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● 07.01.16

● Links 1/7/2016: Enlightenment 0.21.0, Peppermint 7, New Mint

Posted in News Roundup at 5:13 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ Why I’m Unlikely to Ever Return Microsoft’s Love

• Every time I write an article criticizing the depth of Microsoft’s proclaimed love of Linux, as well as questioning the motive behind it, I receive return criticism, often from places I would’ve, in the past, least expected, such as from within the GNU/Linux community. In places like Slashdot, some open source subreddits, and even occasionally on FOSS Force, there are commenters who accuse me of letting the past blind me to the great work that Microsoft is now doing for Linux and open source.

=> ↺ Not Love

• I had seen GNU/Linux once before in my life. At a previous school, the husband of one of the teachers installed it on a PC in my presence. He couldn’t get it working…. Still, I read that GNU/Linux did not crash. I needed that. I was willing to make the effort to download and install GNU/Linux if I could have only that. Our Internet connection was a few KB/s on dial-up… I spent two weekends and five evenings downloading an .iso CD-image with FileZilla or something on a Mac in the lab. I had never burned a CD before but tried once copying the file to the CD. That wouldn’t boot. I discovered CD imaging… So, on the second try, I had a CD that would boot on the machines. I first did one machine and it wouldn’t start X. Having never seen X before, this was a problem but it turned out all I needed was the scanning frequencies for the CRT in a configuration file. Google helped me find those for each of my five different kinds of monitors. Suddenly, the PCs were useful with GNU/Linux.

=> ↺ Linux Under the Hood: Silence of the RAM

• Now that I see the events of the last week chronicled clearly in front of my very eyes, maybe the disparaging old junk man was right after all. I’m shameless enough to admit my own idiocy as long as it leads to learning from my mistakes. Maybe Linux isn’t rocket science, but installing RAM was sure beginning to feel like it.

=> ↺ Check out our new issue plus win an ebook bundle!

Desktop

=> ↺ 30 days in a terminal: Day 10 — The experiment is over

• When I set out to spend 30 days living entirely in a Linux terminal, I knew there was a distinct possibility I would fail utterly. I mean, 30 days? No GUI software? No Xorg? Just describing it sounds like torture.

• And torture it was. Mostly. Some moments, though, were pretty damned amazing. Not amazing enough to help me reach my 30-day goal, mind you. I fell short—only making it to day 10.

Server

=> ↺ Permabit offers deduplication to Linux masses – almost

• Permabit has moved beyond OEMs, making the latest release of its dedupe technology available as a Linux software package so that ISVs, professional services folks and systems integrators in its Hybrid Cloud Professional Services partners programme can use it.

• Previously it was available to OEMs in Albireo (dedupe) and Virtual Data Optimizer or Virtual Data Optimizer, VDO (dedupe+compression+thin provisioning) form.

• VDO v6 is designed for the cloud service provider market, Permabit says, and the VDO for Hybrid Cloud package simplifies VDO installation and configuration in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) data centres.

=> ↺ What are Linux containers?

=> ↺ Does your company have a plan for adopting containers?

• Linux containers are definitely attracting a lot of attention as cloud-native alternatives to virtual machines for application isolation and deployment, but where does your company sit on the adoption spectrum?

• As organizations grapple with how best to make business decisions in the face of challenges from limited resources, both human and capital, and find the speed of competition rapidly advancing, they must look to not just new technologies but new paradigms in order to stay afloat. Many organizations are looking to Linux containers as a part of this solution.

=> ↺ Using nano-segmentation Apcera looks to bring cloud trust to Docker container deployment

• Highly secure trusted cloud platform provider Apcera, Inc. today announced the release of its own approach to securely managing Docker containers in production at scale. The product is an enterprise-ready orchestration framework called the Apcera Trusted Cloud Platform and it is designed to address today’s gaps in container deployment, management and scalability with an eye for trust and security.

=> ↺ Analyst Angle: NFV and cloud driving changes in core network licensing models

• As telecom operators move toward NFV, SDN and cloud architectures, licensing models will need to adapt to new deployment methods

=> ↺ DevOps done right: Five tips for implementing database infrastructures

• DevOps couldn’t be hotter. To cope with modern customer demands, applications need to be developed, tested and put into production swiftly. Industry experts have been preaching about DevOps for faster, more reliable software development. Gartner expects this development approach will go mainstream by the end of 2016.

=> ↺ How Linux and Open Source Are Powering Comcast’s Massive Infrastructure

• Comcast is a heavy user of Linux, and it touches everything: from back-end servers to customer facing devices like X1 products. Muehl said. “Comcast, like so many others, is a very Linux-heavy operating system company.”

• Comcast’s choice of Linux flavors is interesting. “Generally speaking, we’re more on the open-source side of those Linux distributions than the commercial side of those Linux distributions,” said Muehl. Comcast is using Ubuntu and CentOS.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Bad Voltage Episode 70 Has Been Released: Delicious Amorphous Tech Bubble

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Tokyo: Automotive Linux Summit

• Engineers will gather in Tokyo July 13-14 for the annual Automotive Linux Summit, a conference where auto-industry stakeholders discuss the adoption of an open-source Linux-based platform for in-vehicle infotainment.

• The two-day summit brings together automotive systems engineers, Linux experts, developers and other players.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Google open sources SwiftShader, a library for high-performance graphics rendering on the CPU

=> ↺ Google Opens Up High-Performance Software Graphics Rasterizer

=> ↺ “Radeon Settings” GUI Control Panel May Be Open-Sourced For AMD Linux Users

=> ↺ Extra Steam Linux Gaming Benchmarks Of The AMD Radeon RX 480

=> ↺ New SteamOS Beta Bundles Interesting AMDGPU-PRO Driver

=> ↺ AMD Is Launching A New Beta Program For Their Drivers

=> ↺ AMDGPU-PRO 16.30 Released With RX 480 Support

=> ↺ AMD Radeon RX 480 On Linux

• After weeks of anticipation, AMD’s high-end Radeon RX 480 “Polaris” graphics card is officially launching today! This graphics card starts at just $199 USD (or $239 USD for the 8GB version) and has day-one Linux support! There’s available open-source driver support as well as an AMDGPU-PRO update that’s expected today for those wanting to make use of this newer hybrid Linux driver stack. I’ve been testing the Radeon RX 480 under Linux the past week under both driver stacks and have my initial results to share this morning.

=> ↺ Check out this AMD video talking about Vulkan (and DirectX12)

=> ↺ AMDGPU-PRO Driver 16.30 Officially Released with Support for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

• Today, June 29, 2016, AMD released the final version of the AMDGPU-Pro 16.30 graphics driver for GNU/Linux operating systems, bringing support for new technologies like the Vulkan API.

=> ↺ Radeon RX 480: RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. AMDGPU-PRO – Interesting CPU/Power Difference

=> ↺ For Those Interested In GPGPU Compute, Here Are Many Radeon RX 480 OpenCL Tests

=> ↺ AMD Posts Sign-Up For Radeon Software Beta Testing

=> ↺ Compare Your Linux System’s OpenGL Performance Side-By-Side With The Radeon RX 480

Benchmarks

=> ↺ The OpenGL Speed & Performance-Per-Watt From The Radeon RX 480 To Radeon HD 4850/4870

• With the Radeon RX 480 Linux review now being out of the way and our various other RX 480 Linux benchmarks, the latest results I have to share with being a benchmarking fanatic are RX 480 results with high-end AMD GPU tests of each generation going back to the Radeon HD 4850/4870 (RV770) days. This article has high-end GPUs from the RX 480 to RX 200, HD 7900, HD 6900, HD 6800, HD 5800, and HD 4800 series compared side-by-side with the latest open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver code. Not only is the raw performance being looked at but the system power consumption was also being polled in real-time for looking at the performance-per-Watt too. For any other benchmarking fanatics curious about the Radeon GPU evolution over the past eight years (RV770 launch in 2008), here are the numbers to enjoy.

Applications

=> ↺ Pitivi 0.96 — Cogito Ergo Proxy

=> ↺ Pitivi 0.96 Released With Proxy Editing Support

• In addition to proxy editing, Pitivi 0.96 also has timeline changes, transformation box, setting changes, user interface improvements, the start of allowing custom keyboard shortcuts, and support for Flatpak packages.

=> ↺ Calamares 2.3 Universal Linux OS Installer Released with Full-Disk Encryption

• Today, June 30, 2016, the Calamares team was proud to announce the final release and immediate availability for download of the Calamares 2.3 distribution-independent system installer.

• Calamares is currently being used in numerous popular operating systems, including, but not limited to, KaOS, Apricity OS, Chakra GNU/Linux, Netrunner, Sabayon, and OpenMandriva. It is the universal installer framework that many GNU/Linux distributions should adopt as it’s now one of the most advanced system installers.

=> ↺ etcd3: A new etcd

• Over the past few months, CoreOS has been diligently finalizing the etcd3 API beta, testing the system and working with users to make etcd even better. Today etcd v3.0.0, the distributed key value store developed by CoreOS, is available.

• In practice, etcd3 is already integrated into a large-scale distributed system, Kubernetes, and we have implemented distributed coordination primitives including distributed locks, elections, and software transactional memory, to ensure the etcd3 API is flexible enough to support a variety of applications. Today we’re proud to announce that etcd3 is ready for general use.

=> ↺ Zend Framework 3 Released!

• After 17 months of effort, hundreds of releases, tens of thousands of commits by hundreds of contributors, and millions of installs, we’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of Zend Framework 3.

=> ↺ ANNOUNCE: virt-viewer 4.0 release

=> ↺ Virt-Manager’s Virrt-Viewer 4.0 Released

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ 5 SSH Hardening Tips

=> ↺ Make Peace With Your Processes: Part 5

=> ↺ How to Install VLC 3.0 Nightly on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

=> ↺ Fifth week at GSoC: push information from the daemon!

=> ↺ Fast Tracing with GDB

=> ↺ Pretty Print directory of .json files

=> ↺ Blender and Flatpak

=> ↺ Linux Lexicon: Working With Directories In Linux

=> ↺ Tutorial on Signal Processing in Linux with Octave

=> ↺ Create Your Own “Neural Paintings” using Deep Learning

=> ↺ Install Avactis Shopping Cart on a CentOS 7 VPS

=> ↺ Install Nagios core 4.1.1 on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) Server

=> ↺ Client-Side Performance

Games

=> ↺ Oxenfree, an adventure game with supernatural elements, available on Linux

• This well-received indie title has been ported over to Linux. Combining plenty of elements of 80s teen movies and packaging them in a polished adventure, Oxenfree may be worth checking out if you’re a fan of adventure games.

=> ↺ Space station management game, The Spatials: Galactology, is confirmed to be coming for Linux

• This is an expanded and reimagined version of the management sim, The Spatials. It’s yet to be released but the developers have confirmed that a Linux version is in the works.

=> ↺ Crush Your Enemies looks like a fun and simple RTS coming to Linux this July

• Crush Your Enemies from Vile Monarch and Gambitious Digital Entertainment looks like a pretty fun little RTS game and it’s coming to Linux on July 13th.

• You can pre-order it right now on Games Republic (this supports us a little), or directly from Steam if you prefer. Which will give you a Steam key at release.

=> ↺ Some essential mods to try in XCOM 2 that don’t break the balance or change gameplay

• I love XCOM 2, it’s probably my favourite strategy game right now. The problem is, it’s still a bit of a buggy mess, a lovable mess mind you.

• I’ve played 47 49 hours of the game, and I do feel like certain aspects of it are lacking. I will keep searching for you, but here’s some quick picks. There’s thousands of modifications available for XCOM 2, so even these took a while of sifting through junk.

=> ↺ ZED by Eagre Games reaches the funding goal, developer thanks GOL and the Linux community

• I’m never one to shy away from patting my fellow Linux users on the back, so here it is pats. Thanks to the Linux gaming community and our own contributor BTRE, ZED by Eagre Games has passed the funding goal on Kickstarter.

• They now need less than $2,000 to hit their first stretch-goal, so hopefully they will hit that as it sounds like it will be a very nice thing to have.

=> ↺ Nightdive Studios aren’t sure when the Linux version of the System Shock remake will be available

• I shot off a message to Nightdive Studios about their Linux plans for System Shock since Linux is a stretch goal. The reply doesn’t fill me with confidence to pledge right now.

• My question: “About the Linux stretch goal, is that for a Linux version after the initial Windows release or for a same-day Linux release?”

