• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Maybe it’s time to trust Microsoft. Maybe not.

Is this truly a changed Microsoft? Personally, I don’t believe it is. The day they stop this silly 235 patent BS, then we might talk about it. But you know as well as I do, if they pull the covers back on their lie-of-the-century, then they may stand to lose billions in paying back those companies they extorted in the past.

“Oh those patents. Yeah, that was silly wasn’t it. Well, we’re sorry your company lost share holder value due to having to pay us all that money. But let’s just let bygones be bygones…whaddaya say?

Stick it all up in your bygones Microsoft. You’re a liar and a thief and the only reason most of your higher execs aren’t in prison is that U.S. law and your good ol’ boy network protected you. You aren’t fooling anyone. You don’t love Linux any more than I love liver and onions. You have merely realized that the only way you are going to survive into the next decade is to integrate Linux into your strategies…and integrate it deeply.

Let’s face it. You need us. More than we need you.

Server

• Five key legal considerations when negotiating cloud contracts

  Watch out for some cloud providers’ complex, multi-document contract structures that may be poorly updated and oddly worded. In particular, don’t assume that you know what’s in a provision based on its heading. For example, in some terms, ‘force majeure’ seems to be elastic-sided enough to capture “changes in the taxation basis of services delivered via the Internet” as a force majeure event!

Kernel Space

• Linux founder Torvalds on the Internet of Things: Security plays second fiddle

  This development caught Torvald, Linux’s founder, by surprise — 15 years ago. “I never see the entire chain running Linux. Twenty five years ago I started Linux wanting a workstation. From that to a server wasn’t a surprise. There was no single point where I was surprised, but 15 years ago I started seeing these odd, embedded systems. The first one that really caught my eye was a gas pump running Linux.”

  Today, Torvalds continued, “Many changes have been invisible. Even I don’t see all the uses of Linux.”

• Linux Foundation announces Civil Infrastructure Platform

  On the first day of the Embedded Linux Conference, the Linux Foundation announced a new software project called the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP).

  CIP is an open source framework that will support the development of software needed to run critical services that create the backbone of any modern society, including electric power, oil and gas, water, health care, communications, and transportation.

• The Linux Foundation Launches First Linux-Based Civil Infrastructure Project

• ​The Linux Foundation launches Linux-based Civil Infrastructure Project

  There’s the Internet of Things — DVRs, refrigerators, and cars — and then there’s the Internet of civic things — electrical power grids, oil and gas production facilities, and highway traffic management. Linux has a role to play in both.

• New Linux-based effort to support global civil infrastructure demands

• Welcome, 2016, The Year Of The ARMed Everything

  Shucks. I was just getting very comfortable with Linux 4.4.* when news came of delicious new stuff in 4.6 for some of the ARMed SoC’s on motherboards I’m considering here. Having their drivers in the mainline would certainly simplify maintenance. Oh well, at least I can be sure to have software support for years to come.

• Graphics Stack

  • X.Org Server 1.18.3 Adds an Important Performance Fix to the “Present” Extension

    Today, April 4, 2016, Adam Jackson announced the release and immediate availability for download of the third maintenance build in the X.Org Server 1.18 stable series of the display server for GNU/Linux systems.

  • Mesa 11.2.0 3D Graphics Library Officially Released, Here’s What’s New

    After being delayed a few weeks, the final release of the open-source Mesa 3D Graphics Library 11.2 arrived earlier today, April 4, 2016, for all GNU/Linux operating systems.

  • X.Org Server 1.18.3 Has A DRI3/Present Fix To Avoid Eating Your CPU & Other Issues

  • Mesa 11.2.0 Has Been Officially Released

  • Nouveau Kepler On Linux 4.6 vs. NVIDIA’s 364 Proprietary Driver

    We’ve already looked at the GeForce 900 series performance on Nouveau with the Linux 4.6 kernel that finally has the necessary bits for supporting 3D hardware acceleration on these Maxwell GPUs. Those GTX 900 series results didn’t end up being particularly exciting since there isn’t yet any re-clocking support on this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver. For complementing those results are some GeForce 600/700 “Kepler” graphics card results when comparing Nouveau on Linux 4.6 with Mesa 11.3-devel and using re-clocking then compared to the latest NVIDIA proprietary driver.

  • Nouveau NVC0 Adds ETC2/ASTC Texture Compression For Newer GPUs

    Back in December a patch rolled out for supporting ETC2 and ASTC texture compression by the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver. Today that patch was finally merged for benefiting newer NVIDIA GPUs.

    With the commit that landed there is now ETC2 and ASTC texture compression support for the GK20A (Tegra K1) graphics processor as well as the GTX 750 “GM107″ graphics processors and newer.

  • Getting Involved In Linux Graphics Driver Development

    If you are interested in getting involved in Linux graphics driver development outside of initiatives like Outreachy and GSoC, here are some resources.

    For those wanting to get involved in DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) driver development, there is the DRM Janitors Wiki page that was last updated in February. The DRM Janitors page has items like subsystem refactoring, proper panic handling, better testing. and more.

  • ARM Hopes To Have OpenCL 2.0 Support Completed For LLVM Clang 3.9

    Anastasia Stulova of ARM’s Media Processing Group has provided an outline of their work on enabling OpenCL 2.0 support within the LLVM/Clang compiler stack.

  • POCL 0.13 Released With The Early Stages Of OpenCL 2.0, Better HSA Support

    POCL 0.13 was released today of the Portable Computing Language that continues striving for being an MIT-licensed, portable implementation of the OpenCL standard.

Applications

• Shell calendar generator

  Html and css made the whole exercise really easy and I have something working now on GitHub in 150 lines of code where half of it is CSS. It’s not perfect, there is plenty of space for optimization, but it is really simple and fast enough. Are you interested? Give it a try and if it doesn’t work well for you, pull requests are welcome 😉

• YodaQA learned to tweet

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to ping multiple hosts at once in Linux

  • How to build nginx with Pagespeed module

  • Improving QEMU security part 4: generic I/O channel framework to simplify TLS

  • Improving QEMU security part 5: TLS support for NBD server & client

  • Monitoring RPM dependency graph size with INSIM

  • Allowing Nginx to use a Puma/Unicorn UNIX socket with SELinux

  • ttystudio – Record the Terminal session in GIF

  • Vagrant: Sharing folders with vagrant-sshfs

  • Sound Effects For Your Linux Application Launchers

  • Top things to do after installing Arch Linux

  • How To Fix A USB Drive After Linux Has Been Installed On It

    Here is the scenario. You have followed one of my guides for creating a Linux USB drive but not you want to use it again for a different purpose.

    For whatever reason it only shows a small amount of disk space showing and it doesn’t show up in Windows Explorer.

    What can you do to fix it?

    This guide takes you through the steps to getting the full disk space back. Let me be clear though that at no point did Linux break the USB drive. It just repartitioned it so that it can boot on a computer with the UEFI boot loader.

• Games

  • Open-Source Serious Engine 1 Now Running On Linux

    Last month Croteam open-sourced the Serious Engine 1 with the original support for Windows. Now though Serious Engine 1 with its open-source code-base is running along on Linux and OS X.

    Croteam confirmed this morning that Ryan “Icculus” Gordon who did some of the original Serious Sam Linux/OSX ports has got his work in order and opened up his platform changes.

  • Serious Engine 1 now working on Linux and Mac thanks to Ryan ‘Icculus’ Gordon

  • P·O·L·L·E·N, an incredible looking interactive first person sci-fi exploration game could come to Linux

    I love my space sci-fi games, and P·O·L·L·E·N looks incredible. I spoke to the developer, who said if there’s a demand for it, they will seriously consider a Linux version.

  • Kona, a good looking first person adventure game now in Early Access, some thoughts

    Looks like for now on Linux it needs a pretty good card, but even so on Medium the game is still great to look at.

  • Zelda 30 Year Tribute: Fans recreate the original in 3D

  • The Witness may one day see a Linux port, for fun or for ideological purposes

    It seems The Witness may one day see a Linux release, although the developer expects to make a loss on it, it may come to Linux “for fun or for ideological purposes”.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Plasma Wayland Image Update

    It’s your fortnightly update to the Plasma Wayland image. Rather pleasingly window decorations are the right colour and I can resize windows.

  • QtCon Call for Papers

    QtCon 2016 Call for Papers is open. The event will assemble KDE Akademy, VideoLAN Developer Days, Qt Contributors’ Summit, FSFE Summit and KDAB Qt training day. We invite contributors to these projects to present their work and insight at QtCon 2016. The conference will take place from 1st to 8th September in Berlin, Germany. The talks will be from 2nd to 4th with KDE continuing with BoFs till the 8th

Distributions

• Five Linux Distros that Break the Mold

  One of the complaints we hear sometimes about the plethora of GNU/Linux distributions is that they’re all “cookie cutters.” One is just like the other, we’re told, so why have so many versions of the same thing? For starters, except for a couple of rare instances, no two Linux distros are exactly alike, not even when they start with the same base. The most obvious example here would be Ubuntu, which although based on Debian, offers the user an experience completely different from the parent distro. Likewise, Linux Mint is built with Ubuntu under the hood, but as many Mint users will attest, the distro is hardly just a rebranded *buntu.

• Reviews

  • Matriux Linux Operating System For Hackers — An Alternative To Kali Linux

    Matriux is an open source Linux-based operating system that’s designed in accordance with the needs of security researchers and professionals. The OS comes with more than 300 hacking tools that include the likes of Wireshark, Aircrack-ng, Nmap, Vidalia, TrueCrypt and more. Matriux hacking OS features a traditional desktop environment that’s powered by GNOME Classic

• New Releases

  • NuTyX houaphan 8.1 available with cards 2.0

• Arch Family

  • Manjaro Linux LXQt 16.04 Lands with Linux Kernel 4.4.4 LTS, Software Updates

    Hot on the heels of Manjaro Linux JWM 16.04 Community Edition, the Manjaro Linux LXQt 16.04 Community Edition operating system has been released earlier, April 4, 2016, and it is now available to download.

    According to the release notes, Manjaro Linux LXQt 16.04 Community Edition is now powered by Linux kernel 4.4.4 LTS, includes a 64-bit version of the Chromium web browser, and the 32-bit flavor of Mozilla Firefox, a new screen capture tool that can be activated with the Print Screen button.

    As expected, the stable branch of the Manjaro Linux operating system has been used to generate the Manjaro Linux LXQt 16.04 release, which comes with the multilib repositories enabled by default for 64-bit systems, as well as the latest version of the advanced Calamares graphical installer.

• OpenSUSE/SUSE

  • SUSE Linux Gets a New CTO

    SUSE named a new CTO today, with Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo taking on the the role of Chief Technology Officer, reporting to CEO Nils Brauckmann.

    The last time I personally ever spoke to a SUSE CTO was way back in 2009, when Markus SUSERex (now CEO of OwnCloud) held the job, and SUSE was still part of Novell.

    Giacomo joins SUSE from Swisscom Hospitality Services, where he was CTO and vice president of innovation. Giacomo has as a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Geneva, where he was a senior researcher

  • SUSE Expands Executive Leadership, Naming New Chief Technology Officer

  • Suse expands distributor network in Mideast

  • Turris Omnia and openSUSE

    About two weeks ago I was on the annual openSUSE Board face to face meeting. It was great and you can read reports of what was going on in there on openSUSE project mailing list. In this post I would like to focus on my other agenda I had while coming to Nuremberg. Nuremberg is among other things SUSE HQ and therefore there is a high concentration of skilled engineers and I wanted to take an advantage of that…

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat looking at investing in startups to push growth [Ed: reposted a lot in India these days]

  • SanDisk and Red Hat Partner Around Ceph Storage

  • Finance

    • Can Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Improve on the Earnings Front?

      This will be the question investors and analysts will be asking when Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) is next slated to issued their quarterly results on or about 2016-06-16. Most recently the firm announced earnings of $0.34 against the Zack’s consensus of $0.31 for the quarter ending on 2016-05-31. This marked a surprise factor of 9.68%, a difference of $0.03. A large surprise can often lead to significant swings in the stock price immediately following an earnings release, or in the days and weeks to follow. As the earnings date approaches, analysts often update their models based on Street sentiment and company announcements. These can be key indicators as to if the firm will meet, beat or fall short of expectations.

    • Early Check For Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) Receives Average Rating of “Buy” from Brokerages

    • Red Hat Incorporated (NYSE:RHT) Sellers Covered 10.55% of Their Shorts

    • Shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) Sees Large Outflow of Money

    • Ruling stocks in today’s market: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Bp Plc Has $1,739,000 Stake in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

  • Fedora

    • Why modularization matters to Sys Admins

      However, these days, the world has changed. Many, many applications are now open source and managed in the Fedora ecosystem. Rebuilding applications is a fully automatable process as is the testing of those applications. Disk space has become relatively cheap, as is the bandwidth required to update individual libraries.

      What if we can ensure that the applications you have installed on your system(s) have been tested with the library that was just patched, and for the applications that have not been verified, they can continue to use the old version. In the cases where an application is facing internally only, this may be sufficient. However, if the application is public, you can elect to force it to take the patch and trust that it will just work, or choose to disable that application specifically because Fedora will know which applications are still at risk.

    • Contributing to Pagure made easy.

      I don’t get as much of a chance these days to do things like patches or other technical contribution. But I had some time free the other day and used it to stick my hands directly into a cool project, Pagure (pronounced roughly “pag-yOOR,” or listen here). You may have read about Pagure in this Fedora Magazine article a few months back.

• Debian Family

  • Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 “Jessie” Live DVD ISOs Are Now Available to Download

    We reported the other day on the immediate availability for download of the installation-only ISO images of the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 “Jessie” operating system.

    It took one more day for the Debian Project team to generate all the Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 Live flavors, and as promised, we’re informing you today about their availability for download, just in case you want to showcase them to your friends or deploy them on new computers.

  • There’s more than one way to exploit the commons

    Debian ships an operating system that prides itself on stability. The Debian definition of stability is a very specific one – rather than referring to how often the software crashes or misbehaves, it refers to how often the software changes behaviour. Debian is very reluctant to upgrade software that is part of a stable release, to the extent that developers will attempt to backport individual security fixes to the version they shipped rather than upgrading to a release that contains all those security fixes but also adds a new feature. The argument here is that the new release may also introduce new bugs, and Debian’s users desire stability (in the “things don’t change” sense) more than new features. Backporting security fixes keeps them safe without compromising the reason they’re running Debian in the first place.

  • Derivatives

    • Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5

      Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 is desktop-friendly distribution based on Debian. Built on Debian’s Stable branch, Parsix comes with a useful selection of applications and some nice customizations, but so do many of the other Debian-based and Ubuntu-based distributions. So what exactly is Parsix’s niche? What does it do better than its competition? I downloaded the 1.3GB 64-bit ISO and gave Parsix 8.5 a trial run in order to try to find out.

      Booting from the Parsix ISO provides six options: “Boot or Install Parsix” with text mode, failsafe video, and failsafe alternative boot/install options; “Test CD for Defects”; and “Boot from First Hard Disk.” After using the “Test CD for Defects” option to check the ISO for errors, I selected the standard “Boot or Install Parsix” option, which resulted in a fairly quick load time. The GNOME desktop was ready to use and the installer was readily available on the desktop.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Another Ubuntu Linux Tablet? Yes, But This Time, It’s not ARM-Based

        Want an x86 tablet that can run GNU/Linux? If a new crowd-funding campaign succeeds, it could be yours.

        MJ Technology has launched an Indiegogo fundraising campaign to develop what it says will be the “world’s [sic] first true made for Linux/Ubuntu x86/x64 tablet.” In non-geek terms, that means a tablet that comes with a 64-bit x86 processor — the same type used in most desktop and laptop computers — rather than an ARM chip, the architecture common in tablets and other mobile devices.

      • Ubuntu 15.10: Changing the Linux game

        I’m not new to Linux operating systems. I have tried and reviewed earlier versions of Ubuntu as well as experimented with other Linux distributions but I have to admit that none of my earlier reviews have been positive. There were always inherent problems, graphical or systematic, that I have had to spend time trying to fix, something that I did not have time for. I expected Ubuntu to work right out of the box, much like how I deal with a fresh install of Windows where I set it up and install the applications that I want. But this was never the case with Ubuntu; the operating system always pushed me to give it more time and manually fix operating system problems.

        Linux is often used by power-users who love the operating system for its stability and ease of use, but here I will be talking about how user-friendly the system is for normal users who don’t code or use terminal commands.

      • Ubuntu Budgie Could Be the New Flavor of Ubuntu Linux, as Part of Ubuntu 16.10

        Last month we told you about a new GNU/Linux distribution called Budgie-Remix, whose ultimate goal is to become an official Ubuntu Linux flavor, possibly under the name of Ubuntu Budgie.

        Today, Budgie-Remix developer David Mohammed informs Softpedia about the progress made with the project, which Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said that it would definitely support if there were a community around the packaging, as well as the availability of the second Beta build for the upcoming 16.04 release.

      • Ubuntu Touch OTA-10 Update Brings VPN Support, New Out-of-the-Box Experience

        We told you yesterday that the Ubuntu Touch OTA-10 update for Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices has officially received a release date of April 6, 2016, from Canonical.

        And we promised to inform you about the new features that landed in the anticipated OTA-10 software for Ubuntu-powered devices. Therefore, it looks like Ubuntu Phone/Tablet owners will finally get VPN support, but without the ability to connect to PPTP VPN servers, Japanese keyboard support, and per-application download queues.

      • Ubuntu Touch’s Web Browser Lets Users Copy/Paste Selected Web Content in OTA-10

        We reported earlier that Canonical finally decided on a release date for the next major software update of its Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, OTA-10, due for release on April 6, 2016.

        Today, April 4, 2016, Ubuntu developer Olivier Tilloy reports on the major new features that have been implemented in the Web Browser app of the Ubuntu mobile OS, which will be pushed to Ubuntu Phone users on April 6 as part of the OTA-10 software update.

      • Ubuntu Touch OTA-10 Launches April 6 for All Ubuntu Phones and the Ubuntu Tablet

        Łukasz Zemczak of Canonical has just informed the community about the release date of the forthcoming OTA-10 software update for the Ubuntu mobile operating system.

        Ubuntu Touch OTA-10 has been in development for quite some time now, and we covered its development cycle during the past month, during which we told you about some of the new features and improvements that the update would bring to all supported Ubuntu Phone devices, as well as the brand new Ubuntu Tablet.

      • Five hundred days using Ubuntu Phone

        Today is my five hundredth day of using the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition exclusively as my mobile phone. This is a nice piece of hardware (good power, good camera and simple but elegant design).

        Here’s what I’ve learnt.

        I have written a bunch of phone apps you can install and blogged it. Writing for the Ubuntu phone is by far the easiest platform I’ve developed for. Click packaging works really well and the speed at which you can release to the Ubuntu store and get the update on your phone is incredible. QML allows you to build beautiful apps quickly however can be a challenge when apps get more complicated. Qt / C++ is functional, but feels lacking compared to more modern languages. If I could get Swift and an improved QML working together I’d be very happy. I initially used the Ubuntu SDK for building and deplying the apps but have now switched to doing everything on the command line (I’ve never found an IDE that doesn’t feel over-engineered).

      • Ubuntu on Windows?

        Then there are tools like Cygwin that create a Linux-like environment for the Windows command line. But although the environment is familiar, it falls short of supporting the full array of commands and features that would work on a normal Linux environment.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • REVIEW: Linux Mint 17.3 delivers better interface plus long-term support

          The latest version of Linux Mint, dubbed “Rosa,” offers long-term support and in our tests we found that it delivers an improved user experience no matter which interface is selected.

          Linux Mint is a desktop operating system for non-tablet, Intel/AMD-powered systems, in 32- or 64-bit processor families, based on Ubuntu core components, but without Ubuntu’s Unity UI.

Devices/Embedded

• HMI dev kits run Linux or Android on 1GHz Cortex-A9 SoC

  VIA’s “Mobile360 HMI” flat panel starter kits run Linux or Android on VIA’s own 1GHz Cortex-A9 based WM8980 SoC, and offer WiFi and touchscreen options.

  VIA Technology’s “Mobile360 HMI” flat panel display starter kits appear to have been showcased at Embedded World in late February, but came to our attention in a recent design win announcement from VIA. One of the kit models is being used by the Italian Post Office to deploy intelligent signage systems throughout the country.

• Arduino aims $35, WiFi-enabled hacker board at IoT apps

  Arduino LLC debuted a $35 IoT focused MKR1000 board, supported with an Arduino IoT site, and soon, an Arduino Create code editor and Arduino Cloud platform.

  At Arduino Day this week in Berkeley, Calif., Arduino LLC’s cofounders Massimo Banzi, David Mellis, and Tom Igoe hailed the company’s new MKR1000 board as combining the functionality of the Zero and the WiFi Shield. They were referring not to the Linux-driven Raspberry Pi Zero, but rather the microcontroller-based Arduino Zero follow on to the Uno, and the relatively new WiFi Shield for Arduino boards.

• Picademy: Free professional development for teachers from the Raspberry Pi Foundation

  From the beginning, Raspberry Pi has been all about education. The idea that a piece of hardware everyone could afford in the hands of students used to learn programming skills and to build things was at the heart of the Foundation’s mission to fix a problem in the education system in the UK. Soon it became apparent that the hardware was only part of the solution, and hands-on training for teachers would be needed, too.

• Phones

  • Android

    • BlackBerry Priv Now Open to Android Beta Testing Program

      Owners of the Android-powered BlackBerry Priv can finally have something to smile about as the Canadian company has announced that this device is now open to Android beta testing program.

    • Android is killing Windows Phone, but won’t put BlackBerry back in black

      Microsoft won’t admit it, but Windows Phone is a busted flush – and it’s all Android’s fault. But while Android is great at killing off lesser rivals, it’s not so good at keeping hardware firms alive: just ask BlackBerry, whose jump to Android was almost certainly too little, too late. Have smartphones become a two-horse race?

    • BlackBerry Launches First Android Marshmallow Public Beta For Priv Users

      BlackBerry has announced that BlackBerry Priv owners can now take part in its first public beta program for Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

    • Android can’t make BlackBerry phones attractive again

      Realizing that it stands no chance of attracting consumers with BlackBerry 10 OS devices, BlackBerry last year released a smartphone that runs Android. Called Priv, it offers an interesting mix of business and consumer-oriented features that make it a powerful contender in the high-end segment. Many folks seem to like it, but just how much of a success is it?

    • How to switch from iPhone to Android

      There could be many reasons behind why a person might ditch their iPhone in favour of an Android device. But, no matter what that reason may be, anyone who has done it or plans to do it primarily cares about one thing: making the switch in a way that allows him or her to successfully transfer all their contacts, photos, music, calendars, and apps from their old phone to the new one.

    • Android vs iOS: how they compare

      Let me start with a simple truth, I am a fan of Android. I have such a passion for Google’s mobile operating system that I worked my way to a job where I get to play with Android all day, and share my experiences with you, our faithful readers. Today I am going to talk about iOS as well, and I may have to say some nice things, hang in there and we’ll get through this together.

    • Smartphone survival test: Swapping my iPhone 6s for a $200 Android handset

      So what am I hoping to accomplish with this? Well, I think if it ends up that I can use an inexpensive Android device interchangeably with iOS without significant migration pain or loss of functionality, it will have been deemed a success.

    • Switching from iOS to Android

      But believe it or not, I’m pretty sure that my last (and only) Android handset was the very first Android handset, the T-Mobile G1 (i.e. HTC Dream). Suffice it to say that taking and making calls, sending and receiving text messages, snapping pictures, and doing other Android smartphone functions has advanced a bit in the past few years

    • ICT, UK HealthCare Corporate Communications Seek Innovative, User-Friendly Android Mobile Application

      The ICT Mobile App Challenge, sponsored by University of Kentucky HealthCare Corporate Communications and powered by the Information Communication Technology (ICT) program is accepting Android mobile app submissions until Friday, July 1.

    • Nokia C1 Leaks Running ANDROID & Windows 10 Ahead Of Q4 2016 Launch – Joined By “JOKE” Nokia A1 Mid-Ranger

    • Nokia A1 Android-Powered Mid-Ranger Shows Up In Leaked Renders Ahead Of Alleged Summer Launch

      Nokia A1 images permeated the media and it looks like the company is close to releasing a mid-range handset sometime this summer.

    • Power up your Android clipboard with these four awesome apps

    • Taliban Spokesperson Says Their ‘Android App’ Will Help Gain More Global Supporters: Report [Ed: anti-encryption push from the media. The latest anti-encryption push from the corporate media associates phones with terrorists. Contains back doors advocacy.]

    • Afghan Taliban creates its own Android app

    • Taliban Android app latest example of group’s growing tech savvy

    • Android M Update News for Samsung Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S5 and More

    • Best new Android widgets (April 2016)

    • Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow update now rolling out to Samsung Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy Note 4

    • April’s Android Security Update Kicks Off Today With Factory Images (Updated)

    • Google’s Nexus security update for April fixes 8 critical Android bugs

    • Google issues biggest Android security update yet

    • How to choose the right microSD card for your Android

    • Researchers reveal ‘Surreptitious Sharing on Android’ vulnerabilities

    • Android Auto now available in 18 new countries, including Brazil, Russia, & India

    • Android Auto comes to 18 new countries including Brazil, India, and Russia

    • Android Auto update removes interaction limit on Google Play Music when your car is parked

    • Scan and Search PDFs With Google Drive for Android

    • Oppo’s F1 Plus Android smartphone cares more about selfies than sunsets

      Chinese handset maker Oppo is throwing its proverbial hat into the ring once again with a new flagship smartphone aimed at wooing buyers away from better-known household brands.

      The handset keeps a similar appearance as Oppo’s R7s, but with an important addition – a fingerprint sensor where the ‘Oppo’ logo sits at the bottom of previous models.

Google open-sources Walt, a tool that measures lag for touch and voice commands

Google today talked for the first time about Walt, a piece of software that people can use to figure out how long it takes for a device to respond to touch or voice input. Google has been using Walt to do performance tests on Android devices and Chromebooks, and now the software is available under an open source Apache license on GitHub.

Google’s tool for measuring touch and audio latency on Android and Chrome OS is now open source

Google Open Sources WALT, A Tool For Measuring Touch And Audio Latency On Android And Chrome OS

Google’s Touch & Audio Latency Tool Is Now Open Source

Do You Love Open Source? Google Has An Android Experiments Challenge For You

To encourage open source app development, Google has launched the Android Experiments I/O Challenge. The three winners of this challenge will win a trip to Google I/O Developer Conference 2016 and their projects will be showcased at Android Experiments. Read more to know how to participate.

20 Popular Open Source Alternatives to Expensive Software

Impostor syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger effect in communities

At OSCON 2016 in Austin, Jessica Rose, developer relations at Dream Factory, will give a talk called Impostor syndrome and individual competence. In this interview, she explains the role the Dunning-Kruger effect plays in open source communities, and offers tips for managers to help them recognize when candidates under- or over-estimate their own skill levels.

Events

• How to start a ChickTech chapter

  ChickTech is dedicated to introducing young girls to tech careers. It’s best known for its high school program, in which teacher-nominated students are set up with workshops, mentorships, and job shadowing opportunities.

SaaS/Back End

• 7 Open Source Container and Microservices Projects to Watch

• Superuser Awards, evolving for scale, and more OpenStack news

• Free Guidance on Open Cloud Computing

• A Data Lake Architecture With Hadoop and Open Source Search Engines

  “Big data” and “data lake” only have meaning to an organization’s vision when they solve business problems by enabling data democratization, re-use, exploration, and analytics. At Search Technologies, we’re using big data architectures to improve search and analytics, and we’re helping organizations do amazing things as a result.

Databases

• Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2016-W13

BSD

• PC-BSD 10.3 Is the Last in the Series, PC-BSD 11.0 Arrives Later This Year

  PC-BSD developer Kris Moore was more than happy to announce today, April 4, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download of the PC-BSD 10.3 operating system.

• LLVM’s New LLD ELF Linker Continues To Mature For Linux Systems

  Last year LLVM developers made significant progress on developing a new ELF linker for Linux/Unix-like systems. Since then, this high-performance linker from LLD (dubbed “LLD”) has continued maturing and gaining additional functionality.

• FreeBSD 10.3 lands

• FreeBSD 10.3 Officially Released With Much Better Linux Binary Compatibility

  FreeBSD 10.3 is now out in stable release form.

  FreeBSD 10.3 offers improvements to its UEFI boot loader support, support for high availability setups with the CAM Target Layout, much improved support to FreeBSD’s Linux binary compatibility layer, support with the Linux compatibility layer for running 64-bit applications on x86_64, initial support for reroot support in the reboot utility, GNOME 3.16.2 is now packaged, and there are many other improvements.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• ignuit 2.24.2 released

  A “drill” mode has been added, category navigation is now possible when the category pane is switched off, and several bugs related to the new category properties dialog have been fixed. The user manual has also been updated.

Public Services/Government

• Galicia: open source allows IT standardisation

  The combination of open source software and open standards allows public administrations to standardise enterprise IT systems, according to the employment agency of the government of the autonomous region of Galicia (Spain).

• GitHub Forum Highlights Public Views on Open Source in U.S. Government

  What’s good about open source software, what are its limits and how should it be used in government? These are issues that the public is now debating vigorously in a new forum created by the U.S. government following its recent push to make more government-owned code open.

  The backstory: Last month, the federal government used GitHub to solicit public comments on draft guidelines that would require federal agencies to make more use of open source code. Among other requirements, the proposal would mandate that at least twenty percent of federally owned code be released as open source.

• White House proposes government open-source software

• [Older] US government commits to publish publicly financed software under Free Software licenses

  At the end of last week, the White House published a draft for a Source Code Policy. The policy requires every public agency to publish their custom-build software as Free Software for other public agencies as well as the general public to use, study, share and improve the software. At the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) we believe that the European Union, and European member states should implement similar policies. Therefore we are interested in your feedback to the US draft.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Think Globally, Build Locally With These Open-Source Recycling Machines

  Walk on almost any beach or look on the side of most roads and you’ll see the bottles, bags, and cast-off scraps of a polymeric alphabet soup – HDPE, PET, ABS, PP, PS. Municipal recycling programs might help, but what would really solve the problem would be decentralized recycling, and these open-source plastics recycling machines might just jump-start that effort.

• Open Access/Content

  • A spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz is angering publishers all over again

    Stop us if you’ve heard this before: a young academic with coding savvy has become frustrated with the incarceration of information. Some of the world’s best research continues to be trapped behind subscriptions and paywalls. This academic turns activist, and this activist then plots and executes the plan. It’s time to free information from its chains—to give it to the masses free of charge. Along the way, this research Robin Hood is accused of being an illicit, criminal hacker.

    This, of course, describes the tale of the late Aaron Swartz. His situation captured the Internet’s collective attention as the data crusader attacked research paywalls. Swartz was notoriously charged as a hacker for trying to free millions of articles from popular academic hub JSTOR. At age 26, he tragically committed suicide just ahead of his federal trial in 2013.

    But suddenly in 2016, the tale has new life. The Washington Post decries it as academic research’s Napster moment, and it all stems from a 27-year-old bioengineer turned Web programmer from Kazakhstan (who’s living in Russia). Just as Swartz did, this hacker is freeing tens of millions of research articles from paywalls, metaphorically hoisting a middle finger to the academic publishing industry, which, by the way, has again reacted with labels like “hacker” and “criminal.”

Programming/Development

• GitHub Now Lets You Block Troublesome Users From Public Repositories

  GitHub is a git repository service widely used to host open source software projects. The beauty of open source projects on GitHub is that people can collaborate to edit and improve the code. Trouble is, with multiple people working on the same project, it can get a bit chaotic and one uncooperative coder can ruin it for everybody. This is why GitHub is now letting project owners of public repositories block abusive users.

Standards/Consortia

• Free ANSI Event to focus on open source and its community impact.

Science

• Thanks to math, we can calculate the benefits of human sacrifice

  Most of us would agree that human sacrifice is a bad idea. Yet many ancient civilizations (and some more modern ones) engaged in religious rituals that involved sacrificing people. Why do so many societies evolve a system of human sacrifice, despite the obvious moral drawbacks? A group of social scientists has just published a statistical analysis in Nature that reveals how this grisly practice has fairly predictable results, which benefit elites in socially stratified cultures.

  The group examined 93 Austronesian cultures in the Pacific Islands, drawing information from the Pulotu Database of Pacific Religions to determine which groups had human sacrifice and when. Previous analysts have suggested that human sacrifice helps to maintain social stratification. In this new study, the researchers wanted to understand the relationship between human sacrifice and social stratification over time.

Security

• Security advisories for Monday

Defence/Aggression

• ‘The Boys Who Said No!’: New Documentary About War Resisters

  Evil is participatory, says interviewee David Harris at the beginning of a documentary in progress about Vietnam-era draft resisters, The Boys Who Said No!

  Evil continuing depends on people joining in, and the first step to stopping it, he continues, is withdrawing your own participation. So Harris said no to the Vietnam-era draft, and went to jail for it.

Transparency/Secrecy

• Bipartisan Trade Secrets Protection Bill Passed by U.S. Senate

• White House supports Senate’s trade secrets bill

• Obama Administration strongly supports Defend Trade Secrets Act

• Senate easily passes trade secrets bill

  The Senate on Monday easily passed on an 87-0 vote a long-awaited measure that would strengthen federal law and provide damages for U.S. companies affected by the theft of corporate intellectual property.

• US Senate unanimously approves trade secrets bill

• Senate passes legislation to protect trade secrets

• Senate Passes Bill Protecting Trade Secrets From Foreign Competitors

• Senate Passes Trade-Secrets Bill

• We Need To Safeguard The Secrets of America’s Innovation Economy

• Senator Hatch Calls Trade Secrets Bill ‘Critical

• Senate Passes the Critical Intellectual Property Legislation

• Washington Week Ahead: Senate debates trade secrets, GMO bill fate still uncertain

• Monday: Trade secrets

• Congress’ intellectual property breakthrough: A bipartisan victory for Utah innovators and job creators

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• As Indonesian forests burn, new anti-fire agency feels heat

  As forest fires raged like never before across Indonesia last year, President Joko Widodo announced he was setting up a special agency to tackle the annual scourge that shrouds parts of Southeast Asia in choking haze.

  But, with this season’s fires already blazing, the Peatlands Restoration Agency has barely got off the ground and has a huge task ahead of it.

  Nazir Foead, who was appointed to lead the body, told Reuters it needed at least $1 billion in funding over five years, but that the government was unlikely to allocate a budget for another two months.

Finance

• A Key Similarity Between Snowden Leak and Panama Papers: Scandal Is What’s Been Legalized

  FROM THE START of the reporting based on Edward Snowden’s leaked document archive, government defenders insisted that no illegal behavior was revealed. That was always false: Multiple courts have now found the domestic metadata spying program in violation of the Constitution and relevant statutes and have issued similar rulings for other mass surveillance programs; numerous articles on NSA and GCHQ documented the targeting of people and groups for blatantly political or legally impermissible purposes; and the leak revealed that President Obama’s top national security official (still), James Clapper, blatantly lied when testifying before Congress about the NSA’s activities — a felony.

• Panama Papers day one: Revelations over offshore accounts reverberate across the world from ‘biggest leak ever’ – as it happened

  The International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ), a nonprofit group based in Washington, said the cache of 11.5 million records detailed the offshore holdings of a dozen current and former world leaders, as well as businessmen, criminals, celebrities and sports stars.

  A co-founder of the Panamanian-based law firm where the documents originated, Mossack Fonseca, confirmed the authenticity of the papers and said thay were obtained illegally in a hacking attack.

  The ICIJ said the law firm’s leaked internal files contain information on 214,488 offshore entities connected to people in more than 200 countries and territories.

• What to Know About the ‘Panama Papers’ Leak

  With more than 2.6 terabytes of data comprising more than 11.5 million documents, the release of Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca’s records this week represents one of the largest data leaks in history—bigger than both the intelligence records revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden three years ago and the U.S. diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks in 2010.

• Privatisation! Free trade! Shares for all! The great con that ruined Britain

  I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can’t deny that I did. I believed all that stuff about privatisation and free trade and the unrestrained market. I think I may even have been taken in by the prophecies of a great share-owning democracy.

  I thought – this now seems especially funny – that private British Telecom would be automatically better than crabby old Post Office Telephones.

  I think anyone who has ever tried to contact BT when things go wrong would now happily go back to the days of nationalisation. Soviet-style slowness was bad, but surely better than total indifference.

• Panama Papers: Leaks spur global investigations

  Authorities across the world are being spurred into action after a huge leak of confidential documents revealed how tax havens are used to hide wealth.

  Eleven million documents were leaked from the secretive Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

  They show how the company has helped some clients launder money, dodge sanctions and avoid tax.

• Biggest Data Leak In History — “The Panama Papers” Expose Global Corruption

Censorship/Free Speech

• COMMENTARY: Yiannopoulos’s issues with censorship

• Letter: Policy is censorship

  Freedom of speech is our most precious constitutional right, defended by newspaper editors more than anyone. Why would the ASNE award an editor for censoring free speech of his readership and fellow citizens?

  Letters to editors are traditional forms of participation within democracies for citizens. When editors ignore or censor them, those that are printed fill an agenda and become “Letters from the editor.”

• Fighting Israeli Occupying Forces Is “Terrorism.” Boycotting Is “Anti-Semitism.” What’s Allowed?

  THAT “TERRORISM” IS a malleable term of propaganda, with no fixed meaning or consistent application, is now quite well-established. Still, its recent application to a spate of violence targeting Israel’s occupying soldiers in the West Bank is so manipulative and extreme that it’s well worth highlighting.

  Israel has militarily occupied the West Bank for decades (it’s also still functionally occupying Gaza, as this two-minute video proves). The West Bank “occupation is illegal under international law and the United Nations has repeatedly told the country’s government to vacate Palestinian territory.” Even ardent defenders of Israel admit that “the West Bank is under a legal regime of belligerent occupation” and “Israel’s settlement enterprise is, and has always been, grossly illegal under international law.” Despite this world consensus, Israeli settlements continue to grow rapidly. Israel is not engaged in any meaningful efforts to negotiate an agreement to end the occupation, and leading Israeli ministers now openly oppose such efforts.

• UN partially reverses decision to censor Israel exhibition

  The display on Zionism, which defined the concept as “the liberation movement of the Jewish people”, was the one that was ultimately approved.

• Controversy Brewing After United Nations Censors ‘Israel Matters’ Exhibit

  Israel’s permanent mission to the United Nations, along with the group StandWithUs, displayed an exhibit of pride at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on Monday.

• Let Singaporeans express sentiments as they will

• Editor’s note

• Editing is not the same as censorship

• Dr Lee made serious allegation about my conduct as journalist: Janadas Devan

• Censored or Edited: LWL in The Straits Times

• Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong accuses HSBC of political censorship for rejecting bank account bids

  Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow were trying to open savings and current accounts for their new party, which grew out of student group Scholarism

• Bob threatens China style internet control

• Chinese style internet censorship coming to Zimbabwe – President Mugabe

• Zimbabwe Intensifies Crackdown on Facebook and WhatsApp Messages Insulting Mugabe

• Literary Forum: Can jokes bring down governments?

• DAHLIA: Quebec’s Quiet Bill 74 And Its Unprecedented Internet Censorship

• Quebec Government to Block Access to Unregulated Gambling Websites

• Experts weigh in on proposed online gambling-blocking bill

• Proposed law has experts worried Quebec government could censor the Internet

• Student in Censorship Row After ‘Raising Hand’ During Debate

• At my university, censorship is out of control

• University of Edinburgh student Imogen Wilson breached ‘safe space’ rules for raising hand

• Student ‘violated university safe space rule… by raising her arm at a meeting’

• Student Raises Hand, Accused of Violating ‘Safe Space’

• Delicate snowflakes in United Kingdom file safe zone complaint against student… for raising her hand

• U.K. student slapped with ‘safe space complaint’ after raising hand during discussion

• Student Accused of Violating Campus ‘Safe Space’ Policy After Raising Her Hands During a Meeting

• Edinburgh University student Imogen Wilson accused of violating ‘safe space’ rules for raising hand during meeting

• Student accused of violating university ‘safe space’ by raising her hand

• Student almost kicked out of university meeting for invading ‘safe space’ – by raising her hand

• Edinburgh University student Imogen Wilson violated ‘safe space’ by putting her hand up

• Student Accused of Violating Campus ‘Safe Space’ Policy After Raising Her Hand at Meeting

• Pure Insanity: Student Violated Safe Space Rules Because She Raised Her Hand

• Student accused of violating university’s ‘safe space’ rules for doing this

• 18 people voted to REMOVE student from council meeting because raising her arm was ‘triggering’

• Anger as Edinburgh University students vote for Israel boycott

• Raised Hands Violate University Safe-Space Policy

• Mad uni chiefs slam student for ‘violating classmates’ safe space’… by raising her hand

• Uni chiefs tell student NOT to raise her hand because it ‘violates classmates’ SAFE SPACE’

• University Officer Accused of Violating ‘Safe Space’ Rules for Raising Hands

• Councillors’ revolt threatened over censorship row

• York censored video latest: ‘Reinstate the cuts or I’ll call an emergency council meeting’

• VIDEO – City of York Censorship Row – Gwen Swinburn speaks out

• Apple’s new tech will automatically scan songs and remove curses

• New Apple Technology Will Remove Swear Words From Songs

• Future iPhones could automatically censor music and audio books

• Apple Secures Patent To Automatically Censor Entertainment Content

• Apple has developed new technology to censor out swearing from songs

• Apple has applied for a patent for real-time censorship technology

• Apple Applies for Patent on Real-Time Censorship Technology

• Apple has been granted a patent for technology that automatically censors songs

• Apple has developed new technology to censor swear words

• Apple Awarded Patent for Auto-Censoring Swear Words From Media

• Apple is exploring a way to automatically censor the swear words in your music

Privacy/Surveillance

• Tor calls out CloudFlare over blocking of services

  ANONYMYSING THING Tor has complained that otherwise net friendly outfit CloudFlare is blocking its services and making it a pretty pointless proposition.

  Tor’s noises follow a report from CloudFlare called The Trouble with Tor which claims that a significant chunk of the onion-smelling content is malicious. It is not particularly glowing and reckons that the trouble with Tor is significant.

  “Based on data across the CloudFlare network, 94 per cent of requests that we see across the Tor network are per se malicious. That doesn’t mean they are visiting controversial content, but instead that they are automated requests designed to harm our customers,” wrote CloudFlare’s Matthew Prince.

• Uncorrectable freedom and security issues on x86 platforms

  It has recently come to my attention that many in the free software movement are unaware of a relatively new development on x86 platforms that permanently removes the ability to use these platforms without also continually executing signed, proprietary code at the highest possible privilege level. All post-2013 (AMD) and virtually all post-2009 (Intel) systems contain this mandatory technology, and therefore, by design, can never be converted to run using pure FOSS. Prior to these changes projects such as coreboot could be used to replace the boot firmware with a FOSS alternative.

• FBI wants to access terror suspect’s Skype records

  The FBI is investigating whether a third, unknown person discussed an alleged terrorism plot with Alexander Ciccolo, the Western Massachusetts man accused of planning to attack a state university with guns and explosives on behalf of the Islamic State terror group.

  FBI Special Agent Jeffrey J. Lawrence said in an affidavit filed in US District Court in Springfield last week that Ciccolo told a witness who was cooperating with the FBI that he had discussed his terrorism plans with one other person.

• At Westminster College, NSA Deputy Director Calls for American Consensus in Determining Privacy Rights Versus National Security

• Hanna was pioneer at NSA [Ed: new example of NSA femmewashing]

• Now it’s double oo-ar-7: Huge recruitment drive for next generation of spies is launched in Cornwall as top secret site receives first royal visit [Ed: 007 boils down to recruitment propaganda tool?]

• Young spy recruitment drive launched in Cornwall

  A large recruitment drive has been launched for the next generation of James Bond spies, in Cornwall.

• 71% Want The Dark Net Shut Down, Showing Most Have No Idea What The Dark Net Is

  In other words, a majority of citizens not only think the dark net should be shut down, but they’re also making it very clear they have no idea what the dark net is. Shutting down the dark net would require finding and shutting down some 7,000 secret Tor nodes worldwide. Given how well anti-piracy efforts have gone in trying to shut down BitTorrent websites using IP addresses on the public Internet, just how well do people think this really would be? And that’s just Tor; you’d also need to shut down other dark net access avenues like I2P or Freenet, then magically ban any new technologies from being developed.

• Oculus Users Freak Out Over VR Headset’s TOS, Though Most Of It Is Boilerplate

  So Facebook’s Oculus technically “launched” the Rift VR headset on March 28, and while the press generally seem to like the gear, the launch itself hasn’t been going particularly well. Most users that pre-ordered still haven’t received not only their headset — but any kind of hard shipping date from the company. Initially, all users had to go on were some anonymous posts at Reddit implying that Facebook lawyers wouldn’t let Oculus communicate a reason for the delays. Over the weekend however users received an e-mail informing them that because of an “unexpected component shortage” shipments have been delayed by a few weeks. To soothe the angry hordes, Oculus has decided to offer free shipping on all pre-orders.

• Comcast Thinks Having Basic Broadband Privacy Protections ‘Irrational’

  Last week the FCC announced that it would be imposing some relatively new basic privacy protections on broadband. While the full rules will be hashed out after extensive public and company input (meaning if anything they’ll get weaker), FCC boss Tom Wheeler’s proposal (pdf) is fairly basic: ISPs should alert customers when their data is stolen, ISPs should be totally transparent about what they’re collecting, and ISPs should provide users with working opt-out tools for any data collection service the ISP employs. None of these requirements are particularly onerous, and most ISPs will find that they’re already adhering to them.

• Opinion: The NSA must adapt to survive the Digital Age [Ed: espionage agencies, social control]

  Every US intelligence agency must change with the times to stay relevant. Change is especially urgent as America’s adversaries become more adept at using the digital tools that the global technology revolution has made available within just a few clicks.

• Terabyte-Sized ‘Panama Papers’ Leak Confirms The Continuing Rise Of The Super-Whistleblowers

  The main Panama Papers site run by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists notes this bounty has provoked the “largest cross-border collaboration ever”; dozens of media sites are involved, although curiously few from the US. That means in-depth analysis of the implications of these documents for the rich, the powerful, the criminals and the companies they created will be appearing for many weeks, if not months. So there’s little point trying to second-guess what will emerge, not least because there is no public access to the documents involved, making deeper analysis impossible.

  Fortunately, here on Techdirt we’re interested in a few specialized angles. For example, the tech side. The Guardian states that the the Panama Papers total 2.6 terabytes of data, which dwarfs earlier leaks of financial documents: the HSBC files are 3.3 gigabytes, the Luxembourg tax files 4.4 gigabytes, and the so-called “offshore secrets” files total 260 gigabytes, while Wikileaks is a mere 1.7 gigabytes.

  A few years ago, it would have been inconceivable to “exfiltrate” terabytes of data like this. That in itself was a powerful brake on massive leaks. But today you can buy a portable, pocket-sized USB hard disk drive with a capacity of several terabytes for tens of dollars, with prices continuing to fall — thanks to Kryder’s Law and other factors. As a result, we are seeing leak inflation: where whistleblowers first grabbed megabytes and then gigabytes, but they now take terabytes, simply because they can. Why settle for a partial set, and risk leaving behind the juicy stuff, when you can simply “collect it all” (now, where have we heard that before?)

  So leaks are likely to get bigger. They may also become more common. The more high-profile whistleblowers there are, the more others are likely to be inspired to do the same. That fact has not gone unnoticed in the corporate world. In an evident attempt to stem the flow of embarrassing leaks, companies have been pushing for more laws to protect their “trade secrets.”

• Not ‘Going Dark’: 15 Out Of 15 Most Recent EU Terrorists Were Known To The Authorities In Multiple Ways

  Not unnaturally, perhaps, most commentary has been about the fact that Belgium’s prime minister was apparently being considered as a target. But there’s something else in this story that’s interesting, not least because it’s not explicit. The Belgian sources for this story have revealed that “plans and a photograph” were found on a computer. Assuming the laptop did indeed belong to the terrorists, that means one of two things: either the system did not use encryption at all, or that it was possible to bypass the protection. In either case, it looks like this is yet another demonstration that things are not “going dark” when it comes to terrorism, despite continued claims to the contrary.

  Given how details about the attackers are coming through very sporadically, it can be hard to see the bigger picture. To address that issue, the German journalist Sascha Lobo has pulled together all the information he could find about lethal terrorist attacks carried out by Islamists over the last two years in Europe. Specifically, these were the attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels in May 2014; the Paris attack on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in 2015; the attack on a cultural center and synagogue in Copenhagen in 2015; the second attack in Paris in November last year; and the recent attacks in Brussels.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Denver Police Officers Improperly Access Sensitive Crime Database Because Department Has No Interest In Stopping Them

  Massive databases full of personal information are in the hands of law enforcement. There are many legitimate uses for these databases, but like anything containing sensitive information, the temptation to abuse access privileges is omnipresent. This is highly problematic when the violator is a law enforcement officer. Not only does this violate internal policies and local statutes, but it puts sensitive info in the hands of someone who has plenty of power but little apparent interest in wielding it properly.

  Officers have run suspect background checks on police review board members, used sensitive databases to screen potential dates, and spy on their ex-wives. So, it’s unsurprising that another law enforcement agency has been found to be housing abusers of sensitive databases.

• Denver Monitor Urges Steep Penalty For Crime Database Abuse

  Denver police officers caught using confidential criminal databases for personal reasons – such as learning a woman’s phone number – get only light punishment, allowing the potentially dangerous abuse to continue, the city’s independent police monitor wrote in a report released Tuesday.

  The problem involves the National Crime Information Center, a database used by tens of thousands of law enforcement agencies across the country to catch criminals, recover stolen property and identify terror suspects. Its users seek information on stolen guns and cars, fugitives, sex offenders and other subjects.

