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● 04.27.17

● Links 27/4/2017: Mesa 17.0.5 RC1, Git 2.13.0 RC1, and Linkerd 1.0

Posted in News Roundup at 10:25 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ 3 Linux questions from the community

• In the last The Queue, I flipped the script and asked you questions as opposed to answering them. It was so well received, I’m going to keep it going with three more questions this month. I’ll resume answering next month, so don’t forget you can fill the queue with your questions about Linux, building and maintaining communities, contributing to an open source project, and anything else you’d like to know. While the previous two questions were a bit philosophical, this month we’ll keep it fun.

Desktop

=> ↺ Here’s the master list of Chromebooks that will get Android apps, straight from Google itself

• One of the most exciting advances in the Chromebook world was Google’s announcement that certain Chrome OS devices would support Android apps. Google first started experimenting with Android apps on Chromebooks in 2014, but fully brought the Google Play Store to certain models in summer 2016.

=> ↺ Don’t install our buggy Windows 10 Creators Update, begs Microsoft

• Microsoft has urged non-tech-savvy people – or anyone who just wants a stable computer – to not download and install this year’s biggest revision to Windows by hand. And that’s because it may well bork your machine.

• It’s been two weeks since Microsoft made its Creators Update available, and we were previously warned it will be a trickle-out rather than a massive rollout. Now, Redmond has urged users to stop manually fetching and installing the code, and instead wait for it to be automatically offered to your computer when it’s ready.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Automotive Grade Linux Welcomes Six New Members

=> ↺ Linux Foundation Adds New Members to Blockchain Initiative and Marketplace

• In a recent announcement, the Linux Foundation project to build an open framework for IoT edge computing has said it’s added 135 members to its Hyperledger open blockchain initiative and 50 to its new EdgeX Foundry to unify the IoT Marketplace.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Mesa 17.1.0 Development Advances, Second RC Hits the Streets with 18 Changes

• With a three day delay than initially expected, the second Release Candidate (RC) build of the upcoming Mesa 17.1 3D Graphics Library was announced by Collabora’s Emil Velikov.

=> ↺ Mesa 17.0.5 RC1 Packing More Than Three Dozen Fixes

• For those sticking to stable Mesa releases, Mesa 17.0.5 is being prepped for release in the days ahead.

=> ↺ Mesa’s Shader Cache Will Now Occupy Less Disk Space

• Mesa previously had a hard-coded limit to not take up more than 10% of your HDD/SSD storage, but now that limit has been halved.

• In a change to Mesa 17.2-dev Git and primed for back-porting to Mesa 17.1, Timothy Arceri has lowered the cache size limit to 5% of the disk space. He noted in the commit, “Modern disks are extremely large and are only going to get bigger. Usage has shown frequent Mesa upgrades can result in the cache growing very fast i.e. wasting a lot of disk space unnecessarily. 5% seems like a more reasonable default.”

Benchmarks

=> ↺ Amazon EC2 Cloud Benchmarks vs. AMD Ryzen, Various AMD/Intel Systems

Applications

=> ↺ gydl and youtube-dl-gui are two useful front-ends to work with youtube-dl for downloading videos

• The command-line tool youtube-dl [GitHub] is useful for sure, but if you’re looking for a handy interface I have two nice options here for you.

=> ↺ SMPlayer media player updated to support the ffhevcvdpau decoder

• SMPlayer, the graphical front-end to the powerful MPlayer has been updated with a bunch of fixes and new features.

=> ↺ Vivaldi 1.9 Browser Is Out with Ecosia Search Engine to Help Reforest the Planet

• Today, April 27, 2017, is a great day if you’re a fan of the Vivaldi web browser because you can finally help reforest the planet as Vivaldi 1.9 just launched and includes a new default search engine powered by Ecosia.

• If you haven’t heard of Ecosia until now, let us tell you that it’s a search engine that uses its ad revenue to plants trees around the world, and it looks like Vivaldi 1.9 is world’s first web browser to integrate Ecosia and enable it by default for new installations. If you have Vivaldi 1.8 installed and you’re upgrading to Vivaldi 1.9, go to Search Settings and click on the “Restore Defaults” buttons to enable Ecosia.

=> ↺ Vivaldi browser 1.9 released with the Ecosia search engine, UI customization and more

=> ↺ Git v2.13.0-rc1

=> ↺ Git 2.13-rc1 Released

• Git 2.13 has stepped closer to being released with today’s 2.13-rc1 debut.

• Git 2.13 features a number of internal improvements, improvements to the experimental split-index feature, various performance improvements, some improvements around Git’s Windows port, and various other changes. There are also many fixes since Git 2.12.

=> ↺ Announcing Linkerd 1.0

• Today, we’re thrilled to announce Linkerd version 1.0. A little more than one year from our initial launch, Linkerd is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and has a thriving community of contributors and users. Adopters range from startups like Monzo, which is disrupting the UK banking industry, to high scale Internet companies like Paypal, Ticketmaster, and Credit Karma, to companies that have been in business for hundreds of years like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

=> ↺ gnURL 7.54.0 released

=> ↺ GNUstep Graphos 0.6

• After (too) many years, finally a new release of Graphos.

• This release has two new important features: cusps and images.

=> ↺ GNU Parallel 20170422 (‘Санкт-Петербу́рг’) released

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Complete Guide: Linux grep command

=> ↺ Graph Any Data with Cacti!

=> ↺ How to run NGINX as a Docker container

=> ↺ libVirt on Hetzner

=> ↺ Endpoint visibility and monitoring using osquery and syslog-ng

=> ↺ How many disks can you add to a (virtual) Linux machine?

=> ↺ Reverse engineering ComputerHardwareIds.exe with winedbg

=> ↺ Brightness control doesn’t work in i3wm

=> ↺ RTP for broadcasting-over-IP use-cases in GStreamer: PTP, RFC7273 for Ravenna, AES67, SMPTE 2022 & SMPTE 2110

=> ↺ Puppet : Automate/Reset first time root password for MySQL 5.7.x

=> ↺ An Simple Way to Access/Setup Google Drive in Linux

=> ↺ How to set up a mail server with PostfixAdmin on CentOS 7

=> ↺ The beauty of links on Unix servers

Games

=> ↺ Adventure game Syberia 3 looks like it will be heading over to Linux

• You can see on SteamDB here that it’s showing signs of coming over to Linux.

• The user reviews are a little worrying, even more worrying is some more professional reviews giving it quite low ratings. As always, I take other reviews with a pinch of salt as I do at times love what others hate, but in this case it seems like it’s rather buggy. Hopefully it will be a little more polished if it does release on Linux.

