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● 03.02.17

● Links 2/3/2017: Systemd 233, GNOME 3.24 Beta 2

Posted in News Roundup at 1:28 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

=> ↺ Adapt or Die: The New Pattern of Software Delivery

• In recent years, however, we’ve seen an explosion of new developments in software; each intended to achieve the above-stated goal. The current nexus of software development, also referred to as ‘Cloud Native Computing’ does just that and lies at the intersection of containers, microservices, Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery/Deployment and the modern cloud.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ systemd 233

• Finally, here’s systemd 233. Tons of new features, even more bugfixes. Enjoy!

=> ↺ Systemd 233 Released

• Lennart Poettering has announced the release of systemd 233.

=> ↺ systemd 233 Released with Python 3 Support, over 70 Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Lennart Poettering is announcing today, March 1, 2017, the general availability of the systemd 233 init system for Linux-based operating systems that have adopted the open-source technology.

• systemd 233 comes four months after the release of the previous version, namely systemd 232, and it’s a major update that adds over 70 improvements and bug fixes, as well as some new features. First of, it looks like all the Python scripts that ship with systemd now require Python 3 to be installed on your GNU/Linux distribution.

=> ↺ Linux and Open Source Lead New Era of Software Development

• With the rapid growth of virtualized infrastructure and containerization, open source software and especially Linux are leading the way into a new era of software development. That was the message Al Gillen, vice president of the software and open source group at IDC, told the crowd at the Open Source Leadership Summit in Lake Tahoe in February. In his talk, Gillen charted the growth of Linux and other open source initiatives from 2001 to the present. The picture his data painted was a positive one for the open source community.

• “The future is all about open source, and we see very much open source becoming the standardization layer that enables everything else we do in the industry,” Gillen said.

=> ↺ Genode 17.02 uses Linux TCP/IP stack as file system

• The just released version 17.02 of the Genode OS framework comes with greatly enhanced virtual file-system capabilities, eases the creation of dynamic system compositions, and adds a new facility for processing user input. Furthermore, the components have become binary-compatible across kernel boundaries by default such that entire system scenarios can be moved from one kernel to another without recompiling the components.

• Genode’s virtual file-system (VFS) infrastructure has a twisted history. Originally created as a necessity for enabling command-line-based GNU programs to run within Genode’s custom Unix runtime, the VFS was later extracted as a separate library. This library eventually became an optional and later intrinsic part of Genode’s C runtime. It also happened to become the basis of a file-system-server component. If this sounds a bit confusing, it probably is. But the resulting design takes the notion of virtual file systems to an new level.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Vulkan Descriptor Update Extensions Wired Up For Intel’s ANV Driver

=> ↺ Khronos working on an ’3D Portability Initiative’ to enable portable development across Vulkan, DX12 and Metal

• The Khronos Group have announced a ’3D Portability Initiative’ to enable 3D applications that are portable across Vulkan, DX12 and Metal.

=> ↺ Mesa 17.0.1 Promises More Gallium and RadeonSI Improvements, First RC Out Now

• Collabora’s Emil Velikov announced today the immediate availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) development version of the upcoming Mesa 17.0.1 3D Graphics Library, which will be the first point release to the Mesa 17.0 series.

• Mesa 17.0.1 promises to be a hefty maintenance update that addresses approximately 70 issues discovered since last month’s release of Mesa 17.0.0. Fixes have been implemented across all of the supported open-source drivers, including but not limited to RadeonSI, Gallium, Intel i965, Nouveau, Radeon RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan ones.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Linux Benchmarks

• The day many of you have been waiting for is finally here: AMD Zen (Ryzen) processors are shipping! Thanks to AMD coming around at the last minute, I received a Ryzen 7 1800X yesterday evening and have been putting it through its paces. Here is my walkthrough of the Linux experience for the AMD Ryzen and new motherboard and a number of the initial Linux benchmarks for this high-end Zen CPU while much more coverage is coming in the hours and days ahead.

Applications

=> ↺ GNU ddrescue – The Best Damaged Drive Rescue

• When you rescue your data from a dying hard drive, time is of the essence. The longer it takes to copy your data, the more you risk losing. GNU ddrescue is the premium tool for copying dying hard drives, and any block device such as CDs, DVDs, USB sticks, Compact Flash, SD cards — anything that is recognized by your Linux system as /dev/foo. You can even copy Windows and Mac OS X storage devices because GNU ddrescue operates at the block level, rather than the filesystem level, so it doesn’t matter what filesystem is on the device.

=> ↺ Kdenlive and Audacity… A Powerful Combo for Education

• It was time to give the platform a try. After all, the university is also advocating the use of FLOSS, so…

Proprietary

=> ↺ LCPSoft Released a Cross-Platform Auditing Tool for Linux Passwords

• LCPSoft has announced the release of a new product: JRecoverer for Linux Passwords 1.1.0. The program imports hashes of user passwords of various Linux distributors from a shadow file from a local computer or a remote computer using an SSH protocol, restoring original passwords using one of three methods.

• The cornerstone of system security and user data protection is password security. In the Linux operating system, user passwords are stored not in an open format, but as hashes. If a user only knows the hash, he cannot restore the original password. It can, however, be matched, although this recovery method takes significantly longer.

=> ↺ Skype 5.0 for Linux Enters Beta with Video Call Support and Better Collaboration

=> ↺ Trojan horses

• Microsoft announced that Skype 5.0 for Linux has entered Beta stages of development after being in Alpha for more than eight months, during which it received numerous builds that users were able to take for a test drive.

• As you can see, not only that status of the application was changed from Alpha to Beta, which means that it should be more stable and reliable, but also the version number. Skype’s version scheme was bumped to build 5.0 from 1.x, showing Microsoft’s commitment to offer Linux users a modern VoIP client that’s feature rich and on par with the Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows builds.

=> ↺ Skype-on-Linux graduates from Alpha to Beta status

=> ↺ Skype’s Linux app graduates to beta with new features including cross-platform video chats, calls to mobile numbers

=> ↺ Microsoft releases Skype for Linux Beta version 5.0

=> ↺ Microsoft is binning its Skype WiFi hotspot service

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Mars Lander, Take II: Crashing onto the Surface

=> ↺ SiriKali – GUI Front End To Manage ecryptfs, cryfs, gocryptfs, securefs, and encfs Encrypted Folders

=> ↺ Most Useful Linux Command Line Tricks

=> ↺ Keeping Docker containers safe

• Few debate that the destiny of a hosting infrastructure is running applications across multiple containers. Containers are a genuinely fantastic, highly performant technology ideal for deploying software updates to applications. Whether you’re working in an enterprise with a number of critical microservices, tightly coupled with a pipeline that continuously deploys your latest software, or you’re running a single LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP) website that sometimes needs to scale up for busy periods, containers can provide with relative ease the software dependencies you need across all stages of your development life cycle.

=> ↺ How to Install Debian, Ubuntu, or Kali Linux on Your Chromebook

• At the same time, you can also access all the Linux utilities, whether it’s sshing into your server or using applications like GIMP and LibreOffice. To be honest, I do most of my consumer side work in Chrome OS; it has almost all commercial and popular apps and services. Whether I want to watch Netflix, HBO Now, Hulu, or Amazon Prime, I can do this on the same machine where I can also use core Linux utilities and manage my servers easily.