• The FBI Doesn’t Want To Share Details On The Exploit It Deployed While Running A Child Porn Site

  The FBI will not be talking about the Network Investigative Technique (NIT) it used to obtain information about anonymous visitors to the child porn site it seized and ran for two weeks while the NIT did its work. A recently-filed declaration (uploaded by USA Today’s Brad Heath and pointed out by the ACLU’s Chris Soghoian) by the FBI tells the court the defense will learn nothing from being provided details on the NIT’s inner workings, especially since the agency isn’t willing to turn these details over to Jay Michaud’s lawyers.

• Dear Mr Gove, bad Ministry of Justice policy making has not gone away

  Another policy failure of the Ministry of Justice becomes apparent: over at the Law Society Gazette, John Hyde has detailed how the MoJ has collected only a small proportion of the criminal courts charge.

  The charge has now been terminated; but the underlying problem remains: the MoJ is simply not any good at policy making and policy implementation.

  The MoJ adopts a policy, usually without assessing evidence or even thinking things through, and it then “presses on” with the policy regardless of onlookers pointing out that, well, the policy will not work.

  The policy is then eventually reversed.

  This is not just a one-off; the cycle of policy adoption-failure-reversal has been a feature of the MoJ for as long as one can remember.

• Campaigner attacked on bus ‘for warning pupils that FGM is child abuse’

  A survivor of female genital mutilation today told how she had been attacked in public over her outspoken campaign to confront the barbaric practice in London’s schools.

  Hibo Wardere, 46, who fled Somalia’s civil war at the age of 18 having suffered FGM aged six, has made it her life’s work to educate and speak frankly about the brutal surgery which affects 200 million women in 30 countries.

  Mrs Wardere, a teaching assistant who visits schools to educate children about the procedure, has written a book about her one-woman fight to wipe out FGM in her lifetime.

• TSA spent $47,000 on an app that just randomly picks lanes for passengers

  According to Mashable, the Transportation Security Administration apparently spent $47,000 on an app that is essentially a random number generator—it was briefly used to assign travelers to left or right lanes at airports.

  As the website reported: “The app was used by TSA agents to randomly assign passengers to different pre-check lines as part of a now-discontinued program called ‘managed inclusion.’”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Netflix throttling itself isn’t a net neutrality problem, FCC chair says

  Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said yesterday that he has no plans to investigate Netflix for throttling its own video streams, despite Netflix’s critics calling for an investigation.

  Netflix acknowledged last week that it reduces video quality on most mobile networks to help users stay under their data caps and avoid data overage charges. Opponents of net neutrality rules that prevent Internet service providers from throttling online content claimed Netflix is being a hypocrite, since the video company supported the FCC’s ban on throttling.

• Inside the Secret ‘Hotels’ Where the Internet Lives

  Well, part of the Internet. The 24-story art-deco building is what’s known as a “carrier hotel,” a hub where telecommunications companies exchange Internet traffic to boost efficiency. There are five such hotels scattered around New York, according to Wired, housing everything from large Internet Service Providers like AT&T, to consumer tech giants like Google, to tiny startups in need of server space and blazing-fast speeds.

DRM/TPMs

• Save Netflix!

  Netflix is in terrible danger. In fact, these might be its last days.

  Oh, not today’s Netflix. The Netflix you’re using today is fine. It made it—got to do something daring and edgy, prove out its model, and become part of the establishment.

  But the next Netflix—the company so cool it makes Netflix look like Blockbuster Video—that Netflix is practically dead in the water.

  Imagine you wanted to start a business where you bought copies of movies, fair and square, and then sold the right to people to watch them from their homes, painlessly sending them right to their doors. Every copy you bought might be viewed by hundreds of people and you could charge each one of them for the right to look at the movies you transmitted to their homes, and you wouldn’t have to give anything back—after all, you bought the movie, you own it, and you can do what you want with it.

  Sounds crazy? Illegal?

  It’s Netflix, from its founding in 1997, the company mailed DVDs around America and then the world, right up to 2007, when it switched to streaming. Right from the start, major movie studios hated Netflix (and its competitors, like Redbox). They even tried to get their retailers to refuse to sell discs to Netflix (though indies and documentary makers loved having a powerhouse who’d put their wares on equal footing with products from the big five studios). Netflix plowed on, and on the way, became the studios’ best friend, and now it’s a studio in its own right, making some of the most innovative programming on any of our screens.

• TPMs, event logs, fine-grained measurements and avoiding fragility in remote-attestation

  Trusted Platform Modules are fairly unintelligent devices. They can do some crypto, but they don’t have any ability to directly monitor the state of the system they’re attached to. This is worked around by having each stage of the boot process “measure” state into registers (Platform Configuration Registers, or PCRs) in the TPM by taking the SHA1 of the next boot component and performing an extend operation. Extend works like this:

Intellectual Monopolies

• Anti-Piracy Informant Who Thought He Was A Paid Informant Sues Adobe For Not Paying Him

  An interesting case has been brought to our attention by Eric Goldman. What happens when someone takes it upon themselves to play IP Policeman for a large corporation? The plaintiff in this case, David Heller, uncovered piracy of Adobe products in Florida (referred to in the opinion as the baseball-esque “Florida Pirates”). He brought this information to Adobe’s attention. Adobe was pleased. So was Heller… at least for a little while.

  The problem seems to be that Heller felt he should have been paid for his investigative efforts while Adobe felt he should have been satisfied with being a Good Citizen.

  Shortly after publishing his discovery on his personal blog, Heller was contacted by Adobe’s outside counsel, David Pham. A meeting between Heller and Adobe reps was set up.

• Trademarks

  • Bandai Namco Is Apparently Looking To Trademark The Term ‘Finishing Move’

    Okay, this really needs to stop happening. There has been a recent wave of those in some way involved in the video gaming business applying for trademarks on insanely common gaming terms and phrases. We saw this in recent examples, such as Sony’s brazen attempt to trademark “let’s play,” a term for wildly popular online videos showing games in action. Tangentially, the Fine Brothers’ attempt to transform “react videos” into a licensing revenue stream was met with heavy criticism, warranted or not. And now we have Bandai Namco trying to trademark the term “finishing move” in Japanese.

• Copyrights

  • WordPress Wants Statutory Damages for DMCA Abuse

    WordPress.com is taking a strong stance against copyright takedown abuse. The company is recommending that the U.S. Copyright Office should introduce statutory damages and bonds to decrease the frequency of fraudulent and abusive DMCA takedown requests.

  • Movie Studios Want to Copy Megaupload’s Servers

    Hollywood’s major movie studios are protesting a request from Megaupload’s legal team to put their civil lawsuit on hold for another six months. The movie studios will only agree to the request if they can get copies of the Megaupload servers stored at Cogent, something the defunct cloud-hosting service fiercely objects to.

  • Supreme Court: Wikimedia violates copyright by posting its own photos of public, taxpayer-funded art

    A ruling in the Swedish Supreme Court today establishes that Wikimedia, the publisher of Wikipedia, must pay compensation to the creators of original sculptures and monuments when publishing Wikimedia’s own photos of said sculptures and monuments. Note that this isn’t about using photos without permission; the photos are used with permission. It’s the fact that the photos depict public – and taxpayer-funded – art. This is the Freedom of Panorama gone wrong, and shows just one facet of the copyright regime’s utter brokenness.

  • Wikimedia ‘breaks copyright’ with Swedish statue photos

    Sweden’s supreme court ruled on Monday that the non-profit internet giant Wikimedia breaches Sweden’s copyright laws by publishing photos of public artworks.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Rhythmbox 3.3.1 Music Player Released to Better Handle Locked Android Devices

The development team behind the popular, open-source Rhythmbox free music player have just announced this past weekend the general availability for download of the Rhythmbox 3.3.1 release.

As usual, we’ve managed to get our hands on the internal changelog (attached at the end of the article) to tell you everything about the changes implemented. Therefore, Rhythmbox 3.3.1 offers better handling of locked Android devices and simplifies the ReplayGain processing, which should no longer crash so often.

MKVToolNix 9.0.1 Hotfix Released to Patch Nasty Bugs in the MKV Manipulation App

Hot on the heels of the major MKVToolNix 9.0.0 release, developer Moritz Bunkus pushed a first point release, which he calls an urgent hotfix to patch a couple of nasty bugs.

Simplenote Charges On Linux With An Official App

Kernel Space

• Linux 4.6-rc2

  You all know the drill by now – another week, another rc. I’d say that
  things look fairly normal at this point: it’s not a big rc2, but
  that’s been true lately (rc3 tends to be a bit bigger – probably just
  because it takes time for people to start noticing issues).

  The patch statistics look fairly normal too: about half is drivers,
  almost a quarter is architecture fixups, and the rest is mostly
  networking and some documentation updates, but there’s some core
  kernel/mm/fs fixes in there too.

  The shortlog is appended and gives a good flavor of the kinds of
  changes we have.

  Go out and test, nothing looks all that scary there.

• Linus Torvalds Announces Linux Kernel 4.6 RC2, Things Remain “Fairly Normal”

  It’s Sunday, so Linus Torvalds has just announced the general availability, for testing, of yet another RC (Release Candidate) build towards the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel.

• Linux 4.6-rc2 Kernel Released

• Linux May Get A New Subsystem For RPMB: Replay Protected Memory Block

  The new subsystem proposal with patches by Tomas Winkler of Intel is for RPMB, the Replay Protected Memory Block specification for eMMC, NVMe, etc. Replay Protected Memory Block (RPMB) is a several year old specification for having a portion of memory be more secure and accessed via a hidden security key. The RPMB block in eMMC can be used for matters like storing DRM protection keys, OEM security keys, and other information that can’t — for whatever legal or security reasons — can’t be stored via normal storage.

• Graphics Stack

  • Vulkan 1.0.8 Released

  • NVIDIA Continues Discussing Their Controversial Wayland Plans With Developers

    Two weeks ago NVIDIA released their 364 Linux driver with initial support for Wayland and Mir.

• Benchmarks

  • Linux Benchmarks On Ten Popular ARM Boards

    Here are benchmarks of ten different ARM SBCs/boards including the Banana Pi M3, ODROID-XU4, ODROID-C2, Raspberry Pi 3, Orange Pi PC, Orange Pi Plus, Orange Pi One, ODROID-C1+, Banana Pi M2, and the Raspberry Pi 2 using their respective flavors of Ubuntu/Debian/Raspbian/Armbian.

Applications

• NetworkManager 1.0.12 Is Out with New Features, Branch 1.2 Still in Development

  A new maintenance release of the widely used NetworkManager 1.0 network connection manager software used by default in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems has been updated this past week.

• Rhythmbox 3.3.1 Music Player Released to Better Handle Locked Android Devices

  The development team behind the popular, open-source Rhythmbox free music player have just announced this past weekend the general availability for download of the Rhythmbox 3.3.1 release.

  As usual, we’ve managed to get our hands on the internal changelog (attached at the end of the article) to tell you everything about the changes implemented. Therefore, Rhythmbox 3.3.1 offers better handling of locked Android devices and simplifies the ReplayGain processing, which should no longer crash so often.

• MKVToolNix 9.0.1 Hotfix Released to Patch Nasty Bugs in the MKV Manipulation App

  Hot on the heels of the major MKVToolNix 9.0.0 release, developer Moritz Bunkus pushed a first point release, which he calls an urgent hotfix to patch a couple of nasty bugs.

• Simplenote Charges On Linux With An Official App

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Extra node on Tripleo Quickstart

  • How to Configure Sshguard With IPFW Firewall On FreeBsd ?

  • FreeIPA for Tripleo

  • Today I Learned: Overlapping pull requests in Pagure

  • Image building in OpenStack CI

  • Image building for OpenStack CI — Minimal images, big effort

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine Staging 1.9.7 Released with Microsoft Video For Windows Improvements, More

    Wine Staging 1.9.7 arrives today, April 3, 2016, one day after the release of the Wine 1.9.7 development version, bringing various improvements and bug fixes.

  • Wine-Staging 1.9.7 Has Multimedia & Shell32 Improvements

    Building off Friday’s release of Wine 1.9.7 is now a new release of Wine-Staging.

  • Release 1.9.7

    Today we released Wine Staging 1.9.7. This version contains improvements for shell32, Video For Windows and several smaller fixes. Release 1.9.7

• Games

  • How To Play Your Childhood Nintendo Games In Linux

    We all love Nintendo games that we played in our childhood. Remember Mario Bros? I still love to play that one and many other. If you wish to play your favorite Nintendo games, then no problem you can play your favorite games in Linux using ZSNES, an SNES emulator programmed in assembly language.

  • Full Linux-on-PS4 hits Github

    Ever since fail0verflow first told Chaos Computer Club Sony PS4 machines could be persuaded to run Linux, a fair amount of work has gone into replicating his demonstration.

    The problem for other PS4 hackers: to avoid take-downs and other sueballs from Sony, fail0verflow published only a Linux-to-PS4 port, leaving the rest of the world to discover the specific exploit used.

    That unleashed a widespread effort, not only to find the best exploit, but to turn it into something stable.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Big update includes Plasma 5.6.1, Frameworks 5.20.0 and important package groups

    We are happy to announce that the brand new 5.6 series of Plasma releases, more specifically Plasma 5.6.1, is now available in our stable repositories. This quick update that followed the first 5.6 release provides several bug fixes to Plasma users, in addition to the many changes that were introduced in 5.6.0 which aimed at enhancing users’ experience:

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Making profiling easy

    One of the tools we often find ourselves using when working on GTK+ is sysprof. While doing some profiling recently, I got annoyed that it was one of the few programs on my system that required GTK+ 2.x.

Distributions

• Which Linux Distribution Is Best For Me — Top 11 Operating Systems

  Choosing your first Linux distribution could turn out to a life-changing decision for you. The right Linux flavor can either sweeten your computing experience or turn Linux into a bad dream. Trying to answer these questions, we have tried to prepare a best Linux distros list for 2016.

• New Releases

  • Minimal Linux Live Is Now Based on Linux Kernel 4.4.6 LTS and BusyBox 1.24.2

    Today, April 3, 2016, Minimal Linux Live developer Ivan Davidov was happy announce the immediate availability for download of an updated version of his project that lets people create minimal, live BusyBox- and Linux kernel-based operating systems.

  • Solus Linux Receives More Budgie Desktop Enhancements, Latest Software Versions

    Josh Strobl from the Solus Project today, April 3, 2016, announced the twenty-fifth installation of the “This Week in Solus” weekly newsletter for users of the Solus Linux operating system, informing them about the latest changes.

  • Chakra GNU/Linux Gets Major Qt 5.6 Update, KDE Plasma 5.6.1 and Frameworks 5.20

    Earlier today, April 3, 2016, Chakra GNU/Linux maintainer Neofytos Kolokotronis proudly announced the availability of some major updates in the main software repositories of the Arch Linux inspired operating system.

  • Linux Top 3: Guix, NixOS and Bodhi Linux Update

    There are any number of different reasons why a developer, or group of developers come together to build a new Linux distribution. In the case of GuixSD the purpose is to serve as a platform for a new package manager.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

  • Installing PCLinuxOS with UEFI Boot: An excellent release

    All in all, this is an excellent release. I think the best news is UEFI boot compatibility, followed closely by the easier method of creating a Live USB stick. Although the installed system it produces is the same an existing PCLinuxOS system which was up-to-date with the latest updates, that’s the whole point of a rolling distribution, isn’t it? ISO images are periodically updated to ensure that it doesn’t take an excessive number of updates.

• Arch Family

  • Manjaro Linux JWM 16.04 Community Edition Boots with Less than 120MB of RAM

    The Manjaro Linux community was proud to announce on April 3, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download of the Manjaro Linux JWM 16.04 Community Edition operating system.

• Red Hat Family

  • How Red Hat is bringing consistency to global brand marketing campaigns

    The arduous task of maintaining the quality and consistency of marketing collateral across multiple regions is becoming a thing of the past for enterprise software vendor, Red Hat, thanks to a new technology platform.

    Red Hat’s lead brand manager for global regions, Andy Fitzsimon, told CMO one of the big challenges the company had been facing when dealing with a rapidly expanding list of go-to-market materials across the Asia-Pacific was fragmentation and quality issues. The company operates in 50 countries and has physically distributed, in-field marketing teams, each with their own marketing priorities and tactics.

    Being the brand advocate, Fitzsimon needed to make sure everyone was at a level of professionalism and design that matched the Fortune 500 brand’s stature.

  • .NET on Red Hat Enterprise Linux sneak peak on April 12

    The new Microsoft under Satya Nadella continues to bring about collaborations between Microsoft and Linux vendors.

    One key item in the works has been making the .NET framework available for Linux. This was foreshadowed when Microsoft announced ASP.NET vNext and the open-sourcing of .NET components in 2014, and again in November 2015 when Red Hat itself announced Microsoft and Red Hat were collaborating to bring .NET to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL.

  • Red Hat mulls more investments in technology startups to push growth

  • Red Hat mulls more investments in startups to push growth

  • IT firm Red Hat mulls more investments in startups to push growth

    IT firm Red Hat is actively looking at investing in start-ups working on innovation, infrastructure and open source technologies to further accelerate its growth in the country.

    Red Hat, which has invested in start-ups in India and Israel, is also expanding its workforce in the country to cash in on the opportunities in the telecom and government space.

  • Red Hat expands Red Hat Developer Programme

  • Red Hat & San Disk hook up to push Ceph open-source storage

    Red Hat Inc. is teaming up with San Disk Corp. in the realm of open-source distributed storage. The two companies have just announced a new partnership that’ll see them deliver an integrated storage solution based on the scale-out storage platform Ceph.

  • Finance

    • Stock Performance Review: Red Hat, Inc.( NYSE:RHT )

    • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Raised to “Strong-Buy” at Vetr Inc.

    • Analysts Watching Stocks: Applied Materials, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMAT) , Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

  • Fedora

    • Rawhide: notes from the trail, 2016-04-03 edition

      Well, it’s been a while again, so I thought I would update everyone on recent goings on in Rawhide, Fedora’s rolling development release.

      Since my last post we finally moved over to having Rawhide and Branched (what will be Fedora24) done by the new pungi4. There are sadly lots of little issues that have been cropping up and getting fixed by Release Engineering, but it’s been a bit of a bumpy ride. As of this post, the last Rawhide compose that finished was the 2016-03-31 one, all the ones since then have failed. Hopefully this will get sorted out tomorrow. The current cause of problems is adding atomic/ostree to the compose (which we very much need/want), it’s just been more difficult that we first hoped. Once things settle down we will really be in a better place than before, with full composes (tested by openqa!) every night.

    • Fedora Badges Workshop

      Hey everybody! Quick announcement: this Wednesday Red Hat Czech is opening doors of our Brno office again. Visit us and experience unique atmosphere of openness and cutting edge technology – all of it in our newest building located in Technology Park Brno.

    • HFOSS: Final Project Proposal

      This post serves as the project proposal for me and my team’s Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development “Final Project“.

      In this project proposal, we take a look at the game idea we are looking at completing for this project, based on the New York 4th grade math curriculum. Our game idea is based off of a minigame from Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, a puzzle-solving educational game.

    • How to take screenshots on Fedora Workstation

    • Fedora and Mozilla Activity Day in Kosovo

      Last week I organized a FAD and a MAD (Fedora Activity Day and Mozilla Activity Day) it took part at the Prishtina Hackerspace. The event was about community building and finding the best path for new contributors to join open source communities. To make the event even more better we had the opportunity to join forces together with Open Labs Albania.

      The first day was dedicated to Fedora. I did an introduction to Fedora and the different channel there are to contribute. Jona gave an awesome speech about women in Fedora, Elio with his creativity showed how easy it is to use inkscape and create badges for Fedora, and Boris showed us how to install Pidora on a Raspberry PI.

    • Fedora at Google Summer of Code

      Last week I presented the process on how to apply to Google Summer of Code for the Fedora Project. It is the first time GSoC is presented in our college. I presented the process on how to apply to Fedora. Students seemed to be really interested and the college staff showed support for the application process. The event was one of the Campus Fedora Ambassadors events that are going to be held at UBT (University for Business and Technology).

    • dgplug summer training student Suraj Deshmukh

• Debian Family

  • Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 “Jessie” Now Available for Download, Live DVDs Coming Soon

    We reported the other day that the Debian Project announced the availability of the fourth update in the stable Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” series, along with the Debian GNU/Linux 7.10 maintenance release.

  • Helping out around the edges …

    for two point releases of Debian CDs.

  • Debian Releases GNU/Linux 8.4 ‘Jessie’ and 7.10 ‘Wheezy’

  • My Free Software Activities in February and March 2016

Devices/Embedded

• Rugged carrier and mini-PC build on Jetson TX1 COM

  Connect Tech’s “Astro” carrier board integrates Nvidia’s Linux- and Tegra X1-driven Jetson TX1 COM. It also drives a rugged “Rosie” embedded computer.

  Guelph, Ontario based Connect Tech offers a wide variety of Linux-ready carrier boards, SBCs, COMs. In addition to detailing the new Astro carrier board and Rosie computer, we’ve briefly summarized two of the company’s other recent SBCs farther below.

• Phones

  • Android

    • BBM for Android, iOS, BB10 Gets Free Privacy-Focused Features and More

      BlackBerry has rolled out an update for its cross-platform messenger app on Android, iOS, and BB10 OS with new features and improvements focusing on the user’s privacy.

      One of the highlights of the BBM app update is that users now have unlimited access to Retract a sent message and use the Timer feature, both which are features that were previously a part of the BBM subscription. “Building on the renowned immediacy, reliability and security inherent to BBM, the new release provides unmatched level of privacy and control to BBM users without any subscription fees,” said Matthew Talbot, SVP, BBM at BlackBerry. “Keeping control over the messages and content that they share, BBM users can be ensured that what they share is always theirs to control.”

    • WhatsApp 2.16.6 Download Available for Android Devices – Improved Features

    • WhatsApp version 2.16.5 Download Available for Android

    • Android N Is Good for Tablets, But It’s Not the Answer for Beating Apple and Microsoft [Ed: This article is nonsense. Android commands ~85% of the market, this writer thinks it needs to “beat” Microsoft’s 2%]

    • Must read: top 10 Android stories this week

    • BlackBerry’s Android Gamble Has Failed

    • 5 Android Apps you shouldn’t miss this week! – Android Apps Weekly

    • Verizon updates the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 edge to Marshmallow

    • Getting started with JRebel for Android

    • Android 6.0 Marshmallow Update Released For Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and Note 4

    • New Android App Makes It Easy to Log All Your Call Drops

    • Nokia’s first Android phone, the A1, exposed

      Nokia’s long-rumored Android phone may finally be here. A leaked image from Android Authority claims to show the front and back of the device, allegedly called the A1.

      The A1 looks like a solid mid-range phone, and reportedly packs a 5.5-inch display, a Snapdragon 652 processor and a textured plastic design. The device also sports a large primary camera and a rear-facing speaker. It appears to be running Android software along with Nokia’s Z Launcher.

    • Lenovo leaked to have its first Android Yoga convertible

      Lenovo has reserved the “Yoga” brand for its devices that flip and bend to accommodate three to four styles of use. However, its Yoga Android tablets are somewhat less remarkable in that regard, equipped only with a kickstand that rotates along the tubular edge of the slate. Soon, however, Lenovo might actually be launching an Android device truly worthy of the Yoga name. Called the Lenovo Yoga Book, this contraption isn’t simply a tablet a true, 2-in-1, convertible laptop like most of the OEM’s Windows-powered Yogas.

1btn: A Powerful, Open Source, And Hackable Button For The Internet

11 Excellent Open Source Solutions for Home Automation

Home Automation software is software that lets you control and monitor common home and office appliances using a computer. Home automation used to be confined to turning on and off lights and appliances. But the possibilities are much wider letting users build a wireless network, automate TV and hi-fi, monitor pets when you are away, set up an answering system, create a weather station – integrating an abundance of different home automation technologies into one.

Many home automation systems use proprietary networking protocols. The protocols used will be specific to the company that developed the system. The software company may favor such an approach as it ties the customer to their products only. However, this can only be detriment to the user of the home automation system. It is therefore important to evaluate a home automation system to ensure that it is built on open protocols. All of these solutions are released under an open source license.

Do not think home automation is just for geeks. It is now mainstream and a burgeoning industry. Become an home automation expert and try out these finest open source software for home automation. There are some real gems here. Many users flock to Domoticz and openHAB, but one of the others listed here may be a better fit for your requirements.

eBay Joins FIDO, Contributes Open-Source Authentication Server

The FIDO Alliance, which is working to deliver stronger forms of authentication for online access, expands such efforts with eBay’s help.
The FIDO (Fast Identity Online) Alliance is gaining momentum, with eBay joining the effort and contributing a new open-source Universal Authentication Framework compliant server.

FIDO is a multistakeholder initiative whose aim is to enable stronger forms of authentication for online access. The big milestone event for FIDO occurred in December 2014 when the group announced the Universal Second Factor (U2F) and UAF 1.0 specifications.

Education

• Studying the relationship between remixing & learning

  With more than 10 million users, the Scratch online community is the largest online community where kids learn to program. Since it was created, a central goal of the community has been to promote “remixing” — the reworking and recombination of existing creative artifacts. As the video above shows, remixing programming projects in the current web-based version of Scratch is as easy is as clicking on the “see inside” button in a project web-page, and then clicking on the “remix” button in the web-based code editor. Today, close to 30% of projects on Scratch are remixes.

BSD

• FreeBSD 10.3 Officially Released with Skylake Support, ZFS Boot Capability, More

  Today, April 4, 2016, the FreeBSD project proudly announced the official release and general availability of the FreeBSD 10.3 operating system powered by a BSD kernel.

• FreeBSD 10.3 Officially Released With Much Better Linux Binary Compatibility

Public Services/Government

• The French Revolution Is In Doubt In 2016

  The basic concepts of FLOSS are now in the public eye. The public has been using FLOSS browsers and operating systems for a decade or longer and they know it. Will they be fooled? Will they be afraid? I don’t think so. Further, any politician who thinks this is a non-issue is about to receive an education.

Science

• A Space Archaeologist May Have Found a Second Viking Settlement In Canada [iophk: free Vinland from the yoke of Canadian oppression]

  A thousand years before East Coast hosers went for the first rip in history, vikings may have walked the same land in Newfoundland.

  This discovery comes courtesy of “space archaeologist” Sarah Parcak, who used satellite imagery taken from space to pick out possible man-made shapes in Newfoundland, south of L’Anse aux Meadows. Parcak’s team, which includes Canadians, did some digging and found evidence of iron-working, which suggests that vikings might have made it all the way to the land of the donair.

  It’s not a sure thing, but if it’s true, then the Newfoundland site will be the second confirmed viking settlement in Canada, and in all of North America.

• [Older] The man who studies the spread of ignorance

  In 1979, a secret memo from the tobacco industry was revealed to the public. Called the Smoking and Health Proposal, and written a decade earlier by the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, it revealed many of the tactics employed by big tobacco to counter “anti-cigarette forces”.

  In one of the paper’s most revealing sections, it looks at how to market cigarettes to the mass public: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

Security

• My first DSA

• Linux Ransomware and why everyone could be affected [Ed: Bitdefender ad as ‘article’]

• Kaiten targets Linux routers, gateways, access points and now IoT

  Change default passwords on network equipment even if it is not reachable from the Internet.

• Security is really about Risk vs Reward

  Every now and then the conversation erupts about what is security really? There’s the old saying that the only secure computer is one that’s off (or fill in your favorite quote here, there are hundreds). But the thing is, security isn’t the binary concept: you can be secure, or insecure. That’s not how anything works. Everything is a sliding scale, you are never secure, you are never insecure. You’re somewhere in the middle. Rather than bumble around about your risk though, you need to understand what’s going on and plan for the risk.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Greenpeace reveals Indonesia’s forests at risk as multiple companies claim rights to same land​

  Compiled over almost a decade by Greenpeace using data from provincial governments, resource companies and others, the interactive maps highlight the vast scale of the concession overlap. Across more than 7m hectares – an area equivalent to the Republic of Ireland – licences for the same concessions have been allocated to as many as four palm, pulpwood, logging or coal mining companies at a time.

  With no central land registry in Indonesia, campaigners say the result is a mess of competing claims. Companies may end up thinking they have the right to clear land that another company or government body has pledged to protect from deforestation.

  The federal ministry of environment and forestry grants the rights to develop land for pulpwood and selective logging, whereas coal mining and palm oil concessions are granted by local and provincial officials.

• Lost in Nicaragua, a Chinese Tycoon’s Canal Project

  There are also concerns about the seismic activity in the area, or the many volcanos. Some analysts point to China’s poor record on environmental matters and Mr. Wang’s inexperience in building anything, let alone a $50 billion (some say $80 billion) canal carving through miles of protected areas that are home to many endangered species, including the jaguar, and legally recognized indigenous lands. The little-known Mr. Wang made his fortune in telecommunications, not in construction.

• Future for Oil As World Shifts to Combat Climate Change

  Carbon Tracker Initiative advisor Paul Spedding discusses why this oil price drop is different with Alix Steel on “Bloomberg Markets.”

Finance

• Panama Papers: Ex-MPs, Lords And David Cameron’s Father ‘Named In Offshore Finance Leak’

  Former Conservative MPs, peers and David Cameron’s late father are among scores of people and politicians whose financial affairs have been exposed by a massive leak of data about offshore investments.

  The leak of more than 11 million documents from the Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, casts an unprecedented light on the way the rich and powerful are able to use tax havens to shield their wealth.

  Ian Cameron, the prime minister’s father who died in 2010, is reportedly named as a client of the firm. Six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and “dozens” of donors to UK political parties who have been shown to have had offshore assets – although none have so far been named.

• Iceland’s prime minister walks out of interview over tax haven question – video

  Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, the prime minister of Iceland, walks out of an interview with Swedish television company SVT. Gunnlaugsson is asked about a company called Wintris, which he says has been fully declared to the Icelandic tax authority. Gunnlaugsson says he is not prepared to answer such questions and decides to discontinue the interview, saying: ‘What are you trying to make up here? This is totally inappropriate’

• The Panama Papers: what you need to know

  It is a Panama-based law firm whose services include incorporating companies in offshore jurisdictions such as the British Virgin Islands. It administers offshore firms for a yearly fee. Other services include wealth management.

• US companies holding $2.1 trillion offshore profits

  There’s enough cash sitting in offshore bank accounts to wipe out the federal deficit — if only it was subject to U.S. taxes.

  That’s because U.S. companies are saving some $620 billion by parking profits outside the country, according to the latest accounting from Citizens for Tax Justice and U.S. PIRG Education Fund.

  At least 358 large U.S. companies collectively maintain 7,622 separate overseas subsidiaries holding $2.1 trillion in profits, the group said in a report Tuesday. (The estimated tax bill comes from corporate regulatory filings.)

• #PanamaPapers breaks the Internet with revelations of global corruption

• Leak boosts Panama’s image as money-laundering hub

  A huge data leak from a law firm in Panama suggesting it hid billions of dollars in assets of global politicians, sports stars and entertainers threatened Sunday to dramatically boost the country’s reputation as an offshore haven for money laundering.

• Iceland’s PM faces calls for snap election after offshore revelations

  Iceland’s prime minister is this week expected to face calls in parliament for a snap election after the Panama Papers revealed he is among several leading politicians around the world with links to secretive companies in offshore tax havens.

  The financial affairs of Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson and his wife have come under scrutiny because of details revealed in documents from a Panamanian law firm that helps clients protect their wealth in secretive offshore tax regimes. The files from Mossack Fonseca form the biggest ever data leak to journalists.

• Brazil’s former top judge hid price he paid for Miami condo

  When Brazilian news outlets found out then-Supreme Court chief justice Joaquim Barbosa had bought a Brickell condo in 2012, they asked the well-respected jurist how much he paid.

  Barbosa refused to say.

  The problem? In Florida, real-estate sales are public.

  But not Barbosa’s.

  Miami-Dade County property records seemed to suggest the 61-year-old paid a big, fat zero for his one-bedroom condo at Icon Brickell, one of the trendy neighborhood’s best-known condo towers.

• Enormous document leak exposes offshore accounts of world leaders

  ….40 years of records and information about more than 210,000 companies in 21 offshore jurisdictions.

• Panama Papers Q&A: How assets are hidden and taxes dodged

  The revelations in the millions of papers leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca uncovering a suspected money laundering ring run by close associates of Vladimir Putin may leave readers drowning in a sea of confusing terms and phrases.

  Although there are legitimate ways of using tax havens, most of what has been going on is about hiding the true owners of money, the origin of the money and avoiding paying tax on the money.

  If you are a wealthy business owner in Germany who has decided to evade tax, an international drugs dealer or the head of a brutal regime, the methods are all pretty similar.

  Mossack Fonseca says it has always complied with international protocols to ensure the companies it incorporates are not used for tax evasion, money-laundering, terrorist finance or other illicit purposes.

• Massive leak reveals money rings of global leaders

  A massive, anonymous leak of financial documents from a Panamanian law firm has revealed an extensive worldwide network of offshore “shell” companies — including ones with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin — that allow the wealthy to hide their assets from taxes and, in some cases, to launder billions in cash, a German newspaper alleges.

  The documents, combed through in the past year by dozens of journalists worldwide, show links to 72 current or former heads of state, including dictators accused of looting their own countries.

• Panama Papers: Jurgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca – the lawyers whose firm is at the centre of global controversy

  John le Carre’s 1996 novel, The Tailor of Panama, tells the story of Harry Pendel, a British tailor who serves the great and good but whose refusal to come clean about his past almost leads to his downfall. In Panama, he believes, discretion is the only way.

  For more than four decades, the law firm Mossack Fonseca – whose twisting saga may even have been beyond the imagination of le Carre – has adopted a similar strategy of discretion and survival.

  If the documents obtained and analysed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) are to be believed, the firm that has its headquarters not far from those of the fictional Harry Pendel, has had financial dealing with a total of 128 politicians and public officials around the world. The company has denied any wrongdoing.

• Panama vows to cooperate if legal fallout from ‘Panama Papers’ leak

  Panama’s government vowed Sunday to “vigorously cooperate” with any legal probe that might be launched in the wake of the “Panama Papers” data leak.

  “The Panamanian government will vigorously cooperate with any request or assistance necessary in the event of any legal action occurring,” it said in a statement.

• The Panama Papers: how the world’s rich and famous hide their money offshore

  The hidden wealth of some of the world’s most prominent leaders, politicians and celebrities has been revealed by an unprecedented leak of millions of documents that show the myriad ways in which the rich can exploit secretive offshore tax regimes.

  The Guardian, working with global partners, will set out details from the first tranche of what are being called “the Panama Papers”. Journalists from more than 80 countries have been reviewing 11.5m files leaked from the database of Mossack Fonseca, the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm.

• Who’s involved

• Documents leaked from a Panamanian law firm reveal a global web of corruption

  German authorities had known about the connection between Mossack Fonseca and some criminal elements for at least two years. A whistleblower at the firm had sold information to the authorities, according to the story in the Suddeutsche Zeitung on the history of the Panama Papers’ leak.

• About the Panama Papers

  Over a year ago, an anonymous source contacted the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and submitted encrypted internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that sells anonymous offshore companies around the world. These shell firms enable their owners to cover up their business dealings, no matter how shady.

  In the months that followed, the number of documents continued to grow far beyond the original leak. Ultimately, SZ acquired about 2.6 terabytes of data, making the leak the biggest that journalists had ever worked with. The source wanted neither financial compensation nor anything else in return, apart from a few security measures.

• A storm is coming

  At the time, the country’s three biggest banks folded within just three days, in part because their senior executives had illegally doctored the stock listings of their own banks. “Market manipulation”, as Hauksson curtly calls it.

• Corporate Media Gatekeepers Protect Western 1% From Panama Leak

  The Suddeutsche Zeitung, which received the leak, gives a detailed explanation of the methodology the corporate media used to search the files. The main search they have done is for names associated with breaking UN sanctions regimes. The Guardian reports this too and helpfully lists those countries as Zimbabwe, North Korea, Russia and Syria. The filtering of this Mossack Fonseca information by the corporate media follows a direct western governmental agenda. There is no mention at all of use of Mossack Fonseca by massive western corporations or western billionaires – the main customers. And the Guardian is quick to reassure that “much of the leaked material will remain private.”

  What do you expect? The leak is being managed by the grandly but laughably named “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists”, which is funded and organised entirely by the USA’s Center for Public Integrity. Their funders include

  Ford Foundation
  Carnegie Endowment
  Rockefeller Family Fund
  W K Kellogg Foundation
  Open Society Foundation (Soros)

  among many others. Do not expect a genuine expose of western capitalism. The dirty secrets of western corporations will remain unpublished.

• Oxfam reaction to Panama Papers tax leak

  “Tax avoidance is a local problem, as well as a global one – and the Australian Government must act now.

• Mossack Fonseca: The Nazi, CIA And Nevada Connections… And Why It’s Now Rothschild’s Turn

  These include the Nazis, the CIA, Mexican drug lords, and of course, the U.S.

• Massive Document Leak Details Offshore Accounts Connected to Putin and Other Leaders

• Panama Papers: Vladimir Putin associates, Jackie Chan identified in unprecedented leak of offshore financial records

• 5 things to know about the Panama Papers

  A massive data leak of files from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca went online Sunday, in a collaboration by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, exposing how the world’s ultra-rich manage their offshore accounts.

• What you need to know about the #PanamaPapers investigation

  Eleven million leaked documents published on Sunday reveal how a secretive law firm based in Panama may have helped world leaders such as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak move money.

  The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung acquired the Panama Papers, of the firm Mossack Fonseca, through an anonymous source and shared it with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which distributed them to more than 100 media organizations worldwide.

• Transparency International calls for immediate action by world leaders to stop secret companies

• Want to hide your cash? This PanamaPapers game tells you how

  The Panama papers ICIJ website has created a flash game giving players tips to create offshore accounts and evade taxes. Titled ‘StairWay to Tax Heaven,’ it essentially shows three characters which include a soccer player, a politician, and a business executive.

  “Welcome to the secret world of offshore. Your goal is to navigate this parallel universe and hide your cash away. Don’t worry! Lawyers, wealth managers, and bankers are there to help you.

  Pick a character and don’t get caught,” reads the page.

  Each character you select puts you in a hypothetical situation where you’re asked to pick up an option. Depending on what you click, you’ll be given a final option which will determine whether you made the right move or is it game over for you.

• Failing to provide the resources HMRC needs to tackle tax abuse is in itself a form of corruption

  Let’s be clear that corruption takes many forms. Failing to provide the resources needed to tackle corruption is, in itself and in my opinion, a form of corruption. The turning of the blind eye that it both implies and even endorses helps these corrupt practices take place with, at most, limited risk. That has to be a corrupt practice.

• Panama tax leak reaction

• Panama Papers: Huge leak alleges elites hiding money

  Several major media outlets have published the results of an investigation into the financial dealings of the rich and powerful, based on a vast trove of documents handed over by an anonymous source.

  The International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ), a nonprofit group in the US, said the cache of 11.5 million records detailed the offshore holdings of a dozen current and former world leaders, as well as businessmen, criminals, celebrities and sports stars.

• Jobs Report Blues

  In short, corporations maximized short-run profits by ruining their domestic consumer market along with the personal income and sales tax base for government. It is unclear that this extraordinary mistake can be unwound.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• How Israeli Propaganda Succeeds

  The United States is one gentile culture where the Zionist narrative dominates. Key to this is control of language, controlling thought. U.S. pollster Frank Luntz was commissioned to maintain this, producing a “dictionary” of language to use — a playbook for shading domination as defense.

Censorship/Free Speech

• UN censors Israeli exhibit about Zionism

• Israeli Ambassador to U.N. Criticizes Censorship of Pro-Israel Exhibit

• UN disqualifies pro-Israel exhibition

• Israeli envoy outraged after UN censors parts of pro-Israel exhibition

• UN censors pro-Israel exhibit

• UN censors Israeli exhibition featuring Zionism and Jerusalem

• Out from under the censors in Myanmar

• The war on free speech on campus and beyond

  I spent part of the week speaking on several college campuses in Texas, and my subject was free speech and the threats against it on campus and beyond. The students were in the main shocked and dismayed at the revitalization of censorship as a political ideal and by the widespread support for censorship among so-called liberals. Most of them were genuinely unaware of just how far and wide the war against free expression currently ranges.

• Glenn Reynolds: Talk of censorship backfires for Erdogan, Obama and anti-Trumpers

  From U.S. college campuses to Turkey to the White House, censorship provokes more speech.

• Unrest over censorship row at York council intensifies

  POLITICAL leaders from City of York Council have backed calls to end a censorship row at the authority, which has now been rumbling on for more than a week.

  Council leader Chris Steward has said he is unhappy with the way official video footage of a controversial meeting last Thursday was edited before it was made public.

  Cllr Steward said: “I share a lot of the concerns raised about the editing. It wasn’t something that I sanctioned.”

• When ‘progressive’ censorship strikes

  Although the cross was a historic marker, the ACLU argued that its presence on a public beach violated the “wall of separation” between church and state. So the cross was moved to the Roman Catholic Church’s San Carlos Cemetery in central Monterey, which adjoins the second California mission founded by Father Junipero Serra.

• White House Censors Video Of French President Saying ‘ISLAMIST Terrorism’

• The Obama White House Just Censored A Foreign Leader Who Mentioned ‘Islamist Terrorism’

• White House accused of censoring Hollande saying ‘Islamist terror’

• White House accused of censoring French president mentioning ‘Islamist terrorism’

• Nur Jazlan: Too much film censorship bad for society

• Excessive film censorship will make Malaysians narrow-minded, deputy minister says

• Non-Muslim religious authorities can boost movie industry

• Too much movie censorship not good for society: Nur Jazlan

Privacy/Surveillance

• Oculus Rift has some shady stuff in their terms & privacy policy

  Shocker, the Facebook owned Oculus Rift VR device has some pretty concerning stuff in its terms and conditions.

  Starting note: I’m really not surprised by any of this since Facebook own it, but it’s still not good.

• We’ve streamlined the fight against Big Brother!

  You’ll now receive private StartPage search results on Ixquick.com. We’ve merged our two search engines so we can focus on fighting Big Brother, rather than maintaining two different brands.

  StartPage by Ixquick gives you actual Google search results with the full privacy guarantees of Ixquick. Google never sees you – and, of course, neither do we.

• Who, What, Where, and Why: The FBI/NSA Mass Surveillance Collaboration

  Dragnet surveillance: Need to make a bust? Doesn’t matter for what. Just listen in!

  That pretty much sums up what could soon become the status quo for law enforcement in America.

  Executive action by the Obama administration is expected to authorize direct sharing of information collected by the NSA with the FBI. In other words, the FBI will be able to directly access unfiltered streams of NSA data. It will basically allow the NSA to spy for local cops.

• Senator: let’s fix “third-party doctrine” that enabled NSA mass snooping

  This past week hundreds of lawyers, technologists, journalists, activists, and others from around the globe descended upon a university conference center to try to figure out the state of digital rights in 2016. The conference, appropriately dubbed “RightsCon,” featured many notable speakers, including Edward Snowden via video-conference, but relatively few from those inside government.

• Rise of Ad Blocking Is the Ad Industry’s Fault, Says Outgoing FTC Commissioner

  A commissioner at the US Federal Trade Commission who is leaving the agency after six years of working on consumer privacy issues has some critical words for the ad industry.

  Speaking with Ad Age, departing FTC commissioner Julie Brill lamented the current state of consumer tracking and data collection on the web, linking the rampant rise of ad blockers with the ad industry’s foot-dragging and non-cooperation in the commission’s efforts to create privacy systems based on user consent.

  “We’ve seen an incredible rise in consumers taking matters into their own hands, which is precisely what I said would happen back then,” said Brill, who has tackled a host of consumer privacy issues during her tenure at the FTC.

• FBI fights back against court order demanding Tor exploit source code

  The FBI is dragging its heels on a court order which requires the agency to reveal how an exploit was used against the Tor network to find a suspected child pornography viewer and their true IP address.

  US law enforcement says that revealing the source code of the Tor exploit, used to infiltrate the surveillance-thwarting network, is not necessary to the case, while the judge behind the order, Robert Bryan, considers it a “fair question” to ask how the defendant was caught.

  Jay Michaud, a school administrator from Vancouver, Washington, is the focus of the criminal case. Michaud was arrested on charges of downloading child pornography in July, 2015.

Civil Rights/Policing

• How many H-1B workers are female? U.S. won’t say

  When the U.S. begins accepting applications for new H-1B skilled-worker visas today, we can be certain that tech workers from India will make up a large portion of the requests.

  What we probably won’t know, though, is how many of those applicants are female.

  While program data shows which job categories, countries and companies are awarded the most visas, the federal government says it is not tracking applicants’ gender — although the question is asked on the visa application form. The U.S. begins accepting H-1B visa applications on April 1 for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

  The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) will not release the gender data. It has rejected a Senate request for the information, as well as public records requests from the IEEE-USA and Computerworld.

• Fordham 2016: Without disclosure mechanisms or criminal sanctions is the EU Trade Secrets Directive a poor cousin to US trade secrets law?

  On the first, the draft DTSA included language taken directly from the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, allowing judges to issue injunctions against “threatened” misappropriation. Opponents expressed concern that this might be used by federal courts to apply the so-called “inevitable disclosure doctrine” to prevent employees from moving to a competitive job simply because they knew too much. The ultimate solution to this concern was specific and narrow: in concluding the existence of a “threat,” courts had to have evidence of untrustworthy behavior and could not rely simply on what someone knows. The DTSA whistleblower provision is similarly specific and narrow, providing immunity to individuals who reveal confidential information about wrongdoing, but only for communication in confidence to law enforcement officials. The EU Trade Secrets Directive is of course a step forward in European harmonization of definitions and remedies, but it mostly re-states the language and standards already required by TRIPs. It does add provisions covering confidentiality of information in judicial proceedings, but there is a requirement that at least one party representative always be given access, so the common U.S. practice of “attorneys eyes only” protective orders appears to be unavailable under the EU Trade Secrets Directive. In addition, the Directive does not require countries to provide criminal remedies, and it fails to address the fundamental challenge of every trade secret case: how can the trade secret owner get access to information to prove the misappropriation? This probably reflects the tension between common law and civil law systems, but the need is real. James is even more concerned about the broad and undefined “exceptions” of the Directive, allowing the use or disclosure of information for “exercising the right to freedom of expression” or “for the purpose of protecting a legitimate interest recognized by Union or national law.” As for whistleblowers, the exception broadly applies to any disclosure to anyone, so long as this is done “for the purpose of protecting the general public interest.” What James concludes from all of this is that the U.S. remains the leading jurisdiction in meeting customer needs and expectations for the protection of trade secrets. With the EU Trade Secrets Directive, we will need to wait for rulings from the CJEU to see whether the exceptions will present serious problems for trade secret owners.

• Saudi Arabia executions reach record high as beheadings set to double this year

  Saudi Arabia has already executed 82 people this year and is on course to behead twice as many prisoners as it did in 2015, according to new statistics compiled by a leading human rights organisation likely to raise fresh concerns about the UK’s close ties to the Kingdom.

  The British Government has been urged to do more to put pressure on its Gulf allies to halt the bloodshed in light of the figures, which would see the total death toll in Saudi Arabia reach a record high of more than 320 by the end of the year if the current rate is maintained.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Reclaiming the Web

  Self hosting does not mean getting webspace with a provider. This is not enough. There are at least two serious options available to us that will allow us to be self-hosting we require. Running a Raspberry Pi plugged into your home router or hiring a droplet from Digitial Ocean. Both these offer a chance to both serve out your pages and also run software to pull in other content.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Perpetual image rights for the good: the proposed Dutch Cruyff provision

    As UK-based readers will know, in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 there is a peculiar provision [s301] that provides the trustees of London pediatric Great Ormond Street Hospital with a (perpetual) right to a royalty in respect of the public performance, commercial publication or communication to the public of Sir James Matthew Barrie’s Peter Pan, as well as any adaptation thereof, notwithstanding that – technically speaking – copyright in that work expired a while ago (31 December 1987).

    Now something similar to the Peter Pan provision under UK law is being advanced in The Netherlands, though the proposal has to do with image rights (or portrait right) rather than copyright.

  • Digital Rights Groups: DMCA Reform Should Target Takedown Abuse, Errors

    Advocacy groups supporting digital rights and access online joined rights holders and artists in calling for reform to the United States law intended to balance copyright protection with the free flow of information on the internet. But the advocacy groups say the problem may be rights holders’ improper takedowns of online content and errors in the system.

    At issue is the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which is being reviewed for reforms. Stakeholders submitted comments on the reform (focused on DMCA Section 512) by the 1 April deadline.

    Rights holders, artists and managers called for the DMCA protections to be made stronger as the “notice-and-takedown procedure is not working (IPW, North American Policy, 1 April 2016).

  • Rightscorp Plans to Hijack Pirates’ Browsers Until a Fine is Paid

    Anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp says that it’s working on a new method to extract cash settlements from suspected Internet pirates. The company says new technology will lock users’ browsers and prevent Internet access until they pay a fine. To encourage ISPs to play along, Rightscorp says the system could help to limit their copyright liability.

  • Copyright Troll Partner Threatens to Report Blogger to the Police

    A company assisting US-based copyright troll outfit TCYK LLC has just threatened to report a blogger to the police. Joe Hickster, an anti-troll activist who has helped dozens of wrongfully accused individuals avoid paying settlement fees, was threatened after describing troll services company Hatton and Berkeley as being involved in a smoke-and-mirrors operation.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

An Introduction to Linux Distributions

What this means for you is that even though Linux is Linux, not all distributions are interchangeable. If you’re using one distribution and want to switch to another, you can’t just flip a switch. Instead, you would need to completely install the new distribution. If you’re running one distribution and want a piece of software that’s in the repositories of another, you can’t just connect to another repository. And if you find a software package for one distribution online, you can’t necessarily install it on your system. Different distributions might look the same, but there are technical differences between them that prevent them from being completely interchangeable with each other. Distributions are ecosystems. The big advantage of Linux is that it’s not a closed ecosystem. There’s a lot of choice and flexibility in it, so if you don’t like the default music player chosen by your distribution, it’s trivial to remove it and choose the one you like. And if a piece of software you want isn’t in the repositories, there’s usually a way to install it.

