This page permanently redirects to gemini://gemini.techrights.org/2017/06/18/new-debian-release/.

● 06.18.17

● Links 18/6/2017: New Debian Release, Catchup With a Lot of News

Posted in News Roundup at 6:31 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

• And we need to adapt our thinking accordingly: we don’t need free and open source software and copyleft so that the next generation can hack the Linux kernel; we need it so they can hack a flying car.

=> ↺ Linux Is Everywhere (The Shirt)

=> ↺ I made a T-Shirt called “Linux Is Everywhere”, Thoughts?

• This shirt is to celebrate the proliferation of Linux throughout the computing world. Linux is so widely spread that it is very likely everyone uses it everyday, whether they know it or not. Linux powers about 80% of the Internet, 100% of Android devices (phones and tablets), 100% of Chromebooks, Chromecasts, Roku, and so much more.

Desktop

=> ↺ Star Labtop: a new Linux laptop contender

=> ↺ [Older] Setting up my new notebook with seven types of Linux – and Windows 10

• A few months ago I bought an ASUS X540SA notebook, which I was quite pleased with as a low-priced system.

• The one thing about it that I was never really happy with was the 15.6-inch display, because the display size determines the overall system size (and indirectly the weight), and I prefer to carry smaller/lighter laptops in my backpack. In addition, the larger display consumes more power, thus shortening battery life. Despite that, though, I have been using that laptop quite a lot, and I’ve been very pleased with it.

• A week or so ago, I saw another very similar ASUS notebook on sale here in Switzerland at about the same price (CHF 300.-), but with a 14-inch display. Not only does that smaller display avoid my complaints about the larger X540S, but because it has the same resolution (1366×768) I think the display looks better on the smaller size.

• I wish that I could tell you for sure what the model number of the new system is, but I’m can’t. I can say for sure that what is written on the box, and on the sticker on the bottom of the system, is R414SA. However, when I went to the ASUS website to verify the configuration, I couldn’t find any mention of that model – or of any “R”-series model!

=> ↺ [Older] Ultra-Geek Linux Workstation Guide

• So I’ve gone a little overboard collecting notes about what seems to me to be an ideal Linux workstation for hackers. Everything from hardware to software. Thought I’d share it with you all because many of the items on the list were a surprise to me, and I think you’ll enjoy them. Feel free to write me and suggest even better ideas.

=> ↺ [Older] “Oryx Pro Linux-powered Laptop Review” – Lunduke Hour – June 5, 2017

=> ↺ [Older] Review: Galago Pro is a Linux laptop for professionals

• There used to be a time when buying a new laptop was a huge undertaking for a Linux user. It required a lot of pre-sales research to ensure that the system you were going to buy would work with Linux, ‘with’ a workaround or extra effort.

• Linux has come a long way, thanks to the efforts of the kernel community, especially Greg Kroah-Hartman who works with hardware vendors to add support for Linux. Nowadays, in most case, everything just works.

• This improved support for Linux has encouraged hardware vendors to offer systems with Linux pre-installed, creating a niche, yet growing market for some companies. Denver-based, System76 is one such company that has made its name by offering a wide range of Ubuntu powered systems.

• Last week I got my hands on the latest System76 laptop, Galago Pro, which offers a great mix of portability and raw power.

Server

=> ↺ [Older] OpenStack faces the challenges of cloud backups

• It seems that system administrators will never shake the need for backups, even when they shove everything into the cloud. At the OpenStack Summit in Boston last week, a session by Ghanshyam Mann and Abhinav Agrawal of NEC laid out the requirements for backing up data and metadata in OpenStack—with principles that apply to any virtualization or cloud deployment.

=> ↺ CoreOS Container Linux on the Desktop!

• Live demo of Container Linux on the Desktop! How to run apps like Spotify and Chrome as well as basic workflow when your entire desktop is containerized. This will also go over the benefits gained from using Container Linux as a base OS and how to go about running it on the desktop.

=> ↺ Linode Launches Preliminary CoreOS Support

• With the rise of cloud-computing came many tools that have redefined the way we run applications on the Internet. Docker brought Linux containers (LXC) to new heights allowing applications to be tested and deployed quickly and in a reproducible manner. Containers went hand-in-hand with microservices architecture causing tools such as [Kubernetes][k8], created by Google, to be developed to help orchestrate scalable, Docker-based infrastructure. In an increasingly container-based world, new technologies at every level of the stack were created to adapt. At the operating system level, CoreOS was created and now Linode finally supports it.

=> ↺ Celebrating Clair v2.0.0, the container security scanner

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Linux Kernel Podcast for 2017/05/14

• In this week’s catchup mega-issue: Linux 4.12-rc1 (including a full summary of the 4.12 merge window), Linux 4.11 final is released, saving TLB flushes, various ongoing development, and a bunch of announcements.

=> ↺ Late Night Linux – Episode 12

• Nextcloud scaling up, decentralised Internet, KDE love, Devuan, Linux in the real world, Fedora’s sales pitch and more on LNL 12.

=> ↺ Brandon’s KVM Conundrum | For The Record

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux 4.14 to Be the Next LTS Kernel Series, Supported for at Least 2 Years

• Renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced earlier this morning on his Google+ page that the upcoming Linux 4.14 kernel series will be an LTS (Long Term Support) branch.

=> ↺ Linux 4.14 Will Be The Next LTS Kernel Branch

• Now, first spotted by Softpedia, Greg has once again announced on his Google+ page that the next LTS kernel branch will be Linux kernel 4.14.

=> ↺ Linux 4.11.6

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.11.6 kernel.

