrangling”, states the Uber team.

• Uber had been working on developing Ludwig for the past two years to simplify the use of Deep Learning models in projects. Uber has used the toolkit for several of its own projects such as its Customer Obsession Ticket Assistant (COTA), information extraction from driver licenses, food delivery time prediction, etc. Ludwig comes with a set of model architectures that can be combined to develop an end-to-end model for a given use case.

• Want to dive earnestly into artificial intelligence (AI) development, but find the programming piece of it intimidating? Not to worry — Uber has your back. The ride-hailing giant today debuted Ludwig, an open source “toolbox” built on top of Google’s TensorFlow framework that allows users to train and test AI models without having to write code.

• Jim Whitehurst had a nice job as chief operating officer of Delta Airlines in 2008, when he switched career tracks to take a position as CEO of Red Hat. Since then, he’s been at the forefront of a historical shift in the technology industry, as open source has made the transition from maverick and dangerous — a “scary, cult-like thing,” in Whitehurst’s own words — to mainstream.

• Nothing makes mainstream business sit up and take notice like money, and by that measure, Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) has turned the business world upside down not once but at least twice. The company went public in 1999 for a market cap of nearly $5 billion a day after its debut.

• Last year, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) announced its pending acquisition of Red Hat for $34 billion, which would see Red Hat continue to operate as an independent business unit under the Red Hat umbrella, with Whitehurst remaining in charge. (See How Red Hat Could Give IBM’s Telco Strategy a New Lease of Life and IBM-Red Hat: A Crazy Plan That Might Work.)

• “To take a huge leap forward in effective disaster response, we must tap into the global open source ecosystem to generate sustainable solutions we can scale and deploy in the field. But we cannot do it alone,” said Lord.

• The storage and processing options available in a hybrid computing world have created new accessibility in cloud computing, but businesses still need supportive technologies to streamline the bridge between multiple disparate data environments.

• To ensure organizations can actually take advantage of the multicloud opportunity, Jason McGee (pictured), IBM fellow, vice president and chief technology officer of IBM Cloud Platform, is working to develop that bridge through open-source container-based technology.

• IBM’s latest developer outreach seeks to rebuild lives with ones and zeros as it helps organizations prevent, manage and respond to natural disasters.

• IBM and the Linux Foundation issued the Call for Code challenge in May 2018, a five-year, $30 million pledge to fund developer tools, technologies and training to help prevent and manage natural disasters. Their follow-up effort, the Code and Response initiative unveiled here at IBM Think 2019, aims to put those technologies into practice.

• Moderating a panel of industry and foundation thought leaders at the IBM THINK 2019 conference, Ginny Rometty probed how open source is revolutionizing software development, and why large companies need to play a role in sustaining that innovation

• The cloud is booming for IBM, which has recently said it has closed $3 billion in cloud deals already this year. The latest deal is covered in the first Top Story below, and Big Blue has got to be big happy to see the its cloud investments paying off. IBM also had more news on the AI front, revealing plans for a new AI research hub in New York. Now is a good time for you to start thinking about investing in yourself. There are plenty of good opportunities listed in our Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings section below, including webinars that require no travel, or conferences like COMMON where you will be able to find the team from IT Jungle this year in Anaheim.

• Over the past year, IBM has made clear its intention to evolve in support of a transformed digital enterprise market. 2018 saw the company reach a few notable benchmarks in its multi-year digital transformation, including its promising first signs of revenue growth in more than 20 quarters. IBM’s cloud business grew 12 percent to a total $19.2 billion in 2018, expanding the company’s gross profit margin to 49.1 percent.

• [...]

• Projects like the AI OpenScale platform for bias identification and the Nvidia Corp.-backed converged system for greater value extraction in AI workloads illustrate the potential IBM has to offer in a market where AI is only becoming more relevant.

• Key to IBM’s reinvigorated cloud and AI strategy is its acquisition of open-source provider Red Hat Inc. The $34-billion grab is a historic one for IBM, signifying a tangible pivot to microservices and hybrid cloud. The containerization software now available to IBM via Red Hat and its flagship offering OpenShift gives the company relevance within a new developer audience through its direct line to Kubernetes, a significant force in hybrid cloud simplicity.

• The newly acquired asset is intended to bolster cross-platform processes through IBM Cloud Private, a service that delivers digital infrastructure and AI data analytics to various custom enterprise environments.

• The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is arguably the biggest operation in human history. But it’s increasingly based on secret models with a bad track record. That has to change!

• For me, this journey started in 2007 (Dutch link). I was doing some research in my spare time and it struck me that solar, wind and electric vehicles were on course to become cheaper than fossil alternatives. What struck me even more, was that the predictions of ‘authoritative’ institutions like the International Energy Agency and the Energy Information Administration seemed to ignore this development. At first, it seemed unrelated to my work in computers, the Internet and mobile phones. Then I realized the similarity: I had been ‘fighting’ with ‘trusted experts’ in Telecom for the past 15 years. They had been denying the future of PCs, the Internet and mobile phones all through my career. The lesson I take from this: experts of the old cannot fathom the new.

• Reinforcement learning — a machine learning training technique that uses rewards to drive AI agents toward certain goals — is a reliable means of improving said agents’ decision-making, given plenty of compute, data, and time. But it’s not always practical; model-free approaches, which aim to get agents to directly predict actions from observations about their world, can take weeks of training.

• Model-based reinforcement learning is a viable alternative — it has agents come up with a general model of their environment they can use to plan ahead. But in order to accurately forecast actions in unfamiliar surroundings, those agents have to formulate rules from experience. Toward that end, Google in collaboration with DeepMind today introduced the Deep Planning Network (PlaNet) agent, which learns a world model from image inputs and leverages it for planning. It’s able to solve a variety of image-based tasks with up to 5,000 percent the data efficiency, Google says, while maintaining competitiveness with advanced model-free agents.

• Originally created by Substance Software GmbH (Substance) as a JavaScript library of tools for web-based content editing, Texture has been supported by a community of organisations collectively known as the Substance Consortium and including Érudit, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and SciELO. eLife has now invested in Texture’s development to support its own open-source publishing platform, but – as with the organisation’s other open-source projects – any new features will be added to the tool in such a way that they can be repurposed by other publishers.

• GraphQL is quickly becoming the preferred approach for working with APIs. It is a query language for APIs, and is designed to give users more insight and understanding into the data inside their APIs.

• According to GraphQL platform provider Apollo, it’s also so much more than a query language. “It’s a comprehensive solution to the problem of connecting modern apps to services in the cloud. As such, it forms the basis for a new and important layer in the modern application development stack: the data graph. This new layer brings all of a company’s app data and services together in one place, with one consistent, secure, and easy-to-use interface, so that anyone can draw upon it with minimal friction,” the company wrote.

• Testing is a crucial part of the development cycle. How else will we find out if that cool new idea actually works in practice? Entering a crowded field, OpenTest offers developers a new tool for standardizing functional tests across a wide variety of platforms and teams.

• OpenTest is an open source functional test automation tool for web applications, mobile apps and APIs. With a wide variety of features and a focus on mainstream testing practices, OpenTest gives developers a spectacular foundation to evaluate their applications for the mobile web. What’s more, it is an easy to use tool for beginners as well as experts.

• Facebook AI Research is open-sourcing PyText, a natural-language-processing (NLP) modeling framework that is used in the Portal video-calling device and M Suggestions in Facebook Messenger.

• NLP is a technology for parsing and handling human languages and is a key component of chatbot or smart-assistant applications. Engineers developing NLP algorithms often turn to deep-learning systems to build their solutions, such as Facebook’s PyTorch platform. PyText builds on top of PyTorch by providing a set of interfaces and models specifically tuned for NLP. Internally, Facebook is using PyText to power NLP in their Portal video-calling device and in their Messenger app’s M Suggestion feature.

• One of the most common problems facing the Ethereum blockchain is scaling. While Ethereum has seen its fair share of proposed scaling solutions, state channels appear to be the best solution so far. State channels are a form of block communication that occurs outside of the blockchain and can be used to support greater scalability. And that’s not in the distant future – state channels are already available.

• Researchers have developed a new software that could spot potentially lethal heart diseases and may lead to improvements in prevention and treatment, says a new study.

• The software – ElectroMap – which measures electrical activity in the organ, is a new open-source software for processing, analysis and mapping complex cardiac data.

• The ElectroMap software is an open-source software for processing, analysis and mapping complex cardiac data, said experts at the University of Birmingham Dubai.

• The heart’s pumping ability is controlled by electrical activity that triggers the heart muscle cells to contract and relax.

• In certain heart diseases such as arrhythmia, the organ’s electrical activity is affected.

• Cardiac researchers can already record and analyse the heart’s electrical behaviour using optical and electrode mapping, but widespread use of these technologies is limited by a lack of appropriate software, according to the study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

• Purchasing a Smart Band or a smart wrist-based fitness tracker means that you not only purchase a product, but you also purchase yourself into an ecosystem of services controlled by the manufacturer. The functionality that is present on your smart band flows to you through the manufacturer, meaning that your data always goes through one extra pair of hands than is required. For most smart bands, you have to create an account with the manufacturer and continue tracking your activity and data through the manufacturer’s app — something that may not appeal to everyone in this privacy-conscious world. Enter Gadgetbridge, an open-source app that focuses on removing the manufacturer out of the equation.

• Open source software is becoming increasingly more common in the technology world. True to its name, the underlying base of open source software is available for its users to study and tinker with. As such, dedicated userbases for open source technology have propped up to provide resources, updates, and technical help for open source programs.

• Despite having become buzzwords in music technology over the last few years, it has often felt like “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” were experiments taking place in secluded computer labs or only with established musicians. The tools that promised to revolutionize the way we make music never seemed to trickle down to the “we” of your regular bedroom producer.

• Magenta Studio might be set to change all that. Developed by the Google AI team and first showed at Ableton Loop in Los Angeles last year, Magenta is now available standalone and on Ableton (both Mac and Windows), giving you the chance to experiment with the powerful data analysis that machine learning provides.

• As the demand for machine learning and artificial intelligence goes up, leading tech giants realised the need to give developers access to tools to build and deploy models. From the industrial perspective, there aren’t enough skilled programmers and data scientists within the industry to develop these systems. Tech giants are now open sourcing their platforms and developer tools to lower the barrier for entry in AI/ML.

• In this article, we list down 5 such tools that are making ML and AI accessible:

• Lobe:Lobe is an easy-to-use visual mechanism that lets users to build custom deep learning models, promptly train them, and ship them immediately in a user desired app without writing any code. Users can begin by dragging in a folder of training examples from there desktop. Lobe automatically builds its users a custom deep learning model and starts training. User can export the trained model and ship it directly in their app.

• “The Healthscape visualization serves two purposes. The first is to provide the public and professionals interested in the healthcare space a way to increase understanding and explore how all the pieces fit together. The second is to give providers, patient advocacy groups, health policymakers, and health economists a visual communication tool to discuss issues at the higher health systems level,” said Juhan Sonin, director of GoInvo.

• The company is hoping American consumers will also be interested in its wearables, as today, it reveals the previously announced HUAWEI WATCH GT is finally coming to America. While not the company’s first smartwatch to hit the USA, it is definitely the most intriguing. It runs an open source operating system called LiteOS, and battery life can apparently reach two weeks. No, that is not a typo — two weeks! It focuses heavily on health — it can monitor fitness and sleep. Best of all, it is compatible with both iOS and Android, so it won’t lock you into either platform.

• In 2015, the Python-ARM Radar Toolkit (Py-ART) made its open-source debut. After 4 years, and with contributions from 34 individual editors, it is now a staple in radar science. The toolkit helps scientists analyze radar data to improve models of the Earth’s systems; its growth illustrates the power of community software.

• Py-ART is an architecture for working with radar data in the Python programming language. It ingests data from a wide variety of atmospheric radars to produce visualizations that enable users to draw meaningful conclusions. Institutions across the world — including the National Weather Service, MeteoSwiss, IBM and the University of Illinois — use Py-ART to organize and analyze radar data.

• [...]

• Inspired by Py-ART’s success, scientists have launched the OpenRadar Partnership, an informal collaboration across Europe, Canada and the United States on open-source radar software education and inter-compatibility.