Desktop

• IBM ThinkPad X40 Tour [Ed: Puppy Linux.]

Server

• Why Google Will Dominate Cloud Computing

  Google Cloud Platform is running behind in the battle for cloud market share, yet recent changes will accelerate GCP’s fortunes.

• Containers Are Entering the Mainstream

  Container technologies, like the white-hot Docker platform, are quickly becoming the norm among enterprise IT environments according to a new study by the Web server and application specialists at NGINX.

• Here’s What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe

  Connor Krukosky is an 18 year old college student with a hobby of collecting vintage computers. One day, he decided to buy his own mainframe…an IBM z890. This is his story.

• CoreOS Linux Hits Day 1000

  This past weekend we shipped CoreOS 1,000. Each release version number is a count of the days since the CoreOS Epoch, July 1, 2013. Sunday’s release marks 1,000 days of CoreOS Linux.

  We started CoreOS with the mission to secure the infrastructure that powers the Internet. Like Chrome made the front-end of the Internet more secure by bringing automatic updates to the Web browser, CoreOS Linux made the back-end of the Internet more secure by delivering automatic updates to servers and clusters. Since common practice is to set up a server and never touch it again, we believe the only way to secure the Internet is to provide automatic software updates to the server.

Kernel Space

• A Stable Linux Kernel API/ABI? “The Most Insane Proposal” For Linux Development

  For some lighthearted weekend reading and sure to make for some interesting discussions in the forums is what was volleyed today onto the kernel mailing list: “The most insane proposal in regard to the Linux kernel development.” It’s about shaking up the way the Linux kernel development happens, but almost surely the proposal won’t end up resulting in changes.

  The proposal was sent out this morning by Artem Tashkinov who from the Linux kernel Git logs has contributed to the upstream Linux kernel just in the form of reporting issues and testing patches.

• Linux Kernel 3.2.79 LTS Out Now with Small s390, x86, and JFFS2 Improvements

  Linux kernel developer Ben Hutchings announced the release and immediate availability for download of the seventy-ninth maintenance release in the Linux 3.2 LTS kernel series.

• New syscall: leftpad()

• Graphics Stack

  • RadeonSI OpenGL Compute Shader Patches Published

  • Lima Driver Code Sees First Commits In Years

    The commits were to limadriver-ng, but before getting too excited, the latest changes were just some mundane tweaks. With the latest two pull requests, it’s just build fixes and a fix for adjusting the Lima dump path.

  • CSS: Revolutionizing the Appearance of the WWW

    Upon further inspection of the original Compiz code and the default configuration, resize is blocked from triggering the effect. Applying this to the updated effect code resolved the issue for the time being.

    As a bonus, a small issue encountered during the very early stages of the project was the velocity from the initial placement of the window creating some even more interesting animations:

  • OpenChrome Version 0.4.0 is almost ready

  • Mesa 11.2.0 release candidate 4

  • Initial support for ARM Mali Display Processors

  • Collaboration on standard Wayland protocol extensions

    It’s almost the Year of Wayland on the Desktop(tm), and I have reached out to each of the projects this message is addressed to (GNOME, Kwin, and wayland-devel) to collaborate on some shared protocol extensions for doing a handful of common tasks such as display configuration and taking screenshots. Life will be much easier for projects like ffmpeg and imagemagick if they don’t have to implement compositor-specific code for capturing the screen!

  • Wobbly Windows Support & Other Post-Processing Effects For Wayland

    Samsung developers have been working on implementing client-side post processing effects for Wayland. This is to achieve similar effects like “wobbly windows” as were common to the Linux desktop going back many years with AIGLX / Compiz / Beryl.

    Samsung’s Derek Foreman and Mike Blumenkrantz have been working on a “Wayland Wobbly Windows” protocol that exposes when clients are being moved and when they’re being dragged in order to implement different graphical effects.

Applications

• NetworkManager 1.0.12 brings a couple of fixes

  It’s quite some time since we’ve done an update to the 1.0.x version. As it matures, we’re busy getting the 1.2.x tree ready for release. Nevertheless, fixes waiting to be delivered have accumulated over the time, so we’re releasing them now.

• Simplenote Text Editor Now Available for GNU/Linux & Windows

  Simplenote is a minimalist looking and a versatile syncing text editor that was only available for Mac OS previously. Not anymore though, because Simplenote developers have just released a new version finally enabling the application to natively run on both Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux operating systems.

• Simplenote’s Syncing Plain Text Editor Is Now Available for Windows and Linux

• Simplenote for Windows and Linux

• Simplenote Finally Has an Official Linux App

  One of the most popular note-taking apps on iOS is now available for Linux desktops.

  Simplenote, developed by WordPress makers Automattic, lands on Linux and Windows 10 through the flexible combo of React and Electron.

  If you know the name ‘Electron’ but can’t quite place it, it might be because we’ve recently featured a bunch of other awesome Linux apps that use it.

• Internet Messengers lead the way of FOSS to the end users

  The year 2016 may become pivotal in the world of open source.
  It is no longer a secret that many “backbone” systems of the world work on open source products. But a “regular” user, Joe Blogs, is not so familiar with Free Open Source Software.
  This is changing. Internet messengers take a lead here.

• 6 Best PDF Document Viewers for Linux Systems

  …in this series we will introduce you most famous open source tools for Linux systems.

• LabPlot 2.2.0 released

  We are happy to announce the next release of LabPlot. You can download the source code of the KDE4Libs-based version of LabPlot here. For the KF5-version of LabPlot use this link.

  The main new feature of this release is a new tool that allows you to easily extract data from image files – Datapicker. This tool was contributed by Ankit Wagadre during GSoC2015, s.a. his final report, who continued to work on this tool even after the summer program was over.

• Asciinema 1.2.0 Is Probably The Most Awesome Software For Sharing Terminal Sessions

• Video Editor `OpenShot` 2.0.7 (Beta 4) Released, Adds Universal Linux AppImage Downloads

• OpenShot 2.0.x Crowd Funded Video Editor Available for Ubuntu/Linux Mint

  OpenShot video editor is an open-source video editor for Linux but also available for Windows and Mac, it is free and released under GNU GPL 3 license. Using OpenShot video editor you can create a film with your videos, photos, and audio tracks that you have always thought of. It lets you add transitions, effects, and sub-titles, and you can export to DVD, YouTube, Video, and many other common formats. OpenShot is written primarily in Python, with a GTK+ interface, and uses the MLT framework, FFmpeg, and Blender to power many of the advanced features. After a successful Kickstarter campaign of OpenShot we have seen that it reached to 2.0 version in recent past and made tremendous improvement. Recently developers released a new update 2.0.7 beta-4, currently main PPA doesn’t have this version but testing PPA, hopefully the main PPA will be updated soon.

• 3 Best Evernote Alternatives With Official Linux Clients

  Evernote is very popular note taking application allows to create, edit and delete notes from their web based application as well as Evernote client app available for Windows, Mac and all major mobile platforms. Sadly Evernote does not provide any client app for Linux. There are some unofficial clients for Evernote such as Everpad. But there are always some issues with such unofficial clients. In this article, I have come up with the list of 3 Evernote alternatives that provide all note taking features with Linux client to sync notes right from your Linux desktop.

• Discourse 1.5 Released!

  We’re proud to announce that today marks the release of Discourse 1.5!

• Proprietary

  • Skype For Linux: Dead? Or Just Resting? [Ed: Microsoft never added GNU/Linux support to Skype but merely inherited it when NSA/Microsoft took over, then phased it out, over time]

    Last month many users reported that Microsoft had broken the app’s ability to join calls. Two Linux enthusiasts penned the issue in a blog signed by “lots of angry Linux users.” I have contacted Microsoft numerous times over the past few weeks but it remains tight-lipped on the matter. I have a feeling Microsoft isn’t going to update Skype for Linux.

  • Vivaldi – A Modern Web Browser for Next Generation Internet Browsing

    Vivaldi is a Chromium/Blink engine based web browser with very appealing interface. The browser is tab based thus allowing user to open multiple tabs and switch between them using input devices. The browser is designed to fit all the open tabs in one windows.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to install Webasyst on CentOS

  • How to install mysql server 5.6 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS ( Xenial Xerus )

  • 10 Ubuntu / Debian Linux apt Command Examples

  • Good practices for writing shell scripts

  • How to validate JSON from the command line on Linux

  • Download Linux Wallpapers That Are Also Cheat Sheets

  • Linux Programming – sigaction() for better signal handling

  • How To: pass GPU to VM and back without X restart

  • Auto-Reply for Exim Mail Server

  • A Raspberry Pi dashcam with two cameras and a GPS

  • Building a Custom Linux Environment With Openbox

  • Linux Tools – Conky

  • Simplify Your Command-Line with APT instead of apt-get

  • Let’s Encrypt & Nginx

  • Your Linux Server: Introduction

  • USDT Probe Support in BPF/BCC

  • Dynamic Tracing Tools for Linux

  • Linux BPF/bcc Road Ahead, March 2016

  • Running Bash Commands in the Background the Right Way [Linux]

  • How to connect your LAN to Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

  • Netdata – A Real-Time Performance Monitoring Tool for Linux Systems

  • How to configure sudo for two-factor authentication using pam-radius on Ubuntu and CentOS

  • Run your own cloud: Installing OwnCloud 9 on Debian 8

  • Install GnuCash 2.6.12 on Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf

  • Install Calibre 2.54 (Open-Source E-book Management Software) on Linux

  • How To Stream Audio To A Chromecast Or DLNA / UPnP Device From Linux (Using pulseaudio-dnla)

  • Ubuntu Make 16.03 Released With Eclipse JEE And IntelliJ IDEA EAP Support, More

  • How To Get Chrome To Support Installing GNOME Shell Extensions From The GNOME Extensions Repository

  • LFCS: Monitor Linux Processes Resource Usage and Set Process Limits on a Per-User Basis – Part 14

  • How To Easily Upgrade Your Ubuntu System To Ubuntu 16.04 Beta

  • How To Install Wine 1.9.7 on Ubuntu

  • Setup Docker Hypervisor on Multi Node DVR Cluster RDO Mitaka

  • Mini-Story: Deathly Silence of Linux (after rm -rf /*)

  • syslog-trusted-timestamp – chain of trusted timestamps for your syslog

  • Installing a Linux Agent for VSTS Build Has Never Been Easier

  • Fuzzy: a many-valued logic

  • Installing and Setting Up LAMP Stack (Linux Apache MariaDB PHP) with PHP7.0 in Debian

• Games

  • Discord’s experimental Linux release, Mono relicensed under MIT, and more open gaming news

  • Valve Reports Steam Linux Usage Fell Further In March

    The Steam survey results are out for March 2016 and indicate a further reduction in the Linux gaming market-share.

    The March 2016 Steam survey results report the Linux gaming market-share at 0.85%, which is a drop of 0.06% compared to the month prior. That’s quite the drop considering that for January 2016, Steam on Linux was at 0.95%. For many months recently, the Steam Linux market-share has hovered at just under 1% and generally not seeing ~0.06% swings on a monthly basis.

  • The latest Steam Hardware Survey is out

  • Warsow 2.1 (Quake-Like Game) Has Been Released

    As you may know, Warsow is an open-source, multi-platform, first-person shooter game, being somehow similar to the good old Quake 3 game, but it provides a cartoonish look and feel.

    The latest version available is Warsow 2.1 (stable), which brings a big list of changes. For information about this release, see the official announcement.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• What’s The Difference Between GNOME, Unity And MATE?

• A brief history of visual interfaces

  The command line should be familiar to anyone who used Unix systems “back in the day.” You will also be familiar with the command line if you used the original Apple computer, or MS-DOS or any of the other DOS systems from the 1980s and early 1990s. (In 1994, I created a free software version of DOS, called FreeDOS. Many people still use FreeDOS to play classic DOS games, to run legacy business software, or to support embedded systems.)

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • PlasmaShell Sans GL

    Since Plasma 5, the main shell is powered by QtQuick, which till now brings a requirement on a working OpenGL setup. This causes problems for Plasma in situations where we can’t run OpenGL; either extremely cheap hardware, xrdc or when a user upgrades and breaks their nvidia setup (a seemingly common occurence).

  • Plasma Weather widget: code template available to add your favorite weather data provider

    Plasma 5.6 has finally seen the return of the Plasma Add-ons Weather widget, which had been missing the port from Plasma4.

  • Next Kdenlive cafés

    After our successful 4th edition of the Kdenlive café(*), we are preparing the next 2 meetings.
    If you are interested to join us to discuss the future of Kdenlive, you are welcome.

  • Touring CERN and the LHC

    During the Sprint at CERN everyone got to take a tour of the Large Hadron Collider, it was a fantastic time and a proud moment for members of the KDE community to see the massive and incredible machines which happened to have KDE software running at the controls.

  • Plasma 5 Application Widgets and Managing Your Applications with KDE Menu Edit

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Vivacious Colors Gtk Theme Suite Available in ‘Light’ and ‘Dark’ Variants

    Vivacious Colors is a new theme suite released by RAVEfinity targeting Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial. It looks similar to previous suites (Ambiance and Radiance Flat Colors) but from top to bottom the suite is written from scratch in order to make it better and faster for Cinnamon, Gnome Shell, and other desktops (the entire code base has been overhauled meaning it is much cleaner, modern and has some awesome new features and effects and visuals that Ambiance & Radiance Flat does not have.), it works fine in Unity, Xfce, Mate too.

  • GNOME 3.22 Pencils In a Release Date

    GNOME 3.22 is set to be released on September 21, 2016.

    The date is listed in the draft release schedule for the next major version of the GNOME desktop.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa – Cinnamon Installation, Review and Customization

    Linux Mint is arguably one of the easiest and most user-friendly Linux-based operating systems to come by in the Linux world; and while it might be second to Ubuntu in popularity, it remains the favorite of a large majority of Linux users around the globe.

    Why? It’s easy; Linux Mint is essentially “Ubuntu done right”. While the latter might not be bad in it’s own right, it is no news that the stability and flexibility the former offers is unmatched by Ubuntu.

  • Pisi Linux 1.2 Xfce don’t love me none

    I know what the Pisi team can do. I’ve seen it. Pardus was one of the more refreshing concepts for a long while, with its super-unique, super-friendly and frankly awesome approach to computing. That seems to be missing from Pisi 1.2 Xfce, and I want it.

    The current release seems to have lost some of the flare, that enthusiasm, and that can happen when projects change their name, missions statement and whatnot. What I see is an almost template-like attempt to have an Xfce edition, without all that fire and fervor that we’ve seen with Xubuntu and Mint. First and foremost, the hardware piece. After that, everything else. And like Cindy sings, I wanna have fun. Alas, not meant to be this time around. Looking forward to version 2.0, which is currently in the alpha stage. Hopefully, it will be good. Seeing what Pardus had done once upon a time, I’m counting on it.

• New Releases

  • NixOS 16.03 “Emu” Operating System Released with systemd 229 and Linux 4.4 LTS

    NixOS developer Domen Kožar announced the release of the NixOS 16.03 operating system, which is considered an update to the previous version, NixOS 15.09.

    Dubbed Emu, NixOS 16.03 introduces updates to most of the core components, starting with the systemd init system, which has been updated to version 229, and continuing with the Linux kernel packages, now rebased on the latest long-term support branch, version 4.4, replacing the old 3.18 kernels.

    Among other software that received updates during the six-month development cycle of the NixOS 16.03 “Emu” operating system, we can mention GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 5.3, which is a significant upgrade from the previous 4.9 release, the Glibc 2.23 library, Perl 5.22, as well as Binutils 2.26.

  • NixOS 16.03 Screenshot Tour

  • NixOS 16.03 released

• Arch Family

  • Arch Linux 2016.04.01 Is Now Available for Download with Kernel 4.4.5 LTS

    Another month has passed, and it’s already April, so the time has come for the lightweight and flexible Arch Linux operating system to get its monthly ISO respin.

  • Latest Manjaro Linux 15.12 Update Brings Linux Kernel 4.5 and KDE Plasma 5.6.1

    The Manjaro Linux development team announced the general availability of the fourteenth update pack for the Manjaro Linux 15.12 (Capella) operating system.

  • Manjaro 16.06 – second preview released

    It took us another month since our first preview to prepare this second preview of our upcoming stable release we call Daniella.

    The Xfce edition remains our flagship offering and has received the attention it deserves. Few can claim to offer such a polished, integrated and leading-edge Xfce experience. We ship Xfce 4.12 with this release of Manjaro. We mainly focused on polishing the user experience on the desktop and window manager, and on updating some components to take advantage of newly available technologies such as switching to a new theme called Maia, we already using for our KDE edition.

  • Manjaro Linux 16.06 “Daniella” Gets a Second Preview Release, Download Now

    Manjaro Project leader Philip Müller announced the immediate availability for download of the second preview release of the upcoming Manjaro Linux 16.06 “Daniella” Arch Linux-based operating system.

  • Arch Linux 2016.04.01 Has Been Released. Instructions To Keep Your System Up To Date

• OpenSUSE/SUSE

  • Uptown Funk Parody By OpenSUSE Linux team

  • Contributing to our Project – The openSUSE Project is awesome. We’re doing facinating stuff that is treading new ground in the world

• Slackware Family

  • Zenwalk 8.0 Beta 3 Arrives for Slackware Fans with LibreOffice 5.1.1, FFmpeg 3.0

    The development cycle of the Slackware-based Zenwalk 8.0 Linux kernel-based operating system continues, and its maintainers have announced the release of the third Beta build.

• Red Hat Family

  • Prestigio Nobile 150 and Centos + Compiz

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Is Now Free For Developers

  • Red Hat announces a no-cost RHEL developer subscription, Google’s Machine Learning series, and Intel wants to ease cloud deployments—SD Times digest: April 1, 2016

  • Finance

    • Lucrative Stocks in today’s market:Red Hat, Inc., (NYSE:RHT)

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 23 finally running on Lenovo G50-70! Results.

      I’m pleased that Fedora 23 runs on my G50 laptop now. It’s a good thing, and I’m pleased with the system and its behavior. Hardware compatibility is decent, but it isn’t stellar, and there’s more to be done, including better Bluetooth, better battery life, and of course, normal and sane network. C’mon! Performance and responsiveness are just okay, not as sharp as Xfce desktops, though.

      Apart from that, all the goodies we had in the original review still work. Media, smartphone support, apps, and such. Oh, I couldn’t install Gnome extensions this time, but I believe this is a temporary glitch with the online system, and not a Fedora problem. At the end of the day, Fedora comes with its mixed bag of chaos, state-of-art technology, weird issues and surprising stability, and with Gnome 3, it delivers a fair compromise between speed and aesthetics and raw functionality. No mind-splitting conclusions here, no ugly twists. Solid, dependable, just as it should be. And now, on modern technology, too. Once again, Fedora 23 proves itself, and its availability on my Lenovo box means there ought to be some great stuff coming out soon. Have fun.

    • Last week to submit your FLOCK talk!

      The Council is particularly interested in talks that address any of the current Council Objectives as well as discussions around new Objectives people would like to see. Of course, innovation happens outside of Fedora itself and we’d love to hear about that as well. If you’ve been using Fedora as a foundation for other interesting Free and Open Source software and/or community work, consider submitting a talk or workshop around it.

    • Fedora 24 Alpha released

      The Fedora 24 Alpha is here, right on schedule for our planned June final release.

• Debian Family

  • Debian 8.4 Released With Security Fixes, Other Package Updates

  • Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 “Jessie” and 7.10 “Wheezy” Officially Released

    Today, April 2, 2016, the Debian Project proudly announced the release of the Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 and Debian GNU/Linux 7.10 “Wheezy” maintenance releases for existing users.

  • Updated Debian 8: 8.4 released

    The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian 8 (codename “jessie”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • ubuntuBSD 15.10 Beta 3 Released, Brings Support for Virtual Text Consoles

        The upcoming ubuntuBSD 15.10 operating system has just received a third Beta build on the first day of April to fix a bug reported by a user in the LightDM display manager init script.

      • Ubuntu Make 16.03 Has Been Released

        As you may know, Ubuntu Developer Tools Center is an command-line, open-source tool that enables the users to easily install the main platforms for Android application development.

      • UbuCon Europe, the Very First European Ubuntu Conference, Announced for November

        Ubuntu Member José Antonio Rey was happy to announce the first ever UbuCon Europe conference for Ubuntu users and developers alike, which will take place later this year in Germany.

        As you may well be aware, Canonical revived its popular Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) conference, which they’ve killed about three years ago and replaced with an online event called Ubuntu Online Summit (abbreviated UOS), under the name UbuCon last year in October.

        The first UbuCon Summit event already took place earlier this year, between January 21-22, as part of the 14th annual Southern California Linux Expo a.k.a. SCALE 14x, which was held in Pasadena, CA, USA, but not many Ubuntu members could attend, especially those who live in Europe. As such, a team of dedicated Ubuntu members have put together the UbuCon Europe conference.

      • Ubuntu 16.04 / Unity 8 Full Screen (Staged) Mode!

      • An awkward confession and what we should do about it

        I have an awkward confession.

        At this point, we have been running Ubuntu machines for at least nine years or so, starting with Ubuntu 6.06 and moving forward from there. In all of that time, one of the things I haven’t done (and I don’t think we’ve done generally) is really dive in and learn about Debian packaging and package management. Oh sure, we can fiddle around with apt-get and a number of other superficial things, we’ve built modified preseeded install environments, and I’ve learned enough to modify existing Debian packages and rebuild them. But that’s all. That leaves vast oceans of both dpkg and APT usage that we have barely touched, plus all of the additional tools and scripts around the Debian package ecosystem (some of which have been mentioned here by commentators).

        I don’t have a good explanation for why this has happened, and in particular why I haven’t dug into Debian package (because diving into things is one of the things that I do). I can put together theories (including me not being entirely fond of Ubuntu even from the start), but it’s all just speculation and if I’m honest it’s post-facto excuses and rationalization.

Devices/Embedded

• Fair Source, April Fools’, Winbuntu review

  Today in Linux news, Matt Asay explained why Fair Source isn’t Open Source and Blogger Locutus reviewed the new Winbuntu monster. Microsoft lured Oracle’s Linux guy to Redmond and LinuxGizmos changed name and focus to Hackerboards.com. Of course, April 1 wouldn’t be the same without some April Fools’ jokes.

• This Student Built An Amazing Steam Engine-powered Raspberry Pi

  Running a Raspberry Pi doesn’t need much power and a 5V microUSB executes the job. However, a Swedish student decided to go for a more badass way to run his DIY-companion and used an actual steam engine to power his single board computer.

• RaspEX (Build 160331) Brings Kodi Installed By Default

  As you may know, RaspEX is a free and open-source distribution specially created for the Raspberry Pi 3 singleboard computer, by Arne Exton, a third party, independent developer.

  A few days ago, RaspEX Build 160331 has been released, bringing Kodi pre-installed, Wicd network manager, Mozilla Firefox as the default internet browser, SAMBA, PulseAudio and Bluetooth support, among others. The system has replaced LXDE with Kodi, but is still based on Debian 8.3 Jessie and Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf.

• RISC-V Offers Simple, Modular ISA

  The RISC-V ISA has been featured in the latest edition of the Microprocessor Report written by David Kanter of The Linley Group.

• jor1k: OpenRISC OR1K Javascript Emulator Running Linux With Network Support

• ownCloud Pi Drive

  You get a Micro usb/2A power supply, a case with a 2 TB HD, a three headed cable for internal connections, a 4GB microSD (and a useless SD adapter) with the software, an elbow HDMI adapter and a screwdriver/screws to attach the PI to the case.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Copperhead, Guardian Project and F-Droid Partner to Build Open, Verifiably Secure Mobile Ecosystem

      Three open-source projects haved joined together to announce a new partnership to create an open, verifiably secure mobile ecosystem of software, services and hardware. Led by the work of the Toronto-based CopperheadOS team on securing the core Android OS, Guardian Project and F-Droid have joined in to partner on envisioning and developing a full mobile ecosystem. The goal is to create a solution that can be verifiably trusted from the operating system, through the network and network services, all the way up to the app stores and apps themselves. Through a future planned crowdfunded and commercial offering, the partnership will provide affordable off-the-shelf solutions, including device hardware and self-hosted app and update distribution servers, for any individual and organizations looking for complete mobile stacks they can trust.

    • Announcing CopperheadOS Crowdfunding

      Copperhead Will Be Crowdfunding with Privacy Partners Guardian Project and F-Droid

    • This Video Shows How to Build an Android App for Your Arduino Project

      There are several great projects you can do with an Arduino, and if you’re just getting started, you can use other people’s code. However, as the video above shows, you can also create your own simple apps for your Arduino project using MIT App Inventor.

    • 5 Android shortcuts you’ll wish you knew all along

    • BlackBerry Falls Short in Attempt at Android-Based Revival

    • 8 of the best new and updated Android apps from March

    • Android battery problems? Google’s hidden power setting will extend your battery life by 30%

    • The Windows 10 Anniversary Update can mirror Android notifications

    • How to create a new user account on Android

    • Turn your old Android device into a security camera

    • What Can Android Learn from its Competition?

    • Top Android news of the week: Samsung Assist, Office gets better, Google Wallet cards to go away

    • Android malware doubled in 2015, Media Server took the most hit: Report

Crowdsourcing code: why startups are turning to open-source software

A startup wants a mobile menu for their new app. It’s going to cost them time and money to build one from scratch, so they search on Google to find one that is ready-made, a template if you will.

It is because of publicly available ‘open-source software’ (OSS) that finding such a component is relatively easy. Simply put, OSS is when a product, and the source code that accompanies it, is made available for others to use and even change, or add on to, as they see fit.

Events

• Tickets are live for foss-north

  I’ve written about foss-north earlier. From now, tickets are available. What we are looking at is a free and open source one day conference in Gothenburg. Great speakers already now, and the CfP isn’t even closed.

• Talking at FOSSASIA 2016 in Singapore

  This year I was able to attend this year’s FOSSASIA in Singapore. It’s quite a decently sized event with more than 150 speakers and more than 1000 people attending. Given the number of speakers you can infer that there was an insane number of talks in the two and a half day of the conference. I’ve seen recordings being made so I would expect those to show up at some stage, but I don’t have any details. The atmosphere was very friendly and the venue a-maze-ing. By that I mean that it was a fantastic and huge maze. We were hosted in Singapore’s Science Museum which exhibits various things around biology, physics, chemistry, and much more. It is a rather large building in which it was easy to get lost. But it was great being among those sciency exhibits and to exchange ideas and thoughts. Sometimes, we could see an experiment being made as a show to the kids visiting the museum. These shows included a Tesla coil or a fire tornado. Quite impressive.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox and cookie micromanagement

    For most of its existence, Firefox has provided users with the ability to manage how cookies are stored with a rather high degree of granularity: users can block specific cookies, create site-wide exceptions to the accept/block policy, and configure behavior for third-party cookies. Up until Firefox 44, there was an additional option as well, one that allowed users to choose the expiration point (that is, expiring them at the end of the session or letting them persist) for every cookie they encounter. That option was removed in the Firefox 44 release, which has made some users rather unhappy.

    The option in question was found in the Privacy preferences screen, labeled “Ask me every time” on the “Keep until:” selector. When enabled, the option raised a dialog box asking the user to accept or reject each cookie encountered, with a “accept for this session only” choice provided. Removing the option was proposed in 2010, although the patch to perform the removal did not land until 2015. It was released in Firefox 44 in January 2016.

  • How Safe Browsing works in Firefox

    If you want to learn more about how Safe Browsing works in Firefox, you can find all of the technical details on the Safe Browsing and Application Reputation pages of the Mozilla wiki or you can ask questions on our mailing list.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Testing ODF on Document Freedom Day

  Because OpenDocument Format (ODF) is the open standard that I am involved in most, I want to write a few words about it.

  Since last autumn, I’m working on the ODF standard for the Dutch government. Supporting standards in government is an important task: new software comes and goes, but documents, once created, should be readable and reusable into the future.

• LibreOffice Logic

  When you switch to LibreOffice, you can usually assume that all the features available in other office suites are available. They might have a slightly different name, or be placed in another menu, but the basic functionality should be the same in both. If you make a note of the features you use most often, and systematically learn how to do each one, you can often cope with the transition.

BSD

• Book Review: FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystem

  A filesystem is nothing but the data structures that an operating system uses to keep track of files on a disk. The filesystem stores pictures, music, videos, accounting data and more. The different operating system comes with various filesystems. One may need to move data between FreeBSD and other Unix-like systems like OS X or Linux based devices. Knowing all about filesystem help us to archive or move data between system. The “FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystem” is an essential, practical and well-written book.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Inessential weirdnesses in free software

  I’ll discuss aspects of our behavior and jargon that stop or slow down some new users and contributors in free software, so that in outreach efforts, we can be better at bridging the gap. These include git’s terrible UI, our in-person conference structures, and widespread scorn of and dismissiveness towards team sports, Top 40 music, patriotism, religion, small talk, and Microsoft Windows. In getting rid of unnecessary barriers, we need to watch out for disrespectful oversimplification, so I’ll outline ways you can know if one of our weirdnesses is necessary. And I’ll talk about how to mitigate the effects of an inessential weirdness in your outreach efforts.

• PSPP 0.10.1 has been released

  I’m very pleased to announce the release of a new version of GNU PSPP. PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS.

Public Services/Government

• Is Source Code covered by the PSI Directive?

  Concerning France, the court decision may have a considerable impact, as the source code of any software produced by or for the various national or local administrations becomes legally “libre” or open source under no or very permissive conditions. Therefore the interest to clarify the applicable licence: when communicating it, relevant administration should then apply the EUPL or the French CeCILL, according to the 12 September 2012 prime minister Ayrault circular.

• MIT Media Lab Changes Software Default to FLOSS*

  The MIT Media Lab is part of an academic ecosystem committed to liberal sharing of knowledge. In that spirit, I’m proud to announce that we are changing our internal procedures to encourage more free and open-source software.

Licensing/Legal

• BMW *are* complying with the GPL

  Earlier this month I accidentally kicked off a minor kerfuffle over whether BMW was respecting the GPL. Their i3 car contains a huge amount of Open Source Software and there was some confusion as to BMW’s compliance with the licence terms.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Open Platform: Open Systems, Open Source, Open APIs… Open Opportunities?

  The panacea of true data optionality and portability is technically possible today, but is being held back by a range of factors at vendors and end-user firms. Andrew Miller, managing director of consultancy Net Effect, highlights the key gating factors and encourages us to take a leap of faith that will deliver benefits for all.

• Strontiium-90 and a Raspberry Pi to teach college students, Thyrosim for thyroid treatment, and more news

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Open Source Trend Overtakes CPUs

    Open source may be ready to consume a category of products that has thus far eluded the trend: microprocessors.

    Researchers at ETH Zurich and the University of Bologna have collaborated on the development of an open source microprocessor designed specifically for use in wearable devices and other small Internet of Things (IoT) things.

Programming/Development

• Atom reaches one million active users

  We have reached an exciting milestone: one million people have launched some version of Atom in the last month. That’s three times the number of active users we had under a year ago at the one-year anniversary of Atom becoming completely open-source.

• Here’s A New Programming Language That Talks To Living Cells And DNA

  The genius minds at MIT have created a new system that uses a programming language to design complex DNA circuits and control the living cells. As a part of their research, MIT researchers have programmed 60 circuits with a variety of functions.

• JavaScripthon — A Simple Python To ES6 JavaScript Translator

  So many, Python and JavaScript seem like similar languages — object oriented, functional hybrid, dynamically typed and a rich library. Keeping the same in mind, probably, a coder has created a small and simple Python to JavaScript translator.

Here’s What Happened to Apple’s Third Co-Founder

“WHEREAS,” it read, “Mr. Stephen G. Wozniak (hereinafter referred to as WOZNIAK), Mr. Steven P. Jobs (hereinafter referred to as JOBS), and Mr. Ronald G. Wayne (hereinafter referred to as WAYNE), all residents of the County of Santa Clara, State of California, have mutually agreed to the formation of a company to be specifically organized for the manufacture and marketing of computer devices, components, and related material, said company to be organized under the fictitious name of APPLE COMPUTER COMPANY.”

Can Premier League leaders Leicester City hold their nerve? [Ed: off topic]

It was a year ago, on 4 April 2015, when the great recovery to survival started as bottom-of-the-table Leicester beat West Ham United 2-1. With the pressure to avoid relegation at its height, Leicester won seven of their last nine games to stay up.

Southampton boss: Jamie Vardy’s rise from non-league to Leicester and England is crazy

Vardy has helped push Leicester City to the verge of the Premier League title, and forced his way into England’s Euro 2016 reckoning just four years after plying his trade in non-league football.

Defence/Aggression

• The Libyan Enterprise: Hillary’s Imperial Massacre

  In fact two documents strongly backed Qaddafi on this issue. The first was a secret cable to the State Department from the US embassy in Tripoli in 2008, part of the Wikileaks trove, entitled “Extremism in Eastern Libya,” which revealed that this area was rife with anti-American, pro-jihad sentiment.

  [...]

  By October of that year, Muammar Qaddafi was dead and stuffed in a meat locker. Denied post mortem imagery of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, the world was presented with photographs of Qaddafi, dispatched with a bullet to the head after being wounded by NATO’s ground troops outside Sirte.

• Cleaning Up Hillary’s Libyan Mess

  U.S. officials are pushing a dubious new scheme to “unify” a shattered Libya, but the political risk at home is that voters will finally realize Hillary Clinton’s responsibility for the mess, writes Robert Parry.

• Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit Neglects 98 Percent of the World’s Bomb-Ready Uranium

  But critics have pointed out that the summits have only focused on highly enriched uranium in civilian possession, which, according to the Department of Energy, only accounts for 2 to 3 percent of the world’s supply. That small percentage is used mostly by academics for research and medical isotope production.

  The remaining 97 to 98 percent is held in military stockpiles, which the security summits have largely ignored. Countries keep the safeguards on these stockpiles secret, and military material falls outside the scope of international security agreements.

• A ‘Silent Coup’ for Brazil?

  Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments are on the defensive as U.S.-backed political movements employ “silent coup” tactics to discredit and remove troublesome leaders, writes Ted Snider.

• Iraq is Broke. You Have to Pay for It.

  The next time a candidate or reporter asks during a debate about education or healthcare “But how are you going to pay for that?” I would like the person being questioned to respond “The same way we find money to pay for Iraq.”

  So maybe it would just be better for Flint, Michigan to claim it is under attack by ISIS instead of just being poisoned because no one has the money to fix America’s infrastructure.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• ‘I am so sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me’: Clinton snaps at Greenpeace activist

  A question about fossil-fuel-industry donations to her campaign unleashed a rare flash of anger from Hillary Clinton on the rope line in New York on Thursday.

  The moment was recorded by an activist, whom Greenpeace identified as Eva Resnick-Day, who sought to pressure Clinton about the roughly hundreds of thousands of dollars her campaign has received from individuals with ties to fossil-fuel industries.

• Unilever ditches major palm oil trader after its sustainability certification is revoked

  Unilever has cancelled its contracts with the IOI Group, after the major Malaysian palm oil trader was suspended by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) for destroying forests and peatlands in Indonesia.

  The IOI Group – whose customers include Kellogg’s and Mars – is one of the largest companies to have lost RSPO certification since the roundtable was formed in 2004.

  The decision will be seen as a test of consumer company policies on responsible sourcing of palm oil, which commit major brands to excluding suppliers responsible for deforestation and peatland drainage.

• The Danger of a Runaway Antarctica

  The startling new finding was published Wednesday in the journal Nature by two experts in ice-sheet behavior: Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and David Pollard of Pennsylvania State University. It paints a grimmer picture than the one presented only three years ago by a United Nations panel that forecast a maximum sea level rise of three feet by 2100. But that projection assumed only a minimal contribution from the massive ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. And things could get worse in the centuries to come — the melting from Antarctica alone, not counting other factors like thermal expansion, could cause the seas to rise by nearly 50 feet by 2500, drowning many cities.

• Saudi Arabia Plans $2 Trillion Megafund for Post-Oil Era: Deputy Crown Prince

  Saudi Arabia is getting ready for the twilight of the oil age by creating the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund for the kingdom’s most prized assets.

  Over a five-hour conversation, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman laid out his vision for the Public Investment Fund, which will eventually control more than $2 trillion and help wean the kingdom off oil. As part of that strategy, the prince said Saudi will sell shares in Aramco’s parent company and transform the oil giant into an industrial conglomerate. The initial public offering could happen as soon as next year, with the country currently planning to sell less than 5 percent.

• Norway Is Killing Whales To Feed Animals Raised For Fur

  Norway has killed more whales than any other nation over the past four years, and some of that meat has become animal feed for the Norwegian fur industry, according to new documents unveiled by two environmental organizations.

  Revelations from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) come as Norway opened up its whaling season Friday, and a week after Japan reported killing more than 300 minke whales — including pregnant females — for what it labeled as research. Now, groups are once again calling for an end to whaling — though this time the attention is placed on Norway, which along with Iceland and Japan, ignores a 30-year-old international moratorium on whale hunting.

• With Coal Crashing, Will Polluted Communities Be Left Holding the Bag?

  Federal law requires coal companies to clean up and reclaim toxic mining sites. But what happens when a coal company’s gone bankrupt?

• Flesh Vs Fossil: Let’s shut down the UK’s largest opencast coal mine in May

  2016 has got off to an even worse start. The United States’ second largest coal company – Arch Coal –­ filed for bankruptcy. The Chinese government announced the closure of more than 5,000 coal mines, with 1,000 to go this year. Almost half the UK’s coal power stations have announced closure in the last 12 months.

• Did Sanders Lie About Clinton’s Oil Money? NPR Factchecker Can’t Be Bothered to Check

  So the factchecker’s job is to determine whether Clinton is right to say that she just gets money from people who work for fossil fuel companies, and that the Sanders campaign is lying about this, or whether the Sanders campaign is actually correct in saying that she relies heavily on funds from fossil-fuel lobbyists—right?

  See, that’s why you don’t have a job at NPR.

• Bernie Sanders Took Money From the Fossil Fuel Lobby, Too — Just Not Much

  The Bernie Sanders campaign countered by pointing to a Greenpeace tally that says she has collected “$1,259,280 in bundled and direct donations from lobbyists currently registered as lobbying for the fossil fuel industry.”

  Additionally, Greenpeace found “$3,250,000 in donations from large donors connected to the fossil fuel industry to Priorities Action USA,” the main Super PAC backing Clinton’s campaign.

• Flint Moves to Sue Michigan Over Water Contamination Fallout

  Flint has made moves to sue the state of Michigan, citing “grossly negligent oversight” that led to the city’s ongoing water contamination crisis.

  The city filed a notice of intent to sue with the Court of Claims on March 24, and it was reported on by various Michigan news outlets on Friday.

  It names the state, the Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), and four MDEQ employees as defendants.

  Flint mayor Karen Weaver wrote in the notice of intention to file claim, which the Flint Journal has posted here (pdf), that “the damage to the water system infrastructure caused by the MDEQ employees’ grossly negligent oversight is irreversible.”

Finance

• Why a 250% Steel Tariff is Fair

• This Obama Endorsement Is a Sign Pro-Corporate Democrats Are Getting Nervous

  PRESIDENT OBAMA on Monday endorsed Debbie Wasserman Schultz, his handpicked Democratic National Committee chair, in her congressional race. What’s stunning about that is that Obama felt the need to endorse a six-term congresswoman running in a heavily Democratic district at all.

• After WikiLeaks Revelation, Greece Asks I.M.F. to Clarify Bailout Plan

  Greece called on the International Monetary Fund on Saturday to explain whether it was seeking to usher Athens toward bankruptcy ahead of a pivotal referendum in June on Britain’s membership in Europe. Greece’s comments came after I.M.F. officials raised questions in a private discussion published by WikiLeaks about what it would take to get Greece’s creditors to agree to debt relief.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• You’re not a farm animal: A plea to journalists to release themselves from Trump’s press pens

  Covering the Trump campaign on a daily basis today appears to be a rather miserable media existence. Reporters are threatened by staffers, and the Trump communications team seems to be utterly nonresponsive to media inquires. (“There is no Trump press operation,” one reporter told Slate.)

• “It’s a Revolution”: Actress Rosario Dawson on Why She Supports Sanders for President Over Clinton

  As former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders campaign in New York ahead of the state’s primary later this month, more than 16,000 people gathered in St. Mary’s Park in the South Bronx for a Sanders rally on Thursday. He spoke alongside film director Spike Lee and actress and activist Rosario Dawson, known for her roles in “Kids” and many other films, including “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.” Amy Goodman caught up with Dawson after the rally to discuss why she supports Bernie Sanders. “It’s a revolution,” Dawson says, noting the corporate media has failed to fairly cover his platform. She also discusses the rise of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump. “He isn’t the problem,” she says. “There is a lot of stuff been going on for many years that has gotten out of control.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• German Television Pulls Satire Mocking Turkey’s Erdogan

  GERMANY’S STATE BROADCASTER, ZDF, apologized on Friday for what it called satire that had crossed the line into slander and removed video of a comedian reading an obscene poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from its website and YouTube channel.

  The poem, which was read by the German satirist Jan Böhmermann on Thursday’s edition of his late-night show “Neo Magazin Royale,” described Erdogan in vile, obscene terms — even comparing him, at one stage, to Josef Fritzl, an Austrian man who fathered seven children with a daughter he held in a cellar for 24 years — but the text was presented as part of a comic demonstration of the difference between satire and slander.

• For Israel’s Sake The Israel Lobby Must Be Held To Account

  It was ten years ago that the London Review of Books published an article on the Israel Lobby by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, distinguished scholars at two of America’s top universities. The following year the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux found the courage to publish The Israel Lobby, a book with 357 overwhelmingly 5 star amazon.com reviews.

  The Israel Lobby is an understated critique of the enomous influence that the tiny state of Israel, which consists of land stolen by fire and sword from the helpless Palestinians, exercises over United States foreign policy. The crazed Israel Lobby went berserk. Mearsheimer and Walt were demonized as anti-semetics who wanted to bring back Hitler.

  Also in 2006 former President Jimmy Carter’s book, Peace Not Apartheid, was published by Simon & Schuster and became a New York Times bestseller with 846 overwhelmingly 5 star amazon.com reviews. Carter, who as US president did his best to bring Israel and Palestine to a settlement, truthrully explained that Israel was the barrier to a settlement. The Israel Lobby demonized Carter as an anti-semite, and the Jews on the board of the Carter Center resigned.

• Espousing freedom of speech, and practising censorship

  Have you noticed how people you are eager to meet often prove to be disillusioning? Perhaps anticipation builds up huge expectations but they end up less than they originally seemed. Rather than their perceived star qualities it’s their faults and flaws you notice. Consequently, heroes end up with feet of clay.

• Bonnici wants criminal libel removed, but censorship law comes first

  Justice minister says government is discussing the removal of criminal libel but the pending censorship and freedom of expression law takes precedence

• Criminal libel should have been abolished in 2011 – Law Commissioner Franco Debono

  Law Commissioner Franco Debono yesterday told The Malta Independent that the whole criminal libel controversy involving shadow Justice Minister Jason Azzopardi could have been avoided if criminal libel was abolished in 2011, as he had proposed in a private members bill.

  The ‘controversy’ that Dr Debono spoke of is the 6 April criminal libel case against Shadow Minister for Justice, Dr Jason Azzopardi which was instituted through a criminal complaint by former police Commissioner Peter Paul Zammit.

• Busuttil insists police ‘in Muscat’s grip’ over Azzopardi arraignment

  Opposition leader Simon Busuttil insisted that the police, who are instituting criminal defamation charges against PN MP Jason Azzopardi, are “state apparatus in the grip of Joseph Muscat”.

  Busuttil told MaltaToday that criminal defamation is a perfectly acceptable legal tool unless “manipulated by government to intimidate the Opposition” and that Opposition MPs are only charged in court with criminal defamation in banana republics and dictatorial regimes.

• Some prominent Chinese are chafing against censorship

  The editor-in-chief of China’s Global Times, a tabloid closely tied to the Communist Party and known for its often-rabid nationalism, isn’t exactly the kind of guy you’d expect to be calling publicly for more freedom of speech and less censorship.

• China Party journal denounces critics seeking to discredit anti-graft drive

  A top magazine of China’s ruling Communist Party lashed out at critics of its ongoing anti-corruption campaign, saying foreign media and individuals from home and abroad were intentionally trying to discredit the effort as a political “power struggle”.

  Chinese President Xi Jinping has pursued a sweeping campaign to root out corruption since assuming power about three years ago, and has promised to strike hard at both senior and low-level officials, the “tigers” and “flies”.

  Nonetheless, there has been persistent speculation that the graft crackdown is also about Xi taking down his rivals.

• It’s time for America’s lawyers to come to the aid of their Chinese counterparts

  Last summer, the Chinese Communist Party regime began a nationwide crackdown on human rights activists and attorneys. It’s time that the American Bar Association, the largest attorneys organization in the world’s most powerful democracy, took a clear, unequivocal stand on the crackdown in defense of universal values and the rule of law.

• China’s tight control of speech

• Norwegian band Slutface change name to Sløtface due to ‘social media censorship’

• Slutface change name to Sløtface due to “social media censorship”

• Slutface changes name to SLØTFACE, shares new single “Sponge State” — listen

Privacy/Surveillance

• Bringing Signal to the desktop

  The non-profit Open Whisper Systems (OWS) organization is best known for its smartphone apps: first TextSecure and, more recently, Signal. Lately, however, the project started branching out by developing a desktop front-end for Signal, thus allowing users to take advantage of verifiable, end-to-end encryption for instant messages and group chats from the comfort of a full-size keyboard. The desktop version remains linked to the smartphone edition, although opinions certainly may vary as to whether that constitutes a plus or a minus.

  TextSecure was released as open-source software in 2011, followed by an encrypted voice-calling app named RedPhone in 2012. OWS then merged the functionality into a single iOS app called Signal in March 2015; the Android version was released in November of the same year. Signal Desktop was announced in December, via a beta program for which potential users had to sign up and wait to receive an invitation. As with all of OWS’s projects, of course, the source code for Signal Desktop is available on GitHub.

• Decentraleyes Addon Fixes Browser Privacy, Circumvents CDNs

  Widespread CDN acceptance has been a security flaw that sacrifices privacy simply because it breaks web pages on anything put a text-based browser, which is a sacrifice few are willing to make for the sake of their information remaining local.

• Remember that California bill to ban the sale of encrypted phones? It just got worse

  The assemblyman, who decried Apple for “risking our national security and the safety of our kids” by using encryption, also uses an iPhone.

• RAF’s new ‘GCHQ in the sky’ spy planes which can hack enemy emails and phone calls

  Air chiefs have bought nine spy planes, each one like a flying GCHQ.

  The Boeing P-8 Poseidon is as effective at information ­gathering as the Government’s eavesdropping headquarters.

• Sure, why not? FBI agrees to unlock iPhone for Arkansas prosecutor

  The FBI, which just a few days ago was attempting to convince the country of its helplessness in the face of encrypted iPhones, has generously offered its assistance in unlocking an iPhone and iPod for a prosecutor in Arkansas, the Associated Press reports.

  TechCrunch has contacted the prosecutor’s office for details, which for the moment are thin on the ground — but the timing seems unlikely to be a coincidence. It was only Monday that the FBI announced it had successfully accessed a phone after saying for months that it couldn’t possibly do so — and that Apple was endangering national security by refusing to help.

• British Authorities Demand Encryption Keys in Case With “Huge Implications”

  BRITISH AUTHORITIES are attempting to force a man accused of hacking the U.S. government to hand over his encryption keys in a case that campaigners believe could have ramifications for journalists and activists.

  England-based Lauri Love (pictured above) was arrested in October 2013 by the U.K.’s equivalent of the FBI, the National Crime Agency, over allegations that he hacked a range of U.S. government systems between 2012 and 2013, including those of the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and NASA.

  The U.S. Justice Department is seeking the extradition of Love, claiming that he and a group of conspirators breached “thousands of networks” in total and caused millions of dollars in damages. But Love has been fighting the extradition attempt in British courts, insisting that he should be tried for the alleged offenses within the U.K. The 31-year-old, who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, has argued that he would not get a fair trial in the U.S., where his legal team says he could face a sentence of up to 99 years in jail.

• ODNI Lawyer Bob Litt Says There’s No NSA Data Sharing With Law Enforcement… If You Don’t Count The FBI, DEA, Etc.

  Just when we thought some surveillance reforms might stick, the administration announced it was expanding law enforcement access to NSA data hauls. This prompted expressions of disbelief and dismay, along with a letter from Congressional representatives demanding the NSA cease this expanded information sharing immediately.

• The Trouble with CloudFlare

  Wednesday, CloudFlare blogged that 94% of the requests it sees from Tor are “malicious.” We find that unlikely, and we’ve asked CloudFlare to provide justification to back up this claim. We suspect this figure is based on a flawed methodology by which CloudFlare labels all traffic from an IP address that has ever sent spam as “malicious.” Tor IP addresses are conduits for millions of people who are then blocked from reaching websites under CloudFlare’s system.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Video shows white cops performing roadside cavity search of black man

  For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on an investigative series about police abuse in South Carolina. I’ve found a dizzying number of cases, including illegal arrests, botched raids, fatal shootings and serious questions about how all those incidents are investigated. Many of these cases were previously unreported, or if they were reported, the initial reports were a far cry from what actually happened. The series will run at some point in the next week. But in the meantime, I want to share one particularly horrifying incident that I came across this week while researching the series.

• asha bandele and Laura Carlsen on the War on Drugs

  What this country calls a War on Drugs has never been indiscriminate in its victims. The punitive, interventionist drug policies embraced by a succession of US administrations have hit hardest in communities of color, and, in Latin America, it has been the poor, the indigenous and those outside of power that have borne the brunt of practices, nominally aimed at stopping drug-trafficking, that have only driven corruption and horrific violence.