=> ↺ Good deals going this week for Linux gamers, a quick look

=> ↺ TerraTech has a major update with a creative mode, new blocks and more

=> ↺ Best Linux Distros for Gaming in 2017

• Gaming in Linux has evolved a lot in the past few years. Now, you have dozens of distros pre-optimized for gaming and gamers. We tested all of them and hand-picked the best. There are a few other articles and lists of this type out there, but they don’t really go into detail and they are pretty outdated. This is an up-to-date list with any info you’d need.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE Plasma Getting Chrome Integration, Followed By Firefox

• KDE Plasma is getting web-browser integration initially for Google Chrome and is expected to be followed by Mozilla Firefox support.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ GNOME 3.26 Desktop Environment to Offer Todoist Integration, Quarter Tiling

• They came much faster than we expected, and it looks like more features of the upcoming GNOME 3.26 desktop environment for GNU/Linux distribution have been revealed.

=> ↺ Epiphany 3.25.1 Released, Ported To Meson

• Epiphany 3.25.1 has been released as the latest update for GNOME’s Web Browser in what will be part of GNOME 3.26 this September.

• Epiphany 3.25.1 has continued the trend by other GNOME components in porting to the Meson build system. With Epiphany 3.25.1, Meson is present and its Autotools build system has been removed.

Distributions

OpenSUSE/SUSE

=> ↺ Tumbleweed Snapshots Update Fonts, Perl, Python Packages

• openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots this week gave many newer versions of Perl and Python packages, but several other packages were updated in the repositories including some open fonts.

• Google and Adobe fonts were updated in snapshots 20170424 and 20170420 with google-croscore-fonts and adobe-sourcehansans-fonts being added to the repositories respectively.

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Red Hat announces the Red Hat 3scale API management platform

=> ↺ Red Hat Introduces Fully Containerized API Management Platform

• As the first major release of the platform following Red Hat’s June 2016 acquisition of 3scale, Red Hat 3scale API Management – On Premise builds on Red Hat’s vision to accelerate digital transformation and innovation with API-driven hybrid cloud architectures. Described as the “new language of collaboration,” APIs serve as the building blocks underpinning today’s hyperconnected economy, driven by mobile, the Internet of Things (IoT), and new application architectures such as containers and microservices.

=> ↺ Red Hat debuts containerized API management platform to boost flexibility, scale and control

=> ↺ Catching up with Red Hat Mobile to talk about low code in the enterprise

• Low code is a movement that has emerged in the marketplace in recent times, not only for mobile but also for business process management (BPM) and other application development areas. What company can resist the pull of low-cost and relatively fast development times? Especially when it’s as simple as a drag and drop gesture away. So it’s not surprising that many big names are throwing themselves into the ring to see how well they can compete against other providers in a thriving marketplace.

=> ↺ Holistic approach imperative to digital transformation: Red Hat

• MALAYSIAN organisations embarking on digital transformation initiatives must embrace a holistic strategy that encompasses the deployment of a gamut of ideas and should not just approach it on a piecemeal basis, cautioned open source software giant Red Hat Inc.

• Speaking to the media after revealing a new study on enterprise mobility recently, Red Hat vice president and general manager for Asean Damien Wong (pic, bottom right) said the term digital transformation is being bandied about so much these days and companies are so keen to embrace it that they may not be approaching the process correctly.

=> ↺ Red Hat Brings Cloud-Native Java to OpenShift

• The latest release of OpenShift, Red Hat’s packaged distribution of the open source Kubernetes container management and orchestration system, comes with new support for cloud-native Java.

• OpenShift already supported traditional Java EE applications, including fully integrated enterprise middleware services from the Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio. Version 3.5 of the platform, announced last week, expands that support with a new Java container image for cloud-native workloads.

=> ↺ Red Hat job opening for Linux Graphics stack developer

• So we have a new job available for someone interested in joing our team and work on improving the Linux graphics stack. The focus of this job will be on GPU compute related work, but you should also expect to be spending time on improving the graphics driver stack in general. We are looking for someone at the Principal Engineer level, but I do recommend that even if you don’t feel you are quite at that level yet you should apply because to be fair the amount of people with the kind of experience we are looking for are few and far between, so in the end there is a chance we will hire two more junior developers instead if we have candidates with the right profile.

=> ↺ New CloudLinux 7 Beta Linux Kernel Available for Testing, Two Crashes Addressed

• CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi announced today, April 26, 2017, the availability of a new Beta kernel for users of the CloudLinux 7 operating system series, addressing various vulnerabilities discovered lately.

=> ↺ Red Hat Bets on Innovation in the Channel

• Red Hat has launched the Red Hat Application Partner Initiative, working with partners to build a practice around core platforms for emerging use cases.

• IT solution providers tend to focus more on technologies that are just hitting the top of the bell curve in terms of mainstream adoption. But Red Hat is making a case for partners to place more focus on emerging technologies.

=> ↺ Huawei takes on servers, HPC and cloud with Red Hat, Intel and GE

• Company unveils plans to build high performance computing centres in in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China, and in Munich, Germany.

• Chinese ICT company Huawei has unveiled a series of agreements and collaborations with some of the world’s largest companies to advance cloud and high performance computing (HPC).

• Firstly, Huawei has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Intel to cooperate in HPC.

=> ↺ Red Hat Unveils JBoss AMQ 7

• Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today introduced Red Hat JBoss AMQ 7. The latest release of Red Hat’s messaging platform combines the performance and efficiency of reactive programming with a more flexible architecture, giving customers a strong foundation for building distributed, reactive message-driven applications.

Finance

=> ↺ Red Hat, Inc. (RHT): What’s the Story?

Fedora

=> ↺ Fedora Installation Workshop in Ranchi

• Fedora Installation workshop was organized at Ranchi, Jharkhand, India on 23 April, 2017 to introduce Fedora OS to local students and computer users. The workshop was conducted by Mohan Prakash and was attended mostly by undergraduate students. Fedora DVDs and stickers were distributed. The participants used Fedora Live and also installed Fedora on their machines. Mohan Prakash spoke about important packages shipped with the Fedora DVD and introduced different websites related to Fedora.

=> ↺ Flock Cod Registration Form Design

=> ↺ Encrypt all the Fedora Project

=> ↺ Flatpak 0.9.3 Linux App Sandboxing Framework Released with Many Builder Changes

• Alex Larsson from the Flatpak team announces the release and immediate availability of the third maintenance update to the Flatpak 0.9 series of the open-source Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework.

=> ↺ FCAIC in the House, part III

• Ok, not that “Hello”. I’ve been writing quarterly updates on what I’m working on to help the Fedora Community. If you’re new to the party, welcome. I have the privilege of being the current Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator. I wrote last week on the Red Hat Community blog about what this role means and how it interacts with the world.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Improve Your Online Security with Tails

• The popular image of online dangers is scary bad guys trying to steal our stuff. This image is accurate if you remember to include unfettered corporate interests as the scary bad guys.

• Our protections against our good friends the telcos and cable companies have never been strong, and now they’re nearly non-existent. Repealing Broadband Privacy Rules, Congress Sides with the Cable and Telephone Industry sums it up beautifully: “Internet providers will be given new powers to harvest your personal information in extraordinarily creepy ways.” And buy and sell it with no oversight or accountability, and law enforcement will get their hands on it as surely as road apples draw flies.