=> ↺ silence about ‘The Silent Age’, a point-and-click adventure for which a Linux port was promised

=> ↺ imprint-X from Morgondag is now on Kickstarter, a causal puzzle game set on an Asteroid Base

Desktop Environments/WMs

=> ↺ Enlightenment DR 0.21.0 Release

=> ↺ Enlightenment 0.21 Released With Its Much Better Wayland Support

• Another Enlightenment release, another round of significant Wayland improvements.

=> ↺ Enlightenment 0.21.0 Desktop Environment Released with Better Wayland Support

• Today, June 30, 2016, Mike Blumenkrantz from the Enlightenment project has had the great pleasure of announcing the final release of the Enlightenment DR 0.21.0 desktop environment.

• Enlightenment is a free window manager/desktop environment distributed under an open source license for all and any GNU/Linux operating system that wants to either adopt it as the default user interface or include it in the software repositories.

• The main goal of the Enlightenment desktop environment is to be as lightweight as possible, but at the same time beautiful, and last but not least, provide users with the latest, cutting-edge technologies.

Distributions

Reviews

=> ↺ [Corrected URL:] Hands on with KaOS Linux: Not just another derivative distro

• If you are interested in a small Linux distribution which is a bit out of the mainstream, KaOS Linux could be just the ticket for you. It is independently developed, not derived from any of the larger Linux distributions, and it is absolutely focused on the KDE desktop. Just those two things really set it apart — not just YAUD (Yet Another Ubuntu Derivative), and not available in a variety of desktops.

New Releases

=> ↺ Peppermint 7 Released

• Peppermint 7 launched a few days ago. Peppermint is a lightweight Ubuntu-based Linux distribution with an emphasis on speed and simplicity. Although the name is similar to Linux Mint, the projects aren’t directly related. Peppermint originally was envisioned as a “spicier” alternative to Mint—whatever that means!

• Many distros come with a wide assortment of feature-rich applications, and that’s great for power users who need those apps. But older machines can struggle to cope with those demanding distros. Peppermint solves the problem by offering a carefully curated suite of web apps that perform tasks traditionally handled by native apps. It’s an approach that will be familiar to any Chromebook users reading this article.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

=> ↺ SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP2 to Ship with GNOME 3.20, Public Beta Out Now

• Today, June 30, 2016, SUSE has had the great pleasure of announcing the availabilty of a public beta release of its upcoming, commercial SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 2 operating system.

=> ↺ openSUSE.Asia Summit 2016 | Logo competition announced

• Preparations for the openSUSE.Asia Summit is rolling. Following tradition, we are back with the logo contest. We are looking for a logo reflecting openSUSE and its community in Asia. The contest is open now and ends on 3 August 2016. “Geeko Mystery Box” will be sent as an appreciation for the best logo designed.

=> ↺ openSUSE.Asia Summit | Call for Sponsorships is open

=> ↺ HackWeek XIV @SUSE: Wednesday

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Red Hat Summit showcases how to organize chaos

=> ↺ Big Value From Software-Defined Storage Requires New Skills

=> ↺ Enterprise Application Platform 7: Java is here to stay

=> ↺ Linux Cloud Storage Advances

=> ↺ What 3 things do customers looks for in a product?

=> ↺ Red Hat Insights Brings Predictive Analytics to Containers, OpenStack and Virtualized Infrastructure

=> ↺ Red Hat improves container support with enterprise platform upgrade

=> ↺ Red Hat Enterprise Linux ‘getting in the way’ and needs to evolve, says product director

=> ↺ Jim Whitehurst: The power of participation

=> ↺ Red Hat Unleashes the Power of Linux Containers with Industry’s Broadest Solution Set

=> ↺ Red Hat Delivers Container Security Scanning with RHEL

=> ↺ RHEL 8 promises relief from dependency hell, more integration

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is hitting maturity as a server OS with widespread enterprise adoption, so RHEL 8 updates should focus on security and stability, and integration with various tools.

=> ↺ Compliance and security number one topic at C-level

=> ↺ Amadeus floating high on cloud nine

=> ↺ Red Hat in container lead; making money, analysts say

=> ↺ Containers and open source: How Red Hat is winning the market over

=> ↺ Red Hat Enlarges OpenShift Container Management

=> ↺ Red Hat and Microsoft partner to reduce development hassles

=> ↺ Red Hat’s monitoring service can now peer inside your containers

=> ↺ Red Hat Summit Hosts a Wedding – for Real.

=> ↺ $13 billion Red Hat threw a wedding on stage at its big conference — with the CEO as ring bearer

=> ↺ The power of open-source development

• As Paul Cormier, EVP of Engineering and president of Products and Technologies at Red Hat, Inc., led the keynote address on Day Two of Red Hat Summit 2016 at Moscone N & W in San Francisco, he began by looking back over the early days of the summit. Cormier looked back at the vision and the evolution of open source and said he was amazed at what has happened over the past 12 years and at how IT is evolving.

=> ↺ Unrequited Microsoft, Red Hat in the Way, LinDoz

• Christine Hall penned an opt-ed today saying that she remembers Microsoft’s dirty tactics, tactics they still employ while professing love for Linux. The media can fawn all they want, but Hall will never trust them. Elsewhere, Jack Germain said LinDoz is a “smooth Windows-Cinnamon blend” and Jamie Watson had nice things to say about KaOS 2016.06. Mint 18 Cinnamon and MATE editions are planned for this week and Red Hat said “RHEL is getting in the way.”

=> ↺ How to respond to direct, harsh criticism at work

• Open organization culture emphasizes the giving and receiving of direct feedback, often in public channels, and, frequently, in ways that feel less diplomatic than you might expect. I’ve coached a many new Red Hat associates through their initial experiences with this phenomenon, which can be uncomfortable. Normally, the harsh-sounding feedback is focused on the work at hand, the outcomes that work seeks to achieve, or the impact that a decision had on somebody.

=> ↺ Red Hat touts Linux experience as container differentiator

• With containers built on Linux, Red Hat believes vendors touting products in this space can do so effectively only when they have the ability to fully support a commercial Linux distribution.

=> ↺ $13 billion Red Hat threw a wedding onstage at its big conference — with the CEO as ring bearer (RHAT)

=> ↺ Midokura Achieves Certification With Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 8

=> ↺ Red Hat CEO is making history of his own

=> ↺ Cloud, containers, and analytics in focus for Red Hat enterprise play

=> ↺ Red Hat ramps up container and hybrid cloud support at Summit event

=> ↺ Red Hat Announces 2016 Women in Open Source Award Winners

=> ↺ OpenShift diversified: How Red Hat has tailored its platform for everyone | #RHSummit

=> ↺ Three open-source partners and a wedding: A groundbreaking keynote at Red Hat Summit | #RHSummit

=> ↺ Developers getting more out of Red Hat between containers and .NET Core 1.0 | #RHSummit

=> ↺ Innovative ‘Women in Open Source’ recognized at Red Hat Summit | #RHSummit

=> ↺ From space exploration to technology innovation at Red Hat Summit | #RHSummit

=> ↺ Red Hat Insights predictive analytics tool gets updates for managing risks, containers and private cloud

• Red Hat unveiled its latest version of Red Hat Insights Wednesday at the company’s annual summit. Here’s what you need to know about the new features and how it works.

=> ↺ Red Hat and Eurotech Launch End-to-End, Fully Open Source IoT Cloud Platform Project

• Co-sponsored Eclipse Kapua project based on Eurotech Everyware Cloud software and driven by Red Hat’s open source expertise and leadership

=> ↺ Container networking closing the gap on virtualization

• In order to be a great application developer, do you need to understand the stacks and orchestration? David Ward, CTO of Engineering and chief architect at Cisco Systems, Inc., argued that is not the goal. The underlying infrastructure is very complex, and if exposed to too much of it, an application developer may not write applications. Exposing that infrastructure is not the goal at Cisco Systems.

=> ↺ Community engagement key to open-source projects

=> ↺ Scientific Linux 6.8 to Be Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8, RC1 Is Out Now

• Today, June 30, 2016, Connie Sieh from the Scientific Linux development team has had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the first Release Candidate (RC) of the upcoming Scientific Linux 6.8 operating system.

=> ↺ Keynote at US tech summit ends with onstage wedding

=> ↺ A Red Hat wedding

• On the second day of the Red Hat Summit this week, attendees found themselves invited to a wedding during one of the general sessions.

• The groom was Matt Hargrave, a Red Hat client from Texas, and, it probably goes without saying, a huge fan of the company. The bride was Shannon Montague, a sign language interpreter.

=> ↺ Oh, Red Hat. Contain yourself and your ‘new innovations’ talk

• Red Hat is going full tilt after bringing containers and traditional Linux apps together under its management with a raft of announcements.

=> ↺ Red Hat drives home need for cultural change to keep up with pace of innovation

=> ↺ Keeping customers involved in design and activity | #RHSummit

=> ↺ Containers swiftly becoming the de facto route to storage | #RHSummit

=> ↺ Red Hat showing solid growth; poised for more, analysts say | #RHSummit

=> ↺ Closing the gap to outer space with open source | #RHSummit

=> ↺ From space exploration to cloud innovation at Red Hat Summit | #RHSummit

=> ↺ Merging the ‘right stuff’ in IoT software | #RHSummit

=> ↺ Three open-source partners and a wedding: A groundbreaking keynote at Red Hat Summit

=> ↺ Application Software Under Review — Oracle, Red Hat, Marketo, and Paycom Software

=> ↺ Red Hat Cloud Business Seen Hot Topic At Investor Day

=> ↺ Red Hat CloudForms Expands Public Cloud Management with Google Cloud Platform, Improves Microsoft Azure Capabilities, and Adds Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Support

=> ↺ Red Hat Storage VP sees different uses for Ceph, Gluster

• Red Hat Storage showed off updates to its Ceph and Gluster software and laid out its strategy for working with containers at this week’s Red Hat Summit in San Francisco.

Finance

=> ↺ Application Software: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Position of the day

• Outlined as the total market value of all unsettled shares of the company, the current market cap for the Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Application Software is valued at 12701.65. The dominant statistics will authorize the investment community to govern the size of Red Hat, Inc. compared to the sales or total assets figures. Consequently, investors will be able to grasp the rudimentary determinant of asset distribution and all kinds of risk-return parameters for stocks together with the stock mutual funds. Nevertheless, it is a common misunderstanding that a greater share price directs towards a larger company where stock price might also twist the definite worth of the organization.

=> ↺ Revenue Update on Red Hat Inc(NYSE:RHT)

=> ↺ Shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) Sees Large Outflow of Money

=> ↺ Right Management Consultants Inc’s (NYSE:RHT) Sentiment is 1.09

=> ↺ Notable Runners: Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE:GCI), Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

=> ↺ Red Hat Summit 2017 Dates Announced

=> ↺ Analyst Rating Update on Red Hat (RHT)

=> ↺ Sentiment Report: Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT)

=> ↺ Red Hat Insights Brings Predictive Analytics To Containers, OpenStack And Virtualized Infrastructure

=> ↺ Red Hat, Inc. Stock Momentum Hits Weakness

=> ↺ Analyst’s Rated Stocks: EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) , Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

=> ↺ Short Term Price Target on Red Hat (RHT)

Fedora

=> ↺ Fedora 24 Debuts in Workstation, Cloud and Server Editions

=> ↺ What makes up the Fedora kernel?

• Every Fedora system runs a kernel. Many pieces of code come together to make this a reality.

• Each release of the Fedora kernel starts with a baseline release from the upstream community. This is often called a ‘vanilla’ kernel. The upstream kernel is the standard. The goal is to have as much code upstream as possible. This makes it easier for bug fixes and API updates to happen as well as having more people review the code. In an ideal world, Fedora would be able to to take the kernel straight from kernel.org and send that out to all users.

=> ↺ Fedora Ambassadors: Communicating about Design

• This week is busy and continues to keep the pace of previous weeks. A lot has happened this week in the Fedora Project and I’ve taken on a few new tasks too. In addition to existing work on Google Summer of Code, Community Operations, Marketing, and more, I wanted to take some time this week to focus on CommOps Ticket #71. This ticket originally focused on improving accessibility of design resources for Fedora Ambassadors. However, after an interesting conversation with Máirín Duffy on the Design Team workflow, I discovered the availability was not the main issue. Instead, it seemed like communicating was an area needing focus.

=> ↺ Investigating Python

• I have been trying to implement private projects on Pagure, while doing that I was struggling with certain design of a function and while doing that I constantly have to switch between shell, editor and at times browser.

=> ↺ When is a kernel bug not a kernel bug?