• DOJ Reopens Asset Forfeiture Sharing Program After Temporary, Budget-Related Shutdown

  Right before the end of last year, the DOJ — facing budget cuts — announced it would be ceasing its “equitable sharing” program with local law enforcement agencies. These agencies complained loudly about the unfairness of being decoupled from the asset forfeiture money train, as this partnership often allowed them to route around more restrictive state laws.

• The feds have resumed a controversial program that lets cops take stuff and keep it

  The Justice Department has announced that it is resuming a controversial practice that allows local police departments to funnel a large portion of assets seized from citizens into their own coffers under federal law.

• ‘They Want South America Back the Way They Used to Have It’

  Mark Weisbrot: “They’ve been trying to get rid of all the left governments, really, for the whole 21st century.”

  [...]

  “In a flash, Argentina has become pro-American,” CBS’s 60 Minutes told viewers, and Leslie Stahl shared that watching Macri and his wife play with their daughter, “you can’t help but think of the Kennedys and Camelot.” US corporate media seem to concur: Macri is a pragmatist, and though they aren’t certain he can lift Argentina from what CBS called “a morass of debt, inflation and international isolation,” it’s clear we’re meant to wish him well.

• Houston Federal Marshal Tries to Snatch Camera from Citizen Journalist Who Was Assaulted by 2nd Agent

  “You’re about to go to jail for being a dumb-ass,” said a Houston Federal Agent Calderon to PINAC citizen journalist David Warden.

  Boy, was he wrong.

  The Houston Federal Court Security Agent assaulted PINAC correspondent David Warden when he lawfully recorded outside of a Federal Courthouse on its sidewalk.

• Texas Cops’ Complaint Censorship Attacks YouTube Videos of Public Officials in Public

  Texas police launched a “complaint censorship” attack on David Warden’s YouTube channel News Now Houston, claiming his videos violate their privacy.

• Houston Prosecutors Exonerate PINAC Correspondent Recording Near Shell Oil Refinery

  Texas prosecutors admitted they can’t prove their contempt of cop case “BARD” against PINAC correspondent David Warden, who recorded video near a Shell Oil Refinery on the outskirts of Houston.

  In other words, state attorneys had no way to prove that David Warden interfered with public duties of an officer last December, as charged, because BARD stands for ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ and officers couldn’t conceive of a single illegal thing Warden did while recording near the oil refinery as you can see in the legal document below.

DRM

• Fighting DRM in HTML, again

  In 2013, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) raised the ire of many in the free-software community (and elsewhere) by adopting an API that adds support for DRM modules within web content. Now, the working group that produced the API in question has come up for renewal, and a number of high-profile parties—including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Free Software Foundation (FSF)—are using the occasion to push back against the DRM camp, in hopes of regaining some of what was lost.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Awesome Stuff: Putting Nature In The Public Domain

    This week, we’ve got one standout project that seems worth highlighting here at Techdirt because of its commitment to things we all care about: cutting-edge media technology, the planet we all live on, and the public domain. Catalog.Earth is a project to use the first to capture the second and dedicate it to the third.

  • EFF to Copyright Office: Improper Content Takedowns Hurt Online Free Expression

    Safe Harbors Work for Rightsholders and Service Providers

    Washington, D.C. – Content takedowns based on unfounded copyright claims are hurting online free expression, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told the U.S. Copyright Office Friday, arguing that any reform of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) should focus on protecting Internet speech and creativity.

    EFF’s written comments were filed as part of a series of studies on the effectiveness of the DMCA, begun by the Copyright Office this year. This round of public comments focuses on Section 512, which provides a notice-and-takedown process for addressing online copyright infringement, as well as “safe harbors” for Internet services that comply.

    “One of the central questions of the study is whether the safe harbors are working as intended, and the answer is largely yes,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “The safe harbors were supposed to give rightsholders streamlined tools to police infringement, and give service providers clear rules so they could avoid liability for the potentially infringing acts of their users. Without those safe harbors, the Internet as we know it simply wouldn’t exist, and our ability to create, innovate, and share ideas would suffer.”

  • Today [Friday] is your last day to comment on Internet censorship through copyright abuse

  • Music Industry: DMCA Copyright Law is Obsolete and Harmful

    A coalition of 400 artists and various music groups including the RIAA are calling on Congress to reform existing copyright law. The DMCA is obsolete, dysfunctional and harmful, they claim, calling for stronger measures against the ongoing piracy troubles they face.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Server

• CoreOS and Intel to Meld Kubernetes, OpenStack into Single Stack

  Kubernetes just keeps heading in new directions. It started as essentially a version of Borg, which harnesses computing power from data centers into a powerful virtual machine. It has made a difference for many cloud computing deployments, and optimizes usage of container technology. Then, last year, Google handed stewardship of Kubernetes over the to Cloud Native Foundation. The CNCF, in partnership with the Linux Foundation, has helped a coalition of partners including Cisco, eBay, Huawei, IBM and Intel, advance Kubernetes’ capabilities.

  Now, CoreOS has announced a technical collaboration with Intel to deploy and manage OpenStack, open source software for building clouds, with Kubernetes, which focuses more on automating deployment, scaling, and operations of applications.

Publications

• April 2016 Issue of Linux Journal

• Linux.com Login Temporarily Frozen for New Site Launch

Kernel Space

• Linux 4.7 Will Bring Intel Color Manager, Changes Needed For Vulkan On Haswell

  While the Linux 4.6 kernel is still a number of weeks away from being released with the merge window only having recently closed, the Intel OTC developers responsible for the i915 DRM graphics driver have already begun aligning their first round of updates for DRM-Next to in turn target Linux 4.7.

  First up, for Intel Haswell users, Linux 4.7 will have changes needed for their Mesa driver’s Vulkan support. The command parser in the i915 DRM driver for Linux 4.7 whitelists a number of registers needed for Vulkan support on Haswell. That’s in the command parser side while all of the Vulkan magic on Intel hardware under Linux continues to happen within their branched Mesa codebase for their “Anvil” Vulkan driver.

• Graphics Stack

  • OpenGL Compute Shader Support Lands For Nouveau GK104 & GM107+

    With the exception of the GK110 graphics processor, NVIDIA’s Kepler and Maxwell GPUs now support OpenGL compute shaders (GL_ARB_compute_shader) with the latest Nouveau driver code in Mesa.

  • OpenChrome 0.4.0 DDX Driver Revives VIA Open-Source x86 Graphics

    The xf86-video-openchrome 0.4 release has finally happened! It’s been more than two years since this VIA x86 X.Org driver was last updated.

  • ARM Posts A New Mali Display DRM Driver

    This initial DRM driver just called “arm” is for supporting their Mali DP500, DP550, and DP650 display hardware. The driver supports up to three planes with hardware rotation support. This driver isn’t yet feature complete but good enough for getting X11 running when using fbdev emulation or Wayland when using Pixman rendering.

Applications

• Cockpit 0.100 Released

  Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. There’s a new release every week. Here are the highlights from this weeks 0.100 release. Even though 0.100 may seem to be a magical number … it’s really just the number after 0.99

• Calibre 2.54 eBook Manager and Converter Is Out for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows

  Calibre developer Kovid Goyal has released a new maintenance version of his widely used ebook library management software for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to install Elxis CMS on CentOS 7

  • How To Stream Audio To A Chromecast Or DLNA / UPnP Device From Linux (Using pulseaudio-dnla)

  • Improving QEMU security part 3: securely passing in credentials

  • Rebase-helper tool for rebases and for upstream monitoring services

  • How to add proxy exceptions on Ubuntu desktop

  • How to setup HAProxy as Load Balancer for Nginx on CentOS 7

  • Enable IPTV using a Netgear R8000

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine Announcement

    The Wine development release 1.9.7 is now available.

  • Wine 1.9.7 Has More Work On The D3D Command Stream, SM5 Shaders

    Wine 1.9.7 is now available as the latest bi-weekly development release of this program for running Windows programs on Linux and other operating systems.

  • Wine 1.9.7 Released with More Support for Shader Model 5 Shaders, 42 Bug Fixes

    The Wine development team announced the release of Wine 1.9.7, the seventh milestone towards the next major version of the open-source project designed for Linux users who want to run Windows apps and games.

    According to the release notes, Wine 1.9.7 brings additional support for Shader Model 5 shaders, which has been introduced in the previous snapshot, Wine 1.9.6, released two weeks ago, on March 18, 2016, along with support for Windows-style static import libraries, and C++ exception handling for 64-bit (x86_64) hardware architectures.

  • The Wine Development Release 1.9.7 Is Now Available

• Games

  • 0 A.D. Alpha 20 Timosthenes Brings Many In-Game Improvements

    The 0 A.D. real-time strategy game is out with its 20th alpha release codenamed “Timosthenes” and is a rather hefty update.

    0 A.D. Alpha 20 brings ten new maps, improvements to the cinematic in-game camera, support for sharing drop sites with allies, murder holes, improvements to game option menus, high quality effects are now enabled by default on appropriate systems, an idle worker button, new barracks, and much more.

  • Open source RTS ’0 A.D.’ alpha 20 Timosthenes released

  • Secrets of Grindea, an old-school RPG with co-op support could see a Linux release

    Thanks to Ethan Lee and his FNA project, it looks like Secrets of Grindea an old-school RPG with co-op support could be seeing a Linux release.

  • Human Resource Machine from World of Goo creators now on Linux & SteamOS

    Human Resource Machine have a brief beta period, and now the developers have announced it’s officially supported on Linux & SteamOS.

  • Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear DLC released with day-1 Linux support

    Great news RPG fans, as Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear DLC is now available and has day-1 Linux support as promised.

    This big new expansion for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition features an additional 25+ hours of gameplay, pretty nice for a rainy day!

    Along side this DLC is a big 2.0 patch for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, and you can find the patch notes here.

    I love that old games like this not only get revived in Enhanced Edition form, but also get big patches and DLC content to keep players happy too.

  • Until I Have You, a story-driven, fast-paced, retro-aesthetic platformer is coming to Linux

    I have it confirmed by the publisher that story-driven, fast-paced, retro-aesthetic platformer ‘Until I Have You’ will come to Linux after release.

  • Gorky 17, another classic Topware published title now in beta for Linux, uses Wine

    Topware are certainly delivering on their promise of supporting old games with Wine. This time Gorky 17 gets the treatment, and a beta has been opened for testing on Steam.

  • Create weird looking creatures in CHKN, now on Linux and I have some thoughts

    The trailer for CHKN delighted me with how weird it was, so I got a key from the developer and took a look at the Linux version of this weird sandbox game.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Plasma 5.7 will let you login through online account

    KDE is going to provide an ownCloud installation to let Plasma and KDE PIM (Kontact) users sync their data: you can already use ownCloud with cardDAV, calDAV and webDAV protocols to keep contacts, calendars and files synced across your devices, including the ones powered by Plasma and Kontact.

  • Plasma, online accounts and sync: what is true

    My previous post, as many have quickly realized, was an April Fool’s joke, sorry. But it will not be entirely false: the only sure thing is that something as complex won’t be released for the 5.7. And what makes it so complex is the involvement of the login manager (SDDM). In fact, as many pointed out around the web, there would be security risks. After all it wanted to be a joke.

  • KDE’s Plasma 5.7 To Let You Login To Online Accounts, Initially OwnCloud

    A nice feature coming to KDE Plasma 5.7 is support for logging into an online account from the login manager to have your Plasma configuration synced from the remote server. Initially this work is focused around supporting ownCloud. If supplying your username, password, and ownCloud provider to the Plasma 5.7 log-in screen, you’ll have all of your data synced locally. This will include Plasma’s look and feel, ownCloud hosted files, email data, contacts, and calendar.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 3.20 Provides Shortcuts to the Linux Desktop

    GNOME 3.20 is the first major update to the GNOME desktop environment in 2016, officially becoming generally available on March 23—and since that date it has been slowly trickling into the repositories of Linux distributions. GNOME 3.20 is code-named Delhi in honor of the GNOME.Asia event that will be held in Delhi, India, April 21-24. The new GNOME release is the first since GNOME 3.18 in September 2015, and it provides incremental improvements. An overarching update across multiple applications in GNOME 3.20 are new shortcut screens that provide users with a simple list of keyboard shortcuts to perform common actions in a given application. As was the case with GNOME 3.18, the File utility in GNOME 3.20 benefits from usability improvements. This time, the improvements are around searching and finding files on the system. The Web application is also improved, with improved session restore capabilities. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at the key features of the GNOME 3.20 desktop update.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • NixOS 16.03 Released

    NixOS 16.03 is codenamed “Emu” and it’s out today as the latest stable release of this interesting Linux distribution.

    NixOS 16.03 isn’t the most exciting of releases but has Nix 1.12.2, systemd 229, the Linux 4.4 kernel, GCC 5.3, Glibc 2.23, Binutils 2.26, and other package updates. There’s also been work on improving bitwise reproducible builds.

• OpenSUSE/SUSE

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the Weeks 2016/12 & 13

    Today I cover again two weeks. Both weeks were ‘shorter’ due to the Easter celebrations, which took some time off from many contributors. And if that’s no excuse, one of the weeks was literally by one hour shorter over here (Switch to DST).

• Slackware Family

  • Zenwalk 8.0 beta 3 is ready

    Many, many updates between beta 2 and beta 3 including ffmpeg 3, mplayer 1.3, latest Chromium 49, latest Libreoffice 5.1.1 and a few changes at desktop level :
    - the switch to pulseaudio mixer
    - full polkit desktop integration for privileges elevation management
    - some improvements in system tools
    - a few desktop tweakings (ie : intelligent hiding of the back panel)
    - all audio production tools have been updated (thanks to Emurikku)

  • Zenwalk 8.0 Beta 3 Now Uses PulseAudio Mixer, Full PolicyKit Integration

    The third beta of the Slackware-based Zenwalk 8.0 Linux distribution is now available for testing.

    Zenwalk 8.0 has been in beta for the past few months and has shared changes with upstream Slackware like the distribution finally making use of PulseAudio.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat boosts open source system business

    Red Hat said Friday it has become the world’s first open-source system provider to achieve over $2 billion in sales last year.

    The company said its sales in the 2016 fiscal year has increased 21 percent year-on-year, on the back of 56 consecutive quarters of sales growth in the fourth quarter last year. It said companies are increasingly adopting open-source systems, a trend it expects to accelerate in the coming years.

  • Red Hat Gives Developers Access to Free RHEL Licenses

  • Free software: Red Hat gives away RHEL to developers

    Red Hat announced the news at Microsoft’s Build conference in San Francisco on Thursday afternoon.

  • Get a Red Hat Enterprise Linux license totally free — here’s how

    While many people use the old cliché that nothing in life is free, that isn’t always true. Are there often strings attached? Absolutely. With Gmail, Google combs through your communications for targeted advertising. Microsoft’s Windows 10 is a free upgrade for many, but it has more strings than a gross of violins — from a privacy standpoint, that is.

  • Ceph Open Source Storage Powers Red Hat and SanDisk Partnership

  • Red Hat Ceph optimized for SanDisk InfiniFlash storage

    Red Hat Ceph Storage software is now officially tested, optimized and certified to run on SanDisk’s InfiniFlash storage system thanks to a strategic partnership between the two vendors.

  • Red Hat and SanDisk Enters Strategic Alliance to Streamline Robust Data Management

  • SA’s first Red Hat learnership begins

    Red Hat, Obsidian Systems and CTU on Thursday celebrated the launch of the first Red Hat learnership in SA.

    Over the next 12 months, 20 students will be trained as open source professionals, specialising in Red Hat’s open source software.

    The programme incorporates six months of theory with six months of practical work, which will be divided into three months working for Obsidian, and three months working for external clients, explained Muggie van Staden, MD at Obsidian.

  • How To Get Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Operating System For Free

  • Finance

    • Earnings Revision For Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Latest Broker Coverage

    • Red Hat, Inc (RHT) current consensus investment analysts is to Outperform

    • Bank of Montreal Can Has $51,851,000 Position in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Suite now free in bid to boost traditional and cloud enterprise applications

    • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Shares Bought by Gulf International Bank UK Ltd

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 24 Alpha Benchmarks

      With trying out Fedora 24 Alpha this week and it going well, I decided to run a few benchmarks on the same system to see how the performance compared to Fedora 23.

      Keep in mind that Fedora 24 is still months away from being released and currently does ship with some debug options, but nevertheless is an interesting look to see how Fedora 24 Alpha is comparing to Fedora 23 out-of-the-box and then when applying all stable release updates.

    • Video: KVM within KVM, aka Nested

      A few of us were talking about VDI and KVM in IRC and our buddy kaptk2 told me that nested KVM was working pretty well these days… since Fedora 19 he said. I had not tried it yet so I thought I’d give it a try. It worked so well that I thought I’d make a screencast showing it off. The original recording size was 1920×1080 (plus titlebar) and I scaled it down to 1280×734… so full-screen it for a better view beyond the embedded 824×473 video. Oh, and yes SELinux is enabled and in enforcing mode everywhere. Umm, and NO, this is NOT an April fools joke!

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • 2016: The Year of the (Ubuntu) Linux desktop on Windows

        To be fair, I’ve personally run Linux on Windows machines in various forms for a very long time. Usually by way of some form of hypervisor, like VirtualBox. Though going even further back, all the way to the Ubuntu 8.04 ‘Hardy Heron’ release in 2008, Canonical had an easy way to get Ubuntu onto Windows. Back in 2008, Ubuntu debuted a technology called Wubi, which is a Windows-based installer for Ubuntu that installed Ubuntu as a large file on a Windows partition, rather than the usual procedure of needing to create and resize partition.

      • Ubuntu Linux Tablet Launches On Indiegogo From $230 (video)

        After announcing plans early this year to launch a crowdfunding campaign for a Linux tablet that would be equipped with a 10 inch display and capable of running Ubuntu software. The company has this week started their project via the Indiegogo website with the aim of raising $200,000 to help take the Linux tablet into production.

      • New Linux tablet aims to make Ubuntu desktop mobile

        If you weren’t scared off by Jolla’s tablet disaster on Indiegogo, another little-known brand wants you to back its Intel-based Ubuntu Linux tablets.

      • Ubuntu 16.04 Mascot Revealed – Available in SVG and XCF Files, Download it Now

        Every release, Ubuntu has own official mascot. For upcoming release Ubuntu 16.04 LTS canonical adopt the animal logo called “Xerus” which is the posh name given to a type of ground squirrel. This new mascot will used to promote Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

        The logo, revealed in an update to the Ubiquity package, appears on the installer slideshow that plays during every Ubuntu installation. As you can see image on above, the design of ubuntu 16.04 mascot inspired from the art of oragmi.

Devices/Embedded

• $10 Orange Pi One Linux Benchmarks Against The Raspberry Pi & Other ARM Boards

  The folks at LoveRPi.com recently sent over an Orange Pi One when they had also sent over the ODROID-C2 $40 64-bit ARM development board for review. Here are some benchmarks of the Orange Pi One compared to several other ARM boards.

• Net appliance targets Internet cafes

  The FWS-2251 ships without an OS, but Aaeon tells us most of their customers will load a Linux distribution. The appliance supports firewall, IDP/IDS, load balancing, network access control, bandwidth management, web filtering, and anti-spam virus applications, says the company.

• Raspberry Pi IoT shield offers 1-wire, Grove, PMOD, and more

  Pi 2 Design’s 502IoT Shield for the RPi Pi B+ 2 and 3 offers sensor expansion via 1-Wire, Grove, and PMOD I/O connectors, plus WiFi, Ethernet, M.2, USB, and more.

• LinuxGizmos is now HackerBoards, but we still love Tux

  We will continue our extensive coverage of SBCs and COMs, but will reduce our coverage of end user products and expand our coverage of OSes beyond Linux.

  In celebration of LinuxGizmos.com’s third birthday, and 16 years after I launched its predecessor, LinuxDevices.com, we have decided to make some exciting changes to the site. In recent years, LinuxGizmos Editor Eric Brown and I have been delighted to see the rapid expansion of interest in single board computers and computer-on-modules beyond the realm of commercial engineers.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android device updates: Verizon Galaxy S6, S6 Edge finally score Android Marshmallow

    • Best Android smartphones: April 2016

      Looking to buy a new Android smartphone? Want to know what the best Android smartphones out there currently are? Read on!

      It’s time once again to take a tour of a handful of the best Android phones currently available on the market.

    • Not even Google’s Android can pull BlackBerry out of its tailspin

      The company only sold 600,000 phones in the fiscal fourth quarter. Wall Street had been looking for so much better..

    • Android for Work overhauls setup process, now possible for mere mortals

    • How to secure Android: 14 top tips for securing your phone or tablet

    • Best Android tablets: April 2016 edition

      Looking to buy a new Android tablet? Want to know what the best tablets out there currently are? Looking for the “iPad” of Android tablets? read on!

      I’ve distilled all the manufacturers and models available down to seven tablets from Sony, Google, Nvidia, Dell and Samsung that I think are the very best tablets currently available.

BlazeMeter Adds Open Source Tools for Performance Testing

An open-source microprocessor for IoT devices

Tech for easier wearable microelectronic devices

Thoughts on Leaving the OSI Board

After six years (two terms), this week marks the end of my time on the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). While I plan to remain involved with open source issues and with the Board, the end of my service on the Board is a significant personal milestone, so I thought that I would briefly reflect on the past six years for open source, and especially the OSI.

When I was nominated for the OSI Board in 2010, the Board was a small, select group whose early members made important contributions to the open source community, notably the Open Source Definition and the approval of licenses that conformed to that Definition. The Board’s activities were supported by a couple of corporate donations. Since all of the Board members had “day jobs” that brought in their personal incomes, everyone was quite busy and it was often difficult to make progress on various initiatives. It’s a testament to the hard work of the earliest members of the Board that the OSI was well-recognized as the steward of licenses and the OSD.

What happens to a great open source project when its creators are no longer using the tool themselves?

PANDA, the four-year-old Knight News Challenge-winning newsroom application for storing and analyzing large data sets, still has a respectable community of users, but could now use a new longterm caretaker.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google Fixes Four Critical Vulnerabilities in Latest Chrome Build

Databases

• Relational Databases – the Exception to DevOps Rules

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• I hate Microsoft Office

  Here’s an example: The icon to delete emails in Outlook is a swooshy “χ” icon. That seems out of step with the smooth appearance that Microsoft seems to prefer. The swooshy “χ” is probably supposed to make Office look cool, but to me it just looks old. Like, that was a neat idea in the 1990s or early 2000s, but today that’s just clutter.

CMS

• What’s New in Open Source CMS In April ’16

  WordPress — which is just days from releasing version 4.5 — released a plugin in February that adds support for AMP.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Opening 2 Open [Ed: very weak grasp of what FOSS is]

• Open Source is the New Marketing

BSD

• UbuntuBSD

  Regardless of your position on the systemd debate, projects such as the UbuntuBSD distribution offer a wider range of options to the FOSS community at large. And, there are cases where a BSD kernel will provide better performance than Linux.

• [pfSense] 2.3 Release Candidate now available!

  We are proud to announce pfSense® software version 2.3 Release Candidate is now available!

  The most significant changes in this release are a rewrite of the webGUI utilizing Bootstrap, and the underlying system being converted entirely to FreeBSD pkg (including the base system and kernel). The pkg conversion enables us to update pieces of the system individually going forward, rather than the monolithic updates of the past.

• LLVM Adds Intel Lakemont CPU Support

  The LLVM compiler infrastructure now has support for Intel’s Lakemont processor.

  Lakemont is the codename for the Quark processors that include the Quark X1000 SoC. The Lakemont hardware has been available for a while now but continues to be used in different applications and Intel continues improving its support.

Public Services/Government

• Critics Say White House’s Open Source Software Policy Doesn’t Go Far Enough

  Members of 18F, the General Services Administration’s digital consultancy that shares all its code on public repository Github, argue that a more comprehensive, “open source by default” policy would allow agencies to reuse code instead of constantly re-developing it. Coding in the open would also let developers gather input from the public about potential glitches.

  Open source development “helps to encourage good documentation and coding practices,” an 18F statement posted on GitHub said. “Everyone is aware and following processes for open information from day one. There is no just-before-launch, last minute review of everything.”

• France unveils source code of income tax application

  France has officially opened the source code of the fiscal calculator used by the French fiscal administration to calculate the income taxes of individuals in France. Taxes for businesses are not included in the code.

• Election Tech: How big data pioneers use open source technology to win elections

  National Field’s PHP application, MySQL backend, Node.js technology was used during the Obama reelection campaign in 2012, and acquired by and integrated with NGP VAN in 2013. Today, the product is used up-ticket and down by every major Democratic candidate, and their technologies have been embraced by the GOP and several non-partisan data brokers as well.

• MIT Media Lab Goes Open Source, And Doesn’t Forget To FLOSS

  The MIT Media Lab, a tech innovation center that has has a hand in numerous tech related products over the years, including Guitar Hero has revealed that going forward, the way it deals with its approach to software releases is to fundamentally change.

Licensing/Legal

• Fair Source licensing is the worst thing to happen to open source-definitely maybe

  Fair Source attempts to bastardize open source to ensure companies get paid.

  [...]

  This seems true, but is actually false. Fair Source really offers none of the benefits of open source precisely because of that “ability to charge for the software.” While free software licensing (e.g., GNU General Public License) attempts to force freedom on downstream developers, true open source basically says, “Take this software, use it and improve it (or not), and license the resulting product as you wish.”

Programming/Development

• Contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

  A common well-being issue in open-source communities is the tendency of people to over-commit. Many contributors care deeply, at the risk of saying yes too often harming their well-being. Open-source communities are especially at risk, because many contributors work next to a full-time job.

  The contribution graph and the statistics on it, prominent on everyone’s profile, basically rewards people for doing work on as many different days as possible, generally making more contributions, and making contributions on multiple days in a row without a break.

Kyiv Smart City: how Kiev wants to become one of the smartest cities in Europe

This project is part of a more global project, called Kyiv Smart City, the goal of which is to transform the Ukrainian capital into a smart city, comparable with the top five smart cities in Europe: Paris, London, Barcelona, Copenhagen and Vienna, as mentioned in the description of the project.

How People Lost Their Jobs Due To Google’s April Fool’s Day Prank

Google has killed one of its April Fool’s Day pranks as it caused outrage among Gmail users. According to various complaints and online posts, people lost their jobs and harmed professional relationships.

Health/Nutrition

• Will Osborne’s Manchester ‘devolution’ fall flat on its face?

  Today, Manchester becomes the first English region to “take control of its health spending”, supposedly. But what do patients, NHS campaigners and junior doctors think?

• Government ‘Ignored’ Environmental Threats When Approving GE Salmon, Lawsuit Claims

  Risk of escape is high on the list of worries for the environmental groups that filed the lawsuit. The fish are raised in land-based pens now, but if the industry takes off, there could be many more GE salmon being raised around the world, in different kinds of environments. The groups are concerned about “the risk that GE salmon will escape from the facilities where they are manufactured or grown and interbreed with wild endangered salmon, compete with them for food and space, or pass on infectious diseases; the interrelated impacts to salmon fisheries and the social and economic well-being of those who depend on them; and the risks to ecosystems from the introduction of an invasive species.”

• Not an April Fool joke: UK pharma giant won’t patent its drugs in poorer countries

  The UK pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has announced that it will not be routinely patenting its drugs around the world. Instead of applying for patents on its medicines in all regions, it will now take into account the economic development of the country before deciding whether to seek monopoly protection there. As a result, a poorer country can encourage local manufacturers to create cheaper generic versions of GSK’s products, and thus provide them to a greater number of its population, potentially saving many lives.

  Specifically, GSK says: “For Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Low Income Countries (LICs), GSK will not file patents for its medicines, so as to give clarity and confidence to generic companies seeking to manufacture and supply generic versions of GSK medicines in those countries.”

  For slightly wealthier countries, “GSK will file for patents but will seek to offer and agree licences to allow supplies of generic versions of its medicines for 10 years. GSK intends to seek a small royalty on sales in those countries. This offer will apply even for those countries that move out of [Lower Middle Income Country] status due to increased economic growth during this period.” This should allow generic versions to be produced for a decade even in nations whose economies become more developed.

Security

• Friday’s security updates

• Linux container security is on the evolutionary fast track

  Although containers still have their drawbacks, the Linux container security benefits far outweigh the risks and their rapid evolution promises hope for the future of server virtualization.

Defence/Aggression

• Reports: State Troopers, Civilians Shot At Virginia Bus Station

• At Least 14 Dead In Overpass Collapse In India

• How US-Backed War on Syria Helped ISIS

  By funneling TOW missiles and other weapons to Syrian jihadists for their “regime change” war, President Obama facilitated the rise of the Islamic State with the terrorist blowback now hitting Europe, says Daniel Lazare.

• Americans Have Been Accidentally Shooting Themselves for Three Centuries

  Bad luck? Sure, in part. But this is really about stupidity on the part of adults. Today, thousands of Americans are shot accidentally each year, and that doesn’t even count the collateral damage—stray bullets that take out a toddler or some other innocent, resulting in an assault or homicide charge—nor does it factor in our 20,000-plus annual gun suicides. All of these unhappy accidents, as it turns out, are very, very costly.

• The Ultimate Trial of Israeli Society

  Last Thursday, March 24th, an Israel defense force (IDF) soldier was filmed executing a wounded Palestinian man alleged to have carried out a stabbing attack against IDF soldiers in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood of Hebron. The videographer responsible for the filming is Imad Abu Shamsiya, a Palestinian shoemaker who has since received death threats and intimidation from extreme right-wing Israeli settlers with the prospect of a potential lawsuit. Though the incident is part of a wave of extrajudicial killings of Palestinians carried out by Israeli soldiers, this particular case is different. Here, the film unambiguously shows that the wounded Palestinian man did not present a danger to his surrounding. Quite shockingly, not only does the film implicate the executioner; it also shows his IDF comrades as completely unfazed by the incident, including medical personnel. What’s more, the soldier has received a wave of public support that politicians from the right-wing have seized as an opportunity to further erode the moral fabric of Israeli society in a bid to serve their political and ideological interests.

• U.S. Troops on Russia’s Borders

  Official Washington’s hype about “Russian aggression” has cloaked a U.S. military buildup on Russia’s borders, possibly increasing risks of escalation and even world war, explains ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

• Caveat Emptor, Canada: What the Acquisition of Lethal Drones Will Bring

  Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been shopping around for lethal drones for the Royal Canadian Air Force. The prospective acquisition is being downplayed as intended primarily for surveillance purposes. Of course, that’s how it always begins. The first step toward joining the bloody ranks of the avid drone killers – the United States, Israel and, increasingly, Britain – is obtaining the means to conduct surveillance. But these sophisticated machines were developed for use by the military, which is why they have the modular capacity to be armed. As their names have always implied, Predator and Reaper drones can be used not only for surveillance but also to kill by remote control. Snap on a couple of Hellfire missiles, and you’re good to go.

• The Facade of Israel is Cracking

  For many more years than any intelligent person would want to count, Israel was the sacred cow of the United States. From its violent, bloody, genocidal inception that involved the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians, and the murder of another 10,000, right through to the illegal, immoral occupation of the West Bank and blockade (aka occupation) of the Gaza Strip, Israel, in the view of U.S. governance and politics, could do no wrong. Anyone who dared to criticize Israel’s many crimes was accused of anti-Semitism; as Dr. Norman Finkelstein said, “whenever Israel faces a public relations debacle, its apologists sound the alarm that a ‘new anti-Semitism’ is upon us”. In the past, if a Jew, such as Dr. Finkelstein, was critical of Israel, Zionists raised the cry that he was ‘a self-hating Jew’, and U.S. politicians bought that ridiculous line. As a result, Israel became the beneficiary of the bulk of U.S. foreign aid, and has relied on the U.S. for years for protection from international accountability for its crimes, with the U.S always happy to veto any United Nations resolution condemning Israeli violations of human rights and international law.

• Derailing Peace Deal in Colombia

  A resurgence of drug-connected right-wing terrorism in Colombia has undercut a historic peace deal between the government and the main leftist rebel group, writes Jonathan Marshall.

• Obama in Arabia

  Like his predecessors, President Obama is putting cozy ties with the Saudi royals ahead of telling the truth to the American people about the Saudi role in 9/11, writes 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser.

  Why does President Obama think it’s okay for 15 Arabs (and four of their friends) to come into our country, hijack our planes, crash them into our buildings, and brutally kill 3,000 innocent people? Because those 15 Arabs were Saudis, that’s why. And, Saudis are special. Saudis are apparently allowed to get away with murder — or at least the financing of it.

  I am a 9/11 widow. My husband Ron was killed while he was working at his desk for Fiduciary Trust Company on the 94th floor of Tower 2. Ron was 39 years old, I was 30, and our daughter was two. I watched the horror unfold on live worldwide television as I stood in my kitchen speaking to Ron. Moments later, I watched Flight 175 slice into his building, exactly where he stood on the other end of the line talking to me.

  [...]

  There are 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry of Congress (an investigation into the U.S. government intelligence failures prior to 9/11) that have remained classified and hidden away from the American public by both the Bush and Obama Administrations. These 28 pages allegedly prove that the Saudis had a controlling hand in funding the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 innocent people.

• What Do Terrorists Want?

  It’s not hard to fathom why officials and pundits do not acknowledge the full story of terrorism: it would draw attention to what the U.S. government and allied states have long been doing to people in the Muslim world. Nearly all Americans seem to think it’s a sheer coincidence that terrorism is most likely to be committed by people who profess some form of Islam and that the U.S. military has for decades been bombing, droning, occupying, torturing, etc. in multiple Islamic countries. Or perhaps they think U.S.-inflicted violence is just a defensive response to earlier terrorism. (I might be giving people too much credit by assuming they even know the U.S. government is doing any of this.)

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Who’s the April Fool: Trying Out the Hillary Defenses

  “So, you know why I pulled you over, ma’am, right?”

  “Oh, I have no idea at all officer,” Hillary said.

  “You were speeding. Clocked you right here.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Hillary said.

  “Well, you did. You broke the law, you did something unsafe, you endangered others, you set a poor example for your whole organization, you compromised security.”

  “Well, everybody does it,” Hillary said.

  “No, they don’t. Most people drive safely.”

• IMF Internal Meeting Predicts Greek ‘Disaster’, Threatens to Leave Troika

  Today, 2nd April 2016, WikiLeaks publishes the records of a 19 March 2016 teleconference between the top two IMF officials in charge of managing the Greek debt crisis – Poul Thomsen, the head of the IMF’s European Department, and Delia Velkouleskou, the IMF Mission Chief for Greece. The IMF anticipates a possible Greek default co-inciding with the United Kingdom’s referendum on whether it should leave the European Union (‘Brexit’).

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Indonesian government threatens to deport Leonardo DiCaprio for palm oil criticism

  The Indonesian government has threatened to deport Leonardo DiCaprio after the Oscar-winning actor and film-maker made critical statements about the country’s palm oil industry during a visit.

  DiCaprio, an environmental campaigner, landed in Indonesia on 26 March from Japan. On Tuesday he posted a photograph to his Instagram highlighting the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation’s plans with local partners to establish a “mega-fauna sanctuary” in the Leuser rainforest ecosystem, a lowland Sumatran national park where palm oil plantations, mining, logging and other developments are endangering local populations of Sumatran elephants, orangutans, rhinos and tigers.

• British Columbia’s Carbon Tax Has Been So Successful That Businesses Want To Increase It

  A carbon tax may be a controversial topic in the United States, but in one Canadian province, this eight-year-old policy has been such a success that on Wednesday more than 100 businesses said they support a tax increase.

  In a letter addressed to Premier Christy Clark, who governs the province of British Columbia, more than 150 companies said they back a plan to increase the carbon tax by $10 — about $7.70 U.S. — per metric ton a year starting in July 2018, an idea the government-sponsored Climate Leadership Team unveiled earlier this year.

• Cantarow and Levy, Could Nuclear Disaster Come to America?

  Since the United States used nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, nuclear power has always had a fearsome aspect. In the 1950s, the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower began promoting “the peaceful atom” in an attempt to take some of the sting out of atomic power’s bad rep. (As part of that project, Eisenhower helped then-ally the Shah of Iran set up a “peaceful” nuclear program, the starting point for Washington’s more modern nuclear conflicts with that country.) Unfortunately, as we’ve been reminded, from Three Mile Island to Chernobyl to Fukushima, there is ultimately a side to nuclear power that couldn’t be less “peaceful,” even in a peacetime setting. As you think about the Indian Point nuclear power plant, the subject of today’s post, and its long history of problems and crises that only seem to be compounding, keep in mind how close Tokyo came to utter catastrophe and then think about the vast New York metropolitan area and what any of us would be able to do other than shelter in place if disaster were someday to strike up the Hudson River.

• Environmentalists Call For No New Offshore Drilling, Period

  When the Obama administration scrapped leasing plans for drilling off the southeast Atlantic coast earlier this month, environmentalists praised the move, saying it was a win for the environment and the fight against climate change. But now some environmentalists and indigenous organizations from coastal regions say that’s not enough, and they’re calling on President Obama to use his executive power to end all new fossil fuel extraction in federal waters.

  In a petition filed Tuesday, more than 45 groups led by the Center for Biological Diversity say that ending offshore drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf is an important step to limit global warming, as agreed to by countries in Paris last year.

  “We saw the president react to the opposition to offshore drilling in the Atlantic and think that our public policy should be set forth by … the public demanding further action to address climate change,” Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told ThinkProgress.

Finance

• Unaoil: THE COMPANY THAT BRIBED THE WORLD

  In the list of the world’s great companies, Unaoil is nowhere to be seen. But for the best part of the past two decades, the family business from Monaco has systematically corrupted the global oil industry, distributing many millions of dollars worth of bribes on behalf of corporate behemoths including Samsung, Rolls-Royce, Halliburton and Australia’s own Leighton Holdings.

• China Hits Steel Made In UK With 46% Levy

  Beijing’s decision to clamp down on foreign imports while dumping cheap steel in the EU comes at a bad time for the UK Government.

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren Calls for Total Overhaul of Student Loan System

  ‘Five simple principles. Everyone in government who is serious about standing up for the tens of millions of student loan borrowers in this country should embrace them.’

• New York Reaches Deal to Raise Minimum Wage to $15

  Not to be outdone by its perennial rival on the west, New York announced on Thursday it had reached a deal to raise the minimum wage in New York City to $15 by 2018. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo hailed the agreement as the “best plan the state has produced in decades.”

  “We’re leaders in economic justice,” he said in an announcement outlining the state’s budget.

  But unlike California, where lawmakers approved a measure to hike its statewide minimum to $15, the Empire State failed to reach an agreement on a statewide minimum. Instead a hike will go into effect regionally: Areas outside of New York City, including New York’s wealthier suburbs in Westchester and Long Island, will have six years to implement the wage boost. The minimum wage in northern regions that are generally less affluent will only go up to $12.50 by 2021.

• Most Americans Won’t Make $15 an Hour for Five Years—but Why Not Now, Like in This City?

  Newly adopted $15 minimum wage laws have been unveiled with great fanfare and media coverage. But lost in the headlines is the reality that because of phase-in schedules, workers won’t actually see $15/hour in their pay for three, five or even seven years—at which point the buying power will have been eroded by rent hikes and the rising cost of living.

• The Clinton Myth and the Strange Case of Donald Trump

  The transition from Condoleezza Rice to Hillary was, all things considered, a step down. American foreign policy remained about the same, but at least Rice had no time for “humanitarian interveners” of the Samantha Power type.

• The real poison pill in the TPP

  Canadians have many reasons to be concerned about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive international trade agreement that, if ratified, will result in restrictive new rules governing our daily lives, from how we use the Internet, to how much we pay for medicine.

  We already know the TPP will extend copyright terms for decades, keeping valuable cultural content out of the hands of new artists and the public. We know it will hamstring Canadian innovation, with top Canadian tech entrepreneurs telling us how it locks in the economic advantage U.S. firms already enjoy in the intellectual property sector.

  But the real poison pill in the TPP lies in its “investor-state dispute settlement” mechanism, or ISDS. Economists from all sides of the political spectrum have warned about how the TPP’s ISDS rules would allow foreign conglomerates to challenge our domestic laws and subject Canada to multi-million-dollar lawsuits.

• Rio de Janeiro’s public health system on verge of collapse

  None of Brazil’s 27 states have found themselves in such a dire financial situation in the country’s recent history – even if the public health sector has been facing multiple chronic difficulties throughout the country.

  Two health systems co-exist: the free and universal public sector system called the SUS (Sistema unico de saúde, designed along the lines of the French social security system) and the private sector financed by expensive health insurance schemes that 20 per cent of the population pay into to make sure they are taken care of more quickly.

  In Brazil public health funding remains relatively low: only 4 per cent of GDP as compared to 11 per cent in France. Government at all levels (the Federal State, the federalised states, districts and municipalities) contribute to the health budget.

• Underpaid in the UK? The state probably isn’t going to help you

  The new £7.20 rate is still well below the real living wage — based on the cost of living — of £8.25 an hour. It’s only for over-25s, with younger people stuck on the old rate. Shareholders, CEOs and senior management of the corporations that dominate the economy will continue to accrue bumper payouts. Companies including Tesco, Wilko and B+Q have already cut other benefits to mitigate the impact of the new rate, while others are planning lay-offs.

  For the hundreds of thousands of workers currently paid below the minimum wage, its increase will mean little. Recent governments have shown little inclination to crack down on employers who are illegally underpaying their staff. The present one, for all its rhetoric, doesn’t seem set to change.

• Chase Freezes Guy’s Bank Account For Paying His Dogwalker For Walking Dash The Dog

  It wasn’t so long ago that we were discussing the problems with the United States Treasury Department’s list of scary names and how it was being used to prevent completely innocent folks from using online services. The ultimate point of that post was that casting broad nets in which to turn suspicious eyes without applying any kind of checks or common sense was a recipe for calling a whole lot of people terrorists that aren’t actually terrorists.

• Chase freezes man’s bank account because his dog’s name, ‘Dash,’ looked like ‘Daesh’

  The processors at Chase Bank thought that Dash might be a sneaky way of spelling Daesh (which is the mocking, insulting nickname used by critics to refer to “ISIS”), decided that this was possible terrorist money-laundering, and stopped the payment, froze his account, and notified the Treasury Department that he was a suspected terrorist.

  It’s hard to know what’s stupidest about this: that the bank thought that Daesh was the kind of thing that a terrorist sympathizer would use to help mark out laundered payments, that the bank subsequently insisted that “this is an important part of ensuring that crime does not filter through the US banking system,” or that Francis himself thinks that being put out and branded as a terrorist somehow made him safer.

• Bank freezes online payment over dog’s ‘terrorist-sounding’ name

  Bruce Francis, who has multiple sclerosis, was transferring money from his Chase Bank account to his dogwalker and he put the 9-year-old pitbull’s moniker “Dash” in the memo line.

  Bank officials thought Dash sounded a little bit too much like Daesh, the Arabic term for the self-described Islamic State, and canceled the payment.

• Elizabeth Warren Warns Banks Are Lying About Upcoming Rule Change, Potentially Breaking The Law

  On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent a letter to the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accusing banks of lying about the pending rule requiring financial advisers to put clients’ interests ahead of their own, thus potentially violating securities laws.

• Elizabeth Warren Slams Donald Trump’s Lies About Being a Business Success

  Fresh off of her delightful Twitter takedown listing all the ways she believes Donald Trump is a “loser,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren appeared on the Late Show on Wednesday to shred the Republican frontrunner’s self-touted reputation as a successful businessman.

  “The truth is that he inherited a fortune from his father, he kept it going by cheating and defrauding people, and then he takes his creditors through Chapter 11,” Warren told host Stephen Colbert.

  “We have an economy that is in real trouble,” she added. “But when the economy is in this kind of trouble, calling on Donald Trump for help is like if your house is on fire, calling an arsonist to come help out.”

• The Lies of Neoliberal Economics (or How America Became a Nation of Sharecroppers)

  Mortgages, with many houses now underwater because of 2008. I want to look first at the self-identified liberal class within the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama. It often uses the language of economic justice, and will even chastise Wall Street rhetorically, but has been as committed to this neoliberal project as the Republicans.

• A Chicago Teacher Explains Why She’s Willing to Risk Arrest in Order to Strike Against the Destruction of Public Schools

  We got to this point because CPS has been starving our schools for years. It has been death by a thousand cuts. But recently it’s felt more like, I don’t know, chopping off our arms. We’ve seen over the years more layoffs, class sizes increasing, cuts to counsellors and clinicians, our schools being closed, private schools and charters opening up. It’s making the learning and working conditions very difficult in the schools.

  Just this school year, there’s been so many cuts to our schools that it’s hard to keep track of them. At the beginning of the year, there were millions of dollars in cuts to special ed. Our students with disabilities weren’t getting their services that were required by law; parents and teachers and community groups had to go fight the Board of Ed with lawyers to get services back.

  Then there were more special ed cuts in the middle of the year, then more general layoffs. A month or two ago, there were even more cuts. My school lost $100,000. Our budgets were already bare bones, and the principals had to cut even more.

  And then just two weeks ago, we had another round of cuts. They froze all the funds; my school lost another $80,000. For my school, they’ve cut almost all the before- and after-school programs—intervention programs for kids who were struggling, all types of clubs—plus most of our substitutes.

• Why The Major Media Marginalize Bernie

  “Bernie did well last weekend but he can’t possibly win the nomination,” a friend told me for what seemed like the thousandth time, attaching an article from the Washington Post that shows how far behind Bernie remains in delegates.

  Wait a minute. Last Tuesday, Sanders won 78 percent of the vote in Idaho and 79 percent in Utah. This past Saturday, he took 82 percent of the vote in Alaska, 73 percent in Washington, and 70 percent in Hawaii.

  In fact, since mid-March, Bernie has won six out of the seven Democratic primary contests with an average margin of victory of 40 points. Those victories have given him roughly a one hundred additional pledged delegates.

  As of now, Hillary Clinton has 54.9 percent of the pledged delegates to Bernie Sanders’s 45.1 percent.That’s still a sizable gap – but it doesn’t make Bernie Sanders’s candidacy an impossibility.

  Moreover, there are 22 states to go with nearly 45 percent of pledged delegates still up for grabs – and Sanders has positive momentum in almost all of them.

  Hillary Clinton’s lead in superdelegates may vanish if Bernie gains a majority of pledged delegates.

  Bernie is outpacing Hillary Clinton in fundraising. In March, he raised $39 million. In February, he raised $42 million (from 1.4 million contributions, averaging $30 each), compared to Hillary Clinton’s $30 million. In January he raised $20 million to her $15 million.

• Bernie’s Right. Wall Street’s Business Model Really Is Fraud.

  Fraud is an essential part of Wall Street’s DNA. A 2015 survey, commissioned by law firm Labaton Sucharow, found that a deeply immoral culture had taken root among British and American bankers.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Bernie Sanders Flipping Presidential Script, Turning Democratic Race Into Epic Contest

  If not for a certain Manhattan billionaire, Bernie Sanders’ surprising strength and Hillary Clinton’s relative weakness would be the big political story of the year.

  Democrats are fortunate that bloody insurrection is roiling the Republican Party. Clinton—the likely Democratic nominee—will almost surely face either Donald Trump, who is toxic to most of the electorate, or an alternative chosen at the GOP convention and seen by Trumpistas as a usurper.

• Elizabeth Warren: Electing Donald Trump President Is Like Calling an Arsonist to Put Out a Fire

  Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told Stephen Colbert on Wednesday that Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump got where he is by “cheating and defrauding people.”

  “He is not a business success,” she said on Colbert’s “The Late Show,” citing disasters that punctuate Trump’s professional life and the wealth he inherited from his father. “He is a business loser.”

• Hillary Clinton’s Support Among Nonwhite Voters Has Collapsed

  On February 27th, Hillary Clinton led Bernie Sanders among African-American voters by 52 points.

  By March 26th, she led Sanders among African-Americans by just nine points.

  And on Thursday, Public Policy Polling, a widely respected polling organization, released a poll showing that Sanders leads Clinton among African-American voters in Wisconsin by 11 points.

• Bernie Leads Hillary in Wisconsin, Slams Wall Street and NAFTA

  Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders currently has a 4-point lead over Hillary Clinton among Wisconsin voters. Of likely Wisconsin Democratic primary voters, 49.2 percent chose Sanders, while 44.9 percent went with Clinton. Five and a half percent are still undecided.

• ‘The power to create a new world is… in our hands’

  DR JILL STEIN IS RUNNING FOR THE UNITED States presidency on the Green Party ticket. This will not be her first attempt. In 2012, Jill Stein’s Green Party ticket—with Cheri Honkala, the advocate for the homeless—won half a million votes. But running on a “third party” ticket in the U.S. is not easy. The two major parties, Democratic and Republican, keep a firm hold on the political process. It is hard to get on the ballot in all 50 States of the U.S., and it is impossible to join the candidates of the two major parties at their presidential debates. In fact, when Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala tried to enter the debate venue in New York during the 2012 election, they were both arrested. But arrests are not unusual for Jill Stein. During the 2012 election, she was arrested at a Philadelphia sit-in against home foreclosures and she was arrested while offering support to environmental activists in Texas who had camped out against the Keystone XL pipeline. Activism is the measure of Jill Stein’s politics.

• Foreign Money Is Flowing Into U.S. Elections, Alito’s Lying Lips Notwithstanding

  IN HIS 2010 State of the Union address, Barack Obama attacked the then-new Citizens United Supreme Court decision for making it possible for U.S. elections to be bankrolled by “foreign entities.”

• Is Hillary Clinton Running Away From Political Reality?

  As this new Wisconsin poll shows: Sanders leads Clinton 49% to 43%. Sanders leads among all African-Americans 51% to 40%. Sanders leads among 18 to 45 year olds 65% to 28%.]

• “I’m Sick of It”: Climate Activist Touches Nerve, Clinton Responds with Finger

  ‘Clinton needs to listen to the people, not fossil fuel interests,’ says Greenpeace campaigner.

• Hmm, That’s Strange… Why Would Clinton Use Trump Abortion Remarks to Attack Sanders?

  Even though Bernie Sanders immediately took to Twitter and called Donald Trump “shameful” for his comments on Wednesday regarding “punishment” for women who would have abortions, Hillary Clinton is now using the incident as an opportunity to attack her Democratic rival by suggesting to voters that Sanders does not take the issue of women’s choice seriously enough.