• All users of the 4.11 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 4.11.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.11.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

=> ↺ Linux 4.9.33

=> ↺ Linux 4.4.73

=> ↺ Greg Kroah-Hartman’s post

=> ↺ Stop the plagiarism

• Guys, this is your last warning. This stops now or I’m sending lawyers after you and the companies paying you to plagiarize our work and violate our registered copyright (which for the record entitles us to punitive damages which now are very easily provable). It’s time to get serious about attribution — what you are doing is completely unacceptable. I’m already in contact with lawyers to prepare for the next time this happens. If any of this plagiarized and misattributed code actually made it into the Linux kernel, you’d all be in a world of pain.

• Matt — did you not see in the directory the Kconfig file was copy+pasted from the following…

=> ↺ Elixir Cross Referencer: new way to browse kernel sources

• Today, we are pleased to announce the initial release of the Elixir Cross-Referencer, or just “Elixir”, for short.

=> ↺ Some weekend stable kernel updates

=> ↺ With Linux 4.12, Clouds/VMs Backed By NVMe Storage Should Be Much Faster

• With the Linux 4.12 kernel when running in emulated environments like VMs/clouds atop NVMe (NVM Express) solid-state storage you should be able to obtain much greater performance.

=> ↺ [Older] The end of the 4.12 merge window

=> ↺ [Older] How I Found A 20-Year-Old Linux Kernel Bug

=> ↺ Rewrite the Linux kernel in Rust?

• I do not write code for a living. Nor do I study computer science in university. And you know why this is great? Because it allows me to code completely stupid and useless things without anybody being on my back to tell me I shouldn’t. And what I am about to talk is precisely one of these codes…

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Insights On Companies Behind Wayland [Updated]

Applications

=> ↺ What’s the story with VLC?

• VLC is one of the most used software in the world, and it’s completely free. Where does it come from? This is your answer …

=> ↺ [Very old] 8 Free Linux BitTorrent Clients For linux users

• BitTorrent is an open source peer-to-peer file protocol for sharing large software and media files. It is a well established protocol which accounts for a significant proportion of internet traffic. Many Linux companies rely on BitTorrent as a key method of distributing their software, relieving the bandwidth burden on their servers. Downloads get faster when there are lots of users downloading and sharing at once. So to provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 8 polished Linux BitTorrent clients. Hopefully,We think the software presented here represents the big players, and a wide range of interfaces and features.

=> ↺ Quod Libet 3.9 Highlights

• (Quod Libet is a audio library tagger, manager, and player for Linux / Windows / macOS)

=> ↺ Gerbera v1.0 Released

• I am proud to announce the first release of the Gerbera media server!

• There have been over 340 commits since the last commit on the MediaTomb git. These including porting the build system to cmake, removing lots of bundled code (including libupnp itself), replacing spidermonkey with duktape, code housekeeping, album artwork support, bugfixes and more.

=> ↺ VirtualBox: Are You Getting Your Money’s Worth?

• Well of course you are. It’s free, isn’t it? Ok, so then why not double the return on your investment? Why not find out how much more you can accomplish as a VirtualBox power user?

• Oracle’s VirtualBox is easy to install, easy to use, and gives you the ability to run virtual versions of just about any modern operating system from within any other modern operating system. Windows 10 on Ubuntu Linux? I’ve done it myself. FreeBSD on CentOS Linux? Sure, why not?

=> ↺ FreeCAD Arch development news – May 2017

• So here we are for our monthly report of what has been going on on the FreeCAD front this month. As usual, I will mostly talk about what I have been doing myself, but don’t forget that many people are working on FreeCAD, so there is always much more happening than what I talk about in these notes.

=> ↺ 10 Alternative Web browsers for the Linux operating system

=> ↺ Top 10 Text Editors for Linux Desktop

• In this article we are going to look at the top 10 text editors for Linux desktop environment. Some text editors are not just a default editor to edit text but also doubles up as an IDE, which makes it quite useful. These are very helpful in developing application in the linux environment and even though there are a lot of text editors out there, we are only going to focus on the ten best text editors for the linux desktop environment. So let’s quickly jump into the list without wasting any more time:

=> ↺ [Older] Arcan 0.5.2

• A new version of Arcan has been tagged. There is no demo video or fancy screenshots this time around; those things will have to wait until updates come to the related projects (mainly Durden) in a few weeks. Most of the work that remains on the 0.5 series isn’t much to look at by itself – but is nevertheless conceptually and technically interesting.

=> ↺ Ambient Noise (ANoise) Player Fixed For Ubuntu 16.04 And Newer

• Ambient Noise, or ANoise is a simple, lightweight application for playing ambient noises, such as waves, rain, fire, and so on, useful to help you stay focused and boost productivity, or fall asleep.

• The application didn’t work in Ubuntu 16.04 and newer until recently, when it was updated to GStreamer 1.0 and Python 3, along with some bug fixes.

=> ↺ Calibre 3.0 Adds Support for Reading Books In-Browser on Your Phone or Tablet

• Calibre developer Kovid Goyal unveiled today Calibre 3.0, a major update of the open-source and cross-platform ebook library management application for all GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows computers.

• Compared to the 2.0 series of the app, Calibre 3.0′s biggest new feature is an entirely re-written Content Server component that lets users read book in-browser on their phone and tablet devices. Best of all, the implementation also works offline, so you won’t need an Internet connection to read your favorite books while on the go.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Automatically Create/Remove And Mount Swap File In Linux Using Shell Script

=> ↺ Measuring success – l10n/language

=> ↺ Configuring msmtp on Ubuntu 16.04

=> ↺ Initial Magic Wormhole implementation in Keysign

=> ↺ [Older] Exploring /dev/input

=> ↺ Deploying Kubernetes Secrets with CircleCI

=> ↺ [Older] ARM pointer authentication

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Basic Tutorial : Installing Raspbain,Connecting with SSH , Tightvncserver

=> ↺ Writing a Unix Shell – Part I

=> ↺ Writing a Unix Shell – Part II

=> ↺ How To Run Particular Commands Without Sudo Password In Linux

=> ↺ RHEL7: How to get started with CPU governor.