• Open Robotics, previously known as the Open Source Robotics Foundation, is pouring its development efforts into rewriting the core of the Robot Operating System (ROS) 1.0 this year. ROS has been around since 2007, and while version 1.0 is already being used in a number of different applications and solutions, the robotics industry is changing and Open Robotics is determined to see that the technology changes with it.

• Despite its name, ROS is not exactly an operating system. It is a collection of software libraries and tools used to develop robot applications. According to Brian Gerkey, CEO of Open Robotics, when the organization first started working on ROS, many of the robotics solutions already available were in the form of traditional robot arms used in factories or in such things as floor-cleaning robots for consumers.

• “Since that time we’ve seen an explosion of products in other domains, especially mobile robots that do everything from transport goods, to provide facility security, to entertain. And of course we’ve seen the impossible to ignore trend of investment and advancement in autonomous vehicles,” he said.

• The ongoing evolution of the robotics industry, and the need for more advanced solutions, is what led Open Robotics to rethink the core system.

• “Relationships once thought to be inherently history-dependent can now be reconsidered based on rigorous geometric theory,” McClure said.

• The team used the open source Lattice Boltzmann for Porous Media (LBPM) code, developed by McClure and named for the statistics-driven lattice Boltzmann method that calculates fluid flow across a range of scales more rapidly than calculations using finite methods, which are most accurate at small scales. The LBPM code, which uses Titan’s GPUs to speed fluid flow simulations, is released through the Open Porous Media Initiative, which maintains open-source codes for the research community.

• Here comes another tool open sourced by Google! This time, security and testing take the center stage. ClusterFuzz helps find bugs in your software so you can exterminate them with its scalable fuzzing infrastructure. Open sourced on February 7, 2019, this service focuses on stability and security.

• ClusterFuzz already has some impressive numbers to brag about. So far, it found over 16,000 bugs in Chrome, as well as over 11,000 bugs in open source projects integrated with OSS-Fuzz. If you use Chrome as your browser of choice, then you owe some of your experience to ClusterFuzz. Now you too can harness that power for good and keep your own projects secure and bug-free.

• As always, it is a great plus to all developers when a useful tool gets open sourced. Contributing to open source is becoming the new normal, with even large organizations getting on board. Hopefully FOSS will continue to grow and help break down silos.

• Google has open sourced ClusterFuzz, a scalable fuzzing infrastructure project that has already helped to get rid of more than 16,000 Chrome bugs.

• It is also the tool used for Google’s Oss-Fuzz initiative, which aims at helping maintainers of open source projects get their project as ready to deal with anything users throw at it as possible – an offer over 160 projects have accepted in the last two years. Fuzzing is a sort of testing approach which confronts a system with random inputs to help developers to find security flaws and unexpected behaviour.

• ClusterFuzz has been written to offer fuzzing at scale and in a continuous manner, which is why Google claims to have it running on over 25,000 cores for Chrome. There it is integrated into the development workflow and provides users with a web interface for managing and viewing crashes caused during testing. To ensure no issue goes unnoticed, it also includes automatic bug filing and closing for the Monorail issue tracker.

• They move on, inevitably, to Huawei and its ongoing drama, before concluding with a look at the growing O-RAN Alliance and the unique qualities of T-Mobile US boss John Legere.

• “We made a big bet that open source was the right way to go,” Ryan Van Wyk, AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) associate VP, network cloud software engineering, tells Light Reading. And that bet paid off handsomely, he says.

• AT&T last week described a substantial, multi-year project to build its 5G network on a cloud based on Kubernetes and OpenStack. The telco has implemented OpenStack on Kubernetes in more than 20 regions to date, with more to come. (See AT&T Inks ’8-Figure’ Kubernetes & OpenStack 5G Deal With Mirantis.)

• AT&T is in the midst of an ambitious project called Airship that could have sweeping implications for the $350 billion telecom equipment industry.

• Late last week, AT&T signed an “8-figure,” three-year deal with a company called Mirantis. According to Mirantis, the company will help AT&T build out and manage the infrastructure it needs for its 5G network.

• Airship means that if you want to build a cloud, specialized hardware and software from vendors like VMware, Cisco, Juniper, and Huawei are unnecessary, Mirantis’ cofounder and chief marketing officer, Boris Renski, tells us.

• Taking at a look at OMEC first, the ONF envisages it as a high performance, scalable, open source mobile core platform. It is being established under the CORD project umbrella in collaboration with Sprint (there are plenty of “umbrellas” in the open source community, and let’s not forget that the ONF is a member of the Linux Foundation). CORD, incidentally, is an acronym for Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter – an ONF project that combines NFV and SDN with the elasticity of commodity clouds to bring datacenter economics and the traditional telco Central Office. The OMEC project is intended to become an open source production grade Evolved Packet Core (EPC).

• OMEC is being built using an NFV architecture that is optimised for Intel platforms and has reportedly already been tested for scale. It is 3GPP Release-13 compatible, features a DPDK-based data plane to support large subscriber numbers (hence the Intel connection), and provides full connectivity, billing and charging capabilities. It is also designed for lightweight and cost-effective deployments, including IoT and edge applications.

• ONF, the recognized leader driving transformation of the networking industry through collaborative development of open source platforms, today announced the launch of Open Mobile Evolved Core (OMEC), an industry-first high performance scalable open source Mobile Core platform. ONF, in collaboration with Sprint, is launching OMEC under the CORD® project umbrella. The project is intended to become an open source production grade Evolved Packet Core (EPC).

• Rubrik announced an open source community, Rubrik Build, which aims to simplify improvement of existing projects and ease creation of applications, automation tooling, and integrations. It’s based on a set of APIs providing pre-built use cases, quick-start guides, and integrations with popular tooling.

• A goal is inclusion. “Many people in the tech community do not come from a traditional software engineering background, and this can make contributing to open source seem daunting,” Rubrik Principal Technologist Rebecca Fitzhugh told SDxCentral. “The goal of Rubrik Build is to break down these barriers so anyone can contribute to a project.”

• Rubrik just announced Rubrik Build, a new 100 percent public, 100 percent Open Source community built around use cases and integrations that consume Rubrik APIs. As part of Rubrik Build, contributors can leverage existing software development kits, tools, and use cases or contribute their own ideas, code, documentation, and feedback.

• The goal of Rubrik Build to establish a community around consuming Rubrik’s world-class APIs to quickly get started with pre-built use cases, quick start guides, and integrations with popular tooling. The Build program was designed with customers in mind, easing their transition to consuming APIs.

• The idea, says Fitzhugh, is to encourage an open source ecosystem to flourish around Rubrik, though the company’s main offering is not offered as open source.

• In a recent interview with New Left Review, Stallman described how MIT’s AI lab fostered a culture of collaboration and radical openness to the point where the lab’s giant computer wasn’t protected with passwords and the doors to the lab were always unlocked. To be sure, Stallman acknowledged that some of this culture of openness was a product of circumstance: Minsky, for instance, was always losing his door keys and the researchers in the lab couldn’t help but share the room-sized computer because it was the only one. Nevertheless, the spirit of the lab made an impression on Stallman.

• In 1983, he posted a message to a Usenet group—basically a proto-forum—in which he declared his intention to create an operating system and “give it away free to everyone who can use it.” Stallman called the operating system GNU, a recursive acronym for “Gnus Not Unix,” a challenge to the dominant proprietary OS of the time—Unix, which was used internally at Bell Labs—embedded in its very name.

• GNU was the opening salvo in the free software movement, whose principles Stallman summarized in the 1985 GNU Manifesto: “I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way.”

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Edge’s move to Chromium means that the balance of power has tipped further towards a single party who can increasingly become the arbiter of which ideas should be developed, which standards should be accepted and which usability concerns matter the most. The seats at a W3C meeting should not be 70% filled by Chromium-based platforms, nor should Google have veto powers on open source projects.

• Such a monopoly hamstrings innovation, and the resultant complacency has consequences. Whilst it may be great for developers to have one less rendering engine to worry about, we and our users are still paying the price for Internet Explorer’s market domination circa 15 years ago.

Education

• I owe part of my IT education to the Open Source Community. I enhanced my programming skills using open source programming languages; I garnered a better understanding of operating systems through my study and research of the Linux kernel; I understood the inner workings of software by having access to their code; and in college, I used learning materials from computer science classes made available by MIT Open Courseware. But this article is not about how I benefited from open source software. I only mentioned my experience with open source software to illustrate that if I can benefit from it, every Liberian can do the same. Therefore, this article is about how open source software can benefit Liberia as a developing country. It is also a call to both private and public organizations to invest in open source software in order to enhance Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D) and Information and Communications Technology for Dollars (ICT4$).

• Liberia’s ICT sector has achieved a lot since the end of the civil war. The creation of a liberal market, the advent and deployment of the ACE subsea cable and several other achievements have been the factors that have driven Liberia’ ICT revolution. Again, this article is not intended to delineate all of Liberia’s ICT achievements; it’s about the benefits we can get from investing in open source software.

• Before going further into this discussion, permit me to briefly discuss the difference between the two types of software. Open source software is software whose source code is openly published, is available at no charge, and can freely be modified and distributed. Proprietary software is software that is generally licensed for a fee and its source code is kept secret. It is often developed by software firms or companies such as Microsoft.

Windows Lies

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• We have released version 6.6 of Texinfo, the GNU documentation format.

Licensing/Legal

• Red Hat is prising MongoDB out of its Satellite infrastructure management platform in favour of PostgreSQL.

• The open source vendor made the announcement in a blog post yesterday saying it would “standardize on a PostgreSQL backend” and that it wanted to ensure users “were not caught by surprise as this is a change to the underlying databases of Satellite”.

• “No specific timing or release is being communicated at this time. At this point we’re simply hoping to raise awareness of the change that is coming to help users of Satellite prepare for the removal of MongoDB,” it added.

• Amazon has a habit of taking free software created by other companies and selling it on its cloud. But Google Cloud isn’t like that, new CEO Thomas Kurian says.

• At his inaugural appearance as the new CEO of Google Cloud on Tuesday, Kurian spoke about how Google Cloud allows customers to use a variety of open source tools to build applications on its cloud.

• Many of these tools are developed by other startups and made available as open source, meaning that they are free for anyone to use, download, modify — and even sell, something that Amazon Web Services frequently does.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Justin Atkin‘s name might not ring a bell, but you’ve probably seen his popular YouTube channel The Thought Emporium, devoted to regular doses of open source science. Justin’s interests span a wide range, literally from the heavens above to the microscopic world.

• His current interest is to genetically modify yeast to produce spider silk, and to perhaps even use the yeast for brewing beer. He and the Thought Emporium team have been busy building out a complete DIY biology lab to support the effort, and have been conducting a variety of test experiments along the way.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Fritzing is a very nice Open Source design tool for PCBs, electrical sketches, and schematics for designers and artists to move from a prototype to real hardware. Over the years, we’ve seen fantastic projects built with Fritzing. Fritzing has been the subject of books, lectures, and educational courses, and the impact of Fritzing has been huge. Open up a book on electronics from O’Reilly, and you’ll probably see a schematic or drawing created in Fritzing.

• However, and there’s always a however, Fritzing is in trouble. The project is giving every appearance of having died. You can’t register on the site, you can’t update parts, the official site lacks HTTPS, the Twitter account has been inactive for 1,200 days, there have been no blog posts for a year, and the last commit to GitHub was on March 13th. There are problems, but there is hope: [Patrick Franken], one of the developers of Fritzing and the president of the PCB firm Aisler which runs the Fritzing Fab, recently gave a talk at FOSDEM concerning the future of Fritzing. (That’s a direct FTP download, so have fun).

• A slicer is a software application that takes in 3D model files, like STL and OBJ, as input and, based on the user’s preferences and settings, creates g-code files as output.

• G-code is a set of commands that control the movement of a 3D printer along the X, Y, and Z axes for the entire model. They also contain instructions for heaters and other connected devices, such as servos or leveling sensors.

• When Wave Computing acquired MIPS, “going open source” was the plan Wave’s CEO Derek Meyer had in mind. But Meyer, a long-time MIPS veteran, couldn’t casually mention his plan then. Wave was hardly ready with the solid infrastructure it needed to support a legion of hardware developers interested in coming to the MIPS open-source community.

• To say “go open source” is easy. Pulling it off has meant a huge shift from MIPS, long accustomed to the traditional IP licensing business.