  “Last night, Sen. Sanders agreed Donald Trump’s comments were shameful,” Clinton said during a campaign rally in Purchase, New York on Thursday. “Then he said they were a distraction from the, and I quote, ‘serious discussion about serious issues facing America.’”

• The Clash of Trump, Bernie and Hillary Is About to Create a Huge Political Circus in New York

Censorship/Free Speech

• Turkish President Comes To The US, Pretends That It Can Silence And Attack The Press Like It Does At Home

  We’ve written a whole bunch about the incredibly thin-skinned and litigious President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan took his show on the road to the US this week, and apparently that included pretending that he can treat press in the US as bad as he does at home. Erdogan spoke at the Brookings Institution yesterday, and there were protestors outside. That’s not that surprising, but rather than doing what basically anyone else does in that situation and ignore the protestors,

• Removing ‘Vaxxed’ From Tribeca Festival Is Common Sense, Not Censorship

  On March 21, the Tribeca Film Festival announced its 2016 lineup. The festival, which runs from April 13 – 24, was started in 2001 as a way to revitalize lower Manhattan after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. Now in its fifteenth year, TFF has garnered a reputation of celebrating independent filmmaking and storytelling through diverse and emerging voices.

  This year’s lineup, however, found the festival and one of its co-founders, Robert De Niro, caught in a firestorm of accusations of promoting lies and censorship.

  Scheduled to be screened on the last day of the festival was the documentary film “Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Controversy” by disgraced anti-vaccination zealot Andrew Wakefield. The film parrots the long disproven myth that vaccinations, particularly the MMR vaccine, causes autism. The theory was created by Wakefield who in 1998, then a gastroenterologist, published a fraudulent study suggesting the link.

• MPAA Actually Steps Up To Defend Free Speech (Really!); Gets Attacked For It

  And “conduct, not merely speech” is the crux of the MPAA’s opposition to the bill. The MPAA doesn’t want revenge porn to go unpunished, but it only wants actual revenge porn punished — not everything else that might get pulled in by the broad wording and lack of a malicious intent requirement. Franks decision to excise the very element the MPAA was concerned about is completely disingenuous, as it places her on the side of the Supreme Court, even when the Supreme Court doesn’t agree with her assertions.

• Today is your last day to comment on the Internet censorship through copyright abuse!

  Evan from Fight for the Future writes, “Hey Internet! Ever since SOPA we’ve all known that copyright laws have a huge impact on the Internet, free speech, innovation, creativity.”

• How an underground hip hop artist and his book club threaten Angola’s regime

  This week 17 Angolan activists received jail sentences for participating in a book club. Here’s why.

• Our Comment On DMCA Takedowns: Let’s Return To First Principles (And The First Amendment)

  As mentioned earlier, today’s the day to file comments with the Copyright Office over the DMCA’s notice and takedown provisions. We’ve already discussed the recent set of studies showing that there are way too many bogus takedown notices that are clogging the system, creating real problems for small service providers and censoring free speech. We also wrote about the patently ridiculous filing by the legacy players in the music industry, who whined about how the public is enjoying more content than ever before (which, you know, is the stated purpose of copyright law), but they’re upset that their business models are now obsolete. Finally, we wrote about the fantastic filing from Automattic, which gives many more real world examples of how the takedown process is abused (which the legacy industry pretends isn’t true, because people don’t file counternotices).

• More Evidence That Tons Of DMCA Takedowns Are Bad News… And That People Are Afraid To Counternotice

  Earlier this week, we wrote about a major new study that revealed that a ton of DMCA takedown notices are clearly faulty, and how that shows just how messed up the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown provisions are in giving tremendous incentives to send notices with absolutely no punishment for filing bogus takedowns. The legacy music industry and its supporters keep claiming that the fact that there are so few counternotices is evidence that there’s almost no abuse. In fact, in the legacy music industry filing we wrote about earlier today, they even had the gall to claim that the real abuse is in the counternotices themselves.

• Want To Tell The Copyright Office To Stop Abusive DMCA Takedowns? Here’s How

  So, today’s been DMCA 512 takedown day here at Techdirt. Today’s the day that comments are due at the Copyright Office concerning the effectiveness (or not) of the DMCA’s notice and takedown provisions. And, of course, no one’s entirely happy with the DMCA, but they’re unhappy in very different ways. We wrote about the legacy music industry whining that Google has built a successful service while they failed to adapt themselves. We wrote about Automattic reinforcing how DMCA takedowns are regularly abused to try to censor content (and how people are afraid to counternotice), and we wrote about our own filing, highlighting how the abuse of the DMCA process raises questions about how the current setup is Constitutional.

• Slutface change name to SLØTFACE, share new single

• Social media censorship forces Slutface to change name

• Norwegian Band Slutface Changes Name Due to ‘Social Media Censorship’

• China’s latest move to strengthen its grip on the Internet

• China Domain Proposals Prompt Web Crackdown Fears

Privacy/Surveillance

• With Upcoming David Medine Departure, Will PCLOB Slip Back into Meaninglessness?

  The Chair of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, David Medine, has announced he will resign effective July 1 to work with a development organization “advising on data privacy and consumer protection for lower-income financial consumers.”

  The move comes not long after Congress has, in several ways, affirmatively weakened or unexpectedly stopped short of expanding PCLOB’s mandate, by ensuring it could not review any covert programs, and by eliminating a PCLOB oversight role under OmniCISA.

• A Conversation on Privacy With Edward Snowden, Noam Chomsky, and Glenn Greenwald

  The panel marked Snowden’s first public appearance after the terror attacks in Brussels. Commenting on Belgium’s intelligence failures, he referenced New York Times reporting that Belgian authorities ignored a tip from Turkish intelligence. “When you collect everything, you understand nothing … you’re blinded by the noise,” Snowden said. “I worked at that desk, I used the tools of mass surveillance.”

• NSA Used Submarine Probes To Listen In On Undersea Cable Communications

  LinkedIn is the stodgy, respectable sibling to the business-casual feel of Facebook or the teens-past-curfew chic of SnapChat. Filled with work-centric blogposts aimed at thinkfluencers and colleagues, the network is a soft, focus-grouped level of gray, as thrilling as a watercolor conversation about quarterly reports. That blandness is deceptive: sometimes people’s resumes reveal secret programs, like that time the NSA used submarines to splice into underwater cables. Minor, resume-building stuff.

• FBI Won’t Tell Apple How It Got Into iPhone… But Is Apparently Eager To Help Others Break Into iPhones

  Remember how the FBI insisted over and over again that the case in San Bernardino was not about setting a precedent and was totally about getting into “just that one phone?” Of course, no one believed it, but pay close attention to what’s happening now that the FBI was able to hack into Syed Farook’s work iPhone. The DOJ has also said that the crack was limited to just that type of phone and probably wasn’t widely applicable.

• Police Go on Fishing Expedition, Search the Home of Seattle Privacy Activists Who Maintain Tor Network

  Seattle police descended on the Queen Anne condo of two outspoken privacy activists with a search warrant early this morning, leaving them shaken and upset.

  Jan Bultmann and David Robinson, a married couple and co-founders of the Seattle Privacy Coalition, said they were awakened at 6:15 a.m. by a team of six detectives from the SPD knocking on the door. Bultmann said were made to sit outside as the officers, who had a search warrant, examined their equipment. They claimed to be looking for child pornography.

• Bob Litt Spins Sharing NSA-Collected Comms with DEA and FBI as Harmless

  ODNI General Counsel Bob Litt has a pretty amusing post attempting to reassure us about the imminent change permitting the NSA to share intelligence it collects under EO 12333 more broadly. As part of it, he suggests that EO 12333 “imposes additional restrictions” (which amount to the procedures he is currently developing in secret) on the sharing of SIGINT.

• Intelligence Community Olive Branch on Data Sharing Greeted With Skepticism

  When conducting criminal investigations, the FBI can currently search through data the NSA gives it from programs run under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Those programs are designed to target the communications of overseas persons, but “incidentally” grab some American communications, too. Those FBI’s searches have been likened to “backdoor surveillance.”

• VICE News Battles Canadian Police Over Right to Protect Journalist’s Material

• Canadian Court Says Vice Magazine Must Hand Over Its Communications With A Suspected Terrorist

• Reddit Hints That US Now Spying On Its Customers

• Reddit probably got subpoena’d by the FBI or NSA

• Reddit kills snooping ‘warrant canary’

• Reddit has lost its warrant canary

• Reddit’s removal of ‘warrant canary’ could hint at US demand for its user data

• Reddit’s big hint that the government is watching you is a missing “warrant canary”

• Reddit uses ‘warrant canary’ signal to warn users that the government sought-out user data

• How Reddit Strongly Hinted It Received a Secret Surveillance Order

• Concern As Reddit Kills ‘Warrant Canary’

• Reddit deletes surveillance ‘warrant canary’ in transparency report

• Reddit drops hint on national security snooping

• Reddit signals receipt of secret government orders to hand over user data

• Reddit warrant canary disappears from transparency report

• Reddit Has Subtly Said That the Government Secretly Requested User Data Last Year

• Reddit Hints—Without Saying Anything—That It Got a National Security Letter

• Reddit’s missing ‘warrant canary’ suggests classified data requests from feds

• Reddit removes ‘warrant canary’, signaling US sought its user data

• Reddit Removes ‘Warrant Canary’ In Transparency Report: What This Means In English

• Has the US forced Reddit to secretly hand over user data?

• Reddit is open to government surveillance

• Reddit ‘warrant canary’ disappearance sparks surveillance fears

• Reddit hints that it received a secret order from US spies that may have been on the hunt for Edward Snowden

• Reddit Subtly Hints Government Might Be Snooping On User Data

• Reddit discloses National Security request by killing its warrant canary

• Reddit Missing Warrant Canary, Under Secret Surveillance

• Reddit May Be Under Government Surveillance: ‘Warrant Canary’ Deleted Today

• Reddit’s 2015 Transparency Report teases National Security Letter

• Reddit’s warrant canary shuffles off this mortal coil

• Reddit’s Warrant Canary On National Security Letters… Disappears

Civil Rights/Policing

• ‘No such country as Israel’ Belgian terror helpline operator tells Jewish caller

  A Jewish man trying to arrange the return of two Israeli casualties of Belgium’s jihadist attacks, engaged in a spat with a Belgian helpline worker, Zakaria, who would only refer to the victims’ homeland as Palestine.

• Brussels attack crisis centre operator fired

  A Belgian crisis centre operator handling calls about last week’s terrorist attacks has been fired after denying the existence of the State of Israel in a request about the repatriation of hospitalised Israeli victims, according to local media.

  A triple suicide bomb attack at Brussels’ international airport and a subway station in the Belgian capital on March 22 left 32 victims dead and wounded a further 340.

• Belgian emergency services ‘only recognize Palestine’

• Brussels Attacks Hotline to Jewish Caller: Israel Doesn’t Exist, It’s Palestine

• To Israel’s Chief Rabbi: I Make Coffee for a Goy on a Regular Basis

  The day on which Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef said it is forbidden for non-Jews to live in the Land of Israel unless they are the servants of Jews was the day on which I decided that I am no longer willing to serve this system.

• Non-Jews should be forbidden from living in Israel, says Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef [Ed: Radical Judaism isn’t helping]

• Council Of Europe Internet Governance Strategy 2016-2019 Stresses Human Rights

  The Council of Europe, the 47-member intergovernmental group based in Strasbourg, France, this week adopted an internet governance strategy for the next four years, putting particular emphasis on human rights and democracy online. The strategy includes a series of steps and actions.

• European directive: worrying expansion of anti-terrorism scope

  While tragic attacks struck the heart of the European Union, the directive on combating terrorism, currently being discussed by the European Parliament, could speed up the implementation of security policies across the whole Europe. La Quadrature du Net is concerned about a Europeanisation of the French Anti-Terrorism drifts.

• Dying in Prison

  Over the past three decades, judges and juries have filled America’s prisons with non-violent offenders.

  Many are serving draconian sentences for first-time offenses. Indeed, while only about 5 percent of the world’s people live in the United States, our country is locking up nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison population.

  President Barack Obama has at least begun to address this issue by creating the Clemency Project, which connects prisoners to pro-bono lawyers who can argue for them to have their sentences reduced. Inmates are eligible if their sentences would have been shorter today than when they received them — as long as they’ve already served at least half their time.

• The Clinton Investigation Enters a Dangerous Phase

  The public will never stand for that. America has a bedrock commitment to the rule of law. The rule of law means that no one is beneath the law’s protections or above its requirements. The DOJ is not in the business of rewriting the law, but the Democrats should get in the business of rethinking Clinton’s status as their presumptive presidential nominee, lest a summer catastrophe come their way.

• Attorneys for ‘Jackie’ in Rolling Stone lawsuit protest under-oath deposition, say it could ‘re-traumatize’ her

• Lawyers for Rape-Hoax Story’s “Jackie” Claim She’d Be “Re-Traumatized” by Giving a Deposition

• U.Va. student in ‘Rolling Stone’ case wants upcoming deposition canceled

• Lawyers for ‘Jackie’ in discredited Rolling Stone rape story fight deposition

• Chicago Cop Suspended for Murdering Teen Given New Job by Police Union

  Jason Van Dyke, the white police officer who killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014, emptying his gun into the teen as he walked away from cops, was charged with first-degree murder last year. He was subsequently suspended without pay from the department. Chicago Fraternal Order of Police president Dean Angelo told the Associated Press the organization had taken on Van Dyke because he’s in a “very difficult situation, financially.”

• Watch: Israeli Gov’t Calls for ‘Civil Elimination’ of Left-Wing Activists and Roseanne Barr Goes on a Rampage

  The Stop BDS conference featured Roseanne Barr as its keynote speaker. As Richard Silverstein recently reported for AlterNet, Barr has equated followers of Islam with Nazis, called for dropping a nuclear bomb on the University of California-Davis to retaliate for its students’ support for BDS, and has referred to supporters of Palestinian human rights as “Nazis’ helpers.” Before her transformation into a Likudnik Twitter troll, Barr was a self-styled critic of Israel who promoted anti-Semitic activist Gilad Atzmon and once posed as Adolf Hitler in a supposedly humorous photo spread that depicted her shoveling “Jew cookies” into an oven.

• As support for torture grows, so does consensus that it doesn’t work

  A new poll shows nearly two-thirds of Americans see torture as a justifiable way to interrogate terrorism suspects, despite the fact that a diverse group of intelligence experts say so-called enhanced interrogation is not the best way keep America safe.

  A Reuters/Ispos poll Wednesday showed that 63 percent of Americans felt “the use of torture against suspected terrorists” was “often or sometimes justified.” The levels of support are roughly equivalent to Nigeria, which is enduring a seven-year insurgency, and Kenya which has been hit with a number of large-scale attacks by Al Shabab in recent years, Reuters noted.

• The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison

  So Ferguson promises us influential left-wing conspiracy theorists, which we’re to understand are inherently silly things to be, as if one is not forced into theorizing about conspiracies when one studies a man who conspired to secretly carpet bomb Cambodia, and who did so under the aegis of a presidential administration in which was discussed the viability of assassinating a troublesome newspaper columnist by having LSD applied to his steering wheel.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Save The Internet: Final Consultation for the sake of Net Neutrality in Europe

  The BEREC is set to complete its guidelines on August 30, 2016, hereby settling the fate of an open and competitive Internet in Europe (the “Net neutrality”). It is therefore necessary that the principles laid down in EU legislation or in the “Open Internet Order” in the United States do not stay just wishful thinking: A failure of Net Neutrality in Europe would have dramatic consequences for citizens and European companies.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • 50,000 People Protest DMCA Abuse, “Crash” Government Server

    A campaign launched by Fight for the Future and popular YouTube channel ChannelAwesome to protest DMCA abuse has generated 50,000 responses to the U.S. Copyright Office in less than 24 hours. The public interest is so overwhelming that the Government’s servers “crashed” under the heavy load.

  • Artists, Music Industry Urge Reform Of “Broken” DMCA

    Arguing that the copyright law in the United States intended to protect creative works while allowing access by the next creators is “broken”, hundreds of top artists, songwriters, managers and music associations are urging reforms to the law. Top performers like Katy Perry and Christina Aguilera joined the call.

  • RIAA: How Dare The Internet Use The DMCA That We Wrote To Build Useful Services!

    As we’ve mentioned, today is the day that comments are due to the Copyright Office on the effectiveness (or not) of Section 512 of the DMCA, better known as the “notice and takedown” safe harbor provisions. We’ll be posting the details of our own filing at some point (possibly not until Monday as we’re still finalizing a few things), but some of the other filings are starting to filter out, including a fairly astounding 97-page document from a bunch of legacy music industry organizations (about half of which is the actual filing, with the rest being appendices), including the RIAA, ASCAP, AFM, NMPA, SoundExchange and more. It’s basically every organization that represents the way the industry used to work — and the document reads like an angry polemic against the internet. It would have been much shorter, if they just wrote “our business used to be much better when we had more control and less competition — and we never bothered to adapt, so fuck Google and all those internet companies — and let’s change the DMCA to punish them and magically bring back the good old days.”

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Legacy PCs Continue Nose-diving In 2016

  Intel is selling well in up-scale machinery like premium PCs, servers and some gadgets, many running GNU/Linux.

Kernel Space

• Free ‘law for Linux developers’ class opens its virtual doors

  No one becomes a programmer to become an intellectual property (IP) expert. But, in today’s lawsuit-happy world, with patent trolls ready to attack and licensing becoming increasingly complicated, developers needs to know some IP law.

• IBM, DAH Propose Blockchain Code Merger as Hyperledger Project Code Foundation

• Hyperledger Project announces key leadership positions

• JPMorgan, Deutsche Borse, DTCC and CME take leadership roles in Hyperledger Project

• Blockstream, Bloq, Gem, ItBit, Thomson Reuters and Others Join the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project

• TODO Group and Linux Foundation want more enterprise companies to use open source

  Open source development looks to be here to stay, and the TODO Group and Linux Foundation want all industries to push much, much farther into open source software development.

• Certification Watch (Vol. 19, No. 13)

  Linux Foundation Tosses Legalese Lifeline to Software Developers

• TODO Group, New Linux Foundation Project, Spurs Open Source Adoption

  The open source ecosystem gained another major partner collaboration this week with the announcement that the TODO Group has become a Linux Foundation project, increasing the investment of a number of major companies in open source.

• Graphics Stack

  • Wayland Protocol Extensions Are Being Talked About A Lot This Week

    If you are looking for some Wayland drama, check out the most commented on mailing list thread this week: collaboration on standard Wayland protocol extensions.

    Drew DeVault who has been developing the Sway Wayland compositor as a drop-in replacement to X11′s i3 window manager, started this mailing list thread in trying to foster more collaboration over Wayland protocol extensions between the different desktop environments / compositors.

  • More Of OpenGL ES 3.2 Is Getting Finished Up Within Mesa

    It seems we’re currently pacing at a rate where almost each day there is new OpenGL 4.x or OpenGL ES 3.2 activity reaching Mesa Git master.

  • GLVND GLX Extension Lands In X.Org Server

  • More Interesting Slides From GDC 2016 Are Now Online

    The interesting slides from this month’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) are now available online.

    GDC’16 happened a few weeks back and while there’s been the video recordings of some of the sessions to surface online, more of the presentation slides are now available for those not having the time to sit through an entire video presentation.

  • Nominees For The 2016 X.Org Board Elections

    Following a two week delay to the schedule, the list of nominees for the X.Org 2016 Board of Directors elections was published this morning.

    The nominees include Bryce Harrington, Alex Deucher, Egbert Eich, Keith Packard, and Lucas Stach. These five individuals are competing for four board seats with the terms ending for Alex Deucher, Matt Dew, Egbert Eich, and Keith Packard.

Applications

• Simplenote brings its free Markdown-friendly writing app to Windows and Linux

  As a Windows user, my options for decent text editors to write my articles with are fairly limited. The majority of them are either best suited for coding or too greedy for system resources.

• ALSA 1.1.1 Released For Linux Audio

  ALSA 1.1.1 is out today as the newest version of this Linux audio library, utilities, plugins, and tinycompress for the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.

• Changes v1.1.0 v1.1.1

• Proprietary

  • Microsoft may love Linux. But it doesn’t love Skype on Linux

    Back in 2011, when Microsoft bought Skype for US$8.56 billion, people were wondering if it would continue to update the Linux client that the VoIP platform had.

    It looks like the fears of these folk are slowly coming true. The last release of Skype for Linux was a 32-bit update in 2014 to version 4.3.

    Those who had paid for subscriptions in the hope that they would one day get a 64-bit client with an improved user interface have been waiting and waiting in vain.

    Now a group of users is reporting that from, February 22, the Linux Skype client is unable to join calls.

    They say that numerous tweets to @SkypeSupport have gone unanswered.

  • Opera 37.0 Web Browser with Built-in Ad Blocker Lands Today in the Beta Channel

    Opera Software, through Błażej Kaźmierczak, today, March 31, 2016, proudly announced that the highly anticipated Ad Blocker functionality to be implemented in future versions of the Opera web browser has just landed in the Beta channel.

    Earlier this month, we had the great pleasure of exclusively reporting on the release of the Opera 37 web browser with integrated ad-blocking capabilities, which promised an increase in browsing speed of up to 90 percent. However, at that moment in time, Opera 37 lived only in the Developer channel.

    That changes today, as Opera Software has pushed the anticipated Opera 37 web browser to the Beta channel for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows, offering users a much more stable Ad Blocking experience, and many other great improvements.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Dialog for YodaQA!

  • Improving QEMU security part 1: crypto code consolidation

  • Passwordless encryption of the Linux root partition on Debian 8 with an USB key

  • Setup Docker Hypervisor on Two Node Cluster RDO Mitaka

  • Dude! Where’s My Data!

  • BIP9: versionbits In a Nutshell

  • Improving QEMU security part 2: generic TLS support

  • Android malware doubled in 2015: Report

  • TLDR Pages – A Simplified alternative to Unix/Linux man pages

  • Trying CMake Again

• Wine or Emulation

  • CodeWeavers Announces CrossOver 15.1.0 for Linux and Mac, Based on Wine 1.8.1

    CrossOver developer CodeWeavers has just informed us via an email announcement about the immediate availability of CrossOver 15.1.0 graphical interface for Wine, for both GNU/Linux and Mac OS X platforms.

  • CrossOver 15.1 Released For Linux & OS X Users

    CodeWeavers this morning announced the release of CrossOver 15.1 as the latest version of their software to allow Windows programs to run on Linux and OS X. CrossOver 15.1 is now powered by Wine 1.8.1.

• Games

  • Achievement Unlocked, There Are Now Over 2,000 Games on Steam for Linux

    Yes, that’s right, you’re reading it correctly: as of today, March 31, 2016, there are over 2,000 games on Steam that offer support for the Linux platform, including Valve’s SteamOS gaming operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux.

  • Unreal Engine 4.11 Released with Major New Features, Countless Improvements

    Today, March 31, 2016, Epic Games has had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of its brand-new Unreal Engine 4.11 game engine software for all supported platforms.

  • 0 A.D. Alpha 20 Timosthenes Free RTS Game Released with Ten New Maps, More

    After more than four months of development, free RTS (real-time strategy) game 0 A.D. was updated on March 31, 2016, by developer Wildfire Games to version Alpha 20, dubbed Timosthenes.

    0 A.D. Alpha 20 Timosthenes comes with a bunch of cool new features, among which we can mention ten new maps, including the Stronghold, Hell’s Pass, Empire, Ambush, Lions Den, Island Stronghold, Flood. There are also Frontier random maps, and the Golden Island and Forest Battle skirmish maps for two and four players, respectively.

  • Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked Expansion sails out of Early Access, Linux supported

    Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked Expansion is a pretty big expansion to the really great survival game Don’t Starve. It is now fully available and features Linux support.

    I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet myself, but the reviews are suggesting it’s amazing.

  • 1993 Space Machine, a game originally meant for the Amiga is coming to Linux

    1993 Space Machine a game that was originally supposed to be on Amiga, but never released is out for other platforms. The developer has confirmed it’s on its way to Linux.

    It doesn’t just look retro, it really is retro. The game was built in 1993 and has been released in 2016. Now this right here is a proper classic game.

  • Hyper Light Drifter Classic Action RPG Now Available on Steam for Linux

    The anticipated Hyper Light Drifter role-playing game that was first spotted on Kickstarter two and a half years ago, has been finally released today on Steam.

  • Hyper Light Drifter released, some thoughts

  • Unreal Engine 4.11 Released With Better Performance & Greater Visuals

    Epic Games is ending out the month by releasing the newest version of UE4, Unreal Engine 4.11.

    Unreal Engine 4.11 delivers a wide variety of performance improvements, greater parallelism thanks to threading improvements. new realistic hair shading, realistic eye shading, improved skin shading, realistic cloth shading, capsule shadows, particle depth of field, improved hierarchical LOD, support for LLVM Clang 3.7 on Linux, and a ton of other improvements.

  • There Is A Steam Linux Game Where Nouveau On Kepler Is Outperforming NVIDIA’s Blob

    With yesterday’s Nouveau Kepler vs. Maxwell Performance On Linux 4.6 + Mesa 11.3-dev benchmarks, a number of Phoronix readers expressed their surprise how well the GeForce 600/700 “Kepler” series hardware was performing on the open-source Nouveau driver once manually re-clocking these graphics cards. It’s certainly much better than the GTX 900 series performance on Nouveau as the Maxwell GPUs don’t have any re-clocking support on Nouveau at all. I’m working on some fresh Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Kepler tests and for one Steam Linux game, this reverse-engineered NVIDIA open-source driver is able to beat out the “binary blob” from NVIDIA.

  • Linux now has 2,000 games on Steam, big milestone

    I have double checked this, and it seems to be accurate. Linux now has 2,000 games on Steam, and that’s a pretty healthy milestone.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Status QtWebEngine in KDEPIM

    As QtWebKit will be remove from official Qt package I decided some months ago to evaluate QtWebEngine.

    For sure QtWebEngine < 5.6 was too limited. But I started to use it. I evaluated QtWebEngine 5.5 but some features were missing (as possibility to block request or use custom scheme url).

    I started to focus on Akregator as it still used khtml, I migrated it to QtWebKit and after that to QtWebEngine. (For 16.04 there is a experimental option to activate compilation).

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GTK+ 3.20.2 GUI Toolkit Released to Fix Strange Blue Background in Emacs Windows

    The GTK+ open-source GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit has been updated today, March 31, 2016, to version 3.20.2, the second maintenance release in the stable 3.20 series of the software heavily used in the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment.

Distributions

• Top 5 lightweight Linux distros for older PCs

  The strange thing about PCs is that as they get older, even though they appear to be working fine, they can eventually become unusably slow. Successive operating systems take up more and more resources until your PC grinds to a halt.

  You don’t need to throw your computer away and upgrade to get access to the latest software, though; a lightweight Linux-based operating system will let you have the latest web browser and office software, while running smooth as silk in as little as 256MB RAM. Here’s our pick of the best lightweight Linux distros for older computers – and best of all, they’re all free.

• New Releases

  • SparkyLinux 4.3 Development Continues, Now Rebased on Linux Kernel 4.4.6 LTS

    The developer of SparkyLinux, a Debian-based Linux operating system made in Poland, announced today, March 31, 2016, the immediate availability of the third milestone towards SparkyLinux 4.3.

  • Simplicity Linux 16.04 Enters Beta, Ships with Linux Kernel 4.4.4 LTS

    Earlier today, March 31, 2016, the developers behind the Simplicity Linux project, a GNU/Linux distribution derived from LXPup, a Puppy Linux variant built around the LXDE desktop environment, announced the release of Simplicity Linux 16.04 Beta.

    The Beta of Simplicity Linux 16.04, which should see the light of day later this Spring, at the end of April, comes one month after the release of the Alpha builds on February 29, 2016, bringing a new kernel rebased on the upstream Linux 4.4.4 LTS (Long-Term Support) branch, thus adding support for new and modern hardware components.

  • Bodhi Linux 3.2.0 Is Here, Only 4 Months Till Bodhi Linux 4.0

• OpenSUSE/SUSE

  • Will openSUSE develop the SUSE Phone?

    I am currently in the process of interviewing the leaders of every Linux distribution on the planet, with the goal of helping us get to know the people behind the projects better. Having just wrapped up discussions with the heads of both elementary and Fedora (and others in the works) I decided it was time to talk about openSUSE.

    This gets a little tricky as, earlier this year, I was elected to a position on the openSUSE board. I thought, for a moment, about either skipping the openSUSE interview or having someone else conduct it – to avoid the perception of bias.

  • Update on openSUSE Conference

    There are 15 more days to submit a proposal for the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg June 22 – 26, so I would like to provide an update to the community about the conference.

    As you might already be aware, there will be SaltStack, ownCloud, Kolab and SUSE Labs summits during the conference and we also plan on having a program for kids on Saturday, June 25.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat NSA, SUSE Phone, Fedora Looking Great

    Sam Varghese today again asked about Red Hat and its dealing with the NSA saying, “Red Hat is receiving a goodly sum to assist the NSA in activities that infringe on people’s privacy.” Red Hat today offered its enterprise operating system free of cost to developers and Phoronix.com said Fedora 24 is “looking great.” Paul Thurrott posted screenshots of Ubuntu Bash on Windows 10 and Bryan Lunduke today asked, “Will openSUSE develop the SUSE Phone?”

  • Red Hat program programme: no-cost RHEL developer subs

    This catalogue of resources now includes access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Suite as well as the Red Hat JBoss Middleware portfolio, both available via no-cost developer subscriptions.

    With this suite, developers have access to development tools and in addition to the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server.

  • Red Hat will give away its Linux distro for free to developers

    Two years after making its JBoss suite of middleware tools free for non-production use, Red Hat Inc. is introducing the ability to download its flagship Linux distribution under the same terms. The move should make it much more straightforward for developers to take advantage of the platform, which has until now been fairly tricky to access without a paid support subscription even though it’s open-source.

  • Red Hat Expands Red Hat Developer Program with No-Cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Subscription

    Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Suite now available through no-cost developer subscription, helping to streamline the creation of traditional and cloud-native enterprise applications

  • Red Hat Ceph optimized for SanDisk InfiniFlash storage

    Red Hat Ceph Storage software is now officially tested, optimized and certified to run on SanDisk’s InfiniFlash storage system thanks to a strategic partnership between the two vendors.

    The alliance – announced this week – is Red Hat’s first partnership involving an all-flash array. Ross Turk, director of storage product marketing at Red Hat, said running Ceph software-defined storage on performance-optimized hardware has been a hot topic of discussion at events and conferences.

  • Red Hat’s EVP of Strategy and Marketing Discusses Diversity and Inclusion at Politik’s Interzone

  • Save it, devs. Red Hat doesn’t want your $99 for RHEL

  • As in beer: Red Hat offers RHEL free to developers

  • Red Hat offers no-cost RHEL subscription to developers

  • Red Hat boosts open source system business

  • ​Red Hat offers free Red Hat Enterprise Linux to developers

    It’s always been easy to get started with Linux development. Download a distro, learn some C, and you were ready to go. But, to program for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), you needed more. Sure, Fedora, Red Hat’s community Linux, and CentOS, Red Hat’s free server Linux, can help, but it’s not the same thing.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Now Available for Free for Registered Developers

  • Red Hat Makes RHEL Available To Developers For Free

  • Finance

    • Should Investors Buy Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)?

    • Red Hat (RHT) earnings expectations

    • Pine River Capital Management Lp Decreased Stake in Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) by $21.84 Million as Shares Rose

    • Vetr Inc. Upgrades Red Hat Inc (RHT) to “Strong-Buy”

    • Key Stocks of the Day: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Bank of Montreal Can Has $51851000 Position in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

    • Ashfield Capital Partners LLC Continues to Hold Position in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

    • Tremblant Capital Group Lowers stake in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

    • William Blair Investment Management Lowers stake in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

    • Analysts update: Cowen upgraded Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) to Upgrade

    • Advent Capital Management De Lowers stake in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

    • Mizuho Trust & Banking Co. Ltd. invests in Red Hat Inc (RHT) Shares

    • Gagnon Securities Lowers stake in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

    • Earnings Outlook on Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • RED HAT INC (NYSE:RHT): Analysts Maintain an average rating of Strong Buy

    • Earning Update on Red Hat Inc (RHT)

    • RidgeWorth Capital Management LLC invests in Red Hat Inc (RHT) Shares

    • Brokerage Firm Rating on Red Hat (RHT)

    • Target Price & Performance Review Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Why Red Hat’s Stock Failed to Surge after Its Fiscal 4Q16 Results

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 24 Alpha Released For POWER & AArch64

      Trailing the Fedora 24 Alpha x86 release by a few days is now the secondary architecture spins for POWER and AArch64 (64-bit ARM).

    • Fedora 24 Alpha X.Org vs. (X)Wayland Gaming Tests

      With testing Fedora 24 Alpha this week, I also spent some time test driving the GNOME on Wayland experience even though developers have already decided F24 will continue to use the X.Org Server by default.

      I did run some quick game tests this afternoon of Fedora 24 Alpha when running on the X.Org Server (default) and then when running GNOME on Wayland where the games end up getting piped through XWayland. For your viewing pleasure, here are those quick results.

    • Fedora 24 Alpha Is Looking Great, Running Well

      Since Tuesday’s release of Fedora 24 Alpha I’ve been having a wonderful time trying out this test release with all of the exciting changes building up for Fedora 24.

    • Fedora 24 Alpha Linux Released for AArch64 and POWER Hardware Architectures

      Fedora Project’s Peter Robinson announced on March 31, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download of the Fedora 24 Alpha operating system for POWER and AArch64 hardware architectures.

    • Fedora 24 Alpha for aarch64 and POWER

    • PHP version 5.5.34, 5.6.20 and 7.0.5

    • PHPUnit 5.3

      RPM of PHPUnit version 5.3 are available in remi repository for Fedorra ≥ 21 and in remi-test repository for Enterprise Linux (CentOS, RHEL…).

• Debian Family

  • Free software activities in March 2016

  • Derivatives

    • Business Oriented Language Lives On Confirms Knoppix Spinoff

      A new Linux distribution based on Knoppix will be written entirely in the COBOL programming Language.

      COBOL has been given a lease of new life in recent years including the birth of object oriented COBOL.

      COBOL can also be used as a client side scripting language and many people see it as a replacement for JavaScript. Forget JQuery, the new kid on the block is COBQuery and angularCOBOL.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • MJ Technology’s Ubuntu tablet hits Indiegogo for $230 and up

        Canonical and BQ may have partnered to create the first Ubuntu tablet to ship with support for both mobile and desktop user interfaces. But if you’re looking for something a bit more powerful than the BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet which recently went up for pre-order, a startup called MJ Technology thinks it has the answer.

        Earlier this year MJ Technology announced plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign for a 10 inch tablet with an Intel Atom Cherry Trail processor and Ubuntu software. While the campaign is launching a little later than expected, it’s now live at Indiegogo, and the developer hopes to ship the first tablets in August, assuming the campaign raises at least $200,000.

      • Ubuntu-Based Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition Laptop Launches in Europe

        We reported earlier this month that Dell launched its highly anticipated XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop in US, as well as the worldwide launch of the Dell Precision line of Ubuntu-based workstations.

        And today, March 31, 2016, Dell is happy to announce that the XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop, which also ships with the Ubuntu Linux operating system pre-installed, is available in countries around Europe too, including United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

      • World’s First Ubuntu-Powered Tablet Up for Pre-Order

        Canonical’s open source software finally gets into the mobile devices officially. After being babbling about the mobile experience for years, they finally get to field their Ubuntu US in a tablet device, which has now started entered the pre-order phase.

      • MJ Technology’s Ubuntu tablet hits Indiegogo for $230 and up

        Canonical and BQ may have partnered to create the first Ubuntu tablet to ship with support for both mobile and desktop user interfaces. But if you’re looking for something a bit more powerful than the BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet which recently went up for pre-order, a startup called MJ Technology thinks it has the answer.

Devices/Embedded

• RaspEX Linux for Raspberry Pi 3 Gets Kodi Media Center, Bluetooth Support

  The RaspEX Linux distribution for Raspberry Pi 3 single-board computers has been updated today, March 31, 2016, by developer Arne Exton, bringing support for various hardware components on the new Raspberry Pi board.

  RaspEX Build 160331 arrives today as a free upgrade for existing users, and includes the Kodi media center software, Wicd network manager, Mozilla Firefox web browser, VNC4Server VNC connection manager, Samba file sharing tool, PulseAudio sound server, and Bluetooth support.

• There Is No Chrome For Pi

  Sadly Victor, Chrome isn’t available for the Pi 2. There are however, various methods for installing Chromium onto your Pi if you’re needing something that it provides. I must warn you though, you’re not going to be watching much browser powered video on your Pi 2. If you do, you will be pretty disappointed.

  Instead, might I encourage you to do the following instead. Install an alternative browser like QupZilla or Midori. For YouTube videos, you might try something like SMTube or Minitube. Personally, I’d suggest Minitube as it provides the best overall experience. Still, watching videos on a Pi 2 is going to depend on what else you have running at the time.

• Daily Deal: VoCore Mini Linux Computer

• Linux robot teaches coding, shoots lasers

  Makeblock’s “Codeybot” is a dancing, singing, laser-shooting robot that runs OpenWrt Linux, and teaches kids how to program using mBlockly.

  With 42 days left on Kickstarter, Shenzhen-based Makeblock is close to achieving its $100,000 goal for its Codeybot educational robot. The $99 packages are gone, but you can still pick up a Codeybot with docking station for $129, or $149 with one laser LED add-on. Deliveries are expected in August.

• 3 cool projects to celebrate Arduino Day

  The Arduino is a truly powerful piece of electronics. Small, low power, flexible, and completely open source. Lots of makers and hackers have already figured out that giving their project an Arduino-brain ensures a simple, yet powerful and reliable core. There are more and more Arduino libraries and shields being released every day, so there’s a good chance you won’t even have to write a lot of code to use one.

  In celebration of Arduino Day tomorrow—April 2, 2016—here are three Arduino-powered projects that I like lately. And, if you’re new to Arduino, here are three projects to get you started. Remember fellow makers and tinkerers, the Internet of Things is just a fancy way of saying, “I can hack an Arduino into that.”

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Major Tizen Store update for both consumers and developers goes online !

      Today, the Tizen Store received a major update in terms of both the user Interface for consumers and also back end for developers that will be discussed later. Just in case you didn’t know the Tizen Store is the online shop that houses all the current smartphone apps. The Store will begin automatically updating itself once it is launched, taking it to version 1.5.0. The new app has a much simpler layout that provides you version number, file size and ratings at a glance.

    • Samsung Gear Manager updated to version 2.2.16022241 for Tizen Smartwatches

  • Android

    • Android Headliner: BlackBerry’s Android Hesitation Will Cost Them

      It seems hard to understand what is currently going on with BlackBerry. Although to be fair, many will say that has long been the case with BlackBerry as they have been a company that until recently stuck to their guns relentlessly and continued on pushing their own operating system, in spite of sales figures and adoption rates making it clear that the rest of the world had moved on. But BlackBerry did move on and really well. After mountings of speculation, BlackBerry did finally confirm that they were going to release a handset which solely ran on the Android operating system. A move which although many saw as an admission of the failings of their own OS, was a move which was significantly long overdue. Nevertheless, they did announce an Android smartphone and towards the close of the year, they did release it. Enter, the BlackBerry PRIV.

    • Why Xiaomi’s compact Mi 5 could be a game changer

      A few days after the launch of the iPhone SE by Apple, the ‘Apple of China’, Xiaomi published data and an image of its new 4.3-inch Mi 5 Mini with a Snapdragon 820 processor. Chinese media outlets see the Mi 5 Mini as Xiaomi’s response to the 4-inch smartphone from Apple.

    • How to add Android N’s best new features to your phone right now

      Android 6.0 Marshmallow was announced nearly six months ago and according to Google, it has only found its way to 2.3% of Android devices so far. That… is not a lot of Android phones. Since Marshmallow has been available for six months and it’s only found on less than 3% of devices, you can imagine how long it will be before Android N makes its way to end users. Google surprised us all when it released a developer preview build earlier this month, and the final build of Android N is expected to be released sometime this summer. So if trends stay true, we can expect N to become the most widely used version of Android sometime in 2018. Seriously.

    • IF and DO Button by IFTTT on Android Wear – Android customization

    • Android devices yield their secrets to the feds more readily than iPhones

    • What if the FBI tried to crack an Android phone? We attacked one to find out [Ed: posted from another source before]

    • Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow OTA Update Available For Galaxy S5, Note 4, Note Edge, Note 5

    • How to Customize Android’s Quick Settings Dropdown Menu

    • What one silly app reveals about Google’s grand plan for Android

    • Five great keyboard alternatives for Android tablets

      The tablet keyboard is a personal thing. To one user, it’s just a means for typing messages and statuses, entering data while on the go. To someone else, it’s a way of making the mobile experience more efficient and enjoyable.

      Out of the box, the Android keyboard is serviceable… especially on the smartphone form. But once you venture into the realm of the tablet, that stock keyboard seems a bit less than user-friendly.

    • Google Nexus 6P vs. Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge—Two of Android’s finest

      There are other differences between the two devices. The Nexus 6P doesn’t have wireless charging or expandable storage, nor does is it have IP68 certification. For most consumers, these features aren’t crucial to the experience though they’re certainly nice to have. Once you do use a device with wireless charging, it’s hard to live without.

      Most people will go with Samsung simply because it’s a recognizable and trusted brand. And, let’s be honest, on paper it’s superior to the Nexus 6P. But it’s not always about specs—often times it’s about the experience that counts.

    • Catch all of the Android April Fools’ Day jokes right here

      Despite the general public displeasure with all things on the Internet come April 1, the big companies in the tech space just can’t help themselves. Year after year we get tons of April Fools’ Day jokes, gags and pranks. Most are flops and some are worth a chuckle, and no matter how well they go over we’re rounding them all up right here.

Abot — How To Make Your Own Digital Assistant With This Free And Open Source Tool

Ever wished to create your own digital assistant that talks back to you and completes your day-to-day tasks? Now it’s easier than ever with an open source tool Abot that’s written in Go programming language. Know more about it here and start coding one for you.

An open source microprocessor for wearables

Swiss open-source processor core ready for IoT

Every part of this microprocessor is open source

Software source codes and hardware designs tend to be closely guarded trade secrets. But researchers recently made the full design of one of their microprocessors available as an open-source system.

Open source web development for better customization

Open source software opens door to web design career

Before I discovered open source software in 2005, I had never touched a digital design package and probably couldn’t have named one. In fact, I never believed myself to be creative in any way, let alone thought about teaching myself an entirely new discipline.

Michael DeHaan on Achieving Project Adoption

Starting a successful open source project requires a lot more than technical skills. You need to have wise strategies, which Michael DeHaan, founder of the IT automation company Ansible, clearly explains in this valuable video. In this talk, recorded March 22 on the Centennial Campus of North Carolina State University, he explains that for users to adopt your open source creations, the documentation needs to be outstanding. Your web site needs to be very well done. Learn these and other tips in this video.

Google Open Sources 360-Degree VR and Photo Tool

Membership Drive Results 2016

This year, we are delighted to say hello to 335 new and returning members. This means that our membership numbers are up 172% over last year, which is wonderful to see!

Industrial city hackerspace teaches something more valuable than code

James Wallbank is a founder of one of the longest-running hackerspaces in the U.K. Access Space opened in the center of the northern industrial city of Sheffield in 2000 with the goal of being open to all.

Beyond being a place for coding and programming, Access Space refurbishes donated laptops for charitable use. It was also the subject of a recent academic study on barriers to womens’ participation in hackerspaces and makerspaces. In this interview, Ikem Nzeribe of Moss Code and I ask Wallbank about his experience running the hackerspace, revealing lessons that all projects looking to support diversity can use for themselves. The hackerspace model of economic self-empowerment could lead to a more diverse tech sector, but Wallbank makes it clear that there are no short cuts. The challenge may be finding enough champions of genuine diversity with the right balance of vision, critical evaluation, and persistence to enable under-represented communities.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • FLOSS Weekly 381: Mozilla Encryption Campaign

    Brett Gaylor is a Director at the Mozilla Foundation, where he helps helm the current encryption education campaign. He also oversees Mozilla’s Open Web Fellows program, which places open source technologists and activists at leading nonprofits like Amnesty International and ACLU.

SaaS/Back End

• AtScale Advances its BI and Hadoop Strategy

  As it began to develop, the Big Data trend–sorting and sifting large data sets with new tools in pursuit of surfacing meaningful angles on stored information–remained an enterprise-only story, but now businesses of all sizes are evaluating tools that can help them glean meaningful insights from the data they store. As we’ve noted, the open source Hadoop project has been one of the big drivers of this trend, and has given rise to commercial companies that offer custom Hadoop distributions, support, training and more.

Databases

• The PostgreSQL Global Development Group’s PostgreSQL

  Other specific features are performance boosters for today’s more powerful big iron servers, analytics and productivity enhancements to speed complex query capabilities on extreme data volumes, and a foundation for horizontal scalability across multiple servers for importing entire tables from external databases.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 5.2 Launches in August, First Bug Hunting Session Starts April 22

  On March 31, 2016, The Document Foundation Co-Founder Italo Vignoli announced the release plan for the upcoming major release of the world’s popular free office suite, LibreOffice 5.2.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Licensing and Compliance Lab interviews Matt Lee of GNU Social

  GNU social was created as a companion to my earlier project, GNU FM, which we created to build the social music platform, Libre.fm. After only a few short months, Libre.fm had over 20,000 users and I realized I didn’t want to be another social media silo like MySpace or Facebook, so I came up with this vague idea called GNU social. A few prototypes were built, and eventually we started making GNU social as a series of plugins for Evan Prodromou’s StatusNet project, with some help from Ian Denhardt, Craig Andrews and Steven DuBois. Later, StatusNet, GNU social and Free&Social (a fork of StatusNet) would merge into a single project called GNU social. If that sounds confusing and convoluted, it is.

• March 2016: photos from Bhopal and Utrecht and through to Quebec City and Montreal

  RMS was in India, the Netherlands, and Canada this past month. He started his trip in February in Pilani, in Delhi, and in Roorkee, where he spoke, at APOGEE 2016, the annual Birla Institute of Technology & Science–Pilani technical festival, at Tryst, the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi’s annual science and technology festival, and at Cognizance,1 IIT–Delhi’s annual technical festival. He then moved on…

Programming/Development

• Migrated to Git

Why are so many people using ad blockers?

Prominent mobile device companies like Apple and Samsung have recently added the ability to run ad blockers on their phones and tablets. And many users have been installing them, making ad blockers some of the most popular apps in app stores.

Ad blockers are a hot topic of debate though, with revenue-starved sites being pitted against users who are concerned about malware as well as their overall reading experience. Users are defending their right to run ad blockers, while sites are requesting that they turn them off.

But there’s another reason why so many people are using ad blockers on their mobile devices: mobile data allotments. It turns out that advertising can eat up a user’s fixed data allotment very, very quickly and that could result in expensive overage charges.

Code talker Gilbert Horn laid to rest

To the broader outside world, Horn was best known as a Native American code talker who fought with the storied WWII deep penetration unit known as Merrill’s Marauders. But to those who knew him best, he was simply “Uncle Gil,” chief of the Fort Belknap Assiniboine Tribe.

“My dad touched a lot of people’s lives in a good way,” said Willowa “Sis” Horn, Gilbert Horn’s oldest daughter. “But to me he was just daddy – just my dad.”

Horn was born May 12, 1923, during an era when much of white society viewed Native culture as a quaint anachronism – something that would be gradually extinguished as Indian people were assimilated into the dominant western culture.

Health/Nutrition

• Review Of WHO Pandemic Flu Preparedness: Data Sequencing And Other Issues

  A representative of Sequirus, one of the largest vaccine manufacturers, on behalf of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA), the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), and another industry group, said industry supports the PIP Framework.

  Genetic sequence data of influenza viruses with pandemic potential are not WHO PIP biological materials per the definition of PIP biological materials, the representative said. It is critical that GSD remain in the public domain for continued influenza R&D efforts, she said. In the context of the PIP Framework review, “industry is willing to consider an appropriate revision to the PIP biological definition to reflect anticipated technological advances.”

  However, “not all influenza IVPP and IVPP GSD should be included in the definition and subject to the WHO PIP Framework obligations,” the industry representative said, rather only GSD which is used directly to develop and manufacture commercial IVPP products. “Attaching obligations to the general use and the sharing of publicly available GSD could potentially inhibit influenza R&D.”

• Global E-Waste Epidemic: Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind

  Many of us identify with the growing movement to better understand our collective and individual impact on the environment and one another. We can look to our own communities for working examples of regulations, initiatives, and programs that have been developed to tackle the growing problem of electronic waste. Curbside donation programs have sprung up in many communities around the U.S., but most of us stop thinking about the disposal process once it leaves our hands. There has been a lack of media coverage regarding the global community’s outsourcing of electronic waste.

  Steps have been taken on an international level to promote responsible disposal, for example with the creation of the Basel Convention. However, loopholes exist. In her report, Madeleine Somerville points to the fact that externalizing the costs of disposal contributes to the exploitation of marginalized communities as well as the environment. The fundamental problem is not that we don’t care about the effects of e-waste, but that we are relatively unaware of the complete life cycle of the electronics we use. We are not yet tuned in to how our everyday lifestyles contribute to the amount of production and subsequent waste.

• If Addiction is a Disease, Why is It Criminal? Maia Szalavitz Envisions a Compassionate Drug Policy

  President Obama has unveiled a series of steps aimed at addressing the epidemic of opioid addiction in the United States. We speak with journalist Maia Szalavitz about her new book, “Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction,” and about her own experience of overcoming addiction. “We need to create a more compassionate and loving drug policy,” Szalavitz says. “Nobody is going to believe that addiction is a disease as long as the behavior is criminal.”

