● 05.13.19

● Links 13/5/2019: ExTiX 19.5 and GNU Radio Conference 2019

Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• But most people won’t know it. That’s because the bones of the open-source operating system kernel will soon be baked into Windows 10 and Chrome OS, as Microsoft and Google revealed at their respective developer conferences this week… Between lurking in Windows 10 and Chrome OS, and the tiny portion of actual Linux distro installs, pretty much any PC you pick up will run a Linux kernel and Linux software.

• Have you ever felt the urge to give back to the Linux community? To help out the developers who spend a significant amount of their (typically unpaid) free time creating the distro, software, or desktop environment that you enjoy on a daily basis? If you’re anything like me, you may have reservations about this. Maybe you’re not some technically savvy power user, maybe you have zero programming or coding skills. Maybe you just have no clue where to start. That’s exactly the predicament I found myself in, so I started asking questions.

• I spoke extensively with Dustin Krysak, a system administrator on the Ubuntu Budgie team, and tons of other people chimed in with helpful suggestions. Two dominant themes emerged from these conversations. First, there are numerous ways to make a tangible difference even if you can’t write a single line of code. Second, they’re starving for help.

• “Programming is the carpenter, but you still need the architects, designers, project managers (quite literally), permit people – to make a construction job come together,” Krysak says.

• So below, I’m going to outline a bunch of things we can do to make an impact. To bring more visibility to your favorite projects and improve them for everyone.

Audiocasts/Shows

• RHEL 8 is released, we report from the ground of the big announcement, Microsoft announces WSL 2 with a real Linux kernel at the core, and details on their new open source terminal.

• Plus Alpine Linux Docker images shipped for 3 years with root accounts unlocked, and Google’s new attempt to send updates directly to your phone.

• Josh and Kurt talk about fire. We discuss the history of fire prevention and how it mirrors many of things we see in security. There are lessons there for us, we just hope it doesn’t take 2000 years like it did for proper fire prevention to catch on.

• Being able to control a computer with your voice has rapidly moved from science fiction to science fact. Unfortunately, the majority of platforms that have been made available to consumers are controlled by large organizations with little incentive to respect users’ privacy. The team at Snips are building a platform that runs entirely off-line and on-device so that your information is always in your control. In this episode Adrien Ball explains how the Snips architecture works, the challenges of building a speech recognition and natural language understanding toolchain that works on limited resources, and how they are tackling issues around usability for casual consumers. If you have been interested in taking advantage of personal voice assistants, but wary of using commercially available options, this is definitely worth a listen.

Kernel Space

• Announced by Linus Torvalds on May 6th, the Linux 5.1 kernel series brings numerous new features and improvements, among which we can mention better file system monitorization, new cpuidle governor called TEO, support for configuring Zstd compression levels in Btrfs, and the ability to boot to a device-mapper device without using initramfs.

• Linux kernel 5.1 also adds support for cumulative patches in live kernel patching, the ability to use persistent memory as RAM, faster and more scalable asynchronous I/O, support for delivering safe signals in presence of PID reuse, more preparations for the year 2038, and lots of new and updated drivers.

• Both Intel and AMD laptop hardware are seeing various improvements coming with the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel.

• First up, Linux 5.2 will finally offer better compatibility with many AMD Ryzen laptops out there… In particular, as previously covered, the new AMD PCIe MP2 I2C controller driver has been merged and allows many laptop touchpads / touchscreens to finally function accordingly under Linux. It has taken a long time for this AMD driver to get into shape for mainline but it’s here with Linux 5.2 to finally provide out-of-the-box/working touchpad/touchscreen support without requiring an out-of-tree DKMS module or hitting other snags.

Graphics Stack

• Karol Herbst of Red Hat who has been working for more than the past year on providing OpenCL support in Gallium3D’s “Clover” state tracker via SPIR-V so it can easily work with drivers like Nouveau seems to be approaching the finish line.

• It’s been almost a month since the last Vulkan spec update with Vulkan 1.1.107, which is a long time considering they go through some periods of almost weekly updates, but out today is v1.1.108 and it introduces two new extensions.

• Vulkan 1.1.108 does bring with it a number of clarifications and corrections to the documentation itself. The Vulkan 1.1.108 changes appear mostly routine and nothing too notable when it comes to the fixes.

Benchmarks

• Continuing on from the initial Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 benchmarks last week, now having had more time with this fresh enterprise Linux distribution, here are additional benchmarks on two Intel Xeon servers when benchmarking RHEL 8.0, RHEL 7.6, Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, and Clear Linux. RHEL 8.0 is certainly delivering much better out-of-the-box performance than its aging predecessor but how can it compete with Ubuntu LTS and Clear Linux?

• As a reminder as to what is shipped by each of these Linux distributions, the core components include:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 – RHEL 7.6 uses a (heavily patched) Linux 3.10 kernel, GCC 4.8.5 compiler, and XFS file-system by default.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 – RHEL 8.0 runs with the Linux 4.18 kernel, GCC 8.2.1 compiler, and XFS file-system by default. There is a slew of updated packages compared to RHEL7 and what’s available there, including other changes like changing over to Retpolines for the Spectre V2 mitigations.

• While we have endless passion and fun for Linux (and BSD) benchmarking, with Phoronix Test Suite 8.8 being released there are yet more improvements for our open-source, automated and repeatable benchmarking on Microsoft Windows.

Applications

• In less than a generation, we’ve gone from bare-metal servers to virtualization to containers. It’s a story of expanded possibilities aided by stakeholder communities coming together to solve problems. Over time, processes have become easier and more efficient for end users. We’ve learned to orchestrate containers with Kubernetes, and now we can manage Kubernetes clusters and their associated infrastructure needs across multiple cloud providers (and hopefully on-premises) with Cluster API.

• Looking back to how we got here, the path is entirely logical: physical servers were once underutilized. They frequently ran only one application per physical server, leaving a vast majority of their computing power just sitting idle.

• Virtual machines came about to let you convert your underutilized physical servers into appropriately sized virtual servers. They reduced waste and made things easier: You were able to pack multiple virtual machines into a single physical server. With virtual machines, you could increase density and reduce cost.

• Released this weekend was IWD 0.18 as the latest version of the Intel-developed wireless daemon for Linux systems.

• The main feature with IWD 0.18 is support for FILS, the Fast Initial Link Setup. Fast Initial Link Setup is part of the 802.11ai specification for allowing a WLAN client to setup a secure link within 100ms.

Instructionals/Technical

• Learn how to enable SSH in Raspberry Pi and then how to SSH into a Raspberry Pi device.

Games

• Developer Joshua Ashton sure is a busy bee, with D9VK (based on DXVK) advancing very quickly with a second release out in the space of a week.

• Version 0.11 – Poison Dart was released last night and it brings in numerous performance improvements like a rewritten buffer code which should be “faster in every instance and correct some memory errors”. Skyrim should also see improvements with it, thanks to support for cube render target/depth stencils which fixes flickering water. A Hat in Time should also see shadows nicely fixed up with this release, thanks to a partial clears implementation.

• Another title becoming available next month (it’s going to be busy) is Barotrauma, a co-op submarine sim that has a very good atmosphere.

• It’s going to be available on June 5th and as far as I know this will include Linux support, especially as their testing builds were on Linux and it’s still advertising Linux support on Steam right now.

• Hyperspace Delivery Service, a retro-styled adventure from Zotnip is getting ready to leave Early Access. On June 5th, it will release in full for everyone and it does include Linux support too.

