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● 06.11.16

● Links 11/6/2016: Wine 1.9.12, PHP 7.1 Alpha

Posted in News Roundup at 9:54 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

=> ↺ PC sales are falling faster than expected and it’s all Windows 10′s fault

• PC SALES are declining faster than first thought and Microsoft’s controversial Windows 10 free upgrade programme is to blame.

• That’s according to forecasts by analyst outfit IDC, which claims that PC shipments will fall by 7.3 per cent year on year, around with growth in the market now forecast at two per cent below its earlier predictions for 2016.

=> ↺ {Older] Free Windows 10 upgrade hurt 2015 PC sales as shipments fall under 300 million

• PC sales fell by as much as 10 percent in 2015 compared with 2014 as vendors such as HP, Dell, Lenovo and Acer saw shipments decline, according to similar data from analyst houses IDC and Gartner.

• In particular, the launch of Windows 10 did not provide the boost to sales that had been hoped, in part because the free upgrade offered to Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 device owners meant that many did not need to buy a new machine.

• Gartner estimated that worldwide PC shipments in 2015 totalled 288 million, an eight percent decline on the 313 million shipped in 2014.

Server

=> ↺ High-Availability Allows Business Continuity, Says Dietmar Maurer, Proxmox CTO

• Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH — based in Vienna, Austria — offers enterprise server virtualization solutions, including the open source project Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), which combines container-based virtualization and KVM/QEMU on one web-based management interface. The company was founded in 2005 by brothers Martin and Dietmar Maurer. In 2014, the company joined the Linux Foundation to deepen its commitment to virtualization technologies such as KVM.

• In this exclusive interview, Dietmar Maurer, CTO of Proxmox, talks about how virtualization is driving the modern IT infrastructure and how high availability (HA) directly affects business operations.

=> ↺ How The Symbiotic Relationship Between Persistent Storage And Containers Can Benefit Developers

• Containers package application code along with all of the libraries and other resources they require to run. This removes most requirements from the host system, making it far easier to move the container from place to place, from host to host, as necessary. Think of shipping containers loaded in the warehouse rather than the dock, each specially packaged for the contents — from Waterford crystal to lawn mowers — and yet shipped in standardized containers that can be loaded onto a truck, ship, or perhaps even a plane.

=> ↺ Sysadmin Skills and University Degrees

• Covering the basic coding skills takes a lot of time. I don’t think we can reasonably expect a CS degree to cover all that and also give good coverage to sysadmin work. While some basic sysadmin skills are needed by every programmer I think we need to have separate majors for people who want a career in system administration.

=> ↺ What is the Future of the PaaS Term?

• Since those first tentative releases in early 2007, PaaS has become more complicated to explain, both because the category itself has expanded its ambitions and because other, competitive layers of abstraction have emerged.

=> ↺ HPE Wants Open Source Devs to Kick The Machine Into Gear

=> ↺ Pivotal Cloud Foundry Is Not Just for New Apps Anymore

• Pivotal, the EMC-VMware spinoff that promises businesses a modern way to build and deploy software, has undergone a subtle but important messaging shift in the last few months.

=> ↺ Blockchain as a Service: The New Weapon in the Cloud Wars?

• The cloud wars rage on. The room is full of 800lb gorillas that have been battling over market share and supremacy for several years now. You know who the key players are—Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM—all still standing. Three years ago, Gartner described the market as ‘still evolving and maturing’. However, last year, they described the market as ‘in a state of upheaval’ with many providers shifting their strategies as they struggle to obtain market share.

Kernel Space

Benchmarks

=> ↺ Steam Client Stable vs. Beta Tests With Vulkan On AMDGPU-PRO

• Here’s the impact of benchmarking Dota 2 with Vulkan using the stable Steam client versus the Steam client beta.

• The Steam client beta a while back introduced some Steam overlay fixes explicitly for Vulkan. It turns out that these fixes currently in the Steam beta are very important for better AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan performance.

Applications

=> ↺ Grilo 0.3

• The major release happened almost 6 months ago and it has brought some API/ABI changes being my favourite the merge of all Grilo media types into GrlMedia (#755551); This introduces support from Grilo to different types of media!

Proprietary

=> ↺ Microstar Laboratories, Inc.’s Accel64 for Linux

• Microstar Laboratories, Inc., develops Data Acquisition Processor (DAP) systems for PC-based high-performance multichannel measurement applications. Microstar observes that GNU/Linux distributions generally presume that if you have 64-bit hardware and a 64-bit operating system, the applications will use compatible 64-bit development tools and drivers, leaving support for 32-bit applications incomplete. This can present problems for vetted 32-bit applications, particularly those dependent on kernel extensions.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Stream Audio from Your Linux PC to Android

=> ↺ Module filtering and depmod

=> ↺ check-pylint: mini tool for running pylint anywhere

=> ↺ It’s all relative

• Overall, my main point is although most modern developers know how to deal with Uniode pain, I think there is a more general lesson to learn — namely, you should always know what data you have, and always remember what it is. Understand assumptions as early as you can, and always store them with the data.

=> ↺ GLOBAL GIVEAWAY: 3 copies of Linux Server Security: Hack and Defend

=> ↺ Setting Up Real-Time Monitoring with ‘Ganglia’ for Grids and Clusters of Linux Servers

=> ↺ Lonely Cactus: Mapping xterm 256-color palette colors to X11 color names

=> ↺ Contributing to Prometheus: An Open Source Tutorial

=> ↺ Grab this “Linux All-in-One For Dummies” eBook (valued at $25.99) FREE for a limited time

=> ↺ Securing the server programs hiding in your Docker containers

=> ↺ An IRC quickstart guide

=> ↺ Create a bootable USB stick of Linux Mint 17.3 on a Windows 10 PC

=> ↺ Jenkins Management in Linux

=> ↺ Your First Steps w/ Phoenix and Elixir

=> ↺ Triple-boot Linux Mint 17.3, Ubuntu 16.04, Windows 10 on a PC with UEFI firmware

=> ↺ nbdkit ruby plugin

=> ↺ Simple remote mail queue monitoring

=> ↺ SAML Federated Auth Plugin

=> ↺ Process command line arguments in shell

=> ↺ File permissions, SUID, SGID, sticky bit, acl, nmcli, ssh, and nmtui tools for RHCSA

=> ↺ Big-O Quiz: Graph Theory

=> ↺ Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks for Text Classification

=> ↺ Ansible: Indenting in Templates

=> ↺ Typosquatting programming language package managers

=> ↺ Install and using netstat in Linux

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ Wine 1.9.12 Works On More Shader Model 4 Support

• Wine 1.9.12 is this latest development release and it features a bug-fix update to the Mono engine, initial version of a taskbar in the desktop mode, fixes for right-to-left languages in Uniscribed, continued work on more Shader Model 4 (SM4) support within Direct3D, better meta-file support in RichEdit, and various bug fixes. In total there are 20 known bug-fixes for this release.

=> ↺ Wine Announcement

• The Wine development release 1.9.12 is now available.

=> ↺ The Wine Development Release 1.9.12 Is Now Available

=> ↺ Wine 1.9.12 Fixes Splinter Cell: Blacklist Crashes, Improves Dragon Age 2 Demo

• Today, June 10, 2016, the Wine development team was proud to announce the release and immediate availability of yet another milestone towards the major Wine 2.0 software for running Windows apps and games on GNU/Linux distributions.

• Wine 1.9.12 is the twelve point release in the Wine 1.9 development series, coming two weeks after the launch of Wine 1.9.11 to improve the Shader Model 4 support in Direct3D, add an initial built of a taskbar in desktop mode, improve the metafile support in RichEdit, and fix right-to-left (RTL) languages in Uniscribe.

Games

=> ↺ Latest Steam Client Update Improves Steam Controller Support with DOOM 2016

• Today, June 10, 2016, Valve pushed a new major Steam Client update to the stable channels for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

=> ↺ Starbound developer comments on Linux support and their SteamOS icon

• Starbound is a really cool game that has supported Linux for quite some time, but they had their SteamOS icon removed on Steam some time ago. The developer is doing a reddit AMA so I decided to pop two questions that got nice answers.

=> ↺ Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut is having a free weekend and big sale on Steam

=> ↺ Things I feel Valve need to address to help SteamOS really be something fantastic

• I need to state for the record that I am actually feeling positive about it all. I’ve said time and time again SteamOS and Steam Machines would never be an overnight success, but Valve certainly aren’t helping matters. This is more of a “what I hope to see” and not a “we are all doomed” piece. If someone at Valve is reading, please take some notes. I want it to succeed, but Valve need to actually help it.

=> ↺ The Talos Principle updated, 32bit support for Vulkan and more Vulkan optimizations

• Croteam are beating The Talos Principle with a hammer to bring out another stable version and a beta, both have even more Vulkan goodies.

=> ↺ SteamWorld Heist launched with day-1 Linux support, some thoughts

• SteamWorld Heist is the follow up title to the indie hit SteamWorld Dig. A very different game, but it has the charm of the original and then some.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Q&A: Jonathan Riddell on the release of KDE neon User Edition 5.6

• I’m thrilled to be part of the first project to bring KDE’s flagship desktop software to our users direct from the KDE community. We had to fill in a few gaps in what Plasma offers its users to complete the experience but we did that by working in Plasma rather than doing our work separately. So we added bootup themes for Grub and Plymouth and we’ve worked to make sure the app store, Discover, covers the whole archive. But the most important feature is what Neon is intended to be, a Plasma 5.6 desktop as the developers intended it.

=> ↺ Krita 3.0: The Animation Release

• Krita 3.0 is finally here! Releasing round version-number releases is always exciting for any kind of project. It’s like the start of a new beginning! And 3.0 presents a lot of new beginnings to us as well: First, we have now our own repository, for our code, as well as our own wiki, for the manual! So we started this release with a Spring-cleaning: Porting to Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5, necessary to keep Krita easy to maintain in the future. But also cleaning out the code. We removed lines of dustbunny code and reorganized all the files. We also started work on making OSX a first-class platform for Krita, but though we’ve already done lots of work, that is still a work in progress.

=> ↺ Randa Meetings 2016 Fundraising Campaign

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Experiments in Meson

• Last GUADEC I attended Jussi Pakkanen’s talk about his build system, Meson; if you weren’t there, I strongly recommend you watch the recording. I left the talk impressed, and I wanted to give Meson a try. Cue 9 months later, and a really nice blog post from Nirbheek on how Centricular is porting GStreamer from autotools to Meson, and I decided to spend some evening/weekend time on learning Meson.