• POTUS advisors vote for Superbug Czar but go soft on farm antibiotic use

  The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that trek between farms and clinics and across international boarders is unquestionably one of the most serious public health threats of our time. They currently sicken around two million people in the US each year, killing at least 23,000. To tackle the issue, the Obama Administration last year released a National Action Plan and established a panel of diverse experts to research and guide the government’s efforts to squash those deadly superbugs.

  That 15-person panel, called the Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria or PACCARB, convened this week in Washington, DC to discuss and vote on its first progress report and key recommendations, which now head to the president’s desk. Thursday, the council unanimously voted for six recommendations, which spanned calls for funding and collaboration. But chief among them is the call for the president to establish a White House-level leader that could coordinate all of the government agencies’ efforts to fight drug resistance.

Security

• Thursday’s security updates

• Your router could succumb to a new Telnet worm

  Building botnets made up of routers, modems, wireless access points and other networking devices doesn’t require sophisticated exploits. Remaiten, a new worm that infects embedded systems, spreads by taking advantage of weak Telnet passwords.

  Remaiten is the latest incarnation of distributed denial-of-service Linux bots designed for embedded architectures. Its authors actually call it KTN-Remastered, where KTN most likely stands for a known Linux bot called Kaiten.

• Remaiten Is a New DDoS Bot Targeting Linux-Based Home Routers

  Malware coders have created a new DDoS bot called Remaiten that targets home routers running on common Linux architectures, which also shares a lot of similarities with other DDoS bots like Tsunami and Gafgyt.

• Oh, Look: Yet Another Security Flaw In Government Websites

  Or worse. The open direct could lead to spyware and malware, rather than just advertising masquerading as content or bottom-feeder clickbait. Fortunately, you can keep an eye on what URLs are being reached using these open redirects via this link. Unfortunately, it may be only citizens keeping an eye on that page, and they’re in no position to prevent further abuse.

• CNBC Asks Readers To Submit Their Password To Check Its Strength Into Exploitable Widget

  People’s passwords and their relative strength and weakness is a subject I know quite well. As part of my business, we regularly battle users who think very simple passwords, often times relating to their birthdays and whatnot, are sufficient. Sometimes they simply make “password” or a similiar variant their go-to option. So, when CNBC put together a widget for readers to input the passwords they use to get feedback on their strength or weakness, I completely understand what they were attempting to accomplish. Password security is a real issue, after all — which is what makes it all the more face-palming that the widget CNBC used was found to be exploitable.

• Reviewing Important Healthcare Cybersecurity Frameworks [Ed: Microsoft Windows]

  Just recently, a ransomware attack affected Hollywood Presbyterian in California, causing the hospital to pay $17,000 to regain access to its databases.

• U.S., Canada issue joint alert on ‘ransomware’ after hospital attacks [iophk: The governments need to track down those spreading Windows in the hospitals.]

  The United States and Canada on Thursday issued a rare joint cyber alert, warning against a recent surge in extortion attacks that infect computers with viruses known as “ransomware,” which encrypt data and demand payments for it to be unlocked.

  The warning follows reports from several private security firms that they expect the crisis to worsen, because hackers are getting more sophisticated and few businesses have adopted proper security measures to thwart such attacks.

• NIST Publishes New Security Standard For Encrypting Credit Card, Medical Info

  The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed new encryption methods for securing financial data and other sensitive information.

  The NIST publication SP 800-38G authored by Morris Dworkin specifies cryptography standards for both binary and non-binary data, preserving the look and feel of the unencrypted digits. Earlier encryption methods designed by NIST worked for binary data. But for strings of decimal numbers, there was no feasible technique to produce coded data that preserves the original format.

Defence/Aggression

• Freedom in North Korea (I Hate Travel Stories About North Korea)

  Every travel story about North Korea reads the same:

  We went to North Korea voluntarily, and were shocked to find that we couldn’t like hang out at clubs with everyday Koreans, and the dudes there, like, spied on us.

  And we couldn’t use WhatsApp or take selfies anywhere we wanted, or like mock the hell out of the fat guy who dictates the place LOL. It’s like so oppressive and I’m so glad to be back in the U.S. where sh*t is totally free, I mean literally, bro.

  Wash, rinse, repeat.

• No Thank You for Your Service: The Fallacy of Troop Worship

  There is a pervasive idea in today’s American society that regardless of political philosophy or party affiliation, one must never criticize the members of the United States military. Conventional wisdom holds that we must appreciate the sacrifice soldiers have made to “fight for our freedom,” and even if one is against the war, they must always “support the troops.” This line of thinking is not coming solely from the pro-war crowd; many of those who consider themselves antiwar (or at least oppose a specific war or conflict) have the utmost regard for those who fight in them. But is this canonization of those who take up arms in the name of the United States government truly just? Or is it a falsehood based on propaganda, emotion, and a lack of critical thinking?

• NATO: Worse Than ‘Obsolete’

  That promise was not kept. Instead, the lobbyists, both foreign and domestic, went into overdrive in a campaign to extend NATO to the very gates of Moscow. It was a lucrative business for the Washington set, as the Wall Street Journal documented: cushy fees for lobbyists, influence-buying by US corporations, as well as political tradeoffs for the administration of George W. Bush, which garnered support for the Iraq war from Eastern Europe’s former Warsaw Pact states in exchange for favorable treatment of their NATO applications.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Italy should work on its OGP commitments and their implementation

  The Progress Report covers the second Italian OGP Action Plan (for the period 2014-2015), which was adopted in December 2014. The plan was developed by the new government that was installed at the beginning of that year and that “planned to set up structural reforms in many sectors of public administration, stressing the relevance of transparency, accountability, and open data.”

Finance

• New Analysis Shows ‘Frivolous’ Corporate Sovereignty Suits Increasingly Used To Deter Regulation Rather Than Win Compensation

  The rise in public awareness of the dangers of corporate sovereignty provisions in agreements like TPP and TAFTA/TTIP has brought with it a collateral benefit: academics are starting to explore its effects in greater depth. An example is a new paper from Krzysztof J. Pelc, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, at McGill University in Canada. Called “Does the Investment Regime Induce Frivolous Litigation?” (pdf), it looks at how the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism has evolved in recent years, and in a very troubling direction.

• Open-Source P2P Currency Exchange CurrencyFair Secures €8 Million

  CurrencyFair, an open-source, peer-to-peer, international currency exchange with offices in the U.K., Ireland and Australia, has raised an additional €8 million and announced a new chief marketing officer.

• Vox and the False Consensus of ‘Most Economists Agree’

  Sometimes Vox does actually link to something at least attempting consensus, as they have done here and here. But more often, even when an attempt at consensus is reached, it’s plagued with blinders that render the “most economists” distinction suspect.

  For example, the University of Chicago “poll” that sampled economists about the value of Uber, showing uniform consensus about how great it was, did not contain a single African-American or Hispanic economist. Does the class and racial composition —let alone the University of Chicago’s notorious association with free-market ideology—affect what this cohort of “most economists” thinks? Probably. Does anyone at Vox care? Evidently not.

  Sometimes the “most economists” device is just a lazy placeholder, and it’s entirely possible that “most economists,” if subjected to anything approaching a scientific poll, would actually agree with the author’s assertion. Sometimes vague intuitions about what others think are true!

  But like Fox News‘ use of “some say,” “most economists” or “most experts” is often a weasel phase that permits the writer to smuggle in their own opinion and ideology where it ought not be, and couches their own subjective, ad hoc analysis as something reflecting scientific consensus. Certainly, if “most experts” on a subject agree, what they agree on must therefore be objectively and undoubtedly true.

  Ultimately, the “most expert/economists” cliche is a lazy appeal to authority that shortcuts actually showing one’s homework—how one got from premise to conclusion. If the news is going to be “explained” rather than just asserted, most media critics agree that Vox should drop this tic altogether.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Corporate Media Circles Wagons Around Tories

  There is a huge amount of polling evidence over decades that shows that the perception that a party is divided causes much damage to that party’s popularity rating. Indeed the perception of division or unity is almost as important as what the actual policies are. The spectacular tumbling of popular Tory support in the UK is therefore entirely expected when the Tories are kicking pieces out of each other over Europe and Osbornomics.

  The corporate media, including the BBC, of course know this very well. That is why ever since those opinion polls the bitter Tory internal battles have simply stopped being reported. I have no doubt their political correspondents are having conversations like the one I had with an MP this morning, several times every day. Yet when did you last see one reported? Compare this to the regular reporting of every tittle tattle of anonymous Blairite briefing against Corbyn.

• Moyers & Co. Cites FAIR on Media Consolidation

• Anonymity in the New York Times: By the Numbers

  A new report from FAIR looks at a year’s worth of anonymity in the New York Times, with media critic Reed Richardson taking an in-depth look at how unnamed sources were used in the paper in 2015. His research substantiates that the observation Times public editor Margaret Sullivan made in 2014 (12/29/14) is still true: “Anonymity continues to be granted to sources far more often than a last-resort basis would suggest.”

• Twenty Years of Media Consolidation Has Not Been Good For Our Democracy

  Wall Street’s sinister influence on the political process has, rightly, been a major topic during this presidential campaign. But history has taught us that the role that the media industry plays in Washington poses a comparable threat to our democracy. Yet this is a topic rarely discussed by the dominant media, or on the campaign trail.

• Error Keeps Sanders off D.C. Ballot [iophk: The establishment, in pushing Clinton, is really pulling some dirty tricks.]

  Bernie Sanders is not on the ballot for Washington, D.C.’s Democratic primary on June 14, thanks to a clerical error.

  Both Sanders, a senator from Vermont, and front-runner Hillary Clinton submitted their paperwork and the $2,500 fee in advance of the March 16 deadline. But due to a clerical error, the D.C. Democrats did not notify the Board of Elections until March 17, according to WRC-TV in Washington.

• Bernie Sanders Has an Interesting Theory About Why the Republican Party Exists

  Rachel Maddow posed an interesting question to Sen. Bernie Sanders during their interview on Wednesday: Would he like to see the Republican Party just disappear? Sanders’ answer was also an interesting one. He didn’t take the bait; instead, he offered an alternative theory—the GOP would disappear if corporate media simply told the truth about the party’s agenda.

  [...]

  “The Republican Party today now is a joke,” he continued, “maintained by a media which really does not force them to discuss their issues.”

  Sanders was returning to one of his driving issues over the years—a fervent belief that corporate-owned media was steering democracy off a cliff. In 1979, he wrote an essay arguing that TV networks were “using the well-tested Hitlerian principle that people should be treated as morons and bombarded over and over again with the same simple phrases and ideas” to prevent them from thinking critically about the world around them. He hit those same themes (albeit more diplomatically) in his book, Outsider in the House, arguing that TV news coverage was dumbing down America by inundating viewers with superficial coverage of O.J. Simpson instead of “corporate disinvestment in the United States.” Not surprisingly, when Maddow asked Sanders in an interview last fall what his dream job might be, he quickly blurted out, “president of CNN.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Opinion: Censorship leads to many harmful, scary precedents

  Last week, “Trump 2016” was chalked in many places across Emory University’s campus. The backlash was swift. Students called for an immediate investigation. Emory administrators responded quickly, saying they would review security footage in order to find the “perpetrators” to then execute disciplinary protocol.

  In consistency with the free speech editorial we wrote in the fall, we write this in the hopes of criticizing this kind of censorship and policing culture often taken by college administration in response to speech that could be construed as hate speech.

  We certainly are not condoning the type of rhetoric that Donald Trump espouses or the type of politics that he inspires, but rather are calling for a more long-term strategy for protecting the rights of the marginalized. As many legal experts have noted, the type of precedent this Orwellian approach to censoring and stifling speech — however advantageous in the short term it may be — will come to disproportionately affect students’ ability to voice opinions later. If the chalkings were anti-University administration, students have now inadvertently created a protocol under which that too can be stifled by Emory officials.

• Nintendo FIRES feminist Alison Rapp following furious paedophile porn censorship storm

• Nintendo denies Alison Rapp firing is linked to harassment campaign

• Nintendo fires woman who became online target

• When Chinese state censorship reached the L.E.S.

  Manhattan-based artist Joyce Yu-Jean Lee never guessed she was in for a bit of international intrigue and even global headlines when she launched a show and accompanying discussion panels in February at a couple of alternative venues on the Lower East Side.

  The installation, which lasted a month, was a pop-up Internet cafe dubbed “Firewall.” This is a reference to the “Great Firewall of China” (officially the “Golden Shield”) that filters the Internet in the People’s Republic.

• Apple patents on-the-fly censorship technology

  Apple recently patented a software system that can automatically detect and remove swear words from streamed audio tracks. The patent, dubbed “Management, Replacement and Removal of Explicit Lyrics during Audio Playback” scans a piece of music, compares the lyrics against a database of banned words, marks any explicit bits it finds and then removes the offending content, replacing it with either a beep or silence. The technology can also, according to its patent filing, detect the background music and boost that to cover what’s being censored. The system isn’t limited to music, mind you, it can just as easily be applied to audio books. As with many of Apple’s patents, there is no word on when — or even if — the technology will ever make it into an actual product.

• Apple has patented technology to automatically scan songs and remove swear words

  Apple has been granted a patent for technology that can automatically scan songs being streamed online and edit out any swear words in the lyrics.

• The Latest In Reputation Management: Bogus Defamation Suits From Bogus Companies Against Bogus Defendants

  Pissed Consumer has uncovered an apparent abuse of the court system by reputation management firms. Getting allegedly defamatory links delisted by Google requires a court order, which is something very few people can actually obtain. But the plaintiffs featured in this Pissed Consumer post seem to have no trouble acquiring these — often within a few days of filing their lawsuits.

• Onlinecensorship.org Launches Inaugural Report

  We’re proud to announce today’s release of Onlinecensorship.org’s first report looking at how content is regulated by social media companies. Onlinecensorship.org—a joint project of EFF and Visualizing Impact (VI) that won the 2014 Knight News Challenge—seeks to encourage social media companies to operate with greater transparency and accountability toward their users as they make decisions that regulate speech.

  Onlinecensorship.org was founded to fill a gap in public knowledge about how social media companies moderate content. As platforms like Facebook and Twitter play an increasingly large role in our lives, it’s important to track how these companies are regulating the speech of their users, both in tandem with governments and independent of them. As self-ordained content moderators, these companies face thorny issues; deciding what constitutes hate speech, harassment, and terrorism is challenging, particularly across many different cultures, languages, and social circumstances. These U.S.-based companies by and large do not consider their policies to constitute censorship. We challenge this assertion, and examine how their policies (and their enforcement) may have a chilling effect on freedom of expression.

• Texas Cops’ Complaint Censorship Attack YouTube Videos of Public Officials in Public

  Texas police launched a “complaint censorship” attack on David Warden’s YouTube channel News Now Houston, claiming his videos violate their privacy.

  Which is a lie, because in public, nobody has a right or expectation of privacy.

  Least of all public officials like police.

  You can see a new video below, Warden talking about the agony of having been first assaulted and then attacked with complaint censorship on his news channel and three false complaints aimed at censoring his citizen journalism.

  It’s his only way to monetize important public interest news-gathering activities.

  It’s where he tells the world about official abuse.

  Complaint censorship happens with false or improper complaints submitted with intent to damage a citizen journalist or news outlet’s online publishing access or tools.

• Vietnamese Bloggers Sentenced to Prison in a Renewed Crackdown on Free Expression

  A prominent Vietnamese blogger and his assistant were sentenced to prison last week in Hanoi for their work on a popular web site, read by millions of Vietnamese, that reported on human rights and government corruption. The case raises alarms of a new wave of repression against independent media and free expression online in Vietnam.

  On March 23 a Hanoi court sentenced Nguyen Huu Vinh, a former police officer and the son of Vietnam’s ambassador to the former Soviet Union, to five years in prison for “abusing democratic freedoms to harm the interests of the state.” Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy, Vinh’s assistant, was sentenced to three years. Vinh, better known as Anh Ba Sam, set up a popular blog in 2007 and later launched two others. The sites provided news and comments about democracy, social and economic issues from state media and activists, and articles critical of Vietnamese government policies. One site, AhnBasam, was repeatedly attacked by hackers in 2013 and 2014; Vinh and Thuy were arrested in May 2014 in Hanoi and indicted on charges that articles posted on the sites had “untruthful” content and “distort the lines and policies” of the ruling Community Party.

• Onlinecensorship.org launches first report (PDF)

• ‘Barney’s Wall’ Needs Money to Complete Film

  The producers of the film “Barney’s Wall,” about the creative vision and legacy of Barney Rosset, need money to cover post-production costs.

  The film focuses on the man and the mural he made in his later years on the main wall of his apartment and office space in the East Village. He worked on the mural until the last days of his life in 2012. In the years following his death, the apartment was sold to developers, and it was clear that the mural would not survive there.

• Barney’s Wall: New Film Celebrates How One Man Brought Down Censorship in the US

• Some prominent Chinese are chafing against censorship. Then their complaints are censored

• Play Pamphlet Sparks Censorship Debate in Hong Kong

• Pakistan Islamist protesters end four-day blasphemy protest

• Turkey Wants Ban on Mocking Its Leader Enforced Abroad Too

Privacy/Surveillance

• FCC advances privacy proposal for U.S. internet users

  The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Thursday advanced a proposal to ensure the privacy of broadband Internet users by barring providers from collecting user data without consent.

  The proposed regulation from FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler won initial approval with a 3-2 vote to require broadband providers to obtain consumer consent, disclose data collection, protect personal information and report breaches — but would not bar any data collection practices.

  “It’s the consumers’ information and the consumer should have the right to determine how it’s used,” Wheeler said.

• Exclusive: Egypt blocked Facebook Internet service over surveillance – sources

  Egypt blocked Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) Free Basics Internet service at the end of last year after the U.S. company refused to give the Egyptian government the ability to spy on users, two people familiar with the matter said.

  Free Basics, launched in Egypt in October, is aimed at low-income customers, allowing anyone with a cheap computer or smartphone to create a Facebook account and access a limited set of Internet services at no charge.

  The Egyptian government suspended the service on Dec. 30 and said at the time that the mobile carrier Etisalat had only been granted a temporary permit to offer the service for two months.

  Two sources with direct knowledge of discussions between Facebook and the Egyptian government said Free Basics was blocked because the company would not allow the government to circumvent the service’s security to conduct surveillance. They declined to say exactly what type of access the government had demanded or what practices it wanted Facebook to change.

• Reddit deletes surveillance ‘warrant canary’ in transparency report

  Social networking forum reddit on Thursday removed a section from its site used to tacitly inform users it had never received a certain type of U.S. government surveillance request, suggesting the platform is now being asked to hand over customer data under a secretive law enforcement authority.

• Reddit removes “warrant canary” from its latest transparency report

  Reddit has removed the warrant canary posted on its website, suggesting that the company may have been served with some sort of secret court order or document for user information.

  At the bottom of its 2014 transparency report, the company wrote: “As of January 29, 2015, reddit has never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or any other classified request for user information. If we ever receive such a request, we would seek to let the public know it existed.”

  That language was conspicuously missing from the 2015 transparency report that was published Thursday morning. (Disclaimer: Ars and Reddit are owned by the same parent company, Advance Publications.)

• Signal

  Signal is a pretty amazing app; it manages to combine great security with great simplicity.

• Amnesty International: Encryption is a Human Rights Issue

  New Report Analyzes How Crypto Backdoors, Interference with Crypto, and Compelled Disclosure of Encryption Keys All Impact Free Expression and Privacy

  Defending encryption is a human rights issue, according to a new Amnesty International report. The report calls on nation-states to promote the use of encryption tools as part of their international human rights obligations to protect the privacy of their populations.

• NSA Chief Refuses ‘To Get Into’ Whether Hillary’s Email Server Was Hacked [VIDEO]

  National Security Agency (NSA) director Michael S. Rogers adamantly refused on Thursday to say whether Hillary Clinton’s private email server was ever hacked.

  “It’s something I’m just not going to get into,” Rogers told Yahoo! News’ Michael Isikoff when asked in an interview if Clinton’s server was ever compromised.

• Did a Self-Identified Spy Hunter Leak an NSA Secret on LinkedIn?

  The American government built underwater drones in the 1990s to tap into fiber-optics cables, he claims.

  [...]

  He later called it a “new series of fiber optic [remotely operated vehicles].”

  Edward Snowden, who knows some things about secrets, called the disclosure “probably the most incredible leak of compartmented [top secret] material I’ve ever seen on LinkedIn.”

• Using the NSA Intrusion Lifecycle to bolster security

  IT systems in both the public and private sectors are woefully unprepared for an environment in which cyberthreats are becoming more constant and complex, according to Curtis Dukes, director of the National Security Agency’s Information Assurance Directorate.

• Would it be any easier for the FBI to crack Android?

• This Map Shows How the Apple-FBI Fight Was About Much More Than One Phone

  The FBI’s request was part of a sustained government effort to exercise novel law enforcement power.

  The government insisted that its effort to force Apple to help break into an iPhone as part of the investigation into the 2015 San Bernardino shootings was just about that one case. Even though the FBI no longer needs Apple’s help in that case, the FBI’s request was part of a sustained government effort to exercise novel law enforcement power.

• Google Was Also Ordered To Unlock A Phone, But Did Not Put Up A Fight

• The TOR Project: “Our Developers Will Quit If Ordered To Backdoor TOR Browser”

  The TOR Project has expressed its commitment to researching and developing new ways to mitigate the threats of security failure. Meanwhile, if TOR developers are asked to deploy some backdoor in the software, they would rather resign than honor the request.

• Spy Agency Says NSA Data Will Be Shared Within Government

• Spies close in on plan to share NSA data despite privacy worries

  The intelligence community is close to completing a plan to let the National Security Agency share more of the raw data it collects with other U.S. spy agencies, a system that would put an end to more than a decade of wrangling among the different organizations.

• Jay Evensen: While we talk about security vs. freedom, government keeps expanding data-gathering

  This would allow the FBI, for instance, to use NSA-gathered information to investigate crimes that have nothing to do with terrorism.

• Spy office denies allegations that NSA data will be used for policing

  A top lawyer for the nation’s intelligence agencies is pushing back on mounting criticism about new plans to widely share intercepted data throughout the federal government.

  Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, confirmed that the change in policy is “in the final stages of development and approval” in a post on national security legal blog Just Security on Wednesday.

  But Litt denied allegations that the change would allow the FBI and other agencies to use the sensitive data for domestic law enforcement matters, which members of Congress had speculated could be unconstitutional.

  “There will be no greater access to signals intelligence information for law enforcement purposes than there is today,” Litt claimed in his blog post. “These procedures will only ensure that other elements of the intelligence community will be able to make use of this signals intelligence if it is relevant to their intelligence mission.”

• UVU hopes to increase student retention with opening of money management center

• UVU working with NSA to get employees for data collection center

• Senator Wyden Lays Out New ‘Compact For Privacy & Security In The Digital Age’ In Response To Surveillance/Encryption Fights

  Yesterday, at the excellent RightsCon event in San Francisco, Senator Ron Wyden gave a barn burnder of a speech, in which he detailed why it was so important to protect our privacy and security in a digital age, at a time when law enforcement and the intelligence communities are digging deeper and deeper into all of our personal information.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A Look At Our Future: 5 Nations Who Elected Their Trump

  America makes a lot of questionable decisions, and when we do, the world is quick to call us out on it. For example, remember that time we impeached our president over an extramarital affair and countries lined up to express their amusement over the fact that we’d take such drastic steps over a relatively minor thing?

• Startup Offers Citizens More Opportunities To Get Shot By/Have Their Smartphones Seized By Law Enforcement

  I’m not sure people are going to be more comforted that people are carrying guns they can’t see, especially not US law enforcement, which has already demonstrated it fears cell phones as much as it fears guns.

• No Charges To Be Filed in Minneapolis Police Shooting of Jamar Clark

  Black Lives Matter activists are planning a protest in Minneapolis tonight after Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced no charges will be filed against the two Minneapolis police officers involved in the shooting death last fall of Jamar Clark, an unarmed 24-year-old African American. Clark was shot in the head after a scuffle with officers who responded to a report of an assault. In announcing the decision, Freeman rejected claims by multiple witnesses that Clark was shot while handcuffed. Freeman also claimed Clark placed his hand on an officer’s gun during the scuffle. Clark’s death sparked a series of protests in Minneapolis.

• North Carolina: Flush Your Bathroom Bill Down the Toilet

  Opponents call it “the Bathroom Bill.” In a special session last week, the North Carolina state legislature passed HB2, officially called the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act. Gov. Pat McCrory signed the law that night. The new law denies transgender people use of the bathroom, changing room or locker room that matches their gender identity. Resistance to the bill is fierce, and growing daily.

• When a Headscarf Becomes a Target

  To make clear their rights, the ACLU has just released a Know Your Rights guide for women and girls who wear hijab.

  Libraries and schools are supposed to be inclusive spaces for learning, growing, and tolerance. But two women last week — one in California, one in D.C. — learned these safe spaces do not always live up to their reputation.

• They Came A-Knockin’, and I Said “As-Salam Alaikum, Y’all!”

  The first year was hard. While my husband enjoyed his new position at the university, I was having a difficult time finding work in my field — civil rights. I took up cooking and working out, trying to keep up with these very elegant Southern moms who always looked well-manicured. I even joined the PTA. At my first meeting, I was approached by someone who appeared to be the head lady of the group.

  “What church do you go to?” she asked, smiling from ear to ear.

  “Church? Oh. Uh. I don’t. I’m Muslim.”

• UK Law Enforcement Trying To Force Man They’ve Never Charged With A Crime To Decrypt His Computers

  British hacker Lauri Love stands accused of causing “millions of dollars” in damages to US government computers — charges he’s been facing for more than two years. These charges originate in the US, but it’s the UK that’s been trying to get Love to give up his encryption keys for the past couple of years.

  Under RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act of 2000), the UK government can charge Love with “failure to cooperate” by refusing to comply with the order to decrypt files. To date it has not done so, despite Love blowing off its demands since the middle of February 2014.

• UK cops tell suspect to hand over crypto keys in US hacking case

  At a court hearing earlier this month, the UK’s National Crime Authority (NCA) demanded that Lauri Love, a British computer scientist who allegedly broke into US government networks and caused “millions of dollars in damage,” decrypt his laptop and other devices impounded by the NCA in 2013, leading some experts to warn that a decision in the government’s favor could set a worrisome precedent for journalists and whistleblowers.

  Arrested in 2013 for the alleged intrusions but subsequently released, Love was re-arrested in 2015 and is currently fighting extradition to the United States. He has so far refused to comply with a Section 49 RIPA notice to decrypt the devices, a refusal that carries potential jail time. However, British authorities have not charged Love with any crime, leading him to counter-sue in civil court for the return of his devices.

• Slain Activist Berta Cáceres’ Daughter: US Military Aid Has Fueled Repression & Violence in Honduras

  Another indigenous environmentalist has been murdered in Honduras, less than two weeks after the assassination of renowned activist Berta Cáceres. Nelson García was shot to death Tuesday after returning home from helping indigenous people who had been displaced in a mass eviction by Honduran security forces. García was a member of COPINH, the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, co-founded by Berta Cáceres, who won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize last year for her decade-long fight against the Agua Zarca Dam, a project planned along a river sacred to the indigenous Lenca people. She was shot to death at her home on March 3. On Thursday, thousands converged in Tegucigalpa for the start of a mobilization to demand justice for Berta Cáceres and an end to what they say is a culture of repression and impunity linked to the Honduran government’s support for corporate interests. At the same time, hundreds of people, most of them women, gathered outside the Honduran Mission to the United Nations chanting “Berta no se murió; se multiplicó – Berta didn’t die; she multiplied.” We speak with Cáceres’s daughter, Bertha Zúniga Cáceres, and with Lilian Esperanza López Benítez, the financial coordinator of COPINH.

• Indigenous Hondurans Demand Investigation of Berta Caceres’ Assassination

  Describing a backdrop of long-term US “meddling” in Honduras, Caceres spoken out publicly in 2014 against Hillary Clinton’s role as US Secretary of State in the 2009 coup that ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya and opened what the Goldman Prize website described as the “explosive growth in environmentally destructive megaprojects that would displace indigenous communities.”

• Turkish President Visits Washington, Clashes With Journalists

  Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is visiting Washington, D.C. this week — and his security team has brought along some of its tactics for shutting down dissent and free speech.

  Outside a planned speech at the Brookings Institution on Thursday, confrontations between protesters and Erdogan’s guards devolved into violence. Eyewitnesses reported that Turkish security forcibly removed one journalist from the scene, while another was kicked and a third was thrown to the sidewalk. Inside the event, journalists reported being forced to leave by Turkish security.

• Breaking: Cherelle Baldwin Found Not Guilty in Death of Abusive Ex, Freed After 3 Years in Jail

  Cherelle Baldwin has been freed after a 12-member jury in Bridgeport, Connecticut found her not guilty of murder in the death of her abusive ex-boyfriend, Jeffrey Brown. According to the Huffington Post, Baldwin “collapsed to the floor in tears as the verdict was announced,” crying, “My baby will have his mommy back.”

• EFF Pressure Results in Increased Disclosure of Abuse of California’s Law Enforcement Databases

  EFF’s efforts to fix holes in oversight of the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS) are paying off.

  New data and records released by California Department of Justice (CADOJ) show a steep increase in the number of agencies disclosing cases of abuse of the state’s network of law enforcement databases—a major victory for transparency and law enforcement accountability.

  Last year, EFF identified major failures in how a CADOJ committee charged with overseeing the system—the CLETS Advisory Committee (CAC)—reviews misuse investigations. The body, EFF found, had failed to follow established procedures for disciplining users who break access rules, leading to a 100% increase in reported misuse since 2010.

• Ham-Handed Arrest at Pediatric Clinic Highlights Official War on the Powerless

  The cops raided my wife’s pediatric practice looking for a fugitive, last week.

  Actually, let’s put the word “fugitive” in quotes. The story is an eye-opening tale in itself. It’s also a glimpse at how business-as-usual in courts and cop shops around the country screws with people’s lives and alienates the public from those who are allegedly their protectors.

  My wife, Dr. Wendy Tuccille, was on her way to the office in Cottonwood, Arizona, when her phone rang. Frantic staff called to tell her that the clinic’s parking lot was full of cops, there to arrest one of her employees, C.H. (it’s a small town so we’ll stick with her initials), on an outstanding warrant.

  When my wife arrived she found a gaggle of cops—12 to 15 she told me, some in battle jammies—in plain view at the rear corner of the building. The parking lot was full of police vehicles, in sight of families and children arriving to be seen and treated.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Stop the Obama administration from surrendering authority over the Internet

  We all know now that the Internet began as a US government project. Administration of parts of it was eventually outsourced, first to Network Solutions Inc and then to a non-profit corporation created just for the task: ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). ICANN operates autonomously, but under a contract from the US government, specifically from the NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) in the US Department of Commerce.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Practical tips for filing designs post-Trunki

  Following the UK Supreme Court’s judgment in the Trunki design dispute, Managing IP summarises practical tips from UK practitioners on filing designs and eight lessons from the judgment

• Copyrights

  • Rightscorp Blames VPNs and ISPs For Drop in Revenue

    Anti-piracy cash settlement outfit Rightscorp has just announced a net loss of $3.5m for its operations during 2015. Interestingly the company cites a number of reasons, some of them cryptic, for decreasing revenues. Alongside the mysterious “shutting down” of unnamed file-sharing infrastructure, VPN use and ISP reluctance to assist trolling are major factors.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Acer Chromebook 14 arrives with aluminium chassis and 14-hour battery life

  PC MAKER Acer has unveiled the Chromebook 14, a premium-looking Chrome OS laptop that claims a MacBook-rivalling 14-hour battery life.

  Acer, perhaps not best known for premium devices, added the aluminium-clad Chromebook 14 to its laptop line-up this week. This is Acer’s first all-metal Chromebook, and the chassis with rounded corners weighs just 1.55kg.

• Getting GNU/Linux To Work For You

Kernel Space

• Linux developers offered free compliance and copyright training

  It is designed to provide software developers with knowledge about legal and licensing issues for building and using open source software.

  According to the Linux Foundation, complying with open source licences doesn’t have to be difficult, but “it does require training and is essential for anyone building or contributing to open source code bases today”.

• Legal and licensing issues a hot topic for Linux Foundation as it opens free developer course

  The Linux Foundation has opened up a free course for developers designed to help them understand legal and licensing issues when building and using open source software.

• The Linux Foundation Will Lead a Cross-Industry Open Source Group

  The Linux Foundation, which has proven to be an effective steward for many open source initiatives, has announced that it will host the TODO Group, a cross-industry effort to focus on establishing best practices, tools and programs to support corporate open source engagement. The TODO Group was originally formed in November 2014, and the foundation will now be its steward.

• Reiser4 Now Available For Linux 4.5 Kernel

  The Reiser4 file-system has been updated with support for the Linux 4.5 kernel.

  Edward Shishkin, the main Reiser4 developer left working on this out-of-tree file-system, today spun the Reiser4 patches for the Linux 4.5 kernel that also includes a few fixes/changes for satisfying the kernel and compiler. Aside from that, there’s nothing new to report today with regard to new Reiser4 file-system features nor any new attempt to try to mainline this file-system code.

• TODO Group comes to the Linux Foundation

  The Linux Foundation is unveiling plans to help organizations utilize and release open-source software. The foundation announced it will host the TODO Group, a cross-industry effort to focus on establishing best practices, tools and programs to support corporate open-source engagement.

  “From carmakers and banks to retailers and hospitals, every industry relies on open-source software, and every company is an Internet company,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “The TODO Group reaches across industries to collaborate with open-source technical and business leaders to share best practices, tools and programs for building dependable, effective projects for the long term.”

• Open source blockchain project, hyperledger, settling it at the linux foundation

  The open source movement can be traced back as far as 1997, when Eric Raymond published The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The paper reflected upon the hacker community and free software principles. It received significant attention in 1998, and was a key driving factor behind the decision to release the Internet suite, Netscape Communicator, as free software. The source code went on to become the backbone of many search engines, including the widely used Mozilla Firefox.

• Graphics Stack

  • Nvidia Releases Long-Lived 361.42 Graphics Driver for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris

    Just a little more than a week after the release of the Nvidia 364.12 graphics driver for *NIX platforms, today, March 30, 2016, Nvidia released an updated version for its long-lived branch.

  • Radeon/AMDGPU Firmware Binary Blobs Updated, Polaris Added

    Hitting the linux-firmware Git tree are updates to the firmware/microcode binary-only images for the graphics cards supported by the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM drivers.

  • NVIDIA 361.42 Linux Driver Brings Bug Fixes, New GPU Support

    While not nearly as exciting as the changes to find with the latest NVIDIA 364 Linux driver series, the 361.42 Linux driver is out today as the newest version in the 361 long-lived driver series.

    New product support in the NVIDIA 361.42 point release includes bringing up the GeForce 920MX, GeForce 930MX, and Quadro M6000 24GB graphics processors.

• Benchmarks

  • Nouveau Kepler vs. Maxwell Performance On Linux 4.6 + Mesa 11.3-dev

    For putting the open-source GeForce GTX 900 driver performance into better perspective from the results this week with the new support found on Linux 4.6 and compared to NVIDIA’s proprietary driver, hare are some benchmark results when comparing the Nouveau driver performance of the GTX 900 “Maxwell” graphics cards to that of the GTX 600/700 “Kepler” graphics cards with their experimental re-clocking support.

Applications

• QEMU 2.6 Is Coming With Many Improvements

  QEMU 2.6-rc0 was tagged today as the first milestone leading up to the QEMU 2.6 release in the near future.

  QEMU 2.6 is bringing many ARM and MIPS improvements, support for new x86 CPU features, QEMU VFIO now supports AMD XGBE platform passthrough, performance improvements in VirtIO, SDL2 and SPICE now support OpenGL and VirGL, block device improvements, and more.

• OpenToonz Animation Software Begins Seeing Linux Support

  Toonz is an animation software solution used by studios like Studio Ghibli and has been in development for more than two decades. Earlier this month it was announced Toonz would be open-sourced and then a few days back the code was published as OpenToonz. While Toonz/OpenToonz originally didn’t have Linux support, patches are emerging to allow this high-end animation software to run on Linux.

• Libav’s libavcodec Adds New VA-API Encoders

  For those still relying upon the FFmpeg-forked libav project, their libavcodec code has added new VA-API encoder support.

  With the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) largely backed by Intel, the Libav code-base is supporting GPU-accelerated H.264 encoding and H.265/HEVC encoding.

• Proprietary

  • Vivaldi 1.0 Web Browser Is Just Around the Corner, Based on Chromium 49.0

    Vivaldi’s Ruarí Ødegaard has announced earlier the release and immediate availability for testing of what appears to be one of the last snapshots before the final build of the upcoming Vivaldi 1.0 web browser.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Quartz: Enterprise Open Source Job Scheduler – Part 2

  • The latest OpenStack tips, tricks, and tutorials

  • docker unstable package install with openSUSE Leap 42.1 ( + ansible )

  • Testing containers using Kubernetes on Tunir version 0.15

  • Create documents with LyX: LaTeX made easy

  • A Roundup Of Linux Articles From About.com

  • Beware of Double Stubs in RSpec

  • How To Install LEMP Stack On Ubuntu LTS 16.04

  • Automatic grouping in mgmt

  • Tianocore (UEFI) now has a free FAT driver

  • Files: Find recent content easily

  • A New Design Book for LibreOffice

  • enhance your Archlinux security using ufw Firewall

  • How to Block access of USB and CD/DVD in Debian and Derivatives

• Games

  • Latest Steam Client Beta Adds Support for Steam Controller to OpenVR Games

    Just three days ago, we reported about the latest stable Steam Client update Valve pushed to Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows users, which brought numerous Steam Controller and SteamVR features, and now a new Beta version is out.

  • It Was Only 4 Years Ago That Many Thought Steam On Linux Was An April Fools’ Day Joke

    While there are around two thousand Linux-native games now available on Steam brought over by many different studios, it was just four years ago that many thought Valve bringing Steam to Linux was a joke or far-fetched rumor.

    Today marks four years to the day since Gabe Newell had emailed us about Linux driver problems in their porting of Source Engine games to Linux as part of their initial Steam Linux bring-up. Many didn’t believe it then, in part due to being close to April Fools’ Day, and even when in 2012 I went out to Valve’s HQ to talk with them about their Linux plans including what would become Steam Machines and SteamOS.

  • PlayStation 4 Jailbreak Code Allows Hackers to Load Linux on the Orbit OS of the Game Console and Possibly Come Up with New Exploits

    When the PlayStation 4 was reportedly jailbroken not too long ago, it has become the preoccupation of some hackers to find and develop new ways on how to jailbreak Sony’s current generation gaming console in the least complicated manner possible.

  • Fail0verflow group hacked Playstation 4 & installed Linux – Cape Coral Tech Air

  • CHKN is probably the weirdest sandbox game I’ve ever seen, coming to Linux on April 1st

    I have to give this a go, I just have to. I look forward to creating some true monstrosities.

    I have requested a key, so hopefully I will be able to show you what it’s like at release.

  • Banished Linux port is pretty much complete, OpenGL performing well

    I do wonder if he will detail any annoyances about Linux he had, as it would be useful for other developers to know I’m sure. Sounds like he came across annoyances on Mac as well.

  • EVERSPACE, a fantastic looking 3D space shooter with roguelike elements coming to Linux

    EVERSPACE is an incredibly beautiful looking 3D space shooter that takes elements from roguelikes that was funded on Kickstarter. They smashed their funding goal, and it’s heading to Linux now too.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Digikam updated in area51

    The latest version of digiKam has been added to the unofficial ports tree in area51. The unofficial ports tree is where the KDE-FreeBSD team works on ports in preparation for their inclusion into the official ports tree. The trunk of that repository is basically “what’s next” for the official ports tree from our point of view. There are other branches: mostly plasma5, for the upcoming (from a FreeBSD perspective, at least) KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5; qt5.6 for testing the recently-released Qt 5.6. Official ports will remain Qt 5.5 for the time being.

  • KDE Proudly Presents Kirigami UI!

    KDE has a long tradition of providing user interface components beyond the basics that are offered in Qt itself. With KDE Frameworks 5, these have become more easily available for Qt developers who are not part of KDE. Now, with KDE’s focus expanding beyond desktop and laptop computers into the mobile and embedded sector, our QWidgets-based components alone are not sufficient anymore. In order to allow developers to easily create Qt-based applications that run on any major mobile or desktop operating system (including our very own existing Plasma Desktop and upcoming Plasma Mobile, of course), we have created a framework that extends the touch-friendly Qt Quick Controls: Welcome Kirigami UI!

  • Qt 5.7 Beta Is Running Behind Schedule

    While Qt 5.6 was just released after being delayed by months, Qt 5.7 was supposed to be a quick follow-on release but it too is already seeing delays.

    Qt 5.7 went into alpha while Qt 5.6 was still being prepared for release, but now the Qt 5.7 beta is going to be delayed by an unknown amount of time.

  • KDE Announces Kirigami UI

  • KDE Announces Kirigami UI, a Framework to Build Cross-Platform Qt-Based Apps

    Today, March 30, 2016, KDE, through Thomas Pfeiffer, has proudly announced a new framework for developers who want to build cross-platform Qt-based applications.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Epiphany 3.20

    So, what’s new in Epiphany 3.20?

    First off: overlay scrollbars. Because web sites have the ability to style their scrollbars (which you’ve probably noticed on Google sites), WebKit embedders cannot use a normal GtkScrolledWindow to display content; instead, WebKit has to paint the scrollbars itself. Hence, when overlay scrollbars appeared in GTK+ 3.16, WebKit applications were left out.

  • Positive progress on WebKitGTK+ security updates

    I previously reported that, although WebKitGTK+ releases regular upstream security updates, most Linux distributions are not taking the updates. At the time, only Arch Linux and Fedora were reliably releasing our security updates. So I’m quite pleased that openSUSE recently released a WebKitGTK+ security update, and then Mageia did too. Gentoo currently has an update in the works. It remains to be seen if these distros regularly follow up on updates (expect a follow-up post on this in a few months), but, optimistically, you now have several independent distros to choose from to get an updated version WebKitGTK+, plus any distros that regularly receive updates directly from these distros.

  • GUADEC 2016 call for talks

    GUADEC 2016 will be held for the first time in Karlsruhe, Germany. The conference will be held on August 12th-14th, with a day of workshops beforehand, and 3 days of BoFs and hackfests after.

Distributions

• Bodhi

  • Bodhi Linux 3.2.0 Release

    Back in December I laid out a rough timeline of Bodhi events for 2016. Today I am happy to announce that we successfully met two of the first three. While some work related commitments prevented me from getting a Swami release out on time, we did successfully release version 0.2.0 of the Moksha desktop, and today I bring to you version 3.2.0 of Bodhi Linux. This is our last scheduled update release of the Bodhi 3 branch. Existing Bodhi 3 users do not need to reinstall to obtain this latest release – they simply need to perform all of their current system updates.

  • Bodhi 3.2.0, SCOmbie Lives, Winbuntu

    Jeff Hoogland today announced the release of Bodhi Linux 3.2.0 featuring a new version of his Moksha desktop. The news of Ubuntu’s Bash on the next Windows 10 update has been filling the headlines for two days and today blogger Locutus called it “The Devil’s Spawn.” OpenOffice extensions are terribly outdated and SCO is back from the dead to file another appeal.

  • Bodhi Linux 3.2.0 Screenshot Tour

  • Bodhi Linux 3.2.0 Is Out, Bodhi Linux 4.0 Coming in August Based on Ubuntu 16.04

    Bodhi Linux developer and maintainer Jeff Hoogland is proud to announce the release of the Bodhi Linux 3.2.0 operating system, based on the Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS Linux distribution.

    According to the release notes, Bodhi Linux 3.2.0 has been released mainly to promote the Enlightenment-based Moksha Desktop 0.2.0 desktop environment, which makes Bodhi unique and popular with the Linux community. It’s powered by Ubuntu 15.10′s Linux 4.2 kernel and adds some much-needed UEFI improvements.

• Screenshots/Screencasts

  • Sabayon 16.04 MATE Screencast and Screenshots

  • Sabayon 16.04 GNOME Screenshot Tour

• OpenSUSE/SUSE

  • Applied Micro Provides ARM Boost to openSUSE Build Service for Linux

    The openSUSE Build Service (OBS) has a long history dating back to January 2007, when it was first announced. For the majority of its lifespan, OBS has enabled developers to easily build Linux packages for x86, but in recent years, ARM has become increasingly important.

  • GNOME 3.20 to Arrive Soon in the openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux Repositories

    Now that the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment has been officially released, the time has come for it to land in the software repositories of some of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions.

    We’ve already told you that the latest development versions of the upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 and Fedora 24 operating systems offer technical previews of the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment to those brave enough to become early adopters.

  • GNOME 3.20 coming real soon to Tumbleweed

  • OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Users Will Soon Get GNOME 3.20

• Red Hat Family

  • With US$2b revenue, why does Red Hat need the NSA’s money?

    Last week, Red Hat became the first open source company to cross the US$2 billion mark in annual revenue.

    Presumably, this means that the company will no longer have to depend on clients like the NSA for income.

    Last year, it was reported that XKEYSCORE — an application that the Intercept, the website run by journalist Glenn Greenwald, describes as NSA’s Google for private communications — was being run for the most part on Red Hat Linux servers.

    At the time, Red Hat had crossed the billion-dollar revenue mark. But the company could not summon up anyone to talk intelligently about why it was selling, and providing support, to an organisation that is surreptitiously conducting mass surveillance of the American population and a goodly portion of the rest of the world too.

  • Exec: Why Red Hat’s new partnership with Sandisk matters

    Raleigh open-source giant Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) announced a new strategic partnership Tuesday – this time with flash storage firm SanDisk Corporation (Nasdaq: SNDK). In a prepared statement, the company said the strategic alliance would bring the “combined benefits” of Red Hat technology and flash storage to enterprise customers.

    Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager of storage at Red Hat, says the announcement also validates a $175 million buy from two years ago – that of California-based open-source storage provider InkTank. The buy included Inktank’s flagship technology, then called Inktank Ceph Enterprise, which delivered storage software to businesses deploying public and private clouds. At the time, executives said the buy put Red Hat in a position to become “the leading provider of open software-defined storage across object, block and file system storage.”

  • SanDisk, Red Hat partner on Flash-based Ceph storage for enterprise customers

    Red Hat and SanDisk have partnered to deliver flash-based Ceph storage solutions to enterprise customers.

  • Finance

    • Analysts Expectations From Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Ruling stocks in today’s market: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Shares Bought by Brown Advisory Inc.

    • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Shares Bought by RidgeWorth Capital Management LLC

    • Brown Advisory Inc. invests in Red Hat Inc (RHT) Shares

    • Red Hat Incorporated (NYSE:RHT) Shorts Decreased by 10.55% After Short Covering

  • Fedora

    • Video: Comparing Fedora 23 and Korora 23 (Cinnamon)

      A user with the IRC nick of CoffeeMan wanted to know how Fedora 23 and Korora 23 (Cinnamon edition) compared for resource usage because he was seeing performance differences between the two. There shouldn’t really be much in the way of differnces other than branding and themes… so I created two KVM VMs and installed them both side-by-side. While I realize that running two VMs at the same time isn’t really that bright when it comes to getting accurate performance metrics, it at least gives one an idea how of they compare… and things like the number of processes, CPU usage, RAM used, disk used, etc… shouldn’t really vary that much.

    • Golden chance to translate Fedora 24 in your language

      Out of the six billion people in the world, only 339 million have English as a first language. The importance of English in global business increases the number of English speakers, but the people learning are taking English on as a second language. A notable number of users prefer products in their own language. Japan is a common example of this.

    • Achievement get: Pizzelle!

      Today, I received the Pizzelle badge in Fedora Badges. I was awarded with Pizzelle after a short “karma storm” in the EMEA Ambassadors meeting. After finding out I was awarded the badge, I had a light bulb sort of moment. As of this month, it has been a year since I first found myself wanting to get involved with the Fedora Project. I remember seeing the announcement for Flock 2015 and how that was right next to my soon-to-be university, the Rochester Institute of Technology. I remember lazily dismissing the idea of taking any further steps into Fedora until after Flock 2015. And now, a year later, I’m reflecting back on crazy of a past few months it has been.

    • Fedora at Google Summer of Code

      Last week I presented the process on how to apply to Google Summer of Code for the Fedora Project. It is the first time GSoC is presented in our college. I presented the process on how to apply t…

    • taskwarrior tips and notes

    • Fedora 24 alpha brings Gnome 3.20

      It’s not Fedora if it ships on time. After a couple of delays, the Fedora community has announced the alpha release of Fedora 24, the next version of this free and open source Linux distribution.

      Fedora now comes in 3 versions, targeted at different use cases: Workstation for desktops; Server for (obviously) servers and Cloud for containers. For testing purposes, I downloaded the Workstation version and installation was easy, as is the case with most Linux distributions.

• Debian Family

  • Easter patching of Britney

    I decided to take a couple of days of vacation next to Easter and obviously ended up with tons of time. I ended up channelling most of the (productive) time into improving Britney.

  • DebConf16 welcomes its first nine sponsors!

    DebConf16 will take place in Cape Town, South Africa in July 2016. We strive to provide an intense working environment and enable good progress for Debian and for Free Software in general. We extend an invitation to everyone to join us and to support this event. As a volunteer-run non-profit conference, we depend on our sponsors.

  • Re-signing PPAs

    Julian has written about their efforts to strengthen security in APT, and shortly before that notified us that Launchpad’s signatures on PPAs use weak SHA-1 digests. Unfortunately we hadn’t noticed that before; GnuPG’s defaults tend to result in weak digests unless carefully tweaked, which is a shame.

    I started on the necessary fixes for this immediately we heard of the problem, but it’s taken a little while to get everything in place, and I thought I’d explain why since some of the problems uncovered are interesting in their own right.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Make Now Lets You Install Superpowers, Eclipse JEE, IntelliJ EAP & Kotlin

        Today, March 30, 2016, Ubuntu Make developer Didier Roche has announced the general availability of Ubuntu Make 16.03 for all supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems.