=> ↺ How Service Discovery Works in Containerized Applications Using Docker Swarm Mode

=> ↺ Get started podcasting and producing video on Linux

• Interested in producing your own podcast or video series entirely from a free software-fueled, Linux-powered computer? Here’s how I accomplish that task.

• Feel free to copy my exact setup for your own use. Or take some of my recommendations. Or ignore everything I say here and do things better than I do. Either way, hopefully this proves useful in your Linux-fueled media production endeavors.

=> ↺ Video: MontanaLinux CentOS 7 mini-XFCE LiveCD

• I have a very minimal LiveCD of CentOS 7.x that has XFCE from EPEL as default. How minimal? It is about 580MB and is installable if desired. Here’s a video showing it start in a KVM virtual machine.

=> ↺ An introduction to GNU Screen

=> ↺ Installing CentOS 7.2 on IBM Power System S822LC for high-performance computing (HPC) with a USB device

=> ↺ How to Switch Between Linux Distros Without Losing your Data

=> ↺ Setup Golang 1.8 and gb on Fedora (and other Linux distributions)

=> ↺ FLOSS Activities February 2017

=> ↺ Using the Mythic Beasts IPv4 -> IPv6 Proxy for Websites on a v6 only Pi and getting the right REMOTE_ADDR

=> ↺ Configure SSSD to work on IPv6-only Hosts

=> ↺ Ansible Inventories

=> ↺ Metaparameters in mgmt

=> ↺ Host-based simulation for embedded systems

=> ↺ Horrible configure script

=> ↺ A short history of password hashers

Games

=> ↺ Isabella Von Carstein and the host of Bretonnia arrive on the Linux version of Total War: Warhammer

• Feral Interactive have announced that not one but TWO new DLC packs are now available for Total War: Warhammer on Linux. These new DLCs provide players the opportunity to try out new armies, new Legendary Lords and new magical abilities. Watch the two trailers below to see what is coming to the old world…

=> ↺ Strap in: DiRT Rally has just been released on Linux

=> ↺ DiRT Rally Racing Game Is Out for Linux and SteamOS, Ported by Feral Interactive

• Feral Interactive, the UK-based games publisher know for porting AAA titles like Life Is Strange, Mad Max, Tomb Raider (2013), and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided to Linux and Mac platforms, just announce the availability of the DiRT Rally racing game for Linux.

• If you’ve been waiting to play the most acclaimed, thrilling and authentic rally racing simulation game developed and published by Codemasters on your Linux gaming rig, now you can. DiRT Rally is available for purchase on Steam for Linux, as well as on Valve’s SteamOS gaming platform for Steam Machines, or directly from Feral Interactive’s online store.

=> ↺ Stir up a storm in DiRT Rally for Linux

=> ↺ DiRT Rally races onto Linux, watch the new trailer here

=> ↺ Dirt Rally powerslides onto Linux

=> ↺ Start your engines as DiRT Rally is now on Linux, port report & review

• DiRT Rally [Steam, Feral Store] is one game a lot of Linux gamers have been looking forward to, so here’s my port report and review.

=> ↺ Open-Source Radeon Performance Is Very Good For DiRT Rally On Linux

• DiRT Rally is the latest game from Feral Interactive that has launch-day open-source AMD graphics support, a welcome improvement from the past. Thanks to the ever maturing state of the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and Feral’s increased Radeon testing, there is good out-of-the-box Radeon support for this AAA racing game on Linux.

=> ↺ Fourteen NVIDIA GeForce GPUs Tested With DiRT Rally On Linux

• Just weeks after bringing HITMAN to Linux, Feral Interactive this morning has released another high profile game ported from Windows: DiRT Rally. DiRT Rally is now available for Linux gamers interested in a fun racing game. I’ve been benchmarking their Linux port the past few days and have both Radeon Gallium3D benchmarks and NVIDIA results to share for launch-day. Here are fourteen NVIDIA GPUs tested with DiRT Rally on Ubuntu Linux.

=> ↺ The Talos Principle has another stable build with Vulkan improvements, much better than OpenGL

• Croteam have put out yet another stable build of The Talos Principle [Steam], which brings improvements for the Vulkan version. I did some fresh benchmarks and the different is quite amazing.

=> ↺ Torment: Tides of Numenera, early port report and thoughts

• …available with day-1 Linux support…

=> ↺ The Talos Principle Rolls Out More Vulkan Improvements

• Croteam has pushed yet more Vulkan improvements into The Talos Principle as they prepare to bring Vulkan and Linux support to their other titles this year.

=> ↺ Steam’s Latest Monthly Survey Puts Linux Gaming Marketshare At 0.75%

• Valve has put out their Steam survey results for February 2017 and show another drop in the estimated Linux gaming market-share.

• The Steam survey data for last month shows Linux use at a 0.05% drop over the month prior, or a total overall market-share of 0.75%.

=> ↺ The ‘System Shock’ remake has switched from Unity to Unreal Engine, Linux still aiming for day-1 release

• The ‘System Shock’ remake being done by Nightdive Studios has switched to Unreal Engine and they have said that Linux support ‘is not in question at all’. You can find the official announcement here.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE Plasma 5.9.3 Linux Desktop Environment Released, over 40 Recorded Bug Fixed

• The KDE project had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the third maintenance update to the recently released KDE Plasma 5.9 desktop environment stable series.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ GNOME Games 3.24

• GNOME 3.24 will be out in a few weeks and with it will come Games 3.24. This new version will offer a few new features and many refinements, some of which have been implemented by new contributors theawless and Radhika Dua, kudos to them!

=> ↺ GNOME ED update – Week 9

• As mentioned in my previous post, I’ll be posting regularly with an update on what I’ve been up to as the GNOME Executive Director, and highlighting some cool stuff around the project!

• [...]

• A fairly lengthy and wide-ranging interview with myself has been published at cio.com. It covers a bit of my background (although mistakenly says I worked for Collabora Productivity, rather than Collabora Limited!), and looks at a few different areas on where I see GNOME and how it sits within the greater GNU/Linux movement – I cover “some uncomfortable subjects around desktop Linux”. It’s well worth a read.

=> ↺ GTK+ 3.22.9 Released for GNOME 3.22 Users with HiDPI and Wayland Improvements

• The release cycle of the GTK+ 3.22 toolkit is nowhere near the end of life, and a new point release appeared on the official FTP servers of the GNOME Project, versioned 3.22.9.

• GTK+ 3.22.9 has been released at the end of February two weeks after the launch of the eighth maintenance update to the GTK+ 3.22 stable series, which is targeted to users of the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment. GTK+ 3.22.9 is a modest update that adds a bunch of bug fixes and improvements for Wayland support, as well as HiDPI.

=> ↺ GNOME 3.24′s Epiphany to Add New Search Engine Dialog, Improve Incognito Mode

• The GNOME developers are currently preparing to unleash the second and last Beta milestone for the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, due for release on March 22, 2017.