• What can we do about it? I believe that the best solution is legislative. I prefer technical solutions for protecting ourselves from hostile and predatory interests, but there aren’t many, and they’re incomplete. Internet access is a requirement for many routine aspects of our daily lives, and even if you avoid going online you have no knowledge or control of the information the vendors and service providers that you use are collecting and trading, or what people share about you on social media. Stores, electric and gas utilities, healthcare providers, tradespeople, private clubs, non-profit organizations, charitable groups, banks, insurance companies, and on and on. They all collect information about you, and many trade it freely. Of course, it’s not fair to assume that everyone is venal, but even when a vendor has a heart of gold they may be lacking in technical competence.

=> ↺ Debian Project to Shut Down Its Public FTP Services, Developers Are Not Affected

• The Debian Project, a group of developers from all over the world who create one of the most popular and used free operating systems on the planet, Debian GNU/Linux, announced that they’re shutting down their FTP servers for users.

Derivatives

=> ↺ LinuxAndUbuntu Distro Review Of The Week Debian Linux 8.7 (Jessie)

• ​I have always been a Ubuntu guy. I use Ubuntu or some other derivatives like Mint or elementary but never have I tried Debian. Well not anymore. I tested Debian and I must say I really like it. The thing with Debian is that stability is prioritized over all other factors. So if you are looking for the latest updates to packages, Debian is not the one. Debian is very popular amongst Linux users and rightly so. It enjoys a very superior community support compared to many other distros and most importantly the stability. So my experience? Let’s start the distro review of the week, Debian 8.7.

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) Linux OS Is Now Officially Open for Development

• Canonical’s Adam Conrad announced the other day that the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, due for release on October 19, 2017, is now officially open for development.

=> ↺ Canonical Releases a Technology Preview of Ubuntu Server 17.04′s New Installer

=> ↺ Canonical Outs Major Kernel Update to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, 10 Vulnerabilities Fixed

=> ↺ Canonical Releases Snapcraft 2.29 Snap Creator Tool for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS & 17.04

=> ↺ Snap creation tool ‘snapcraft’ has a new release with the groundwork for collaboration

=> ↺ Mobile Ubuntu Gamble to Fizzle Out in June

=> ↺ The Pop GTK Theme Brings Ubuntu with GNOME to Life

• If you’re looking to give your newly minted GNOME desktop a bit of a makeover look no further than the Pop GTK theme. Created by the popular Ubuntu computer seller System76, the Pop GTK theme puts a modern spin on the Ubuntu brown and orange colour scheme (which also happen to be the colours used in the System76 logo).

=> ↺ 2017 will be the year of the Linux desktop… for GNOME on Ubuntu

• A few weeks ago, Mark Shuttleworth, now CEO of Canonical, announced that the Unity desktop shell would be abandoned in favour of GNOME. While we were told that GNOME would be used by Ubuntu 18.04, we weren’t sure whether it’d be included in Ubuntu 17.10, the next release. Following a meeting on IRC, we now know that GNOME will ship by default in the next release.

=> ↺ Ubuntu GNOME merged into mainline Ubuntu

• Ubuntu has been using the Unity environment developed by Caonical Ltd. since the netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.10, initially released on June 9, 2010. However, it has been decided that the Unity environment would no longer be the standard environment used for the popular GNU/Linux distro.

• In a blog post by Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, he says, “We are wrapping up an excellent quarter and an excellent year for the company, with performance in many teams and products that we can be proud of. As we head into the new fiscal year, it’s appropriate to reassess each of our initiatives. I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.”

=> ↺ 3 cool features in Ubuntu 17.04

• April showers bring May flowers, and fresh versions of Ubuntu too. Canonical’s latest official Ubuntu release—17.04—arrived this month after news of the death of Unity 8 and the return to the GNOME desktop in 2018. For now, Ubuntu is still shipping with its Unity desktop.

• I wrote earlier that most users who need stability and support over new features will probably want to stick with Ubuntu 16.04, which was released last April, until Ubuntu 18.04 arrives a year from now. However, there are a few small things in Ubuntu 17.04 that will appeal to users who are keen to get all the newest updates.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Raspberry WebKiosk 6.0 released

• Raspberry WebKiosk 6.0 has been released today with a complete update of its underlying operating system, from Raspbian Wheezy to Raspbian Jessie Lite (a Debian Jessie derived OS for the Raspberry Pi microcomputer).

• Raspberry WebKiosk is designed for the cheapest possible web kiosks and multi-user web workstations (think about using it in cafès, offices, schools, hotels, hospitals, libraries) with the Raspberry Pi base, where people can surf the web with a normal browser. It’s a port of the more powerful Instant WebKoisk system for PCs.

Phones

=> ↺ Project Halium Seeks A Unified Mobile GNU/Linux

• New forks of GNU/Linux come out all the time, but some, like the newly unveiled Project Halium, actively seek to unite a given landscape. In this case the mobile world. Rather than being yet another version of Linux on mobile devices, like SailfishOS or Ubuntu Touch, Project Halium’s goal is to create a base that anybody can work off of to integrate all sorts of Linux code into the Android stack smoothly. Ideally, Project Halium wants to not only build out a base framework that anybody can use to hook their Linux project into Android’s soft underbelly of code and run it on an Android device, but they want to be the de facto example of such, in much the same way that saying the word “Linux” out in public will make many people immediately think of Ubuntu.

=> ↺ Linux on Android smartphones: Project Halium wants your handset to run Ubuntu, Sailfish

• A group of developers hope to unite several Linux-based mobile distributions with a common Android base that will make it easier for them to run on Android hardware.

• The developers are aiming to create a better way for non-Android GNU/Linux distributions like Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS, Plasma Mobile, and others to make progress in the context of porting an OS to Android hardware.

Tizen

=> ↺ Smartphone App: Jio TV app now available on Tizen store for Samsung Z2

=> ↺ Smartphone App: Another good photo editor app: Beautica added to Tizen Store

Android

=> ↺ Linux CLI Launcher Transforms Your Home Screen Into A Terminal

• The Google Play Store features many launchers of all kinds ready to make your life easier. Whether it’s Nova Launcher, Apex Launcher, or Evie Launcher, there are a ton of third-party launchers out there for you to try out. At the base level, though, these launchers start out thematically quite similar although you can customize them with beautiful icon packs, themes, widgets, and more. As you might know, Android is built on the Linux kernel. Thus it has a hidden shell functionality which fans of GNU/Linux might be pleased to try. A full Linux terminal environment on an Android phone? That sure sounds interesting. But what if you could replace your stock launcher with a launcher that mimics the Linux terminal interface? Luckily, you can thanks to the Linux CLI Launcher.

=> ↺ ZTE announces the MAX XL with a 6-inch display and Android 7.1.1

• You can still spend nearly $1000 on a phone if you want, but there are vastly cheaper options that aren’t terrible. ZTE has been making great strides in the “cheap but not bad” space lately, and it has just announced a new device called the MAX XL. As the name suggests, it’s a big phone. The price isn’t big, though. This device is live on Boost Mobile today for $129.99, and it’s on sale for $28 off.