• Think of this scenario: You’re sitting at your shiny Fedora install and notice a kernel update is available. You get all excited, update it through dnf or Gnome Software, or whatever you use, reboot and then things stop working. “STUPID KERNEL UPDATE WHY DID YOU BREAK MY MACHINE” you might say. Clearly it’s at fault, so you dutifully file a bug against the kernel (you do that instead of just complaining, right?). Then you get told it isn’t a kernel problem, and you probably think the developers are crazy. How can a kernel update that doesn’t work NOT be a kernel problem?

=> ↺ Notes on PXE booting with Fedora

• The typical method of installing Fedora on a desktop distribution is via some physical media (CD/DVD once upon a time, USB sticks these days). Fedora also supports PXE boot installation. I ended up doing a PXE install for some recent hardware that was shipped to me as that was the best supported method. The Fedora instructions are good but I still ran into a few hiccups. These are my notes which might be useful for others (or be wrong, YMMV). This was also a UEFI only setup.

=> ↺ UEFI virt roms now in official Fedora repos

• Kamil got to it first, but just a note that UEFI roms for x86 and aarch64 virt are now shipped in the standard Fedora repos, where previously the recommended place to grab them was an external nightly repo. Kamil has updated the UEFI+QEMU wiki page to reflect this change.

=> ↺ Fedora Design Suite considered “best of the basics”

• Do-it-yourself site MakeUseOf recently highlighted Fedora Design Suite from their article “6 Linux Distros Designed for Artists, Musicians and Editors“. They also called the Fedora Design Suite as the “best of the basics”.

=> ↺ Fedora 22: End Of Life, 2016 July 19

• With the recent release of Fedora 24, Fedora 22 will officially enter End Of Life (EOL) status on July 19th, 2016. After July 19th, all packages in the Fedora 22 repositories will no longer receive security, bugfix, or enhancement updates, and no new packages will be added to the Fedora 22 collection.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Free software activities in June 2016

=> ↺ RMarkdown and Metropolis/Mtheme

• Nick Tierney asked on Twitter about rmarkdown and metropolis about whether folks had used RMarkdown-driven LaTeX Beamer presentations. And the answer is a firm hell yeah. I have been using mtheme (and/or a local variant I called ‘m2′) as well as the newer (renamed) release mtheme for the last year or two for all my RMarkdown-based presentations as you can see from my presentations page.

=> ↺ DebCamp16 day 6

• Redirect one person contacting the Debian sysadmin and web teams to Debian user support. Review wiki RecentChanges. Usual spam reporting.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Canonical Releases Snapcraft 2.12 Snaps Creator with New Parts Ecosystem, More

• Today, June 29, 2016, Canonical has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the highly anticipated Snapcraft 2.12 Snappy creator tool for the Ubuntu Linux operating system.

=> ↺ Is Canonical the Victim of High Expectations?

• When Ubuntu was new, those who questioned it were mostly Debian developers, disgruntled because they were not hired or because Ubuntu failed to acknowledge its debt to Debian. Today, however, a vocal minority seems to view Canonical Software, the company behind Ubuntu, as a Microsoft in the making. From being the uncritical darling of open source, Canonical is closely and cynically scrutinized, and its motives constantly questioned.

• So how did this transformation happen? Suspicion about corporations is hardly new in open source, yet Canonical seems singled out in a way that SUSE or Red Hat only occasionally are.

=> ↺ Don’t want to pay for Windows 10? Try Ubuntu – the free operating system

• In the ever-changing world of high-tech gadgets and gizmos, a whole load of jargon is thrown our way that many of us don’t necessarily understand.

• In our regular series What is… we tackle a tech term or object and explain what it means so you can understand it a bit more.

• Here we explain Ubuntu, an alternative operating system that works across PC, tablet and more.

=> ↺ Canonical 32-bit PC Support Being Dropped for Ubuntu

=> ↺ Ubuntu Snap Packages Can Now Run on Any Linux Distro

=> ↺ Exclusive: Meizu MX6 Ubuntu Edition Promo Images Surface

• Meizu had introduced three new smartphones back in April, the Meizu M3, M3 Note and the PRO 6 flagship. This China-based company is expected to introduce a couple of more devices this year, and the Meizu MX6 handset seems to be the next in line. Its predecessor was announced back in July 2015, and it sported a really compelling spec sheet, while it wasn’t that expensive at all. The Meizu MX5 shipped with a 5.5-inch fullHD display, 3GB of RAM and the Helio X10 64-bit octa-core processor, which was MediaTek’s flagship processor back then. The MX5 also came with a full metal body, and its 20.7-megapixel rear-facing camera was also quite capable.

=> ↺ New Ubuntu-Powered Meizu Smartphone Codenamed ‘Midori’ is in the Works

• There are reports that Meizu’s upcoming smartphone codenamed “Midori” will run on a new edition of Ubuntu.

=> ↺ Meizu MX6 Spy Shot Leaked Along With Specs and Price

• It has been a couple of months since the Meizu PRO 6 was announced, and the phone has got its fair share of popularity. Meanwhile, the Chinese manufacturer is believed to be working on the next MX flagship, the Meizu MX6. Today, we have spotted a new spyshot of the phone along with its specs and price have surfaced online on Chinese site Weibo.

=> ↺ Ubuntu 16.10 Alpha 1 Is Out for Opt-in Flavors, Final Release to Land October 13

• Believe it or not, the development cycle of the next Ubuntu release has started, and a first Alpha build is now officially released, today, June 30, 2016, as expected based on the release schedule for Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak).

=> ↺ Logic Supply Is Giving Away a CL100 Ubuntu-Powered Mini-PC, Here’s How to Win

• Logic Supply informs Softpedia about a new contest they’ve put together to promote their fanless and ventless industrial PCs, and they’re giving away one of the new CL100 ultra-compact mini-PCs powered by Ubuntu Linux.

=> ↺ Got Dust? Logic Supply Launches Dirtiest PC Contest with #GoFanless Campaign

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Alpha 1 Arrives with MATE 1.14 Built Entirely Against GTK 3.18

=> ↺ Lubuntu 16.10 Alpha 1 Officially Released with LXDE and Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS

=> ↺ Ubuntu Kylin 16.04 Alpha 1 Now Available for Chinese Users with Linux Kernel 4.4

=> ↺ Cinnamon 3.2 Desktop Environment to Adopt New Menu Layout, Add Many Improvements

=> ↺ Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” Cinnamon and MATE Editions Officially Released

=> ↺ Linux Mint 18 KDE & Xfce Editions to Land in July, Along with 17.3 Upgrade Path

=> ↺ Linux Mint 18 Final First Look

=> ↺ Linux Mint 18.1 to Come with Cinnamon 3.2 & MATE 1.16, Flatpak and Snap Support

=> ↺ Linux Mint 18 MATE & Cinnamon Editions Released

=> ↺ Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” Cinnamon released!

=> ↺ MeX Operating System Brings Cinnamon 3.0 & Linux Kernel 4.6 to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

• Today, June 30, 2016, Arne Exton has released a new build of his MeX GNU/Linux distribution, based on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.

• Shipping with the Cinnamon 3.0.5 desktop environment (Cinnamon 3.0.6 is now the latest version available) and borrowing some of the technologies from the Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 “Jessie” repositories, MeX Build 160630 is now available for download powered by the Linux 4.6 kernel.

=> ↺ Review: Linux Mint 18 (Sarah)

• If you were looking to jump the Ubuntu ship completely, then we recommend taking a look at our recent Review of Fedora 24. It’s equally as good as Mint 18 and equally worthy of your consideration.

• Between Linux Mint 18 and Fedora 24, we reckon it’s exciting times in the Linux world. With the exception and onset of the boring world of vanilla Ubuntu releases, Linux feels reinvigorated and fresh once again. Jump on board, because it can only get better from here.

=> ↺ Linux Mint 18 Screenshot Tour

=> ↺ Declare independence from Windows 10 by downloading Linux Mint 18 ‘Sarah’ now!

• As we approach the Fourth of July weekend, I begin thinking about independence. I am very proud of my forefathers for defeating the British — our now-ally — and creating our great nation, the USA.

=> ↺ Monthly News – June 2016

• The Cinnamon and MATE editions of Linux Mint 18 will be announced this week. They successfully passed QA (quality testing) yesterday and they’re on their way towards a stable release.

=> ↺ Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” MATE released!

• The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” MATE Edition.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ RPi 3 add-on loads up on sensors, wireless radios

• Matrix Labs’s FPGA-driven “Matrix Creator” IoT daughter board for the Raspberry Pi 3 is loaded with sensors, 802.15.4 radios, and a mic array.

• The disc-shaped Matrix Creator add-on for the Raspberry Pi is based on AdMobilize’s successfully Kickstartered Matrix home automation and surveillance hub. AdMobilize spun off Matrix Labs, which has now built this cheaper, board-level version of the product.

=> ↺ Denver Mini Maker Faire Roundup

• We told you about NixCore in a links post last fall. This is a small Linux-based router board with a dev board add-on option. [Drew] himself was on hand giving live demos and selling boards. $30 is a pretty good price for this small SBC that’s not quite a Pi or an Arduino nor an ESP8266.

=> ↺ Atom-based gateway taps new open source IoT cloud platform

• Eurotech’s rugged, IP40 protected “ReliaGate 20-26” IoT gateway runs Red Hat Linux on a Bay Trail Atom, and has cellular, GPS, WiFi, and Bluetooth options.

• Eurotech’s ReliaGate 20-26 is the latest in a line of Internet of Things gateways, such as the ReliaGate 10-11, based on a TI AM3352 Sitara SoC, and the Intel Atom Z510-based ReliaGate 50-21. For the ReliaGate 20-26, Eurotech advances to a more modern “Bay Trail” Atom E3800.

=> ↺ Rugged COM Express Type 6 modules adopt Skylake and Braswell

• Win Enterprises unveiled a COM Express Compact module for Intel Braswell, following two COM Express releases for Skylake. They all operate from -40 to 85°C.

• The Win Enterprises MB-73450 is a 95 x 95mm COM Express Type 6 Compact computer-on-module that supports Intel Pentium and Celeron N3000, as well as Intel Atom x5-E8000, system-on-chips from the 14nm “Braswell” family. The module is the third in a new wave of Win Enterprises COM Express modules with Intel chips released in recent months.

=> ↺ Tough Mini-PC with up to four GbE ports runs Linux Mint on AMD SoC

• CompuLab’s Fitlet-RM is a rugged mini-PC that runs Linux Mint on an AMD A10 Micro-6700T, and offers -40 to 70°C operation, WiFi, and up to four GbE ports.

=> ↺ Transcend Wifi SD Card Is A Tiny Linux Server

• He read a post about these cards on the OpenWRT forums. They’re all a similar configuration of a relatively large amount of memory (compared to the usual embedded computer), a WiFi chip, and an ARM processor running a tiny Linux install. The card acts as a WiFi access point with a little server running on it, and waits for the user to connect to it via a website. It also has a mode where it will connect to up to three access points specified by the user, but it doesn’t actually have a way to tell the user what its IP address is; which is kind of funny.

Phones

Android

=> ↺ New Nexus 2016 specs rumors follow Android Nougat announcement

• Google’s meticulously planned transition from the Android N to the Android Nougat naming scheme has been closely followed by fresh Nexus 2016 news.

• The internal specs for these next two Android phones has been leaked, and they’re both shaping up to be promising sequels to the current Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X, according to Android Police.

• As we’ve reported on in the past, HTC is making both handsets this year, but we finally have a clearer idea of the power being put into the larger Android Nougat smartphone, codenamed HTC ‘Marlin’.

=> ↺ Android Without Google: A Brief And Mostly Uninspiring History

• Profit margins on hardware tend to be slim, and because Google enforces strict conditions on the inclusion of its app store and services, phone makers don’t have much room to stand out with their own software if they want to include any Google elements at all. Analyst firm Canaccord believes many Android phone makers are merely breaking even or losing money.

=> ↺ Google is working on a virtual reality version of Chrome for Android devices

• Google wants the entirety of the internet to be explorable in virtual reality, and it’s started using its mobile Chrome browser to make that happen. The latest beta and developer versions of Chrome for Android include support for the open source WebVR standard, reports Road to VR. The dev version also makes mention of a “VR Shell” feature that, in the future, will enable mobile device headsets to browse any website regardless of whether it uses WebVR.