• The Vagabond update for Sunless Skies due on June 12th is going to expand the game a little further and it’s another free update.

• With this update, you will get the ability to recruit yourself a new officer with Amiable Vagabond. It seems they come with their own story-line too, as they will take you to “the abandoned quarters of the sky” and you will get to meet the “skylarks”, a community of “ragged wanderers who rove the heavens, and help them find the way to the Sugarspun Garden”.

• June seems to be a popular month lately, with Sean Young announcing his peaceful building RPG Littlewood is going to release on June 18th.

• I love first-person shooters, it’s easily my favourite genre next to traditional real-time strategy games (the kind where you build a base, then send out an army) and the cyberspace FPS Black Ice is continuing to be impressive.

• Looking over it, it hasn’t had a stable release update for some time now, from my checking it seems the most recent was last year. However, it does have regular beta builds and some of them have added in some really fun features like a Charges mechanic, so certain items can build up an amount of charges to release when you’re ready. Linking in with that is the new item class Executables, they’re weapons that come with charges but no weapon model so you could think of them like spells or abilities. There’s also another new item class called Exploits, a special type of Executables that give off an extra triggered ability when you hit a target you’ve debuffed (slow, stunned, on fire etc).

• It’s been a few weeks since AMD developers last updated the public source trees making up their official open-source “AMDVLK” Vulkan driver but out this morning is v2019.Q2.3 as their newest update.

• Given the time since the last AMDVLK code push, there are a number of noteworthy changes with AMDVLK 2019.Q2.3. The AMDVLK 2019.Q2.3 release brings compile-time optimizations to its LLVM Pipeline Compiler (LLPC), updated Vulkan headers, the shader disk cache is now enabled for the Dawn of War III game, there is additional performance tuning for Thrones of Britannia, and a new option around the pipeline uploader.

• Another slice of recent Linux gaming news for those having a little trouble keeping up, this time it’s quite a positive one! The Linux Gaming News Punch has reached Episode 12.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In his latest weekly report, KDE developer Nate Graham highlights some more of the new features coming to the KDE Plasma 5.16 desktop environment next month, including a completely revamped notification system that will support a Do Not Disturb mode, better support for multi-monitor configurations, and persistent notifications.

• The notification history will finally feature grouping while being more intelligent, file transfer operations will also benefit of much-improved notifications, and full-screen applications will show critical notifications. On top of that, the System Settings page was made more usable to allow users to configure everything related to notifications.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• For about every 250 bug reports I recieve I get an email offering to help. Most of the time the person offering help isn’t capable of diving right in the trickiest parts of the code and just wanted to make my life easier. Now I have a task that almost anyone can help with…

• For the next version of the LVFS we deploy we’re going to be showing what was changed between each firmware version. Rather than just stating the firmware has changed from SHA1:DEAD to SHA1:BEEF and some high level update description provided by the vendor, we can show the interested user the UEFI modules that changed. I’m still working on the feature and without more data it’s kinda, well, dull. Before I can make the feature actually useful to anyone except a BIOS engineer, I need some help finding out information about the various modules.

Distributions

• In Intel’s own words: “Clear Linux OS is an open source, rolling release Linux distribution optimized for performance and security, from the Cloud to the Edge, designed for customization and manageability.”

• In more specific terms, Clear Linux is built from scratch atop the GNOME desktop environment, and it’s highly tuned for Intel platforms, with all performance optimizations enabled by default. Those optimizations occur across the entire stack: kernel, libraries, middleware layers, frameworks and runtime.

• Clear Linux has Flatpak support out of the box, and an included software store with more than 4000 applications and bundles. So yes, if you wanted to treat this as a traditional desktop workstation, I don’t see any major obstacles to doing that aside from a slight learning curve with regards to Intel’s custom “swupd” package manager.

Screenshots/Screencasts

• In this video, we are looking at Condres OS 2019.05.

Arch Family

• Ahh, Arch Linux; the distribution with the most pretentious user base. If you aren’t familiar with Arch, please know it is a very good operating system that is unnecessarily difficult to set up. As a result, the ones who are successful, and end up using the distro, are often quite full of themselves. Many Arch users seem to look down on those using a different distro, such as Ubuntu or Linux Mint. This is what has lead to the infamous “BTW I use Arch” meme. No, not all Arch users are insufferable, but many are. True story.

Fedora

• Fedora 30 continues the trend of each new Fedora release being a little better and more polished than the last. There are still a few rough edges (e.g., Toolbox creating an image that still has updates-testing enabled and certain Flatpak games not properly exiting), but those should be resolved soon enough. Fedora 30 Workstation is more than ready for anyone who likes being an early adopter, but more conservative upgraders should perhaps give it a few more weeks.

• Fedora 30 Silverblue is almost ready for anyone interested in using Flatpaks for all of their apps and containers for development. Silverblue’s GNOME desktop needs a few minor odds & ends fixed to bring into feature parity with Workstation, but most of the issues with Silverblue involve getting various Flatpak applications to communicate with each other and with the base system. So for some, Silverblue may be ready, it really depends on an individual’s particular software needs, but for others it still needs work.

• Business documents often require special handling. Enter Electronic Document Interchange, or EDI. EDI is more than simply transferring files using email or http (or ftp), because these are documents like orders and invoices. When you send an invoice, you want to be sure that:

• 1. It goes to the right destination, and is not intercepted by competitors. 2. Your invoice cannot be forged by a 3rd party. 3. Your customer can’t claim in court that they never got the invoice.

• The first two goals can be accomplished by HTTPS or email with S/MIME, and in some situations, a simple HTTPS POST to a web API is sufficient. What EDI adds is the last part.

• This article does not cover the messy topic of formats for the files exchanged. Even when using a standardized format like ANSI or EDIFACT, it is ultimately up to the business partners. It is not uncommon for business partners to use an ad-hoc CSV file format. This article shows you how to configure Fedora to send and receive in an EDI setup.

• One of the latest Fedora 31 change proposals is for shipping the very latest MinGW environment and toolchain in this next Fedora Linux release for ensuring a great experience for those building Windows applications on Linux.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• Based on the recently released Ubuntu 19.04 (Disco Dingo) operating system, ExTiX 19.5 is now available featuring the lightweight LXQt desktop environment by default instead of GNOME, the latest and most advanced Linux 5.1 kernel series, and the upcoming Kodi 19 “Matrix” media centre with the Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Plex add-ons pre-installed.

• The ExTiX 19.5 release also ships with Refracta Installer as default graphical installer instead of Ubuntu’s Ubiquity live installer, with built-in support for UEFI-enabled computers, the latest Nvidia 418.74 graphics drivers, as well as the Refracta Snapshot utility, which lets you create your own live and installable system based on ExTiX 19.5 and Ubuntu 19.04.

Devices/Embedded

Android

Free Software/Open Source

SaaS/Back End

• We are happy to share the news that SUSE CaaS Platform 3 on premise is validated for SAP Data Hub 2.5 with SUSE Enterprise Storage as storage backend.