=> ↺ NuAns tries its customizable Neo phone again, this time with Android

=> ↺ Over Two Million Users Infected With New Android Adware

=> ↺ Zimperium Acquisition Program Publishes Exploits for Patched Android Bugs

=> ↺ Kodi 18 on Android TV will have voice search and recommendations

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ 5 more open source companies to watch in 2017

• An exciting class of startups with a focus on enterprise IT are those built on open source foundations, in some cases commercializing and adding value to an already popular open source project.

• We recently highlighted 5 such open source-oriented companies, and below we introduce you to 5 more. Note that this list only contains companies that have announced funding over the past year or so, and isn’t intended to be an all-inclusive compilation. Without further ado…

Events

=> ↺ Nimble services, happier customers – how DBS Bank is transforming IT with DevOps and open source

• At M|17, MariaDB‘s first user conference, we heard plenty about the virtues of open source. The story of Singapore-based DBS Bank stood out, in part due to their scale. But I especially liked how they tied digital change/customer experience into their DevOps and microservices ambitions. Here’s what I learned during our sit down after the keynote.

=> ↺ Get your GNU on at the GNU Hackers’ Meeting in Hessen, Germany

• The GNU Hackers’ Meeting is a friendly, semi-formal forum to discuss technical, social, and organizational issues concerning free software and GNU. This is a great opportunity to meet GNU maintainers and active contributors. This year, accommodation and all meals are included in the cost of registration.

=> ↺ Upcoming FreeBSD Events

=> ↺ Linux Security and Isolation APIs course in Munich (17-19 July 2017)

• I’ve scheduled the first public instance of my “Linux Security and Isolation APIs” course to take place in Munich, Germany on 17-19 July 2017. (I’ve already run the course a few times very successfully in non-public settings.) This three-day course provides a deep understanding of the low-level Linux features (set-UID/set-GID programs, capabilities, namespaces, cgroups, and seccomp) used to build container, virtualization, and sandboxing technologies. The course format is a mixture of theory and practical.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Thunderbird now has some new themes inspired by the awesome mockups from Monterail

• I recently pointed out the mock-up Thunderbird design Monterail did and it turns out someone has actually made a pack of themes inspired by it.

=> ↺ That Slick Thunderbird Mockup? It’s Now a Real Theme

• A recent Thunderbird redesign mockup has now been made into a real working theme, and helps give the desktop e-mail client a modern look.

SaaS/Back End

=> ↺ Intel bets on AI, partners Preferred Networks for open source deep learning

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

=> ↺ Happy Document Freedom Day

• It is with great pleasure again that we are announcing Document Freedom Day celebration. As we mentioned we gave people 1 more month to prepare for the event and run it on Wednesday April 26th so it’s today!

• DFD is the international day to celebrate and raise awareness of Open Standards. Open Standards goes beyond essays and spreadsheets and covers all digital formats from artwork, sheet and recorded music, email, or statistics. They provide freedom from data lock-in and the subsequent supplier’s lock-in.

=> ↺ LibreOffice in The Matrix [m]

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

=> ↺ React to React

• The Additional Grant of Patent Rights is a patent license grant that includes certain termination criteria. These termination criteria are not entirely unprecedented when you look at the history of patent license provisions in OSI-approved licenses, but they are certainly broader than the termination criteria [or the equivalent] in several familiar modern licenses (the Apache License 2.0, EPL, MPL 2.0, and GPLv3).

=> ↺ BetConstruct declares the source code for its front-end as open source

• The project is distributed under MIT license.

Public Services/Government

=> ↺ Prototype of eParticipation portal shared as open source

• The EU’s Publication Office has just published the source code for a prototype of an eParticipation portal, allowing citizens to help draft EU legislative proposals. The code for the prototype is the result of a so-called pilot project, launched by the European Parliament in 2015. Such pilot projects are tacked onto the Parliaments’ approval of the annual budget for the European Commission.

=> ↺ Portugal to harmonise usability of govt portals

• All of the code, information and tools are made available for reuse.

Licensing/Legal

=> ↺ Why GPL Compliance Education Materials Should Be Free as in Freedom

• I am honored to be a co-author and editor-in-chief of the most comprehensive, detailed, and complete guide on matters related to compliance of copyleft software licenses such as the GPL. This book, Copyleft and the GNU General Public License: A Comprehensive Tutorial and Guide (which we often call the Copyleft Guide for short) is 155 pages filled with useful material to help everyone understand copyleft licenses for software, how they work, and how to comply with them properly. It is the only document to fully incorporate esoteric material such as the FSF’s famous GPLv3 rationale documents directly alongside practical advice, such as the pristine example, which is the only freely published compliance analysis of a real product on the market. The document explains in great detail how that product manufacturer made good choices to comply with the GPL. The reader learns by both real-world example as well as abstract explanation.

• However, the most important fact about the Copyleft Guide is not its useful and engaging content. More importantly, the license of this book gives freedom to its readers in the same way the license of the copylefted software does. Specifically, we chose the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA) for this work. We believe that not just software, but any generally useful technical information that teaches people should be freely sharable and modifiable by the general public.

=> ↺ JRC: ‘Releasing code without a licence hinders reuse’

• Projects that publish source code without a licence weaken the reusability of their code, warns Stefano Gentile, a copyright and trademark specialist working for the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). Currently just 20 % of all projects published on GitHub, one of the most popular source code sharing platforms, have selected a licence for their work – down from about 60% in 2008, Gentile said, quoting numbers published in 2015 by GitHub.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

=> ↺ Wikitribune: Wikipedia Co-founder’s Open-source News Site to Combat Fake News

• Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales (shown) is launching an innovative news website called Wikitribune to combat “fake news” by creating a partnership between professional journalists and a community of volunteer contributors. Readers will be able to suggest edits to the news aricles. This “open-source” model of news reporting borrows more than a little from the model of Wikipedia.

=> ↺ Is the MOST Initiative’s effort to reduce college textbook costs doomed to fail?

Programming/Development

=> ↺ RcppTOML 0.1.3

• A new bug fix release of RcppTOML arrived on CRAN today. Table arrays were (wrongly) not allowing for nesting; a simply recursion fix addresses this.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ OpenChain Specification 1.1 Makes Compliance Easier for Everyone in the Open Source Software Supply Chain

• The Linux Foundation today announced the OpenChain Specification 1.1 and an accompanying Online Self-Certification service. These allow organizations of every size to ensure consistent compliance management processes in the open source supply chain. The OpenChain Project is proud to welcome Siemens, Qualcomm, Pelagicore and Wind River as the first four organizations to self-certify to the OpenChain Specification 1.1.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales exits Guardian board over conflict of interest with Wikitribune news site

• Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, will leave the board of the Guardian newspaper after opting to launch his own rival news operation that will compete for staff, stories and donations.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ Sick children’s wellbeing ‘compromised’ by shortage of NHS staff

• ‘After seven years of Tory mismanagement our health services are dangerously understaffed,’ says shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth

=> ↺ Air Force snubs Michigan law on tainted well

• Oscoda area residents whose wells are affected by groundwater contamination from the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base have been urged by state and local public health officials to seek an alternative water supply. And a new Michigan law that took effect in January would make the U.S. Air Force responsible for covering the cost of those alternative water supplies.

