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Links 1/5/2017: Krita 3.1.3, feren OS 2017.0, Android Widens Gap Over Windows



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Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Get functional! 5 open source frameworks for serverless computing
    Sometimes all you need is a single function. That’s the idea behind serverless computing, where individual functions spin up on demand, perform a minimal piece of work (serve as an API endpoint, return static content, and so on), and shut down. It’s cheap, it uses minimal resources, and it has little management overhead.

    Most of what we currently identify as serverless computing kicked off with AWS Lambda, later joined by similar services on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Bluemix. But there’s a healthy complement of open source serverless architectures available—not only facilitators for the serverless frameworks on a particular cloud, but full-blown methods to deploy serverless frameworks on the cloud or hardware of your choosing.


  • The next big challenge for open source: rich collaboration software
    The file sync and share movement started over a decade ago, led by the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive, and others, and became popular very fast. The killer feature was having all your files available on all your devices. No more forgetting to bring that important document to a meeting, emailing files, or handling multiple USB sticks. Files were always there when you needed them! That its growth happened with the start of the smartphone age made file sync and share even more useful.

    But its popularity wasn't just about having access to your own files on all your devices: it also made sharing easier, enabling a new level of working together. No longer emailing documents, no longer being unsure whether your colleague's feedback came on the latest version of your draft, no longer fixing errors that were already fixed.


  • Linux foundation specification for open software supply chain compliance
    The Linux Foundation has used its news chain to unveil the OpenChain Specification 1.1 and an accompanying Online Self-Certification service.

    The technology is positioned as a means for organisations to ensure consistent compliance management processes in what is being called the open source software supply chain.


  • Wrapping things up
    At the end of this month, after six-and-a-half years working there, I’ll be leaving the Dutch Association of Audiological Centres (FENAC) where I’ve been working as developer. I’ll be switching to Free Software-related projects, which I’ll write about around june 1st.


  • Women programmers face bias, say N.C. State researchers


  • Study finds gender bias in open-source programming [Ed: Gender bias exists everywhere, including programming, and it's not a FOSS phenomenon]s
  • Study suggests gender bias exists in open-source programming [Ed: not just FOSS]


  • Events



    • Join The Linux Foundation at OSCON for Booth Swag, Project Updates, and More


    • Introducing the Forum at OpenStack Summit Boston
      If you are joining the thousands of OpenStack enthusiasts as we converge on Boston for the OpenStack Summit (May 8-11), don't be surprised if someone asks you, "Where is the Design Summit?"

      This year, nary a Design Summit sign will be found. That's because the Design Summit is no more. True to the ever-evolving, continuously improving nature of open source projects, the OpenStack community is trying something new. The Design Summit has been reorganized and split into two separate events: the Forum and the Project Teams Gathering (PTG).




  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice



    • The May 2017 Month of LibreOffice begins!
      Yes, a new Month of LibreOffice begins today, crediting contributions all across the project. This time we’re giving away real printed stickers for your laptop, desktop PC or other kit! If you help the LibreOffice community in various ways, we’ll add your name to a wiki page and then, at the end of the month, you’ll be able to claim your sticker. It’ll look like this:




  • Programming/Development



    • SPIR-V Support For LLVM Is Moving Forward
      While the original SPIR intermediate representation from the Khronos Group was derived from LLVM IR, SPIR-V that's used by OpenCL 2.1+ and Vulkan is not. But there is still work underway on being able to translate from LLVM IR into a SPIR-V back-end.






Leftovers



  • Science



    • EPA purges climate change information as part of “Website Updates”
      On Friday, the Trump administration removed all of the EPA's climate information from the agency's website. In its place was this announcement: "We are currently updating our website to reflect EPA's priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt."

      The official EPA announcement of the changes says they're needed to "reflect the agency’s new direction under President Donald Trump and Administrator Scott Pruitt." Removing them, according to the EPA spokesman, was needed to "prevent confusion."




  • Health/Nutrition



    • New R&D Funding Model For TB, Antimicrobial Resistance
      The World Health Organization Bulletin this month has an article about the need for new models of research and development for tuberculosis and antimicrobial resistance. The article describes a new funding framework called the 3P Project.

      [...]

      The project’s funding model will ensure that a new regimen is affordable and accessible to all those in need.




  • Security



  • Defence/Aggression



    • Wall Street Firm Paying Obama $400,000 Faced Internal Controversy After Pocketing Huge 9/11 Settlement
      Barack Obama will deliver a speech this September at a swanky healthcare conference for investors run by Cantor Fitzgerald. As Fox Business News first reported on Monday, the firm is paying him $400,000.

      The ensuing criticism of Obama for cashing in on his presidency has been thunderous – but has overlooked exactly whose money he is taking.

      Cantor Fitzgerald, a major Wall Street brokerage house, lost 658 of its 960 employees when the World Trade Center was destroyed in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. But when it settled a long-running lawsuit against American Airlines for $135 million in 2013, the proceeds didn’t go to the families of the dead.