        For those not in the known, Ubuntu Make is an open-source command-line tool designed from the ground up to help developers and programmers install all sorts of third-party applications that aren’t available in the Ubuntu repos or don’t have a PPA.

      • Embrace and Extend? Microsoft Adopts GNU’s Bash, Gives HoloLens Code to GitHub

        The company announced it is bringing the much-loved (by some) “bash” command prompt and its libraries to Windows 10.

      • Ubuntu (not Linux) on Windows: How it works

      • Bash on Windows: Only the beginning of the Microsoft-Linux experiment

      • Ubuntu’s bash and Linux command line coming to Windows 10

      • Hell freezes over: Microsoft and Ubuntu bring Linux’s Bash shell to Windows 10

      • Linux command line tools are coming to Windows 10

      • Microsoft is adding the Linux command line to Windows 10

      • You’ll Soon be Able to Run Ubuntu on Windows 10: Report

      • Build 2016: Microsoft is working on integrating Ubuntu into Windows; developers rejoice

      • Report: Microsoft and Canonical bringing Ubuntu to Windows 10 at Build

      • Windows 10 might soon run Ubuntu, Linux utilities natively

      • Ubuntu Coming to Windows 10

        We can also expect to see some longtime Ubuntu users announcing that they’ll be ditching Ubuntu for another distribution.

        This is indeed a day to grab the popcorn. With the news that SCO is back and planning to appeal the dismissal of its case against IBM, this latest news makes today something of an all day double feature picture show.

      • Microsoft is bringing the Bash shell to Windows 10

      • Ubuntu on Windows — The Ubuntu Userspace for Windows Developers

      • Linux comes to Windows – and 5 other big things Microsoft just announced

      • Here’s how Microsoft will support Bash on Windows 10

      • Microsoft Officially Brings Your Favorite Bash Shell To Windows 10

      • Canonical Joins Microsoft To Bring Ubuntu On Windows 10

      • Canonical Announces Ubuntu on Windows 10, an Ubuntu Userspace for Windows Devs

      • Windows and Ubuntu: “Cygwin Can Suck It”

      • Strange Bedfellows: Microsoft And Canonical Bring Ubuntu Linux Bash To Windows 10

      • Microsoft is reported to announce Ubuntu Linux runs on Windows 10

      • Windows Adds Support For Bash Scripting

      • Microsoft to announce Bash on Linux on Windows

      • This is the news that got the biggest applause at Microsoft’s big event today

      • BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition Now Available for Pre-Order, Starting Price at $291.99

      • World’s first Ubuntu tablet goes up for pre-order at £200

      • Linux is coming to tablets, and you can pre-order the first one now

      • Canonical’s First Ubuntu Tablet Available For Pre-Order

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Ubuntu 16.04 and Official Flavors Beta 2 Available to Download

          Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) beta 2 has been released, along with the final beta of official flavors, including Ubuntu GNOME 16.04,Ubuntu MATE 16.04, Ubuntu Kylin 16.04, Ubuntu Studio 16.04, Kubuntu 16.04, Lubuntu 16.04 and Xubuntu 16.04.

        • Black GNOME Linux 16.04 Beta 2 Released, Based on Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS Beta 2

          The second Beta build of the upcoming Black GNOME Linux 16.04 operating system has been released earlier today, March 30, 2016, bringing a significant amount of new features and improvements.

          Black GNOME Linux 16.04 Beta 2 highlights includes numerous software updates for the GNOME Stack, such as GNOME Shell 3.18, as well as most of the packages from the stable GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, because, after all, the distribution is based on the upstream Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS Beta 2 operating system.

        • Xubuntu Based Emmabuntüs 3, Version 1.03, Released

          The Emmabuntüs Community today announced the third maintenance release of Emmabuntüs 3, version 1.03, based on Xubuntu 14.04.4. Like its *buntu namesake, the distro ships with the Xfce desktop by default, but also includes LXDE as an option.

Devices/Embedded

• Rugged, Linux-ready RTX COMs tap Sitara and i.MX6

  Advantech has launched a pair of modules based on a new, rugged, RTX 2.0 spec for computer-on-modules: the AM3352-based ROM-3310 and i.MX6-based ROM-3420.

  The ruggedized, open-spec RTX 2.0 (Rugged Technology eXtended) form-factor for ARM computer-on-modules is first being implemented in board-level products by Advantech. The company’s TI Sitara AM3352-based “ROM-3310” and NXP i.MX6-driven “ROM-3420” COMs both showcase the new spec’s highlights, including a tiny (and durably thick) 68 x 68 x 2mm foundation, optional -40 to 85°C support, wide-range, 5 to 24V power, and four vibration resistant 100-pin expansion connectors. In all these features, RTX exceeds the capabilities of the ARM-oriented Qseven and SMARC standards.

• SMARC COM and IoT gateway SBC are buzzing with wireless

  Shiratech’s Linux-based “SparkGate-7 Open IoT Gateway” SBC, featuring WiFi, BT, 802.15.4, and optional cellular, is built around a “Spark-501” SMARC COM.

  Aviv Technologies Group´s Shiratech Embedded unit first tapped Atmel’s Cortex-A5-based SAMA5D3 processor in 2013 with a Linux-ready, SODIMM-style AT-501 computer-on-module in 2013. Shiratech has now followed this with a Spark-501, which appears to be the first SMARC form factor COM built around an Atmel SAMA5x SoC. The module also fuels the new “SparkGate-7 open IOT Gateway,” which uses a Yocto Project based Linux build.

• Get the Tiny VoCore Mini Linux Computer for Just $39

  Good things come in small packages, and the VoCore Mini Linux Computer is proof. Get yours for just $39 at Escapist Deals-and while you’re at it, master Linux with the five-course Linux Power User Bundle, just $19, a savings of 97%.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Exclusive: Samsung to Launch Z2 Tizen Smartphone (SM-Z200F) in 2016

      Last year Tizen Experts exclusively revealed that the Samsung Z3 was going to be the next Tizen smartphone to be launched, after the Z1. The Z3 was seen as a huge improvement from the Z1 and therefore warranted skipping the Z2 model number.

    • Application: ConfirmTkt IRCTC Indian Rail Info Samsung Z1 and Z3 available in Tizen Store

      ConfirmTkt IRCTC Indian Rail Info is an app that lets you check Passenger Name Record (PNR) live status Information. The IRCTC app was developed by Confirmtkt and has already been downloaded more than 16,000 times from Google Play Store. Today, the app has finally become available in the Tizen Store for Samsung Z1 and Z3 smartphones. There are 2 more similar apps are available in Tizen Store PNRTrain and Indian Train Status and they are also available on Z1 & Z3.

  • Android

    • First Click: I hate myself for wanting this tiny Android-powered projector from Indiegogo

    • Everything you need to know to follow Major League Baseball on Android

    • Samsung unblocks ad-block plugins from its Android browser

    • Why does the iPhone need to be perfect when Android devices are still graded on a curve?

    • Feds ordered Google’s help unlocking nine Android phones since 2012

    • What If the FBI Tried to Crack an Android Phone? We Attacked One to Find Out

    • Messenger v1.8 Fixes A Major Crashing Bug On Android N And Adds Manual Override For Incorrectly Detected Countries [APK Download]

    • Moto G (2015) Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow Software Update Rolling Out

    • AT&T is considering making Cyanogen-powered Android phones, says report

    • Oracle will seek a staggering $9.3 billion in 2nd trial against Google

    • Hands-on with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay in a 2016 Chevy Tahoe

    • Top 20 Android apps and games of the month – from Doctor Who to Miitomo

    • Android’s unpatched dead device jungle is good for security

    • Google to Oracle: Your $9.3bn Android Java damages claim is mad

    • Android 6.0 Marshmallow Update For BlackBerry Priv Shown In A Video

    • This Android smartphone and barcode reader comes in a 10-oz. package

      Rugged computer maker Janam Technologies on Wednesday announced the XT2, a 10-oz. rugged device with a 5-in. touchscreen that runs Android 5.0 (Lollipop).

      The device could be called a rugged smartphone, since it comes with many smartphone features, including voice. It supports GSM and GPRS radio signals for voice, as well as 4G LTE for data — with a Chrome browser. But Janam also added in a Zebra barcode-scanning feature, the ability to withstand 5-foot drops and immersion in up to three feet of water.

      Instead of referring to it as a smartphone, Janam instead calls the XT2 a rugged touch computer and claims it is the lightest and most rugged in its class. Janam CEO Harry Lerner said it is “as sleek as a smartphone … with the most advanced technologies to meet the diverse needs of virtually any mobile worker.”

    • HTC 10 benchmark tells all on HTC’s new flagship Android smartphone

      The HTC 10 is set to be the company’s most powerful phone ever. The device is expected to offer cutting-edge hardware across the board, and a recent benchmark appears to back up those rumors.

      The latest list of specs comes from a recent performance test on GFXBench, where the device is referred to by its rumored “HTC 10” branding. It packs a 5.1-inch Quad HD display, a Snapdragon 820 processor and runs the latest version of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. The new phone is also equipped with 3.7GB of RAM, which will likely be rounded up to 4GB, and 24GB of storage (probably 32GB total).

Open-source microprocessor

Software source codes and hardware designs tend to be closely guarded trade secrets. Not so with open-source products. For instance, the code of open-source software is freely available to all: the best known example is the Linux operating system. Not only are interested developers able to use the software, they can also further develop it and adapt it to their own needs.

Open-Source Microprocessor

Engineers Develop Open-Source Microprocessor for Wearables and IoT

eBay first to open source a FIDO UAF authentication server

eBay becomes first ecommerce member of FIDO Alliance

eBay joins FIDO Alliance

Google Introduces Open Source VR View For Easy 360-Degree Photo And Video Embeds On The Web And In Apps

Glucosio helps diabetics track blood sugar

Apcera is Integrating Kubernetes into its Cloud Platform

Apcera has remained among the more interesting companies differentiating themselves in the cloud computing space, as we explored in our recent interview with Apcera SVP of Product and Engineering Neeraj Gupta (shown here). Now, Apcera has announced it will extend its platform to support Kubernetes, which recently moved under the direction of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The company also announced that Apcera founder and CEO, Derek Collison, has joined the governing board for CNCF.

1btn is a powerful, open source, do-it-all button for the Internet

What can a simple button do? Amazon’s Dash can re-order houeshold supplies. Domino’s will order you your favorite pizza. The open-source 1btn, on the other hand, is capable of doing a whole lot more.

1btn won’t be limited to performing a single action. You’ll be able to make it do just about anything you want via an easy-to-use web-based interface. No companion app is required to do it, either. You simply connect a Wi-Fi device to the hotspot that 1btn creates the first time you turn it on, launch a web browser, and point it to the 1btn’s built-in web server.

Several popular services will be supported out-of-the-box, including Twilio to send SMS messages or emails. You’ll be able to set up URL-based actions like turning connected lights on and off, summon a ride to your front door, or start a pot of tea without putting your entire network at risk.

Profitable licensing models could bring more open source solutions to the enterprise

While companies like Red Hat have managed to make a fortune by offering an open source solution, other open source developers have struggled to monetize what is commonly viewed as “free.” A Fair Source license could be a solution to help developers make money, while still upholding the spirit behind open source code.

Two key challenges of using open source in the enterprise [Ed: misses the point. Proprietary software has exactly the same 'challenges' (if not worse)]

The proliferation of open source technologies, libraries, and frameworks in recent years has greatly contributed to the advancement of software development, increased developer productivity, and to the flexibility and customization of the tools landscape to support different use cases and developers’ preferences.

To increase productivity and encourage a culture of autonomy and shared ownership you want to enable teams to use their tool(s) of choice. That being said, since the advent of agile development, we see large enterprises wrestle with striking a balance to allow this choice while also retaining a level of management, visibility, and governance over all the technologies used in the software delivery lifecycle. And this problem gets harder over time, because with every passing day new tools are being created and adopted to solve increasingly fine-grained problems in a unique and valuable way.

Events

• Event: OSDC 2016

  Open Source Data Center Conference (OSDC) is a conference on open source software in data centers and huge IT environments and will take place in Berlin/Germany in April 2016. I will give a talk titled “Continuous Integration in Data Centers – Further 3 Years Later” there.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Everyday Internet Users Can Stand Up for Encryption — Here’s How

    At Mozilla, we believe encryption is critical to the health of the Web. It allows us to live, work and play on a more secure Internet. Encryption helps keep the Internet exceptional.

    Today, encryption is being threatened around the world. More and more governments are proposing policies that would harm user security by weakening encryption. From France to Australia to the UK, these suggested measures would thwart strong encryption for everyday Internet users. And in the U.S., the FBI was asking Apple to undermine the security of its own products.

SaaS/Back End

• Rancher Rolls Out Docker Container Management Platform

  The open-source effort hits general availability, enabling developers to manage and deploy containers.

  Rancher Labs today announced the general availability of its namesake platform Rancher 1.0, which provides tools that enable organizations to easily manage and deploy Docker containers.

• The OpenStack Schizophrenia

  When I started contributing to OpenStack, almost five years ago, it was a small ecosystem. There were no foundation, a handful of projects and you could understand the code base in a few days.

  Fast forward 2016, and it is a totally different beast. The project grew to no less than 54 teams, each team providing one or more deliverable. For example, the Nova and Swift team each one produces one service and its client, whereas the Telemetry team produces 3 services and 3 different clients.

Databases

• How NoSQL graph databases still usurp relational dynasties

  Despite being assaulted from all sides, the relational model for databases is still the king of the hill and it looks like it will not only survive, but thrive as well.

  NoSQL databases have become increasingly popular and have been offering a number of data and deployment modes that have overcome the limitations – real or imagined – of their SQL cousins.

  NoSQL databases come in a number of guises, but essentially they are designed either to make the life of the programmer easier or to overcome the problem of distributing data at scale.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Apache OpenOffice Notice on Extensions

  Since 2012 we at SourceForge have been proud partners of the Apache OpenOffice community. We’ve maintained both the Apache OpenOffice Extensions and Templates sites and made sure to spread the word about their latest news and developments.

  It’s been reported that extensions that haven’t been updated in a while are displaying this warning message:

  “This extension was not updated recently. It might not work with latest versions of OpenOffice.”

  For registered users, there’s an additional message that allows them to contact the original author and apply to be a co-maintainer. As co-maintainer they can edit the extension description and create releases.

CMS

• Drupal creator on saving the open web

  Can we save the open web? Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal, talked to a group during SxSW Interactive about how he began the content management service (CMS) Drupal in his dorm room in 2001. Today, Drupal powers 1 out of 30 websites in the world. Technology has changed a lot from 2001 to 2016. Back in 2001, only 7% of the population had Internet access, there were only 20 million websites, and text messaging was just introduced. So, when we talk about the open web what we’re talking about is people having choice and transparency in their options.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Love our open API? Talk to our lawyers, says If This Then That

• MAS moving towards open source API architecture to give FinTech a boost [Ed: A so-called “open API” does not make anything Open Source [1, 2]]

• MAS urges banks to treat fintech as friend, not foe

• MAS plans to offer data through APIs

• MAS takes step towards open API architecture to bolster Fintech push

• Build 2016: Microsoft impresses developers with change – open source, bots and universality [Ed: no new FOSS, just E.E.E. of other people’s work and openwashing]

  A natural result of the acquisition of Xamarin, now makes it possible to develop, emulate and target other mobile platforms such as Android and iOS from within Visual Studio.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• BMW complies with GPL by handing over i3 car code

  BMW has sent Terence Eden a DVD containing GPL-licenced code used in its electric i3 model .

  Why should you care? Because Oxford resident Eden last month inadvertently caused something of a global stir when he pondered the quality of the i3′s software and the security of BMW’s update mechanisms. Along the way he noticed that the i3′s on-board “About” screen mentioned it uses some GPL-licenced code and idly wondered if the auto-maker complies with the licence.

• All’s Well That Ends Well With The GPL

• Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup: April 1st (not a joke)

  While the Free Software Directory has been and continues to be a great resource to the world over the past decade, it has the potential of being a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help!

Public Services/Government

• Study: Organisation’s understanding impacts IT projects

  How much management and staff understand IT has a major influence on public administration’s large IT projects, writes Denmark’s ‘Government IT Project Council’ (Statens IT-projektråd). In its progress report on large IT projects, the Council recommends that public administrations improve project execution and project management competencies.

• OMB Considering Greater Open Source Push

  OMB has published a draft policy to improve the way custom-developed government code is acquired and distributed by requiring that it be made available for reuse across federal agencies.

• MIT Media Lab defaults to free & open source software

  MIT Media Lab, that 30-year-old tech innovation factory that has had a huge hand in churning out everything from LEGO MindStorms to the Guitar Hero video game, has now wowed the open source and free software crowd.

  Lab Director Joi Ito over the weekend revealed on the Medium blogging platform that MIT Media Lab has changed its approach to software releases to FLOSS (free/libre/open-source software) by default.

Licensing/Legal

• Giving away the farm – Risks in adopting open source software solutions [Ed: Johnson Winter & Slattery should write also an article about proprietary software EULAs, the BSA, etc.]

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Study: ‘Smart cities need knowledge sharing platforms’

  Sustainable smart cities need to exchange best practices, focus on increasing citizen participation, and allow public and non-public delivery of innovative services. These are three of the policy recommendations in the ‘Smart Sustainable Cities – Reconnaissance Study’, published by the United Nations University in March.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Opendesk, cracking the production code for open-source furniture

    Before the Industrial Revolution, if you wanted a new piece of furniture, you’d go to your local carpenter. Today, you’re more likely to buy a chair that’s made of Brazilian wood, designed by a Swede, and manufactured in China than one with even a single locally-produced nail. Enter Opendesk, a furniture company with a global network and local manufacturing model, which might just spark a new revolution in the industry.

Programming/Development

• SwiftStack versus Swift

Health/Nutrition

• Open source recycling initiative Precious Plastic launches to help users 3D print every type of plastic

  As the 3D printing community consumes vast amounts of plastic on a daily basis, it’s strange that recycling isn’t a more prominent theme in the community. To be sure, our failed prints are hardly responsible for filling the oceans and beaches of the world with non-degradable plastic, but as localized consumers of many different plastics, we could play a huge role in fighting plastic pollution. The only downside: not every plastic is easily 3D printable and recycling equipment is very costly. Fortunately, Dutch open source recycling initiative Precious Plastic has just launched an excellent alternative: they have provided all the blueprints and equipment necessary to set up your own recycling plant and allows you to reuse plastics, either as 3D printable filament or with DIY molding machines.

• Two New Reports Released on the Current State of US Plastics Recycling

Security

• Security advisories for Wednesday

• Remaiten Linux bot combines malware features to target weak credentials

  ESET researchers have spotted a new variant of malware, dubbed Remaiten, which combines different features from other families of malware and uses a unique method of distribution.

• Infosec miscreants are peddling malware that will KO your router

  A new and improved version of Kaiten, an Internet Relay Chat (IRC)-controlled malware typically used to carry out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, is spreading, security firm ESET warns.

• 1,400+ vulnerabilities found in automated medical supply system [iophk: Windows kills.]

• Maryland hospital group hit by ransomware launched from within

• VIDEO: How a hospital is hacked, Kaspersky finds Health IT is sick

• Apple’s fruitless rootless security broken by code that fits in a tweet

  Apple’s much-hyped rootless security mechanism in OS X can be evaded even in the latest version of the operating system, according to a top researcher.

  The Cupertino goliath fixed an exploitable bug in its rootless code in the latest round of patches for Macs and iThings. But that’s the not the end of the story, we’re told.

  Apple’s rootless design, aka System Integrity Protection (SIP), marks sensitive directories in the computer’s file system as being off-limits even to the root user.

Defence/Aggression

• Falklands Nonsense

  Britain shows utter disregard to the right of self determination of the people of Diego Garcia, yet claims it as inalienable for the Falklanders. Evidently it is a vital universal right, except for rather dusky people.

  The corporate media have universally demonstrated their inability to understand any complex situation, in reporting the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf’s determination on Argentina. Here is a quick guide to what really was decided.

• State Department: Let’s Fight ISIS With the #TeeVee

  No, no, just kidding about Taylor Swift, but the other stuff is sadly, pathetically true.

  To understand this, you need to understand the State Department. The Department is made up of a few old people in senior positions, and lots of young people (“millennials.”) Think of the old people as your sad, old dad after a divorce, bugging you to explain to him stuff like Tindr and Molly that wasn’t around when he was “dating” but now suddenly seems like something he needs to “get down with.”

  So that’s what happens inside State. Old people are told to stop ISIS somehow. They ask the young staffers about this social media gadget they read about in AARP magazine and the young people, none of whom have a rat’s butt worth of overseas knowledge but have lived their whole lives within a media bubble, tells the olds “Let’s do something social media, or make a TV thing we can show on YouTube. We’ll get, like, seriously, a zillion hits. Anti-ISIS will go, literally, viral, you know.”

• Medea Benjamin and Arnie Gunderson

  Peter and Mickey open the program with a wide-ranging conversation with long-time social justice activist Medea Benjamin; the discussion covers topics from trade deals to drone warfare, as well as her latest project of trying to alert Americans about the human rights abuses committed by US ally Saudi Arabia.

• Iraq Ranks In Ten Most Corrupt Countries In World, Again

  Iraq, the failed state that over 4,600 (and counting…) Americans died to free from some evil tyrant 13 years ago, is still ranking high internationally in something. Unfortunately, that something is corruption.

  A couple of other places where America has been intervening for freedom also made the list.

  Germany’s Transparency International released its newest corruption index for 2015, and as usual Iraq was on the list. The ten worst countries in its new study were Somalia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Sudan, South Sudan, Angola, Libya, Iraq, Venezuela, and Guinea-Bissau.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• After Leading The Attack On Investigative Journalism, President Obama Whines About A Lack Of Investigative Journalism

  But he leaves out his own administration’s actions as a big part of why the job of reporting has “gotten tougher.” While he came into office promising “the most transparent administration in history” and one of his first official actions as President was to tell the entire federal government to default to revealing information in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, as we’ve detailed over and over again, the administration has actually been one of the most opaque, setting records for denying FOIA requests, and making it nearly impossible to get any information out of the government without a lawsuit.

  [...]

  And then, of course, there are the criminal lawsuits. The Obama administration has used the Espionage Act against more journalists and leakers than every other President in history combined… and doubled. And, as of two years ago, he had put media leakers in jail for nearly 50 times as long as all other administrations combined.

  That is not supporting investigative reporting. That is threatening and intimidating journalists and their sources. Creating true chilling effects and scaring people away from doing the very work that the President insists the media should be practicing.

  Way back in 2011, I saw Daniel Ellsberg speak, and he speculated that a key reason why President Obama was so incredibly hostile to a free and open press was because he was embarrassed by his own actions that they were investigating. Ellsberg pointed out that the previous president, George W. Bush was known for widely abusing the power of his position, but he seemed proud of doing so. President Obama, on the other hand, got elected with promises of moving away from such abuses and restoring civil liberties. But that didn’t happen. Things went in the other direction under his watch and his command. So you could understand why the President remains less than keen about leaks and the media digging into things like mass surveillance of Americans, or secret drone bombing campaigns.

• BGA Sues CPD For Failing To Turn Over Video Footage

  Chicago Police Department stonewalls Better Government Association request for video of all fatal shootings by cops over past five years, so BGA takes agency to court.

• Chicago’s New Era Of Transparency Looks Pretty Much Identical To Its Old Era Of Opacity

  Mayor Rahm Emanuel ushered in a new age of law enforcement/city transparency recently by opening his mouth and saying words to that effect. This followed the city/law enforcement sitting on the recordings of a highly-controversial shooting by police officers for more than a year.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Sea levels set to rise by more than a metre over next century, claims new research

  Sea levels are set to rise by more than a metre over the next century – more than twice the previous forecast, according to alarming new research.

  The threat posed by rising sea levels is much greater than had been thought because scientists have underestimated the effect of atmospheric global warming on Antarctic ice sheets – having tended to concentrate more on climate change’s role in warming the water than increasing the air temperature.

• A new study predicts that parts of the ice sheet on western Antarctica may melt faster than scientists had previously figured

  Warmer air, less frigid water and gravity may combine to make parts of Antarctica’s western ice sheet melt far faster than scientists had thought, raising sea levels much more than expected by the end of the century, according to a new study.

  New physics-based computer simulations forecast dramatic increases in melting in the vulnerable western edge of the continent. In a worst case scenario, that could raise sea level in 2100 by 18 to 34 inches (46 to 86 centimeters) more than an international panel of climate scientists predicted just three years ago.

  And even if the countries of the world control heat-trapping gases at the moderate levels they pledged in Paris last year, it would still mean three to 12 inches (8 to 31 centimeters) higher seas than have been forecast thought, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

• Adopting Sustainable Energy to Combat Climate Change

  The U.N. has reported that pollution caused by indoor stoves that use fire, coal, charcoal, or animal waste could account for as many as 4.3 million premature deaths annually. At the January 2016 summit, Ban noted that climate change disproportionately affects women and children, because they are the ones most directly exposed to these stoves and open flames. Furthermore, “It is women and girls who bear the brunt of collecting firewood and fuels,” argues Ban, activities that “limit their work and education opportunities.”

Finance

• Sajid Javid Deliberately Collapsed British Steel

  The banks received state subsidies to the value of £35,000 from every man, woman and child in the UK. Yet it is unquestionable dogma that not even 0.1% of that can be given to aid manufacturing industry. I can think of no legitimate explanation of this duality.

• Fight for the Future condemns Internet Association’s support for TPP

  Today the Internet Association, a trade group representing major web companies including Google, Twitter, and Facebook, endorsed the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP). Leading digital rights group Fight for the Future launched an online campaign in response, calling for the companies to drop their misguided support, and issued the following statement, which can be attributed to campaign director Evan Greer:

• US Tech Industry Associations Endorse TPP

  A number of internet and software industry in the United States have come out in support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiated by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) last year.

  USTR sent a note to reporters today highlighting the trade associations that have supported TPP. The memo is reprinted below.

• Ezra Klein and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good Tax Calculator

  Actually, it does no such thing; it’s a gimmick that is entirely useless except as a deceptive advertisement for Hillary Clinton.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• How They Brainwash Us — Paul Craig Roberts

  Anyone who pays attention to American “news” can see how “news” is used to control our perceptions in order to ensure public acceptance of the Oligarchy’s agendas.

  For example, Bernie Sanders just won six of seven primaries, in some cases by as much as 70 and 82 percent of the vote, but Sanders’ victories went largely unreported. The reason is obvious. The Oligarchy doesn’t want any sign of Sanders gaining momentum that could threaten Hillary’s lead for the Democratic nomination. Here is FAIR’s take on the media’s ignoring of Sanders’ victories: http://fair.org/home/as-sanders-surges-cable-news-runs-prison-reality-show-jesus-documentary/

  We can observe the same media non-performance in the foreign affairs arena. The Syrian army adided by the Russian air force just liberated Palmyra from ISIS troops that Washington sent to overthrow the Syrian government. Although pretending to be fighting ISIS, Washington and London are silent about this victory on what is supposed to be a common front against the terror group.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Complying with Israeli Censorship Order, NYT Conceals Name of Soldier Who Shot Wounded Palestinian

  Last Thursday, an Israeli soldier was arrested after the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem posted horrific video of the soldier shooting a 21-year-old Palestinian man in the head from point-blank range, and killing him, even though he was already shot, wounded, and laying incapacitated on the ground. The killing took place in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron after the Palestinian man, Abed al-Fatah al-Sharif, stabbed an IDF soldier at a military occupation checkpoint.

• Will free speech on Israel survive progressive censorship?

  Jewish liberals and activists from the ACLU defended the Nazis’ right to march and display the swastika as a form of free speech.

  [...]

  Jewish liberals and activists from the ACLU defended the Nazis’ right to march and display the swastika as a form of free speech. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that any ban was unconstitutional.

• Proposed Chinese internet rules ‘could boost censorship’

• China rejects worry over web rules, calls it ‘misunderstanding’

• China Says New Internet Regulations Won’t Increase Blocking of Foreign Websites

• China ponders new internet rules to block foreign websites

• China proposes new Web rules that could enhance censorship

• Foreign companies ‘advised’ to register websites in China under tighter Internet laws

• Chinese newspaper editor Yu Shaolei denounces censorship and resigns

• Chinese journalist resigns over censorship

• Nintendo Employee ‘Terminated’ After Smear Campaign Over Censorship

• Nintendo ‘Terminates’ Employee after Censorship Smear Campaign

• Horny Nerds Launch Campaign To Fight ‘Censorship’ Of Video Game Butts

• Let’s Talk About Smog: Censoring Environmental Issues in China

  China is increasingly making strides toward becoming a global environmental leader, but its continued censorship of critical discussion at home complicates this progress.

• Internet Censorship à la Mode

  There’s a new global censor in town, and it’s not China or Russia. It’s France. A ruling this month from a regulator in Paris threatens to limit an American’s or Korean’s access to information on the Internet.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Google has also been asked to unlock stuff for the FBI

  APPLE IS NOT the only firm to be approached by the US authorities under the hoary All Writs Act, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the request has also gone the way of Google.

  Apple has been getting all the attention for defying demands under the All Writs Act in recent weeks, but an ACLU study found that 63 other requests had been directed at Google.

• The Trouble with Tor

  The Tor Project makes a browser that allows anyone to surf the Internet anonymously. Tor stands for “the onion router” and that describes how the service works. Traffic is routed through a number of relays run across the Internet where each relay only knows the next hop (because each hop is enclosed in a cryptographic envelope), not the ultimate destination, until the traffic gets to the final exit node which connects to the website — like peeling the layers of an onion.

• Global majority backs a ban on ‘dark net,’ poll says

  The findings, from a poll of at least 1,000 people in each of 24 countries, come as policymakers and technology companies argue over whether digital privacy should be curbed to help regulators and law enforcement more easily thwart hackers and other digital threats.

• The state has lost control: tech firms now run western politics

  By now, the fact that transatlantic democratic capitalism, once the engine of postwar prosperity, has run into trouble can hardly be denied by anyone with the courage to browse a daily newspaper.

  Hunger, homelessness, toxic chemicals in the water supply, the lack of affordable housing: all these issues are back on the agenda, even in the most prosperous of countries. This appalling decline in living standards was some time in the making – 40 years of neoliberal policies are finally taking their toll – so it shouldn’t come as a shock.

  However, coupled with the spillover effects of wars in the Middle East – first the refugees, now the increasingly regular terrorist attacks in the heart of Europe – our economic and political malaise looks much more ominous. It’s hardly surprising that the insurgent populist forces, on both left and right, have such an easy time bashing the elites. From Flint, Michigan, to Paris, those in power have accomplished such feats of cluelessness and incompetence that they have made Donald Trump look like a superman capable of saving planet Earth.

• Former NSA deputy director says Edward Snowden lacks courage

  In the first segment of an interview with Chris Inglis, former deputy director of NSA, the Irari Report talks with him about his perceptions of Edward Snowden’s motivations and intentions in committing his acts of espionage. In the video segment, Inglis discusses his impressions of Snowden, and theorizes as to why Snowden left for China, and to where he intended to defect.

  Edward Snowden’s defection occurred during Inglis’ tenure as Deputy Director of NSA, and as such, Inglis was extremely involved in overseeing the investigation incident and mitigation of the resulting damage. Inglis states that Snowden was indiscriminate in his release of information, and is full of rage. When asked to comment on why Snowden has not released any documents about Russian or Chinese domestic surveillance efforts, which are plentiful throughout NSA, and would have been readily available to Snowden while he was at NSA, Inglis stated that Snowden lacks any courage to speak up about any concerns while he might be held accountable.

• Global majority backs a ban on ‘dark net,’ poll says

  Seven in 10 people say the “dark net” – an anonymous online home to both criminals and activists fearful of government surveillance – should be shut down, according to a global Ipsos poll released on Tuesday.

  The findings, from a poll of at least 1,000 people in each of 24 countries, come as policymakers and technology companies argue over whether digital privacy should be curbed to help regulators and law enforcement more easily thwart hackers and other digital threats.

• European hearing may limit GCHQ’s powers

  An upcoming European hearing over UK surveillance laws may result in a severe limitation on GCHQ’s powers.

  The Guardian reported yesterday that a European emergency hearing over the legality of such laws would be held for the first time on April 12th.

  In dispute are laws like the incoming Investigatory Powers bills or the 2014 Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA), which makes telecommunications providers retain the data of customers for potential later use by security services.

  Both laws are widely condemned by privacy advocates for the violating powers that they grant the forces of national security.

  Tom Watson MP and David Davis MP, leading members of the Labour and Conservative parties respectively, brought a legal challenge against the Home Office last year, over the rushing through of DRIPA. The two MPs claimed that such a law directly conflicted with law which superseded the authority inherent in DRIPA, like the European Union Charter on Human Rights.

• Protesters interrupt former NSA, CIA director’s lecture at Duquesne University

  Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and the CIA, said he was not surprised when four young protesters interrupted his remarks Tuesday afternoon at Duquesne University. He has had to make some difficult and controversial decisions in the war on terror.

• Protesters interrupt former NSA, CIA head’s Duquesne lecture

Civil Rights/Policing

• Congressman Wants To Make Attacking A Cop A Federal ‘Hate’ Crime

  The proposal is also accompanied by a heartfelt “Dear Colleague” letter that talks about cops “holding together the fabric of our nation” and how they’ve been “intimidated” by recent acts of violence. No statistics are cited to back up his insistence that this a real problem that needs to be addressed with legislation… because there aren’t any.

  The National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund’s stats show the number of officers killed in the line of duty has been decreasing over the last several years and appears to have hit a lower plateau of ~120/year for the past four years.

• UNHRC investigator: Hebron killing has all the signs of an ‘extra judicial execution’

  The Hebron shooting last week was an extrajudicial execution, charged United Nations special rapporteur Christof Heyns on Wednesday, as he weighed in on the controversial incident in which an IDF soldier shot a Palestinian assailant as he lay apparently wounded and immobile on the ground.

• Why do some Israeli soldiers use unauthorized force?

  An Israeli soldier was detained last week after allegations that he shot and killed a wounded Palestinian man lying incapacitated on the ground. Moments earlier the Palestinian, 21-year-old Abd al-Fatah a-Sharif, along with another man, had allegedly stabbed and injured a soldier in the West Bank city of Hebron. The stabbing is one of the latest in a wave of attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians in the past six months.

• Groups Call for France to Investigate IDF Shooter for ‘War Crime’ if Israel Absolves Him

  Human rights groups said Wednesday that France should investigate the French-Israeli soldier filmed shooting a Palestinian attacker in the head and killing him while he lay motionless, if the Israeli justice system fails to convict him.

• Israeli military chief appeals to soldiers after shooting

• Why Israel Is Warming Up to The World’s Largest Muslim Country

  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for the establishment of official diplomatic relations with Indonesia on Monday, as the world’s largest Muslim country continues to look eastwards to boost diplomatic and economic ties.

• Police Charge Trump Campaign Manager With Battering Reporter, Release Video Evidence

  Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has been charged with battering then-Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields.

  The incident occurred on March 8. Fields alleged Lewandowski forcibly yanked her after she asked Trump a question. Despite an eyewitness account from a Washington Post reporter corroborating her version of events, Lewandowski denied any involvement with the incident whatsoever and called Fields an “attention seeker.”

• My daughter was offered a place at an academy – so I’m home-schooling until she can go somewhere I trust

  And I don’t trust academies. Not one bit. I don’t trust any organisation that removes their employees’ right to unionise, or one that no longer values the trained over the untrained. If you don’t respect teaching qualifications, after all, then why should my child respect your teachers?

• Appeals Court Says Indiana’s Bad Anti-Texting Law Can’t Be Used To Justify Stops Or Searches

  The opinion dismantles the government’s arguments with aplomb, taking apart each assertion made to defend a drug bust predicated on something that doesn’t even approach “reasonable” suspicion. Extending the government’s logic to other possibly illegal acts, the court points out the government’s reliance on this terrible law is woefully misguided. Since the government can’t possibly know how many people looking at their phones while driving are performing illegal acts, it can’t base traffic stops on nothing more than the mere possibility something illegal may be happening.

• Jean Charles de Menezes: Family of Tube shooting victim lose human rights case

  The family of Jean Charles de Menezes have lost a human rights challenge over the decision not to bring charges against British police marksmen over his death.

  Judges at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled British prosecutors were right not to charge police officers over Brazilian electrician’s fatal shooting in 2005.

  It comes more than a decade after he was mistaken for a suicide bomber and shot dead by police marksmen on a London Tube train.

• Conductors to shut down rail network in wildcat strike

  Train conductors in Finland will walk off the job on Thursday in protest at the government’s transport policies, causing the cancellation of some 300 long-distance services. The move comes on the heels of the announcement that some 214 jobs could be lost as the state railways company VR looks to cut costs.

• Passenger train monopoly nears the end of the line, several operators show interest

  Finland’s passenger train traffic is set to open up for competition in 2017, a move that will likely end years of market domination by the state-owned operator VR. The Ministry of Transport and Communications says over ten companies have expressed an interest in the prospect of a market share.

• ‘We Have Never Ignored Cuba’

  FAIR contributor Adam Johnson noted recently how in this country discussion of US history, and that of its allies, is permitted a certain moral nuance, while official enemies are presented as essentially, unrelievedly evil. So it is with Cuba, where Barack Obama just paid the first visit by a sitting US President in 88 years. Any mention of, say, Cuba sending doctors overseas to help in crisis zones is nullified in elite US debate by the fact that—it’s Cuba! Where Castro lives! Few countries are drawn as cartoonishly, making a clear view of Cuba’s strengths and struggles, along with the meaning of any supposed thaw with the US, harder to come by.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• AT&T Follows Comcast’s Lead, Now Charging Users $30 More To Avoid Usage Caps

  Last fall, Comcast added a new wrinkle to its plan to impose arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps on the company’s broadband customers. It began charging users a $30-$35 premium if users wanted to avoid caps, effectively turning the idea of unlimited data into a luxury option many could no longer afford. Caps continue to be a great way to impose price hikes on uncompetitive broadband markets, charge more money for the same service, with the added bonus of both curtailing — and cashing in on — the growing use of Internet video.

• FCC Commissioner: Gov’t Should Never Interfere In Private Markets…Unless ISPs Have A Chance To Mock Netflix

  As we just got done noting, Netflix recently admitted that it has been throttling the streams it sends to AT&T and Verizon wireless customers in order to lessen the impact of usage caps. While most everybody agrees that Netflix should have been transparent about the practice, most also agree that Netflix — an outspoken opponent of usage caps and supporter of net neutrality — was actually trying to improve the customer experience with the move. As such, no real harm was done, and nobody even noticed that Netflix had been doing it — for five years. Really not much of a story in and of itself.

  But the telecom industry and its allies, outraged by Netflix’s support of net neutrality, opposition to usage caps, and the threat it poses to legacy TV, have been desperately and hysterically trying to paint Netflix’s reveal as some kind of immense gotcha.

• Romania opens broadband networks to competition

  The Romanian government has approved a draft law aiming to reduce the cost of broadband communication infrastructure. For example, the bill sets tariffs that give competitors access to physical telecommunications infrastructure. The law also defines a single point of information, to be managed by the Agency for Digital Agenda of Romania.

DRM

• Why Won’t W3C Carve Security Research Out Of Its DRM-In-HTML 5 Proposal?

  A few years back, we wrote a few stories about the unfortunate move by the W3C to embrace DRM as a part of the official HTML5 standard. It was doubly disappointing to then see Tim Berners-Lee defending this decision as well. All along this was nothing more than a focus by the legacy content providers to try to hinder perfectly legal uses and competition on the web by baking in damaging DRM systems. Even Mozilla, which held out the longest, eventually admitted that it had no choice but to support DRM, even if it felt bad about doing so.

  There are, of course, many problems with DRM, and baking it directly into HTML5 raises a number of concerns. A major one: since the part of the DMCA (Section 1201) makes it infringing to merely get around any technological protection measure — even if for perfectly legal reasons — it creates massive chilling effects on security research. To try to deal with this, Cory Doctorow and the EFF offered up something of a compromise, asking the W3C to adopt a “non-aggression covenant,” such that the W3C still gets its lame DRM, but that W3C members agree not to go after security researchers.

Intellectual Monopolies

• India, EU Leaders Touch On IPR, Innovation, ICTs, Pharmaceuticals

  The leaders of India and the European Union today in Brussels discussed a wide range of topics including intellectual property rights – including geographical indications – innovation, digital issues, and health and pharmaceuticals.

  But details on what was said were few.

  The 13th EU-India Summit was held on 30 March. The EU was represented by Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, and Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission. India was represented by Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi.

• Trademarks

  • Federal Circuit denies writ of mandamus in Slants case

    Tam, who fronts the Asian-American band The Slants, petitioned the Federal Circuit for a writ of mandamus to instruct the director of the USPTO to publish his application, which the director opposed.

  • CJEU on taser, ahm, tacit prorogation of jurisdiction

    The facts of the case are rather simple. In 2008, Taser International concluded an agreement with the Romanian company Gate 4 which obliged Gate 4 to assign to Taser International the Taser trade marks which Gate 4 had registered, or for which it had applied for registration, in Romania. The agreement contained a clause conferring exclusive jurisdiction on a court in the United States. Gate 4 refused to fulfil its obligations and Taser International sued it before the Tribunalul Bucureşti (District Court, Bucharest). Gate 4, despite the jurisdiction clause, entered an appearance before the Romanian court without challenging its jurisdiction. The Romanian court found for Taser and ordered Gate 4 to execute the formalities necessary to transfer the trade marks.

  • Court Rules Against Lionsgate In TD Ameritrade Suit For Dressing Up Copyright Claim As A Trademark Claim

    Last year, we wrote about a lawsuit Lionsgate Studios had initiated against TD Ameritrade over a throwaway line at the end of one of the latter’s advertising spots. That commercial included the line, “Nobody puts your old 401(k) in the corner,” an imperfect parody of a famous line from Dirty Dancing, the rights for which are owned by Lionsgate. The fact that the ad was no longer running at the time of the lawsuit, nor the fact that Lionsgate was in no way involved in the investment business, failed to keep the studio from claiming this was trademark infringement. The studio even went so far as to hilariously claim that consumers would be confused into thinking that TD Ameritrade either had rights to the movie or was in some way affiliated with Lionsgate Studios.

• Copyrights

  • Creative Content UK Aims to Re-Educate Book Pirates

    The UK government’s multi-million pound campaign to deter Internet piracy is now hoping to reach out to book fans. A new and rather pleasant video published under the Creative Content UK banner extols the virtues of buying books from genuine sources, but whether it will resonate with the younger generation more used to digital acquisition remains to be seen.

  • Copyright Does Not Protect the Klingon Language, Court Hears

    Paramount Pictures and CBS Studios can’t claim copyright over the Klingon language, Vulcan’s pointy ears, or Phaser weapons, a court heard this week. This defense comes from the makers of crowdfunded Star Trek spin-off ‘Prelude to Axanar’, who were sued over their use of various well-known Star Trek elements.

  • DMCA’s Notice And Takedown Procedure Is A Total Mess, And It’s Mainly Because Of Bogus Automated Takedowns

    Both Congress and the Copyright Office continue to explore possible ways to reform copyright laws, and one area of interest to a lot of people is reforming the whole “notice and takedown” process in the DMCA. The legacy players have been pushing for a ridiculously stupid concept they’re calling “notice and staydown” in which they argue that once there’s a notice for a particular piece of content, a platform needs to proactively block any copies of that content from ever being uploaded again. This is dumb and dangerous for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that it would place tremendous burdens on smaller players, while locking in the more dominant large platforms that can build or buy systems to handle this. But, even more importantly, copyright infringement is extremely context dependent. The same content may be infringing in one context, while protected fair use in another. But a notice and staydown process would completely wipe out the fair use possibilities, and potentially violate the First Amendment (remember, the Supreme Court itself has declared fair use to be the “safety valve” that allows copyright law to fit with the First Amendment).

  • Nigerian Government Says Country Needs More Jail Time For Pirates And Control Over Content Of Creative Works

    That should make people “respect” copyright more. Put ‘em in jail for violating ethereal rights. Or for contributing to terrorism. Or for making the government look bad. It’s all pretty much interchangeable as far as the government — and the backers of the government’s plan — are concerned. Stiffer penalties have done little to curb piracy elsewhere in the world and are frequently a PR nightmare when imposed. Piracy spread Nollywood’s influence throughout the world and allowed its films to be viewed by residents of other repressive nations whose governments have maintained local control of creative content.

    The minority represented here is hoping to control not only the distribution, but the content, of future creative works. Piracy may be the talking point, but government expansion and increased protectionism are the ultimate goals.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• After a nasty computer virus, sys admin looks to Linux

  My first brush with open source came while I was working for my university as a part-time system administrator in 2001. I was part of a small group that created business case studies for teaching not just in the university, but elsewhere in academia.

  As the team grew, the need for a robust LAN setup with file serving, intranet applications, domain logons, etc. emerged. Our IT infrastructure consisted mostly of bootstrapped Windows 98 computers that had become too old for the university’s IT labs and were reassigned to our department.

• Linux alternatives to Windows XP

  Microsoft, sometime ago decided to end support for older versions of Windows such as Windows XP. No more technical support and security updates for these versions in future signalled Microsoft’s intentions to encourage users to migrate to the latest version of Windows. Lets face it, there are several users who are still on Windows XP – especially in the developing parts of the world. While upgrading Windows XP to Windows 10 seems to be the logical step, users who unwilling or unable to pay can migrate to a free operating system based on Linux.

Kernel Space

• Linux at 25: Q&A With Linus Torvalds

  Linus Torvalds created the original core of the Linux operating system in 1991 as a computer science student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linux rapidly grew into a full-featured operating system that can now be found running smartphones, servers, and all kinds of gadgets. In this e-mail interview, Torvalds reflects on the last quarter century and what the next 25 years might bring.

• Linux at 25: Why It Flourished While Others Fizzled

• Why Linux succeeded where others failed

  When Linux Torvalds put the first version of his operating system kernel on Usenet in 1991, he had no idea what it would become.

• One of the world’s most successful programmers has some surprising advice for success

• The TODO Group and the Linux Foundation: Marrying open source and the enterprise

  Using open-source software is easy, getting your company to integrate open-source development is hard. The Linux Foundation and the TODO Group aim to change this.

• Linux Foundation Welcomes IT Security Leader Symantec as Gold Member

• Linux Foundation Advocates for a Big Tent to Improve Open Source

• The Linux Foundation Announces Free Open Source Compliance Course for Developers

• Open Source Developer Compliance

• Linux Foundation Continues Push to Make Open Source World More Diverse

• Mazda Motor Corporation Invests in Open Technology Development With Linux Foundation Gold Membership

• Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Others Bring Open Source Group to The Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation Extends Diversity and Education Initiatives With Blacks in Technology and Kids on Computers

• Big data gets runtime specification

• Hadoop project ODP regroups under Linux Foundation’s umbrella

• ODPi reins in Hadoop complexity with runtime specifications and standards

• Hadoop rebels unleash spec to battle the Cloudera/MapR empire

• ODPi Publishes Runtime Spec to Streamline Big Data Applications

• Open Source Blockchain Effort for the Enterprise Elects Leadership Positions and Gains New Investments

  Hyperledger Project Board of Directors and Technical Steering Committee Chair Elected; New Member Investments Underscore Demand for Open Source Blockchain Platform Development

• Open Source Blockchain Effort, HyperLedger, Elects Leadership Positions and Gains New Investments

• IBM Forages Deeper into Adapting Blockchain to Finance & Beyond

  Jerry Cuomo, IBM’s vice president of blockchain, favors a blockchain-enabled insurance plan for driverless cars. He also sees an opportunity to move supply chains to the blockchain.

• Blockstream Among 10 New Firms to Join Hyperledger Blockchain Project

  Bitcoin development startup Blockstream is among 10 new companies that have joined the open-source Hyperledger blockchain project led by the Linux Foundation.

• Hyperledger Project makes board appointments and adds new members

  The Hyperledger Project is a collaborative effort to establish, build and sustain an open, distributed ledger platform that will satisfy a variety of use cases across multiple industries.

• LVM Internals

  This post is intended to detail the LVM internal disk layout including the thin-volume metadata structure. While documentation of the LVM user space management utilities is abundant, very little exists in the realm of on-disk layout & structures. Having just added support for this to CloudForms, I figure this would be a good opportunity to expand on this for future reference.

• Graphics Stack

  • OpenChrome 0.4 Coming For Letting Open-Source VIA Support Live On

    With now having a new maintainer, the OpenChrome DDX driver is preparing for its first release in more than two years.

  • Mesa 11.2 Planned For Release Friday; RC4 Issued

    It’s been over three weeks since Mesa 11.2 was supposed to have been released while 11.2.0 is now scheduled to make its debut on Friday.

  • Radeon + AMDGPU Performance On Linux 4.6

    For those curious whether the Linux 4.6 kernel is bringing any noticeable performance improvements to the AMDGPU and Radeon DRM drivers over Linux 4.5, here are some benchmarks in conjunction with using Mesa 11.3-devel built against LLVM 3.8.

  • Gallium3D VDPAU Gets Better Interoperability Support With DMA-BUF

  • Mesa 3D 11.2.0 Gets One More RC Build, Final Release Launches April 1, 2016

    Today, March 30, 2016, Collabora’s Emil Velikov has announced the immediate availability for download of the fourth and last RC (Release Candidate) build of the highly anticipated Mesa 11.2.0 3D graphics library.

    While many of us were expecting to see the final release of Mesa 3D Graphics Library 11.2 out the door in the second week of March, as originally planned, or at least the RC4 build announced today, it looks like the Mesa development team ran into some issues that needed to be resolved before the final Mesa 11.2 could be released.

• Benchmarks

  • ODROID-C2 ARM SBC Offers Great Performance For $40

    Hardkernel’s ODROID-C2 64-bit ARM single board computer retails for $40 USD and is powered by an Amlogic S905 SoC. While just a fraction more than a Raspberry Pi 3 or the Pine 64+ when factoring in shipping costs, there’s very competitive performance out of this board with its four cores running up to 2.0GHz.