=> ↺ Wrapping up week 2

• Diana, Renata and Ciarrai have posted some great work on personas, and recently wrote some sample GNOME personas. They did a very complete job here. I feel like I have a good understanding of all these sample personas.

=> ↺ Let’s start week 3

• Having learned about personas and written some sample personas, the next step toward usability testing is to document the scenarios under which these personas typically use the program.

=> ↺ Preliminary Results – GNOME Foundation Board of Directors Elections 2016

• We’re happy to announce the preliminary results for this year’s Board of Directors elections:

• Allan Day Nuritzi Sanchez Cosimo Cecchi Shaun McCance Jim Hall Meg Ford Alexandre Franke

=> ↺ Rendering transit itineraries in Maps

• And lastly, I added some animations for options toolbar GtkRevealer and the stack switching between the itinerary overview and “diving in” on an itinerary.

Distributions

New Releases

=> ↺ Dix changements apportés par HandyLinux 2.5. Le septième va vous étonner !

• En fait, pour tout vous dire, j’ai longtemps hésité avec un autre titre : « HandyLinux 2.5 – Bob le bricoleur ».

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

=> ↺ PCLinuxOS 64 2016.06 KDE Is Coming with Latest KDE Plasma 5.6 and Looks Gorgeous

• We promised to offer you more details about upcoming PCLinuxOS editions, and today we have some great news for those who love the KDE Plasma desktop environment.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

=> ↺ openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the Weeks 2016/23

• Week 2016/23 will go into the history books as the week a Tumbleweed snapshot sneaked through all openQA tests, hiding a breakage most users experienced. I’d like to apologize for the troubles you had with the 20160605 snapshot. I will explain at the end of the post how this could happen and how we plan on preventing such issues in the future.

Slackware Family

=> ↺ 10th Anniversary of SBo Project

• I started to use Slackware in 2005 when i couldn’t get Mandriva 2005 working properly on my first laptop (Acer Travelmate). The installation went well, but it always ended in a kernel panic situation. I described them on my first post to this blog in 2006 (took me several months to decide to make a new blog that discuss my daily live with Slackware). I used Slackware 10.2 at that time.

=> ↺ Ten years of SlackBuilds.org

• Many of us will remember the time when a true Slacker did not bother herself with build scripts. The “configure && make && make install” mantra was at the forefront of everyone’s mind when it came to installing new software. Slackware made this possible. Unlike the other big distros, the Slackware package management did (and does!) not get in your way. If you want to compile your software by hand, bypassing the package management ‘database’ (which in Slackware is nothing more than a directory), then nothing or no one is stopping you.

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Setting up Vagrant for testing Ansible

• As part of my Google Summer of Code project proposal for the Fedora Project, I’ve spent a lot of time learning about the ins and outs of Ansible. Ansible is a handy task and configuration automation utility. In the Fedora Project, Ansible is used extensively in Fedora’s infrastructure. But if you’re first starting to learn Ansible, it might be tricky to test and play with it if you don’t have production or development servers you can use. This is where Vagrant comes in.

=> ↺ Some tools for working with Docker images

• For developing complex, real-world Docker images, there are a number of tools that can make life easier.

Finance

=> ↺ Stocks inside Investors Spotlight: ServiceSource International, Inc. (NASDAQ:SREV) , Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

=> ↺ Blue-chip stocks of the day: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

=> ↺ Red Hat Inc (RHT) Rating Reiterated by Oppenheimer

Fedora

=> ↺ Fedora 24 delay, and more openQA work

• You probably read a more sensationalized version of this on Phoronix already, but we had the Fedora 24 go/no-go meeting today and decided to slip for a week. The sole reason for this was this blocker bug, which is to do with booting Windows from the Fedora boot menu on a UEFI system, wasn’t fixed in time. If you don’t need to do that, you could frankly go ahead and grab a Fedora 24 nightly and use it. It’ll be fine. Go ahead, have a ball.

=> ↺ Contributing to Fedora Quality Assurance

• Every day, people from all over the world work together to create and support new releases of Fedora. One of the many important tasks is QA, or quality assurance. The QA sub-project in Fedora helps test software updates and new versions of Fedora. This includes testing in Rawhide, the “constantly changing” branch of Fedora development, as well as the alpha and beta releases.

=> ↺ Getting started with Fedora QA (Part 1)

• This article is a part of a series introducing what the Fedora Quality Assurance (QA) team is, what they do, and how you can get involved. If you’ve wanted to get involved with contributing to Fedora and testing is interesting to you, this series explains what it is and how you can get started.

=> ↺ Sources for Openly-Licensed Content

=> ↺ 32nd Chaos Communication Congress (32C3)

• At the end of last year Zacharias and Jacob joined me in representing Fedora at the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress in Hamurg, Germany. It was the first Fedora Event that I organized as Fedora Ambassador, therefore I was quite nervous. Until I arrived at the hotel it was unclear whether I will have any swag to decorate the assembly (there are no classic booths at the Congress), but I also packed some blue sweets, chocolate and Aachener Printen to lure visitors to our assembly. Luckily as you can see on the picture, additional swag also arrived in time.

=> ↺ python-bugzilla API changes in git

=> ↺ Fedora 24 to Ship with Linux Kernel 4.5.7, Will Be Rebased Later on Linux 4.6

• If you’re reading the news lately, you should be aware of the fact that the Fedora 24 Linux operating system has been delayed a fourth time, and it now looks like it hits the streets on June 21, 2016.

=> ↺ One week in

• I finished my first week on the Fedora Engineering team and it was wonderful. My first week happened to correspond with the FAD Cloud WG 2016 meeting in Raleigh, so I had a chance to meet a lot of Fedora people and spend late nights learning useful bash hacks.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Debian LTS

• May marked the thirteenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I spent the 17.25 hours working on these LTS things…

=> ↺ Reprotest has a preliminary CLI and configuration file handling

=> ↺ Reproducible builds: week 58 in Stretch cycle

=> ↺ Working to pass GSoC

• Habits are a powerful thing. Successful students have a habit of making at least one commit every day. The “C” in GSoC is for Code and commits are a good way to prove that coding is taking place.

=> ↺ Google Summer Of Code

• This the title of my project for this summer. It sounds good, but what am I going to really do? Well, since I’m a student at Université du Québec à Montréal, I have had the opportunity to meet with the company Savoir-Faire Linux in Montreal last year and that’s when I found out about their exciting project: Ring.

=> ↺ You’ll thank me later

• Consent culture was not part of my education, and it was something I’ve had to discover for myself. I assume that to be a common experience, and that pushing against boundaries does happen, even without malicious intentions, on a regular basis.

=> ↺ Week 1 on Reproducible Builds

• In this post I’m reviewing what I’ve done the last 6 days of Outreachy-funded reproducible builds work, outline what I plan to do the next two weeks, and speculate on long term goals. For those of you involved in the Debian reproducible builds project, please provide feedback about future plans and work!

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Canonical Patches Multiple Kernel Vulnerabilities in All Supported Ubuntu OSes

• Today, June 10, 2016, Canonical published multiple security notices to inform Ubuntu users about the availability of new kernel updates for all supported Ubuntu operating systems.

• It appears that every Ubuntu OS has received a kernel update today, including Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), as well as Ubuntu 15.10 for Raspberry Pi 2, and all the official derivatives, such as Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Server, and others.

=> ↺ Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Will Use Less RAM Than Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS, Here’s Why

• Thanks to Martin Wimpress, the leader of the Ubuntu MATE project, we told you a few days ago that the MATE 1.14.1 desktop environment finally landed for Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) users, which they can install right now.

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ Linux Mint 18 Beta Released And Running Without Any Issues

• Linux Mint is an open source, free and Ubuntu based Linux distribution. This is the distribution with which I started exploring Linux. It was the simplest one I could try out. Today it is simple plus more stable. Recently the Linux Mint team announced the next version beta release with some great changes and improvements. I have tried it out. In this article, Let’s see in brief what’s new in this beta release.

=> ↺ Here’s a sneak peek at what’s coming in the next Linux Mint

• The beta version of Linux Mint 18 ‘Sarah’ made its debut this week, and a final release won’t be far behind. Here’s a look at what’s coming to this popular free and open-source operating system.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Tiny Variscite DART joins growing list of Brillo-ready boards

• Variscite’s tiny, i.MX6 UL based DART-6UL module now supports Brillo, adding to the momentum growing behind Google’s Android-based, IoT-focused OS.

• Variscite announced its DART-6UL in December, as a follow-on to similarly tiny DART-MX6. The 50 x 25mm computer-on-module, which ships with Yocto Project Linux support, now supports Google’s lightweight, Android-based Brillo operating system as well. It’s one of several boards and embedded gizmos that support the open source, IoT-focused distro, with more on the way (see farther below).

=> ↺ Embedded syslog-ng: BMW i3 all-electric car

• A few weeks ago I ran into a blog post, sharing the good news: BMW is complying with the GPL. The blog post recounts how BMW shared the sources of the applications they use with the author of the blog on a DVD disk. Luckily, the author uploaded the content of the DVD to GitHub. Browsing the directories, I have found that syslog-ng is also included among the open source applications. It is version 3.4, so it is quite old, but still almost a decade newer than the version included on the Kindle (version 1.6).

=> ↺ IoT Technology: Devices

• An IoT system will typically be made of many devices – from dozens to millions – talking to a scaleable Back-end system. This Back-end system often runs in the Cloud. In some cases the IoT devices will talk directly to the Back-end systems. In other cases an additional system called an IoT Gateway will be placed between the devices and the Back-end systems. The IoT Gateway will typically talk to multiple local IoT devices, perform communications protocol conversions, perform local processing, and connect to the Back-end systems over a Ethernet, WiFi, or cellular modem link.

Phones

Android

=> ↺ The Reasons Why You Should Think Twice Before Buying OnePlus 3

• As we all know about OnePlus Started back in December 2013 in China. The company promised to provide Smartphone devices at very affordable prices. They did it. People liked the first device OnePlus One which was really an appreciable device. The company provided a very fast Snapdragon 801 processor with 3GB RAM and the main thing about the device was its battery which was whopping 3100mAh that could last approximately 2 days with a heavy use.