LibreOffice

• I live in Obninsk, Russia – it’s one of the major Russian science cities. You know, the first nuclear power plant was built in Obninsk. At the moment I work at BaseALT as a QA engineer. I really love testing! (I’ve noticed a minor bug in LibreOffice Writer while typing these words – I will surely report it later)

• I’m also mother of a teenage girl, so a lot of my spare time is dedicated to supporting her interests. Now she is really into biking and swimming, and we dream of visiting the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GNU Radio Conference highlights the substantial and remarkable progress of the world’s premier open-source digital signal processing framework for software-defined radios. In addition to presenting GNU Radio’s theoretical and practical presence in academia, industry, the military, and among radio amateurs and hobbyists, GNU Radio Conference 2019 will have a special focus on the 50th anniversary of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, which landed the first humans on the moon — hence, the selection of “The Rocket City,” home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, as the venue.

Programming/Development

• Last week we celebrated one year of the Kubernetes Podcast from Google. In this weekly show, my co-host Adam Glick and I focus on all the great things that are happening in the world of Kubernetes and Cloud Native. From the news of the week, to interviews with people in the community, we help you stay up to date on everything Kubernetes.

• Every few cycles we check in on the release process for Kubernetes itself. Last year we interviewed the release managers for Kubernetes 1.11, and shared that transcript on the Kubernetes blog. We got such great feedback that we wanted to share the transcript of our recent conversation with Aaron Crickenberger, the release manager for Kubernetes 1.14.

• Since ancient times, we’ve known that one of the most effective ways to learn something is by teaching it to someone else. I’ve put that strategy into practice by teaching Python in my community. If you want to learn Python for free and have fun at the same time, I recommend you consider doing the same.

• I started on this journey about six years ago, based on the recommendation of a friend who was teaching himself Python. It all came together about a year later when I bought my first Raspberry Pi and learned about the Turtle module in Python.

• The Turtle was an epiphany that changed my life and perception of myself as a learner. Turtle graphics helped me understand mathematics and its relevance in my life. I began to explore Python vigorously and, as I gained confidence, I started sharing my newfound knowledge with the teachers and students I came in contact with.

• If you last updated your IT security standards five or more years ago, chances are they don’t line up well with the realities of today’s DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) practices. One particularly sticky topic is testing in production—and, thus, testing with production data—because DevOps and SRE blur the line between what is production and what is not; what is a test and what is not.

• As previously announced, we will be opening early-bird tickets sales today at 12:00 CEST.

• We will have 200 early-bird tickets available when we open up ticket sales. They offer a discount of up to 50% over the standard rate and are usually sold out within a few hours. In 2018 early bird tickets were sold out in just 45 minutes.

• It’s hard to say. I have not tested this on anything except toy programs but it does seem to work. It’s unclear if this was the intended behaviour, but Microsoft does take backwards compatibility fairly seriously so one would expect it to keep working. The bigger problem is that the VS toolchain creates many other files, such as pdb debug info files, that probably don’t like being renamed like this. These files are mostly undocumented so it’s difficult to estimate how much work it would take to make binary hotpatching work reliably.

• The best solution would be for Microsoft to add a new linker argument to their toolchain that would write dependency info to the files as absolute paths and to provide a program to rewrite those entries as discussed above. Apple already provides all of this functionality in their core toolchain. It would be nice for MS to do the same. This would simplify cross platform development because it would make all the major platforms behave in the same way. It would be nice to get the same tools for Linux, too, but it’s not that urgent since build systems already can do this reliably on their own.

• Rust is a systems programming language that runs fast, prevents segmentation faults, and guarantees thread safety. It accomplishes these goals by being memory safe without using garbage collection. The language enables developers to write programs with the performance and control of a low-level language, but with the powerful abstractions of a high-level language.

• Rust is ideal for systems, embedded, and other performance critical code.

• If you had to describe Rust in just three words, they would be fast, safe, and productive. There’s memory safety without garbage collection, concurrency without data races, abstraction without overhead, and stability without stagnation.

• Rust is designed by Mozilla.

• In this article, I recommend 8 books to get you up to speed with Rust. There’s introductory texts, books that dig deeper into the language, as well as other texts that will help you migrate from C++ and Ruby to Rust.

• As a CS professor and longtime Go and Java developer, I’d like to share some of my thoughts and explain why I prefer Go to Java or Python – Go makes it much easier for me to write good code.

• Go has been my main programming tool since 2012, replacing Java, which in turn replaced C in 1998. I use Python mostly for teaching. My journey as a pro­gram­mer started back in 1978 on a TI-57 with 50 program steps and 8 registers.

Standards/Consortia

• Congress is offering up another bite at the data standards apple, introducing H.R.1530 – 115th Congress (2017-2018): Financial Transparency Act.

• [...]

• The data standards must:

• render information fully searchable and machine-readable; be nonproprietary; incorporate standards developed and maintained by voluntary consensus standards bodies; and be consistent with accounting and reporting principles.

Leftovers

• Washington is the only state so far to have approved the move to permanent daylight saving time. California voters approved a ballot measure in 2018 that gave the legislature the power to adopt permanent daylight saving time. In Congress, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) have introduced a federal measure to adopt permanent daylight saving time.

• But so far, failure is more common than victory. Permanent daylight saving time bills are already dead for the year in Idaho, Mississippi, New Mexico, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming, and dozens more will die as legislative sessions turn to more pressing matters.

• You cannot bottle him, export him or use him as a precedent for anything. His calm, even tempered disposition is the stuff of bafflement and bemusement, and yet, after his tenure at one of Europe’s most known football clubs, Jürgen Klopp, football’s everyman (the “normal one”, he insists) will be the model to emulate.

• Klopp has been saddled with the reputation of encouraging “heavy metal” football, marked by whirlwind bursts of vigour and aggressive strumming. Arsène Wenger, who long reigned at Arsenal, was more inclined to soft instrumental and orchestral show, all caress and flow. “He,” reflected Klopp, “likes having the ball, playing football, passes. It’s like an orchestra. But it’s a silent song. I like heavy metal more. I always want it loud.”

• The jaw dropping victory over Barcelona in the semi-finals of the Champions League will be retrospectively touched up and reconsidered for years to come. There will be notations on the Klopp method of bursting deficits – the second-leg victory over Dortmund in the Europa League after the German side was leading 3-1 being one such example. Struggling to come up with an analysis, writers have suggested that the Klopp method, in contrast to the Van Gaal-Guardiola school of coaching, thrives on a loss of control rather than its assertion, a blessed release over miring constipation. When that happens, his side gets its boots dirty, mucking in and making the necessary, combative tackles.

Science

• According to NASA, about 530 million people watched the live broadcast of that first Moon landing. Some of them may have been too young to remember it, or they may have died during the five intervening decades, but that still leaves a pretty sizable population of people who might remember the event.

• Making a recording for this project is fairly simple. NASA’s instructions suggest that people use a smartphone to record their memories, keeping answers to each question under two minutes. Then, just email the recording to apollostories@mail.nasa.gov along with the name and hometown of whoever is involved in the recording.

• The findings, published this week in Nature, confirm the existence of “superionic ice,” a new phase of water with bizarre properties. Unlike the familiar ice found in your freezer or at the north pole, superionic ice is black and hot. A cube of it would weigh four times as much as a normal one. It was first theoretically predicted more than 30 years ago, and although it has never been seen until now, scientists think it might be among the most abundant forms of water in the universe.

Health/Nutrition

• I had the opportunity to testify last week before the House Rules committee on Medicare for All. Incredibly, this was apparently the first time the topic had been explicitly addressed in a congressional hearing. In my testimony, I argued that a Medicare for All program would be affordable, but the key factor was reducing the cost of input prices, like prescription drugs, medical equipment, and doctors’ pay. I also briefly laid out what I considered the key features of a transition from the current system. I want to go into this issue in a bit more detail here.