    • Nooooooooooooooo! Iraq Asks U.S. for Marshall Plan Reconstruction Funds
      Iraq’s Foreign Minister this week asked the United States to develop a financial plan for the reconstruction of the country after ISIS, similar to a program developed for Western Europe after the Second World War.

      In discussions with Special Presidential Envoy to the Coalition Brett McGurk, Ibrahim al-Jaafari stressed the need for “collective support from the international community to contribute to the reconstruction of infrastructure after the defeat of terrorism.” Jaafari suggested “the adoption of a project similar to the Marshall Plan which contributed to rebuilding Germany after the Second World War.”




  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature



    • How a Professional Climate Change Denier Discovered the Lies and Decided to Fight for Science
      The hardest part of reversing the warming of the planet may be convincing climate change skeptics of the need to do so. Although scientists who study the issue overwhelming agree that the earth is undergoing rapid and profound climate changes due to the burning of fossil fuels, a minority of the public remains stubbornly resistant to that fact. With temperatures rising and ice caps melting — and that small minority in control of both Congress and the White House — there seems no project more urgent than persuading climate deniers to reconsider their views. So we reached out to Jerry Taylor, whose job as director of the Niskanen Center involves turning climate skeptics into climate activists.

      It might seem like an impossible transition, except that Taylor, who used to be staff director for the energy and environment task force at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and vice president of the Cato Institute, made it himself.




  • Censorship/Free Speech



    • No, President Trump Isn't Ditching The First Amendment, But He Is Undermining Free Speech


      Did you hear the story this weekend about how Trump's Chief of Staff Reince Priebus went on TV and said that the administration is "looking at" changing libel laws or amending the 1st Amendment of the Constitution? You probably did. It's dumb and wrong and it makes no sense, but that doesn't mean that the President isn't already doing great harm to free speech. But first, let's cover Priebus's nonsensical comments.


    • Social media firms must face heavy fines over extremist content – MPs
      Social media companies are putting profit before safety and should face fines of tens of millions of pounds for failing to remove extremist and hate crime material promptly from their websites, MPs have said.

      The largest and richest technology firms are “shamefully far” from taking action to tackle illegal and dangerous content, according to a report by the Commons home affairs committee.

      The inquiry, launched last year following the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox by a far-right gunman, concludes that social media multinationals are more concerned with commercial risks than public protection. Swift action is taken to remove content found to infringe copyright rules, the MPs note, but a “laissez-faire” approach is adopted when it involves hateful or illegal content.



    • ORG response to Home Affairs Committee report on hate speech and Internet companies
      Open Rights Group has responded to an inquiry by the Commons Home Affairs committee, which calls for Internet companies to do more to take down hate speech and illegal content.


    • Automated censorship is not the answer to extremism




  • Privacy/Surveillance



    • Who Has Your Back in Brazil? Second Annual Report Shows Telecom Privacy Slowly Improving
      Today InternetLab, Brazil’s leading digital rights organization, released their 2017 report on local telecommunications companies, and how they treat their customer's private information. Brazil’s “Quem defende seus dados?” (“Who Defends Your Data?”) seeks to encourage companies to compete for users by showing who will stand up for their customer privacy and data protection. That is why InternetLab, one of the leading independent research centers on Internet policy in Brazil, has evaluated key Brazilian telecommunications companies’ policies to assess their commitment to user privacy when the government comes calling for their users' personal data.

      This report is part of a continent-wide initiative by South America’s leading digital rights groups to shine a light on Internet privacy practices in the region, based on EFF's annual Who Has Your Back report. (Last week both Paraguay's TEDIC and Chile’s Derechos Digitales published reports, and digital rights groups in Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina will be releasing similar studies soon.)


    • No Gathering Social Media Handles from Chinese Visitors
      EFF has joined a coalition effort, led by Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAAJ), to oppose the federal government’s proposal to scrutinize the social media activities of Chinese visitors. Specifically, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seeks to ask certain visa applicants from China to disclose the existence of their social media accounts and the identifiers or handles associated with those accounts.

      Last year, EFF opposed a similar CBP proposal concerning foreign visitors from countries that participate in the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). CBP finalized this proposal in December 2016.
    • NSA ends collection of digital communications about foreign targets


    • Privacy issues help end NSA spying programme
      This let it grab the phone calls and messages of US citizens which mentioned or otherwise involved people outside the US it was keeping an eye on.
    • The NSA's 702 Shutdown Is Good News, But There Are A Whole Lot Of Caveats


      The surprising shutdown of the NSA's email harvesting program -- one that operated "upstream" and grabbed not just communications to and from surveillance targets, but also those "about" surveillance targets -- is good news. Considering the NSA had done nothing but abuse this specific privilege, the shutdown is a welcome surprise. But it's not great news, for a variety of reasons.

      First, the shutdown arrives on the heels of a yearlong denial of surveillance requests by the FISA court. This indicates the NSA was either still abusing its collection or the court no longer felt the program was Constitutional, at least not the way the NSA was running it. The shutdown seems to reflect the NSA's inability or unwillingness to shift towards more targeted surveillance methods -- ones that won't sweep up lots of US persons' communications inadvertently.