• Wave’s first step was hiring Art Swift as president of its MIPS licensing business. Swift fit the bill as someone who knows the best of both worlds — old (traditional IP for licensing) and new (open source). Swift had served as vice-chair of the RISC-V Foundation’s Marketing Committee and was vice president of marketing and business development at MIPS Technologies from 2008 to 2011.

• The core of this build is the HiFive Unleashed, a Linux-capable board from SiFive, makers of the first (production) RISC-V microcontroller. This board uses the Freedom U540 SOC built with a 28nm process, has 8GB of DDR4, and 32MB of Flash. For a board built on an Open archetecuture this is impressive, but it comes at a cost: the HiFive Unleashed ran for $1000 during its crowdfunding campaign.

• We hear stories about new licensing practices at Arm since it was acquired by Japan’s SoftBank. Arm’s rivals tell us that they are engaged in many more talks with current Arm licensees who are looking for alternatives.

• Product developers no longer have the luxury of two-year product development cycles. And many don’t have the big budgets for licensing fees, often quoted as the huge barrier to entry for system-on-chip (SoC) design.

• “Open source does two things for you: it rationalizes price and motivates adoption and investment,” explained Keith Witek, senior vice president, Corporate Development, Strategy, and General Counsel at SiFive, a provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP. “If I charge you too much, you can leave and go to different vendor. I can’t lock you up with proprietary architecture or tools. And you feel like you can invest, because no one can take it away from you. RISC-V takes a big part in democratizing silicon.”

• The basics of RISC-V

• The RISC-V ISA is based on established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles. Anyone can use it for all types of implementation, including development and commercial and open source implementations, without cost. That means that anyone who wants to can design, manufacture and sell RISC-V chips and software.

• The Niskin bottle, a seemingly simple device designed to take water samples at discrete depths, is one of the most important tools of oceanography. These precision instruments allow us to bring ocean water back to the surface to study its chemical composition, quality, and biologic constituency. If you want to know how much plastic is circulating in the deep sea, you need a Niskin bottle. If you need to measure chemical-rich plumes in minute detail, you need a Niskin bottle. If you want to use environmental DNA analyses to identify the organisms living in a region of the big blue sea, you need a Niskin bottle.

• One of the reassuring things about the Arduino, and something that contributed to making it a success, was its open source nature. Of course, this caused Arduino – the company – problems. How to make money and keep control of an open source product is a headache. One solution is to move things online.

• Once upon a time the Arduino was programmed exclusively using an open source desktop IDE. Using it gave the security of open source.

• The garage door is controlled by a button hung on the garage wall. There is only a pair of wires, so a simple relay should be all that is needed to simulate the button press from a Raspberry Pi. I wired a relay module to a GPIO on the Pi mounted in the garage ceiling, and wrote a quick and dirty test program in Python. Sure enough, the little relay was clicking happily– but the garage door wasn’t budging. Time to troubleshoot. Does the push button still work? *raises the garage door* yep. How about the relay now? *click…click* nope.

• Many of us will be familiar with the Star Trek scene where Captain Picard steps up to the food synthesizer and says, “Tea, Earl Grey, hot,” and the drink miraculously appears. When you mention 3D printing to the uninitiated, this is sometimes what they expect.

• The reality is that 3D printing is a lot more down to earth and certainly easier to understand than matter scrambling.

• In this article, we’ll look at how this approach to manufacturing has become a mainstay among hobbyists and engineers alike.

Programming/Development

• In this article, we will start to create the boundary detection mechanism which can be used to help the boy moving around the canvas. We will go slowly where this topic will take a few chapters to complete. In this chapter, we will focus on below issues.

• A release candidate for the upcoming 2.7.16 bug fix release is now available for download.

• In the previous article, we have successfully made the boy climbing up the ladder but the boy will continue climbing even though there is no more ladder for him to climb. In this article, we will solve the previous problem by introducing the following rules. When the boy is climbing the ladder he can only move in either the upward or the downward direction but not side-way.

Leftovers

• And suddenly the music burst through the borders.

• This was in May of 1999, in a city in the Netherlands called Alkmaar. Laura Hassler, an American woman who had been living in the Netherlands for many years by then — who was a choir director and, in essence, the “town musician,” the organizer of public music events — had put together a concert for the town’s annual honoring of the dead of World War II.

• But the bloody war in Kosovo was then raging: Thousands had died; nearly a million refugees were streaming across Europe. Its horror dominated the daily news and Laura couldn’t ignore it. She couldn’t simply focus on the war dead of half a century ago, not when the hell of war was alive in the present moment, pulling at her soul.

• She decided, “We’ll perform music from the people suffering from war now — folk songs from Eastern Europe,” she told me. Her impulse was to reach out, to connect, somehow, with those suffering right now, on the other side of Europe. And something happened the night of the concert. When it ended, there was a moment of profound silence . . . and then, as the audience stood, applause so thunderous that the rafters shook. It went on for 20 minutes.

• One of the musicians, a political refugee from Turkey, said to her afterwards: “This concert was special. We should put it on a train, send it to Kosovo and stop the war!”

• As Frieze Los Angeles takes center stage at the Paramount Studios backlot this weekend, the arts community is of two minds about the arrival of one of the world’s most prestigious art fairs. “L.A. has great galleries, both established and young, and fantastic institutions. It has world-class art schools, [it’s] a place that artists choose to live and work. The only thing it doesn’t have is a major art fair, and we’re bringing it with Frieze,” Victoria Siddall, director of Frieze Fairs, told Truthdig.

• But the recent past is littered with art fairs that launched in Southern California with great fanfare, only to sputter out. In the same location Frieze inhabits through Sunday, Paris Photo L.A. closed in 2016 after only three years.

Science

• The performance of the system was so disconcerting, now the researchers are only releasing a reduced version of GPT-2 based on a much smaller text corpus. In a blog post on the project and this decision, researchers Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, and Ilya Sutskever wrote: [...]

• From the moment that a light gets turned on in the morning, every action of a Western life uses energy. Its easy availability—thanks largely to the so-called fossil fuels—gave us modernity, and now the endless combustion of all that coal and gas and oil has triggered the end of the Holocene and is calling into question the very survival of our civilization. Some of the richest companies on earth have been in the energy business, and geopolitics has long followed the oil derrick. Even our domestic politics is dominated by this industry more than any other; it is, after all, where the Koch brothers made their mint.

• So the wonder is how little attention we actually pay to the subject. [...]

• The current infatuation with large-scale scientific collaborations and the energy they can bring to a scientific domain owes much to the robust correlation that exists between citation impact and team size. This relationship has been well documented in the emerging ‘science of science’ field1. Writing in Nature, Wu et al.2 use a new citation-based index to nuance this conventional wisdom. They find that small and large teams differ in a measurable and systematic way in the extent of the ‘disruption’ they cause to the scientific area to which they contribute.

• Smaller teams of scientists tend to carry out work that is more “disruptive” than that of larger groups, according to a study of more than 65 million papers, patents and software products published between 1954 and 2014. The study, led by James Evans from the University of Chicago, finds that as teams grow from one to 50 members there is a big drop in scientific “disruptiveness”. Large groups instead mostly carry out work that develops on existing research.

• Large research teams are a growing trend and widely thought to increase productivity, citations and grant activity. However, new analysis has shown that small groups are just as essential for a flourishing science and technology sector.

• The team led by James Evans from the University of Chicago analysed more than 65 million papers, patents and software products from 1954–2014. When they compared two major policy incentives for science – funding versus awards – they found that Nobel prize-winning articles were more likely to come from small teams, whereas those acknowledging US National Science Foundation (NSF) funding were associated with large teams. The team concluded that new disruptive ideas tended to come from smaller teams that explore promising ideas from older and less popular work. Large teams were more likely to develop recent ideas by solving acknowledged problems and refining common designs.

Hardware

• Chinese manufacturers now account for almost a third of smartphone shipments in Europe, with Huawei leading the way.

• That’s according to the latest figures from the beancounters at Canalys, whose figures show that Chinese OEMs accounted for 32 per cent, roughly a third, of smartphone sales in Europe in 2018.

• Huawei leads the pack, having flogged 13.3 million handsets during the fourth quarter of last year to claim a sizable 23 per cent of the market. This comes despite the hostility the company is facing in the US, which is starting to rub off onto its European allies.

• The US is facing resistance from European countries it considers allies as it tries to convince them not to use equipment from Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies in their 5G networks.

Health/Nutrition

• Last week, Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate health committee, along with ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) sent a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Health and Human Services. The lawmakers asked what health officials were doing to fight misinformation and help states dealing with outbreaks. “Many factors contribute to vaccine hesitancy, all of which demand attention from CDC and [HHS’ National Vaccine Program Office],” the lawmakers wrote. On Thursday, February 14, the committee announced that it will hold a hearing on the subject on March 5.

• But now a federal judge has ruled that because Walmart could not prove the employee was impaired at work, the company violated the nondiscrimination provision in the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act.

• The Synder administration often recycled the line that government should be “run like a business.” This failed ideology must be trashed. The only recycling left is the millions of plastic water bottles the residents of Flint, and now in cities all over our state, have been forced to drink from.

• Judging by exit polls, the single most effective midterm issue for Democrats was health care — in particular, the argument, made by Democratic candidates across the country, that Republicans were out to eliminate the Affordable Care Act’s regulations governing pre-existing conditions.

• Politico reported Monday that the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) is looking to no longer enforce utility companies to test or remove the chemicals PFOA and PFOS from their water supply under the Clean Water Act.

• Brockovich warns that the two chemicals in question are not only dangerous, but also heavily prevalent throughout the water system across the country.

• In the shadow of some of America’s most controversial coal mines, where companies use huge amounts of explosives to blow the tops off mountains, isolated communities say their water has been poisoned.

• Seventy-three percent of Democratic respondents said they were more likely to vote for a White House hopeful who favors “Medicare for all.” Just 9 percent of Democrats said candidates with that position would be less likely to attract their support.

• What is the answer? We need to shift our focus from investments in health care to investments in health. The most potent determinants of premature mortality and poor health reside outside of the health care system. Social factors, including poverty, food insecurity and substandard housing, have profound effects on population health.

• California’s almond industry is a $5 billion business that produces about 80 percent of the world’s almonds — some 1.1 million tons of the chewy nuts a year, according to the Almond Board of California. During winter, almond trees covering roughly 1 million acres of Central California erupt in blooms of white flowers with fuchsia centers.

• [...]

• “The California almond industry needs about 2 million hives to pollinate all the almonds in California, which is about all the (commercial) hives in the United States,” Kern said. “So they get kind of desperate.”

• The death cap is a global traveler, but only in the past century has it caught its stride. Long after eucalyptus trees and feral cats spread across Australia, long after pigs and mongooses were running loose in Hawaii, Amanita phalloides was still home in Europe, where it grew mostly in deciduous forests and was the leading cause of mushroom poisonings from the Balkans to Russia to Ireland.

• The first death caps in North America were identified on the East Coast in the early 1900s. The first in California were spotted on the grounds of the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey in 1938, growing from the roots of a planted, ornamental tree. After that, the species landed hard in the Bay Area, where it is now common, having spread into wild oaks; it is becoming more abundant in California than in its native European habitat. After the Bay Area, it was reported in a string of Pacific Northwest cities, each one farther up the coast.

• Massachusetts’ allegations painted a grim image of greed and callousness on the part of the family—for example, Richard Sackler’s suggestion to consider patients who became addicted to their powerful drugs “reckless criminals” to protect sales and profits. But the version of the lawsuit released didn’t have the full picture. Parts of the nearly 300-page complaint were redacted at the request of Purdue and the Sacklers.

• That’s not the case anymore. On Monday, January 28, a Massachusetts judge ruled that the lawsuit could be released in full, and the state’s attorney general’s office did so on Thursday. The newly revealed portions don’t dramatically change the loathsome portrait the allegations paint of the affluent family. However, there are some interesting new pieces of information, and Ars has gone ahead and plucked them out.

• In the letters, Schiff wrote that the misinformation on these platforms could make parents ignore legitimate medical advice to vaccinate their children. “Repetition of information, even if false, can often be mistaken for accuracy,” he wrote. He referenced recent reporting by Julia Carrie Wong at The Guardian, who discovered that both Facebook and YouTube are full of fear-mongering, inaccurate anti-vaccine propaganda. What’s more, Wong found, YouTube’s recommendation algorithm helped lead people to those lies.