=> ↺ Enhancing the security of the OS with cryptography changes in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4

=> ↺ RHEL7: How to get started with Atomic Host.

=> ↺ Google Now Conky

=> ↺ Entering the mosh pit

=> ↺ System monitoring with osquery

=> ↺ How to Live boot Kali Linux 2017.1

=> ↺ Is my Red Hat product affected by WannaCrypt ransomware?

=> ↺ Use Bash to remotely create a Reverse Shell — Engineer Man

=> ↺ Linux utils that you might not know

=> ↺ Randomizing structure layout

=> ↺ Restricting pathname resolution with AT_NO_JUMPS

=> ↺ IPv6 segment routing

=> ↺ Async IO on Linux: select, poll, and epoll

=> ↺ How Torch broke ls and made me vulnerable (or the hidden dangers of LD_LIBRARY_PATH)

=> ↺ How to monitor Nginx on Kubernetes: Metrics alerts

=> ↺ How to direct-install Debian SID rolling release using mini.iso (w/ screenshots)

=> ↺ How To Install KDE Desktop Environment On Fedora, CentOS, RedHat?

=> ↺ save-message → sync-mailbox Automatically in Mutt

=> ↺ How to Use Cron

=> ↺ This fancy keyboard overlay shows all the commands you need in Vim

=> ↺ How to install and setup KDE Connect on elementary OS 0.4 Loki

=> ↺ How to correctly install LibreOffice on elementary OS 0.4 Loki

=> ↺ How to get domain name from URL in bash shell script

=> ↺ How to configure Samba to use SMBv2 and disable SMBv1 on Linux or Unix

=> ↺ Auto-opening portal pages with NetworkManager

=> ↺ Script: Install Joomla 3.7 on a CentOS/Fedora VPS

=> ↺ Set up Tails 3.0 Official Release

=> ↺ Things to do after installing elementary OS 0.4.1 Loki

=> ↺ Easy Tutorial to Learn File Compression And Archiving in Ubuntu Linux Terminal

=> ↺ curl doesn’t spew binary anymore

=> ↺ Automatic Whitelist of Cloudflare IPs in FirewallD with Bash script via Cron Job

=> ↺ Manually Throttle the Bandwidth of a Linux Network Interface

=> ↺ Mutt, the Vim Way

=> ↺ Discover 5.11 origin switching

=> ↺ Debugging a mystery: ssh causing strange exit codes?

=> ↺ Ubuntu Router

=> ↺ Running Nextcloud in a jail on FreeBSD

=> ↺ Linux Tutorial For Beginners – 1 | Linux Administration Tutorial

=> ↺ Recover Deleted Files Using the Free Open Source Tool PhotoRec

=> ↺ Speed up ML model development with GNU Parallel

=> ↺ Linux Mint Sandboxing Guide

=> ↺ 4 Ways to Transfer Files to a Linux Hyper-V Guest

=> ↺ Linux History Command – Tips and Tricks

=> ↺ Generating Random passwords using apg in ubuntu linux

=> ↺ Apache Benchmarking using AB in linux

=> ↺ Linux Namespaces And Go Don’t Mix

=> ↺ 7 tips for a productive development setup on Linux

• We all know the frustrations of being a developer- getting stuck on a simple piece of code for hours. Mental exhaustion of situations when bugs elude

• I think it is important for a developer to save time wherever he/she can. I often found myself wasting time over simple things in Linux, and I have seen expert developers saving so much time and frustration just by having proper tools/ setup.

• Here’s a guide for beginner developers that’ll definitely give you a programming productivity boost. Some of this may seem obvious to you, however, I wish had known them before starting my journey with development on Linux.

=> ↺ cron.weekly issue #84: Hadoop, UUID, Evil.sh, GDB, rl, Monica, SFTP, Containers & more (

=> ↺ cron.weekly issue #85: yes, SQLite, bingrep, reredirect, Spack, sudo, mdadm, MySQL & more

=> ↺ cron.weekly issue #83: Humble Bundle, Sudo, kapo, slap, Node, MySQL, iostat & more

=> ↺ cron.weekly issue #82: Puppet 5, Debian 9, Chef, Vim, CNI, TFS, Haraka, PostgreSQL & more

=> ↺ How To Setup Open Watcom On WINE for Windows programmers

• ​Open Watcom is a C/C++ compiler suite (including FORTRAN) for Windows, handy for those Linux users who wish/need to program in Windows environment but don’t have one. This is the only successful programming tool that runs under WINE! Still, that doesn’t mean it works fine without errors. That’s also the fun part because you get the opportunity to use commands more often for compiling, linking and then running the program.

=> ↺ How To Install .tar.gz Or .tgz Packages In Linux

• ​Linux is the operating system with more kinds of packages. Surely, if you have used Debian, you should know the file type .deb or maybe, if you have used Fedora, you should know the file type .rpm. In Linux, we have a lot of file types when we talk about installation packages, and surely, you know the format .tar.gz.

=> ↺ Restrict Access To Linux Servers Using TCP Wrappers

=> ↺ nginx: How To Block Exploits, SQL Injections, File Injections, Spam, User Agents, Etc.