=> ↺ Android N’s name is officially Nougat

=> ↺ It’s Official: Android N Is Android Nougat

=> ↺ Android malware earned a Chinese hacking group over $500,000 per day

=> ↺ Google is not giving India an Android Neyyappam

=> ↺ Dell says it’s done making Android tablets, won’t push new updates to existing ones

=> ↺ PlayStation Vue Arrives on Android

=> ↺ Cracking Android’s full-disk encryption is easy on millions of phones – with a little patience

=> ↺ Best Free Android Games

=> ↺ Google finally reveals the official name for Android N

=> ↺ Amazon Prime will knock $50 off an Android phone if you look at Amazon’s lock-screen ads

=> ↺ BlackBerry is working on 3 new Android phones, codenamed Neon, Argon, and Mercury

• Despite reports of lackluster sales for its first Android smartphone, BlackBerry is tripling down on the platform in the coming year. According to a person briefed on the company’s plans, the Canadian manufacturer will be releasing one phone per quarter for the next three quarters.

• Codenamed Neon, Argon, and Mercury, the trio will target a range of form factors and price points, according to the briefed individual.

=> ↺ Android N is now Android Nougat

• Google announced on Snapchat today that Android N, the latest version of Android, will now go by Android Nougat. The announcement comes after the company said at I/O last month that users could submit suggestions for the name online.

=> ↺ Six Points on The Samsung Galaxy Note 7: AKA The Best Android Phone of 2016

• This year’s Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is going to be EPIC. And that is very good news for long-standing fans of the phablet line, because last year Samsung really dropped the ball and did not bring the Galaxy Note 5 to the UK. Instead it pushed the Galaxy S6 EDGE+ — a bigger, more expensive version of the Galaxy S6. This initiative didn’t go down well at all. In fact, it was kind of a PR disaster for Samsung, who, at the time, wasn’t having the best of luck anyway.

=> ↺ Android OnePlus 3 Review

• A new Android smartphone is making waves for being half the price but full of features. Rich Demuro has his review of the OnePlus 3 in today’s Tech Report. Up until now, you probably haven’t heard of the brand OnePlus – so far they’ve built two smartphones but you needed an invite to buy one. Third time is a charm. Rich describes the phone as beautiful with plenty of features but the price is what you’ll really love — $400 unlocked is the official price tag. The OnePlus aims to be the Apple iPhone of Android — one phone each year with improvements to make it better.

=> ↺ Android will make it easier for you to turn off annoying push notifications

=> ↺ ASUS ZenUI Launcher now supports all Android devices running 4.3 and above

=> ↺ Google Maps for Android is finally rolling out multi-waypoint directions

=> ↺ LevelDropper: Auto-rooting Android malware bypasses Google Play security

=> ↺ Yandex’s Android browser now supports third party ad-blocking extensions

=> ↺ Dell stops selling Android devices

=> ↺ 1.2 million infected: Android malware ‘Hummer’ could be biggest trojan ever

=> ↺ Google Maps for Android now lets you navigate to multiple destinations on a single trip

=> ↺ Android Pay just added 115 new banks (and no, not Capital One)

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Questions loom about the future of open source at VA

• The CIO for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs sought to reassure stakeholders that the agency was committed to open source in the future, but with Congress pressuring the agency to give up the homegrown health record system VistA, the open source community is a bit perplexed.

=> ↺ Watch out for job offers from Google after this open source course

• Over five lakh polytechnic students from 500 colleges across Tamil Nadu would begin training on open source software from Friday, learning more about the nitty-gritties of ‘free’ software under a programme run by the Indian Institute of Technology – Bombay along with the Tamil Nadu government.

=> ↺ Bombay Stock Exchange: Open source is a mindset

• Open source is still gaining momentum in the industry worldwide. Despite naysayers, open-source software and hardware are making believers out of a broad array of users. In the case of Bombay Stock Exchange, LTD (BSE), the transition has been cost efficient, as well as has improved order processing power.

• By switching from proprietary hardware to open source, Kersi Tavadia, CIO of BSE, reported going from being able to process 10 million orders a day to 400 million. Even with the increase, the new open-source hardware is only using 10 percent capacity.

=> ↺ GitHub releases data on 2.8 million open source repositories through Google BigQuery

• GitHub today announced that it’s releasing activity data for 2.8 million open source code repositories and making it available for people to analyze with the Google BigQuery cloud-based data warehousing tool.

• The data set is free to explore. (With BigQuery you get to process up to one terabyte each month free of charge.)

• This new 3TB data set includes information on “more than 145 million unique commits, over 2 billion different file paths and the contents of the latest revision for 163 million files, all of which are searchable with regular expressions,” Arfon Smith, program manager for open source data at GitHub, wrote in a blog post.

=> ↺ How one company is using open source to double its customers’ mobile business

• Most retailers today stay a step or two behind when it comes to modern technology, especially on the mobile side. Sawyer Effect, LLC, a consultant for J.Crew Group, Inc., has been using Red Hat, Inc.’s open-source product Ansible, an IT automation engine, to get its customer’s mobile business up to speed and greatly improve its business.

=> ↺ Can Capital One change banking with open source, mobile apps, and NoSQL?

• Oron Gill Haus of Capital One came to MongoDB World to present on Hygieia, an open source DevOps dashboard built on MongoDB. Behind that dashboard lies an ambition to change the customer banking experience – no small feat. Prior to his keynote, Haus shared his team’s story with me.

=> ↺ How bank Capital One developed an open source DevOps visualisation tool based on MongoDB

• In order to keep up with customers’ expectation of a proactive service available 24×7 on many devices, US bank Capital One moved to an agile DevOps structure and a year ago released its own DevOps dashboard.

• While visualisation tools were available for continuous integration, scanning and testing, Capital One’s development team was unable to find one that provided a complete overview of the whole production process. The dashboard they developed, called Hygieia, was open sourced to encourage rapid development. It is currently in version 2.0.

• VP of engineering Gil Haus explained some of the thought processes that went into the creation of Hygieia.

=> ↺ What is DC/OS?

• What if we could take the total amount of power in any cloud computing datacentre and provide a means of defining that as one total abstracted compute resource? This notion has given brith to DC/OS, a technology base built on Apache Mesos to abstract a datacentre into a single computer, pooling distributed workloads and (allegedly) simplifying both rollout and operations.

=> ↺ Can you imagine a world without open source?

• I worked as a Linux kernel developer in the areas of scheduler and power management. It was fascinating to gain a deeper understanding and contribute to development in these areas. After a while, I felt the need to gain more breadth in my understanding of computer systems. A holistic view would not only help me better contribute to Linux, but would also enable me to explore other domains in a computer system. Towards this end, I chose to pursue graduate studies in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department of Carnegie Mellon University, which offers a wide range of courses in computer systems and is carrying out cutting edge research in this field too.

=> ↺ Asian firms must embrace ‘open innovation’ to remain competitive

• Businesses in Asia should embrace the “open source way of innovating” to gain agility and speed, and ensure they are delivering services that their customers want.

• That was the key message delegates should take away from the Red Hat Summit here this week, said Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, Red Hat’s Asia-Pacific senior vice president and general manager, who underscored the need for a collaborative platform and apply the concepts of open source to the world’s markets,.

=> ↺ Google and GitHub are Opening a New Window on Open Source

• Where can you find millions of open source code repositories? That would be on GitHub, of course, and with all those code repositories, one would think that analyzing them would lead to some interesting conclusions about open source in general, correct?

• That’s the thinking behind a new offering from GitHub in partnership with Google. The two have produced a new open dataset on Google BigQuery, a low cost analytics data warehouse service in the cloud, so that anyone can get data-driven insights based on more than 2.8 million open source GitHub repositories. The move brings new data analytics capabilities to BigQuery.

=> ↺ Open Source Gospel From Cisco’s Lauren Clooney

• Companies that traditionally focused on proprietary software are now playing catch up in order to compete by utilizing open source development.

=> ↺ My condolences, you’re now the maintainer of a popular open source project

• Marc Andreessen, creator of the Netscape web browser, famously said “software is eating the world.” I’d like to posit that it’s actually open source software that’s eating the world, and I have a couple of data points to back me up.

• First, a conclusion from the 2015 Future of Open Source survey: “Seventy-eight percent of respondents said their companies run part or all of its operations on OSS and 66 percent said their company creates software for customers built on open source. This statistic has nearly doubled since 2010.”

=> ↺ Tip: Try these open-source investigative journalism tools

• The Investigative Reporters and Editors conference took place in mid-June in New Orleans, and one of the sessions at the event looked at open-source tools for investigations.

• This ‘Steal my tool’ session highlighted a number of useful open-source investigative platforms, which Sam Berkhead, engagement editor at IJNet, listed in this article published after the conference.

Events

=> ↺ What’s holding your conference back

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Mozilla involves the community in its “open-source” rebrand

• Mozilla is bending the terms of the rebrand with a “branding without walls” open-source initiative.

=> ↺ Mozilla Firefox 47.0.1 Is Now Available in the Arch Linux and Solus Repos

• Mozilla quietly delivered the first point release of the Mozilla Firefox 47.0 web browser to users of Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems on the day of June 28, 2016.

• However, because the built-in updater of the Mozilla Firefox web browser doesn’t work on GNU/Linux distributions, users have to wait for the latest version of the software to be first pushed by the maintainers of their operating systems on the main repositories before they can upgrade.

SaaS/Back End

=> ↺ Solving business issues with a Big Data approach | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ The big leap: How one company moves data across platforms | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ BMC evolving with Hadoop to launch new data solutions | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ Open vs. Open Source: How one proprietary company utilizes Hadoop open-source software | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ The rapid rise of digital culture … and the fallout | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ Enabling discovery with the next-gen platforms | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ Is Hadoop becoming the center of gravity for data? | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ The plot thickens: Converged vs. connected in the data apps race | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ Keeping it together: Organizing endless data streams | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ The sweet spots of cloud access and organization overhaul | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ How to bring ‘intelligence’ to data handling | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ Natural selection: Is Apache the environment of evolution for Big Data? | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ Airtel Leverages Cloudera Enterprise to Improve Customer Experience and Product Personalization

=> ↺ Airtel adopts Cloudera for business intelligence

=> ↺ Airtel moves customer data on an open source platform

=> ↺ ​RightScale can help you pick out the right public cloud

• For example, let’s say you need a local cloud in Australia. With the tool, you’ll see that Google can’t help you while the others can. Or, for instance say you’ve tied your business to Oracle and you want Oracle Linux as your operating system. The program will quickly and easily tell you that AWS and Azure are the clouds for you.

=> ↺ The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® Bahir™ as a Top-Level Project

• Apache Bahir bolsters Big Data processing by serving as a home for existing connectors that initiated under Apache Spark, as well as provide additional extensions/plugins for other related distributed system, storage, and query execution systems.

=> ↺ Bahir is the Latest Big Data Project to Advance at Apache

• Recently, we’ve taken note of the many projects that the Apache Software Foundation has been elevating to Top-Level Status. The organization incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, and has squarely turned its focus to Big Data and developer-focused tools in recent months. As Apache moves Big Data projects to Top-Level Status, they gain valuable community support and more.

=> ↺ Open Source Is Key to the Modern Data Center, Says EMC’s Joshua Bernstein

• Flexibility, freedom, innovation and integration is the answer. The question is why should the enterprise build on open source? How can a business survive if it gives away everything? Joshua Bernstein, Vice President of Technology at EMC, makes the case for enterprise open source in his MesosCon North America keynote.

=> ↺ Do you spend more time solving vendor problems than business problems? | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ Is Hadoop ready for the enterprise world? | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ How one company is creating a united open-source community | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ New search engine makes data instantly searchable, increases data retention | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ Hadoop and Docker: ‘The shift from scale up to scale out’ | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ Is a secondary system for analytics necessary? | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ ‘It’s not a Hadoop-only world’: Casting a wider data net | #HS16SJ

=> ↺ IBM’s Massive Spark Initiatives Include an Offering for Data Scientists

Databases

=> ↺ MongoDB launches Atlas, its new database-as-a-service offering

• MongoDB, the company behind the eponymous open source database, is launching Atlas today, its third major revenue-generating service.

• Atlas is MongoDB’s database-as-a-service offering that provides users with a managed database service. The service will offer pay-as-you-go pricing and will initially allow users to deploy on Amazon Web Services (AWS), with support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform coming later.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

=> ↺ Giving Linux and LibreOffice a Try for Your Home Office

• Running your home office on a tight budget? There’s a way to get all of your software—operating system (OS), productivity suite, scores of applications—completely free. It’ll cost you, but not in the way you might think.

• This life-changing alternative is Linux, which gives you more flexibility, more have-it-your-way customization, and more control than Windows or OS X users could ever dream of. I caution that it’ll cost you because it’s decidedly not for everyone. While it’s far friendlier today than it was a year or even six months ago, Linux still requires you to invest, nay, enjoy some time spent setting up and tinkering with your PC.