• Information discouraging people from getting vaccines for their children, which has gone viral on Facebook, especially in its Groups product, may have contributed to an increase in outbreaks of measles. The crisis drew attention on Thursday from Representative Adam Schiff, who sent a letter to Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and Google boss Sundar Pichai, asking them to address the problem.

• In the struggle to address rising levels of opioid misuse and mortality, an unlikely ally has emerged: marijuana. The relationship between cannabis and opioid use is among of the best-documented aspects of marijuana policy. In short, the science demonstrates that marijuana is a relatively safe and effective pain reliever — and that patients with legal access to it often reduce their use of conventional opiates. Over 35 controlled clinical trials, involving over 2,000 subjects, have been conducted to assess the safety and usefulness of cannabis or its components for the treatment of chronic pain. Many of these trials specifically evaluate the plant’s ability to target hard-to-treat neuropathic pain. An exhaustive literature review of over 10,000 scientific abstracts by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine determined: “There is conclusive or substantial evidence that cannabis is effective for the treatment of chronic pain in adults.”

Security

• Hutchins was then taken to jail, where he made two phone calls. Despite being informed the calls were subject to monitoring and recording, Hutchins allegedly “made incriminating statements,” court records showed, without elaborating.

• In a motion filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, attorneys for Hutchins moved to suppress the statements and any evidence that may have been obtained as a result of them. Hutchins’s grounds are that he didn’t waive his Miranda rights against self-incrimination and that his intoxication and limited understanding of the US criminal procedural system made it impossible for him to voluntarily waive those rights.

• A comprehensive guide to coding safely and preventing security holes in your applications.

• The Guyana Power and Light Inc. (GPL) says its computerised systems were hacked last week and a ransom of digital currency was demanded.

• The cyber-attack resulted in the disruption of some of its services but the Utility Company has assured that the situation is now under control.

• [...]

• GPL said the attackers demanded a ransom of bitcoins to remove all encryptions from within the network, however the Company said it will not heed to such request.

• Another huge file of stolen credentials for sale on the dark web, new stats show how bad breaches were in 2018 and a phony U.S. military web site spotted.

• Researchers with password manager service Myki recently found a site that purported to offer SSO from Facebook. As the video below shows, the login window looked almost identical to the real Facebook SSO. This one, however, didn’t run on the Facebook API and didn’t interface with the social network in any way. Instead, it phished the username and password.

• The initial version of the WireGuard open-source secure VPN tunnel is now available for macOS, following the WireGuard for iOS port a few months prior. But sadly on the Linux front, the kernel bits still have yet to be mainlined.

• WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld announced the release of WireGuard for macOS on Saturday along with the cooperation of other developers. This macOS port is built from the same sources as their iOS app and integrates into Apple’s networking stack.

Defence/Aggression

• Germany is experiencing a public health crisis with millions of people potentially exposed to drinking water contaminated with Per and Poly Fluoroalkyl Substances, or PFAS.

• A major source of this chemical contamination comes from the aqueous film forming foam (AFFF) used in routine fire-training on U.S. military bases. After igniting, then dousing massive fires with lethal foam, the American bases allow the poisons to leach into the groundwater to contaminate neighboring communities which use groundwater in their wells and municipal water systems.

• Confidential US Military documents leaked to the German news magazine Volksfreund in 2014 showed that groundwater at Ramstein Airbase contained 264 ug/L or 264,000 ppt. of PFAS. Other samples at Ramstein were shown to contain 156.5 ug/l or156,500 ppt.

• The water monitoring program of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in the vicinity of the Spangdahlem Air Base found PFAS at concentrations of 1.935 ug/l or 1,935 ppt. The drainage system in Spangdahlem is still spreading the chemicals.

• Harvard scientists say PFOS/PFOA at concentrations of 1 part per trillion (ppt) in drinking water is likely to be harmful to human health. Fishing ponds, streams and rivers around the airfields are a thousand times more contaminated than they should be according to EU requirements.

• The Pew public opinion poll of American adults conducted last month indicates Democrats and Republicans are further apart than ever in terms of which issues they view as being the most important ones facing the country.

• For years there’s been a widening crackdown inside Iran against alleged enemies of the Islamic Republic. Environmentalists, women’s rights activists, and lawyers have increasingly been targeted. Even a member of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team is now behind bars.

• On Friday, Mr Wenda handed to the UN in Geneva a document he has claimed includes 1.8 million signatures from people living in Papua and West Papua.

• Tensions in Venezuela continue to escalate, following a move by Juan Guaidó, the leader of the country’s right-wing opposition and president of the National Assembly, to declare himself interim president ahead of new elections.

• Guaidó was immediately backed by nearly 20 countries, including the right-wing Lima Group in Latin America, as well as European Union officials, Canada and the United States. The effort was clearly coordinated to force Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power, and this will have dramatic consequences for both Latin America and the rest of the world.

• Events continue to evolve rapidly, and any predictions about the outcome would be speculative. Yet it’s worth noting that in 2017, when Trump discussed the possibility of invading the country for the first time as president, he repeatedly brought up the invasions of Panama and Grenada in the 1980s. Trump’s foreign policy mirrors that of President Ronald Reagan, with Trump’s interventions in Latin America likely meant to serve a similar global strategic purpose as the wars in Grenada, Panama and Nicaragua. In the 1980s, those operations honed tactics of military invasion and social destabilization, reviving certain moral justifications for warfare, which eventually allowed the U.S. to launch later wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• In addition to wanting to secure its massive oil reserves and taking out one of the last remaining “Pink Tide” governments in the region, the Trump administration has an opportunity to use a “win” in Venezuela to experiment with new tactics of “regime change” and regain the support needed to build toward launching another major war.

• In late November, General Motors (GM) announced that it had no plans to allocate any new products to its Lordstown, Ohio, plant after it discontinues production on the Chevrolet Cruze this March. The move essentially ends the plant’s last 1,600 jobs, and represents only the latest dispatch from the heartland of what President Trump has called “American carnage.”

• For 52 years, the Lordstown plant, nestled in Trumbull County in the state’s Mahoning Valley, served as one of the nerve centers of the Youngstown-Warren area. Youngstown produced steel: Miles of blast furnaces perpetually lit up the night skies, and locals referred to the accompanying pollution as “pay dirt,” since the steel mills meant prosperity. Today, however, Youngstown is now one of the poorest cities in the country. From 1977 to 1984, all of the major steel producers in the Youngstown area closed, costing 50,000 jobs and igniting Great Depression-levels of unemployment. Since then, the city has become a poster child for the crumbling towns of the Rust Belt.

• The city of Warren, the second-largest in the region, also had steel, but beginning in 1966, when GM opened the Lordstown plant on the city’s outskirts, automotive production increasingly became a crucial part of the area’s industrial backbone. At its height, GM operated its Packard Electric Division plants in Warren, along with its Assembly Division and Fisher Body stamping plants in Lordstown. The largest employer in Mahoning Valley, GM had 25,000 workers on its payroll in the early 1980s. Today, those jobs are virtually gone.

• One day before Trump’s stunning election in 2016, GM announced it would eliminate the third shift at Lordstown, a decision that ultimately cost more than 1,200 workers their jobs. Then, in July 2017, Trump held a rally in Youngstown, paying lip service to the city’s industrial past. “Tonight I’m back in the center of the American heartland,” Trump told the denizens of the Youngstown-Warren area, “far away from the Washington swamp to spend time with thousands of true American patriots.”

• The victims of a disgruntled employee who opened fire at a suburban Chicago industrial warehouse were co-workers ranging from an intern to the plant manager. A look at the victims,,,

• France24 reports that Trump’s attempt to dissuade the Europeans from continuing their support for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal has backfired.

• On Friday at a Munich security meeting, Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, replied to the chiding of Vice President Mike Pence that Iran is destabilizing the region. Maas remarked that “Together with the British, the French and the entire European Union, we have found a means to allow Iran to remain in the nuclear accord. Our objective remains the lack of nuclear weapons, precisely because Iran destablizes the region.” Without the accord, “the region will not be more secure, but would in fact take a further step toward open confrontation.”

• Frederica Mogherini, the European Union’s High Representative for foreign affairs, said, “We think that [this accord] is fundamental and crucial for our security.” The agreement “is a basic pillar of the architecture of nuclear non-proliferation at the global level.”

• Pence had, after a visit to the Holocaust death camp at Auschwitz, accused Iran of fomenting a virulent anti-Semitism reminiscent of that of the Nazis.

• [Iran has a small Jewish community with a representative in Parliament, which is not very much like Nazism. In contrast, Donald Trump called the Neonazis who shouted “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville “very fine people.” Pence has never spoken out about the dangers of white nationalism in the United States.]

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• It is imperative that we pressure the Australian government to make sure its citizen, Julian Assange, is protected from the lawlessness of the American empire. He has not been charged with a crime. He cannot, under international and American law, be kidnapped and taken to the United States and put on trial for his work as a publisher. I implore everyone who can, to attend the two rallies being organized in Australia demanding that the Australian government secure the freedom and safe passage home of Julian.

• That indictment was made public on Wednesday as the Justice Department accused Ms. Witt, 39, of defecting to Iran in August 2013 to work with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in betrayal of the United States.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Over 40 per cent of insect species could go extinct in the next few decades, with butterflies, bees and dung beetles most affected. The main cause is habitat loss. That’s the alarming conclusion of a review of all long-term surveys of insects published in the past 40 years.

• A newly published review of 73 reports on insect decline around the world has found that over 40 percent of insect species are threatened with extinction. For some comparison, that rate of local species extinction is eight times faster than we’re seeing in vertebrates such as mammals, birds, and reptiles.

• Insects play a crucial role in the animal food chain, as well as pollinating plants and recycling nutrients in the environment. If they go, they take other animals with them, and that’s a major problem in maintaining a world we can all live in.

• There are many local legends about how saffron came to Kashmir. One goes back to the 12th century, and says that Sufi saints Khawaja Masood Wali and Sheikh Sharif-u-din Wali presented a local chieftain with a saffron bulb after he cured them of an illness while they were traveling. Another claims that the Persians brought it in 500 B.C., as a means to further trade and market. A third dates the spice back to the Hindu Tantric kings, when it was mixed into hot water to create potions that incited feelings of romantic love.

• According to ExxonMobil, global oil and gas demand will rise by 13% by 2030. All of the majors, not just ExxonMobil, are expected to expand their output. Far from mothballing all their gasfields and gushers, the industry is investing in upstream projects from Texan shale to high-tech deep-water wells. Oil companies, directly and through trade groups, lobby against measures that would limit emissions. The trouble is that, according to an assessment by the IPCC, an intergovernmental climate-science body, oil and gas production needs to fall by about 20% by 2030 and by about 55% by 2050, in order to stop the Earth’s temperature rising by more than 1.5°C above its pre-industrial level.

• So, if we are going to use tariffs, why not use them to address the real and present danger of climate change?

• It’s right there at the top. The Green New Deal’s first four lines call out the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5℃” from last October and the US government’s own Fourth National Climate Assessment, released ignominiously on Black Friday. Past iterations of those reports were stolid accounts of what various computer models said about the potential meaning of limited historical data under certain scenarios as determined by … oh I’m sorry, I must have dozed off. But the latest reports don’t hide under caveats. They are clear-eyed accounts of what’s happening today and what will happen tomorrow if humans don’t get their greenhouse gas-emitting acts together. It might’ve also helped that predictions for a once-far-off midcentury are now only 25 years away.

• For a big, ambitious plan to fight climate change, it would make perfect sense to target transit in general and air travel in particular. Transportation — planes, cars, shipping — is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Surging air travel demand helped fuel the rise in US emissions after years of decline. And aircraft are extremely difficult to decarbonize. While electrification is coming for cars, trucks, and buses, no battery or fuel cell is going to fly anyone across the Pacific anytime soon.

• New research from AAA reveals that when the mercury dips to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, the average driving range of an electric car decreases by 41 percent. When colder temperatures hit, EV owners have the same instinct as their internal combustion engine-driving brethren, which is to crank up the heat as high as it will go. This puts a serious strain on an EV’s battery, reducing the overall range and increasing the need to charge more often to minimize the chance of being stranded by a dead battery.