• On May 7, voters in Denver, Colorado narrowly approved a measure de-criminalizing “magic mushrooms” — mushrooms containing the consciousness-altering compound psilocybin. The measure, National Public Radio reports, “effectively bars the city from prosecuting or arresting adults 21 or older who possess them. In the ballot language, adults can even grow the fungus for personal use and be considered a low priority for Denver police.”

• Those are both great things. A third great thing would have been an order to Denver’s police to simply ignore “magic mushrooms” altogether, effectively legalizing sale of the fungi as well (assuming there would be much of a market for something that’s easily found “in the wild,” growing on everything from rotting wood to cow patties) . But hey, two out of three ain’t bad. Yay, Denver.

• The political justification for this measure (and others like it pending in other polities) is the growing evidence that psilocybin can be useful in treating depression, anxiety, and migraines. How many have needlessly suffered due to the research delays caused by its illegalization?

Security

• This marks the second time ransomware has hit Baltimore: In March 2018, a cyberattack infected the city’s 911 dispatch system and took down automated dispatches for 911 and 311 calls. An Internet port was reportedly left unprotected and exploited by attackers, officials said.

• Baltimore City agencies are scrambling this week to conduct business as normal amid a ransomware attack on government computers.

• Here’s a list of city departments and agencies that have undergone operational changes since the attack: [...]

• The FBI is investigating a ransomware attack on Baltimore City’s network, while city officials try to bring back the network to its full capacity.

• Although city services are no longer are being affected, [intruders] are still accessing the system, according to Mayor Jack Young.

• Security researcher Vitali Kremez, who recently reverse-engineered a sample of RobbinHood, told Ars that the [Windows] malware appears to target only files on a single system and does not spread through network shares. “It is believed to be spread directly to the individual machines via psexec and/or domain controller compromise,” Kremez said. “The reasoning behind it is that the ransomware itself does not have any network spreading capabilities and is meant to be deployed for each machine individually.”

• That would mean that the attacker would need to already have gained administrative-level access to a system on the network “due to the way the ransomware interacts with C:\Windows\Temp directory,” Kremez explained.

• The Joint Cyber Warfighting Architecture (JCWA), was established by Cyber Command within the last year to guide capability development priorities. Cyber is unique within the Department of Defense in that from an operational perspective nearly all aspects are joint. This means in the traditional warfighting realm, the services are responsible for manning, training and equipping for a certain function, infantry or fighter pilots, for example. While those forces are part of a theater-wide campaign plan beneath a combatant command, they are still deployed under their own services.

• The Defense Department wants to publish its blacklist of software companies to better inform the industrial base.

• “We will continue to not buy from sources that are not trusted,” DOD Acquisition and Sustainment Undersecretary Ellen Lord told reporters during a May 10 briefing at the Pentagon.

• “As the transition was made” from Army Cyber Command to MARFORCYBER, U.S. Cyber Command’s leader Gen. Paul Nakasone “thought it was important to expand that mission set,” Maj. Gen. Matthew Glavy, MARFORCYBER’s commander, told reporters May 7 during a first of its kind media briefing at its facilities at Fort Meade.

• Noting that some private companies employ internal phishing campaigns and if an employee can be terminated if they take the bait a certain number of times, Modly said the Navy is looking at punitive measures for users to get them to take cybersecurity seriously.

• Phishing is seen by more than one in four (44%) of Australian businesses as the biggest security threats they face, with ransomware, password and business email compromise continuing to beset organisations, according to a newly published survey.

• There is also strong evidence to suggest that the attack vector was a known vulnerability published on Atlassian Confluence in March 2019.

• Europe is bracing itself for a big shake-up in how we pay for things online, which will have significant consequences for businesses across the region. Similar to how GDPR hugely impacted how millions of organizations handle personal data when it was enforced last year, Strong Customer Authentication (or SCA) will have profound implications for how businesses handle online transactions and how we pay for things in our everyday lives when it is enforced on September 14.

• SCA will require an extra layer of authentication for online payments. Where a card number and address once sufficed, customers will now be required to include at least two of the following three factors to do anything as simple as order a taxi or pay for a music streaming service. Something they know (like a password or PIN), something they own (like a token or smartphone), and something they are (like a fingerprint or biometric facial features).

• Currently, it is unknown how hackers breached Picreel or the Cloud CMS’s Alpaca Forms CDN. In a Twitter conversation, de Groot told ZDNet the hack appears to have been carried out by the same threat actor.

• The two services in question are open source Alpaca Forms and analytics service Picreel.

• vidia GPU display drivers could be on the radar of hackers. According to the latest news, Nvidia is prompting Geforce graphics card owners running Windows OS, to update their drivers.

Defence/Aggression

• The documents Hale allegedly handed to The Intercept provided the basis for the site’s multi-part “Drone Papers” report. The Drone Papers exposed the breadth of the United States’ program for extrajudicial, extraterritorial killings. This included operations in Yemen and Somalia where targeted killings were carried out despite lengthy gaps in intelligence and surveillance. The papers also showed the military referred to collateral damage from drone strikes as “enemies killed in action” without verifying whether or not everyone killed was actually a combatant.

• Hale is unusual among prosecuted whistleblowers in that his investigation rolled out in a more public fashion than most. Hale was featured in the drone warfare documentary “National Bird,” in which he discussed his reluctant participation in intelligence gathering that enabled drone strikes, as well as the risk he was taking talking about his intelligence work with the documentary crew.

• Would it surprise you to learn that Canada’s minister of defence is an arms pusher?

• Last Friday members of Mouvement Québécois pour la Paix interrupted a $135-a-plate luncheon to confront defence minister Harjit Sajjan. At an event sponsored by SNC Lavalin, Bombardier, Rio Tinto, etc., we called for cutting military spending, for Canada to withdraw from NATO and an end to weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.

• While Sajjan’s responsibility for NATO and military spending are straightforward, his role in fueling the Saudi led war in Yemen is less obvious. But, the Department of National Defence (DND) plays a substantial role in Canadian arms exports to Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

• As he did the last three years, Sajjan is set to speak at the CANSEC arms bazar in Ottawa later this month. For more than two decades the annual Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI) conference has brought together representatives of arms companies, DND, Canadian Forces (CF), various other arms of the federal governmentand dozens of foreign governments. In 2018 more than 11,000 people attended the two-day conference, including 16 MPs and senators and many generals and admirals.

• Like you, I’ve had countless experiences of pointing out a new fact to someone, and seeing them acknowledge it and incorporate it into their thinking and their talking from that point forward. I’ve even had this experience with public petitions pushed on powerful people. But, I’ve also had a different experience. There are some facts that some people just will not accept, and for some of them I have a very hard time understanding why. Can you help me understand?

• For example, today I received an appeal from the March for Our Lives people upset and outraged that teachers were going to be allowed to bring guns into their school in Florida. They do not want any guns in their school, they said. But — and this they did not say — their school already has ROTC and gun training. Their school already has lots of guns in it. Their classmate who killed many of their other classmates was trained to shoot guns in their school by the U.S. Army. So, do they want guns in their school or not? They are 100% dedicated to pretending that the ROTC does not exist, but also outraged by the idea of guns being brought into the school that they are pretending is gun-free. Why can they not incorporate into their consciousness the existence of the program whose t-shirt the murderer was wearing? What prevents it? I really want to know. Do you have an answer that’s not just a guess?