=> ↺ Sorting numbers inside text strings

=> ↺ Audacity and GCC – Mismatch between the program and library build versions

=> ↺ Vifm – A Commandline Based File Manager with ‘Vi Keybindings’ for Linux

=> ↺ HTML Email from Mutt

=> ↺ Emacs: Typing dashes in html mode (update for Emacs 24)

=> ↺ Why Oracle Java 7 And 6 Installers No Longer Work

=> ↺ Tool To Create Bootable Windows USB Stick From Linux WinUSB (Fork) Renamed To WoeUSB, Sees New Release

=> ↺ Git trick #481: Prevent accidentally pushing into git instead of Gerrit

=> ↺ Linux Join Command Tutorial for Beginners (5 examples)

=> ↺ Software Defined Networking (SDN) explained for beginners

=> ↺ How to Dual Boot Windows 10 (UEFI) and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS / 17.04

=> ↺ Samba 4 with Active Directory on CentOS 7 rpm based installation with share support

=> ↺ How to Install ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) on CentOS 7 / RHEL 7

=> ↺ Linux Chown Command Tutorial for Beginners (7 Examples)

=> ↺ Fixing OpenStack noVNC consoles that ignore keyboard input

=> ↺ Linux Chgrp Command for Beginners (5 Examples)

=> ↺ How to Install Atom Text Editor on Ubuntu 16.04 / Linux Mint 18 / CentOS 7 / RHEL 7

=> ↺ How to attach and detach direct LUNs to Virtual Machines in oVirt Setup

=> ↺ How to configure MySQL Multi-Master Replication on Oracle Linux

=> ↺ 20 useful Docker Command examples in Linux

=> ↺ Enable AppArmor on a Debian Jessie cloud image

=> ↺ How to Install OrangeHRM on Ubuntu

=> ↺ Install and Configure pfBlockerNg for DNS Black Listing in pfSense Firewall

=> ↺ Installation and Configuration of pfSense 2.3.4 Firewall Router

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ [Older] Dolphin Progress Report: May 2017

• A project cannot survive for nearly fourteen years without making some difficult decisions. Sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong, but, to be successful you have to learn from each and every one. One of the most difficult decisions made for Dolphin was the deprecation and removal of D3D9 despite it being the fastest backend at the time. The promise was that we would take a step back then, and make huge gains in accuracy thanks to being able to use integers throughout VideoCommon.

Games

=> ↺ Canonical/GNOME Hackfest, Huge GOG.com Sale & SteamOS Update | This Week in Linux (Ep.4)

• Big Linux Gaming news this week from GOG.com and Valve. In App News, updates from Wireshark and the Tor Browser. GnuPG announced a crowdfunding campaign and KDE Connect has something really cool on the horizon. This week we saw quite a few Distro Releases from Bodhi Linux, KaOS, and ROSA. We got some cool updates from the GNOME team including how Canonical has been working with GNOME to improve many aspects of it. All that and more.

=> ↺ Bug fixing the MESA 3D drivers

=> ↺ Steam Is Now Available In Flatpak Form

• For those looking to run Steam in a more isolated/sanboxed environment, Valve’s game distribution service can now be easily run in a Flatpak environment.

• There’s been a few different groups investigating Steam in a Flatpak or Snappy environment while this morning Steam appeared on Flathub. Flathub is a build and distribution service around Flatpak.

=> ↺ Ubuntu GamePack

=> ↺ Check out the trailer for the Dawn of War III ‘Annihilation’ game modes coming soon

=> ↺ Insurgency: Sandstorm looks absolutely stunning, still planned to release on Linux

• At E3, a new trailer for Insurgency: Sandstorm [Official Site] was shown off and it looks really quite gorgeous. The developers told me Linux is still planned too.

=> ↺ [Older] For the Emperor! Dawn of War 3 on Linux

=> ↺ [Older] Total War: Shogun 2 on Linux

=> ↺ [Older] Release Notes May 16

• The 0.1.11 Unreal Tournament update was released today. We’ve continued to iterate on the new Blitz game mode. This release also includes improvements to the match start up process, including having bots participate in warm up to give players something to do while waiting for the match to start, and improvements to host controlled match starting (for Hub and LAN matches).

=> ↺ [Older] The 20 Games Linux Gamers Want To See Ported

• As mentioned a few weeks ago when I presented the racing wheels Linux gamers use, I am still going through the analysis of the the End of March 2017 survey we have conducted, and while there’s a much bigger article coming down the road, I will share some specific results week after week that can be treated as separate subjects.

Desktop Environments/WMs

=> ↺ KDE vs XFCE – Resource Usage Comparision

• Lately it seems lots of people have been comparing KDE to Xfce in my video comments so I thought maybe it would be fun to do a non-benchmark comparison between the two desktops!

=> ↺ Improving the Xfce infrastructure: Bugzilla

• Bug management is a vital part of any open source project. Today I’m happy to introduce you to yet another project which aims to improve the Xfce infrastructure – you guessed it – the Xfce Bugzilla!

• The project to improve the Xfce bug management started quite some time ago. The first tasks in this were unrelated to the infrastructure; the team has done some work to clean up old bugs as well as triaging newer ones. Tasks like that can become extremely tedious if the tools are constantly slowing you down.

=> ↺ Xfce 4, now with hybrid sleep support

=> ↺ Road to Xfce 4.14, part 2

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Chakra GNU/Linux Users Get KDE Plasma 5.10.2 Desktop Built Against Qt 5.9

• Chakra GNU/Linux maintainer Neofytos Kolokotronis is informing today users of the community-developed GNU/Linux distribution with an emphasis on KDE and Qt technologies about the availability of the latest KDE releases in stable repos.

=> ↺ KDE Finalizes the Release Schedule of KDE Applications 17.08, Arrives August 17

• The KDE Applications 17.04 stable series is nearing its end of life as the KDE Project plans to release the last scheduled maintenance update next month on July 13, 2017, so now they need to prepare for the next major series.

=> ↺ Plasma secrets – Tips and tricks for the KDE desktop

• I used the word secret. Well, it’s a bit misplaced. It’s not like Plasma really hides its options from the users so that only a select elite can enjoy its full range of capabilities. But then, some of its many virtues are a little obscured from the common user by the proxy of subtle failings in design, ergonomics, intuition, as well as the vast array of settings and features that Plasma offers.