• All of the assessments about climate change—whether coming from the United Nations, the private sector, the Department of Defense, or the Department of Homeland Security—are talking about accelerating migration, displacement of people, and how it will “challenge stability.” Already, 22.5 million people are already being displaced per year, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, with projections ranging between 150 million and one billion by 2050. There’s a lot of talk about risk, and that slips easily into talk about “terrorism,” they talk about conflict, and so on. A significant part of today’s border militarization exists in a context where it isn’t about today or the immediate present, but rather anticipating future events that could happen. DHS and others are planning 30 years into the future—for what they believe will happen—and climate is definitely on their minds.

• 2018 was a particularly bleak year for the industry. Coal capacity retirements actually doubled in 2018 compared to 2017, and coal production was largely flat. Recent projections from the Energy Information Administration don’t show the conclusive end of the coal industry any time soon, but they do show that coal may have reached a point of no return, despite all the rollbacks of environmental regulations that the Trump administration has proposed or enacted.

• After setting record high temperatures every 13 years on average during the first 100 years of records running from 1880 to 1980, that pace has accelerated to one every three years since, NOAA said.

• Researchers from the University of Exeter and Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) examined 50 animals from 10 species of dolphins, seals and whales — and found microplastics (less than 5mm) in them all.

• Animals that died as a result of infectious disease had slightly higher numbers of particles than those killed by injury or other causes.

• President Donald Trump’s new pick for Interior Department secretary played a key role in gutting protection for migratory birds, according to emails obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

• The newly obtained emails from 2017 and 2018 indicate that David Bernhardt, a former industry lobbyist, has been personally involved with intricacies of new policies at the Interior Department that benefit oil companies and other industries.

• According to the emails, Justice Department lawyers apparently opposed the rollback. Daniel Jorjani, the Interior Department’s top lawyer, shared their comments with Bernhardt, calling them “robust.”

• “Well we have a bit of work to do,” Bernhardt replied. “Change is not easy.”

• Trump is losing his rallying cry to save coal. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) voted on Thursday to retire two coal-fired power plants in the next few years despite a plea from the president to keep one of the plants open.

• Earlier this week, the president posted an oddly specific tweet that urged the government-owned utility to save the 49-year-old Paradise 3 plant in Kentucky. It so happens that the facility burns coal supplied by Murray Energy Corporation, whose CEO is Robert Murray, is a major Trump donor.

• Environmental and energy policy is poised to be a hotly contested issue in the leadup to the 2020 election.

• One new group that stands to play a key part in that conversation is Energy 45 Fund, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization founded by outgoing senior Trump administration adviser Mandy Gunasekara “to promote the Trump energy agenda” following her resignation from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

• The source of money fueling the group may remain a mystery. Gunasekara told the Center for Responsive Politics that the group’s funders will be allowed to remain anonymous.

• “I will respect their preferences,” Gunasekara said.

• Moreover, the “dark money” group’s website was purchased weeks before Gunasekara left the Trump administration, while she was seemingly still on EPA payroll.

• In a resignation letter to the White House dated and effective Feb. 7 — the same day House and Senate Democrats floated their “Green New Deal” — Gunasekara formally resigned from her position as principal deputy assistant administrator at the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation then announced plans to launch the group.

• Right now, the Republicans’ unhinged rants against the GND are generating mostly ridicule among Americans, but that could change.

• But the real political danger to Democrats isn’t the Republican assault on the GND, it is that they’ll do what they did with Obamacare—run from the issue and allow the Republicans set the terms of the debate. That approach caused the Party to experience record losses at every level of government in 2014, and it looks like the neoliberals in charge of the party are about to do the same with the GND.

• For example, here’s what Nancy Pelosi had to say about the Green New Deal: “…The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?” The rest of the Democratic leadership is following her lead, and the party’s old guard is following them.

Finance

• Its plan to build a sprawling complex in Queens in return for nearly for $3 billion in government incentives had come under fierce opposition…

• After months of opposition from local politicians, tech industry activists, and residents, Amazon announced Thursday that it would not be building a massive new campus in Queens, New York after all. It’s a win for millions of New York state taxpayers, who were poised to give the richest man on Earth $1.7 billion in incentives and subsidies.

• Amazon’s much-hyped “HQ2” search was a sweepstakes to see which cities would give it the best subsidies, tax breaks, and other handouts to build there. Today’s news is a huge for the people of New York, and a big win for activists, but it is not the end of the era of massive subsidies for big companies.

• Six months after New York City lawmakers enacted a first-of-its-kind cap on the number of cars driving for ride-hail companies in the city, Uber has sued to make it disappear.

• In its lawsuit, filed in a New York state court Friday afternoon, Uber argues that the one-year freeze on ride-hail vehicle licenses is anticompetitive and exceeds the city’s authority. It also argues that there are better policies for fighting traffic, tools that don’t specifically target ride-hail companies.

• Uber filed a lawsuit on Friday to overturn New York City’s first-in-the-nation law capping the number of ride-hail drivers that operate on its streets. The law, which went into effect last August, paused the issuance of new licenses to drivers for 12 months. But Uber wants the law overturned for fear that the city will ultimately make the cap permanent.

• Climate change, biodiversity loss, soil infertility, deforestation, and ocean acidification are among the manmade threats that affect agriculture, energy, public health, economic growth, and immigration. Current disruptions to the environment could seriously destabilize those sectors—which would likely amplify social conflicts and spark widespread civic unrest, the report says.

• Our education system should be geared towards equipping children with the best that has been thought and said, so that they may go on to create, adapt, develop and transform the world around them. A focus on skills, acronyms, fads and buzzwords fails to do this. There’s a reason PPE graduates are the most sought after. They have a broad range of knowledge, the ability to think creatively and apply their knowledge to different areas. While not all children can go on to study PPE at Oxbridge, this is still something we can learn from.

• Critics of the deal, like US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, state senator Michael Gianaris, and city council member Jimmy Van Bramer, complained about the lack of information they were provided and the enormous subsidies Amazon would receive from the local government. Activists and lawmakers also raised concerns over Amazon’s labor practices and its anti-union track record.

• Amazon has ended its plan, less than three months after it was announced, to locate one of its two new headquarters in Long Island City—a deal had triggered fierce if entirely predictable opposition to throwing billions in public subsidies at the world’s richest man, bypassing public review processes, securing few promises for low-income job seekers, and rewarding a company with a lousy labor record, a creepy role in Big Data, and some objectionable dealings with federal law-enforcement agencies.

• Her statement came shortly after Amazon in a blog post announced that it was canceling its plan to build offices, dubbed “HQ2,” in Queens, citing pushback from “a number of state and local politicians.”

• Unfortunately, preventing unwanted in-app purchases is far from straightforward. Many young ones are clever about finding workarounds when they are blocked. And tech companies typically don’t have much incentive to invest in safeguards because these purchases generate revenue.

• Credit scores: Everyone’s got one, even if they don’t know it — and these numbers can have a profound impact on the trajectory of your life. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knows this firsthand, thanks to a false claim circulating about her credit score.

• Over the weekend, she put financial services firm Equifax on blast, calling the credit scoring system “broken.”

• AOC’s comment is a timely one; as a member of the House Finance Committee, she’s in an excellent position to do some digging into the practices of the credit scoring industry, which is dominated by firms Experian, Equifax and Transunion.

• As anyone who’s tried to do anything that requires credit history — buying a house or car, getting a job, buying car insurance, applying for a line of credit, getting housing — knows, the scores developed under the secret sauce used by these companies are arbitrary, really difficult to appeal and hard to shake.

• As Denver public school teachers head back to school, ending their first labor stoppage in 25 years, it’s hard to dismiss the impact the nation-wide teacher strikes have had on American politics. As Democratic presidential candidates rush to voice support for the Colorado educators, Denver’s strike marks the ninth major teacher uprising in the last twelve months, with the anniversary of the very first—West Virginia’s—coming up next week.

• Survey after survey has shown the striking teachers have gotten their message across: The majority of Americans agree teacher pay is a real problem. The annual PDK poll reported in September that two-thirds of people say teacher salaries are too low — a new high in its data since the poll started in 1969. Another national poll released in April found 78 percent of adults think schools don’t pay teachers enough, and 52 percent supported those going on strike over wages.

• As further evidence of how the teacher protests have shaped the national conversation, the House education committee convened this week for its first hearing on K-12 schools in the new Congress, and the topic of teacher pay was front and center. Republicans and Democrats both agreed that teacher salaries were simply too low.

• The House Education and Labor Committee hearing, chaired by Democratic Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, lasted three and a half hours, and was entitled, “Underpaid Teachers and Crumbling Schools: How Underfunding Public Education Shortchanges America’s Students.” Topics explored throughout the convening included more than just teacher compensation and school infrastructure. Legislators and witnesses also discussed adequate funding for students with disabilities, turnaround strategies for low-performing schools, and civil rights protections for students who attend private schools.

• New York offered Amazon close to US$3 billion to build a “second” headquarters in Long Island City on the promise of 25,000 jobs.

• Since the deal was joyfully announced in November, however, many local residents and some politicians in the area have been questioning whether it’s worth it, both in terms of the price tag and the impact on housing and traffic congestion. And on Feb. 14, Amazon backed out of the deal, citing political opposition to its plans.

• The research supports those who question the wisdom of cities and states incentivizing economic development. Studies suggest the jobs and economic gains are usually not worth the tax breaks since the majority of companies would have come even without incentives.

• And that’s when the companies try to live up to the promises they made. They don’t always do so, with the latest example being Foxconn’s announcement that it is reconsidering plans to build a factory in Wisconsin – less than a year after agreeing to create up to 13,000 high-tech jobs in exchange for more than $4.5 billion in incentives.

• But how often do companies that agree to build factories and create jobs in exchange for economic incentives back away from their promises? And when they do, do taxpayers ever learn about it?

• Now that activists in New York City successfully chased Amazon and its “HQ2” plan out of New York City, there is a new challenge: Can the organizers and elected leaders who successfully blocked the kind of economic development they opposed bring about the kind of economic development they want?

• That was a question that Cheyenna Weber, general coordinator for the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City, was wrestling with in New York City hours after Amazon announced on Thursday that it was canceling a planned complex in Long Island City, Queens that they said would bring 25,000 jobs to the area.

• CEANYC offers support and advocacy for a sprawling group of cooperatives and other community-based enterprises that exist under the umbrella of the “solidarity economy.” It’s a particularly robust ecosystem—a 2017 directory lists 2,000 enterprises and orgnizations—that operate based on such values as worker democracy, sustainability, social justice and mutualism. “New York City is unique in that there is every type of solidarity economy entity going on here,” she said, from community food gardens to daycare cooperatives. “That density and diversity don’t exist anywhere else in the country.”

• In early November, word began to leak that Amazon was serious about choosing New York to build a giant new campus. The city was eager to lure the company and its thousands of high-paying tech jobs, offering billions in tax incentives and lighting the Empire State Building in Amazon orange.

• Even Governor Andrew Cuomo got in on the action: “I’ll change my name to Amazon Cuomo if that’s what it takes,” he joked at the time.

• Then Amazon made it official: It chose the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens to build a $2.5 billion campus that could house 25,000 workers, in addition to new offices planned for northern Virginia. Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Democrats who have been political adversaries for years, trumpeted the decision as a major coup after edging out more than 230 other proposals.

• But what they didn’t expect was the protests, the hostile public hearings and the disparaging tweets that would come in the next three months, eventually leading to Amazon’s dramatic Valentine’s Day breakup with New York.

• Immediately after Amazon’s Nov. 12 announcement, criticism started to pour in. The deal included $1.5 billion in special tax breaks and grants for the company, but a closer look at the total package revealed it to be worth at least $2.8 billion. Some of the same politicians who had signed a letter to woo Amazon were now balking at the tax incentives.

• What prosecutors say: First Collection Bureau (PKB), a company owned by the American investment manager Michael Calvey, borrowed 2.5 billion rubles ($37.7 million) from Vostochny Bank. Instead of repaying that loan, Calvey transferred his shares in another company called IFTG to Vostochny Bank in February 2017, telling the bank’s board of directors that the shares were worth nearly 3 billion rubles ($45.3 million). In February 2019, Vostochny Bank board member Sherzod Yusupov went to the Federal Security Service (FSB) and accused Calvey and the other participants in the deal of deceiving him. The FSB says it then verified these allegations, finding an audit assessment allegedly stating that IFTG was worth just 600,000 rubles ($9,050), not 3 billion rubles. Prosecutors say this is how Calvey and his accomplices committed fraud.