• Also today I received an email from Senator Tim Kaine who remains outraged that a president might start an “unnecessary” and “unconstitutional” war. A president cannot legally attack Iran without Congressional approval, Kaine announces for the billionth time. But a president also cannot legally attack Iran WITH Congressional approval. Violating various laws, including the United Nations Charter, is a crime completely and utterly regardless of whether Congress is in on it. There’s no waiver for the U.S. Congress or any branch of any other government. I questioned Tim Kaine about this a long time ago and posted it on my Youtube page. He readily admitted that I was right, but in the next breath went right back to talking the way he has continued talking to this day — just like every single one of his colleagues and every single media outlet he ever encounters. Why is Kaine incapable of grabbing hold of a fact that he readily comprehended? I’d seriously like an answer.

• A source told the news agency that “All genetic identification work on the bodies of those killed has been completed. All of the bodies have been identified, and experts are currently forming conclusions [based on those identifications].”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Just a brief follow-up on a story we ran a few days ago, ALLEGED Chemical Torture of Julian Assange. This article generated a lot of discussion below the line, mainly around its reliance on an anonymous source. Many raised concerns that the accusation of “chemical torture” is unsubstantiated.

• We reached out to the author for her input, and below is her reply (which she gave us permission to publish).

• Clearly scepticism, especially relating to anonymous sources, is very healthy, and is one of the foundational principals of this website. We don’t want our readers to take anything on faith and encourage our readers to find all the information they can, and make up their own minds.

• We wish to make it clear that OffG can neither confirm nor deny these claims.

• That the Swedish investigation into the rape allegation against Julian Assange is being re-opened is something that ought to be welcomed. The alternative would be for this accusation to hang unresolved over Julian’s head forever. The Swedish prosecutors now need finally, as my father used to say, either to piss or get off the pot. They need to decide whether there is sufficient evidence to charge or not.

• There is no reason for delay. The Swedish police have had seven years to investigate this case and all the evidence has been gathered and all statements taken – the last being the interview of Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy in 2017. Hopefully to review the evidence and decide whether to charge will not now be a lengthy procedure. It is worth noting, contrary to much misreporting, Julian Assange has never been charged with anything in Sweden.

• In the event that Sweden does wish to try to extradite, that should take precedence over the US request. There are three good reasons for this. Firstly, rape is by far the more serious alleged offence. Secondly, the Swedes entered the process many years before the Americans. Thirdly, the European Arrest Warrant is a major multilateral arrangement that is much more important than the discredited bilateral extradition treaty with the USA.

• Swedish prosecutors said Monday they are reopening a rape case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and seek his extradition after he has served his 50-week prison term in Britain for jumping bail.

• Eva-Marie Persson, Sweden’s deputy director of public prosecutions, told a news conference in Stockholm that “there is still a probable cause to suspect that Assange committed a rape.” She added: “It is my assessment that a new questioning of Assange is required.”

• [...]

• Julian Assange’s Swedish lawyer Per E. Samuelsen told Swedish broadcaster SVT on Monday he was “very suprised” by the decision to reopen the case.

• “I do not understand the Swedish prosecutor’s … reasoning for reopening a 10-year old case,” he said.

• Swedish prosecutors have reopened an investigation into a rape allegation made against Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange in 2010. The inquiry has been revived at the request of the alleged victim’s lawyer. Assange, who denies the accusation, has avoided extradition to Sweden for seven years after seeking refuge at the Ecuadorean embassy in London in 2012.

• The 47-year-old was evicted last month and sentenced to 50 weeks in jail for breaching his bail conditions.

• He is currently being held at Belmarsh prison in London.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Climate resilience and adaptation efforts are important to keep people safe for now. But in the long run, we can either fight to replace fossil fuels with renewables and ramp down carbon emissions, or we can surrender, and retreat from our coastlines.

• Americans have never been known to run away from a worthy battle. Why start now?

• Americans are finally beginning to understand the severity of the climate crisis. Nearly three-quarters of Americans now say global warming is “personally important” to them, even as the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that we have just 11 years to take dramatic action to avert climate catastrophe.

• I guess we should see this as good news — better late than never — but a crucial question remains: Does America have the political will to enact the big changes needed to address climate change before it’s too late?

• There’s a simple answer: Yes, but only if environmentalists vote.

• The 2018 midterms were something of a high-water mark for turnout of environmental voters. More than 8 million “environment-first” voters flocked to the polls last November, a robust showing that has spawned renewed interest in a Green New Deal and carbon pricing — although not nearly enough interest to actually pass such measures.

• Now, imagine how politicians would react to these kinds of initiatives if twice as many environmentalists turned up to vote.

• It’s not an impossibility. In the 2016 presidential election, 10 million environmental voters stayed home in an election that was decided by fewer than 80,000 votes. Even if only half of them started voting, that would be a “green wave” impossible for any politician to ignore.

• The deputy leader of the Green Party, Amelia Womack, will be at Preston New Road anti-fracking camp today [Monday 13th of May] at 12.30pm, the first time any of the leadership team has visited the site since a climate emergency was officially declared in the UK.

• She is attending the Green Monday event, at which members of the party’s leadership team, and other prominent Greens Party and other environmental campaigners, have been regular visitors.

• Around half of some of the world’s most beautiful mountain ranges are about to lose their melting glaciers, the force that shapes and highlights their beauty.

• Swiss-based scientists investigated 46 world heritage sites nominated by UNESCO, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, and compiled an inventory of 19,000 glaciers. And then, they report in the journal Earth’s Future, they calculated recent changes and the glaciers’ present condition and projected the rate of mass loss into the future.

• They warn that, if the world goes on burning fossil fuels at ever-increasing rates, almost half of all these glaciers will have vanished by 2100.

• Atmospheric levels of carbon registered 415 parts per million over the weekend at one of the world’s key measuring stations, a concentration level researchers say has not existed in more than 3 million years – before the dawn of human history.

• [....]

• While scientists have stated that much of the future warming is already “locked in,” Cole points out that humanity’s main focus must be to make sure all efforts are made to reverse the emissions trend in order to limit the scale of the destruction.

• “What can be stopped is its getting any worse,” Cole concluded. “But that would require moving with blinding speed to wind and solar power and electric cars.”

• And the message from the global climate justice movement has been crystal clear: It’s an emergency. Act like it.

Finance

• Some of this may be a self-perpetuating cycle. If bosses do not like to go home before their underlings, and underlings fear leaving before their bosses, everyone is trapped. Staff may feel that they will not get a pay rise, or a promotion, if they are not seen to be putting in maximum effort. This is easily confused with long hours. Managers, who are often no good at judging employees’ performance, use time in the office as a proxy.

• The consequence is often wasted effort. To adjust the old joke about the Soviet Union: “We pretend to work and managers pretend to believe us.” [...]

• The public sale of shares of Uber and Lyft means that these companies will now be subject to the direct pressure of market investors, who will demand that they turn a profit. Both Uber and Lyft are currently unprofitable, with Uber losing $1.8 billion last year, the largest loss of any company in the year before an IPO.

• The financial speculation over the Uber IPO will be followed by demands from investors for fare increases and further attacks on drivers, already grossly undercompensated. This was spelled out bluntly in a recent Uber management filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Uber wrote, “As we aim to reduce driver incentives to improve our financial performance, we expect driver dissatisfaction will generally increase.”