=> ↺ New LibreOffice Vulnerability Patched in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Debian and Arch Linux

• Today, June 30, 2016, Canonical published a new security notice to inform users of the Ubuntu Linux operating system that the latest LibreOffice builds have landed in the repositories.

=> ↺ From Microsoft to LibreOffice: How Italy’s military is starting its march to open source

• In the past few years a growing number of Italian public bodies have chosen to ditch proprietary software for open source.

• But most of these decisions have been taken at the local level, while in general the country’s central government has seemed more reluctant to follow the open-source path.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

=> ↺ Keynote: The New Open Source Data Center

=> ↺ Dirk Hohndel Leaves Intel to become VMware’s Chief Open Source Officer

=> ↺ criminal company

=> ↺ VMware Appoints Dirk Hohndel as Chief Open Source Officer

=> ↺ Open Source Patents : Boon or Bane?

=> ↺ “Open Source Patents” is a fiction

=> ↺ Microsoft updates .Net to 1.0 with new libraries and tools

=> ↺ Open Source .NET Core 1.0 Released by Microsoft

=> ↺ Microsoft Spreads Open Source Love With .Net Core 1.0

=> ↺ attacks FOSS

Funding

=> ↺ DuckDuckGo: The Little Search Engine That Gives Back Big

• The company’s website says, “DuckDuckGo is a general purpose search engine that is intended to be your starting place when searching the Internet. Use it to get way more instant answers, way less spam and real privacy, which we believe adds up to a much better overall search experience.”

• [...]

• Proprietor Gabriel Weinberg says his once-personal project (founded in 2008) isn’t making anyone wealthy, but he and his workers live decently, and he says they’re doing well enough that giving money to open source projects doesn’t hurt their budget.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

=> ↺ Progress report from FísicaLab project

• Many changes has been done internally to facilitate the aggregation of new modules. But at UI has been some changes too. One of them is at the contextual menu of conversion factors. Now the menu only display the conversion factors available for the selected field.

=> ↺ Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup: July 1st

=> ↺ libbrandt GSoC midterm status update

• the GSoC midterm evaluation finished this week and it’s time for a status update on the libbrandt auctioning library project.

=> ↺ GNUCash News: If you want to build on a Mac

Licensing/Legal

=> ↺ Understanding open source licenses

• Open source licenses are licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition — in brief, they allow software to be freely used, modified, and shared. To be approved by the Open Source Initiative (also known as the OSI), a license must go through the Open Source Initiative’s license review process.

• There has been an increase release of open source software from the day of Linux. Today most popular frame works like bootstrap and software such as Atom IDE used by developers are open source. We often never worry about using open source code but do you know what the license under which the frame you’re using was released means?

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

=> ↺ Build your own open source solar panels

• Do-it-yourself electricity generation is still difficult and expensive. The inventors of the SunZilla project aim to make it easier, cleaner, portable, quiet, and completely open source.

• The SunZilla system is designed to replace diesel and gasoline-powered generators for portable and emergency power: camping, events, mobile phone charging station, provide power to refugee camps, or keep the lights on during a power outage. Two people can set it up in a few minutes. It is modular and plug-and-play. Leonie Gildein is one of the five SunZilla engineers, and kindly answered some questions about the project.

=> ↺ Lessons From The Downfall Of A $150M Crowdfunded Experiment In Decentralized Governance

• Hype around blockchain has risen to an all-time high. A technology once perceived to be the realm of crypto-anarchists and drug dealers has gained increasing popular recognition for its revolutionary potential, drawing billions in venture-capital investment by the world’s leading financial institutions and technology companies.

• Regulators, rather than treating blockchain platforms (such as Bitcoin or Ethereum) and other “distributed ledgers” merely as tools of illicit dark markets, are beginning to look at frameworks to regulate and incorporate this important technology into traditional commerce.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Mechaduino Powerful Open Source Servo Motor (video)

• Tropical Labs has this week unveiled a new open source industrial servo motor it has created in the form of the Mechaduino which takes the form of an affordable solo that is Arduino compatible.

• Check out the video below to learn more about this new Mechaduino servomotor which is taken to Kickstarter to raise $7500 over the next 20 days to go into production.

=> ↺ Will Open-Source Work For Chips?

• The open source movement, as we know it today, started in the 1980s with the launch of the GNU project, which was about the time the electronic design automation (EDA) industry was coming into existence. EDA software is used to take high-level logical descriptions of circuits and map them into silicon for manufacturing. EDA software starts in the five digits, even for the simplest of tools, tacking on two or three zeros for a suite of tools necessary to fully process a design. On top of this, manufacturing costs start at several million dollars.

=> ↺ DIY Off the Grid: Open Building Institute to Change Face of Home Construction & Home Ownership

=> ↺ Building Your Own Home From Open Source Blocks

• What if your next house were to cost 1/10th of the average home while sporting a long list of high-tech hyper-ecological features? With the help of the Open Building Institute (OBI), which is designing affordable, ecological housing accessible to everyone – you may be able to do just that.

• [...]

• OBI is following the same open source methodology that has made the Internet so successful — sharing the source code with a free license. Google and Facebook and many other Internet companies use open source software on the backend because large scale collaboration generally leads to superior technology. Open source hardware follows the same approach from electronics to 3-D printers.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Openfunds launches global standard for fund data interchange

• The standard is published on the openfunds website and can be used by anyone free of charge.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Google Calendar is down and people are freaking out

• If you depend on Google Calendar to manage your every minute, today isn’t exactly your day.

• Google Calendar went down on Thursday morning, preventing people from accessing their schedules.

Science

=> ↺ Light Pollution Is Throwing Off the Seasons

• We already know that light pollution has made the Milky Way invisible to one third of humanity. Now researchers have found that it might also be fast-forwarding the arrival of spring in the UK.

• In a study published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers describe how night-time light pollution is causing early budburst—emergence of new leaves on a tree—in four common types of British tree: ash, oak, sycamore and beech. The researchers based their findings on data collected by citizen scientists and satellite imagery giving information on levels of light pollution in areas across the UK.

• “For the last 13 years, a bunch of citizen scientist have been noting the time at which four common tree species come into budburst,”Richard ffrench-Constant, paper co-author and an entomologist at the University of Exeter, told me. “We found that budburst correlates with the amount of artificial light in an area.”

=> ↺ Stephen Hawking: Humankind is still greedy, stupid and greatest threat to Earth

• Physicist Stephen Hawking says pollution coupled with human greed and stupidity are still the biggest threats to humankind.

• During an interview on Larry King Now, the science superstar told King that in the six years since he’s spoken with the talk show host people haven’t cleaned up their act.

• “We certainly have not become less greedy or less stupid,” Hawking said. “The population has grown by half a billion since our last meeting, with no end in sight. At this rate, it will be eleven billion by 2100.”

• He noted that the massive problem of pollution has only grown in the last five years.

Hardware

=> ↺ How Sony, Microsoft, and Other Gadget Makers Violate Federal Warranty Law

• There are big “no trespassing” signs affixed to most of our electronics.

• If you own a gaming console, laptop, or computer, it’s likely you’ve seen one of these warnings in the form of a sticker placed over a screw or a seam: “Warranty void if removed.”

• In addition, big manufacturers such as Sony, Microsoft, and Apple explicitly note or imply in their official agreements that their year-long manufacturer warranties—which entitle you to a replacement or repair if your device is defective—are void if consumers attempt to repair their gadgets or take them to a third party repair professional.

Security

=> ↺ Hackers want you to continue ignoring this critical home cybersecurity flaw

=> ↺ Microsoft Office 365 Hit With Massive “Cerber Ransomware” Attack

• The Cerber ransomware is here to lock down your important documents and force you to pay ransom in the form of bitcoins. This malware targets the Office 365 documents and even plays a creepy audio warning message demanding the ransom.

=> ↺ This malware pretends to be WhatsApp, Uber and Google Play

• Hackers are stealing credit card information in Europe with malware that can spoof the user interfaces of Uber, WhatsApp and Google Play.

• The malware, which has struck Android users in Denmark, Italy and Germany, has been spreading through a phishing campaign over SMS (short message service), security vendor FireEye said on Tuesday.

=> ↺ Dangerous keyboard app has more than 50 million downloads

=> ↺ Study: Encryption use increase largest in 11 years

• Enterprise use of encryption saw the largest increase over the past year in over a decade, according to a report released today by the Ponemon Institute.

• But encryption technology spending as percent of total IT security budgets has gone down, said John Grimm, senior director of security strategy at Thales e-Security, which sponsored the report.

• In 2005, the first year of the report, only 16 percent of enterprises were using encryption extensively. The percentage increased gradually to 34 percent last year, then jumped to 41 percent this year.

=> ↺ Extracting Qualcomm’s KeyMaster Keys – Breaking Android Full Disk Encryption

=> ↺ Hacked!

=> ↺ Security advisories for Wednesday

=> ↺ Security updates for Thursday

=> ↺ Over 100 DDoS botnets built using Linux malware for embedded devices

=> ↺ LizardStresser botnet targets IoT devices to launch 400Gbps attacks

=> ↺ LizardSquad botnet changes colour to use IoT for 400Gbps attacks

=> ↺ Crooked Cameras? New CCTV Botnet Drives Massive DDoS Attack

=> ↺ LizardStresser IoT botnet launches 400Gbps DDoS attack

=> ↺ 25k connected cameras used as botnets; can your CCTV be hacked?

=> ↺ Huge CCTV Botnet Uncovered

=> ↺ Thousands of hacked CCTV devices used in DDoS attacks

=> ↺ Lizard Squad’s IoT botnet launches 400Gbps DDoS attack

=> ↺ Intel is said to mull sale of its security business

• Intel is considering selling its security business as the company tries to focus on delivering chips for cloud computing and connected devices, according to a news report.

• The Intel Security business came largely from the company’s acquisition for US$7.7 billion of security software company McAfee. Intel announced plans to bake some of the security technology into its chips to ensure higher security for its customers.

=> ↺ Ransomware Attacks May Trigger Breach Notifications

• A powerful California congressman is pushing the federal government to treat ransomware attacks on medical facilities as data breaches and require notifications of patients.

• The pressure is coming from Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and follows comments from officials at the Department of Health and Human Services about the department’s plan to issue guidance to health care organizations about ransomware attacks. The Office for Civil Rights section of HHS, which has responsibility for health information privacy, will provide guidance on how to handle ransomware attacks, and Lieu is eager to ensure that the guidance specifically addresses how ransomware attacks relate to data breach regulations.

=> ↺ Exploring and exploiting Lenovo firmware secrets

• Hi, everyone! In this article I will continue to publish my research of Lenovo ThinkPad’s firmware. Previously I shown how to discover and exploit SMM callout vulnerabilities on example of SystemSmmAhciAspiLegacyRt UEFI driver 1day vulnerability. Also, I introduced a small toolkit called fwexpl that provides API for comfortable development of firmware exploits for Windows platform. My previous Lenovo exploit was able to execute custom code in SMM, such conditions allow relatively easy bypass of BIOS_CNTL security mechanism which protect firmware code stored inside SPI flash chip on motherboard from unauthorized modifications by operating system (BIOS_CNTL bypass also was discussed in my another article “Breaking UEFI security with software DMA attacks”).

=> ↺ How to Compromise the Enterprise Endpoint

• Symantec is a popular vendor in the enterprise security market, their flagship product is Symantec Endpoint Protection. They sell various products using the same core engine in several markets, including a consumer version under the Norton brand.

• Today we’re publishing details of multiple critical vulnerabilities that we discovered, including many wormable remote code execution flaws.

• These vulnerabilities are as bad as it gets. They don’t require any user interaction, they affect the default configuration, and the software runs at the highest privilege levels possible. In certain cases on Windows, vulnerable code is even loaded into the kernel, resulting in remote kernel memory corruption.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Gun nut mom went back for more bullets before executing daughter

• Police say that Christy Sheats, the gun nut mom who shot dead her two daughters during a family confrontation that spilled into a Texas street, returned inside to reload before executing her child in view of horrified neighbors. She was still shooting when cops arrived, which is why they killed her.

=> ↺ Christy Sheats’ Daughters Beg For Their Lives In Chilling 911 Tapes

• The daughters of Texas mom Christy Sheets can be heard begging for their lives in 911 recordings released by police.

• The 42-year-old woman allegedly grabbed a gun and killed them Friday after calling a family meeting.