• This week, the Securities and Exchange Commission tweeted out its guidelines for those launching and investing in ICOs, although many would say that over a year on from the peak of the cryptocurrency boom, the guidelines amount to too little, too late.

• That said, the document still throws up several points of contention, including a rather gloomy outlook for cryptocurrency exchanges – even decentralized ones – and at least one possible violation of the First Amendment on the part of the SEC.

• When Ana Jane* turned 60, she decided she wanted “a complete life change.” Approaching retirement, she was suddenly laid off from her job as an interior decorator in early 2009, during the peak of the financial crisis. Having endured cancer, job loss and an addiction problem, she was hoping to turn her life around. But the opportunities to do so in her home city of Houston, Texas, were limited.

• “I don’t think I can live in Houston for what I had as far as monthly income,” she said. “I wanted out of the states.” So she left.

• Over the last decade, thousands of Americans, most of them white, have left the United States to settle in communities in Latin America, where the cost of living is lower. International “lifestyle marketers,” such as International Living, with ties to real estate investors and developers in select destinations, often promote these communities online.

• Ana Jane chose to live in Cuenca, Ecuador, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage city of 330,000 people located high up in the Ecuadorian Andes, and where the average monthly household income is about $700, well below what most retirees say they live on in the US. About a third of Cuenca’s population work in the informal sector, where even the basic salary of $394 per month is not guaranteed. Though there are no official statistics keeping tab on how many Americans have relocated there, municipal officials estimate as many as 10,000 since the 2008 crisis.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• One possible reason President Trump may have had trouble producing those stats? They don’t really exist. Again and again throughout his remarks, and throughout his years-long battle to build a wall on the southern border, President Trump has relied, instead, on anecdotes, highlighting, for example, the heartbreaking stories of mothers whose children have been killed by undocumented immigrants or noting, as he did during the press conference, individual examples of people being killed on the border last week. These stories confirm President Trump’s stated belief that something new and dangerous is taking place on the border, and so he holds up them up as all the proof the American public needs that he’s right.

• A federal judge says a handful of former Mississippi convicts who are suing to have their voting rights restored can represent everyone who falls into that category.

• The ruling this week by U.S. District Judge Daniel Jordan certifying the lawsuit as a class action raises the stakes considerably. A victory by the plaintiffs could restore voting rights to tens of thousands of Mississippians, not just the handful who sued.

• Jordan ruled that the plaintiffs had met the legal tests for a class action, despite arguments by lawyers for the state that a class-action was unnecessary. Jordan said he might decide later whether the class should only include people who have completed all the terms of their sentence, including payment of fines and restitution, or whether to set different limits.

• There’s still a long way to go in the case. Both sides have asked Jordan to rule without a trial, but the judge could choose to hear witnesses.

• “Russia was able to influence our election because they figured out that racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and transphobia are America’s Achilles heel. These issues aren’t only civil rights—they’re also a matter of national security. We have to deal with that.”

• This kind of rhetoric is a prime example of securitization: the attempt to turn an issue that is not obviously a matter of national security into one. The crux of the message is essentially: if you don’t toe my preferred line on this issue, you will be putting yourselves or your loved ones at risk—and providing comfort or aid to our enemies.

• Kamala Harris literally premised her career on securitization. She won her first public office, San Francisco District Attorney, by unseating one of the most progressive criminal justice reform advocates in the country at the time. Harris’ basic argument was that a commitment to sentencing reform and diversion programs was making San Francisco less safe; it was putting criminals before “the people.”

• Her bid to shift the conversation—from discussions about social justice to concerns about public safety—paid off. She decisively won the election, despite the reality that violent crime had actually dropped precipitously in San Francisco under her rival’s tenure (perhaps due to the very reforms she sowed public distrust against).

• This is why politicians rely on securitization: it is effective. When people come to view something as a security issue, they tend to become more supportive of the person who is promising to keep them safe, and less skeptical of the measures deployed to ensure that safety.

• Yesterday, in anticipation of Trump’s false declaration of a national emergency, Nancy Pelosi warned that such behavior set a bad precedent and invoked the possibility that, once a Democratic president is elected, he or she could declare a national emergency over gun violence. This was not the proper response.

• The proper response is to declare that the House of Representatives will immediately move to impeach the president for violating his oath of office and subverting the three-branch constitutional framework, among his other high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the GOP members of the Senate are going to be held publicly accountable for their support of Trump if they fail to convict him for this absolutely intolerable overreach of presidential power.

• Importantly, the public must be clear that its representatives are empowered to remove the president at their own judgment. That is, impeachment is a political judgement, not one applying criminal law burdens of proof. In an impeachment proceeding, a defendant president is not so easily protected by claiming there is no proof of a criminal intent as he would be in a court of law. Nor can the defendant president argue that conviction is not appropriate because the facts are such that it is plausible one might conclude there is a real emergency. The Senate does not have to overcome reasonable, or plausible, doubt before convicting.

• As of Sunday morning, more than 230 demonstrations in cities and towns across the country are planned for Monday, February 18, with more than 10,000 Americans prepared to protest President Donald Trump’s admittedly-fake national emergency, and Republicans for their support for his actions.

• After Trump’s press conference Friday morning, progressive groups including MoveOn, United We Dream, Indivisible, and CREDO Action set to work organizing demonstrations against what CREDO co-director Heidi Hess called “an unconstitutional power grab that threatens our democracy and escalates Trump’s attacks on immigrants, communities of color, Muslims and Black and Brown people.”

• Within 24 hours Americans had RSVP’d to more than 175 President’s Day protests, with the number exploding again by Sunday.

• Emma Einhorn, campaign director for MoveOn, said the enthusiasm reflected the American public’s widespread opposition to Trump’s anti-immigration agenda.

• Remember the stories about his alleged fury in 2011 when Barack Obama so effectively zinged Trump as he sat fuming from his table at the White House Correspondents Association dinner? Supposedly it was that humiliation at the hands of a black president that convinced Trump to seek the presidency and, God help us, get the last laugh.

• As a candidate, and once he assumed the highest office, in addition to its fundamental principle of Not America But Me First, the Trump platform has been built on planks of anything-Obama-did-I-reject-and-attack. So out went Obama regulations and trade deals. Iran nuclear pact? Be gone. Farewell, Paris climate accord.

• Last week, Trump tweeted, “No president ever worked harder than me (cleaning up the mess I inherited)!” That’s nonsensical on every level. For one, Lincoln and FDR must be laughing their presidential backsides off. And compared to you, Donald, you think Obama made a mess? Unless, of course, it’s something utterly, inarguably good, like the blooming, post-meltdown economy you inherited from him. Then it’s time to take credit for it.

• No putdown of Obama, no matter how petty, fake or borderline racist is beneath Trump. Last month, Josh Dawsey at The Washington Post reported that Trump “relishes” giving tours of the Oval Office and telling visitors that Obama “just sat in here and watched basketball all day.” Given the recent disclosure of Trump’s vast expanses of “executive time” watching Fox News, this is projection at a championship level.

• CNN went in search for a story about a Russian-funded digital media project that produces viral videos aimed at undermining American democracy. When CNN journalists could not find what they were looking for, they effectively manufactured the news by giving Facebook a pretext for removing the project’s pages used to share videos. Now, the cable news network had their story.

• Four CNN journalists worked on the report, “Russia is backing a viral video company aimed at American millennials.” It appeared online late in the day on February 15 and broke the news that Maffick Media had their Facebook pages for three video channels suspended.

• Facebook never required pages to include information about their parent companies nor has the social media company ever labeled state-sponsored media, which CNN acknowledged. Yet, since the project involves funding from Russian state media, CNN and others believed they were trying to hide who funds the videos.

• After rejecting a proposal to reinstate a full ban on corporate PAC donations earlier this week, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) decided on Saturday that the party’s Platform Committee would review a possible ban in 2020.

• At the DNC’s winter meeting, the DNC failed to pass the anti-corporate PAC resolution proposed by Christine Pelosi, chair of the California Democratic Party women’s caucus and daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif). But Pelosi applauded the committee’s rejection of a resolution to “study” the effects of corporate PAC donations, instead directing the DNC’s Platform Committee to vote on whether the contributions will be allowed in 2020.

• [...]

• Former President Barack Obama introduced a ban on corporate PAC money in 2008, but the DNC reversed it in 2016. Despite the fact that reinstating the ban is clearly a winning issue with voters, some Democrats still claim that refusing corporate donations will harm the Party’s chance of defeating President Donald Trump in 2020.

• “My number one focus, frankly, is to get rid of Donald Trump,” Charlie King, a DNC member and former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party, told Vox.com—indicating that offering voters broadly popular ideas is far less important to some members than simply defeating Trump and returning to the corporate-friendly status quo that existed before he was elected.

• Larry Cohen, a member who supported Pelosi’s resolution and who serves on the board of Our Revolution, strongly disagreed.

• he secession crisis festering in Spain’s northeastern corner of Catalonia has spread to the political heart of the European Union nation.

• Twice in less than a year, separatist lawmakers from Catalonia have played the role of king slayer, with their votes in the national Parliament in Madrid proving the decisive push to topple consecutive governments.

• Catalan separatists momentarily aligned with their political nemeses this week by joining Spain’s right-wing parties to kill the Socialist government’s spending bill, after talks between the government and the separatists collapsed over the possibility of a referendum on secession.

• The failure to pass a national spending bill led Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Friday to call an early election for April 28.

• Slamming European countries for “undermining U.S. sanctions” by staying in the painstakingly-reached Iran nuclear deal, Pence called on world leaders to turn away from Iran while accusing the country of antisemitism.

• “The Iranian regime openly advocates another Holocaust and it seeks the means to achieve it,” said Pence.

• Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called Pence’s accusation “laughable.”

• “Iran has always supported the Jews,” he told Der Spiegel. “We are just against Zionists.”

• “Iran’s historic and cultural record of coexistence and respect for divine religions, particularly Judaism, is recorded in reliable historic documents of various nations,” Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi added in a statement.

• “The principle that underlies our foreign policy is the aggressive and occupying nature of the Zionist regime [Israel] … which is a killing machine against the Palestinian people,” he said.

• Regarding Iran, German Chancellor Angela Merkel also addressed the conference, defending the decision of Germany and other European nations to stay in the nuclear agreement and observing the Trump administration’s isolation in the debate over the deal.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Tunisia passed the “Right to Access Information Law” (Law No. 2016-22) in March 2016, joining the few Arab countries that have such laws. Tunisia’s law obliges public bodies to furnish a more extensive range of information than legislation in Jordan (adopted in 2007), Yemen (2012), Lebanon (2017), and Morocco (2017). It also limits what information can be denied. Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government has had a similar law on the books since 2013.

• Tunisia’s law requires all government bodies, public institutions, and any institutions that receive public funding to make a range of information public upon request, including organizational charts, legal texts, state agreements, public policies and programs, procurement processes, statistics, and “any information relating to public finances including detailed budget-related data at the central, regional and local levels.” Tunisia’s law is the first in the Arab world to establish an independent commission to oversee compliance, the Access to Information Authority (known as INAI, its French acronym).

• RSF said journalists had continued to run into obstacles as seen when National Police officers seized mobile phones, computers and material from news outlets in Mallorca. Europa Press and Diario de Mallorca were reporting on alleged large-scale corruption on the island.

• RSF has so far registered a total of 79 media personnel arrests since the protests against an increase in the price of bread began on 19 December and then quickly grew into angry demonstrations against the regime.

• These systematic arrests have targeted not only reporters covering protests in almost all parts of the country but also journalists who themselves dared to protest against the regime’s policy of censorship and arrests of journalists with the aim of restricting coverage of the protests.

• The latest ruling came in October when a Finnish regional court convicted the instigators of an online harassment campaign against Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro of stalking, aggravated defamation and incitement to aggravated defamation following years of sustained attacks on Aro through various channels. Aro is known for her award-winning investigative reports on Russian online [astroturfers].

• “The court judged that systematic harassment of an individual journalist and inciting others to do so can be compared to physical abuse”, Arno Ahosniemi, the editor-in-chief of Finnish business daily Kauppalehti and the chair of the Guild of Finnish Editors, said in an interview with the International Press Institute (IPI).

• On Tuesday, Pakistan’s Supreme Court upheld its acquittal of a Christian woman who had been sentenced to death for blasphemy in 2010, clearing the way for her to leave the country as radical Islamists seethe.