• We’ve already talked about Plasma’s goodness at length. It was my favorite desktop for a brief, fickle while, then it waned, but then it again picked up speed and quality with the fine release of Kubuntu Zesty Zaphod. Moreover, we’ve talked about the State of Plasma, in great detail, and I’ve also given you a handful of practical tips and tricks on what this desktop environment can do, and we discussed the omni-potent Krunner. Now, we’re gonna delve deeper. Let’s do some honest Sherlock Holmes work and unravel a few of these usability mysteries.

=> ↺ A Guide for New KDE Users

• KDE repeatedly polls as the most popular Linux desktop environment. However, since its numbers are 30-35%, that still means that over two-thirds use another interface. Many, too, rely on GNOME applications, that have an entirely different design philosophy. As a result, for many, KDE might as well be an entirely different operating system. Without some sense of what to expect, users of environments like GNOME or Cinnamon can easily be overcome by a sense of difference and retreat from trying KDE before they have explored everything it offers.

=> ↺ Kube::Fabric

• One of the key features of QML is to be able to describe the UI in a declarative fashion, resulting in code that closely represents the visual hierarchy.

=> ↺ Vulkan Support in Qt 5.10 – Part 1

=> ↺ Vulkan Support in Qt 5.10 – Part 2

=> ↺ Introduction for GSoC 2017 with KDE, Krita

• I’m Aniketh Girish. I’m a first-year Computer Science and Engineering student pursuing my bachelor’s from Amrita University. I’m an active member of FOSS club in our university(FOSS@Amrita). I started contributing to KDE since September 2016. I was selected for Season of KDE(KDE-SoK) 2016-17 in which I worked on the project Kstars.I was invited as a speaker for KDE India Conference 2017 in IIT Guwahati, where I gave a talk on the topic “Object tracking using OpenCV and Qt”. I have also contributed to other projects of KDE like Konsole, KIO and much more.

=> ↺ Google Summer of Code 2017: Krita’s Students Introduce themselves

=> ↺ May ’17 AtCore Update.

• Its been some time since I’ve posted any progress for AtCore. Some may wonder what we have been up to ..

=> ↺ Atelier/AtCore Updates =D

=> ↺ GSoC – Weekly Blog

=> ↺ GSoC ’17 – Week #1.

=> ↺ GSoC 2017 with KDE

=> ↺ Awesome::KDE Community

=> ↺ Google Summer of Code 2017 – Welcome!

=> ↺ Week 2 was just about minor changes

=> ↺ GSOC 2017- Week 1 plans

=> ↺ GSOC 2017- Week 1 post-mortem and week 2 plans

=> ↺ Google Summer of Code at KDE – Progressive Web App for WikiToLearn

• If you don’t know me already, I have been involved with WikiToLearn for the past year and half, contributing to the development of the project in its various parts. In the past few months I have been especially involved in the development of its frontend: together with a few other developers I designed and built the current web interface from scratch.

=> ↺ Tools of the trade – Progressive Web App for WikiToLearn

=> ↺ Compare and Contrast – Marble Maps and other Map applications

=> ↺ CMlyst 0.3.0 released

• CMlyst is a Web Content Management System built using Cutelyst, it was initially inspired by WordPress and then Ghost. So it’s a mixture of both.

=> ↺ How do I to Update to the Latest Software?

• KDE neon does continuous deployment of the latest KDE software which means there are nearly always new versions of our software to update to.

=> ↺ Modernizing KStars codebase during GSOC

=> ↺ First Development Builds for Krita 4.0!

• It’s still early days, and we have to say this up-front: these builds are not ready for daily work. We mean it, you might luck out, but you might also seriously lose work. Please test, and please report issues on bugs.kde.org! (But check whether your issue has already been reported…) That said…

=> ↺ Plasma 5.10.1 now in Zesty backports

• The first bugfix update of the Plasma 5.10 series is now available for users of Kubuntu Zesty Zapus 17.04 to install via our backports PPA.

=> ↺ Do you know of any HiDPI issues?

=> ↺ I am going to Akademy’17 !!

=> ↺ Wiki, What’s Going On? (Part 23-Back from OSCAL17)

=> ↺ INTEGRITY RTOS Support in Qt 5.9 LTS

=> ↺ Kubuntu General News: Latest round of backports PPA updates include Plasma 5.10.2 for Zesty 17.04

=> ↺ Kubuntu 17.04 Users Can Also Update to KDE Plasma 5.10.2, Here’s How to Do It

=> ↺ A harder beginning brings cool changes

• Now that I have my own branch and a few new classes added I can continue the adventure with LabPlot!

=> ↺ Krita Available from the Windows Store

=> ↺ Kube: Views and Workflows

• Ever since we started working on Kube we faced the conundrum of how to allow Kube to innovate and to provide actual additional value to whatever is already existing out there, while not ending up being a completely theoretical exercise of what could be done, but doesn’t really work in practice. In other words, we want to solve actual problems, but do so in “better” ways than what’s already out there, because otherwise, why bother?

=> ↺ [Older] KDE Neon – A Month Later

• I’ve been using KDE Neon full time for the past month and its been a pretty interesting experience.

=> ↺ KDE FreeBSD updates mid-june

• I really wanted to say that Krita was the first KDE Frameworks 5-based application available in the official FreeBSD ports tree (so that pkg install krita just works), but it turns out that labplot has been KF5-based for a month or more and no-one noticed.

• Nonetheless, three cheers for Krita and Calligra, which have been updated to the latest, modernest versions.