• Uber drivers are classified as independent contractors, not regular employees. They are therefore not eligible for health benefits, sick days or vacations. They are also not protected by minimum wage regulations and overtime rules, while the employers are freed from paying Social Security and Medicare taxes and unemployment insurance contributions.

• A study by Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute last year concluded that the effective hourly wage of an Uber driver is less than what 90 percent of US workers earn. In other words, they earn a poverty-level income.

• “And what they were able to do is set up sort of a grid of client calls to the API across San Francisco for a six month period in late 2016,” Erhardt told The Verge. “Every two seconds, they say, ‘Hey, where are the 10 closest vehicles, write that to a database. And we ended up with about 17 terabytes worth of data. But what you get out of it are these traces of where the vehicles are, where the drivers are, and when they’re available for a ride.”

• Erhardt’s team used a panel regression model to determine the change in travel time during this period, and what they found surprised them: far from alleviating traffic, Uber and Lyft are actually the “biggest contributor[s]” to San Francisco’s worsening traffic congestion.

• Specifically, they found that the difference in travel times in congested conditions versus travel times in a free-flowing scenario — which they characterize as “vehicle hours of delay” — increased by 62 percent. Average speeds in San Francisco decreased by 13 percent in the time period. By contrast, in a simulated model that removes Uber and Lyft from the equation, weekday vehicle hours of delay increased by only 22 percent and average speeds decreased by 4 percent in the city.

• A study published today in Science Advances comparing pre- and post-rideshare boom traffic in San Fransisco found that the presence of Uber, Lyft, and similar companies has been an overall detriment for people who like getting where they’re going quickly.

• A private investment by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund nearly three years ago is still worth less than at the time of purchase. The fund, overseen by the controversial Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, invested in June 2016 at $48.77 a share. The stock closed its first day of trading Friday at $41.57.

• New Zealand is a gorgeous island country of less than five million people. Its mountains, oceans, and beaches give it a mystic air. Its remote location and small government make it attractive to the global elite looking for an island getaway. In the past 10 years, the powerful and wealthy have flocked to New Zealand. Reclusive billionaire Peter Thiel famously gained New Zealand citizenship after just 12 days in the country. The country has supposedly become home to doomsday bunkers for some of the world’s richest people—especially Silicon Valley’s new class of billionaires.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The stock market has more than tripled in value since the recession. America’s richest 10% own 84 percent of the stocks.

• Real wages have decreased since just before the recession.

• Despite these stunning facts about income disparities, people at the rich end share the Wall Street Journal’s delusion about the economy: “Americans traditionally left behind…are reaping the benefits..” But that’s far, far from the truth. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Real average hourly earnings increased 1.3 percent, seasonally adjusted, from March 2018 to March 2019.” But the cost of living went up 2.8 percent! Even Forbes admits that “real wage growth is actually falling.”

• Trump brags about the low unemployment rate. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics bases the official unemployment rate on employees “who did any work for pay or profit” during the week being surveyed. That includes part-time workers who are employed for just one hour a week. Tens of millions of Americans are limping along with part-time or ‘gig’ jobs that don’t pay a living wage and usually lack retirement and health benefits. According to a New York Times report, almost a third of America’s work force earn less than $12 an hour, nearly all of them without health insurance. An NPR/Marist poll found that 20 percent of American jobs are contract positions, and that within ten years contractors and freelancers could make up half of the U.S. workforce.

• The bottom 60 percent of earners are leading in one category: they’re dying at increasing rates from drugs and suicides.

• There were several lessons to take from last month’s Spanish elections, some special to Spain, others that resonate continent wide. Since the 28-member European Union is preparing to vote on the makeup of the European Parliament at the end of May, those lessons are relevant.

• On the surface the outcome seemed pretty straightforward: Spain’s Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) picked up lots of seats—but not enough to form a government—the country’s traditional center-right Popular Party (PP) took a pounding, the ultra-right edged into parliament and the center did well.

• But Spain’s politics are as complex as the country’s geography, and certainly not as simple as the New York Time’s analysis that the outcome was a “strong pro-European Union vote” that will allow Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez “to tackle Spain’s neglected economic challenges.”

• As famed Latin American author Eduardo Galeano once wrote, “every time the US ‘saves’ a country, it converts it into either an insane asylum or a cemetery.” Of course, as we look over the wreckage left by the US in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, we see that this statement is demonstrably true. And yet, now that the US is poised for another intervention, this time in Venezuela, the press is right there again to cheer it along.

• Analyzing 76 total press articles of the “elite” press from January 15 to April 15, 2019, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) could find not one voice that opposed Trump’s regime plans in Venezuela. Meanwhile, 54 percent openly supported these plans. Of course, this should not be all too surprising given the press’s usual complicity in past US war efforts — e.g., by pushing such war lies as the Gulf of Tonkin, the killing of babies in Kuwait, the WMDS of Iraq and the alleged Viagra-fueled rapes in Libya. The current war lies are coming fast and furious from such outlets as CNN which lied about seeing Maduro forces lighting aid containers on fire at the Colombian border (it was in fact opposition forces which did so as the NYT admitted two weeks later), and which claimed that US puppet Juan Guaido actually won the presidential election against Nicolas Maduro when in fact Guaido never even ran for president.

• My fellow college graduates: Integrity is not an inherited trait. It is not conferred by privilege or status or wealth. It cannot be bequeathed by elite schools or institutions. It is not a product of birth or race or gender. Integrity is not a pedigree or a brand. Integrity is earned. Integrity is determined not by what we do in life, but what we do with what life gives us. It is what we overcome. Integrity is the ability to affirm our dignity even when the world tells us we are worthless. Integrity is forged in pain and suffering, loss and tragedy. It is forged in the courtrooms where you were sentenced. It is forged in the shackles you were forced to wear. It is forged in the cages where you lived, sometimes for decades. It is forged in the cries of your children, those who lost their mothers or their fathers to the monstrosity of mass incarceration. It is forged in the heartache of your parents, your brothers, your sisters, your spouses and your partners. Integrity is forged by surmounting the hell around you to study in a cramped and claustrophobic cell for the college degree no one, perhaps not even you, thought you would ever earn. Integrity is to refuse to become a statistic. Integrity is to rise up and shout out to an indifferent universe: I AM SOMEBODY. And today no one can deny who you are, what you have achieved and what you have become—college graduates, men and women of integrity who held on fiercely to your dignity and your capacity to exert your will, and triumphed.

• Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) – and its two predecessor organizations, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM) – had their origins in the early 1970s, at the beginning of a long-term rightward shift of United States and global politics. This shift to the right – from the 1980s of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – to the 2016 Donald Trump charade – overshadowed the central role these organizations played in the movements of resistance to corporate domination, as well as in today’s ongoing project: organizing an ideological and organizational socialist presence among trade union, community, feminist and people of color and other activists.

• DSA made an ethical contribution to the broader American Left by being one of the few radical organizations born out of a merger rather than a split. DSA also helped popularize the vision of a democratic, ecumenical, multi-tendency socialist organization, an ethos that enabled it to incorporate many thousands of new members, mostly out of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Nevertheless, it was under the leadership of DSA Michael Harrington and his groundbreaking The Other America (1963) that catalyzed the civil rights movement, its leaders and the Kennedy Administrations to prioritize not only issues of race but equal attention to domestic poverty and inequality. This set the stage for Martin Luther King’s “Poor People’s Campaign.”