• Therefore, we can’t help but notice that many of the core components and applications from the GNOME 3.24 Stack have been updated lately, including the Epiphany web browser, which was bumped to version 3.23.91 (3.24 Beta 2).

• Quite a bunch of improvements and some new features have been added in this second Beta release of Epiphany 3.24, among which we can mention the implementation of a new search engine dialog, along with support for search engine bangs.

=> ↺ GNOME 3.24 Beta 2 Released, Prepping For This Month’s Launch

• GNOME 3.23.91 was released this morning by Matthias Clasen. With this GNOME 3.24 Beta 2 release there is an API/ABI freeze, feature freeze, UI freeze, and string freeze.

Distributions

New Releases

=> ↺ Linux Lite 3.4 Beta Is Based on Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS, Doesn’t Ship with Linux 4.8

• Linux Lite creator Jerry Bezencon announced the release and immediate availability for download of the first Beta release of the upcoming Linux Lite 3.4 open-source computer operating system.

=> ↺ Debian-Based Q4OS 1.8.3 “Orion” Distro Released with Update Manager Improvements

• Softpedia was informed today, March 1, 2017, by the Q4OS team about the general availability of the third maintenance update to the Q4OS 1.8 “Orion” stable operating system series.

Arch Family

=> ↺ Arch Linux 2017.03.01 Is Now Available for Download, Drops 32-Bit Support

• It’s the first day of March, which means that Arch Linux users can get their hands on a brand-new install medium of the well-known GNU/Linux distribution with all the latest software updates and security patches.

=> ↺ BlackArch Linux Now Offers More Than 1700 Ethical Hacking Tools, New ISO Is Out

=> ↺ BlackArch Linux 2017-03-01 Hacking Distro Released With 50 New Tools And Kernel 4.9.11

• Whenever we talk about Linux Kali alternatives, we often end up talking about Parrot OS. But, there’s another great option that’s based on Arch Linux. Yes, I’m talking about BlackArch Linux. I keep tracking its releases regularly, and today I’ll tell you about the freshly baked BlackArch Linux 2017-03-01.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

=> ↺ Tumbleweed Gets Kernel 4.10.1, Mesa 17, Python 3.6

• The joy and experimentation of Hack Week didn’t keep openSUSE Tumbleweed from continuing to roll.

• Since the last news article on Tumbleweed two weeks ago, there have been eight snapshots featuring new software packages.

• The most recent snapshot to land in the repositories was snapshot 20170228, which provided less than a handful of packages.

=> ↺ OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Now Running On Linux 4.10, Updated Flatpak & More

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Red Hat builds a tower to deliver DevOps at scale

• Red Hat has made available the latest version of its enterprise-grade, automation platform, Ansible Tower 3.1.

• The Ansible Tower platform enables enterprises to get through all complexities of modern IT environments with the use of powerful automation capabilities that can improve productivity and also reduce downtime.

Finance

=> ↺ Analyst Sentiment Outlines Long Term Upside for Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

=> ↺ Robert W. Baird Just Issued ” Neutral” Rating on Red Hat Inc (RHT)

=> ↺ Red Hat to Webcast Results for Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2017

=> ↺ The Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) Position Boosted by Champlain Investment Partners LLC

=> ↺ Hot Tech Stocks To Watch Right Now: Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), Juniper Networks, Inc. (JNPR)

Fedora

=> ↺ ZipArchive with encryption

=> ↺ PHP version 7.0.17RC1 and 7.1.3RC1

=> ↺ 2016 in review

• And this is also our approach for Flatpak which for us forms a crucial tandem with Wayland and the future of the Linux desktop. To ensure the project is managed in a way that is open and transparent to all and allows for different groups to adapt it to their specific usecases. And so far it is looking good, with early adoption and trials from the IVI community, traditional Linux distributions, device makers like Endless and platforms such as Steam. Each of these using the technologies or looking to use them in slightly different ways, but still all collaborating on pushing the shared technologies forward.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Prometheus in Jessie(bpo) and Stretch

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ Zorin Desktop Is a Crowd Pleaser

• I am impressed with the Zorin OS 12.1 release. Zorin OS is not the same old GNOME distro retread. It has a well integrated and tweaked user interface that justifies the developer’s moniker of “Zorin Desktop 2.”

• Zorin OS 12.1 is an ideal choice for large deployments in businesses, governments, schools and organizations. A key reason for its business and government suitability is the new release schedule. Major releases of Zorin OS happen only once every two years. Minor updates like version 12.1 come every few months as needed.

• Users will be spared major disruptions without feeling that their operating system is aging or abandoned. The result is an efficient and healthy balance.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ New Photos of the $89 Pinebook Linux Laptop Surface Online

• The $89 Pinebook ARM laptop was supposed to go on sale in February.

• Sadly, the month came and went without so much as a peep from Pine64, the company behind the Pinebook.

• But today we’ve some good news. The device hasn’t evaporated into the ether.

=> ↺ The Gemini is an Android-powered keyboard PDA, with Linux dual boot option

• If you miss the era of the keyboard personal digital assistant (PDA) – that is, that strange animal that is trapped in the middle of being a netbook and a smartphone – you might be one of a few. But then again, there was so much to the PDAs in that time – from your Nokia E90 Communicator, to the Dell Axim PDAs, and the HTC Wizard devices. So London-based Planet Computers is bringing the PDA back with the Gemini – an Android-powered PDA with a keyboard and network connectivity like a modern smartphone.

Phones

=> ↺ The Three Charts Requested by Fans: Made Free by Popular Demand from TomiAhonen Almanac 2017 Edition (Updated)

=> ↺ The sad truth about the excitement over the Nokia 3310

• Mobile World Congress – the showcase of the most cutting-edge technology on the planet – is in full swing in Barcelona this week. Phones, wearables and everything else with a microchip is showing off fantastic new features. But all anyone really seems interested in is a remake of a phone from 17 years ago, the Nokia 3310.

• There are a few ways to look at the Nokia 3310. It could just be a marketing ploy, or a Hollywood-esque remake because the industry has run out of ideas. Or maybe it’s trying to tap into the feeling that modern life is too connected, harking back to a simpler time. But whatever you think the Nokia 3310 is, it tells us something interesting about the state of the smartphone industry in 2017.

• “It’s an absolutely damning indictment of the state of the smartphone market that the world is so excited and obsessed with a retro feature phone that shipped 17 years ago,” said Ben Wood, chief of research at CCS Insight.

Tizen

=> ↺ Smartphone App: G Antivirus – Anti Malware and Data Security app is now available on Tizen Store

• All Tizen phones have only one antivirus security app which is made by Intel named McAfee Security. Kaspersky Lab, who has been a long time Tizen partner, announced their security solution for Tizen based IoT devices; but this is not a solution for smartphones.

• Today, an app developer Gagandeep Singh, has added a new antivirus security app named G Antivirus to the Tizen Store. As the name suggests the security app will scan your files for any potential virus.