• This time it’s a Christian mother from Pakistan who spent nearly ten years on death row for the crime of daring to drink from a cup of water reserved for Muslims. Her name is Aasiya Noreen also known as Asia Bibi.

• Asia Bibi’s daughters reportedly arrived in Canada before her and Bibi herself was believed to have arrived in Toronto on a Tuesday afternoon flight, the family reunited for the first time in a decade.

• In a concerted move to forestall public unrest, Pakistani electronic media is underplaying the story.

• The daughters of Pakistani Christian woman Asia Bibi, whose blasphemy case spotlighted religious extremism in her country, are now in Canada, a source close to the case said on Wednesday.

• The Instagram account – under the username @Alpantuni – featured comic strips that showed the abuse and discrimination faced by a gay Muslim character. It had almost 6,000 followers.

• One comic showed the character being told to “burn in hell” and having faeces thrown at him.

• Local media outlets say the communications ministry had threatened to block Instagram if @Alpantuni’s account was not removed.

• Officers from the National Bureau of Investigation arrived late in the afternoon. They told journalists at Rappler, an online media outlet that has been scathing in its criticism of President Rodrigo Duterte, to stop filming as they arrested the organisation’s boss, Maria Ressa. A veteran journalist, Ms Ressa is accused of “cyber libel” in connection with a piece published almost seven years ago. It alleged that a businessman, Wilfredo Keng, whose car a former chief justice used for transport during an impeachment trial, had ties to human trafficking and drug rings.

• New rules limiting internet freedom could be imposed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government any time after Thursday night.

• Under the proposed rules, Indian officials could demand that Facebook, Google, Twitter, TikTok and others remove posts or videos that they deem libelous, invasive of privacy, hateful or deceptive. Internet companies would also have to build automated screening tools to block Indians from seeing “unlawful information or content.” Another provision would weaken the privacy protections of messaging services like WhatsApp so that the authorities could trace messages back to their original senders.

• The new rules could be imposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government anytime after the public comment period ends on Thursday night. The administration has been eager to get them in place before the date is set for this spring’s national elections, which will prompt special pre-election rules limiting new policies.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Russian lawmakers are poised to introduce a new law preventing soldiers from posting information on the internet, in a move designed to avoid details of foreign deployments becoming public.

• On Tuesday, the parliament approved the second of three readings of the legislation, Reuters reported. The ban would cover photographs, video, geolocation data and other information that might compromise the positions of military units or shed light on their activities.

• The new law will also prevent troops from sharing information about fellow soldiers or any of their relatives. Anyone breaking the ban would be subject to disciplinary measures. The bill, if passed, would formally legislate military recommendations issued to troops in 2017, according to pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia.

• If the lower house approves the bill for the third time, it will then be sent to the Senate for approval. If successful, it will pass to President Vladimir Putin for final approval.

• A note explaining the need for the bill read: “Information shared by soldiers on the internet or mass media is used…in certain cases to form a biased assessment of Russia’s state policy.”

• When does “delete” really mean delete? Not always, or even at all, if you’re Twitter .

• Twitter retains direct messages for years, including messages you and others have deleted, but also data sent to and from accounts that have been deactivated and suspended, according to security researcher Karan Saini.

• Saini found years-old messages in a file from an archive of his data obtained through the website from accounts that were no longer on Twitter. He also reported a similar bug, found a year earlier but not disclosed until now, that allowed him to use a since-deprecated API to retrieve direct messages even after a message was deleted from both the sender and the recipient — though, the bug wasn’t able to retrieve messages from suspended accounts.

• Saini told TechCrunch that he had “concerns” that the data was retained by Twitter for so long.

• Direct messages once let users “unsend” messages from someone else’s inbox, simply by deleting it from their own. Twitter changed this years ago, and now only allows a user to delete messages from their account. “Others in the conversation will still be able to see direct messages or conversations that you have deleted,” Twitter says in a help page. Twitter also says in its privacy policy that anyone wanting to leave the service can have their account “deactivated and then deleted.” After a 30-day grace period, the account disappears, along with its data.

• It turns out that despite showing that the message was deleted, Twitter still stores all those DMs dating back years. Folks can access this simply by downloading the archived data on their account from Twitter. Saini confirms that even messages sent to and from deleted or suspended accounts are still accessible.

• t seems that Twitter’s definition of ‘Delete’ is different from ours. In a report published by Techcrunch, it was revealed that Twitter retains users’ messages for years even after they have deactivated their account. Twitter’s policies state that if anyone wants to opt out of the platform, they can have their account “deactivated and then deleted” within a grace period of 30 days.

• Facebook is expected to be slapped with the largest fine the FCC has ever imposed on a tech company, but the exact dollar amount is yet to be determined.

• The company actively monitors its platform for threatening comments, the report said. That can include a nonspecific threat to a Facebook location or a direct one targeted at specific people. Once Facebook determines that a threat from a user is credible, the company uses data from its products to track that person’s location.

• The company’s information security team is capable of tracking these individuals’ whereabouts using the location data they provide through Facebook’s apps and websites.

• The FTC has been investigating Facebook and is negotiating with the company “over a multi-billion dollar fine that would settle the agency’s investigation,” The Washington Post reported yesterday, citing “people familiar with the probe.” New York Times sources also confirmed that the current negotiations “could amount to a record, multibillion-dollar fine.”

• The current talks have not yet reached the F.T.C.’s five commissioners for a vote and it is unclear how close the two sides are to wrapping up the nearly 11-month investigation. The commissioners met in mid-December and were updated by staff members that they had at that point found considerable evidence of violations of the 2011 consent decree.

• No settlement proposal has been presented to the agency’s five commissioners, according to one of the people. The commissioners have the final say over any agreement reached with Facebook. It was unclear whether the two sides have discussed details of how much Facebook would have to pay to resolve the case. The Washington Post reported earlier that they are in discussions about a multi-billion-dollar fine.

• Given the scale of Facebook and the number of people the company has infuriated, this watchlist could be very big indeed — as CNBC points out, if the company tracks 0.1% of its users this way, it’s keeping tabs on 270,000 people.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Though the stakes are high, the payoff is, too. After Padilla’s trash-talking encounter with the San Antonio officer, he said, a more prominent YouTube personality highlighted the video, bringing him new subscribers and millions of views. Padilla also takes donations, meaning that new eyeballs often lead to more money from individuals who want to support his First Amendment “tests.” It’s become a form of business for the 27-year-old, who first became interested in auditing not because of a personal encounter with the cops but after watching police-brutality videos online.

• “I just went out there and did it, homey,” Padilla told The Daily Beast.

• Currently, however, the business has gone cold. Padilla isn’t in a position to film more audits for his audience. For one thing, he’s facing a deluge of death threats over his videos. Worse, after another encounter with police and more than eight arrests over his audits, he’s been under house arrest since July, pending trial on the charges.

• A YouTuber who films her own confrontations with law enforcement was shot yesterday while recording a security guard outside a Los Angeles synagogue and high school.

• The YouTuber, Zhoie Perez, who goes by Furry Potato online, began live-streaming the encounter after the guard drew a gun. “He said if I moved he’s gonna shoot me dead,” Perez says. After several minutes of filming, a shot is fired, and Perez shouts, “Fucker shot me! Fucker shot me in the leg! Fuck!”

• A resolution was put forward by the Wisconsin state legislature’s black caucus about people whom they wanted to see honored during this year’s Black History Month commemorations. One of the people these legislators wanted to single out for praise was a son of Wisconsin: blackballed NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. When Wisconsin Republicans saw his name, they erased it—literal erasure!—from the resolution. Republicans blocked the passage of the resolution until Kaepernick was removed. He is not in the updated version of the resolution. Later, at a press conference, they said Kaepernick was “too controversial” to be included on such a list.

• The U.S. government has suddenly stopped force-feeding all nine Indian immigrants on a hunger strike inside an El Paso immigration detention center, according to local reports Thursday.

• The dramatic reversal comes as public pressure was mounting on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to halt the controversial practice, which involves feeding detainees through nasal tubes against their will. Last week, the United Nations human rights office said the force-feeding of immigrant hunger strikers at the facility could violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture.

• In addition to dog walking, driving with a dog in a car was also being banned by Tehran’s Prosecutors Office, Tehran Police Chief Hossein Rahimi told state-run news agency Young Journalists Club.

• The man was persuading Rajkumari to convert to Islam so that they could marry each other. However, she refused his request.

• The college student and her boyfriend each received 17 lashes for publicly cuddling, which is a violation of the state’s strict interpretation of Sharia law, according to a government spokesman.

• Madrasa teacher, imam tied to trees, beaten up for stopping child marriage in Noakhali

• The organization claims Ammo Bros sells stickers that read “Infidels” and “Pork Eating Crusader.”

• “Changing your religion under ISIS wasn’t even imaginable. ISIS would kill you immediately,” he added.

• When sentencing a pair of jihadis, a NSW judge observed that the Islamic community needs to work out if Koranic exortations to violence are to be taken seriously or not. Predictably, there followed immediate denials that anything needs to change or, indeed, could be changed. It seems Islamic leaders could use a refresher course in their creed’s most sacred text

• In the article, Walid Alhathloul writes that during a recent visit by his parents to see Loujain she told them she was regularly whipped, beaten, electrocuted and sexually harassed in a basement she called the “palace of terror.”

• Alhathloul was arrested in May 2018, along with 10 other women’s rights activists in Saudi Arabia. Her family, Saudi activists and Human Rights Watch have alleged in recent months that she and other female detainees have been tortured and sexually harassed in prison.

• If you dig deep into the bedrock of this, it is clear that this agency is very limited. That is how patriarchy and religion have modernised themselves: by inventing the myth of the agency of women, especially veiled women. It has convinced them that they are making a choice and have the freedom to exert that choice.

• To me, their freedom is just like that of mice in a maze — they are free to go anywhere, so long as they remain inside the maze. That is the whole extent of agency veiled woman have.

• Addressing the women and equalities select committee, he said that Ofsted inspectors are trying to hold schools account for discriminating against girls but feel “isolated” when their stance is not backed up by ministers.

• The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2018, which was passed in the Lok Sabha on December 27 during the Winter Session, criminalises the practice and classifies triple talaq as a cognisable and non-bailable offence, with three years’ imprisonment and a fine. The bill is pending in the Rajya Sabha.

• The decision to withdraw a bill from the agenda at such a short notice is exceptional.

• The Finnish Parliament in October voted overwhelmingly in favour of declaring urgent a series of constitutional amendments necessitated by the new intelligence laws, thus enabling the government to enact the laws by the end of its term in office.

• It was evidently the “blatant” failings of police and politicians that allowed these men to continue raping and abusing these children; the authorities reportedly remained silent either for political gain or to avoid professional damage.

• Yasmine Mohammed: Last year was the first year that I responded to World Hijab Day, which was set up by Islamists in the US. I posted a video of myself burning the hijab, in solidarity with the women in Iran, Saudi Arabia and all over the world who would like to remove this cloth from their heads. For many women in Muslim-majority countries, to do so could not only mean ostracism or abuse from your family and community, but also could mean being imprisoned or killed. This is not unheard of in Western countries, either. In Canada, there was a 16-year-old who was killed for removing her hijab.

• “People are concerned about cultural sensitivities, worried about being branded racist, and it’s being performed on a very private area,” Dr Proudman said, explaining why it has taken many years for the first UK conviction to arrive.

• It’s by admitting past behavior and recognizing that it was wrong and why that we behave in better ways in the future — and maybe set an example for others with similarly ugly beliefs.

• Press freedom advocates and journalists described a Friday report of Capitol Police manhandling and shoving reporters in the Russell Senate Office Building as “bizarre” and “disturbing,” with some calling the altercation an incident far more likely to take place in a totalitarian regime than in a democracy.

• As Roll Call reported Friday, Capitol Police pushed and “slammed into” reporters on Thursday afternoon around the time that senators were voting on the spending bill. The police attempted to prevent reporters from speaking to lawmakers—a practice that is common in the Senate basement, where the incident took place.

• Meanwhile, in a statement, PMK party founder S Ramadoss alleged that Ramalingam had been hacked to death after he opposed religious conversions. He said those involved in the murder should be arrested and severely punished. Besides, the Tamil Nadu and Central governments should offer Rs 1 crore to the victim’s family as compensation.