• Ben Shapiro is trending on Twitter after thoroughly embarrassing himself in an interview with BBC right-wing journalist Andrew Neil. The highlight of the interview came when Shapiro ignorantly pleaded with Neil to admit he is “on the left”. In response, the Brit chuckled in characteristic fashion and said: “Mr. Shapiro, if you only knew how ridiculous that statement is, you wouldn’t have said it.”

• It went downhill from there. And fast.

• In essence, Shapiro was not “destroyed” by Neil. He literally destroyed himself.

• If you are one of the few who have yet to watch the exchange, grab some popcorn and witness Shapiro melt down like the petulant racist snowflake we all know him to be.

• In the Americas, the Trump tsunami has swept across both continents and the “pink tide” of progressivism has all but disappeared from the southern half of the hemisphere. In Europe, with the recent exception of Spain, the left has been banished to the political margins. In Africa and Asia, socialism has devolved into nationalism, authoritarianism, or just plain corruption. And forget about the Middle East.

• In this planet-wide rising tide of right-wing populism, the liberal left commands only a few disconnected islands — Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, Uruguay. In so many other places, increasingly illiberal leaders are in charge. Add up the numbers and significantly more than half the world’s population currently lives under some form of right-wing populist or authoritarian rule, courtesy of Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Xi Jinping in China, among others.

• Optimists cling to the pendulum theory of politics: conservatives are now basking in the limelight, but the day will come when the right inevitably falls on its face and the left swings back into action; witness the results of the 2018 mid-term elections in the United States.

• In addition, pragmatists point out that many of these latter-day autocrats, for all their anti-democratic tendencies, came to power through elections. Yes, they have since sought to change constitutions, pack courts, muzzle the media, and crack down on civil society, but they remain constrained by the guardrails of the more-or-less liberal political systems they still run. In the end, so goes such thinking, democracy will prevail. Look at how, over time, some right-wing populists have been dislodged at the polls (Vladimir Meciar in Slovakia), brought down by corruption scandals (Alberto Fujimori in Peru), or forced to resign in disgrace (Silvio Berlusconi in Italy).

• Accommodating a pathological narcissist does not lead to peace in our time. Ignoring the lies, hateful speech, and antidemocratic actions of an amoral psychopath will not preserve a republic. Such acts enable fascism to flourish.

• These statements are not opinions about what will occur if the Democrats in the House of Representatives of 2019 fail to place our constitution and the future of the nation and planet ahead of their personal political futures. These statements are facts linked to the failures of England and Europe to arrest the death and international disorder visited upon the world by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi minions.

• The politicians surrounding Paul von Hindenburg thought that supporting the appointment of Hitler as German Chancellor on January 30, 1933 would be a fair trade, allowing them to maintain their power and pelf while requiring only containing a person they regarded as no more than a politically naïve clown spewing nonsensical ramblings of hate, division, and Aryan superiority. As their estimation of the ease of manipulating the clown evaporated, cowardice and complicity were transformed into war crimes involving the deaths of 50 million people.

• The trade made by many contemporary Republicans – assurance they would not be “primaried” in quests to retain their elected positions; offerings, in the form of a tax cut, to wealthy benefactors; and judicial appointments guaranteeing that the courts would tilt, for generations, towards the rich and the White and away from the poor and the diverse – requires only ignoring the perfidy of Donald Trump and accepting daily hypocrisy regarding their oaths of office.

• Activist Anastasia Shevchenko has reportedly decided to run for a city-council seat in Rostov-on-Don, where she’s been under house arrest since late January. Shevchenko is the first person in Russia to be charged with the felony offense of working for an illegal “undesirable organization.” She is an activist with the “Open Russia” movement and the regional head of the “Party of Changes” (until last summer, the “Civic Initiative” party), which has endorsed her candidacy.

• In March, the Putin administration reportedly conducted secret sociological surveys to measure how badly constituents in cities and regions across the country want new local leadership. Two sources have apparently leaked the results of these polls to the magazine RBC.

• Some of the governors whose people most want them gone were Dmitry Ovsyannikov (in Sevastopol), Igor Orlov (in Arkhangelsk), and Yunus-bek Yevkurov (in Ingushetia). Several of the officials named in the polling have already been dismissed.

• What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain of political theater. And what political theater it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing.

• Played out on the national stage and eagerly broadcast to a captive audience by media sponsors, this farcical exercise in political theater can, at times, seem riveting, life-changing and suspenseful, even for those who know better.

• Week after week, the script changes (Donald Trump’s Tweets, Congress’ hearings on Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, the military’s endless war drums, the ever-widening field of candidates for the 2020 presidential race, etc.) with each new script following on the heels of the last, never any let-up, never any relief from the constant melodrama.

• The players come and go, the protagonists and antagonists trade places, and the audience members are quick to forget past mistakes and move on to the next spectacle.

• All the while, a different kind of drama is unfolding in the dark backstage, hidden from view by the heavy curtain, the elaborate stage sets, colored lights and parading actors.

• 75-year-old engineering researcher Viktor Kudryavtsev, who has been in pretrial detention since July 2018 on treason charges, has been moved from the Lefortovo pretrial detention center to a state-owned hospital, his attorney Yevgeny Smirnov told TASS. Kudryavtsev stands accused of sending confidential information to a Belgian institute; his lawyers have argued that he had not had access to the information in question for more than 20 years.

• Journalism is in trouble. Writers of articles pointing this out typically argue that this is really bad for democracy or America or whatever. Anyone who disagrees is too stupid to read this so I won’t bother to repeat this obviousness. Such writers also point out contemporaneous evidence of the media apocalypse; here are the three I came across this week. 1. 1,800 local newspapers have gone out of business in the last 15 years. Since print newspapers generate nine out of ten stories that appear on radio, TV and online, that’s a big loss.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The freedom to access and share information and to hold and express personal ideas and opinions has particular resonance in the digital age. As our digital ability to exercise rights of expression and information increases, challenges for protection and enforcement become more complex.

• Post-Brexit, the UK must decide what action it will take to continue to protect our rights to information and expression online, including evaluating whether we should continue to adhere to EU-wide laws and frameworks developed for this purpose.

• Open Rights Group are fighting for balanced copyright laws, researching the reach and impact of web blocking and censorship, and standing up for the respect of freedom of speech online.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The practice of mass surveillance made headlines in 2013 when Edward Snowden exposed the widespread scale on which the UK security agency GCHQ was covertly intercepting and monitoring citizens’ private communications data. Although subsequent court rulings consistently held that this bulk data collection scheme was operating in a manner that breached fundamental rights to privacy, legislation enacted by the government to consolidate its surveillance powers means that the UK currently has the one of the most sweeping and intrusive state surveillance regimes in the Western democratic world.

• The European Parliamentary term of 2019-2024 will be critical for shaping the European digital agenda. Whatever happens next with Brexit, decisions made by the EU about technology, the Internet and Artificial Intelligence will affect the UK for years to come. The MEP candidates that we elect to serve as our democratic representatives on May 23rd will be sent to Brussels with full power and ability to participate in the European legislative agenda. Participation in the 2019 European elections gives British people a genuine opportunity to be part of the change-making process.

• [...]

• The e-Privacy Regulation aims to complement the 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In theory, the two sets of rules will work together to provide a comprehensive, unified data protection regime for the whole of Europe.