=> ↺ Smartphone App: Wings for Twitter, a new twitter client released in Tizen Store

• Last month, a Twitter app client was added to the Tizen Store by KDF named ‘Client for Twitter’. Today, another Twitter client for Tizen smartphones has been added by app developer Kamil Nimisz, named Wings for Twitter. First impressions are that this is a good Twitter app for you to use on your Tizen smartphone. Very simple, easy to use, fast, secure, and synced across all devices etc. aNother great feature of this app is the ability to support multiple twitter accounts.

=> ↺ Smartphone App: Hound Player available in Tizen Store

• Samsung video player, VLC player and MX player (Using ACL Technology) are already 3 of the best video player apps available in the Tizen store as of today. Now, another developer has added a new video player app named Hound Player (previously doMovie) by Victor Sindee with lots of exciting features.

Android

=> ↺ OXI Android ROM tries to make phones double as desktops

• Last week Jide made an announcement that had a familiar message. Following the likes of Microsoft Continuum and Ubuntu Convergence, its Remix Singularity project wanted to turn the very same Android smartphone and apps that you keep in your pocket into the PC that you’ll use on your desktop. Jide is hardly the first nor the only one who has made such an attempt. At MWC 2017, French company Auxens has revealed an alpha version of its OXI ROM that does that as well, with a little less polish but a bit more device support.

=> ↺ Latest OxygenOS Open Betas Bring Android 7.1.1 to the OnePlus 3 & 3T

• OnePlus has been releasing updates for the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T quite often since their release, but if you want to get a taste of their latest offerings before the global OTA roll-out, then you can participate in the OxygenOS Open Beta program for your device. Now, OnePlus has announced that their latest Open Beta update built on Android 7.1.1 for the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T is rolling out.

=> ↺ Is It Still A Nokia If It Runs Google’s Android?

=> ↺ Nokia got better at Android phones, fast

• In case you forgot, Nokia’s new 6, 5 and 3 aren’t actually the company’s first Android devices. Many years ago, it made a mistake the Nokia X. It wasn’t really aimed at western markets and (if you ever got to play with one), it wasn’t really all that good. Fortunately, this second attempt demonstrates that the company’s far more serious with Android, with a classy Scandinavian design notes and an unobtrusive (and importantly up to date) mobile operating system. All the devices clock in at under $250, too, which means Nokia’s taking aim at the mid-range smartphone heartland. The company has learned fast.

=> ↺ Nokia 3310 Coming to India Before Android Phones; Online and Offline Models to Be Mutually Exclusive

=> ↺ Nokia’s comeback explained: Why the historic phone company is suddenly making Android phones

• After the iPhone and Android devices entered the smartphone scene, they changed the entire industry. The formerly-dominant companies in this space – RIM, Nokia, and Palm to name a few – couldn’t catch up fast enough. Nokia, which was the giant to beat at the time, quickly found itself bleeding and struggling to maintain its once dominant market share before Microsoft bought its mobile devices division.

• So why are we now seeing Nokia-branded phones in 2017, years after Nokia seemingly left the competitive smartphone marketplace? The answer lies in a somewhat-complicated history of poor choices, acquisitions, and licensing deals.

=> ↺ Android Enters Year 10 at Mobile World Congress

• Mobile World Congress is the world’s biggest cell phone trade show, and it’s Android phone makers’ biggest show as well. While Google has its own Google I/O conference, that’s typically where Google shows off Android software. You want hardware? You go to MWC.

• Android was first demoed at MWC ten shows ago, back in 2008. Let’s see how the now dominant mobile OS has changed as it enters its tenth year in Barcelona.

=> ↺ Study finds that iPhone performance is far less reliable than Android

=> ↺ Report: iPhones took a reliability hit compared to Android over the past year

=> ↺ Android Wear 2.0 Update Details Emerge Unique Paths To The Top In Tech: VMware’s Sanjay Poonen On Fortt Knox

=> ↺ Android 7.1.1 Nougat Open Beta update for OnePlus 3 and 3T now available

=> ↺ What you should and shouldn’t worry about in Android security

=> ↺ 132 Google Play apps tried to infect Android users with… Windows malware

=> ↺ Talking Android ransomware extorts victims

=> ↺ Japanese Android OBJECT project might soon be taking your life to the 22nd century

=> ↺ Google unveils playable ads for Android game developers and other tools

=> ↺ Asus ZenFone 3 Deluxe Starts Receiving Android 7.0 Nougat Update

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ 4 open source tools for sharing files

• There comes a time in your life when you have to share one or more files with someone, whether that someone is a friend, a family member, a colleague or collaborator, or a client. Many people stay true to their open source convictions by doing the job using applications like ownCloud, Nextcloud, or SparkleShare.

• All three are solid and flexible, but they’re not the only games in town. Maybe your needs lean towards a simpler application. Or maybe you just want a dedicated file sharing tool that puts the power and the data in your hands.

• You have a number of open source options which give you all of that and more. Let’s look at four additional open source tools that can meet all of your file sharing needs.

=> ↺ 3 projects successfully using mesh network technology

• Hyperboria is an end-to-end encrypted mesh network that uses IPv6. The focus of Hyperboria is to create a large-scale neutral network with a security as a first priority. The technology uses CJDNS (no relation to DNS) for Layer 3 routing and employs a novel public key cryptosystem to establish connections and encrypt traffic. Austin, Texas currently boasts the largest segment of Hyperboria with a network size of around 500 nodes. Unlike most traditional networks, and similar to Bitcoin, it uses a public key as an address that data can be sent to.

=> ↺ Open Source Boosts Innovation in Software, Hardware and Beyond

• Many think the development of technology is reserved only for the super-intelligent, and that the average person cannot comprehend it.

• This particular view of technology is a product of a closed-type environment, which hides key information related to the development of technology behind patents, copyrights and trademarks. While it’s debatable how intellectual property rights of inventors must be saved from abuse, traditional modes of doing so can block the flow of information in society.

• This model is primarily driven by commercial interests— where key technological inventions sell at very high prices. But this model increases the divide between the ‘privileged’ class and the ‘under-privileged’ class. The division of the world between developed, developing and under-developed nations is primarily based on the level of technology they possess. This leads to prohibitively expensive technology and an increasing technological divide— we are producing a generation of technology users instead of technology developers.

=> ↺ Cloud Native Computing Foundation Adds Google gRPC Project

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) which itself is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, is expanding its roster of supported projects today with the addition of the gRPC project.

• The gRPC project is an open source, high performance remote procedure call (RPC) framework originally developed by Google. The gRPC project has already been used outside of Google, with CoreOS and Netflix among the technology’s adopters.

=> ↺ EMC’s Joshua Bernstein on When to Deploy Open Source

• “A lot of people are a little shocked and confused to hear about how EMC is contributing to and supporting open source development,” Joshua Bernstein said to open his keynote address at last year’s MesosCon conference in Denver. “I think that while many of us already understand the benefit of that, convincing large companies to do this sort of thing is a challenge.”

• Berstein became Dell EMC’s vice president of technology in 2015, after a four year stint as manager of Siri development and architecture at Apple. At MesosCon, he talked about some of the things that DevOps should consider when deciding whether to deploy open source or proprietary solutions.