Applications

• OpenShot 2.0 Free Video Editor Now Features a Universal Linux Version

  It looks like the OpenShot 2.0 free and cross-platform video editor might be released this year after all, and today we’re informing you about the availability of the fourth Beta build.

• OpenShot 2.0 – Beta 4 Released!

  One of the biggest challenges for testers and myself is to speed up the cycle from bug fix to testable release. While some users compile everything manually, and some Linux users get updates delivered through our PPA, Windows, Mac, and certain Linux users must wait for me to create a new installer (which takes lots of time). So, I have built a cross-platform build server (i.e. really just a cool Python script which is scheduled to run every few hours). It checks Git for updates, re-compiles libraries, freezes the OpenShot Python 3 application (along with dependencies), signs the Windows / Mac versions, and uploads the files to Amazon S3, and lists these files on the openshot.org website. I currently have 3 build servers running (Windows 10, OS X 10.11, Ubuntu 14.04) and creating builds automatically.

• OpenShot 2.0 Beta 4 Released

  While OpenShot 2.0 is long overdue, things are finally looking up for this open-source non-linear video editor with going into beta this past January and today marking the release of the fourth beta.

• darktable 2.0.3 Open-Source RAW Image Editor Lands with Support for Fujifilm X70

  The popular darktable open-source and cross-platform RAW image editor software has been updated today, March 29, 2016, to version 2.0.3, the third maintenance release in the stable 2.0 series of the software.

• Audacious 3.7.2 Open-Source Music Player Released for Linux & Windows with Fixes

  The developers of the popular Audacious free, open-source, and cross-platform music player software released the second maintenance build in the stable Audacious 3.7 series.

  Back in November 2015, the massive Audacious 3.7 release arrived with a multitude of new features, for both GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows platforms, including the ability to shuffle playlists by entire albums, improved HiDPI support, recording of Internet streams during playback, and a unified window for managing equalizer presets.

• qBittorrent 3.3.4 Free BitTorrent Client Adds a “Hide Zero Values” Option, More

  The development team behind the popular qBittorrent free open-source and cross-platform BitTorrent client software announced today, March 29, 2016, the release of qBittorrent 3.3.4.

• FFmpeg 3.0 “Einstein” Free Multimedia Backend Gets Its First Point Release

  Today, March 29, 2016, the major FFmpeg 3.0 “Einstein” open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework received its first maintenance release, version 3.0.1.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Durable photo workflow

  • Zabbix IRC Notifications

  • Parts of a Slow Web Application

  • A First Look Tutorial of Newly Open Sourced OpenToonz

  • Launching and Managing a New MongoDB Instance in OpenStack

  • String Types in Rust

  • Everything you should know about RHCSA Certification

• Games

  • Wyrmsun, the retro-themed & open source RTS is now free on Steam

    The style of it reminds me of Warcraft 2, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that comparison. Gameplay wise though it is rather different. You play through “quests” and unlock new units, tech and buildings, which is pretty cool. Enemies will also drop items for you to use, which is another nice feature.

  • Verdun, the WWI FPS has a free expansion release, game is now broken on Linux

    How can you sell a game on Steam and not test on all your supported platforms when releasing a major new version? Early Access is one thing, but this is a properly released game.

  • Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, a roguelike space adventure with spaceship combat

    As a big space and spaceship combat fan, as well as a roguelike fan having them all merged together is very exciting. I would like to see more space themed games like this on Linux!

  • Developers of ARK: Survival Evolved facing a lawsuit from the Dungeon Defenders devs

    The games are very different, but it’s a people and contracts issue here. It sounds like someone has a vendetta against someone else.

  • Interstellar Marines updated with new main menu and unlockable skins

    It has a new main menu, you can unlock skins with points earned during online gameplay, you can now vote for map and game-mode during online play.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Plasma 5.6 Gets Its First Point Release, Brings Small Bug Fixes

    Today, March 29, 2016, KDE had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability of the first point release for the stable KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment.

  • Manjaro 15.12 KDE – close, but not perfect

    Manjaro 15.12 KDE 64-bit in Live session felt very snappy and fast. I had no issues with the system performance.

    However, there were still some issues that I drew attention to in the paragraphs above.

    I would like to say that if I had a choice between the KDE and Xfce editions of Manjaro operating system, the latter would still be my preference.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Apricity OS Is Clean and Classy

    Apricity OS targets newbies and professionals alike. It has a well-thought-out design. Its execution makes both the GNOME and the Cinnamon editions very functional.

    The overall performance of the distro is impressive. I am looking forward to the release of the nonbeta version.

    Apricity OS is a Linux distro that will make you rethink why you use your existing operating system. It is a distro worth checking out.

• New Releases

  • Emmabuntus 3 1.03 Educational Linux Distro Is Based on Xubuntu 14.04.4 LTS

    A few minutes ago, March 29, 2016, Softpedia has been informed by Patrick Emmabuntüs about the availability for download of Emmabuntüs 3 version 1.03 educational GNU/Linux operating system.

    Based on the latest Xubuntu 14.04.4 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system, Emmabuntüs 3 1.03 arrives today with updated components and dozens of improvements, keeping the GNU/Linux distribution used in schools and other educational environments stable and reliable for a longer period of time.

• Red Hat Family

  • SanDisk and Red Hat Form Strategic Alliance to Deliver High-Performance Flash-based Ceph Storage Solutions

    InfiniFlash for Red Hat Ceph Storage offers next-generation scale-out storage for global customers

  • Red Hat (RHT), SanDisk (SNDK) Enter Flash-based Ceph Storage Alliance

  • Finance

    • Technology Sector Update for 03/29/2016: RHT, CYBR

    • Tech stock news buzz: Red Hat (RHT), Analog Devices (ADI), Globalstar (GSAT)

    • Df Dent Co Inc Lowers stake in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

    • Tech stocks for your portfolio: GrubHub (GRUB), Red Hat (RHT)

    • Red Hat Posts Yet Another Quarterly Growth in Revenues

    • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Upgraded to “Strong-Buy” by Vetr Inc.

    • How Analysts Rated Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) Last Week?

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 24 Alpha released!

      The Fedora 24 Alpha is here, right on schedule for our planned June final release.

    • Fedora 24 Linux Alpha Officially Released, Includes a Preview of GNOME 3.20

    • Fedora 24 Alpha Released

    • New features in Copr

    • Fedora was at PyCon SK 2016

      At the second weekend in March 2016, Fedora had a booth at PyCon SK, a community-organized conference for the Python programming language held in Bratislava, Slovakia. The event happened for the first time this year, and we made sure it happened with Fedora.

    • Has Power Management Improved With The Updates To Fedora 23?

      Yesterday I posted some of benchmarks of Fedora 23 with available stable updates along with enabling the Rawhide Nodebug repository for easy access to the Linux 4.6 Git kernel. Those numbers weren’t terribly interesting, but is it any better on the power consumption front with these kernel upgrades for a Lenovo ThinkPad ultrabook?

      After running each of those tests of a clean install of Fedora 23, Fedora 23 with all available stable release updates as of this past weekend (thus at Linux 4.4), and then enabling the Rawhide Nodebug repository for access to Linux 4.6 Git, I ran power consumption tests for the ThinkPad X1 Carbon with i7-5600U CPU while this notebook/ultrabook was running on battery power.

    • Linux is 25, Fedora 24 Alpha, Classy Apricity

      It’s been 25 years since Linus Torvalds began Linux and IEEE Spectrum ran two articles today on him and his kernel. Elsewhere, Fedora 24 Alpha was released as planned and Jack Germain reviewed Apricity OS saying it’s class and clean. The Register’s Scott Gilbertson reviewed the Ubuntu 16.04 beta and March 30 is Document Freedom Day.

    • Download statistics by PHP Version

      Here is some download statistics from remi repository, for the various PHP versions available.

    • Fedora 24 Alpha Linux distribution now available with GNOME 3.20

      If you are a big GNOME fan — like me — then there is one distribution you must try — Fedora. The Linux-based operating system — the same that Linus Torvalds uses — is a great way to have a vanilla GNOME experience. Desktop environment aside, it is also both stable and fairly cutting-edge, offering modern packages and kernels.

    • Fedora 24 Alpha Workstation Ships with GNOME 3.20 and Linux Kernel 4.5 – Screenshot Tour

      We reported yesterday, March 28, 2016, on the release and immediate availability for download of the Fedora 24 Alpha Linux operating system, which includes a preview of the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment.

• Debian Family

  • Current jessie-backports packaging work in march

  • Release 0.14.1 of ctioga2

    With the (relatively, sorry) recent switch to ruby2.3 as default Ruby version, I realized that my plotting program ctioga2 crashed with ruby 2.3 (due to a rather ugly lazy hack).

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Go nuts, brother: Ubuntu 16.04 beta – no more auto data-spaffing

        There’s still a few weeks to go and this beta definitely has some rough edges, but Ubuntu 16.04 is shaping up to be an excellent release, particularly from an LTS stability standpoint. LTS releases always have to find a balance between incorporating the best of what’s new with the need to support those features and apps for five years.

        Leaving Unity 8 out of it means that Ubuntu users who just want stability can wait out the transition to Unity 8 with a stable system that still stays relatively up to date. Those who want to stay on the bleeding edge can upgrade again, when Unity 8 arrive in 16.10 later this year.

      • First ever Ubuntu tablet here soon

      • iPad Pro 9.7 Vs Ubuntu Tablet: Which Tablet You Should Buy?

      • BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition Available For Pre-Order

      • Pre-order the Ubuntu tablet, Aquaris M10

      • First Ubuntu Tablet Now Available To Pre-Order From €260

      • Aquaris M10, First Ubuntu Linux Tablet, is Now Available for Preorders

      • World’s First Ubuntu Tablet Goes On Sale, Pre-Order It Now!

      • First Ubuntu-powered tablet now available for preorder in Europe

      • BQ’s Aquarius M10 Ubuntu tablet doubles as a Linux desktop for $289

      • World’s First Ubuntu Linux Tablet, Aquaris M10, Available For Preorder From $290

      • First Ubuntu Tablet Goes on Sale

      • You Can Now Preorder BQ Aquaris M10, World’s First Ubuntu Linux Tablet

      • The First Ubuntu Tablet BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition is Now Up for Pre-Orders

      • First Ubuntu Linux Tablet Goes on Sale, BQ’s Aquarius M10 Available for $289

      • First Ubuntu Linux tablet: Aquaris M10 ready to buy now, first deliveries ‘mid-April’

      • First ever Ubuntu Linux tablet up for pre-order: Should Google be worried?

      • Canonical Partners With Microsoft For Ubuntu On Windows 10?

        ZDNet seems pretty confident in its sources on this rumor and perhaps that resurrects the rumor that we were tipped on concerning Microsoft purchasing Canonical.

      • ​Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10

        According to sources at Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, and Microsoft, you’ll soon be able to run Ubuntu on Windows 10.

      • Microsoft to announce Bash on Linux on Windows

      • Microsoft and Canonical to Bring Ubuntu on Windows 10

      • Ubuntu Linux Is Coming To Windows 10 — Microsoft Partners With Canonical

        This combination of Windows 10 and Ubuntu will be aimed at developers. Linux fans shouldn’t expect Ubuntu to come along with its Unity interface. Instead, it’ll rely on Bash and CLI tools like make, gawk, and grep. Having said that, Microsoft’s target audience are developers, not desktop users.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Ubuntu MATE is having a bit of a Mutiny

          There’s a new Ubuntu Mate theme in town and it looks suspiciously a lot like Unity. Find out not only the how-to, but the layer of irony this adds to the MATE desktop interface.

        • Cinnamon 2.8.8 Desktop Environment Released for Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa”

          The story of Linux Mint website being hacked and the forum database stolen is now behind the team of hard-working developers responsible for the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments, and they can finally concentrate all of their efforts on improving these fantastic open-source projects.

          The Cinnamon desktop environment has been updated earlier today, March 29, 2016, to version 2.8.8, a small maintenance release that landed in the main software repositories of the Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” operating system, which is the latest stable release of the Ubuntu-based GNU/Linux distribution.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi: Amazon releases recipe for baking a low-cost Alexa voice assistant

  Alexa is mostly restricted to the US, but Amazon has posted a step-by-step guide on how to build your own companion anywhere in the world

• Tiniest Braswell module delivers the goods, including 4K video

  SolidRun is prepping a tiny, Linux-friendly COM based on Intel’s “Braswell” processors, and featuring SATA, GbE, HDMI, USB3.0, PCIe, 4K video, and more.

• Beware the Pis of March

  It’s beyond amazing how many different project people have created for the Raspberry Pi. Here’s a look at four which are particularly noteworthy.

• Rugged ARM module spec targets harsh environments

  The Linux-supported RTX (Rugged Technology eXtended) open-spec form factor for ARM-based computer-on-modules was developed by a new RTX Consortium with founding members Advantech, Aaeon, and Avalue. The other collaborators on the spec are ARM, NXP, and Texas Instruments (TI), although they have not been formally tagged as members on the RTX site. The RTX 2.0 spec is now available for download along with a design guide, carrier board schematics, and mechanical drawing files.

• Phones

  • Thoughts on Sailfish OS

    For the better part of the last month I have been using Sailfish OS as the daily operating system on my mobile device. For those who are unfamiliar, Sailfish is a Linux powered mobile operating system that largely builds on Qt technology.

  • Tizen/Samsung

    • Samsung partners up with SK Telecom to transform Daegu into an IoT trial town in South Korea

      SK telecom stated that it will be investing KRW 90 billion ($76 million) by end 2016 ,to set up a suitable IoT friendly network in the city while Samsung will be sponsoring all the necessary devices and equipment required for the project. Further, the city officials of Daegu also stated that they will be aiming to raise over KRW 1 trillion ($855 million) to support the establishment of infrastructure in the city and provide necessary funds for the development of local startups to make use of this future tech. The project is expected to start from November 2016 with the opening of Center for Creative Economy and Innovation at the Daegu Samsung Creative Campus.

    • Game: Doodle Jump for Samsung Z1 and Z3 available in Tizen Store

      Doodle Jump is one of my favorite game that I used to play all the time, countless hours dedicated to jumping around this addictive platform game. I have just downloaded the game onto my Samsung Z3 from the Tizen Store. It is so much fun and very easy to play. Games play is very simple as players only need to use the left and right arrows to move.

  • Android

    • Latest HTC 10 Teaser Says to Expect “Fastest and Smoothest Android” Yet

      In the latest teaser for the HTC 10, HTC, the VR-focused electronics company who now makes phones on the side, is bragging up their next phone’s performance. Not only that, but they have confirmed the Samsung-esque button setup on the phone’s chin, although it is at least in the correct arrangement.

    • Adobe & Dropbox Integration Comes To Android Apps

    • Oracle seeks US$9.3 billion for Google’s use of Java in Android

    • Oracle wants over $9bn from Google for use of Java APIs in Android

    • F-Droid, Copperhead, Guardian Project partner to create a security-focused, Android-based ecosystem

      Google’s Android operating system may be based on open source software, but most Android phones ship with a lot of proprietary apps and services (like Google’s own Gmail, Maps, and Play Store). But there are a number of initiatives designed to make Android more open… and many also claim to make it more secure.

    • Copperhead, F-Droid & Guardian Project start partnership for open, secure mobile ecosystem

      Copperhead, The Guardian Project, and F-Droid have announced a new partnership and proposed a crowdfunding campaign, hoping to raise money to create an “open, verifiably secure mobile ecosystem of software, services and hardware” – or in English, a secure phone anyone can buy and use straight out of the box.

      “Through a future planned crowdfunded and commercial offering, the partnership will provide affordable off-the-shelf solutions, including device hardware and self-hosted app and update distribution servers, for any individual and organizations looking for complete mobile stacks they can trust.” reads the announcement.

    • Open Source CopperheadOS Project Accepts Bitcoin Donations

      There is no denying the Android operating system could use a fair amount of tweaks to make things far more secure for its users. Whether or not CopperheadOS will be the answer, remains to be seen, but the ecosystem has a few things going for it. What is even more interesting is how this collaboration with Guardian Project and F-Droid is accepting Bitcoin donations to fund development as well.

    • Google Expands Android Experiments Focus

    • Samsung unleashes ad blocking Android browser

    • Samsung rolls out its ad-blocking Android browser

    • Oracle Seeks $9.3 Billion Over Android’s Use Of Java

    • Oracle to Google: Pay us $9.3bn for using Java in Android

    • Using a Hardware Keyboard With an Android Device

    • Fans of The IT Crowd will love Google’s latest Android easter egg

    • Truecaller Fixes Flaw in Android App That Exposed Data of Millions of Users

    • WhatsApp for Android Update Adds Quick Replies From Notifications and More

    • Moto G (3rd Gen) updated to Android 6.0.1 in India

    • How to watch Amazon Prime Instant Video on Android: Get Amazon Video (and offline films) on Android

    • Truecaller Fixes Data Leaking Hole in Android App

    • Dropbox on Android now lets you open PDF files in Adobe Acrobat Reader

    • How to fix Android’s ‘insufficient storage available’ error message

    • Best Android apps 2016: Best apps for your new phone or tablet

    • Kawasaki Converts iOS Mobile Apps To Android Within Hours

    • Nintendo’s first iOS and Android app launches in the U.S. on March 31st

    • Google Photos for Android just made tweaking your photos painless

    • Galaxy S7 compared to first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1

      SlashGear and out sister site Android Community have been around long enough that we have had hands on just about every Android device to launch since Android hit the market. Way back in 2008 we got hands on with the first Android smartphone, the HTC Dream also known as the T-Mobile G1. Ever wonder how the first Android device might stack up to a modern Galaxy S7? If so, this video comparison is for you.

    • 3 hidden shortcuts for typing faster on Android

      I’ve been thinking a lot about thumbs lately.

      Why, you might wonder? Simple: Whenever I watch unsuspecting strangers use their phones in public (it’s not as creepy as it sounds, I swear), I can’t help but notice how many people rely solely on their thumbs for on-screen typing.

      Me? I’ve never been a two-thumb typing man myself. I’m also not a full-time swiper, which is another increasingly common type of mobile tech typist you see in the wild these days.

    • How to use the ProtonMail encrypted email service on Android

      In the race for privacy, some turn to encrypting their email. Why? Because there are times when sending sensitive information needs a layer of encryption. But adding encryption to mobile email can sometimes be a bit complicated.

      Until now.

    • Premium Android flip phone Gionee W909 unveiled

      Watch out, Samsung SM-W2016, the Gionee W909 is after you. The Android-powered flip phone was officially announced with Android 5.1 (with the custom Amigo UI).

      The W909 has two 4.2″ screens, both IPS LCDs with 720p resolution. It’s powered by the MediaTek Helio P10 chipset with an octa-core processor and 4GB of RAM. It has a generous built-in storage of 64GB, plus a microSD slot.

    • Android Wear watches go chrono-a-chrono with Apple Watch

      Apple Watch may be the media’s darling, but Android Wear has quietly been gaining ground, as evidenced by numerous recent watch and software introductions.

      The Apple Watch drew the media’s attention last week with the announcement of a $50 price drop. Collectively, however, there has been more recent news about Google’s Android Wear. A more autonomous Android Wear 1.4 stack based on Android 6.0 has rolled out to most watches, and several new models broke cover, leading up to the Baselworld show earlier this month in Switzerland.

      Two of these — Casio’s WSD-F10 and LG Watch Urbane LTE, 2nd Edition — are now available for order, with shipments beginning Mar. 25 and April 1, respectively. We’ve included them in here in our second annual slide show of Android Wear watches (click on Gallery link below). Our list has grown by three since last year’s six entries, even as we have excluded non-Android Wear devices and replaced some older watches with follow-on models.

Quali Courts DevOps Community with Open Source Plugins and Libraries

Quali hopes to forge stronger connections with the developer community by contributing plugins for its DevOps cloud sandbox platform as open source code, a move the company announced today.

How Open Source is Changing Data Center Networking

Last June, AT&T went all-in on this bet, joining with the Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) and the Open Network Operating System (ONOS) Project to form what’s now called Central Office Re-imagined as a Datacenter (CORD, formerly “Re-architected”). Its mission is to make telco infrastructure available as a service in an analogous fashion to IaaS for cloud service providers.

Kubernetes 1.2 Offers Rolling Updates, Persistent Volumes

At the Google GCP Next conference last week in San Francisco, the company demonstrated how it was possible with Kubernetes to update a heavily used distributed application while keeping that app running.

For a Kubernetes 1.2 on-stage demo, Greg DeMichillie, director of program management for Google Cloud Platform spun up a service and then used load testing software to dispatch 20,000 requests-per-second to the service.

Way to Go, FCC. Now Manufacturers Are Locking Down Routers

Hey, remember when the FCC reassured us last year that it wasn’t going to lock down Wi-Fi routers? And everyone breathed a sigh of relief, because custom router firmware is actually a really good thing? Sure, it’s fun to improve your router by extending the range or making your network friendlier for guests. But open firmware is important for other reasons: it enables critical infrastructure, from emergency communications for disaster relief and building free community access points to beefing up personal security.

Google open source their Machine Learning System – Spokane Tech Time

OpenWebGIS: An open source geographic information system

There are a lot of great geographic information systems (GIS) that run in web browsers and mobile apps, thanks in large part to the introduction of new web standards in 2010-11 and recent improvements in mobile devices.

And yet, most existing GIS systems are half-built systems that require setup by the users, which can be difficult and inconvenient to common for users who don’t know how to code. There’s also a very limited range of free and open source options for scientific data analysis. We created OpenWebGIS in 2014 to address all of these issues in a single, ready-built solution.

Events

• SxSW panel on the value of open source

  One question I get often is: “How can I build a business around something I’m giving away for free?” So, I wanted to attend the panel at SxSW this year called Don’t open source like a n00b, focused on how to make a project or product open source. We’ve seen many projects successfully do open source—like Linux, WordPress, and Koha—but how does a company like Booz Allen Hamilton jump from being a proprietary company to open sourcing their first product?

  Project Jellyfish was developed here in Austin by Booz Allen Hamilton; it’s software that can be described as a cloud brokering solution. The team there realized that many vendors are open sourcing their applications and that a lot of the new, cool stuff is being developed in the open. So, they made the decision to make Project Jellyfish open source, hoping their developers would more interested in participating. But, they still had to convince their partners to spend money to develop something they were going to give away for free.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Partially switching to Chromium

    There are some sites that even with an empty profile and a vanilla Firefox build right from Mozilla Foundation cause Firefox to generate a very heavy CPU load. I briefly reported this via Twitter to one (but not the only!) of the sites in question and to Firefox Site Compatibility.

  • Google is removing Chrome app launcher from Windows, Mac, and Linux

  • “Goodbye!” Google Chrome App Launcher will Discontinue from Windows, Mac and Linux OS!

  • Chrome app launcher disappearing from everywhere except on Chromebooks

• Mozilla

  • Co-Chairing the US Commerce Department’s Digital Economy Advisory Board

    The U.S. Department of Commerce has just created a Board of Advisors for topics related to the Digital Economy. I will participate as one of the two co-chairs, along with Zoë Baird, President and CEO of the Markle Foundation. The Digital Economy Board of Advisors is to provide regular advice to the Secretary of Commerce from leaders in industry, academia, and civil society on the Department’s new Digital Economy Agenda. The Agenda is focused on advancing the Internet and the digital economy across many frontiers, including promoting innovation, a free and open Internet, trust online, and Internet access for all Americans.

Databases

• Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2016-W12

• SQLite Release 3.12.0 On 2016-03-29

• SQLite 3.12 Brings More Performance Improvements

  SQLite 3.12 increases the default page size from 1024 to 4096, adds a number of other performance enhancements, offers new compile-time options, and has an assortment of different bug fixes.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Happy Document Freedom Day

  Today is Document Freedom Day. As in the past 8 years we celebrate DFD on the last Wednesday of March all around the world. While the date is recommended this year DFD is being celebrated from March 16th to April 5th so far (we’ re still getting new registration as of this writing) .

• Celebrate Document Freedom Day on March 30

  The FSFE has handed over Document Freedom Day to us earlier this year and while it took us a bit of time to get familiar with the way the current DFD website handles the events registration we have been steadily gathering more and more locations all over the world. So Document Freedom Day is happening on the last Wednesday of March, which is March 30th this year and Latin America seems very active in promoting Open Standards. We are very happy to meet new people thanks to the effort and will also celebrate our local DFD in Phnom Penh but slightly later on April 5th. If you are in the area please drop by, and if not please check the Document Freedom Day website for an event in your area. Happy DFD!

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• BlazeMeter Extends Capabilities in Open Source Performance Testing

• LinkedIn’s newest open-source tool will crash your application to test its resilience

BSD

• OpenBSD 5.9 released (early!)

  The release of OpenBSD 5.9, previously scheduled for the usual May 1st, has just been officially announced!

• OpenBSD 5.9 Released

• OpenBSD 5.9 Officially Released

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GnuCash 2.6.12 released

  The GnuCash development team announces GnuCash 2.6.12, the twelfth maintenance release in the 2.6-stable series. Please take the tour of all the new features.

• GNU Guix & GuixSD 0.10.0 released

  We are pleased to announce the new beta release of GNU Guix and GuixSD, version 0.10.0!

  The release comes with USB installation images to install the standalone GuixSD, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of a running GNU/Linux system, either from source or from binaries.

• MediaGoblin 0.9.0 “The Three Goblineers” Free Media Server Is Embracing Python 3

• MediaGoblin 0.9.0: The Three Goblineers

  This release is called The Three Goblineers, because we are finally fully embracing Python 3! You could even think of this release as Py-oneering, which it definitely is. Many traditional web service tools are less-than-ideal for federation and so we’ve had to do a lot of rebuilding and retooling. This release represents lots of intense behind the scenes work to make the user experience smoother, as well as some key improvements for MediaGoblin developers and deployers.

• GnuCash 2.6.12 Free Accounting Software Released, Various Memory Leaks Fixed

Public Services/Government

• MIT Media Lab makes open source the default

  MIT Media Lab has declared open source to be the preferred software licensing model for its projects. According to Joichi Ito, Director of the renowned interdisciplinary research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the academic institution can achieve greater impact by sharing its work.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Open gardening tools for growing green thumbs and a healthier planet

• Foundation takes quality education to rural schools with open source tech hubs

  The Good Work Foundation is on a mission to challenge education and the inequality between rural and urban schools.

  By using digital technology, the foundation’s Kate Groch says she wants to prove to young people that they do not have to move to big cities to access quality education.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • 3D printed ‘SelfieBot’ goes open source to encourage student robotics

Programming/Development

• Modern iOS, OSx Programming Language is Open Source and Available for Linux – Toledo Tech Day

Standards/Consortia

• Paper Competition Announced for U.S. Celebration of World Standards Day 2016

  World Standards Day is celebrated annually around the world to increase awareness of the role that standards play in the global economy. To help celebrate the importance of standards, SES – The Society for Standards Professionals and the U.S. Celebration of World Standards Day Planning Committee co-sponsor an annual paper competition for individuals in the U.S. standards community. The 2016 paper competition winners will be announced and given their awards at the U.S. Celebration of World Standards Day, which will be held this year on October 27, 2016, at the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Ads on news sites gobble up as much as 79% of users’ mobile data

One of the reasons consumers download mobile ad blockers is the impact ads have on their data plans.

It’s the principle reason that carriers like Three in Italy and the UK, and Digicel in the Caribbean, announced plans to roll out network-level mobile ad blocking for their customers. Shine, the company that provides that ad blocking technology, claims mobile ads use 10-50% of user’s data plans.

Why Are People Using Ad Blockers? Ads Can Eat Up To 79% Of Mobile Data Allotments

By now, usage caps on both fixed and wireless networks have grown increasingly common. And while broadband carriers are endlessly looking toward caps and zero rating for a competitive and financial advantage, overlooked is the fact that a huge amount of a user’s monthly bandwidth allotment is now being eroded by good old advertising. How much? According to a new study by Enders Analysis, anywhere from 18% to 79% of your monthly data bucket can go toward delivering advertising. Previous studies had pegged this between 10% and 50%.

Health/Nutrition

• ‘War on Drugs’ has made no difference to number of users and actively harms public health, major study concludes

  The five-decade long international “War on Drugs” started by US president Richard Nixon has harmed the public health and should be scrapped in favour of a process of decriminalisation, a major new report has concluded.

  Anti-drug policies and laws have had “no measurable impact on supply or use” and cannot be justified on scientific or public health grounds, according to the authors of study commissioned by the Johns Hopkins Ivy League university and The Lancet.

  The report presents “compelling evidence” that countries such as Portugal and the Czech Republic have decriminalised non-violent minor drug offences with positive results, including “public health benefits, cost savings, lower incarceration [rates] and no significant increase in problematic drug use”.

Security

• Linux Security Summit 2016 – CFP Announced!

  The 2016 Linux Security Summit (LSS) will be held in Toronto, Canada, on 25th and 26th, co-located with LinuxCon North America. See the full announcement.

• Tuesday’s security updates

• Your computerdump sister also can hack Linux – Orange Tekno Time

  A newly discovered vulnerability makes it incredibly easy to break into a large pool of Linux-based computers. A security hole found in Grub2, a widely-used bootloader in many Linux distributions including Ubuntu and Red Hat, allows a user to login to a computer by pressing the backspace key 28 times. Various Linux distributions have released a patch for the vulnerability.

• New DDoS Defense Turns Servers Into ‘Moving Targets’

  The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is the classic cheap hack. It requires virtually nothing of those who wield it beyond the ability to download something from the internet, yet a DDoS offers unusually public consequences (most real security breaches happen in the dark). It is also difficult to defend against, in some part because it doesn’t involve actually breaching a network at all—just flooding it with more innocuous-seeming traffic than it can handle.

• Google Offers Rare Glimpse at Its Data Center Security Measures

  Laser beam intrusion detection systems, iris scanners and customized access cards are just some of the controls that Google uses to protect its data centers.

  A laser beam intrusion detection system, customized electronic access cards and biometric iris scans are just some of the multilevel security measures that Google has implemented to control access to its data centers.

• Ransomware is scary, but not for the reasons you think it is

  If we keep thinking about this and bring the ransomware to its logical conclusion, the future versions are going to request a constant ongoing payment. Not a one time get out of jail free event. Why charge them once when you can charge them over and over again? Most modern infrastructures are complex enough it will be hard to impossible to remove an extremely clever bit of malware. It’s going to be time for the good guys to step it up here, more thoughts on that some other day though.

  There is even a silly angle that’s fun to ponder. We could imagine ransomware that attacks other known malware. If the ransomware is getting a constant ongoing payment, it would be bad if anything else could remove it, from legitimate software to other ransomware. While I don’t think antivirus and ransomware will ever converge on the same point, it’s still fun to think about.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Is Obama serious about declassifying ‘dirty war’ docs?

  Visiting Argentina on the 40th anniversary of the March 24, 1976, military coup that marked the beginning of that period was a political gamble—much less perhaps than his journey to the Castros’ Havana—but a gamble nonetheless.

• A look back on Argentina’s dirty war

• ‘Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ survivors deserve access to Vatican archives

• Compare And Contrast: Treatment Of Thomas Drake & Hillary Clinton For Having Classified Info

  The Washington Post has a big story delving deep into how the Hillary Clinton email scandal happened, noting that Clinton just didn’t want to give up her BlackBerry, even as the NSA told her repeatedly that it wasn’t secure and there were serious risks involved. What’s amazing, from the story, is how much everyone was focused on the BlackBerry side of things, and sort of skipped over the fact that she was using a private email account with the server set up in her basement. The WaPo article notes that for the first few months in her job as Secretary of State, the email server didn’t even have basic encryption tools enabled. All of that is a travesty, and you should read the whole article to understand the issue more, but I wanted to focus in on a related issue: the high court/low court treatment of Hillary Clinton as compared to others. In particular, the situation with Thomas Drake, the NSA whistleblower.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Burning Issues: Two New Books from NUS Press Look At the Reasons Behind Region’s Haze Crisis

  Why can this problem not be solved? What are the forces at work that make it so difficult to prevent damaging fires and further devastation of the landscape? Two new books from NUS Press bring fresh perspectives, much-needed clarity and important baseline data to these questions. The drivers of the region’s haze crisis can be found in the environmental and social context of Indonesia’s vulnerable peatlands, and in the political economy of agriculture and agribusiness in Indonesia and Malaysia.

• Greenpeace Does What Government Hasn’t: Releases Map of Indonesia Forest Concessions

  One of the biggest challenges when trying to determine who was responsible for last year’s devastating fires in Indonesia was the lack of reliable information on concessions – namely, who, or what entity, was responsible for the land that burned. Greenpeace has done its best to fill this gap with a just-released land use map that is, by far, the best of its kind.

  The map was no easy effort, with Greenpeace Indonesia staff digitizing paper maps and PDF files that they collected from numerous companies. They also made the data easy to use — using the World Resources Institutes’s open-source Global Forest Watch tool to turn it into a user-friendly website entitled Kepo Hutan, or “Curious about Forests.”

• Australia’s Great Barrier Reef hit by ‘worst’ bleaching

  Evidence that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is experiencing its worst coral bleaching on record has renewed calls for the UN to list it as “in-danger”.

  The National Coral Bleaching Taskforce says 95% of reefs from Cairns to Papua New Guinea are now severely bleached.

  It says only four reefs out of 520 have no evidence of bleaching.

  Unesco voted not to put the reef on its World Heritage in Danger list last year, but green groups want the decision reassessed.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Journalism’s Dark Matter

  Many, many more of 2015’s anonymous-source front-page stories were not like the above, however. For every confidential whistleblower quoted, there were dozens more unnamed “American officials” to be found; time and again, the powerful enjoyed the privilege of anonymity orders of magnitude more often than the powerless. All too often, the Times front page resembled a journalistic dumping ground for anonymous source-driven ego scoops, trial balloons, buck-passing and what University of London professor and media critic Aeron Davis calls “inter-elite communication.”

  Moving beyond this first orbit, there was an even larger ring in the anonymous-source solar system, which consisted of stories reported and written by wire services but published by the Times. (A majority of these were breaking news stories posted only on the Times website.) Last year, the combined total of these Associated Press, Reuters and other wire service stories came to more than 3,800. Combined with the total of Times-authored articles, the full-year figure of anonymity rises to more than 5,300 print or online articles—or nearly 15 anonymous-source stories every day.

  Though these stories aren’t written by Times staff, the paper still exercises judgment over whether or not to run them and, thus, owns some culpability over their pervasive presence. Still, I deemed it unfair to hold the paper responsible for any systemic sourcing problems therein, since the Times cannot exert editorial control of how AP articles are reported and edited. As such, I omitted these wire stories from my deeper source analysis below.

• Stop trying to make Bernie disappear: While the establishment pretends nothing has changed, Sanders continues to win big

  A specter appears to be haunting American liberalism — the specter of democratic socialism. As Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) continues to pick up surprising victories across the country, decisively winning Washington state, Alaska, and Hawaii over the weekend, it is becoming clear that his brand of democratic socialism (what some might simply call social democracy) is not a passing fad, but the future of Democratic party politics. While he may not win the 2016 nomination, he is winning the hearts and minds of Democratic voters and Independents. And with his growing popularity, particularly among millennial voters, it has not been surprising to see some liberals dusting off red-scare tactics from the ash heap of history.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Iran’s ‘National Internet’ Offers Connectivity at the Cost of Censorship

  Iran’s plan to isolate and monitor all internet services within the country will place huge limitations on Iranians’ ability to safely express themselves online, according to a report published today by freedom of expression campaign group Article 19.

  The report, Tightening the Net: Internet Security and Censorship in Iran, outlines the wide-ranging and often contradictory objectives of the National Internet Project, which was first announced ten years ago under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and now scheduled for completion in 2019.

• How The NSA Revelations Made Surveillance Worse For Minorities

• New Study Finds That Mass Surveillance Stifles Dissenting Opinions

• Government surveillance stops people sharing controversial opinions online, study suggests

• Argentine warm-up: Obama and Macri set a course for better relations

• Argentina cuts ties with leftist Telesur TV network citing lack of pluralism

  Argentina’s pro-business government is pulling the plug on its involvement in the Spanish-language TV network that was started by the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, saying the broadcaster blocks alternative viewpoints.

• ALBA Movements Condemn Macri Government’s Censorship of teleSUR

• Venezuela: Argentina can’t “disappear” leftist TV network

• Argentina pulling out of Venezuela’s sponsored Telesur TV network

• ALBA Movements Condemn Macri Government’s Censorship of teleSUR

  Social movements aligned with the regional Latin American and Caribbean integration body ALBA has rejected Argentine President Mauricio Macri’s efforts to cut ties with teleSUR and effectively remove the station from the air, criticizing the move as politically motivated censorship of the outlet founded by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

• Argentina to Drop Funding for TeleSUR TV Network

• teleSUR President: Journalists Choose Content, Not Governments

• Argentina to sell stake in Telesur news channel

• Lombardi justifies exit from Telesur

• Argentina pulls plug on TV network Telesur

• Argentina abandons Telesur

• Pluralism on the line

• Cuban Internet Censorship is a Good Thing, According to The Nation

  What’s worse than living under a repressive regime that tightly controls your ability to engage the rest of the world, censors anything remotely critical of the government, and only doles out broadband internet access to privileged individuals?

  Why, Google, of course.

  That’s the basic thesis of a recent article in The Nation, written by Sujatha Fernandes, a professor of sociology at Queens College and the City University of New York (CUNY).

• Humiliation for the Met Police as the CPS tells them they had NO right to charge talent agency boss with inciting racial hatred over Brussels tweet and he will NOT now appear in court today

  Charges against a talent agency boss accused of inciting racial hatred on Twitter have been dropped, in a U-turn by the authorities.

  Police charged private schoolboy Matthew Doyle, 46, with a public order offence on Friday after he tweeted about confronting a Muslim woman and asking her to ‘explain Brussels’.

• Turkish Government Summons German Ambassador Because Of A Silly Satirical Video… That’s Now Getting More Attention

  We’ve written a few times about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who appears to have one of the thinnest skins of any national leader anywhere. He’s been filing an average of over 100 lawsuits a month over “insults” to himself. And the latest is that the Turkish Foreign Ministry summoned the German Ambassador Martin Erdmann to explain why a German television station, NDR, broadcast a silly satirical video (gently) mocking Erdogan.

• KPI proposes censorship of TV programs

  In light of numerous warning letters sent to national television stations, which it says have fallen on deaf ears, the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPI) has requested that the House of Representatives amend the Broadcasting Law to give the body authority to closely monitor TV programs.

  KPI commissioner Amiruddin said the KPI wanted the authority to oversee the content of all television programs, including the power to censor content before it was aired.

  “House Commission I has given us the space to provide input to them regarding KPI’s authority. What we have proposed has been received and is now being discussed,” Amiruddin said, adding that the House of Representatives was enthusiastic about strengthening the KPI.

• Surprise: Court Allows Lindsay Lohan’s Suit Against Take-Two Interactive To Go Forward

  Somehow and for some reason, the head-scratching lawsuit between actress Lindsay Lohan and Take-Two Interactive continues to move forward. If you’ll recall, in 2013 Lohan began asking her lawyers about suing Take-Two over what she claimed wrongly was a direct depiction of herself in the game Grand Theft Auto 5. The character in question is clearly a composite parody of all kinds of Hollywood starlets, in part composed of references to Lohan’s antics, and in part composed of references to other starlets’ antics. Which is ultimately entirely besides the point, because the depiction is parody in nature and that really should have been the end of all of this. Except Lohan’s legal team moved forward with the suit, and even amended it to include as much paperwork as possible, all while asserting that her legal claims could get around the statute of limitations on bringing the suit because Take-Two had manipulated the cover image for the game, which featured a bikini-clad girl Lohan also claims is a depiction of herself, in order to fit it on the DVD the game was shipped with.

• ‘Seek McCartney’ jumps past strict censorship to become first gay love film to hit China’s big screen

• How Google Broke Through China’s Great Firewall, But Only For 105 Minutes

• In a move to expand control, China tightens internet laws further enhancing censorship

• China Proposes New Web Rules That Could Enhance Censorship

  China is consolidating its ability to censor the Internet by drafting new rules requiring businesses that serve domestic Internet users to register their Web addresses inside the country, a move seen as targeting Chinese companies but that has raised concerns among foreign businesses.

• ‘This is a serious escalation’: China mulls tightening control over internet websites, popular .com addresses may be banned

• China proposes tighter restrictions on foreign websites

• New regulations could further close China’s Internet

• China’s latest proposed internet regulations would make foreign websites impossible to reach

• China Seeks More Legal Muscle to Block Foreign Websites

• China Previews Murky Web Domain Rules

• China flexes legal muscle to block foreign websites

• Why China banned Winnie the Pooh and why it matters

• China’s Draft Rule Targets Domain Name Supervision, Could Limit Access to Foreign Sites

• Did the Other Shoe Just Drop On The Chinese Domain Market?

• China proposes foreign domain name censorship

• Beijing Seeks to Tighten Reins on Websites in China

• Pending Chinese law might turn the country’s internet into an intranet

• Draft rule targets domain name supervision

• Russia Plans to Fine Websites for ‘Propaganda’ of Circumvention Tools

Privacy/Surveillance

• FBI To Court: “No, We Won’t Reveal How We Hacked 1000+ TOR Users”

  FBI is pushing back against the order of a judge on revealing the technique it used to catch the defendant in a case of a dark web child pornography. The judge had ordered the FBI to reveal the full malware code used to hack visitors of a dark web child pornography site.

• The DOJ Is Still Pursuing Apple Over an iPhone in New York

  The Department of Justice pulled out of its fight with Apple over dead terrorism suspect Syed Farook’s iPhone 5c yesterday, saying it had figured out how to crack into the phone and no longer needed Apple’s help. But as of Tuesday, the government is still pursuing a similar case in New York—a case where known exploits already exist for the iPhone model in question.

  It’s a bizarre move to continue to pursue the New York case after retreating in the San Bernardino case. In the San Bernardino case, the government repeatedly argued that only Apple was capable of bypassing its own iPhone security.

• Germany unveils security needs for cloud services

  Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (‘Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik’, BSI) has published a list of security requirements for cloud services. The catalogue is aimed at providers of cloud services and their clients. Use of the list is not mandatory.

  “Particular attention is paid to the transparency of cloud service provision”, the BSI said in a statement. The list helps users understand the location of data, jurisdiction and place of litigation and legal requirements for disclosure to authorities.

• Popular Chinese Browser Transmits User Info With Terrible Encryption

  All web browsers have vulnerabilities, but one piece of Chinese software might be eligible for the title of most insecure browser ever.

  Likely unbeknown to its users, QQ Browser has been transmitting identifying information—including web histories, search queries, and nearby WiFi networks—with poorly implemented or no cryptographic protection.

• FBI hack may raise questions about iPhone security

  The FBI hack of an iPhone 5c running iOS 9 may have left the device just a little bit insecure in the eyes of some users, as the agency has not provided details of how it was able to access data on the phone used by the San Bernardino terrorist.

• FBI unlocks seized iPhone without Apple’s help, ends legal case

• If FBI Can Get Into A Device Running iOS 9, Why Does It Say It Still Needs Apple’s Help To Get Into One Running iOS 7?

  The questions raised by the DOJ announcing that it was, in fact, able to get in to Syed Farook’s work iPhone continue to grow. The latest is that, if it could get into that phone, running the fairly secure iOS 9, why is it still fighting the case in NY where it’s trying to get into a drug dealer’s phone running iOS 7? As you may recall, the case in NY has been going on for longer than the San Bernardino one. It started back in October when the DOJ demanded Apple’s help in getting into the iPhone of Jun Feng (a drug dealer who admitted guilt, but who claims he forgot the passcode) and magistrate judge James Orenstein stepped in to ask Apple if this was a reasonable request.

• Spy chiefs tell US lawmakers plan to share raw data protects privacy

• Spy chiefs propose a ‘lawful’ plan to let NSA share raw intelligence data

• Spy agencies’ paralysis lets terrorists slip net

• Spy chiefs tell U.S. lawmakers plan to share raw data protects privacy

• Statement by the President on the Resignation of David Medine

• Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board Chair Resigning

• Top Privacy Watchdog Suddenly Resigns

• Intel privacy board chief resigns

• Head of US’ Top Privacy Watchdog Group Resigns

• NSA watchdog stepping down from federal civil liberties board

• White House: Surveillance, civil liberties chief resigns

• Privacy watchdog chairman resigns two years before end of term

  The first-ever head of a small federal privacy watchdog is resigning this summer, a year and a half before his term ends in 2018.

  The surprise announcement from David Medine, chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), will leave a hole at the top of the five-member board, which has been instrumental to shining a light on the National Security Agency (NSA).

  In a statement, President Obama said that Medine’s tenure took place “during an especially momentous period, coinciding with a concerted examination of our national security tools and policies to ensure they are consistent with my administration’s commitment to civil liberties and individual privacy.

  “Under David’s leadership, the PCLOB’s thoughtful analysis and considered input has consistently informed my decision-making and that of my team, and our country is better off because of it,” Obama added.

• Dark Web’s Got a Bad Rep: 7 in 10 People Want It Shut Down, Study Shows

  Speculation—no matter how baseless—that online black markets for weapons helped make the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels possible hasn’t helped the reputation of the dark web’s anonymous corner of the internet. But one new study shows that even before that dubious link between online anonymity and terror attacks, global opinion on the dark web was already overwhelmingly negative.

• DOJ Says That The Crack Of Syed Farook’s iPhone Only Applies To That Model Of iPhone

  Perhaps the CNN reporter who wrote this really meant “this particular type of phone,” in which case the statement would be only marginally more believable, but the idea that it only applies to “this particular phone” makes absolutely no sense, and suggests the DOJ is flat out lying again. The only way in that works with just this phone would be magically finding Farook’s passcode (perhaps he left a post-it somewhere?). But if that was the case, the DOJ wouldn’t have asked for two weeks to “test” the method (even if they only took one week). Finding the passcode and testing it doesn’t take that long. Update: A DOJ spokesperson says that CNN got the quote wrong and that the actual statement was that the crack only applied to iPhone 5C devices.

• Steven Levy talks encryption: I once went to the NSA

Civil Rights/Policing

• Brussels attacks: ‘Fight the westerners’ text sent to youths in Molenbeek

  Young men in the Molenbeek district of Brussels were sent messages over the weekend calling on them to “make the right choice” and “fight the westerners”.

  The texts were sent on Sunday night from a prepaid account that could not be traced or replied to. It followed a video distributed on Facebook, since removed, apparently showing local youths celebrating the attacks in Brussels last week. The death toll from the bombings has risen to 35, Belgium’s health minister said on Monday.

• Swedish wartime diplomat Wallenberg to be declared dead

  Some 70 years after the disappearance of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved the lives of thousands of Jews in World War II, an application has been filed to formally declare him dead, the daily Svenska Dagbladet reported Tuesday.

  The application to the Tax Authority was made by his trustees, so his estate can be wound up, and is expected to be completed in the autumn, according to the report.

  Wallenberg, who was born in 1912, is credited with helping thousands of Jews escape Nazi death camps in World War II while serving in Hungary.

  He arrived in Budapest in July 1944 to work at the Swedish legation, although his work was mainly funded by the War Refugee Board, set up by the United States.

  Wallenberg adopted unconventional methods to carry out his brief, at times offering bribes to rescue Hungarian Jews who risked deportation. At times, he issued special passports.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Cable Industry Wants Netflix Investigated… For Throttling Itself

  Netflix’s criticism of usage caps and vocal support of net neutrality (not to mention its threat as a pay TV competitor) has helped it replace Google as public enemy number one for the telecom industry. As such, every PR, lobbying, and political asset at the telecom industry’s disposal has taken aim at the streaming giant over the last few years, accusing the company of being a dirty freeloader and horrible hypocrite that’s unfairly lobbying the government to attack poor, honest, hardworking companies like AT&T and Comcast.

• Yankees, Comcast Engage In Public Pissing Match Because They’re Incapable Of Adult Negotiations

  For many years now we’ve seen a dramatic spike in programming contract disputes between broadcasters and cable operators, usually resulting in consumers losing access to TV content they’re paying for. These feuds usually begin simply enough; with a broadcaster asking for a programming rate hike cable operators don’t want to pay for. But instead of sitting down and hashing out a new deal that satisfies both parties like grown ups often do, the companies take their feud into the public sphere, punishing paying customers in the process.

• Cable group: Net neutrality rules for Netflix! (But not for us)

  Since Netflix’s admission last week that it throttles video on most mobile networks to help customers avoid data cap overage charges, Internet service providers and anti-net neutrality think tanks have been blasting the online video provider. Netflix is a hypocrite because it throttles its own video streams even as it supports net neutrality rules that prevent ISPs from throttling traffic that passes over their networks, they claim. Even AT&T, which has throttled its own unlimited data users for years and tried to avoid any punishment for doing so, said it is “outraged” by Netflix’s actions.

• Inside Netflix: How Reed Hastings is building the first global TV network

  THE lobby of the sprawling, low-roofed Netflix headquarters in a sleepy town in California is dominated by a huge television screen, a popcorn cart and a series of glass display cabinets. They hold 13 golden Emmy Awards that Netflix has won for its stellar original series, including Orange is the New Black and House of Cards.

DRM

• Interoperability and the W3C: Defending the Future from the Present

  Imagine a new, disruptive company figured out a way to let hundreds of people watch a single purchased copy of a movie, even though the rightsholders who made that movie objected. The new company charged money for this service, and gave none of it back to the movie’s creators. That’s exactly the business model that a controversial project at the Web’s premier open standards organization seeks to prevent.

• Security researchers: help EFF keep the Web safe for browser research!

  With the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I’ve been lobbying the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which sets the open standards that the Web runs on, to take measures to protect security researchers (and the users they help) from their own bad decision to standarize Digital Rights Management as part of HTML5.

  The W3C decided to incorporate DRM into HTML5 despite the calls from public interest groups, free software developers, security researchers and others. Now, we’re trying to get them to take the minimum steps necessary to prevent the worst harms from DRM.

Intellectual Monopolies