• Legislative progress on the Regulation has been rocky. It covers some of the most hotly contested areas in modern privacy and the digital economy, including online advertising, marketing and cookies, confidentiality of online communications (e.g. preventing EU telecoms companies from selling browsing histories) and the privacy of smartphones and other devices/apps. As such, it has been subjected to an unprecedented level of lobbying by businesses concerned about consumers being given more power to control their data. This pressure has at times threatened to derail the entire process. As the Regulation continues to progress through the legislative stages, MEPs will be critical to its completion and success.

• The right to privacy has become a key part of all our lives. Both online and offline, our relationship with government and business is in many ways defined by our right to privacy. Who can collect our data, for what purposes, who they can share it with and to what standards our information must be protected are questions that become more and more important as we seek the appropriate balance of power between individuals and large organisations.

Civil Rights/Policing

• “An FBI agent would come to the office of a governor or a state or college president and hand them a piece of paper that was always specified in the FBI records and watermarked ‘untraceable blind memo’,” Professor Schrecker recalls.

• “It just listed somebody’s name and all the incriminating associations that person had, with the expectation that person would not get tenure; would not have their appointment renewed; would be eased out quietly. There was no written record that the FBI had been there.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Candidates for governor of both parties are using Kentucky’s long-delayed and over-budget statewide internet project to bash Gov. Matt Bevin, following a jointly published report by the Courier Journal and ProPublica.

• KentuckyWired — a bipartisan plan pushed by former Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear and Republican Rep. Hal Rogers — promised to bring improved broadband internet connectivity to the state’s farthest corners. But it is years behind schedule and more than $100 million over budget.

• Bevin’s Democratic opponents in the governor’s race laid blame with the current administration.

• “The governor has damaged the project with his lack of commitment to keep it on schedule,” House Minority Leader Rocky Adkins, D-Sandy Hook, said in an emailed statement. “In fact, it will cost the state more to get out of the contract than if we continue. In order to go the last mile and complete this project, we need to look at successful models in other states and bring new partners to the table.”

• In the rural northwest corner of Connecticut where I live in the gracious foothills to the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, our 27-town Council of Governments (NWCOG), urged on by the well-intentioned local group “Northwest ConneCT,” is encouraging towns to embrace “fiber broadband” in their new plans of conservation and development and build out municipally owned fiber broadband ASAP. Towns can already own fiber networks for non-commercial use, but this new initiative would bump that to commercial use too. And a new bill here, SB 846, would enshrine commercial municipal broadband into Connecticut law.

• Such efforts for municipal fiber broadband are happening all across the country, but do towns really understand what’s behind this curtain? Hint: many areas are fighting related proposals in federal courts because of what rides on these coattails, including august groups like Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Working Group, and Sierra Club. And California’s former governor Jerry Brown vetoed a 2017 bill not unlike what SB846 would unleash — small cells transmitting radiofrequency (RF) radiation — a known genotoxin — from every third utility pole very close to homes.

• Typically municipal fiber has noble purposes: attract new residents, create/fill jobs, workforce training, better high speed connectivity and cell reception — with fiber the presumed answer to aging populations, decreased school enrollment, youth flight to cities, highway (un)safety, and more. Unfortunately, this focus is on end-points at the expense of what hitchhikes on fiber’s unintended consequences. Many are fighting this nationally, not because of fiber (a true marvel) or even broadband (who doesn’t want more?) but because fiber networks have morphed into highways for small cells that are just like having a cell tower, radiating RF, right outside your door.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The latest chapter in the long-running dispute between Amgen and Sandoz over Sandoz’s Zarxio® biosimilar to Amgen’s Neupogen® biologic drug came to a close last week when the Federal Circuit affirmed grant of summary judgment against Amgen in Amgen Inc. v. Sandoz Inc.

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• The opinion also rejected Amgen’s argument that the District Court abused its discretion in not denying or postponing summary judgment under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 56(d) because Sandoz “intends” (undisputedly), sometime in an uncertain future, to change its purification protocol to (perhaps) an infringing one but has provided neither Amgen nor the FDA with details of its plans. As the Court held in Sunovion Pharm., Inc. v. Teva Pharm. USA, Inc., 731 F.3d 1271, 1279–80 (Fed. Cir. 2013), while district courts cannot ignore amendments to ANDA or aBLA applications in determining whether there is (artificial) infringement under § 271(e)(2), they also have “a broad mandate to render a ‘just, speedy, and inexpensive’ decision,” citing In re Micron Tech., Inc., 875 F.3d 1091, 1100 (Fed. Cir. 2017) (quoting Dietz v. Bouldin, 136 S. Ct. 1885, 1891 (2016)). The opinion discounted Amgen’s argument that failure to postpone judgment would deny them of a remedy if Sandoz changed its process to an infringing one, on the grounds that Amgen could pursue a remedy for infringement to the extent that principles of res judicata and collateral estoppel were not violated, citing Bayer AG v. Biovail Corp., 279 F.3d 1340, 1349–50 (Fed. Cir. 2002). Under the circumstances before the Court in this case (particularly because the possible changes Sandoz might make would still not result in an infringing process), the Federal Circuit held the District Court did not abuse its discretion in declining to postpone entry of summary judgment. This aspect of the decision highlights a disparity in information first encountered when Sandoz refused to disclose either its aBLA or manufacturing information under Paragraph 2 of the BPCIA (42 U.S.C. § 262 (l)(2)). The District Court (expressly), the Federal Circuit, and the Supreme Court evinced their presumption that all requisite information could be obtained during discovery in an ensuing lawsuit (disregarding the disadvantage their interpretation of the statute propagated regarding which patent(s) a reference product sponsor such as Amgen should sue on in the absence of this information). Again, here, the Federal Circuit presumes that Amgen will be able to obtain the information necessary to file a well-pleaded complaint in the event Sandoz begins practicing an infringing version of its purification method, without addressing Amgen’s argument that there is a possibility that they will not have and will not be able to obtain the information, under circumstances where the Court had at least some leverage to obtain binding representations from Sandoz that this information would be made available should that time come.

• Turning to the ’427 patent, the panel also affirmed the District Court’s construction of the term “disease treating-effective amount of at least one chemotherapeutic agent” to be limited to “[a]n amount sufficient to treat a disease for which at least one chemotherapeutic agent is prescribed.” The Federal Circuit rejected Amgen’s argument that the amount need not be effective to treat the underlying disease but only be sufficient to mobilize stem cells in blood or bone marrow. The opinion based this construction on the preamble (“A method of treating a disease”) and (according to the Court) “neither the claim nor the specification lends support to Amgen’s interpretation.” Under Amgen’s construction, the claim would encompass activities directed solely at mobilizing stem cells, which would require the “disease treatment” to correspond to stem cell mobilization per se. There is no basis for this interpretation in the panel’s view, and thus the Court affirmed the District Court’s grant of summary judgment.

Copyrights

• The ‘six-strikes’ Copyright Alert System was once praised as an excellent tool to address online piracy. Nonetheless, it was shut down two years ago. Today, the domain name of the Center for Copyright Information still exists, but it’s now used to sell mattresses instead. While that’s not going to do anything to stop piracy, it could have been much worse.

• hose who are aware of how torrents work know that when you’re downloading a file using a torrent, you are downloading bits and pieces of the desired file from multiple locations. This decentralized and peer-to-peer transfer of files is facilitated by torrent clients. Once you’ve downloaded the magnet links, you need to open it in a torrent client. You can use popular clients like Bittorrent, uTorrent, Deluge, and Vuze.

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