• But Air Force officials will not comply with the new law, Public Act 545, said Paul Carroll, the Air Force’s environmental coordinator for Wurtsmith, at a public forum on the contamination issue in Oscoda on Tuesday.

=> ↺ US Government Grants Exclusive Licence On Zika Patent Over Objection Of Civil Society

• The United States Department of Defense has announced that it intends to grant Sanofi Pasteur, a French pharmaceutical corporation, exclusive rights to develop a vaccine for the Zika virus. The decision follows outcry from the public and civil society groups over concerns of affordability and accessibility in taking such a step.

• The drug candidate was originally developed at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research using public funds.

Security

=> ↺ Kali Linux improves penetration testing

• Penetration testing is an effective tool for companies of all sizes, across the public and private sector, to assess the security of their critical resources. However, the primary mistake businesses make when it comes to penetration testing, is the assumption that all penetration tests are the same.

=> ↺ Kali Linux 2017.1 Security OS Released With New Updates And Features

=> ↺ Chrome 58 ignores commonName in certificates

=> ↺ QUIC in the wild, for Google ad advantage.

• When we inspected web page traffic via chrome://net-internals, we discovered that QUIC requests were and still are being used for a majority of Google’s ad domains

=> ↺ Golang SSH Redux

• What they had was a library with an API prone to misuse. There was never a documentation flaw. The requirement for secure use was always documented.

=> ↺ Millions of Android phone users accidentally downloaded virus

=> ↺ Linux/Shishinga malware spotted burteforcing passwords

=> ↺ Linux kernel security gurus Grsecurity oust freeloaders from castle

• Linux users, the free lunch is over. Pennsylvania-based Open Source Security on Wednesday decided to stop making test patches of Grsecurity available for free.

• The software, a set of powerful Linux kernel security enhancements, includes features such as support for role-based access controls and chroot restrictions that harden Linux implementations.

• Two years ago, the Linux security outfit did the same for stable patches of Grsecurity.

=> ↺ [Older] Practical basics of reproducible builds 3

=> ↺ Microsoft Word flaw took so long to fix that hackers used it to send fraud software to millions of computers

• A flaw in Microsoft Word took the tech giant so long to fix that hackers were able to use it to send fraud software to millions of computers, it has been revealed.

• The security flaw, officially known as CVE-2017-0199, could allow a hacker to seize control of a personal computer with little trace, and was fixed on April 11 in Microsoft’s regular monthly security update – nine months after it was discovered.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Guernica massacre: Madrid removes facade that glorified Nazi role

• Eighty years after Nazi bombers devastated the Basque town of Guernica, inspiring Pablo Picasso’s famous painting, Madrid city council has removed a last, lingering trace of the most notorious atrocity of the Spanish civil war.

• The council announced on Wednesday that it had dismantled a mausoleum in La Almudena cemetery where seven pilots of the German Condor legion are buried.

• Adolf Hitler lent the Condor Legion, a unit of the German Luftwaffe, to Gen Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces during the civil war of 1936-39, to help them fight the republicans. The loan also allowed the Nazis to practise their blitzkrieg tactics, later used in the second world war.

• The 1937 air raid on the Basque market town lasted for four hours, killing hundreds of people and wounding hundreds more.

=> ↺ The Armenian genocide is still being denied: “This human tragedy has been allowed to be treated as a debate rather than actual history”

• In referencing “Schindler’s List,” Berlinger wasn’t being overly dramatic. He was talking about an actual event in history from the 1930s, when another Armenian genocide film, “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,” was in production but scrapped because Turkey pressured the U.S. State Department to lean on MGM to not make the movie. Berlinger (“Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” “Paradise Lost,” “Brother’s Keeper”), a nimble and revered documentarian, has managed to construct an incisive, emotional look at the genocide itself, as well as its representation, and lack thereof, in the movies.

=> ↺ Flashback! Questions from the Last Time America was Supposed to “Take Out” Assad

=> ↺ Do American Airports Suck? Yes, Yes They Do

• Traveling by air in America is one of the best ways to see the country, although it is not always the nicest view.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Public Records Sought on Trump Communications Over Renewable Energy Censorship

• The Center for Biological Diversity filed a Freedom of Information Act request Tuesday demanding records relating to the Trump administration’s attempts to stall renewable power growth to benefit energy companies reliant on coal and other fossil fuels.

• The filing requested communications between the Department of the Energy, Office of Management and Budget and fossil fuel representatives. In the request the Center demanded records of any directives and instructions to remove mentions of renewable energy from formal agency communications.

Finance

=> ↺ They finally suspended operations

• Due to declining sales, limited resources available to design new products, and increased competition from Asia, Soekris Engineering, Inc. has suspended operations in the USA as of today.

=> ↺ Trump tells Mexico, Canada he won’t terminate NAFTA ‘at this time’

• “President Trump agreed not to terminate NAFTA at this time and the leaders agreed to proceed swiftly, according to their required internal procedures, to enable the renegotiation of the NAFTA deal to the benefit of all three countries,” according to a White House account of the calls.

=> ↺ Britain could lose 4,000 Deutsche Bank jobs over Brexit

• Deutsche Bank could move up to 4,000 jobs away from Britain, the group’s compliance chief said Wednesday (26 April), as Germany’s largest lender struggles to work out the consequences of Brexit.

• “For front office people who want to deal with a European Union client, you need to be based in continental Europe,” Deutsche Bank chief regulatory officer Sylvie Matherat told a Frankfurt banking conference.

• That requirement could see some 2,000 of Deutsche’s 9,000 posts in the UK moved.

=> ↺ Brexit puts security cooperation at risk

• Brussels is calling Theresa May’s bluff on security.

• In her Article 50 letter, the British prime minister warned European leaders that cooperation in the “fight against crime and terrorism” would be at risk if the two sides failed to reach a deal on Brexit.

=> ↺ New York Landlords Exploit Loophole to Hike Rents Despite Freeze

• In October 2015, Scherrie and Langston Donaldson received a cryptic notice from their landlord, labeled “preferential rent credit removal.” At first glance, they weren’t sure what to make of it.

• “As you know, we have been billing you at a preferential rent for your 2013-2015 lease,” it read. “Unfortunately, at this time we are no longer able to extend this courtesy to you.”

• Then Scherrie Donaldson realized what it would mean for her family: A $571 increase in the monthly rent. That would upend the budget of the Brooklyn couple, who had recently welcomed a baby boy into their family. They could no longer afford family vacations, she thought, and summer music lessons for her two older sons, Tristan and Avery, were in jeopardy. They might even have to leave the neighborhood they loved.