=> ↺ Microsoft Pushes for Android Apps on Windows 10 with New PC Notifications

=> ↺ Install Android TV on a Raspberry Pi and Sideload Apps

=> ↺ Android will use beacons to tell phone users about local apps

=> ↺ Triada trojan now redirecting Android users to fake, malicious URLs

=> ↺ Hands on: The OneCompute Moto Mod could turn your Android phone into your PC

• We just saw Motorola do something with Android that up to now, only Windows 10 has been able to do. Motorola’s OneCompute prototype Moto Mod takes the concept behind Windows 10′s Continuum feature—the ability to project a Windows phone onto a PC—and ports it to Android. Shown at parent company Lenovo’s Tech World exhibition Thursday in San Francisco, OneCompute could further blur the line between smartphone and desktop.

=> ↺ This Lenovo Crazy Tablet Folds In Half And Becomes A Smartphone

• At the Tech World 2016, Lenovo launched its 2016 flagship smartphone Moto Z. The same event also witnessed something other tech giants like Samsung and LG have been trying to achieve from a long time.

• At the event, Lenovo showed off a tablet that folds in half and becomes a smartphone. Demonstrated by YouTuber Meghan McCarthy, this flexible device has been under development for about a year.

=> ↺ How to Fix Your Privacy on Android

=> ↺ Google Launches Chrome 51 For Android: Buh-Bye For Good, Merged Tabs

=> ↺ Verizon Samsung Galaxy Note Edge Getting Android Marshmallow Software Update: Rolling Out Now

=> ↺ Qualcomm Hides Most Interesting Part Of Android-Powered Maserati In Center Console

=> ↺ World’s Thinnest Premium Smartphone Moto Z Launched, Has No 3.5MM Headphone Jack

=> ↺ Microsoft using Cortana Android notification sync to encourage developers to make UWP apps

=> ↺ Google Is Working On A Closed Source Version Of Android OS — Analyst

=> ↺ Apple to bring iMessage to Android at WWDC: report

=> ↺ 11 Android Hacks You Need to Know

=> ↺ Android malware embeds into browsers, intercepts and changes URLs

=> ↺ Don’t Upgrade Galaxy S5 to Android 6.0

=> ↺ Panasonic T30 and T44 Budget 3G-Enabled Android Smartphones Launched

• Panasonic on Friday unveiled two new budget smartphones, the T30 (seen above) and T44, in India. The company says that the new Panasonic smartphones are targeted at Tier II and Tier III markets in India.

• The Panasonic T30 has been priced at Rs. 3,290 while the Panasonic T44 comes with a price tag of Rs. 4,290. The Panasonic T44 will be available in Rose Gold, Champagne Gold, and Electric Blue colours. The Panasonic T30 will come in Metallic Silver, Metallic Gold, and Steel Grey colours. The company will be offering a free protective screen guard worth Rs. 299 with the new Panasonic T30 and T44.

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Open Source at SanDisk

• More than ever, traditional companies are embracing open source and find that it can get out of control if they don’t have a coordinated plan to manage it. And what do I mean by a traditional company? Companies that are pre-open source (or born before 1995). Also companies that are not in the hardware or software product space, but more in the services space – financial, telecom, healthcare etc.

=> ↺ SysArmy Joins OSI Affiliate Member Program

• New affiliate membership highlights diverse communities of interest supporting open source software beyond programmers.

• The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the steward of the Open Source Definition (or OSD), is announcing the affiliate membership of SysArmy. SysArmy, a community of system administrators and IT professionals from Argentina, was founded to provide, “support for those who give support.”

=> ↺ Open source will revolutionise the enterprise storage market

• Mobility, social media, the Internet of Things, Big Data and the cloud have caused data volumes to reach new heights. Businesses already have too much data to cope with, and it’s unlikely that the growth of ‘Big Data’ will slow down any time soon. Analyst firm IDC has said that the amount of data in the world doubles every two years, and that by 2020 there will be 44 trillion gigabytes of data stored. This data presents massive opportunities for businesses and IDC has also predicted that those organisations that analyse all relevant data and deliver actionable intelligence will see an additional $430bn (£300bn) in productivity gains by 2020 than those that don’t.

Web Browsers

Chrome

=> ↺ Chrome 52 Beta: CSS containment, simpler performance measurement, streamable responses from service workers, and more options for web push

=> ↺ Chrome 52 Beta Brings CSS Containment, Push Improvements

• More details on these tentative features for Chrome 52 can be found via the Chromium.org blog.

Mozilla

=> ↺ Mozilla’s new fund will prevent the next Heartbleed, Shellshock

=> ↺ Mozilla Splashes £350,000 On SOS Open Source Security Fund

=> ↺ Mozilla May Be Pleased to Pay For Your Open Source Security Audit

• You can always count on Mozilla for an interesting spin on open source. The company has launched the Secure Open Source (SOS) Fund to give open source developers the money to pay for hardened security audits of their software.

• Chris Riley, Head of Public Policy at Mozilla said in a post that the SOS fund, part of the Mozilla Open Source Support program (MOSS), will be targeted at developers who need muscular help in improving the security of their open source projects.

=> ↺ Making The Case For Using Rust At Low Levels On Linux Systems

• Linux kernel developer Andy Grover who is employed by Red Hat has written a lengthy blog post making the case for using the Rust programming language for low-level Linux.

• Grover believes Rust is “extremely well-suited for low level Linux systems user-space programming.” Grover believes that for work on new low-level utilities they would be better off written in Rust than the C programming language.

=> ↺ Why Rust for Low-level Linux programming?

• I think Rust is extremely well-suited for low level Linux systems userspace programming — daemons, services, command-line tools, that sort of thing.

• Low-level userspace code on Linux is almost universally written in C — until one gets to a certain point where it’s acceptable for Python to be used. Undoubtedly this springs from Linux’s GNU & Unix heritage, but there are also many recent and Linux-specific pieces that are written in C. I think Rust is a better choice for new projects, and here’s why.

=> ↺ Firefox 48 beta brings ‘largest change ever’ thanks to ‘Electrolysis’

• Firefox 48 entered beta this week, complete with a feature called “Electrolysis” that Mozilla bills as “the largest change we’ve ever made to Firefox.”

• Electrolysis will see Mozilla “split Firefox into a UI process and a content process.” Long-time Firefox developer Asa Dotzler explains that “Splitting UI from content means that when a web page is devouring your computer’s processor, your tabs and buttons and menus won’t lock up too.”

SaaS/Back End

=> ↺ Cloudera and Microsoft Partner to offer new Open Source Platform Called Livy

• Cloudera, is collaborating with Microsoft to build a new open source platform that will reduce the burden on application developers leveraging Spark.

=> ↺ Dispatches from Spark Summit: What You Need to Know

• As we’ve been reporting in conjunction with Spark Summit this week in San Francisco, the Big Data and Hadoop communities are becoming increasingly interested in Apache Spark, an open source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

=> ↺ Commercial apps with open source code are full of holes

=> ↺ Black Duck FUD

=> ↺ “Microsoft-connected Black Duck Software Created by Microsoft Marketing Man as an Anti-GPL Operation, Admits the Management”

=> ↺ Microsoft open sources part of the Edge browser’s WebGL renderer

=> ↺ Microsoft open sources part of its Edge WebGL renderer

=> ↺ Microsoft open sources some ‘critical’ Edge browser code

=> ↺ Microsoft releases transcompiler for WebGL in Edge browser as open source

=> ↺ Microsoft Open-Sources Another Feature of Its Windows 10 Browser

=> ↺ Microsoft Edge WebGL GLSL transpiler open-sourced by Microsoft

=> ↺ Microsoft is open-sourcing another piece of its Edge browser

=> ↺ Microsoft Edge WebGL Implementation Open-sourced

=> ↺ Microsoft WebGL Browser Technology Going Open Source

BSD

=> ↺ Is Microsoft publishing its own FreeBSD? Yes and no

=> ↺ FreeBSD vs. Linux: Which Open Source OS Does Microsoft Now Love More?

=> ↺ Microsoft supports FreeBSD, the world is in shock

=> ↺ Microsoft’s BSD, SourceForge’s Speed Test & More…

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

=> ↺ Intel & ME, and why we should get rid of ME

• If you did not know, built into all modern Intel-based platforms is a small, low-power computer subsystem called the Intel Management Engine (ME). It performs various tasks while the system is in sleep mode, during the boot process, and also when your system is running.

=> ↺ FSF Issues Statement Against Intel’s Management Engine (ME)

• The Free Software Foundation is a bit late to the party, but have finally come out publicly against Intel’s Management Engine (ME).

• For years already free hardware enthusiasts around the Coreboot/Libreboot scene have been upset over Intel’s blobbed-up ME code. The FSF on Friday wrote a public statement over the matter.

=> ↺ Windows 10 Killing PCs, FSF Wants to Kill ME

• Today in Linux news PCLinuxOS is said to be moving to Plasma 5.6.4 and Linux 4.5.6. Katherine Noyes posted a slideshow of Mint 18 features and Dominique Leuenberger share the latest in Tumbleweed developments. Eric Hameleers is celebrating 10 years of SlackBuilds.org and The Inquirer reported today that PC sales are falling fast – and it’s all Windows 10′s fault. Swapnil Bhartiya interviewed Jonathan Riddell and the Free Software Foundation posted that “we should get rid of ME.”

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

=> ↺ Open music: Bolero enters public domain, music encoding standards news

• This month I offer a bit of an open musical smorgasbord: a famous work of music that recently passed into the public domain; a new proprietary music-encoding standard that is gaining ground; three open audio players; and, of course, new music available for download from Linux-friendly vendors.

=> ↺ User-centric design key to improving e-government services

• Digitisation of a public service is not enough to increase the uptake or the quality of the service. User-centred design and design for all are considered most central to the improvement of e-government services. This theme was one of the main topics at the Digital and Open Government conference in Amsterdam last week.

=> ↺ Estonia builds a portal to co-create law

• The Estonian Cooperation Assembly, in collaboration with the Estonian Parliament (Riigikogu), has created a portal with the goal of helping citizens to co-create policies in the country. Called Rahvaalgatus.ee, the portal allows any citizen “to write proposals, hold discussions, compose and send digitally signed collective addresses to the Estonian Parliament (Riigikogu)”, the website said. Through this platform, citizens can also submit a proposal or an amendment to existing regulations.