• In calls from Taylor Sheats, 22, and Madison Sheats, 17, they both can be heard begging their mother to put the gun down. “Please, don’t shoot. Please, I’m sorry. Don’t do it,” one of the young women urges.

• The voice of a man, presumably the girls’ father, Jason Sheats, 45, can be heard saying: “I’m sorry! I promise you whatever you want.”

=> ↺ Texas gun advocate shoots and kills her two daughters

• In March, Christy Sheats, 42, wrote on Facebook: “It would be horribly tragic if my ability to protect myself or my family were to be taken away, but that’s exactly what Democrats are determined to do by banning semiautomatic weapons.”

=> ↺ Islamic Radicalisation Surges In German Jails

• The trial of an Islamic State fighter in Germany has revealed the extent to which Salafists have infiltrated prisons and are radicalising Muslim criminals.

=> ↺ High Court grants legal challenge against British arms sales to Saudi Arabia

• British courts could ban the Government from signing off arms sales to Saudi Arabia after the first hurdle to a legal challenge was cleared.

• The High Court on Thursday granted a judicial review into the legality of UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia after a bid by campaigners and lawyers, who say the sales are unlawful.

• MPs on the international development committee and MEPs in the European Parliament earlier this year called on the Government to stop selling weapons to the autocratic petro-state.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ ACLU Files Challenge To CFAA Over Blocking Research Into Discrimination Online

• There’s been a lot of talk lately about the possibility of discrimination being built into the algorithms that determine our lives. In the past year, multiple publications have discussed what happens when algorithms are racist in a time when algorithms decide more and more of our lives. Just recently, we talked about judges using proprietary algorithms in sentencing, and how those algorithms themselves may judge people based on things like skin color. And just a few days ago, there was a fascinating NY Times article about inherent bias in artificial intelligence systems. I even went to a conference recently, where there was a whole discussion on the question of what do you do “if your algorithm is racist.” It’s not an easy question to answer, honestly, but one thing that we should not be doing is holding back research into these systems.

• And yet… that’s exactly what’s happening. And the culprit, once again, is the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (CFAA), which we’ve written about for years. The law, which is woefully out of date, and was passed (literally) by a Congress that was freaked out over the movie WarGames, is supposed to target evil “computer hackers.” But it’s written so broadly, including terms like “unauthorized access” or “exceeding authorized access,” that it’s been used against things like violating a terms of service (that you didn’t read or even agree to) or against downloading too many files. And that’s scaring the hell out of researchers.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ These fires are huge, hidden and harmful. What can we do?

• As forest fires devastated Fort McMurray, Alberta, last month, a different sort of fire may have started beneath the ground. Peat, a carbon-rich soil created from partially decomposed, waterlogged vegetation accumulated over several millennia and the stuff that fueled Indonesia’s megafires last fall, also appears in the boreal forests that span Canada, Alaska and Siberia. With the intense heat from the Fort McMurray fires, “there’s a good chance the soil in the area could have been ignited,” says Adam Watts, a fire ecologist at Desert Research Institute in Nevada.

• Unlike the dramatic wildfires near Fort McMurray, peat fires smolder slowly at a low temperature and spread underground, making them difficult to detect, locate and extinguish. They produce little flame and much smoke, which can become a threat to public health as the smoke creeps along the land and chokes nearby villages and cities.

Finance

=> ↺ With The Brexit In The Bag, ‘Vote Leave’ Starts Vanishing Away Its Promises And Faulty Math

• In the aftermath of what is generally considered to be a Bad Idea, the forces behind the UK’s exit from the European Union has pulled up stakes on its website and shut the whole thing down. The problem is that it looks more like an attempt to bury the past than to warmly greet the future it helped create, as Wired’s Matt Kamen notes.

=> ↺ Brexit is great news for the rest of the EU

• Democrats across Europe are in shock over Brexit, when they should be jubilant. That a slim majority of British voters – primarily English and Welsh – have acted against their own short- and long-term economic interests to leave us is a blessing. For decades British governments have played a double game: getting all the benefits of EU membership while opting out of its burdens, in the meantime undermining and even blackmailing the club from within. All of this is now over.

=> ↺ Article 50: decoding Donald Tusk’s careful remarks

• So: Prime Minister David Cameron avoided blurting out any notification under Article 50 at yesterday’s European Council meeting.

=> ↺ Carney Signals Rate Cuts as Brexit Chaos Engulfs Political Class

• Mark Carney signaled the Bank of England could cut interest rates within months as the central bank tries to shield an economy rattled by the shock of Brexit and the chaos engulfing Britain’s political classes.

=> ↺ Stop Giving Chickens Away, Bill Gates

• If you are talking about a short-term food donation to stave off hunger, such as after an earthquake, go ahead, please help. But for any long-term good to come of all this, it must respect the realities of the local market, and it must be sustainable. Free chickens are unlikely to do that.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Leave donor plans new party to replace Ukip – possibly without Farage in charge

• The Brexit campaign’s biggest financial donor has said he is considering backing a new political party taking in members of Ukip, Labour and the Conservatives.

• In a sign that the referendum aftershocks already rocking the Conservative and Labour parties could be spreading to Ukip, the insurance multi-millionaire and Ukip funder Arron Banks criticised the party’s growth and proposed harnessing Brexit support in a new party. When asked if Farage would be in charge, he said the Ukip leader “may have had enough”.

=> ↺ ‘Donald Trump’ emails British MP asking for money – receives ‘warm hope’ his ‘repugnant’ campaign will fail

• Glasgow East MP Natalie McGarry also finds it extraordinary that the anti-immigration US billionaire appears to be approaching foreign nationals with his ‘beggging bowl’

=> ↺ Burn It All Down

• Unless Lin-Manuel Miranda does a musical of his life, Bernie’s just a footnote in the history books. But the stigma that he won via a set of tricks to include the “superdelegate system,” some election fraud, and overt partisanship by the Democratic National Committee and much of the media, never mind what Obama does with the FBI report into her mishandling of classified information, lingers like the smell of ripe sh*t in a stadium toilet.

=> ↺ This is the creepiest thing David Cameron has ever said

• He will say Britons believe in “certain values”, adding: “To belong here is to believe in these things. And it means confronting head-on the poisonous Islamist extremist ideology. Whether they are violent in their means or not, we must make it impossible for the extremists to succeed.”

• It’s expected Cameron will introduce a counter-extremism bill in his Queen’s Speech later in May. Planned measures include introducing new orders to ban extremist organisations and restrict people who seek to radicalise youngsters.

=> ↺ Top Clinton aide was “frustrated” with her boss’ e-mail practices

• We already knew that Hillary Clinton’s e-mail and mobile device issues were likely a pain for State Department employees—and even some foreign governments. But new testimony recorded on Tuesday by one of Clinton’s top aides illuminates the extent of those headaches.

• Huma Abedin is the vice-chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign and the former deputy chief of staff and senior advisor to Clinton during her stint as secretary of state. She was deposed on June 28 by an attorney representing the conservative action group Judicial Watch as part of discovery for a lawsuit being brought against Clinton. Judicial Watch published the transcript of that deposition yesterday, and Abedin revealed what she knew about Clinton’s use of the mail server and how she was “frustrated” with the technical glitches caused by Clinton’s mobile device and e-mail travails.

=> ↺ Feds ask for 27-month delay in release of Clinton staff emails

• The Obama administration on Thursday asked a federal court to delay until October 2018 the release of 14,000 pages of emails from aides to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

• In a court filing on Wednesday, administration lawyers said the State Department miscalculated the amount of material it would need to process the documents as part of a lawsuit with the conservative organization Citizens United.

• As a result, the government asked for a 27-month delay to release the emails, which were originally due out on July 21.

• “State deeply regrets these errors, and is working diligently to correct them as quickly as possible,” the lawyers said.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Risky business: Journalists around the world under direct attack

• Index on Censorship magazine editor Rachael Jolley introduces our journalism in danger issue, which explores the pressures reporters face as they do their jobs in this 250th issue.

=> ↺ Reddit Censoring Anti-Islamic Speech Following Istanbul Bombings

• Once again, it seems that Reddit’s primary hub for breaking news is silencing users trying to discuss the latest incident of Islamic terror in Turkey

=> ↺ China’s internet censorship chief steps down

• China’s top internet regulator, who oversaw a severe tightening of internet freedoms during his tenure, has stepped down, reports said on Wednesday.

• Lu Wei – named as one of the world’s 100 most influential people last year by Time magazine – had been in charge of supervising controls on online expression since taking over as head of the Cyberspace Administration of China in 2013.

• China censors online content it deems politically sensitive, while blocking some western media websites and the services of companies including Facebook, Twitter and Google.

=> ↺ China Replaces Internet Censorship Chief

• Chinese authorities announced Wednesday that the head of internet censorship in the country, Lu Wei, will be replaced by his deputy Xu Lin, official news agency Xinhua reported.

• Lu Wei, dubbed as China’s ‘internet tsar’, will step down from his post as director of Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s top web regulator, and will be succeeded by Xu, one of the deputy directors of the organization, according to a decision made by the central committee of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC).

• Before taking charge of CAC, the 56-year-old Lu was head of the Propaganda Department of the CPC Central Committee in Beijing.

• In the same career trajectory, Xu occupied the same post in Shanghai between 2013-2015.

=> ↺ The Man Who Nailed Jello to the Wall

• On March 8, 2000, U.S. President Bill Clinton hailed the arrival of a new era, one in which the internet would mean the triumph of liberty around the world. He dismissed China’s fledgling efforts to restrain online speech. “Good luck,” quipped Clinton. “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.”

=> ↺ China replaces top internet regulator and censor with deputy

• China has replaced its internet regulator, Lu Wei, the hard-liner responsible for leading the government’s efforts to tighten control over domestic cyberspace and export the ruling Communist Party’s philosophy of web control.

=> ↺ China’s controversial ‘internet czar’ Lu Wei surprisingly steps aside, lets his deputy take over

=> ↺ China swaps cyber czars

=> ↺ China appoints new internet regulator

=> ↺ Lu Wei, China’s Internet Gatekeeper Stepping Down

=> ↺ China’s controversial internet czar stepping down from post

=> ↺ China replaces top ‘internet czar’ in unexpected move

=> ↺ China replaces its internet czar. Will its policies change, too?

=> ↺ China replaces internet czar

=> ↺ Cyberspace office names new head

=> ↺ China replaces Internet regulator

=> ↺ Mainland China replaces top internet regulator and censor with his deputy

=> ↺ China’s new internet chief set to maintain tight grip on web

=> ↺ China’s top internet regulator steps down

=> ↺ China to Replace Top Internet Regulator

=> ↺ China internet regulator Lu Wei to step down – report

=> ↺ China’s top Internet Regulator Likely to step down soon: Report

=> ↺ China’s feared “internet czar” Lu Wei is unexpectedly stepping down

=> ↺ China’s new top censor: A ‘political star’ rises

=> ↺ China appoints Xu Lin as head of internet regulator

=> ↺ China Replaces Head Of Cyberspace Affairs, Other Officials: State Media

=> ↺ China names new Internet regulator head: Xinhua

=> ↺ China’s Top Internet Regulator Said Planning to Step Aside

=> ↺ China’s powerful internet tsar steps aside as another of Xi Jinping’s close allies to take over

=> ↺ Chinese government cracks down on search ads and “banned content”

=> ↺ Baidu’s Woes May Benefit Yahoo and Bing: Forbes

=> ↺ China tightens up rules for Baidu and other search engines following scandal

=> ↺ China clamps down on undisclosed search ads

=> ↺ Baidu hit by fresh regulations

=> ↺ China Orders ‘Objective, Fair and Authoritative Results’ in Internet Search Engine Rules After Baidu Probe

=> ↺ China releases new search advertising rules following Baidu scandal

=> ↺ Sanef, journalists take censorship fight to SABC’s doorstep

=> ↺ South Africa: SABC Censorship – DA Writes to Parliament for Unusual Meeting of Communications Committee

=> ↺ Artist’s Artwork On Khajuraho Is A Witty Comment On Censorship

• Visual artist Akshita Chandra is a student at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bengaluru. In her seventh semester at the institute, she had to submit a project based on any historical event.

=> ↺ Apple gets patent for remotely disabling iPhone cameras, raising censorship fears

• A patent granted to Apple may allow iPhone cameras to be disabled by infrared sensors. This seems logical enough for concerts, but what about protests?

=> ↺ DMCA Notices Nuke 8,268 Projects on Github

• Popular code repository GitHub has just published its transparency report for 2015. While receiving a relatively modest 12 subpoenas for user data last year, the site also handed seven gag orders. It also received large numbers of DMCA notices which took down more than 8,200 projects.