=> ↺ Plasma 5.10

=> ↺ KDE Plasma 5.10 – See What’s New

=> ↺ Waiter, There’s A Plasma Desktop In My Soup

• If you’ve been keeping your Solus installation up to date recently, well, you saw that already, right? If not, you should be aware that there are new KDE categories within the Solus Software Center.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Troubleshooting Builder

• If you find yourself needing to troubleshoot Builder (hopefully just during our development cycles) you can now run the command “counters” from the command bar (Ctrl+Enter). This gives you access to some internal counters.

• You can get these out of process too, using dazzle-list-counters PID which cracks open the shared memory page and dumps the counters.

=> ↺ GNOME: The Desktop I Don’t Need to Think About

• I moved to GNOME from Xfce a few months ago (spurred by a new desktop machine), but I couldn’t find the time to write up my experiences. Canonical announcing the death of Unity last month seemed like a good to finally get my thoughts down.

• Way back in November, I got a new desktop. My beloved Thinkpad T420 was aging and slightly slow, but since it never left my desk, a small desktop and large monitor seemed to make more sense. I knew from the beginning I was going with GNOME, since it’s always felt fast and wired for people like me, who don’t want to use their mouse. Of course, Xfce has that same kind of configureability, but if I was using new hardware, why not take advantage of the processing power and use something nice looking, like GNOME?

Distributions

=> ↺ [Older] Best Linux Distros for Developers

• One of the common questions I get asked is “which Linux distro is best for developers?” The short answer is that it depends. The long answer takes the form of this article. This piece will dive into the different Linux distros favored by developers. It’ll also provide some insight as to why there is no automatic (simple) answer for why one developer chooses one distro over another.

• To provide a more accurate look at this entire situation, I’ll provide a break down of each consideration a developer might use to make their Linux distro selection. As you read please note: one must first start off with the right development applications, without these selecting a distro is meaningless.

=> ↺ MakuluLinux Flash Teaser & Release Date !

• You’ve been waiting, and We’ve been busy, Now see whats coming to you Real Soon …

Reviews

=> ↺ Linux For Old PC’s: Puppy Linux Slacko Review

• Pretty awesome distro I’ve been using on many old pcs for a while now, thought it was finally time to review it, so here you go!

=> ↺ “ArcaOS (the new OS/2) Review” – Lunduke Hour – June 6, 2017

• In this episode of the Lunduke Hour I review the newly released ArcaOS — a new version of OS/2 that has been reverse-engineered and updated for modern hardware (and includes modern software such as Firefox).

=> ↺ Wifislax OS wireless hacking tools review

• Wifislax 4.12 dedicated OS for wireless hacking…

=> ↺ Peppermint 8 & Devuan 1.0; WINE 2.9 & Humble Bundle | This Week in Linux

=> ↺ Peppermint OS 8 Review

• Peppermint OS 8 is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Lubuntu and with the latest release, it now includes a host of changes from the previous release. As such, I thought I’d tackle a Peppermint OS 8 Review and see what’s new with the distro.

• Installation, as with most Ubuntu based distros, is standard fare and works pretty much the same across the board. Unique to Peppermint OS 8 however, is a new OEM Install option, allowing computers to be shipped with Peppermint pre-installed.

New Releases

=> ↺ Alpine Linux 3.6.2 released

• The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.6.2 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

• This is a bugfix release of the v3.6 musl based branch, based on linux-4.9.32 kernels and it contains bugfixes.

=> ↺ Security-Oriented Alpine Linux 3.6.2 OS Adds Linux Kernel 4.9.32 and Tor 0.3.0.8

• Alpine Linux, the security-oriented, independently-developed, and lightweight GNU/Linux distribution based on musl libc and BusyBox, was updated today to version 3.6.2.

• Alpine Linux 3.6.2 comes only two weeks after the release of the first maintenance update in the 3.6 stable series of the operating system, and it looks like it upgrades the kernel packages to the upstream Linux 4.9.32 LTS kernel. It also includes Tor 0.3.0.8 and Mozilla Firefox 52.2.0 ESR.

Screenshots/Screencasts

=> ↺ BlankOn 10 Tambora

• BlankOn 10 codenamed “tambora” is the latest release of Linux Blankon. Linux BlankOn is a Linux distribution developed by the BlankOn Developer Team. This distribution is designed and adapted to the needs of the general computer user in Indonesia. BlankOn Linux is developed openly and together to produce a typical Linux distro of Indonesia, especially for education, office and government.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

=> ↺ Kernel 4.11.5 available for PCLinuxOS

• Kernel 4.11.5 is now available for PCLinuxOS and can be installed via the Synaptic Package Manager. The technical changelog can be found here.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

=> ↺ OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Is Now Built With PIE

• The rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution is now building its packages with PIE (Position Independent Executables) as the default.

• Following Fedora making PIE their default (since F23) and Ubuntu 17.10 planning PIE for all, Tumbleweed has transitioned to enabling PIE by default in its compiler. This comes as part of their recent transition to using the GCC 7 code compiler.

=> ↺ AppImages OBS Buildable, UBports’ Ubuntu Touch, & KDE Plasma 5.10 | This Week in Linux (Ep3)

• Big news about AppImages on openSUSE’s OBS, KDE Plasma 5.10 Release and a massive update from UBports regarding their fork of Ubuntu Touch.. Interesting development for the WPS Office story we talked about last week and a lot of application releases from Krita, Scribus, Kodi, and Qt. In addition to a lot of Distro News, we finally got an update from the Xfce team for version 4.14. More Linux Gaming news, Linux Security news and even some hardware updates on this episode of This Week in Linux.