=> ↺ eGovernment4EU online platform

=> ↺ Greece: a workshop to help citizens get involved 3rd NAP

• This workshop took place during the event “Open Government: Participate, Propose and Be Heard! Conformation of the Third National Action Plan 2016-2018”, which was co-organised by the Ministry of Interior and Administrative Reconstruction and Aristotle University.

Open Data

=> ↺ The OPEN Government Data Act Would, Uh, Open Government Data

• The U.S. government has made huge strides in its open data practices over the last few years. Since it launched in 2009, data.gov has become a crucial source for everything from climate and agricultural data to Department of Education records. For the most part, this new era of data disclosure didn’t happen because Congress passed new laws; it happened through presidential orders and procedural improvements in the Executive Branch.

• Unfortunately, it might be just as easy for future administrations to roll back the current open data program. That’s why EFF supports a bill that would mandate public access to government data and urges Congress to pass it.

=> ↺ Open data to ease cities’ growing pains

• The huge amount of data that cities gather can help solve problems related to considerable population growth, which puts pressure on a municipality’s economy and infrastructure. In emergency situations, for example, mobile applications can help citizens and first responders to plan their journey using alternative routes if necessary.

=> ↺ Open Data 2.0

• Although there are large differences between countries in terms of the maturity of their strategies and levels of implementation, open (government) data has really taken off. After the initial phase of publishing as many datasets possible, attention is now shifting to the actual use of open data and the value that can be created. These new perspectives on open data were one of the main topics at the Digital and Open Government conference in Amsterdam last week.

=> ↺ UK publishes its third Action Plan

• Civil society’s ideas and suggestions were collected by the UK Open Government Network (OGN), which brings together over 700 individual members from across the country. For example, OGN created an Open Government Manifesto early in 2015, gathering 28 proposals drafted from contributions from 250 members of civil society.

=> ↺ OOP: the right to be asked for the same data by government only once

• Public agencies should never ask a citizen or business for data that is already available at some other government agency. This so-called Once-Only Principle (OOP) was one of the main topics at the Digital and Open Government conference in Amsterdam last week.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ PHP 7.1.0 Alpha 1 Released

• The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.0 Alpha 1. This release marks the beginning of the first minor release in the PHP 7.x series. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.

=> ↺ PHP 7.1 Alpha Released With Void Return Type, Multi Catch

• The first alpha release was made available on Thursday for the upcoming PHP 7.1.

• PHP 7.1 is baking many features including the void return type, nullable types, generalized support of negative string offsets, class constant visibility modifiers, multi-catch, and more.

=> ↺ PHP 7.1 and number check

• PHP 7.1 introduce a new check during conversion of string to number.

=> ↺ PHP version 5.6.23RC1 and 7.0.8RC1

=> ↺ PHP 7.1 as Software Collection

• Version 7.1.0 Alpha 1 is released. It’s now enter the stabilisation phase for the developpers, and the test phase for the users.

=> ↺ Should A Programmer Use Google And Stack Overflow All The Time?

Leftovers

Science

=> ↺ Evolution of Fish Bioluminescence

• From the bizarre-looking anglerfish to sharks, bioluminescence is surprisingly common among ocean dwellers. Now, researchers from St. Cloud State University in Minnesota have shown that fish evolved the ability to make their own light on at least 27 separate occasions, according to a study published yesterday (June 8) in PLOS ONE. The fishes use their glowing abilities for everything from finding prey, to luring in mates, to communicating with one another.

• “This is the most comprehensive scientific publication on the distribution of fish bioluminescence ever written, and the authors show that bioluminescence evolved way more times independently than previously thought,” Prosanta Chakrabarty of the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, who was not involved in the study, told Smithsonian.

=> ↺ Exploring the Effects of Dimensionality on a PDF of Distances

• Every so often I’m reminded that the effects of changing dimensionality on objects and processes can be surprisingly counterintuitive. Recently I ran across a great example of this, while I working on a model for the distribution of distances in spaces of varying dimension.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ World’s “ugliest color” will be used on cigarette packs

• According to an Australian survey, the shit brown color seen above (Pantone 448C, or “Opaque Couché”) is the ugliest hue around, reminding respondents of dirt and death. To deter smoking, Australian officials required Opaque Couché to be the main color and cigarette packages and now the UK is following suit. Apparently, Australian officials first referred to the color as “olive green” but the Australian Olive Association was none-too-pleased. Now, Pantone is grumpy about the choice of Opaque Couché. “At the Pantone Color Institute, we consider all colours equally,” Pantone’s exec director Leatrice Eiseman told The Guardian. “(There’s no such thing as the ugliest color.”

=> ↺ Stylewatch: Is Pantone 448C really the ugliest colour in the world?

• A thousand Australian smokers voted Pantone’s ‘opaque couché’ the world’s least desirable hue. But hey, it’s still in fashion …

=> ↺ Lee Fang on Industry’s Role in the Opioid Crisis

• This week on CounterSpin: Opioids can be a lifesaver for some people with severe pain. But the overuse and abuse of powerful drugs like oxycodone is driving what the Centers for Disease Control says is an epidemic in this country, with some 16,000 overdose deaths from prescription opioids a year. But when the CDC pushed for non-binding guidelines encouraging doctors to seek alternatives where possible, the opioid industry, which made $9 billion last year, pushed back.

=> ↺ European Parliament speaks out against agricultural colonialism in Africa

• MEPs have called on the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition to radically alter its mission. The Alliance currently pushes African countries to replicate the intensive agricultural practices employed in many developed countries. EurActiv France reports.

• For a large majority of MEPs, the G7’s decision to base its programme for food security in Africa on intensive agriculture is a mistake. The European Parliament took its first official stance on the subject with the adoption of a report on the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NAFSN) on Tuesday (7 June).

• “We have already made the mistake of intensive agriculture in Europe, we should not replicate it in Africa because this model destroys family farming and reduces biodiversity,” said Mara Heubuch, a German Green MEP and rapporteur on the New Alliance.

Security

=> ↺ Tuesday’s security updates

=> ↺ Security advisories for Wednesday

=> ↺ Thursday’s security updates

=> ↺ Security advisories for Friday

=> ↺ Slicing Into a Point-of-Sale Botnet

• Point-of-sale based malware has driven most of the credit card breaches over the past two years, including intrusions at Target and Home Depot, as well as breaches at a slew of point-of-sale vendors. The malware usually is installed via hacked remote administration tools. Once the attackers have their malware loaded onto the point-of-sale devices, they can remotely capture data from each card swiped at that cash register.

=> ↺ Microsoft’s BITS file transfer tool fooled into malware distribution

• Researchers at Dell SecureWorks have spotted a new and dangerous way to misuse of Microsoft’s Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS).

• While working on a customer clean-up project, SecureWorks staff found that attackers had created self-contained BITS tasks that didn’t appear in the registries of affected machines, and their footprints were limited to entries on the BITS database.

• The attack was spotted on a Windows 7 machine in an academic administration environment.

=> ↺ Massive DDoS attacks reach record levels as botnets make them cheaper to launch

• There were 19 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that exceeded 100 Gbps during the first three months of the year, almost four times more than in the previous quarter.

• Even more concerning is that these mega attacks, which few companies can withstand on their own, were launched using so-called booter or stresser botnets that are common and cheap to rent. This means that more criminals can now afford to launch such crippling attacks.

=> ↺ Twitter locks user accounts that need ‘extra protection’

• Better safe than sorry, or so goes Twitter’s latest thinking.

• The social network on Friday maintained it was not the victim of a hack or data breach, as previously reported. But Michael Coates, Twitter’s head of information security, wrote in a blog post that the company has identified some accounts that need “extra protection.” Those accounts have been locked, requiring users to reset their passwords in order to access them.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ ‘It as if we have created 10 open-air Bataclans and invited the jihadists to do their worst’: French bars banned from showing Euro 2016 matches on big screens for fears they could be terror targets

• Bars and restaurants in France have been banned from screening Euro 2016 matches on giant screens amid fears of a terrorist attack.

• Fans will instead have to watch games indoors or in the heavily policed fan zones across the ten host cities – which have been likened to ‘open air Bataclans’.

=> ↺ What pushes the US towards war with Russia

• First of all the US does not have a media. It has a ministry of propaganda. The media in the US is a function of the military security complex and of neoconservatives, and their ideology is world hegemony. That means American control of the entire world includes Russia and China. The neoconservative ideology says that history chose America to be the empire to rule the world. That is why they say that the United States is an indispensable country, and that the American people are the exceptional people. So, what you have here is the same ideology as Adolf Hitler. No one else matters.

=> ↺ The Democratic Party Has Destroyed Itself. Will It Now Destroy The Rest Of Us?

• Obama, Clinton and bipartisan neocons infesting Washington explain the deplorable state of America today – a democracy in name only, enriching the privileged few at the expense of most others, waging endless wars on humanity, leaving its fate up for grabs.

• Clinton was chosen Democrat party nominee last year before primary/caucus season began, assuring endless wars of aggression if elected, perhaps the madness of confronting Russia and China belligerently.

• The possibility of her succeeding Obama should terrify everyone, heightening the risk of global war with super-weapons making WW II ones look like toys by comparison.

=> ↺ The US-Russia Info-War: What’s Real?

• The Obama administration is dangling the possibility of real peace progress in Ukraine to convince the Europeans to renew sanctions on Russia, but is that just a bait-and-switch trick to keep Europe in line, asks Gilbert Doctorow.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Singapore offers Indonesia aid in countering haze

• Singapore has offered aircraft, satellite photos of fires and fire-fighting assistance to Indonesia for the dry season, which runs from this month to October and often brings haze to the region.

• The assistance package, offered every year since 2005, is part of the Singapore Government’s commitment to support Indonesia’s fire mitigation efforts, the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources (MEWR) said in a statement yesterday.

• This year, Singapore is offering up to two C-130 transport planes to fly a Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) fire-fighting team to Indonesia and one C-130 aircraft for cloud seeding.

=> ↺ Restoring peatlands a game changer in anti-haze battle

• In recent months, Indonesia has taken major steps to prevent a repeat of last year’s epic fires. The Joko Widodo administration, shocked into action by the scale of the damage and impact on ordinary Indonesians, has decided to act like no other Indonesian government has before.

• These steps are crucial and long overdue, though only part of the solution.