    • Facebook helped advertisers target teens who feel “worthless”
      Facebook's secretive advertising practices became a little more public on Monday thanks to a leak out of the company's Australian office. This 23-page document, discovered by The Australian, details in particular how Facebook executives promote advertising campaigns that exploit Facebook users' emotional states—and how these are aimed at users as young as 14 years old.




  • Civil Rights/Policing



    • Trump Targets Undocumented Families, Not Felons, in First 100 Days
      Jeff Sessions’s first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border as attorney general kicked off with a ride in a Black Hawk helicopter. It began just after sunrise at the Davis-Monthan airbase outside Tucson, Arizona, and ended in Nogales, where he delivered a blistering address in which he vowed to take the “fight” to the criminal elements that have turned border communities into “war zones.” The performance was repeated a week later in El Paso, Texas. This time around, Sessions was accompanied by John Kelly, the retired Marine general turned Department of Homeland Security secretary overseeing the nation’s top immigration enforcement agencies. “This is ground zero,” Sessions said. “This is the front lines and this is where we’re making our stand.”

      The display was typical of the Trump camp. From the moment he launched his campaign, Trump put a radically reimagined vision of immigration enforcement at the center of his agenda — one that emphasized a wall across the southern border and, at times, the removal of every undocumented immigrant in the country. The justification always had something to do with the tremendous, unprecedented threat emanating from the border and from immigrants. Now that Trump’s 100th day in office is nearly here, the nation has had a glimpse of the president’s response.




  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality



    • Verizon’s bizarre claim that the FCC isn’t killing net neutrality rules
      No major Internet service provider has done more to prevent implementation of net neutrality rules in the US than Verizon. After years of fighting the rules in courts of law and public opinion, Verizon is about to get what it wants as the Federal Communications Commission—now led by a former Verizon lawyer—prepares to eliminate the rules and the legal authority that allows them to be enforced.


    • Comcast Under Fire For Using Bullshit Fees To Covertly Raise Rates
      For several years now cable and broadband providers have been using hidden fees to covertly jack up their advertised rates. These fees, which utilize a rotating crop of bullshit names, help these companies falsely advertise one rate, then sock the consumer with a significantly higher-rate post sale (often when locked into a long-term contract). The practice also allows the company to falsely claim they're not raising rates on consumers. They omit that they're talking about the above the line rate being charged, implying that anything below the line (where real fees like taxes are levied) is outside of their control.

      For example, for several years now, CenturyLink has been charging its broadband customers an "internet cost recovery fee," which the company's website insists "helps defray costs associated with building and maintaining CenturyLink's High-Speed Internet broadband network" (that's what the full bill is supposed to be for). Comcast and other cable companies have similarly begun charging users a "broadcast TV fee," which simply takes a portion of the costs of programming, and hides it below the line. The names differ but the goal's the same: falsely advertise one rate, then charge consumers with a higher price.




  • DRM



    • Cory Doctorow dreams of a DRM-free utopia – so he's suing the US government to get it
      Cory Doctorow fears for the future. Rising inequality, political instability and technological surveillance are merging to create a world, he says, in which "there are disasters - and those disasters are human-made".

      Most sci-fi writers might use this insight to create a dystopia, but Doctorow, 45, has been creating something more optimistic. His new novel Walkaway shows how catastrophes can create "the first days of a better nation".




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights



      • Register of Copyrights Bill Passes the House, We’re Gearing Up to Fight it in the Senate
        The U.S. House of Representatives today voted 378 to 48 to pass a controversial bill that would make the Register of Copyrights a presidential appointee. H.R. 1695, the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act of 2017, will effectively strip the Librarian of Congress of oversight over the Register, and is likely to increase industry influence over an already highly politicized office. The bill does nothing to improve the functioning of the Copyright Office, nor to fix any of the serious problems with copyright law, including its excessive and unpredictable penalties.


      • Homeowner's House Burns Down, He Tries To Rebuild... But Facing Copyright Threats From Original Builder
        It seems that this spring really is the time for obscure copyright disputes with odd connections to the US's weak-kneed compliance with the Berne Convention on copyright. We've already written a few times about the moral rights claim by the guy who created the giant "Wall St. Bull" statue, as well as a lawsuit against a Wall St. church for moving a 9/11 memorial -- both of which reference VARA, the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. VARA was passed as part of the US's slapdash attempt to pretend it complied with the Berne Convention, a document that was created in 1886, and which the US took over 100 years to even pretend to comply with. VARA wasn't the only such move in 1990. That very same year, Congress also passed the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act of 1990, or AWCPA.


      • Australian ISPs to block KickassTorrents
        TPG, Telstra, Optus and Foxtel as well as the companies’ subsidiaries, such as iiNet and Internode, will be obliged to block their customers from accessing BitTorrent site Kickass Torrents under a Federal Court injunction handed down today.

        The site-blocking injunction is the third successful application lodged by copyright holders under anti-piracy legislation passed in 2015.

        ARIA members Universal Music Australia, Warner Music Australia, Sony Music Entertainment Australia and J Albert & Son, along with APRA AMCOS, last year brought the application for injunction. The application has been coordinated with the aid of Music Rights Australia.








Recent Techrights' Posts

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