=> ↺ openSUSE Is An Amazing Underestimated Distribution

=> ↺ openSUSE Conference 2017

=> ↺ Deploying openSUSE on Vultr

• As an avid openSUSE user and fan, I wish more VPS providers supported openSUSE images. Linode and Amazon both do, and there’s nothing wrong with them, but I recently learned about Vultr’s custom ISO feature and decided to try to bring openSUSE to Vultr! Vultr provides guides for installing CoreOS and Gentoo, after all, so why not openSUSE?

=> ↺ openSUSE Conference 2017 openSUSE Kubic – What is this?

=> ↺ openSUSE Tumbleweed OS Is Now Built with PIE as Default for Increased Security

• After finishing the transition of the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 7 to the Tumbleweed repos as the default compiler, it looks like the rolling GNU/Linux distro is now built with PIE (Position Independent Executables) by default.

• OK, so what’s PIE? In computing, PIE, which is an acronym for Position Independent Executables and it’s also known as PIC (Position Independent Code), is a feature that loads executable binaries compiled with PIE support at random memory addresses, disallowing text relocation.

Slackware Family

=> ↺ Adobe Flash security update June ’17

=> ↺ Chromium 59 – a security update

=> ↺ New VLC packages fix security hole in subtitle renderer

• One thing to mention still: after the Fraunhofer patents on MP3 encoding expired last month, it is now perfectly legal to release software that is able to encode MP3 audio. The ffmpeg in Slackware-current, and my own ffmpeg packages, were already updated and include the LAME library. My new VLC packages are now all capable of MP3 audio encoding as well. The AAC audio format is still patented and therefore, the AAC encoding capability is only available in my ‘restricted‘ packages.

=> ↺ OpenJDK security updates Jun’17

=> ↺ More May updates for Slackware’s Plasma 5 addon

=> ↺ LibreOffice 5.3.3 packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current

Red Hat Family

Finance

=> ↺ Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) Position Raised by State of Wisconsin Investment Board

=> ↺ Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) Shares Sold by Asset Management One Co. Ltd.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Debian 9 “Stretch” released

• After 26 months of development the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 9 (code name “Stretch”), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and of the Debian Long Term Support team.

• Debian 9 is dedicated to the project’s founder Ian Murdock, who passed away on 28 December 2015.

• In “Stretch”, the default MySQL variant is now MariaDB. The replacement of packages for MySQL 5.5 or 5.6 by the MariaDB 10.1 variant will happen automatically upon upgrade.

• Firefox and Thunderbird return to Debian with the release of “Stretch”, and replace their debranded versions Iceweasel and Icedove, which were present in the archive for more than 10 years.

=> ↺ Upcoming Debian 9.0 Stretch!

• The Debian Release Team in coordination with several other teams are preparing the last bits needed for releasing Debian 9 Stretch. Please, be patient! Lots of steps are involved and some of them take some time, such as building the images, propagating the release through the mirror network, and rebuilding the Debian website so that “stable” points to Debian 9.

=> ↺ Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” Operating System Officially Released, Download Now

• More than two years after the release of the Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” series, which, as of today, is marked as “oldstable,” the Debian Project is pleased to announce today the availability of Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch”.

• As of a few minutes ago, Debian Stretch or Debian 9 has been declared stable and ready for deployment in production environments. It’s one of the most anticipated GNU/Linux distributions of 2017, on which numerous upcoming Linux distros will be rebased in the months to come.

=> ↺ Debian 9 is available!

• Congratulations to everyone who has played a part in the creation of Debian GNU/Linux 9.0! It’s a great release, I’ve installed the pre-release versions for friends, family and colleagues and so far the feedback has been very positive.

=> ↺ Bits from Debian: Debian 9.0 Stretch has been released!

• Let yourself be embraced by the purple rubber toy octopus! We’re happy to announce the release of Debian 9.0, codenamed Stretch.

• Want to install it? Choose your favourite installation media among Blu-ray Discs, DVDs, CDs and USB sticks. Then read the installation manual.

=> ↺ Debian GNU/Hurd 2017 released!

• It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2017. This is a snapshot of Debian “sid” at the time of the stable Debian “stretch” release (May 2017), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release.

=> ↺ Debian GNU/Hurd 2017 Released, Supports More Than 3GiB Of Memory

• Not only is Debian 9.0 released as the main GNU/Linux OS, but also Debian GNU/Hurd is now out with a major release as their pairing of the GNU user-land with Hurd in place of the Linux kernel.

=> ↺ Debian 9.0 “Stretch” Hits The Web

• Debian 9 “Stretch” is now officially available.

=> ↺ Debian 9 “Stretch” Released

=> ↺ Debian 9 Stretch Released, Bringing A Lot Of Updates

=> ↺ What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?

=> ↺ 7 Reasons Why I Love Debian

• Debian is a huuuuuge project so while sharing all the parts in one article is next to impossible but still I will try to share some of the ideas, processes that had made me fall in love with Debian.

Derivatives

=> ↺ antiX 16.2 Linux OS Is Based on Debian GNU/Linux 8.8 Jessie, but Ditches systemd

• The developers of the antiX Linux operating system have announced today the release and immediate availability for download of antiX 16.2, the second minor update to the antiX 16 stable series of the GNU/Linux distribution.

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Canonical Updates Snapcraft on Ubuntu with Support for Resuming Snap Downloads

• Canonical has released a new stable version of its in-house built Snapcraft utility for creating Snap packages, the universal binary format, that can be distributed across multiple GNU/Linux operating system.

• The biggest change in the Snapcraft 2.31 release appears to be support for resuming the download of the core Snap when building classic Snaps when an error occurs because the package can’t be fetched. This could come in handy during tests and in CI when you package your apps as Snaps.

=> ↺ List of PPA Repositories for Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus

=> ↺ Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo: S10E15 – Numberless Thoughtless Goldfish

• This week Alan and Martin go flashing. We discuss Firefox multi-process, Minecraft now has cross platform multiplayer, the GPL is being tested in court and binary blobs in hardware are probably a bad thing.