=> ↺ IOI’s Indonesian forest fire legacy revealed at European palm oil summit

• Jakarta, 9 June 2016 – New analysis reveals the scale of fires in and around the IOI Group’s palm oil concessions in Indonesia. The findings, published today by Greenpeace International, come as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) meets in Milan for its European Summit.

=> ↺ Singapore Aims to Prosecute Indonesian Polluters Under Haze Law

• Singapore is prepared to prosecute any Indonesian companies found responsible for the fires that produced hazardous ash clouds last year, a minister said, standing his ground even as recent efforts to take firms to account drew ire from the country’s largest Southeast Asian neighbor.

• Under the Transboundary Haze Pollution Act of 2014, Singapore has ordered six suppliers of Indonesia’s Asia Pulp and Paper Group to provide information on steps they are taking to prevent fires on their land, Environment and Water Resources Minister Masagos Zulkifli said in an interview on June 7. APP, one of the world’s largest paper producers, didn’t reply to e-mailed requests for comment, while its parent company didn’t reply to calls for comment.

• “We are standing on high moral ground,” said Masagos. “We have the support of the international community. We are not doing anything criminal nor wrong. We are just asking for the companies and the directors to own up and be accountable for what they’ve done.”

• The six companies have been told that Singapore has the right to bring their directors to court, and firms involved in haze-producing fires face fines of up to S$100,000 ($74,000) a day for every day of fire, the minister said.

Finance

=> ↺ 6 Ways You Didn’t Realize Ronald Reagan Ruined The Country

• Given the nature of this article, it would border on bad taste for me to mention that this past Sunday marked the 12th anniversary of the death of Conservative Republican Godhead Ronald Reagan, but alas, I just did. That said, he’d merit a mention even if I didn’t still have a bunch of decorations to take down, solely on the strength of all the comparisons the Donald Trump candidacy has drawn to that of Reagan’s.

=> ↺ Germany Waves ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ to Costly Wall Street Tax Scheme

• The German Parliament voted Thursday to end a trading strategy that helps foreign investors, many of them Americans,avoid an estimated $1 billion or more a year in taxes on dividends paid by German companies.

• The trades were exposed in a joint ProPublica investigation last month with The Washington Post and German news outlets Handelsblatt and Bayerischer Rundfunk. The report prompted widespread outrage among German lawmakers, some of whom called the maneuver “criminal.”

• This week’s vote effectively shuts down the transactions in Germany, which had been the biggest market for such trades. They live on in more than 20 other countries across Europe and other nations where authorities attempt to collect taxes on dividends.

• While German lawmakers closed the spigot on future tax losses, it remains unclear if tax officials there will be able to recoup billions of lost revenues from previous years.

=> ↺ Sen. Warren Slams For-profit College Accreditor for ‘Appalling Record of Failure’

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., released a report today slamming an accreditor of for-profit colleges for its “appalling record of failure.”

• “Students and taxpayers have paid the price” for the failures of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, she wrote in an accompanying letter to the U.S. Secretary of Education. Warren urged the Department of Education to take “strong, aggressive action to hold ACICS accountable.”

• Citing ProPublica’s reporting, Warren blasted ACICS for accrediting schools that “consistently produce astronomical debt levels and terrible outcomes for students.”

• Warren’s report comes nearly a year after she grilled members of ACICS during a senate hearing on their failure to sanction Corinthian Colleges, which kept its accreditation until the day the school collapsed in bankruptcy.

=> ↺ It’s Up to Us to Level CEO Pay

• Does anyone really need two mansions in the Hamptons, Wall Street’s favorite summertime watering hole? Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO at banking giant Goldman Sachs, has apparently decided he can get by with just one.

• Blankfein recently sold his first Hamptons manse — a seven-bedroom affair with a sunken tennis court that he bought in 1995 — for $13 million. From now on, he’ll have to make do with only his second Hamptons manse, a 7.5-acre spread that set him back $32 million in 2012.

=> ↺ Google Comes Down On The Wrong Side Of The TPP

• The TPP expands copyright rules to ridiculous levels in many countries, including extending copyright terms at a time when there is no sound basis for advocating for extending copyright terms. And the “requiring fair and reasonable copyright exceptions and limitations that protect the Internet” is just wrong. Yes, it’s true that for the first time the USTR actually acknowledges user rights in such an agreement. In the past, all such trade agreements only focused on expanding copyright holder rights. So you can argue that’s progress. But the details showed that it’s not creating “fair and reasonable copyright exceptions and limitations,” but instead pushing a misleading tool that will limit the way countries can explore fair use, and (even more important) makes the fair use stuff optional. Google claiming that it requires such things is just… wrong.

=> ↺ Devastating report reveals a bribery and fraud crimewave sweeping Britain that is costing City £127bn a year

• A bribery and fraud crimewave is sweeping Britain and is costing the City £127bn a year, a devastating report has revealed.

• A major study has uncovered how fraud is costing the economy as a whole £193bn – with the vast majority of this being lost through false invoices, dodgy payments and fake contracts.

• The study suggests banks, charities and the NHS are all major victims. And it shows that the public is also suffering, with millions of people falling victim to identity theft and other scams every year.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ An Election Season Conversation With Ralph Nader, the Nation’s No. 1 Public-Interest Crusader

• It’s been an interesting couple of years for left-wing populist movements, from Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter to Bernie Sanders’ insurgent run for president. Driven by widening inequality and fanned by social media, some have already brought about real changes — like the fight for a $15 minimum wage across the country — while others have quietly faded away. Few people have a longer-term perspective on what it takes to have an impact than public-interest crusader and political maverick Ralph Nader, who, over the span of five decades, has leveraged the courts, the media, and the electoral system to win hefty gains for consumers and the environment. A five-time candidate for president, he’s sitting this election out, working the channels through his role with the Center for Study of Responsive Law, the research and advocacy organization he founded in 1968. The center is housed at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., where we met in a grand, bookshelf-lined conference room and talked politics, elections, and organizing for change as the late-afternoon sun slanted through tall windows.

=> ↺ Clinton helped create Trump: Green Party’s Jill Stein blasts Hillary for already implementing Donald’s policies

• The Clintons’ own right-wing policies helped spawn the rise of far-right demagogues like Donald Trump, argues the Green Party’s presidential candidate. She warns that a Hillary Clinton presidency would only continue to fuel this right-wing extremism.

• Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee for president, spoke on Democracy Now on Thursday. She blasted Hillary Clinton for implementing many of the same policies that Trump is currently calling for, and expressed hope that Bernie Sanders will consider continuing his presidential run on a third-party ticket.

• The present electoral system “tells you to vote against what you’re afraid of and not for what you believe,” Stein said. “This politics of fear has actually delivered everything we were afraid of.”

=> ↺ Sen. Sanders Goes to Washington

• At a Bernie Sanders rally ahead of Washington D.C.’s last-in-the-nation June 14 primary, I wanted to get a sense of how his supporters would vote in the fall with Hillary Clinton now the presumptive Democratic nominee.

• Based on media accounts of how “unruly” Sanders supporters are supposed to be, I was, frankly, somewhat surprised by the number of attendees who said they would vote for Clinton, although this could partly stem from the fact that the rally on Thursday took place in Washington, D.C. which is, by definition, more comfortable with establishment politics.

• [...]

• Still others completely rejected the idea of voting for Clinton in November. “I would rather eat my own hand than cast a vote for Hillary Clinton, and you can quote me on that,” said Nikki Diamantopoulos from Baltimore County, Maryland.

=> ↺ State Department Says It Will Take 75 Years to Release All Requested Clinton Emails

• The State Department this week, apparently with a straight face, defended its claim that releasing all the emails sought by the Republican National Committee (RNC) would take 75 years. “It’s not an outlandish estimation, believe it or not,” spokesman Mark Toner told reporters.

=> ↺ Special Appeal from Senator Bernie Sanders

• It’s been a hell of a journey, we’ve come a long way, and now we are on the verge of our biggest victory! The Democratic Party is about to nominate my opponent, Hillary Clinton, who represents everything we have campaigned against from the very beginning of this race.

• I always said, this isn’t about Bernie Sanders, it is about the Revolution, the young people rising up and confronting Wall Street, confronting militarism, confronting an oligarchy that is killing us all with its climate change and low wage jobs and control of our democracy!

=> ↺ Hillary Clinton Used Leadership PAC as “Slush Fund” in 2008-09

• The Bernie Sanders campaign in April accused Hillary Clinton of “looting” her joint fundraising committee to fund her presidential campaign, effectively circumventing rules that cap donations at $5,400 per person.

• Clinton’s joint committee, called the Hillary Victory Fund, can raise $358,500 per person because it’s supposed to share money with the Democratic National Committee and state parties.

• The Sanders campaign pointed to news reports that the fund has been covering expenses for the Clinton campaign instead of spending on down-ballot races.

• The Clinton campaign called the charges irresponsible.

=> ↺ Why US Politics and Policy Are Adrift

• The U.S. system of politics and public policy is in disarray awash with elites trying to manipulate the public and the public drifting away from any factual grounding, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.

=> ↺ Sanders Encourages Struggle Against Establishment Politics To Continue

• “The struggle continues,” Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders declared in a speech, which capped off his statewide campaign in California. He described the struggle broadly as one for social, economic, racial, and environmental justice.

• Sanders also noted he has overwhelmingly won young people in the majority of the United States. Young people recognize they must shape the future, and they share the Sanders campaign’s vision for a government that works for lower class citizens instead of catering to the interests of corporations and the rich.

• The primary contests did not go as well as Sanders supporters hoped. The campaign won decisively in North Dakota. It eked out a victory in Montana, but the campaign lost in South Dakota and New Mexico. It was blown out in New Jersey. Sanders did not win California, and there is ample evidence of massive irregularities at polling places, which should have Californians concerned.