• According to police sources, Ramalingam’s murder is linked to his recent attempt to resist proselytisation by members of an Islamic group in a Hindu Dalit dominated neighbourhood.

• Upon the review of his Hackney carriage and private hire driver’s licence, it was revoked indefinitely and he will only be able to obtain one in the future if he can demonstrate he is fit to return to driving a taxi.

• However, the country is short of imams so it imports them from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia — the home countries of the main Muslim immigrant communities — Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

• [...]

• By asking those countries and Tunisia to send imams — the need is particularly high during Ramadan — France is walking into an ideological trap that only encourages the spread of political Islam.

• In the decades before the Islamic revolution of 1979, Iran was ruled by the Shah whose dictatorship repressed dissent and restricted political freedoms.

• But he also he pushed the country to adopt Western-oriented secular modernization, allowing some degree of cultural freedom.

• “When I came here, I heard. I haven’t seen one, but…” Her answer trailed off with a nervous laugh. “Well, having slaves is part of Sharia,” she finally ventured. “I believe in Sharia, wherever Sharia is. We must follow whoever is implementing the way, the law.”

• Pope Francis has defrocked former U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick after Vatican officials found him guilty of soliciting for sex while hearing confession and of sexual crimes against minors and adults, the Holy See said Saturday.

• McCarrick, 88, is the highest-ranking Catholic churchman to be laicized, as the process is called. It means he can no longer celebrate Mass or other sacraments, wear clerical vestments or be addressed by any religious title. He is the first churchman who reached the rank of cardinal to be defrocked in the church’s sex abuse scandals.

• The punishment for the once-powerful prelate, who had served as the archbishop of Washington, spent years in New Jersey dioceses and had been an influential fundraiser for the church, was announced five days before Francis leads an extraordinary gathering of bishops from around the world to help the church grapple with the crisis of sex abuse by clergy and the systematic cover-ups by church hierarchy. The decades-long scandals have shaken the faith of many Catholics and threaten Francis’ papacy.

• Today, the Supreme Court announced that it will hear oral arguments on the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. The addition of such a question would likely depress census turnout, skew the allocation of congressional seats, and change how billions of dollars in federal funding are distributed to the states.

• The decision comes after a federal court in New York ruled against the administration in the case, New York v. United States Department of Commerce. The lower court had decided that the Commerce Department’s decision to add the question was “arbitrary” and made in violation of federal law.

• In an unusual move, the Trump administration appealed the lower court’s ruling directly to the Supreme Court, rather than going first to the court of appeals.

• The Supreme Court agreed to take up two questions. First, the Justices will consider whether the New York court was correct to block the citizenship question. Second, the Court will decide if the lower court properly allowed the groups challenging the question to obtain documents and other information from the federal government.

• Imagine paying $20.12 for a 15-minute phone call. That’s how much a call from the Jennings Adult Correctional Facility in Missouri costs.

• In 2013, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) set price caps on interstate calls from jails, prisons and detention facilities. Now, interstate calls can cost no more than 21 cents per minute (or $3.15 for a 15-minute phone call). Two years later, in 2015, it did the same for intrastate (or in-state) calls, which make up 92 percent of all calls from incarcerated people. Prison phone providers filed lawsuits challenging these restrictions and, in June 2017, a federal court ruled in the phone companies’ favor. The ruling means that intrastate calls are not subject to FCC regulation and rates fluctuate wildly depending on each facility’s contract with the phone provider.

• Jennings isn’t the only local jail with outrageous phone prices. The Arkansas County Jail charges $24.82 for a 15-minute call; in contrast, the same call from the state’s prisons costs $4.80. In Michigan, a call from the Benzie County Sheriff’s jail costs $22.56, but $2.40 from the state prison.

• Even when phone costs aren’t as exorbitant, they still add up quickly. The Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which contracts with the company GTL, charge $3.15 for a 15-minute call. That doesn’t count the fee to add money onto a phone account. Carol Speaks, whose son is currently in the jail, says that for every $20 that she adds to her phone account, she gets $17 in calls. In other words, GTL takes $3 of every payment, leaving her with four 15-minute phone calls. Speaks, who earns $15 an hour, said the money she spent on calls meant that, at times, she had to forgo putting gas in her car or buying groceries.

• ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) said they “arrested unlawfully present United Kingdom national Sha Yaa Bin Abraham-Joseph AKA ’21 Savage’ during a targeted operation with federal and local law enforcement partners early Sunday in metro Atlanta. Mr. Abraham-Joseph was taken into ICE custody as he is unlawfully present in the U.S. and also a convicted felon.”

• 21 Savage was picked up by ICE early Sunday morning. He apparently entered the U.S. legally in 2005 but his visa expired and he reportedly is here illegally.

• For a fleeting moment on Friday morning, a wild hope galloped through my mind like a horse fleeing a barn fire. Trump would step to the podium to make his emergency declaration, smirk at the assembled reporters and say, “My fellow Americans, I have never told a joke in my life.” With a sudden howl, he would rip the rubber mask off his head to reveal a man everyone thought was dead. I knew it! It’s Andy Kaufman! Behind him, Mike Pence would tear his mask off to reveal Jerry Lawler, and the two would walk away arm in arm giggling like titmice on a tree bough, having pulled the greatest prank of all time.

• If you’re going to cause a constitutional crisis, you may as well make it fun, right?

• Nope. When Trump unleashed a disorganized, rambling, snarling, sniff-riddled word cloud on China, Korea, Syria, missiles, Obama, wars, duct tape, “bob” wire, Democrats, singsong Beat poetry, caravans and the stock market while announcing his illegal emergency declaration, it wasn’t fun. It was surreal to the point of brown-acid psychedelia, and it was perfectly terrifying in the main, but it wasn’t fun. In an administration made of low points, Friday’s Rose Garden debacle was a Jules Verne novel on live television. Dead or alive, Andy Kaufman would have been a substantial improvement.

• In an administration made of low points, Friday’s Rose Garden debacle was a Jules Verne novel on live television. So that happened, as Trump said on Friday, and here we are. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell jettisoned the last lingering threads of his integrity and endorsed the emergency declaration on Thursday afternoon, likely because he’s also getting the shutdown-avoiding border bill he wanted. With McConnell now on board, a majority of the lemmings in his caucus — many of whom are deeply concerned about the precedent being set — will likely fling themselves over the cliff if House Speaker Pelosi, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Joaquin Castro force a vote on the declaration, which they are all but certain to do.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Today, when you visit a website to read an article, which might be a thousand words of text, your browser might easily load megabytes of data for that. The whole bible fits into one megabyte. When these data packets arrive I would love to go into spartan mode and kick them into a deep dark hole.

• If the web seems slow, blame third-party advertising and analytics scripts.

• Many internet users have already come to that conclusion but Patrick Hulce, founder of Dallas, Texas-based Eris Ventures and a former Google engineer, has assembled data that clarifies the impact of third-party scripts in the hope it prompts more efficient coding.

• Hulce has compiled a list of the third-party scripts residing in the top million websites and found that the 100 most common bits of JavaScript eat up about 59 per cent of script execution time.

• “Third party script execution is the majority chunk of the web today, and it’s important to make informed choices,” he says in the GitHub post where he presents the data.

DRM

• It doesn’t matter though. Whether Epic succeeds or not, Steam has already lost. The days of Valve’s de facto monopoly are over, and all that matters is what comes next.

Intellectual Monopolies

• A federal appeals court on Wednesday revived four patents on a graphical user interface for online stock traders, saying the Patent Trial and Appeal Board had overstepped its authority in reviewing them.

• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated a win for Greenwich, Connecticut-based Interactive Brokers LLC and its holding company, IBG LLC, in a dispute with software developer Trading Technologies International of Chicago.

• BMW asked a Texas federal judge Wednesday to hand it a win in a Texas company’s infringement suit over vehicle software update technology, noting that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board found…

• Alarm.com (Nasdaq: ALRM) has lost its bid for millions of dollars in damages in a patent infringement case relating to smart home security and automation networking.

• A jury found Feb. 8 that SecureNet Technologies did not infringe three of Alarm.com’s patents, awarding no damages in the five-day U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware trial.

• Based in Florida, SecureNet manufacturers a B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for providers of interactive services in the security, smart home, MSO health & wellness and energy verticals.

• Samsung secured a victory Tuesday as the Federal Circuit affirmed a Virginia federal court’s determination that four patents covering a system for processing health data are invalid because they are abstract….

• The Patent Trial and Appeal Board has in recent weeks demonstrated its intent to follow the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s new patent eligibility framework, taking an approach that could enable…

Copyrights

• In correspondence last month that was surfaced on Wednesday in California federal court, Saskia Florence, a supervisory registration specialist in the Office’s Performing Arts Division, told Ribeiro’s attorney that registration must be refused because his claimed “choreographic work” was a “simple dance routine.”

• Piracy is a serious problem. Piracy causes heavy damage to copyright holders and content business. The amount of damage for manga and animation in Japan is about JPY 200 billion (USD 1.8 billion), according to a government survey in 2014.

• In order to solve this problem, the Japanese government tried to legislate piracy website blocking. However, the government had to give up the legislation for that (See here about this). Because it encountered strong opposition, considering infringement on the constitutionally guaranteed secrecy of communication.

• Many people were outraged, and I called this a “new low” for political discourse in the EU. It’s simply inappropriate and unacceptable for a government agency to insult citizens concerned about a legislative proposal (many of whom foot the bill of the Brussels gravy train with their taxes). If there had been a violent demonstration breaking the windows of the Berlaymont building, the term “mob” might have been justified. But no such thing happened in connection with the EU Copyright Directive.

• We’re just talking about citizens expressing their views on the Internet and participating in peaceful demonstrations. In fact, I actually think the opponents of that ill-conceived, misguided bill are too nice for their own good. Apart from some Internet memes involving one MEP (Axel Voss), they haven’t really attacked some people as hard as they could have and in my view should have. My brothers-in-arms in the fight against the EU software patent directive, the FFII activists, maintained a wiki on which they documented the lies of countless politicians. I remember how some MEPs were really upset, especially when they realized that those unfavorable wiki pages were among the very first Google search results for their names. I’m quite sure one could research and publish a lot more information about longstanding relationships of numerous MEPs with certain media companies. And even if one did that, citizens would still be citizens, voters would still be voters, and taxpayers would still be taxpayers–not a “mob” unless there’s violence involved, or at an absolute minimum, insults that can’t be justified with political disagreement.

• It’s something else when President Trump takes to Twitter in his outspoken way. He’s the President, and he gets attacked at a very personal level all the time. Also, he’s already campaigning for reelection. But imagine the outcry you’d hear in the U.S. if the DOJ referred to dissidents in an IP context as a “mob!”

• The Copyright Directive overhaul has been in the planning for some time, but the latest iteration has been described by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as “worse than any in the Directive’s sordid history”.

• Under the new rules, any company over three years old or making more than €10m is completely responsible for content on their site, and any infractions that their users make are completely on them.

• With the ink barely dry on Wednesday’s agreement for the final draft of Article 13, the EU Commission published an eyebrow-raising piece Thursday. While much of it is implied, the Commission suggests that the millions of people who opposed Article 13 have been misled and are therefore poorly informed.

• Goodbye, protections for artists and scientists

• The Copyright Directive was always a grab bag of updates to EU copyright rules—which are long overdue for an overhaul, given that it’s been 18 years since the last set of rules were ratified. Some of its clauses gave artists and scientists much-needed protections: artists were to be protected from the worst ripoffs by entertainment companies, and scientists could use copyrighted works as raw material for various kinds of data analysis and scholarship.

• Both of these clauses have now been gutted to the point of uselessness, leaving the giant entertainment companies with unchecked power to exploit creators and arbitrarily hold back scientific research.

• A video tweeted by President Trump was removed from Twitter on Saturday after the publisher of R.E.M.’s songs complained about the band’s music being used in the video, CNBC reported.

• Pirate site IGG-Games, which sits among the top 1,500 sites in the world, is under fire for meddling with pirate releases. One particular example involves the DRM-free game The Eternal Castle, which has been modified not to run if people remove IGG-Games’ advertising code. The site says it needs to do this to prevent other sites “stealing” its releases but pirates are not impressed. In fact, they’ve developed a tool to remove this ‘DRM’.

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.