• Suddenly, the middle school special education teacher felt priced out of the city that she and her husband — an ironworker who helped rebuild the transit hub at the World Trade Center — have called home for more than 25 years.

• “It makes it just harder to stay in the city,” she said. “Harder to be a New Yorker … just feel like we just keep getting pushed and pushed.”

=> ↺ Lawmakers Seek Stronger Monitoring of Racial Disparities in Car Insurance Premiums

• Six Democratic members of Congress are urging Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to appoint a director for the Federal Insurance Office, which monitors access of minority and low-income Americans to affordable insurance, and has been targeted for elimination by House Republicans.

• Their letter to Mnuchin was spurred by an April 5 article, co-published by ProPublica and Consumer Reports, that documented that residents of minority neighborhoods in four states frequently pay higher car insurance premiums than residents of other areas that are similarly risky. Our investigation has also prompted two Illinois lawmakers and a California consumer group to call for strengthening protections against redlining in auto insurance.

=> ↺ TRIPS Flexibilities Under Threat From Investment Disputes: A Closer Look At Canada’s “Win” Against Eli Lilly

• In the first known investment dispute regarding patents, Eli Lilly & Co v. Canada, Canada recently prevailed over the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. Although Canada won in a unanimous decision, the ruling does not, however, guarantee domestic discretion going forward, contrary to the suggestion of some.

• [...]

• Although investment disputes challenging domestic decisions on IP consistent with TRIPS are still in their infancy, these initial state “wins” should not lull countries or policy makers into complacency. Although no state has yet had to pay money for TRIPS-consistent action, the decisions to date have nonetheless left the door open to this possibility in the future. These initial disputes should be viewed as a troubling regime shift that has a serious chilling effect on proper use of TRIPS flexibility. Accordingly, greater attention to this threat and how to combat it are needed.

=> ↺ ​Trump tax plan could save him millions under guise of helping small businesses

• A tax plan released by the White House on Wednesday could deliver many millions of dollars annually in tax savings to Donald Trump personally under the guise of helping small businesses, multiple tax experts have told the Guardian.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Can Facebook Fix Its Own Worst Bug?

• With its huge reach, Facebook has begun to act as the great disseminator of the larger cloud of misinformation and half-truths swirling about the rest of media. It sucks up lies from cable news and Twitter, then precisely targets each lie to the partisan bubble most receptive to it.

=> ↺ Facebook needs to face up to the new political reality

• The big question in any general election is which party will win. Not this time: it’s going to be the Tories. Any other outcome will be be the result of events so unpredictable that they aren’t worth speculating about. What is contested in this election is the political landscape in which the next one will take place, in which one prize that might be up for grabs is getting Facebook to do something about disclosing political ad spending (see wise @steiny on the same cause here).

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Vietnam complained of “toxic” anti-government Facebook content, now says Facebook has committed to help censor

• Vietnam’s government today said Facebook has promised to work with the communist nation to prevent the publication and distribution of banned online content.

=> ↺ Vietnam says Facebook commits to preventing offensive content

• Within Vietnam itself, YouTube and Facebook account for two-thirds of digital media market share in Vietnam, according to local agency Isobar Vietnam.

=> ↺ ‘Downward spiral’: UK slips to 40th place in press freedom rankings

• Journalists in the UK are less free to hold power to account than those working in South Africa, Chile or Lithuania, according to an index of press freedom around the world.

• Laws permitting generalised surveillance, as well as a proposal for a new espionage act that could criminalise journalists and whistleblowers as spies, were cited by Reporters Without Borders as it knocked the UK down two places from last year, to 40th out of 180 countries in its World Press Freedom Index.

• In the past five years, the UK has slipped 12 places down the index. Rebecca Vincent, RSF’s UK bureau director, said this year’s ranking would have been worse were it not for a general decline in press freedom around the world, making journalists in Britain comparatively better off than those in countries such as Turkey and Syria.

=> ↺ Obama’s crackdown on the media, crushing campus censorship & other comments

• Two high-profile New York Times reporters say don’t be so quick to criticize President Trump’s attitude toward the news media — especially when compared with that of his predecessor. In a recent appearance at Duke University, the school paper Chronicle reports, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman said Trump’s “fake news” attacks are nothing like the “chilling effect” of President Barack Obama’s “crackdown” on journalists and leakers. Apuzzo — who, like Goldman, had his phone records seized — called the Obama administration the “most oppressive” for journalists since Richard Nixon. At least Trump, unlike Team Obama, is “not calling us criminals,” noted Apuzzo, adding: “I’ll take the guy saying we’re fake news.”

=> ↺ European Court Asked To Overturn Ruling Saying Linking To Defamatory Content Is Defamatory

• It seems like common sense. The person legally responsible for defamatory statements is the person making the defamatory statements. But since pursuing that person often seems too difficult, legislators, courts, and disingenuous plaintiffs have engaged in mental/litigious gymnastics in hopes of finding third parties responsible for the statements of others.

• We’ve seen a long list of lawsuits filed against service providers in response to defamatory content hosted on their platforms. We’ve seen courts — mostly outside of the US — convert third-party platforms into “publishers” for the sake of delisting/content removal court orders. We’ve seen numerous attempts to avoid Section 230 defenses by recrafting defamation lawsuits as trademark infringement litigation.

• We’ve even seen some bad lawmaking, attempting to strip away protections for service providers to make it easier to hold them responsible for the actions of others.

=> ↺ Guy Fined $500 For Criticizing Government Without A Permit Sues Oregon Licensing Board

• Government entities tend to dislike people who criticize red light cameras. There’s little evidence supporting the theory they make driving safer, but there’s plenty of data out there showing just how profitable they can be, especially with a little fine tuning.

• When someone takes it upon themselves to dig into traffic cameras, they make few friends at city hall. Oregon resident Mats Jarlstrom’s interest in red light cameras was piqued like so many others: by receiving a ticket. Unlike some others, Jarlstrom has a background in electronic engineering and the inherent inquisitiveness to follow through on a thorough examination of yellow light timing. He did some math and came to the conclusion the timing was off.

=> ↺ India blocks social media in Kashmir in wake of abuse videos

=> ↺ Telecom struggles to block 22 social media banned in Kashmir

=> ↺ Jammu and Kashmir state government censors 22 social media services

=> ↺ WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter in List of Apps Banned in Jammu and Kashmir for One Month

=> ↺ Social media banned in Jammu and Kashmir following student unrest

=> ↺ J&K government bans social media in Valley

=> ↺ Internet banned in Kashmir

=> ↺ Social media banned in Kashmir amid violent unrest

=> ↺ India bans Facebook, Twitter, other social media in Kashmir

=> ↺ CDT Bookshelf: JFK Miller on “Trickle-down Censorship”

=> ↺ In the age of the internet, censorship has acquired a new face

=> ↺ Banning social media will bring neither peace nor order: CPJ

=> ↺ CPJ’s Attacks on the Press Anthology Describes the Challenges Journalism Faces in 2017

• But threats to press freedom are not just coming from repressive governments. One story recounts a journalist’s experience dealing with death threats while covering terrorism in West Africa. Another tells the story of how journalists in Mexico live in constant fear that their work chronicling the drug cartels will end in violence – or worse.