=> ↺ MPAA’s Domain Name ‘Policing’ Results in First Suspensions

• Several “pirate site” domain names have been suspended following complaints from the MPAA. The websites in question all use domain names that are managed by the Donuts registry, which assigned the Hollywood group as its “trusted notifier.” MPAA and the domain registry are happy with results so far and hope that other key players will join their efforts.

=> ↺ Subaru owners complain of SiriusXM ‘censorship’ frustrations

• Some Subaru owners have complained of alleged ‘censorship’ frustrations when listening to SiriusXM satellite radio.

• A 2016 Subaru Outback owner, Vince Patton, raised concerns after his stereo would switch to SiriusXM’s preview channel #001 after he had been listening to certain comedy channels and restarted the car, according to an Automotive IT News report spotted by Forbes.

=> ↺ How Subaru Is Playing ‘Nanny’ By Flipping Satellite Radio Channels In Its Cars

=> ↺ Turkey Censors News, Social Media After Terror Attack

=> ↺ Turkey’s internet censorship after the Istanbul attack is nothing new

=> ↺ Sen. Cruz Slams Administration’s Censorship of ‘Islamist Terrorism’: ‘Orwellian Doublethink’

=> ↺ Cruz focuses on ‘radical’ Islam at testy hearing

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ US courts didn’t reject a single wiretap request in 2015, says report

• The number of wiretaps authorized by the courts in 2015 rocketed compared to the year before, says a new report.

• According to the annual wiretap report released on Thursday, which outlines how many real-time intercept requests were submitted by state and federal law enforcement agencies, the courts allowed 4,148 wiretaps during the last calendar year, up by 17 percent on the year-ago period.

• Most were issued by state courts. The majority of wiretaps were authorized in California, which accounted for 41 percent of all applications.

• New York came in second with 17 percent of wiretaps for the year.

• But not a single wiretap request was rejected during 2015, the report showed.

=> ↺ How many US wiretap requests were rejected in 2015? Not a single one.

• A new federal report shows that the number of surveillance requests skyrocketed in 2015, and that courts approved every single one of them. That’s right, not one single wiretap request was rejected during 2015.

• The U.S. government’s annual wiretap report details how many real-time intercept requests were submitted by state and federal law enforcement agencies. The most recent edition of this report, released today, says America’s courts allowed 4,148 wiretaps during the last calendar year, up by 17 percent from the previous year.

• Most of the wiretap requests in the most recent report period were issued by state courts, and California approved the most of all states — a whopping 41% of all applications.

=> ↺ A Government Error Just Revealed Snowden Was the Target in the Lavabit Case

• It’s been one of the worst-kept secrets for years: the identity of the person the government was investigating in 2013 when it served the secure email firm Lavabit with a court order demanding help spying on a particular customer.

• Ladar Levison, owner of the now defunct email service, has been forbidden since then, under threat of contempt and possibly jail time, from identifying who the government was investigating. In court documents from the case unsealed in late 2013, all information that could identify the customer was redacted.

=> ↺ Lavabit founder confirms feds’ Snowden spy efforts led to encrypted email service shutdown

• Lavabit founder Ladar Levison last week confirmed what had been an open secret: That he shuttered his encrypted email service in 2013 because of the federal government’s pursuit of former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

• In a statement issued June 24, Levison said that the gag order that had enforced his silence had been lifted. “After three years, and five separate attempts, the federal judge overseeing the case has granted Mr. Levison permission to speak freely about [the] investigation,” the statement read.

=> ↺ Snowden’s email provider confirms it was an investigation target

• It’s a poorly kept secret that officials targeted Lavabit’s secure email service as part of their investigation into Edward Snowden’s leaks. Heck, the US government inadvertently leaked the truth itself. However, a gag order has prevented Lavabit from publicly acknowledging this… until now. In a statement, company founder Ladar Levinson can finally confirm that law enforcement pursued Lavabit in order to access Snowden’s communications. When the investigation began, authorities wanted the provider to hand over an encryption key that would not only expose Snowden, but all 410,000 Lavabit customers. It’s no wonder that Levinson decided to close shop — it’s hard to advertise private email when the feds can theoretically spy on any of your users.

=> ↺ Government websites to use HTTPS encryption from October

• GOVERNMENT DIGITAL SERVICES (GDS) websites will use HTTPS encryption from 1 October, according to new security guidelines. And about time too.

• In addition, all services will have to publish a Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) policy applicable to their email systems.

=> ↺ Leaked FBI documents reveal secret rules for spying on journalists with National Security Letters

• Today, The Intercept published leaked documents that contain the FBI’s secret rules for targeting journalists and sources with National Security Letters (NSLs)—the controversial and unconstitutional warrantless tool the FBI uses to conduct surveillance without any court supervision whatsoever.

=> ↺ US efforts to regulate encryption have been flawed, government report finds

• US Republican congressional staff trying to find a middle ground on encryption have said previous efforts to regulate privacy technology were flawed and that lawmakers need to learn more about technology before trying to regulate it, according to a report released on Wednesday.

• The 25-page white paper – entitled Going Dark, Going Forward: A Primer on the Encryption Debate – does not claim any magical solution to the fight over encryption software that has roiled western capitals for more than two years. It was written by Republican staff on the House committee on homeland security, led by representative Michael McCaul, who has proposed a bipartisan top-level panel of encryption experts with senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat.

• But the document remains notable nonetheless for its measured language and criticism of other lawmakers who have tried to legislate their way out of the encryption debate. It also sets a new starting point for Congress as it mulls whether to legislate on encryption during the Clinton or Trump administration.

=> ↺ Facebook is chipping away at privacy – and my profile has been exposed

• Quietly, over the last year, Facebook has killed the concept of a private account.

• The site has always had a love-hate relationship with privacy: it’s long offered some of the most granular controls of any social network for choosing who sees what content, letting users make posts visible on a sliding scale from “everyone” to “only me”.

• That’s increasingly important for Facebook, which has seen a reduction of 21% in “original sharing”, users making posts about their own life. As people have become more aware of the downsides of sharing personal details publicly, it seems that they’ve stopped sharing altogether. Letting them have some control over who sees what they post is an important part of restoring trust.

=> ↺ Facebook wins privacy case, can track any Belgian it wants

• In a somewhat unexpected twist, Facebook has won a legal battle against Belgium’s data protection authority, which had sought to prevent Facebook from tracking non-Facebook (or not-logged-into-Facebook) users, both on the Facebook website itself but also via the company’s Like and Share buttons that can be found in even the darkest depths of the known universe.

• The Brussels appeals court dismissed the case on Wednesday, saying that the Belgian CPP (Commission for the Protection of Privacy) had no jurisdiction over Facebook, which has its European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.

• “We are pleased with the court’s decision and look forward to bringing all our services back online for people in Belgium,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

=> ↺ Facebook Wins Belgian Court Case Over Storing Non-User Data

• Facebook Inc. won an appeal overturning a Belgian privacy ruling that prompted the social network to block people without an account from accessing its site within the country.

• The Brussels Court of Appeal said the nation’s data protection authority couldn’t prevent Facebook from storing data from non-users in a fight over measures the technology giant says help it combat hacking attacks.

• “Belgian courts don’t have international jurisdiction over Facebook Ireland, where the data concerning Europe is processed,” the Brussels court of appeal said in a ruling Wednesday, referring to the company’s European headquarters. The court also said there was no urgency to rule on the case since Belgian court proceedings only started in mid-2015 over behavior that started in 2012.

=> ↺ My Activity Dashboard — How To Know How Much Google Knows About You

=> ↺ Google’s My Activity reveals just how much it knows about you

• Google has rolled out new tools to let users see what its ad-tracking service has learned about them, and to let users opt in or out of a new personalised ads service.

• The addition to Google’s account settings, called My Activity, allows users to review everything that Google has tracked about their behaviour – across search, YouTube, Chrome, Android and everything else – and edit or delete it at each step.

• If you use Google for everything you do, you might be surprised by just how much it catalogues about your comings and goings on the internet.

=> ↺ Another Terrorist Watchlist Leaks, This One Compiled By Thomson Reuters

• Thomson Reuters’ “global screening solution” pulls from hundreds of other databases, including sanctions lists, law enforcement lists, and compiled data from regulatory agencies. The collection doesn’t cause too many problems in the United States, but as Joseph Cox of Motherboard points out, it’s a bit more a problem when deployed in Europe.

• [...]

• As we’ve seen from other terrorism blacklists, the US government is no better at drawing conclusions or checking its lists for false positives on a regular basis. The fact that Thomson Reuters database pulls from hundreds of sources is probably better than the FBI/DHS method of shrugging people onto terrorist watchlists based on hunches, surnames, or camera ownership. It’s still disturbing that a private entity can control access to various services around the world by selling a watchlist to corporate customers, but there’s no reason to believe this private blacklist is any worse than those compiled by various governments.

=> ↺ US Intelligence Agencies To Americans Travelling Abroad: Trust No One, Use Burner Phones, They’re All Out To Get You

• The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has been going through something of an awkward phase the last few years. The Office, which is a part of the White House, and is supposed to direct and coordinate various parts of the intelligence community, has been trying to figure out how to be more open and “transparent” to the public since the Snowden documents began flowing. Given that historically the intelligence community has focused on being as secret as is humanly possible, it’s not very good at this whole transparency thing. And sometimes it’s just really, really awkward. Just try (really) to watch this video it put out on Wednesday, telling US travelers abroad to fear everyone and everything.

=> ↺ Encryption thwarting Feds, terrorists going dark … or not, actually

• Despite repeated warnings by the Obama administration over the use of encrypted communications by criminals, the government says that it encountered less encryption last year than in 2014.

• This according to the latest US Courts Wiretap Report on government surveillance requests, which was published this month.

• The report, which logs federal and state wiretap authorizations, finds that law enforcement officials encountered encrypted communications during wiretaps just seven times in 2015, compared to 22 times in 2014.

=> ↺ US border control could start asking for your social media accounts

• The US government is proposing making social media accounts part of the visa screening process for entry into the country.

• US Customs and Border Protection’s proposed change would add a line on both the online and paper forms of the visa application form that visitors to the US must fill out if they do not have a visa and are planning on staying for up to 90 days.

• The following question would be added to both the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (Esta) and I-94W forms: “Please enter information associated with your online presence—Provider/Platform—Social media identifier.”

• The information will be optional, for now, but the proposed change published by the US Federal Register states that “collecting social media data will enhance the existing investigative process and provide Department of Homeland Security (DHS) greater clarity and visibility to possible nefarious activity and connections by providing an additional tool set which analysts and investigators may use to better analyze and investigate the case.”

=> ↺ Amazon Dash buttons may get a new brand blitz

=> ↺ Here’s What Facebook’s Big New Change Really Means

=> ↺ Mobile messaging apps vying for dominance in Asia and beyond

=> ↺ App providers ordered to fulfill ’6 obligations

=> ↺ China tightens rules for mobile app developers

=> ↺ App providers face new data collection regulations in China

=> ↺ China issues regulations on mobile APP collection of user data

=> ↺ Mobile app developers in China hit with draconian new rules

=> ↺ New Regulations Could Make Apple Part of China’s Surveillance and Censorship Machine

=> ↺ Alexa does not like when you ask her about the NSA

• Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa is pretty good at answering most questions. But if you ask her if the NSA is monitoring you right now? She turns herself off.

=> ↺ Defending Human Rights in a Digital Age

=> ↺ Federation Council Approves Controversial Anti-Terrorism Laws

• The upper house of the Russian parliament, the Federation Council (FC), has passed a controversial anti-terrorism legislation package, the Interfax news agency reported Wednesday.

• The laws include far-reaching surveillance initiatives, harsher punishments for inciting or justifying terrorism online, and an increase in the number of crimes with which children aged between 14 and 17 can be charged. The lower house of parliament, the State Duma, approved the laws on June 24.

• Independent Duma Deputy Dmitry Gudkov took to social media to call the vote a “revolution” after five of the 170 council members voted against the legislation. The FC usually passes legislation unanimously.