=> ↺ SDN, Blockchain and Beyond: The Spaces Where Open Source Is Thriving Today

=> ↺ Black Duck

• What are the newest frontiers that open source software is conquering? Black Duck’s latest open source “Rookies of the Year” report, which highlights areas like blockchain and SDN, provides some interesting insights.

• The report, which Black Duck published Monday, highlights what the company calls “the top new open source projects initiated in 2016.” It’s the ninth annual report of this type that Black Duck has issued.

Events

=> ↺ Embedded Linux Conference 2017 Videos Now Online

• If you are interested in embedded Linux development but missed out last week’s Linux Foundation event in Portland, the videos are now available online.

• Last week was the Linux Foundation’s annual Embedded Linux Conference with a wide-range of mobile and embedded talks. Details from the event are available here.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

=> ↺ An AI Hedge Fund Is Trying To Make Wall Street More Open Source

=> ↺ OnePoint Offers Open Source Access to Mobile Platform

• UK firm OnePoint Global is making the source code for its mobile survey platform available on a Software as a Service (SaaS) basis, allowing clients to build their own survey solutions, integrate survey modules into their existing platforms, or take a ‘white label’ approach.

=> ↺ OnePoint offers open-source option for mobile surveys

=> ↺ Why the future of advertising is open

=> ↺ Is an Open Source initiative the key to solving viewability problems?

BSD

=> ↺ OpenBSD errata, Mar 1, 2017

• A man-in-the-middle vulnerability has been found in OpenBSD’s wireless stack. A malicious access point can trick an OpenBSD client using WPA1 or WPA2 into connecting to this malicious AP instead of the desired AP. When this attack is used successfully the OpenBSD client will send and accept unencrypted frames.

Public Services/Government

=> ↺ Government launches UK Digital Strategy to make Britain ‘a world-leading digital economy that works for everyone’

• The UK government finally published its Digital Strategy today, outlining its plans for making the country a global capital of the digital economy.

• Culture Secretary Karen Bradley MP launched the strategy by laying out the government’s vision of how to develop the requisite infrastructure, regulations and skills to make the UK the ideal place for digital businesses, new technology and advanced research.

• “The Digital Strategy will help to create a world-leading digital economy that works for everyone,” she pledged at the Entrepreneur First startup accelerator. The London incubator is housed in a converted Biscuit Factory, a fitting example of the digital transformation the plans intend to support.

Licensing/Legal

=> ↺ How to Raise Awareness of Your Company’s Open Source License Compliance

• Communication is one of the seven essential elements to ensure the success of open source license compliance activities. And it’s not enough to communicate compliance policies and processes with executive leadership, managers, engineers, and other employees. Companies must also develop external messaging for the developer communities of the open source projects they use in their products.

=> ↺ removing everything from github

• Github recently drafted an update to their Terms Of Service. The new TOS is potentially very bad for copylefted Free Software. It potentially neuters it entirely, so GPL licensed software hosted on Github has an implicit BSD-like license. I’ll leave the full analysis to the lawyers, but see Thorsten’s analysis.

• I contacted Github about this weeks ago, and received only an anodyne response. The Free Software Foundation was also talking with them about it. It seems that Github doesn’t care or has some reason to want to effectively neuter copyleft software licenses.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

=> ↺ Open-source project uses genetic data from viruses to help scientists track outbreaks in real time

=> ↺ A new genetic tool maps how deadly viruses spread around the world in real time

=> ↺ Open Science Prize Awarded to Software Tool for Tracking Viral Outbreaks

=> ↺ Pathogen Surveillance System Wins NIH Open Science Prize

=> ↺ Open Science Prize announces epidemic tracking tool as grand prize winner

=> ↺ Epidemic tracking tool wins Open Science Prize

Open Data

=> ↺ UK GDS to host first Govt. Data Science conference

• The United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service (GDS) will host the first Government Data Science Conference, in London, on 24 April. “The conference is an opportunity to connect communities interested in the better use of data in government including data scientists, analysts and policymakers”, GDS writes on its site.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ M5Stack Open-Source Modular Electronic Prototyping Platform (video)

• Developers makers and hobbyists that are looking for a quick way to prototype electronic projects may be interested in an open source modular prototyping toolkit which has been created by M5Stack, based in San Francisco.

• Watch the demonstration video below to learn how the M5Stack prototyping toolkit can help you transform your ideas into working prototypes using a wide variety of different modules.

Leftovers

=> ↺ New route between Sweden and Denmark announced

• Good news for anyone in the Øresund region this summer: a new route between Sweden and Denmark is set to open, as a ferry designed to carry cyclists between the two bike-mad nations is trialled during the warmer months.

• The ferry will run across the Øresund strait between Dragør near Copenhagen to Limhamn, west of Malmö city centre.

• Dragør’s municipal council last week gave the green light to allow a shipping company to run the pilot project, which will ferry cyclists across the strait in the historic M/S Elephanten, a converted shipping boat built in 1940. It will hold 36 passengers, with the journey taking about one hour to complete.

=> ↺ Microsoft is adding Google Calendar support to Outlook on Mac

• Microsoft is adding Google Calendar and Contacts support to the Mac version of Outlook 2016, the company announced yesterday. The change means that Outlook users will be able to synchronize and track their Google Calendars across a range of devices, from Mac, to Android phone, to Windows PC.

Science

=> ↺ Is anything tough enough to survive on Mars?

• Two recent publications suggest that life, in the form of ancient, simple organisms called methanogens, could survive the harsh conditions found near the surface of Mars, and deep in its soils. Using methanogens to test for survivability is particularly relevant because scientists have detected their byproduct, methane, in the Martian atmosphere. On Earth, methane is strongly associated with organic matter, though there are non-organic sources of the gas, including volcanic eruptions.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ Michigan Ends Flint Water Credit Amid Disagreement on Recovery

• After weeks of meetings aimed at extending state-provided water relief credits, residents of Flint, Michigan, will resume paying the full price for water they still need to filter and have not been able to drink safely since April 2014.

• The credits, totaling roughly $40 million in aid, have covered 65 percent of residents’ water usage since 2014 when the city’s water crisis began. The credits have also covered 20 percent of city businesses’ water use.

• The dangers of Flint’s water drew national attention after an emergency manager answering to the state’s governor, Rick Snyder, ordered the city’s utility to switch water providers from Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water to the Flint River. The move filled the city’s water pipes and residents’ taps with water contaminated by high levels of lead.

Security

=> ↺ Security updates for Thursday

=> ↺ Security updates for Wednesday

=> ↺ Researchers find “severe” flaw in WordPress plugin with 1 million installs

• More than 1 million websites running the WordPress content management system may be vulnerable to hacks that allow visitors to snatch password data and secret keys out of databases, at least under certain conditions.

• The vulnerability stems from a “severe” SQL injection bug in NextGEN Gallery, a WordPress plugin with more than 1 million installations. Until the flaw was recently fixed, NextGEN Gallery allowed input from untrusted visitors to be included in WordPress-prepared SQL queries. Under certain conditions, attackers can exploit the weakness to pipe powerful commands to a Web server’s backend database.