=> ↺ Myanmar jumps 12 spots on World Press Freedom Index despite worsening censorship

• Although Myanmar is labelled as a ‘difficult situation’ on RSF’s Freedom of the Press map, its situation is less serious than those of neighboring Vietnam (175), China (176), and Laos (170). And despite climbing up the list, Myanmar’s global score actually dropped by 3.66. Norway came in first overall with a global score of 7.6; North Korea took home last place.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Who Is Publishing NSA and CIA Secrets, and Why?

• There’s something going on inside the intelligence communities in at least two countries, and we have no idea what it is.

• Consider these three data points. One: someone, probably a country’s intelligence organization, is dumping massive amounts of cyberattack tools belonging to the NSA onto the Internet. Two: someone else, or maybe the same someone, is doing the same thing to the CIA.

• Three: in March, NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett described how the NSA penetrated the computer networks of a Russian intelligence agency and was able to monitor them as they attacked the U.S. State Department in 2014. Even more explicitly, a U.S. ally—my guess is the U.K.—was not only hacking the Russian intelligence agency’s computers, but also the surveillance cameras inside their building. “They [the U.S. ally] monitored the [Russian] hackers as they maneuvered inside the U.S. systems and as they walked in and out of the workspace, and were able to see faces, the officials said.”

=> ↺ Another NSL Gag Order Successfully Challenged In Court

• Another National Security Letter is on its way to being published. There’s no way of telling when it will arrive, but it will be sooner than the government’s clear preference: never.

• Adobe is the unlikely recipient of the NSL and accompanying gag order. The decision in a recently unsealed case says indefinite gag orders aren’t Constitutional, which is good news for the recipients of the thousands of NSLs the FBI issues every year.

=> ↺ NSA blimp spied on U.S. citizens

=> ↺ Bose Lawsuit For Collecting Headphone Data Is Flimsy, But Highlights Continued Lack Of Real Transparency

• To be clear, the complaint, filed last week by Bose customer Kyle Zak in federal court in Chicago, seems more than a little thin. The suit appears to piggyback on growing concern about the wave of internet of things devices (from televisions to smart dildos) that increasingly use internet connectivity to hoover up as much as possible about consumers. Often, this data is collected and transferred unencrypted to the cloud, then disseminated to any number of partner companies without adequate disclosure.

=> ↺ In China, Daydreaming Students Are Caught on Camera

• Some experts warn that live-streaming in schools will make Chinese youth, already accustomed to the nation’s extensive internet censorship and use of outdoor security cameras, even more sensitive to surveillance.

=> ↺ British Cops Will Scan Every Fan’s Face at the Champions League Final

• South Wales Police is piloting facial recognition at one of Europe’s biggest sporting events.

• When thousands of football fans pour into Cardiff’s Principality Stadium on June 3 to watch the final match of the UEFA Champions League, few will be aware that their faces will have already been scanned, processed, and compared to a police database of some 500,000 “persons of interest”.

=> ↺ Police will scan every fan’s face at the Champions League final

• If you’re headed to the UEFA Champions League final in Cardiff on June 3rd, you might just be part of a massive experiment in security — and a privacy uproar. South Wales Police are conducting a face recognition trial that could scan every one of the 170,000 visitors expected to show up in the city for the match, whether or not they’re heading to the stadium. Cameras around both the stadium and Cardiff’s main train station will compare faces against a police database of 500,000 people of interest. If there’s a match, police will get a heads-up that could help them stop a terrorist or frequent hooligan.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ US government appeals against Amos Yee’s asylum; final verdict could take months

=> ↺ U.S. government challenges asylum granted to teen blogger Amos Yee

=> ↺ Amos Yee faces more time in detention as US government appeals asylum decision

=> ↺ Amos Yee still in jail in the US & probably will be for months to come

=> ↺ US government appeals Singapore teen blogger’s asylum case

=> ↺ Pupil: I cannot stand it anymore

=> ↺ Hasina slams critics of bid to remove statue from Supreme Court premises

• Sheikh Hasina has been facing criticism since Apr 11, when she concurred with the demand by radical Islamists that the statue should be removed. She expressed her opinion at a meeting with Qawmi madrasa representatives.

=> ↺ Islam’s Covergirls

• In this case it is plain that the face of intolerance puts many women in unattractive clothing they would not freely choose to wear. We know this by applying self-reflection. We personally, would find it intolerable to dress from head to toe in black serge (or in any other colour) when walking on a hot Australian summer’s day. We also know this from looking at pictures of the way women chose to dress in Egypt, or in Afghanistan, or in Iran in earlier times when free of Islamic religious strictures. Empathy and common observation tells the tale. (editor: the picture below is of Cairo University students in 1978. Not a hijab to be seen.)

=> ↺ Man ‘sentenced to death for atheism’ in Saudi Arabia

• He was arrested on charges of atheism and blasphemy and held in prison before being convicted by a local court and sentenced to death in February 2015.

• [...] a 2014 string of royal decrees under the late King Abdullah re-defined atheists as terrorists, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

=> ↺ Allah is not real, Yaweh, Amadioha, we made all these gods up – Nigerian man

• Mubarak Bala, a self-declared atheist, in a series of Facebook posts discovered by NAIJ.com, said all gods are imagined, and that Allah was an imagination of the prophet of Islam, Muhammed.

• He argued that the idea of Allah was sold to the Arabs by Muhammed and that those who disagreed with prophet were killed during his time to hide the truth.

=> ↺ Threats over gay crackdown coverage force Russian journalist into hiding

• A prominent Russian reporter who revealed horrific details of a crackdown on gay men in Chechnya has told CNN she is in hiding after receiving death threats.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ AT&T Unveils A Fake 5G Network In The Hopes You’ll Ignore T-Mobile Is Kicking Its Ass

• To be clear: fifth generation (5G) wireless should be really impressive when it actually arrives, providing significantly faster mobile broadband speeds at lower latencies. The catch: the 5G standard hasn’t even been created yet, and any real deployment of the ultra-fast technology isn’t expected to even seriously begin until 2020. That hasn’t stopped wireless carrier and hardware vendor marketing departments, which have been hyping the technology as the second coming for several years now. Sure, these salesmen don’t know what 5G really even is yet, but they’re pretty sure it’s going to fix everything.

=> ↺ Internet providers are thrilled with the FCC’s plan for weaker regulations

• Instead of classifying internet providers as “common carriers” under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, they’ll instead be classified as “information services” under Title I. That’ll subject them to much more lenient oversight — and naturally, internet providers are happy to hear it.