=> ↺ Jill Stein to Bernie Sanders: Run on the Green Party Ticket & Continue Your Political Revolution

• As Bernie Sanders prepares to meet with President Obama, we speak to Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who has also been reaching out to the Vermont senator. With Hillary Clinton claiming victory in the Democratic race, Stein is attempting to start a dialogue with the Sanders campaign. In an open letter in April, Stein wrote, “In this hour of unprecedented crisis—with human rights, civilization, and life on the planet teetering on the brink—can we explore an historic collaboration to keep building the revolution beyond the reach of corporate party clutches, where the movement can take root and flourish, in the 2016 election and beyond?” Stein joins us from Albany ahead of this weekend’s New York Green Party convention.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Censorship makes you feel that the audience is like children

• Versatile actress Tisca Chopra will now be seen in a comic caper, ’3 Dev’ which will question the faith in a humourous way. Her last big outing on the silver screen ‘Ghayal Once Again’ was received well by the critics and moviegoers alike. In an exclusive interview to the Timesofindia.com, the ’24′ girl spoke about her future plans, censor board and more…

• [...]

• Do you agree with censor board’s way of working like it happened with ‘Udta Punjab’?

• I am against censorship in principle. I am completely averse to the idea of censoring films because that makes you feel that the audience is like children and they need to be told what they can do and what they can’t do. I think the better and smarter way to do it is to grade films with stuff like PG, A, UA certification like they grade internationally for films. There, the films are rated as ‘above 16′ and ‘above 18′. And then its parent’s choice and the children’s choice. Here, they have a strict identification at the cinema point that this child is not 18 and can’t go and see the film. We are behaving like an immature society by creating this kind of structure.

=> ↺ Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction

• Gawker Media filed for bankruptcy Friday and the company will be put up for auction after a judge ruled that a $140 million jury judgment against it in a costly legal battle with former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan would stand.

=> ↺ Gawker Media files for bankruptcy

• Gawker Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday, in order to protect its assets from seizure by former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan.

• In March, Hogan won a $140.1 million judgment against Gawker Media, CEO Nick Denton and former Gawker.com editor A.J. Daulerio. Following the trial, Gawker asked the presiding judge, Pamela Campbell, to either reduce the judgment or issue a routine stay to give them time to appeal the judgment. In May, Campbell upheld the full amount of the judgment. On Friday morning, she denied Gawker’s request for a stay.

=> ↺ Gawker Files For Bankruptcy, Begins Process Of Auctioning Itself Off

• Either way, this is still unfortunate. Even if you believe the Hogan case was justified (and I think you’re wrong about that), we should still be concerned when a billionaire basically sets out to destroy a media organization through a variety of lawsuits (many of which appear to be extremely questionable).

• What if the next billionaire who gets upset about coverage targets a publication you do like? And don’t say that it won’t matter if that publication doesn’t do anything wrong. Just the lawsuits alone can kill a company. And, even worse, the threat of lawsuits may create a massive chilling effect on what companies publish and how they go about their reporting. And disagree with Gawker’s decisions and tactics all you want, the company did break a ton of important news stories. While this does not mean the end of Gawker, it’s certainly the crippling of Gawker, and that should be a concern for anyone who believes in a free and open press.

=> ↺ Swedes slam ‘censorship’ of cartoon lesbian romance

• A group of Swedes have launched a petition urging Cartoon Network to stop censoring a lesbian romance depicted in one of its shows, after a scene showing two women flirting was apparently altered in the Swedish dub of the programme.

=> ↺ Bankrupting Gawker over a grudge isn’t justice. It’s censorship

• Though Gawker’s chapter 11 filing may not end it, the fact that a personal vendetta caused the act sets a chilling precedent

• [...]

• Gawker has, on occasion, run pieces which teeter on the brink of bad taste. Sometimes the site has even run pieces which fell from that ledge. But those lapses don’t justify bringing the whole structure down in flames.

• The infamous article outing a Condé Nast executive as gay last year was one of those, and Gawker was rightly excoriated for it. The 2007 story outing venture capitalist Peter Thiel was another. Stories in which people’s private sexual preferences, without genuine public interest at stake, are splashed without their consent on the front pages of newspapers or news sites have no place in a modern, enlightened press.

=> ↺ Gawker Union Takes On Peter Thiel

• The legal saga that is Hulk Hogan’s winning suit against Gawker Media for publishing his sex tape is far from over. While Gawker’s attorneys are working to postpone payment of the former professional wrestler’s $140.1 million award and filing for bankruptcy, the media company’s union is taking on Peter Thiel — the PayPal cofounder who surreptitiously bankrolled Hogan’s lawsuit.

• The Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) has launched a petition requesting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to remove Thiel, who was one of the social network’s early investors, from the company’s board of directors.

=> ↺ Gawker Bankruptcy Filing Means Peter Thiel Has Already Won

• But that was before Hogan won a $140 million judgement from a Florida jury—and before it emerged that billionaire Peter Thiel was financing the case, in an attempt to drive Gawker out of business. And now he appears to have succeeded in doing exactly that.

• [...]

• Despite the agreement with Ziff Davis, however, there is no guarantee that it will emerge the eventual owner of Gawker Media. Since the assets the company is selling are the subject of a bankruptcy filing, there will be a court-mandated auction, and it is likely that other bidders will appear (Ziff Davis is what’s called a “stalking horse”). It’s even possible that Peter Thiel could acquire the company and shut it down, a scenario some Gawker-watchers have already speculated about.

• [...]

• Gawker may have published a handful of articles that were beyond the pale of civilized conduct or pushed the boundaries of what should be allowed by privacy rules (although it’s worth noting that two judges ruled that the Hogan material was newsworthy), but it has also done some ground-breaking and valuable journalism on a range of subjects.

• Should all of that have to be destroyed because it published some pieces that upset a billionaire or his friends? If free speech laws don’t protect media outlets that push the boundaries, then who will they protect?

• The reality is that Thiel’s vendetta has pushed an entire media organization into bankruptcy, and forced it to auction off its already damaged assets to the highest bidder. That could mean dozens or even hundreds of journalists will lose their jobs. And for what? And while some of the sites it operated may survive under new ownership, something unique will inevitably be lost. And that’s not something we should be celebrating, regardless of what we think of Gawker or Nick Denton.

=> ↺ Govt must think about film industry: Irrfan on censorship

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ As horrible as Internet surveillance is, the alternative could have been far worse

• While the Internet has turned into a global surveillance machine, with only tech-aware and privacy-aware people opting out of the surveillance, it’s important to remember that we could have had something far worse. In the 1990s, the telcos were aggressively pushing for their own version of a packet switched network – and had they won over the Internet’s simplicity, we wouldn’t even have had the option to turn on privacy today.

=> ↺ Reviewing Microsoft’s Automatic Insertion of Telemetry into C++ Binaries

• Recently Reddit user “sammiesdog” posted claims that Visual Studio’s C++ compiler was automatically adding function calls to Microsoft’s telemetry services. The screenshot accompanying their post showed how a simple 5 line CPP file produced an assembly language file that included a function call titled “telemetry_main_invoke_trigger”.

• The ensuing discussion then revolved around how to disable this unannounced “feature” while also speculating its purpose. “sammiesdog” noted that this appears in release builds, while user “ssylvan” also indicated that it appeared in debug builds too. The telemetry function is intended to communicate with ETW.

=> ↺ German Domestic Intel Chief Accuses Snowden of Working for Russia

• German domestic intelligence chief suggested that Edward Snowden was a Russian spy, the German parliament said in a Friday press release.

=> ↺ NSA’s Word Problem

• NSA analysists fill out lots of paperwork. That paper work is a core protection against NSA abuse. It constrains their activities, and facilitates legal and compliance review. As Justice Sotomayor has noted in her famous Jones concurrence the importance of costs as a constraint on surveillance. Some costs are monetary, but some costs are time. And when presented with things that require time or money, there is a natural inclination to find efficiencies.

=> ↺ Snowden Emails Reveal the NSA Used Notoriously Insecure Microsoft Word Macros

• At the heart of the NSA’s intelligence reporting process are—or at least were, in 2012—some templates using Microsoft Word macros. That’s one of the unbelievable details revealed in a series of Edward Snowden’s emails to NSA’s SIGINT Oversight and Compliance Division released to VICE News in response to a FOIA request. The revelation comes amid renewed focus in the security community on hackers’ uses of Microsoft macros as a vector to launch malware.

• In August 2012, compliance personnel in NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters had a problem. As part of NSA’s oversight of the use of congressionally-authorized spying authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Department of Justice and NSA compliance personnel review the intelligence reports written by analysts to ensure they meet legal guidelines, including ensuring that analysts only targeted appropriate people and masked the identities of any Americans in the reports. But because of new security compartmentalization implemented on its network in Hawaii, personnel in NSA’s headquarters stopped being able to open the files sent by the Hawaii location.

=> ↺ The SSCI Contemplates Splitting CyberCommand from DIRNSA

• The Intercept’s Jenna McLaughlin liberated a copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Intelligence Authorization for 2017 which was passed out of committee a few weeks back. There are two really shitty things — a move to enable FBI to get Electronic Communications Transaction Records with NSLs again (which I’ll return to) and a move to further muck up attempts to close Gitmo.

• But there are a remarkable number of non-stupid things in the bill.

=> ↺ How Did Booz Employee Analyst-Trainee Edward Snowden Get the Verizon 215 Order?

• It’s not clear why Snowden made the switch, but we have certainly seen a number of cybersecurity related documents — see the packet published by Charlie Savage in conjunction with his upstream cyber article. Even the PRISM PowerPoint — the second thing released — actually has a cybersecurity focus (though I think there’s one detail that remains redacted). It’s about using upstream to track known cyberthreat actors.

=> ↺ Communications Show GCHQ’s ‘Oversight’ Talking Itself Out Of Performing Any Sort Of Oversight

• New documents obtained by Privacy International as a result of its ongoing litigation over GCHQ bulk surveillance shows (yet again) there’s really no such thing as “oversight” when it comes to spying. Owen Bowcott of The Guardian highlights conversations between GCHQ and its supposed oversight, in which the former talks the latter out of applying more restrictive guidelines from updated laws to its massive data intake. (Unfortunately, Bowcott discusses the documents but does not link to them, and I have been unable to locate these at Privacy International’s website.)

=> ↺ William Hague to InfoSec community: ‘there can be no absolute right to privacy’

• Former foreign secretary and life peer William Hague said that in light of technological developments there can be no absolute right to privacy versus security, and that although the public is in favour of “unbreakable” encryption now, it might not remain so.

• Former foreign secretary William Hague has advised the information security community that public opinion in support of full encryption can be reversed.

• Speaking at the Infosec 2016 information security conference today, life peer of Richmond – who personally reviewed interception requests from the secret intelligent services in his previous role – outlined his views on achieving a balance between state surveillance and individual privacy.