=> ↺ cloudbleed hero graphics

=> ↺ Botnets

• Botnets have existed for at least a decade. As early as 2000, hackers were breaking into computers over the Internet and controlling them en masse from centralized systems. Among other things, the hackers used the combined computing power of these botnets to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks, which flood websites with traffic to take them down.

• But now the problem is getting worse, thanks to a flood of cheap webcams, digital video recorders, and other gadgets in the “Internet of things.” Because these devices typically have little or no security, hackers can take them over with little effort. And that makes it easier than ever to build huge botnets that take down much more than one site at a time.

=> ↺ Yahoo boss Marissa Mayer loses millions in bonuses over security lapses

• Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer will lose her annual bonus and the company’s top lawyer has been removed over their mishandling of security breaches that exposed the personal information of more than 1 billion users.

• Mayer’s cash bonus is worth about $2m a year and her personal cost from the security flaws increased when the board also accepted her offer to relinquish an annual stock award worth millions of dollars.

• Mayer, whose management team was found by an internal review to have reacted too slowly to one breach in 2014, said on Wednesday she wanted the board to distribute her bonus to Yahoo’s entire workforce of 8,500 employees. The board did not say if it would do so.

=> ↺ Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?

• A few days ago I ordered a small batch of the ChaosKey, a small USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith Packard. Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it work great! According to its designers, to get it to work out of the box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later. I tested on a Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly. I wrote a small test oneliner to test. It first print the current entropy level, drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.

=> ↺ Startup Offers Free ‘Bug Bounty’ Help to Open Source Projects

• Many people don’t realize much of the Internet is built on free software. Even giant companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon rely extensively on big libraries of code—known as “open source” software”—written by thousands of programmers, who share their work with everyone.

• But no software is perfect. Like the proprietary code developed by many companies, open source software contains flaws that hackers can exploit to steal information or spread viruses. That’s why a new initiative to patch those holes is important.

=> ↺ 50 Google Engineers Volunteered to Patch Thousands of Java Open Source Projects

• A year ago, several Google engineers got together and lay the foundation of Operation Rosehub, a project during which Google employees used some of their official work time to patch thousands of open source projects against a severe and widespread Java vulnerability.

• Known internally at Google as the Mad Gadget vulnerability, the issue was discovered at the start of 2015 but came to everyone’s attention in November 2015 after security researchers from Foxglove Security showcased how it could be used to steal data from WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Jenkins, and OpenNMS Java applications.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ The New Yorker’s Big Cover Story Reveals Five Uncomfortable Truths About U.S. and Russia

• The New Yorker is aggressively touting its 13,000-word cover story on Russia and Trump that was bylined by three writers, including the magazine’s editor-in-chief, David Remnick. Beginning with its cover image menacingly featuring Putin, Trump and the magazine’s title in Cyrillic letters, along with its lead cartoon dystopically depicting a UFO-like Red Square hovering over and phallically invading the White House, a large bulk of the article is devoted to what has now become standard – and very profitable – fare among East Coast news magazines: feeding Democrats the often-xenophobic, hysterical Russia-phobia for which they have a seemingly insatiable craving. Democratic media outlets have thus predictably cheered this opus for exposing “Russian President Vladimir Putin’s influence on the presidential election.”

=> ↺ Sweden to reintroduce conscription amid rising Baltic tensions

• Sweden has voted to reintroduce military conscription by 1 July after struggling to fill army ranks on a voluntary basis, citing increased Russian military activity in the Baltics as one of the reasons for the policy U-turn.

• In 2010, Sweden’s centre-right government of the time abolished the draft after more than 100 years, arguing that targeted recruitment would increase the quality of a military that had shrunk by more than 90% since the end of the cold war.

• But with unemployment rates having returned to pre-2008 levels, the country has been struggling to meet its target of 4,000 new recruits per annum.

=> ↺ Conscription

• Canadian armed forces are barely enough to hold a single town together, let alone to fight a war. That’s not good enough. We should ramp up bodies, especially shooters, by at least a factor of five and we should procure vehicles and weapon-system in numbers sufficient for a general mobilization. Modern warfare is not like WWII where we had years to get ready. Things can get really bad in days with ICBMs, suicide bombers, chemical/biological weapons and many thousands of really insane people possessing them with evil intent. Conscription is fine to mobilize a population but we probably don’t need that if our reserves are much larger and our weapon-sytems more capable. We should aim to recruit ~10% of the population for military training and have 1% of the population ready to go instantly. That would give us flexibility similar to other countries who recognize the dangers around the world.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ No Immediate Ruling Made on Dakota Access Pipeline Work

• A federal judge said Tuesday that he’ll decide within a week whether to temporarily halt construction of the final section of the Dakota Access pipeline over claims that it violates the religious rights of two Indian tribes.

• U.S. District Judge James Boasberg told lawyers at a hearing that he wants to issue a ruling before oil begins flowing in the pipeline, which could be weeks away.

=> ↺ Swiss study: snow to largely disappear from Alps by 2100

• By the end of the century up to 70 percent of snow cover in the Alps will have melted and the ski season will be much shorter, Swiss researchers predict.

• If global warming is not halted, only ski areas above 2,500 metres will have enough snow for winter sports, said the scientists from the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF) and the EPFL Lausanne.

• Writing in European Geosciences Union (EGU) journal The Cryosphere, they predicted that the amount and duration of snow cover in typical Alpine areas would have shrunk by the end of the century, even in best-case climate scenarios.

Finance

=> ↺ As Uber Melts Down, Its CEO Says He ‘Must Fundamentally Change’

• It took eight years and at least as many back-to-back-to-back-to-back controversies to break Travis Kalanick.

• After a stunning month of scandals at Uber, Kalanick, its founder and CEO, sent an emotional and uncharacteristically apologetic memo to his employees Tuesday night. “This is the first time I’ve been willing to admit that I need leadership help,” Kalanick wrote. “And I intend to get it.”

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Why some German politicians want Erdogan banned

• “German-Turkey relations are facing one of their greatest challenges of the modern era,” German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said, a day after a German-Turkish journalist was formally charged in Turkey with producing terrorist propaganda and undermining the government.

• The detention of Deniz Yucel, who works for German newspaper Die Welt, has led to an outpouring of anger and frustration from German politicians and media figureheads alike.

• Some politicians have even called into question whether future visits to Germany by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as part of an upcoming election campaign should be allowed to go ahead.

=> ↺ Is it reasonable for a private industry to demand governmental censorship power over general communications?

• The copyright industry is trying – again – to forcefully conscript Internet Service Providers into doing their bidding. This time, the RIAA and other organizations are demanding “filtering”, which is a pretty word for censorship, of anything they don’t want people to send to each other privately.

• Ask yourself this one question: is it any shade of reasonable that a private industry gets a governmental mandate to silence our phonecalls when we talk about things that the private industry in question don’t want us to talk about? Because that’s exactly what the copyright industry is demanding here, exactly what they’re demanding, as applied to the Internet.

=> ↺ Twitter to get even harsher on trolls

• Twitter is cracking down even harder against trolls, including temporarily barring accounts that are harassing other users.

• In a blog posted Wednesday, Twitter’s vice president of engineering, Ed Ho, announced more safety measures to stop abuse on its platform.