=> ↺ The fight for net neutrality is officially back on

• In its first wave of propaganda, the FCC says that its proposal to roll back internet regulation will “Restore Internet Freedom for all Americans” — a mendacious slogan on the level of the “Patriot Act,” or the “World’s Greatest Healthcare Plan.” Like the first fight for net neutrality, this one is going to be about words and what they mean. For instance: “internet freedom.”

=> ↺ Ajit Pai announces plan to eliminate Title II net neutrality rules

• Vote to begin net neutrality rollback scheduled for May 18.

=> ↺ FCC announces plan to reverse Title II net neutrality

• His proposal will do three things: first, it’ll reclassify internet providers as Title I information services; second, it’ll prevent the FCC from adapting any net neutrality rules to practices that internet providers haven’t thought up yet; and third, it’ll open questions about what to do with several key net neutrality rules — like no blocking or throttling of apps and websites — that were implemented in 2015.

• [...]

• It’ll be voted on by the FCC at a meeting on May 18th. From there, months of debate will follow as the item is opened up for public comment. The commission will then revise its rules based on the feedback it receives before taking a final vote to enact them.

=> ↺ The FCC just released a plan to undo its own net neutrality rules

• Tech companies nationwide have urged the FCC to keep the rules in place. Etsy, Vimeo, the start-up incubator Y Combinator and 800 other start-up firms sent a letter to Pai on Wednesday arguing that weakening the net neutrality rules would allow ISPs to “impede traffic from our services to favor their own services or established competitors.” And the Internet Association, a major trade group representing Google, Facebook, Netflix and others, said repealing the common-carrier classification would result in “a worse Internet for consumers.”

=> ↺ FCC head unveils plan to roll back net neutrality

• During a speech at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., Pai said he plans to hand regulatory jurisdiction of broadband providers back to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), an agency that critics argue is less prepared to handle them.

=> ↺ Trump’s FCC Has Begun Its Attack on Net Neutrality

• No act of the recklessly authoritarian Trump administration poses a greater threat to the democratic discourse than the now-announced plan to gut net-neutrality rules. With newspapers dying, radio syndicated, broadcast television commercialized beyond relevance, and cable television mired in scandal and dead-end punditry, the Internet is the essential tool for the communication of ideas and the mobilization of those who choose to resist the autocratic impulses of Trump and his crony-capitalist cabal.

=> ↺ FCC Chief Sparks Clash With Call to Repeal Net Neutrality

• The rules, passed with only Democratic votes at the FCC in 2015, forbid broadband providers from blocking or slowing web traffic, or from charging higher fees in return for quicker passage over their networks.

=> ↺ [Old] ‘Cable Company F*ckery’: John Oliver Explains Net Neutrality

• “They should call it cable company fuckery,” Oliver said.

=> ↺ FCC Boss Unveils Ingenious Plan To Replace Net Neutrality Rules With Fluff & Nonsense

• FCC boss Ajit Pai has made no secret of his disdain for net neutrality. Or, for that matter, his general disregard for the consumer-protection authority granted the agency he’s supposed to be in charge of. Pai had already stated that his “solution” — to his perceived injustice that is net neutrality — is to replace the government’s existing, hard net neutrality rules with “voluntary commitments” by the likes of AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. From there, he hopes to leave any remaining regulatory enforcement to the under-funded and over-extended FTC (we’ve explained why this is a notably bad idea here).

• Pai clarified his plans a little during a speech today in Washington, DC at an event hosted by FreedomWorks (which, not coincidentally, takes funding from the giant ISPs Pai is clearly eager to help). According to Pai, the FCC will issue a Notice of Proposed Rule Making tomorrow to begin the process of rolling back Title II and killing net neutrality. The FCC will then vote on the proposal on May 18, according to the agency head. That means there will be a full public comment period (that’s where you come in) ahead of a broader vote to kill the rules later this year.

Intellectual Monopolies

=> ↺ For World ‘Intellectual Property’ Day, A Reading From Thomas Macaulay

• As we mentioned recently, today is “World Intellectual Property Day,” an event put together by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to promote ever greater protectionism and mercantilism in favor of copyright holders and patent holders, while ignoring any impact on the public of those things. It’s a fairly disgusting distortion of the claimed intent of intellectual property, which is often promoted for the claimed benefits it brings to the public, but extreme supporters, such as WIPO, are never willing to actually weigh out the pros and cons of copyrights and patents, and how over-protection and over-enforcement can cause serious problems for the public, innovators and creators.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Pirate Site Blockades Violate Free Speech, Mexico’s Supreme Court Rules

• Broad pirate sites blockades are disproportional, Mexico’s Supreme Court of Justice has ruled. The Government can’t order ISPs to block websites that link to copyright-infringing material because that would also restrict access to legitimate content and violate the public’s freedom of expression. The ruling is a win for local ISP Alestra, which successfully protested the Government’s blocking efforts.

=> ↺ House Votes Overwhelmingly To Make The Copyright Office More Political & To Delay Modernization

• This isn’t a huge surprise, but unfortunately, today — after a mostly ridiculous “debate” on the House floor full of claptrap and bullshit about how important copyright is to “protecting jobs” (despite this bill having nothing to do with any of that) — the House voted 378 to 48 to approve a bill that makes the head of the Copyright Office, the Copyright Register, a Presidential appointment rather than an appointment by the Library of Congress, as it’s been throughout the entire history of the Copyright Office. As we pointed out just yesterday, Congress appears to be rushing this through for no clear reason. It held no hearings on the issue (other than the fact that the current Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, was getting ready to appoint her own Copyright Register).

=> ↺ US House of Representatives approves register of copyrights selection bill

• The House of Representatives has approved by a vote of 378-48 the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act, which would make changes to the selection process for the head of the Copyright Office

=> ↺ Big content cheers as Congress votes on changes to US Copyright Office

• Copyright Office will be split off from Librarian of Congress, an Obama appointee.

• The US House of Representatives will vote today on a bill that will make the US Register of Copyrights a presidential appointment, confirmed by the US Senate.

=> ↺ Megaupload User Asks Appeals Court to Help Get His Files Back

• Millions of users lost access to their personal files when Megaupload was raided, and after more than half a decade not much has changed. Former Megaupload user Kyle Goodwin has been trying to get his files back for years. This week he urged the Appeals Court to intervene, before it’s too late

=> ↺ Selling Piracy-Configured Media Players is Illegal, EU Court Rules

• Selling devices pre-configured to obtain copyright-infringing content is illegal, the European Court of Justice effectively ruled today. The decision, which evolved from a case involving anti-piracy group BREIN and a shop that sold piracy-configured media players, will have far-reaching consequences across the EU, particularly for those selling piracy-enabled Kodi setups.

=> ↺ Lack of trust in Internet privacy deters online shoppers

• Internet users in many countries, including Australia, are increasingly concerned about their online privacy, and 49% say lack of trust is the main reason for not shopping online, according to a new global survey.

=> ↺ [Older] Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria

• You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still in print you’d have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the great national libraries of Europe—would have been available for free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library that wanted one.

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