• Hague said that, in his opinion, there can be no absolute right to privacy with technology.

• “If I was advising networks and technology companies offering unbreakable encryption – unbreakable by law enforcement authorities – I would give this advice: public opinion on this issue can turn around very quickly,” Hague said.

=> ↺ Creepy startup will help landlords, employers and online dates strip-mine intimate data from your Facebook page

• There’s a scene in the dystopian scifi novel “Ready Player One” in which the protagonist glimpses the dossier of personal information a major tech company has gathered on him. It includes his height and weight, his browser history, his address — even several years of his school transcripts.

• We’re still several years away from that vision, thankfully, but a new British startup called Score Assured has taken a big step in that direction: The company wants to, in the words of co-founder Steve Thornhill, “take a deep dive into private social media profiles” and sell what it finds there to everyone from prospective dates to employers and landlords.

=> ↺ Adobe fined by German privacy watchdog over lifeless EU-US data transfer deal

• Adobe Systems took a kick to the shins from a German privacy regulator, after the software maker was found to be using the defunct Safe Harbour deal to transfer data from the European Union to the US.

• The fine of €8,000 was levied by the office of the Hamburg Data Protection Supervisor, a regulator known for its tough stance on outfits that it feels are breaching privacy laws.

=> ↺ Sir Tim Berners-Lee: Internet has become ‘world’s largest surveillance network’

• WORLD WIDE WEB CREATOR Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said that the internet has fallen into the hands of large corporations and governments and become the “world’s largest surveillance network”.

• Berners-Lee explained in an interview with The New York Times that his invention has steadily come under the control of powerful interests.

• “It controls what people see. It creates mechanisms for how people interact. It’s been great, but spying, blocking sites, repurposing people’s content, taking you to the wrong websites completely undermines the spirit of helping people create,” he said.

=> ↺ Privacy habits: Full-disk encryption goes from optional to very recommended

• As US authorities decide they have the right to seize any data, the mandatory privacy suite expands: full-disk encryption goes from optional to very recommended, in addition to using a firewall and some sort of encrypting anonymizer.

• A decision by a U.S. appeals court says that all your hard drives can be searched without warrant to determine if you’re guilty of a crime, any crime. This means that in addition to an encrypting anonymizer (such as Tor or a VPN) and a good firewall, full-disk encryption is now a must not just for geeks and nerds, but for everybody.

=> ↺ Newspaper Association Thinks FTC Should Force Readers To Be Subject To Godawful Ads And Invasive Trackers

• This assertion continues to scapegoat ad blocking for many publications’ decision to force readers to play “find the content” when visiting their sites. As user ad blindness eventually rendered banner ads invisible, the response has been to escalate intrusion, via new ad delivery methods like popunder/popups, autoplay video ads, pervasive trackers, or escalating encroachment of ads into the “content” area. If ad blocker usage is more prevalent, publishers really have no one but themselves to blame.

• And there’s nothing out there that suggests the only way a publication can remain profitable is by assaulting users with ads and tracking them all over the internet. But that’s the narrative publishers have chosen because it’s simpler to make users conform to their wishes than it is to cede ground to site visitors’ best interests.

• [...]

• The supposed “deception” the NAA refers to is things like AdBlock Plus selling companies spaces on its “whitelist.” Then it has the audacity to make claims about the darkish shade of ad blockers’ kettles by claiming any information about these built-in whitelists is buried in the terms of service. Burial of crucial details under several pages of fine print is SOP for 99.9% of the internet — including (especially) the same tracking software the NAA says is crucial to the survival of the industry.

• The NAA also claims that evading paywalls — if enabled by ad blockers — is an “unfair method of competition.” Considering how easy it is to evade most paywalls (via referral links, Google searches, going “incognito,” etc.), it seems rather disingenuous to claim the automation of this process is somehow a violation of trade laws. For that matter, the complaint offers no proof that any popular ad-blocking extension actually offers this “service.” (There are extensions written solely for that purpose, however.)

• The complaint also takes issue with “replacement” services that substitute bad ads with better ads or offer micropayments to sites in exchange for blocking their revenue generators. The NAA insists these, too, are deceptive and should be kicked of the ‘net by the FTC.

=> ↺ NSA Looking to Exploit Internet of Things, Including Biomedical Devices, Official Says

• The National Security Agency is researching opportunities to collect foreign intelligence—including the possibility of exploiting Internet-connected biomedical devices like pacemakers, according to a senior official.

• “We’re looking at it sort of theoretically from a research point of view right now,” Richard Ledgett, the NSA’s deputy director, said at a conference on military technology at Washington’s Newseum on Friday.

• Biomedical devices could be a new source of information for the NSA’s data hoards—“maybe a niche kind of thing…a tool in the toolbox,” he said, though he added that there are easier ways to keep track of overseas terrorists and foreign intelligence agents.

• When asked if the entire scope of the Internet of Things, billions of interconnected devices, would be “a security nightmare or a signals intelligence bonanza,” he replied: “both.”

=> ↺ Intelligence: Ban The NSA

• A growing number of American politicians (and their constituents) are calling for the elimination of the National Security Agency (NSA). Yet the recent anniversaries of the World War II Battle of Midway (in 1942) and D-Day landings (in 1944) both stand as testaments as to why the NSA matters for grunts on the front line.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Latest Absurd Moral Panic: Parents Complain Amazon Echo Is Creating Rude Children

• It wouldn’t be a month at Techdirt without one group or another engaging in a fit of moral hysteria over something they really don’t need to spend precious calories worrying about. Whether it’s the false claim that video games create deadly assassins, VR makes us slaves to Mark Zuckerberg, smartphones have demolished cultural civility or having Google at our fingertips makes us dumber, there’s always something new to waste time having a hissy fit over.

=> ↺ Parents are worried the Amazon Echo is conditioning their kids to be rude

• Alexa will put up with just about anything. She has a remarkable tolerance for annoying behavior, and she certainly doesn’t care if you forget your please and thank yous.

• But while artificial intelligence technology can blow past such indignities, parents are still irked by their kids’ poor manners when interacting with Alexa, the assistant that lives inside the Amazon Echo.

=> ↺ REPORT: Migrants Burn Down Asylum Centre After Not Receiving Ramadan Wake Up Call

• A massive fire at Düsseldorf’s major international trade fair grounds yesterday has been followed by reports that the blaze was set deliberately by migrants who were angry because of Ramadan.

• Officially, some 160 migrants were resident at hall 18 of the Messe Düsseldorf conference centre, but it was a facility plagued by racial conflict which had seen violence spark before. Düsseldorf’s Express newspaper reports these conflicts were not between European German staff and their guests, but between the predominantly Arab residents, and a minority of Afghans who sided with the security staff running the facility — who were mainly Iranian.

=> ↺ Germany’s migrant crisis turns into a NIGHTMARE as 80% of refugees have NO documents

• THE true scale of the migrant crisis in Germany has been uncovered as it emerges 80 per cent of asylum seekers have arrived there WITHOUT a passport – and hundreds of thousands are now planning to bring over their FAMILIES.

=> ↺ As Brasília’s Corruption Is Exposed, Lawmakers Try to Criminalize Dissent

• Leaked secret audio recordings of Brazil’s most powerful figures have sparked a series of explosive scandals in the nation’s ongoing political crisis. Now, Brazilian lawmakers are trying to outlaw publication of such recordings.

=> ↺ ‘Media Money Matters With the Olympics’

• Another one that often comes up is displacement. For example, in Beijing, 1.5 million people were displaced to make way for the Summer Olympics that year, 1.5 million. In Rio, we’ve seen 77,000 people being displaced for Olympic structures and for Olympic venues since Rio got the games in 2009.

=> ↺ Muhammad Ali: ‘The Truth Must Ultimately Prevail’

• So while media talked about Ali’s conversion to Islam, and his refusal to be inducted into the Army—because, as some even quoted, he refused, in his words, to go “10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over”—it’s still hard to convey how these things were heard, including by media, what it meant to say them, in 1967.

=> ↺ UN chief says he removed Saudi Arabia from damning human rights report under ‘undue’ financial pressure

• The United Nations Secretary General excised the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen from an annual UN register of children’s rights violators, after the middle-eastern country and its coalition partners threatened to cut off crucial funding to the world body.

• Ban Ki-Moon said the removal of Saudi Arabia from the list was “one of the most painful and difficult decisions” he has had to make as Secretary General, describing the pressure the Arab nation had exerted on the UN as “unacceptable”.

=> ↺ African-American Women Now Top the List of Most-Educated Group in the Country

• Statistics on black women and education have shown them leading all other gender and racial groups for a few years now. More than half of all black women specifically between the ages of 18 and 24 are enrolled in college, and black women overall outpace other race and gender groups in terms of college enrollment, according to the National Center of Education Statistics/U.S. Census numbers.

=> ↺ UK was Involved in Libyan Torture Flights and Politicians Knew, Say British Prosecutors

• UK Government prosecutors investigating the kidnap and ‘rendition’ of two families to Libya by MI6 and the CIA have today announced their conclusions that a senior British intelligence official was involved in the operation and had – to a limited extent – sought political approval for it.

=> ↺ My Metropolitan Police Evidence on Torture and Extraordinary Rendition

• This is a transcript of the evidence I gave, at their request, to the Metropolitan Police. I published scans of the witness statements yesterday, and a commenter has kindly transcribed them to make them web searchable. I was interviewed by the Police both at my home and at their headquarters, and it was made very plain to me that not only Sir Mark Allen, but Tony Blair, Jack Straw and numerous officials in the FCO and the Security Services were in the frame. I confess I therefore always expected the Establishment would have the case dropped despite overwhelming evidence.

• I first offered this evidence to the Gibson Inquiry, I was treated by that Inquiry as an important witness and Judge Gibson ordered the FCO to give me full access to all documents I saw while Ambassador, to refresh my memory. No. 10 panicked at this and other evidence that Gibson was doing a genuine job, and the Gibson Inquiry was closed down by Cameron with the active complicity of Nick Clegg. I was then told by the Gibson secretariat that the Metropolitan Police were taking over aspects of that inquiry. I was then contacted and interviewed by the Metropolitan Police and gave this evidence.

• [...]

• All the disciplinary allegations were false and around this time my security clearance was up for review. My security clearance reviewer contacted me to state my clearance had been passed by him but it had then been sent back to him and he had been put under pressure not to clear me. He said that he was sticking by his recommendation and my clearance was renewed.