• One of the methods includes using the company’s internal algorithms to identify problematic accounts and limiting certain account functions — such as only allowing the aggressor to see their followers — for a set period of time if they engaged in troublesome behavior.

=> ↺ Twitter will use algorithms to sniff out trolls

• SOCIAL NETWORK Twitter has announced that it’s making more updates to its service that will help to silence trolls and better allow users to filter out abusive content.

• Last month, Twitter announced a ‘three-step plan’ to tackle trolls, which included an easier way for user filter “abusive and low-quality replies” from users’ timelines by default, a ban on suspended users from creating new accounts, and a new ‘safe search’ feature which the firm claims will remove offensive tweets – along with tweets from blocked and muted accounts – from a users timeline.

• On Wednesday, the firm announced it’s expanding on these efforts, and will now look to algorithms to more actively identify accounts that spread abusive content.

=> ↺ Plymouth clerk’s anti-Muslim post investigated, city manager says

• Longtime Plymouth City Clerk Linda Langmesser is the subject of an internal investigation after an anti-Muslim post she made on Facebook came to light, City Manager Paul Sincock confirmed Tuesday.

• “It’s a matter of an internal investigation,” Sincock said. “We have no further comment.”

• According to Sincock, Langmesser’s posting was a response to a story about a Muslim woman who’d lost her job at the White House; the story, headlined “I was a Muslim in Trump’s White House for 8 Days,” penned for The Atlantic by former White House staffer Rumana Ahmed, who hired into the White House during President Obama’s first term.

• According to Sincock, Langmesser’s post — which has since been removed — talked about how Ahmed wasn’t telling the truth “because that’s what they do in their culture” and that she should “be sent back to where she can worship the koran.”

=> ↺ A positive step forward against the “censorship machine” in the Copyright Directive

• On 24 February 2017 the Rapporteur of the European Parliament (EP) Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO), Catherine Stihler MEP, published her draft Opinion on the Copyright Directive. The Opinion sends a strong message against the most extremist parts of the European Commission’s proposal: the “censorship machine” (aka upload filter) proposal in Article 13 and the suggestion to expand the “ancillary copyright ” (aka “link tax”), that failed so miserably in Germany and Spain to every country of the EU.

=> ↺ We can’t just blame the Left for student censorship – every side is at it now

• If you dare to walk onto a university campus, you better prepare yourself. Flags bearing the stern face of Lenin drape from windows. Reincarnated soldiers of the Red Army patrol the corridors. The harmonic chime of ‘The Red Flag’ hangs in the air.

• Yes, according to a ground-breaking study by the Adam Smith Institute, eight out of ten UK universities are ‘left-wing’.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Germany’s Spy Agency Walks Away From Three-Year Investigation With Expanded Spy Powers

• Netzpolitik — once on the receiving end of treason charges for reporting on leaked documents — is marking the end of the so-called “inquiry” into the BND-NSA partnership with a post discussing the inquiry’s multiple failures. The German government’s investigation into Five Eyes spy efforts was a direct result of leaked Snowden documents, which showed the NSA had spied on the German chancellor.

• It failed to uncover much about that particular allegation. By the time this part of the investigation had been dropped, President Obama had already apologized for the NSA doing perfectly normal NSA-type stuff: spying on foreign officials. The committee turned to a broader discussion of surveillance best practices, including the propriety of spying on friends and neighbors. In doing so, it uncovered plenty of illicit and ill-advised spying by its NSA equivalent, BND.

=> ↺ NSA Will Not Use Quantum Computers to Crack Bitcoin: Antonopoulos

• Bitcoin is not vulnerable to Quantum computer attacks, Andreas Antonopoulos has confirmed.

• Speaking in a Q&A session, the celebrated commentator explained how Bitcoin’s hashes are resistant to quantum algorithms, making it all but impossible to infiltrate it with current technology.

• “We don’t have very good algorithms for breaking hashes with quantum computing,” he said.

=> ↺ After 3 Years, Why Gmail’s End-to-End Encryption Is Still Vapor

• Nearly three years have passed since Google announced it would offer an end-to-end encryption add-on for Gmail, a potentially massive shift in the privacy options of a piece of software used by more than a billion people. It still hasn’t materialized. And while Google insists its encryption plugin isn’t vaporware, the company’s latest move has left critics with the distinct impression that Gmail’s end-to-end encrypted future looks cloudy at best—if not altogether evaporated.

• Last Friday, Google quietly announced that E2EMail, an extension for Chrome that would seamlessly encrypt and decrypt Gmail messages, was no longer a Google effort. Instead, the company has invited the outside developer community to adopt the project’s open-source code. Google was careful to emphasize in a blog post describing the change that it hasn’t given up work on its email encryption tool. But cryptographers and members of the privacy community see the move as confirmation that Google has officially backburnered a critical privacy and security initiative.

=> ↺ New copyright study shows fundamental flaws in EU Commission plans for upload surveillance

• The European Commission wants to obligate internet platforms to monitor all content their users upload for copyright infringements. This is laid out in Article 13 of Günther Oettinger’s copyright overhaul plans.

• I’ve detailed the harmful effects such upload surveillance would have in my previous post 10 things on the web the EU Commission wants to make illegal: Points 6 to 8 as well as the final one would be consequences to this particular part of the copyright plans.

=> ↺ AOL seemingly cutting off third-party app access to AIM starting on March 28

• AOL announced today that it is starting to cut off third-party app access to its Instant Messenger service. As first noticed by ArsTechnica, AOL began notifying users of at least one third-party app, Adium, that it would become obsolete starting on March 28th.

• At this point, it’s unclear whether or not all third-party applications will be rendered useless come March 28th, but the message presented to Adium users seemed to strongly imply that:

=> ↺ As North Koreans gain phone connectivity, surveillance, censorship tech gain ground: US study

• But private citizens’ embrace of a state-controlled network has opened the way to unparalleled state censorship and surveillance in the long-isolated, totalitarian country.

=> ↺ Fact Sheet: Impact of Warrantless Section 702 Surveillance on People in the United States

• Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (50 U.S.C. § 1881a) grew out of a secret George W. Bush-era warrantless surveillance program that monitored the international communications of people in the US. It currently underpins some of the most sweeping warrantless NSA surveillance programs that affect Americans and people across the globe.

=> ↺ Liveblogging Today’s House Judiciary Hearing on Section 702

=> ↺ Surveillance Battle in House Focuses on Number of U.S. Citizens Affected

=> ↺ US surveillance law may see no new protections for foreign targets

=> ↺ White House supports renewal of spy law without reforms: official

=> ↺ House addresses Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments set to expire

=> ↺ Congress Asks NSA for Estimate of American Surveillance Before Reauthorization

=> ↺ FISA Section 702: Is warrantless surveillance national security or a hit to privacy?