=> ↺ Guy Asks Indian Supreme Court To Ban Encrypted WhatsApp… Because People Plan Raves With It

• And, yes, he also tossed in the “fear! terrorists!” argument as well, because of course. And it’s not just WhatsApp. He also wants a variety of other messaging platforms, such as Telegram, Hike and Viber, banned for using encryption (even though the implementations on many of those platforms is questionable). Of course, we don’t need to go through all the reasons why this is dumb. Strong encryption is much more likely to help protect the private information of the general populace from people looking to do bad things with it than it is to help terrorists in their planning. Could terrorists use it? Yes, just as terrorists can use other neutral, but important technologies for bad purposes. But we don’t go and ban them entirely just because they can be misused.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Donald Trump renews support for waterboarding at Ohio rally: ‘I like it a lot’

• Donald Trump offered renewed support on Tuesday for the use of torture while repeatedly comparing a proposed free trade agreement to rape.

• Trump, who has often praised the use of waterboarding and has spoken positively about alleged war crimes committed by American troops, said at a campaign rally, “We have to fight fire with fire”, after referencing the penchant for beheadings by Isis.

=> ↺ Texas Judge Indicted For Making Secret 10-Year Deal With Red Light Camera Company

• The market for red light cameras obviously can’t sustain itself, even with certain legislators drooling over the prospect of installing these revenue generators at every intersection.

• Part of the problem is the technology is still incredibly fallible. Cameras have issued tickets to walls, parked vehicles, and many, many drivers obeying all traffic laws. Millions of dollars of refunds have been paid out by municipalities who once thought they’d have to do nothing more than sit back and let the cash roll in.

• Citizens aren’t fans, so legislators have often pushed these through with a minimum of discussion. Major players in the traffic cam industry lobby hard for placement of their products — sometimes going as far as to engage in good old analog bribery and corruption.

• Officials, both public and private, have been indicted (and convicted) for their participation in the proliferation of traffic cams. Not that the cameras themselves were necessarily illegal, but because the only thing better than an uptick in public funds is an uptick in private funds.

=> ↺ Silicon Valley’s Leaky Pipeline Problem

• The latest data point from a Bloomberg analysis reveals that nearly 1,900 U.S. entrepreneurs received venture capital funding for their startups, 2009-2016. Of those, just 141 were women.

• So, then, you have to ask: Which women? Because things are even worse for women of color. A recent report from #ProjectDiane showed that from 2012 to 2014, African American female founders effectively received next to no venture funding. Of the 10,238 funding deals during that period, only 0.2 percent (24, total) went to African American women entrepreneurs.

• What’s happening here? If you believe that entrepreneurial capacity and talent are evenly distributed by gender and race, then why is there this vast difference in how men versus women, versus women of color, are able to tap venture funding?

=> ↺ Chagos islanders cannot return home, says Supreme Court

• Former residents of the Chagos Islands who were forcibly removed from their homeland more than 40 years ago have lost their legal challenge to return.

• Families left the Indian Ocean islands in the 1960s and 70s to make way for a US Air Force base on Diego Garcia, the largest of the group of islands.

• An Immigration Order preventing anyone from going back was issued in 1971.

• The Supreme Court – UK’s highest court – upheld a 2008 House of Lords ruling that the exiles could not return.

=> ↺ Apostates refused service at Wegmans bakery – fear of invoking offense led to discrimination, says Ex-Muslims of North America

• Wegmans, a chain of 89 grocery stores, refused to bake and decorate a cake for a private celebration for those who have left the faith of Islam.

• The request included a picture of the Ex-Muslims of North America (EXMNA) name and logo, with a caption of “Congratulations on 3 years!”, but was refused by an associate from the Fairfax branch of the popular chain, stating that the request was “offensive”.

=> ↺ Scientology Seeks Captive Converts Via Google Maps, Drug Rehab Centers

• Fake online reviews generated by unscrupulous marketers blanket the Internet these days. Although online review pollution isn’t exactly a hot-button consumer issue, there are plenty of cases in which phony reviews may endanger one’s life or well-being. This is the story about how searching for drug abuse treatment services online could cause concerned loved ones to send their addicted, vulnerable friends or family members straight into the arms of the Church of Scientology.

=> ↺ No decision after hearing for UK man accused of hacking FBI, NASA

• After two days of evidence, Lauri Love still does not know whether he will be extradited to the United States.

• In hearings at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, the Judge heard from 15 witnesses for the defence, but none from the prosecution. Lauri Love, 31, of Stradishall, has been accused by the US authorities of hacking into the US Federal Reserve, NASA, the FBI, and the Missile Defence Agency.

• He was first arrested by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) in October 2013 and was released on bail in July 2014. US prosecutors claim that Love’s alleged offences were not politically motivated and were instead designed to “to disrupt the operations and infrastructure of the US government” by stealing classified data and personally identifying information of government and military personnel.

=> ↺ Johnny Manziel’s Lawyer Accidentally Texts The AP And Then Threatens To Sue Them If They Report On It

• It’s become common game by many in America and elsewhere to crap on lawyers whenever the opportunity presents itself. This is done unfairly in many cases, with a lack of understanding of what the adversarial nature of our legal system requires of legal advocates. For instance, a lawyer that strongly advocates for a client accused of something terrible isn’t himself or herself terrible. That’s the duty of the job.

• But for one of the lawyers on the staff of Johnny Manziel, the seemingly troubled and frequent guest of the court who was once primarily known as a football player, it appears both that proper lawyer-ing is a bit more difficult than for most and that he’s a bully to boot. As you may have heard, Bob Hinton, who had been tasked with representing Manziel in his domestic abuse court case, accidentally texted the Associated Press information about his attempts to settle the case in a rather unfavorable light with respect to his client.

=> ↺ Rhode Island Governor Dumps Revenge Porn Bill In Favor Of Upholding First Amendment

• In an unexpected turn of events, Rhode Island’s governor has chosen the First Amendment over the hot button issue of revenge porn. One of several bad bills recently introduced by legislators (the others being a dreadful CFAA clone and badly-written “cybercrime” bill) is dead, killed by a politician who actually realized the potential damage to free speech it might have caused.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Under Cable Lobbying Assault, FCC Commissioners Waffling On Cable Box Competition Plan

• The cable industry’s relentless lobbying assault on the FCC’s plan to bring competition to the cable box appears to be working. As we’ve been covering, cable lobbyists have been filling editorial sections nationwide with all manner of misleading dreck, claiming the FCC’s plan (which you can read here (pdf)) will increase piracy, hinder innovation, hurt minorities, and rip giant holes in the time-space continuum. They’ve also engaged in the time-honored tradition of paying lawmakers that have no idea how technology works to make all manner of false claims about what the FCC’s plan actually does.

=> ↺ Kickbacks And Legal Tricks Are Protecting Mega-ISPs From Apartment Broadband Competition

• And that’s probably the least creative trick ISP lawyers use. Crawford notes that carriers also convince landlords to sign deals that prohibit any other ISP from even advertising their services on the property.

=> ↺ Dear Landlord: Don’t Rip Me Off When it Comes To Internet Access

• When building owners get kickbacks from big providers it’s the tenants who lose

DRM

=> ↺ Xbox Fitness Users Shelled Out Big Bucks For Workout Programs They’ll Soon Be Totally Unable To Use

• In late 2013, Microsoft launched Xbox Fitness for the then-new Xbox One. The fitness program leaned heavily on the Kinect motion sensor you’ll recall Microsoft initially and ingeniously forced everybody to buy — even though many users had no interest in the accessory. Xbox Fitness included 30 free training sessions, but also allowed users to pay significantly more for additional workouts, including shelling out $60 for P90X routines, to individual Jillian Michaels videos that cost users $12 each. These users likely assumed that once they bought these workouts, they’d be able to use them indefinitely.

• Those users apparently didn’t get the memo that we no longer own the things we buy.

Intellectual Monopolies

=> ↺ African Group Proposes Patents And Health Programme At WIPO

• This week in the World Intellectual Property Organization patent law committee, the African Group submitted an updated proposal for a work programme on patents and health that would help developing countries tailor patent law to their circumstances.

=> ↺ US Sees Weak African IP Protection, But Not Enough To Lose Unilateral Trade Benefits

• The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) today (29 June) released its annual report on the eligibility of African nations for unilateral trade benefits offered by the US. While some countries were praised for progress on intellectual property protection, others were found to be weak in this area, but none were removed from eligibility for that reason. Overall, reporting on IP rights varied widely in the report.

=> ↺ TAFTA/TTIP Just Got Harder: Brexit Is ‘A Midsummer Night’s Nightmare’ Says EU Trade Commissioner

• After the dramatic and largely unexpected victory of the “Brexit” (Britain Exit) camp in the UK — those who want the country to leave the European Union — politicians around the world are trying to work out what the implications will be. For the UK, of course, it meant an immediate trashing of the UK pound against the US dollar; for the US, it meant the loss of a reliable ally within the EU camp.

• [...]

• As that mentions, trade is one area where the UK played a key role for the US, and its departure from the EU will make negotiations for the TAFTA/TTIP deal, now dragging on into their fourth year, even harder, since the UK was one of the main countries pushing for it. The European Commission is worried: after the results of the Brexit vote were known, the EU’s commissioner for trade, Cecilia Malmström, called it “A midsummer night’s nightmare,” (original in Swedish.)

=> ↺ Will the USPTO’s “Patents 4 Patients” Program Even Make It Off the “Cancer Moonshot” Launch Pad?

• Second, in the field of biology specifically, there is considerable debate about whether there are any laws of nature at all. The Evolutionary Contingency Thesis states that there are no laws of biology, since biological relationships are the result of evolutionary forces—random mutations, environmental variables and selection pressures, and multiple functionally equivalent adaptions. As Stephen Gould put it vividly: “evolution is like a videotape that, if replayed over and over, would have a different ending every time.” That a particular sequence of amino acids codes for a specific protein is just as much a result of contingent evolutionary forces as the ability of aspirin to stop headaches: neither was a necessary outcome of the universe. Or to put in the terms overused by the Supreme Court, neither of these are on the level of Einstein’s E=mc2 or Newton’s universal law of gravitation.

=> ↺ WIPO Patent Law Committee Adopts Work Programme; Good Omen, Some Say

• World Intellectual Property Organization members attending this week’s patent law committee meeting agreed on a work programme, reflecting divergent views on patents and health, exceptions and limitations, and patent quality.

Trademarks

=> ↺ You’ll Never Guess Which Portmanteau Everyone Is Suddenly Trying To Trademark

• It had to happen. There was no avoiding it. It’s quite common for individuals, and sometimes even businesses, to surf the wave of a popular news cycle and attempt to translate some story into a trademark to exploit. A good percentage of the time, this is done as something of a short-term squatting attempt, where some word or phrase becomes suddenly popular and someone races to trademark it in order to license or sell it to another entity. Other times, it’s simply done to capitalize on the sudden popularity of a word or phrase directly.

• You already know where this is going. Yes, the “Brexit” trademarks are starting to pour in, almost literally in the case of Sam Adams Boston Lager maker Boston Beer.

=> ↺ NRA Trademark Complaint Over Yes Men Parody Takes Down 38,000 Websites

• You may have seen last week a website called ShareTheSafety.org, which was an impressively detailed parody site, pretending to be from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and gunmaker Smith & Wesson about a “buy one, give one” handgun program — where it claimed you’d buy a handgun, and a free handgun would then be sent to an inner city individual “in need” of a gun. The parody was deep and thorough — including setting up another domain, NRApress.org, in order to post a single press release about this program, and which cleverly is designed with actual links to actual NRA press releases and, if you just go to the main domain, it redirects to the NRA’s actual press site. The site definitely fooled a few people, and there were lots of questions popping up on Twitter about whether or not it was real or parody.

• Of course, a day or so after it started spreading, it was revealed that famed pranksters The Yes Men were behind it. They also posted a promo video and a fake press conference announcing the program (the fake press conference being a fairly common Yes Men trope).

Copyrights

=> ↺ Marrakesh Treaty brought into force by Canada accession

• Canada has become the key 20th nation to accede to the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled. This means the treaty will come into force on September 30, three months after Canada’s accession.

=> ↺ WIPO Treaty On Copyright Exceptions For Visually Impaired Enters In Force

• The World Intellectual Property Organization treaty to facilitate access to books in special formats for visually impaired people will enter into effect, as the 20th member state acceded to the treaty today.

• As a result of the accessions, the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled will enter into effect on 30 September 2016, according to sources.

=> ↺ Malibu Media Sues Its Former Lawyer Over Missing Funds, Breach Of Bar Rules

• All aboard the schadenfreude express! It appears that when you base your business model on dubious litigation, you also to attract dubious litigators. (See also: Righthaven, Prenda Law.) So, this latest development in the Malibu Media saga — brought to our attention by Sophisticated Jane Doe of Fight Copyright Trolls — is perhaps less surprising than inevitable.

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