• l was suspended for four months and sent back to Tashkent and told not to speak to anyone about the outstanding allegations. l was banned from entering embassy buildings and the stress of it all caused my health to collapse. I suffered severe heart and lung problems as a result.

• After four months of investigation l was cleared of all l8 allegations: there was a formal hearing in relation to two matters only. These related to being seen with a ‘hangover’ by a local member of staff in Tashkent and secondly misusing an embassy car, l was cleared on both counts and the evidence against me was shown to be rubbish or non-existent.

• l was however found guilty of telling someone about the existence of the allegations when I returned to Tashkent for which I was given a final written warning in January 2004.

• Later in June 2004 one of the initial telegrams l had written was somehow leaked to the Financial Times newspaper and the Times printed sections of it. This was not done by me and although I denied it I was suspended as a result and in February 2005 I resigned from the Civil Service. I was given six years early retirement severance pay.

• I firmly believe that the allegations against me were knowingly false or grossly exaggerated,. and were concocted against me deliberately to silence me after l was the only senior civil servant to enter a written objection to the policy of collusion in torture. As a consequence my career was destroyed and my health permanently damaged.

=> ↺ England fans in fresh clashes with riot police in Marseille

• French riot police made nine arrests and were involved in a series of pitched battles with England football fans in Marseille as violence threatened to overshadow the country’s opening Euro 2016 game on Saturday.

• On the eve of England’s first game in the European Championship at the city’s Stade Velodrome, riot police fired teargas repeatedly into large groups of fans who had gathered around the city’s old port.

• The fans, many of whom had been drinking heavily for much of the day, responded by hurling bottles at the police as they marched towards them.

=> ↺ Muslim waitress is assaulted in south of France for serving alcohol on first day of Ramadan

• Police have launched a criminal investigation after a Muslim waitress in the south of France was attacked for serving alcohol on the first day of Ramadan.

• The horrifying assault took place in Nice, the seaside city that will play host to thousands of football fans attending Euro 2016 next week.

• Politicians immediately claimed that the incident was an example of the growing influence of religious extremism in France.

=> ↺ African migrant smuggler extradited; wife in Sweden, money in USA banks

• An Eritrean dubbed “the general”, suspected of controlling a people-smuggling network responsible for shipping thousands of people to Europe, has been extradited to Italy.

• Prosecutors said that Medhane Yehdego Mered had a reputation for risky practices, often packing more humans than was safe, Reuters wrote. The NCA reportedly believes that Mered had arranged the transit of a boat that sank near the Italian island of Lampedusa in October 2013.

• Eritrean Medhane Yehdego Mered, accused of organising a trafficking route through Africa, is flown to Rome from Sudan.

=> ↺ Welcome to Swedenistan…and have a lousy day

• ‘All my life I’d been grateful to be part of a civilized society,’ explains Dan, whose parents were among almost the entire population of 8,000 Danish Jews, who were secretly ferried from Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943 to sanctuary in neutral Sweden. ‘And, until about 2005, I felt blessed to live in a true social democracy, where people willingly paid high taxes for a fine welfare system and liberal values.’

• So what prompted – or rather drove – the amiable Dan and his gentle wife, creator of the world’s most lip-smacking gravidlax, to sell their Malmö shoreline home, rip up their roots and migrate to Spain?

• ‘Sure, the sunshine and lifestyle played some part in our decision,’ he explains. ‘But the real reason was Sweden’s changing demographics and politics. The radical, Left-wing establishment became totally obsessed with multiculturalism and political correctness, which we didn’t need reminding had been part of Swedish ethos for centuries.

• ‘But this was different. It was verging on authoritarian diktat and the open-door immigration policy was threatening the nation’s cohesion. Only a fool couldn’t see this, but there was a conspiracy of silence, or rather a policy to whitewash the adverse effects of accepting half-a-million immigrants from the Middle East, who plainly weren’t interesting in adopting Sweden’s values and Swedish culture.

• ‘The politicians, the media, the intellectuals…they all played their parts in pandering to this dangerous ideology and, sadly, it’s changing the fabric of Swedish society irreversibly.’

=> ↺ Police Defend Actions On Barricaded Suspect: ‘Property Is Last’

• The Greenwood Police Department defended the actions of its officers during a 20-hour standoff last week that left a home, where a barricaded shoplifting suspect had taken refuge, destroyed.

• “I made the right call because we’re standing here instead of standing over a casket,” said Greenwood Village Police Cmdr. Dustin Varney.

• Police believe they executed the standoff, which ended with the capture of the suspect with no one injured, tactically well. The homeowner disagrees, calling it a blatant example of excessive force because there was only one suspect inside with a handgun.

=> ↺ It’s not a Fourth Amendment search if a cop swipes your credit card, court finds

• A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that law enforcement can legally scan or swipe a seized credit card—in fact, it is not a Fourth Amendment search at all, so it doesn’t require a warrant.

• In the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals’ 15-page opinion, swiping a card does not constitute a physical search, as the magnetic stripe simply contains the same information obviously visible on the front of the card. Plus, the defendant, Eric-Arnaud Benjamin Briere De L’Isle, couldn’t have had a reasonable privacy interest in the card, the court concluded, because he would have tried to use it when he tried to buy something, thereby giving up privacy interests to a third party (the issuing bank).

• According to court records in United States v. De L’Isle, the case began in June 2014 when Eric-Arnaud Benjamin Briere De L’Isle was driving westbound on I-80 and was pulled over by a Seward County, Nebraska, sheriff’s deputy.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Regulators genuinely don’t understand the Internet can work fine without their regulation

• Every now and then, we see regulators trying the most asinine move toward the Internet: banning encryption, requiring this, prohibiting that. They seem to be trying things at random, and a lot of it can be explained with regulators not being permitted to allow the Internet to come into being in the first place.

• Regulators remain utterly confused when it comes to the Internet – everything from what it is (it’s an agreement about a communications network with endpoints only) via who is responsible for it (no one, it is an organic agreement between millions much like a language) to whether human rights should apply as usual when using it (yes, very yes).

Intellectual Monopolies

=> ↺ Merck’s $200m patent damages award voided after “misconduct”

• Northern District of California judge rules Merck forfeited its right to assert patents against Gilead because of “unclean hands” and “numerous unconscionable acts”, voiding the second-largest US patent damages award of 2016 so far

• A California federal judge has ruled that Merck forfeited its right to assert its Hepatitis C drug patents against Gilead because of “unclean hands,” and voided the $200 million jury verdict that was awarded to Merck in March.

• In the conclusion of her opinion in Gilead Sciences v Merck, Judge Beth Labson Freeman of the Northern District of California wrote that: “Candor and honesty define the contours of the legal system. When a company allows and supports its own attorney to violate these principles, it shares the consequences of those actions. Here, Merck’s patent attorney, responsible for prosecuting the patents-in-suit, was dishonest and duplicitous in his actions with Pharmasset, with Gilead and with this Court, thus crossing the line to egregious misconduct.

=> ↺ Kenya’s Fledgling Innovation Agency Could Be Dissolved

• Kenya could disband its infant innovation agency and have its functions taken up by the state’s science, technology and innovation body, if changes suggested by the government to reform the science, technology and innovation (ST&I) sector are carried through.

=> ↺ Amid Allegations Of IP Theft By Corporations, Local Kenyan Innovators React

• As start-up and innovation centres spring up across Africa, Kenya – which birthed the continent’s tech movement – is emerging as one of its leading innovation nuclei. But concerns are intensifying here that young inventors are losing their innovations to conglomerates, in what is alleged as intellectual property theft or abuse.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Last call to protect freedom of panorama across Europe

=> ↺ Consortium of claimants seek to extend Bolero’s €1m a year international copyright for another two decades

=> ↺ Canada Federal Court Restrains Sale of ‘Pirate’ Boxes

=> ↺ Java API judge tells Oracle to suck it up, quit whining about the jury

=> ↺ Oracle v. Google: What it means for software developers

=> ↺ Sanity Prevails Again, Part II: The District Court Leaves the Oracle v. Google Fair Use Verdict In Place

=> ↺ Judge blasts Oracle’s attempt to overturn pro-Google jury verdict

=> ↺ Appeals Court Trashes Prenda’s Appeal, Affirms Sanctions

• The shoes keep dropping for Team Prenda (now basically down to just Paul Hansmeier and John Steele). As it appears that the FBI is getting close to bringing a criminal action against the two, it’s big appeal in the 9th Circuit has fallen flat on its face. This was the appeal of Judge Otis Wright’s blistering opinion, slamming Team Prenda for all sorts of dishonest and sketchy actions, passing on their info to law enforcement (possibly kicking off the FBI investigation) and issuing $81,319.72 in legal fees and sanctions for the games they played with the court, involving copyright trolling, lying about who actually ran the “company” that was suing (Ingenuity 13) and otherwise general lying to the court.

=> ↺ California Still Looking To Copyright All Sorts Of Government Works, Despite Protests

• Back in April, we were among the first to write about an absolutely horrible bill in the California Assembly, giving various government entities not just the ability, but strong encouragement to copyright and trademark whatever they could. As we noted, this was a very confused and poorly thought out kneejerk reaction to a weird dispute involving Yosemite National Park and its former concession vendor, which had trademarked a variety of famous names at Yosemite, and then tried to sell them back to the park after losing its contract. That was a crazy situation, but the proper response is not granting bad trademarks, not suddenly encouraging the government to copyright and trademark all the things. As a simple example of why this was such a bad idea, it was easy to point to the City of Inglewood which tried to sue a critic for posting videos (plus commentary) of city council meetings. The lack of copyright in those videos helped get that case tossed.

=> ↺ Police: File-Sharing Cases Dominate Sweden IP Complaints

• To a background of legal services gaining traction, it appears that Sweden still has a problem with unauthorized downloads. Figures released by national police indicate that three quarters of intellectual property complaints relate to file-sharing, with a new complaint being filed with authorities every three days.

=> ↺ New York Times Says Fair Use Of 300 Words Will Run You About $1800

• Fair use is apparently the last refuge of a scofflaw. Following on the heels of a Sony rep’s assertion that people could avail themselves of fair use for the right price, here comes the New York Times implying fair use not only does not exist, but that it runs more than $6/word.

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