=> ↺ White House backs ‘clean reauthorization’ of surveillance law

=> ↺ Video: House Judiciary Committee Hearing on Section 702

=> ↺ Pull the Plug on Internet Spying Programs

=> ↺ US surveillance law may see no new protections for foreign targets

=> ↺ House Judiciary signals reauthorization of NSA surveillance powers with privacy tweeks

=> ↺ NSA Director Wants to Contract Companies to Build Future Cyber Weapons

• Adm. Michael Rogers, head of the National Security Agency and United States Cyber Command, envisions a future in which the government outsources the development of its cyber weapons to the private sector.

• Rogers said Friday at an event co-sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute that he questions whether developing all cyber weapons within government is sustainable. The alternative, which Rogers said could be a reality within the next five to 10 years, would be for Cyber Command to tell companies exactly what type of weapon the agency needed to be built and allow the companies to manufacture it.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ 9-month probation for youth who used criminal force against blogger Amos Yee

• A youth who attacked blogger Amos Yee at a Jurong West mall in May last year was ordered to undergo nine months of probation on Wednesday (March 1).

• Bryon Loke Thong Ler, 19, who had confronted the 17-year-old for taking a video of him at Jurong Point, was also ordered to complete 100 hours of community service. Loke’s parents, who were in court, placed a $5,000 bond to ensure his compliance.

• Loke had earlier pleaded guilty to using criminal force on Amos between noon and 12.50pm on May 29 last year. The court had called for a probation report.

=> ↺ Body Worn Cameras Continue To Reduce Police Misconduct, Citizen Complaints In San Diego

• On the other hand, lower-level uses of force have increased 23.5% over the same period. What could be taken as an indication of a partial accountability favor is more likely just a statistical adjustment. For one, the increase in real numbers is only 71 more force deployments than last year, which isn’t all that much when compared to the number of police interactions. According to SDPD numbers, officers responded to 520,000 incidents in 2016.

• As for the uptick in lower-level force deployment — which is much more significant than the drop in higher-level force use — this is little more than a reflection of a positive change in tactics. In most arrests, some level of force is deployed. If San Diego cops are aware they’re being recorded, they’re less likely to deploy high-level force techniques as quickly as they would in pre-camera days. These numbers show there’s more de-escalation occurring, which naturally results in fewer deployments of high-level force. But since some force is still needed in many cases, the numbers have to go somewhere. And they’ve traveled from the high-level stats to the low-level.

=> ↺ Swedish medics need military equipment to enter certain areas – Ambulance Drivers Union

• Gordon Grattidge, chairman of the union, told DGS TV that medics need tactical units and special equipment in order to enter risky areas across Sweden.

• In 2016, more than 55 places were outlined as areas police were struggling to maintain law and order, as thugs attack officers and wreak havoc.

• The situation on Sweden came under scrutiny in February as US President Donald Trump suggested the Scandinavian country’s troubles was a result of its liberal refugee policy.

=> ↺ Police dispute US journalist’s claim he was escorted out of Rinkeby

• Police have disputed American journalist Tim Pool’s claim that he received an escort out of the Rinkeby suburb of Stockholm on Wednesday after he and his colleague were followed by masked men.

• “Several men started masking up and following us. Police told us to leave and had to escort us to our car,” he wrote in a Twitter post on Wednesday.

=> ↺ Danish prison more expensive than luxury hotel

• The list of dignitaries and stars who have pampered themselves in the luxurious settings at D’Angleterre Hotel in Copenhagen goes on into infinity.

• But really, if they’d wanted to spend the night at an even more expensive (though perhaps not as exclusive) establishment in Denmark, they should have booked themselves in at Vridsløselille Prison in the western Copenhagen suburb of Albertslund.

=> ↺ Murderer Tanveer Ahmed inspires Pakistani hardliners from Scottish jail

• When Tanveer Ahmed was sentenced to a minimum of 27 years in jail for murder last August, Judge Lady Rae said he had committed a “brutal, barbaric and horrific crime”.

• Ahmed stabbed to death Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah – who belonged to the persecuted Ahmadi sect – because he believed he was committing blasphemy by uploading online videos in which he claimed to be a prophet.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ FCC Boss Calls Net Neutrality A ‘Mistake,’ Repeats Debunked Claim It Stifled Broadband Investment

• So for several years now, the broadband industry (and the politicians, think tankers, and policy folk paid to love them) has desperately tried to claim that the FCC’s net neutrality rules killed investment in broadband networks, clouding the entire telecom market in a dark shroud of “regulatory uncertainty.” And it doesn’t matter how many times we (and others) debunk this claim, it just keeps popping up like an undead groundhog. The reality is this: net neutrality had zero negative impact on the CAPEX, growth, or financials of major broadband providers. It simply isn’t true.

=> ↺ Can YouTube TV Get You to Cut the Cord for $35 a Month?

• For years, YouTube has served up almost every imaginable kind of video.

• The site’s top trending attractions on a recent afternoon included clips of a gymnasium roof collapsing in the Czech Republic, a colossal alligator lumbering across a footpath in Florida, some North Korean refugees digging into American barbecue for the first time, and a guy demonstrating how to wash a car with a baby. (Step one: Hand the baby the hose.) Now, a dozen years after its creation and about a decade after its absorption into Google Inc., YouTube is on the verge of adding yet one more genre—a category of programming that has long eluded it. YouTube is finally getting regular TV.

DRM

=> ↺ Xbox Games Pass: Microsoft launches $10 monthly subscription for over 100 titles

• Microsoft is launching the Netflix of games, letting people play as many as they want for just $10 a month.

• The Xbox Games Pass will be a monthly subscription service that gives access to 100 games, Microsoft has said. As such, it works like Netflix or similar to the PlayStation Now service that Sony has offered for years.

Intellectual Monopolies

=> ↺ USTR Issues 2017 Trade Policy Review, Listing IPR Priorities

=> ↺ a front group for large US corporations

• The Office of the United States Trade Representative today released its 2017 trade policy agenda. The report includes numerous references to intellectual property rights, mainly focused on enforcement, plans for multilateral discussions on IPR and trade, and promises of an aggressive stance on geographical indications. But overall it is short on overall details about what’s to come with the new administration.

=> ↺ Text Protecting Indigenous Cultural Expressions Streamlined At WIPO, But Divergence Persists

• Renewed discussions on the protection of traditional cultural expressions at the World Intellectual Property Organization have produced a new draft text that provides a clearer view of the different ways in which countries see a that treaty could help against misappropriation of indigenous cultural heritage. Divergences remain on core questions such as what and who should benefit from the protection of an international treaty, in which terms, and to what extent.

=> ↺ Indigenous Peoples At WIPO Call For Respect Of Their Sovereign Rights, Prevention Of Cultural Genocide

• A panel of indigenous peoples speaking at the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization on a potential treaty protecting their folklore from misappropriation asked that indigenous culture be recognised as unique, and not unduly considered as belonging to the whole of mankind. The keynote speaker chastised the United States position in the committee, criticised a US recent document equating the cultural significance of Santa Claus, pizza and sand paintings, and called for the respect of indigenous peoples’ sovereign rights over their cultural expressions.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Unauthorised Streaming Of TV Broadcasts Breaches Copyright, EU High Court Rules

• Internet television broadcasting service TVCatchup (TVC) may not offer live streams of free-to-air TV broadcasts without permission, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) said in a 1 March judgment.

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