=> ↺ Building Apps for Linux without Linux

• I spend a lot of my day talking to developers about their Linux software packaging woes. Many of them are using Linux desktops as their primary development platform. Some aren’t, and that’s their (or their employers) choice. For those developers who run Windows and want to target Linux for their applications, things just got a bit easier.

=> ↺ Stable OTA-1, Halium is Heating up, Convergence Works!

• The UBports project is proud to announce Stable OTA-1 for all of our officially supported devices, minus the Nexus 5 (hammerhead) and Nexus 4 (mako).

=> ↺ Quick Look at Ubuntu 17.10 June 10 2017 Nightly Release With Gnome as the Default Desktop

• Quick Look at Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark June 10, 2017, Nightly Release With Gnome as the Default Desktop

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ AIMS Desktop 2017.1 is available!

• Back at DebConf 15 in Germany, I gave a talk on on AIMS Desktop (which was then based on Ubuntu), and our intentions and rationale for wanting to move it over to being Debian based.

• Today, alongside the Debian 9 release, we release AIMS Desktop 2017.1, the first AIMS Desktop released based on Debian. For Debian 10, we’d like to get the last remaining AIMS Desktop packages into Debian so that it could be a Debian pure blend.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Studio Audio Production Features

• Ubuntu Studio is a Linux distribution loaded with various programs for music and video production. Many of these open source programs are simple to use, and extremely powerful, making this operating system useful for anyone looking to express their creativity without purchasing expensive software. In this video, we cover some of the best programs for audio production included with Ubuntu Studio.

=> ↺ “elementaryOS App Store Ships” – Lunduke Hour – May 17, 2017

• In this episode of the Lunduke Hour I chat with the founder of elementaryOS, Daniel Fore. They just shipped a new version of elementaryOS that includes their recently crowd-funded App Store. We talk about what he thinks it’ll take to make this App Store successful where so many others have failed.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi just majorly extended its reach for young coders

• The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s set of miniature computers, which have become a mainstay for budding coders and indie developers alike, have found themselves everywhere from classrooms to the upper atmosphere. Now, a merger with a coding club network could see the chips land with thousands more children across the world.

• Raspberry Pi is to merge with CoderDojo, a Dublin-based network of programming clubs. There are apparently 1,250 volunteer-led CoderDojos across 69 countries, which are thought to reach 35,000 coders between the ages of seven and 17.

=> ↺ [Older] These are the most exciting Linux powered devices

• What started off as a hobby project for the Finnish engineer Linus Torvalds, has turned into a global phenomenon. Today Linux is literally powering the modern economy – everything from Amazon public clouds, stock exchanges, and social networks run on Linux. It also runs in devices like sensors, printers, routers…and what not. Linux virtually owns the smartphone market with Android.

• Here is a sneak peek at some of the most interesting devices powered by Linux.

=> ↺ Moving from melzi to ramps

• I have been very happy with my printer except for one thing my printer uses a melzi board. The only issue is there is only one firmware for melzi. This makes testing firmwares in AtCore more difficult since I can’t test on a real machine. In order to do that I need to move to a RAMPS kit. This will allow me to flash just about any firmware that I want. I will keep the details to a minimum for this post would be really long otherwise.

=> ↺ Compact, rugged, low power box-PC targets transportation apps

Phones

Tizen

=> ↺ PVS-Studio Team Willing to Work on Improving Tizen Project (open letter)

• This is an open letter from Andrey Karpov, representative of the PVS-Studio team, to the developers of the Tizen OS. Our team is willing to work on improving the quality of Tizen project. The text contains remarks to the code fragments, but this is not criticism. All projects have bugs. The aim was to show by real examples that we aren’t talking about abstract recommendations concerning the code improvement, but about real defects that we can find and fix.

Android

=> ↺ postmarketOS: Overwhelmed by feedback and next steps

=> ↺ Aiming for a 10 year security nightmare

=> ↺ postmarketOS: Aiming for a 10 year life-cycle for smartphones

=> ↺ Reusing old phones with postmarketOS

• In a previous post of mine I listed a lot of things I wished were true in the current mobile OS ecosystem. In the closing notes from my previous post I said that the first step in getting this to work is find some device that can run mainline (or non-android) kernels and can easily be flashed for development.

• Just a week ago I came across a blog post by Oliver Smith that talks about getting alpine linux to build for older android phones with as much open components as possible. This wasn’t exactly my idea of running Debian on my phone but it might even be better.

=> ↺ So long, farewell and goodbye

• after more than three and a half years as lead (and most of the time sole) app maintainer, I “retire” from F-Droid.

• I don’t use Android myself anymore — don’t you worry, I don’t use any less free systems either — so my own interest and motivation are low. Also, I really think maintainers should indeed be users of the “product”, they should dogfood it and actually care about the whole platform.

=> ↺ Android Can Now Boot with a Full Open Source Graphics Stack on NXP i.MX6 Boards

• While the Android operating systems is itself open source, it still relies on proprietary binary files to leverage GPU acceleration, VPU hardware decoding, wireless connectivity, and so on. It’s been possible to run Android with an open source software graphics stack, but it’s normally terribly slow and barely usable. But Collabora has announced it could now boot Android with a full-graphics stack on iMX6 platforms using no proprietary blobs at all.

=> ↺ Google Play is fighting an uphill battle against Android adware

=> ↺ What happened with Anbox since the public release?

=> ↺ Android-powered Nokia 3 now available in India at Rs 9,499

=> ↺ After Judy, Xavier malware found in over 800 Android apps on Google Play Store

=> ↺ How to use Android’s secret settings

=> ↺ Android Nougat Hitting Galaxy Tab S2 9.7 On AT&T’s Network

=> ↺ Android Nougat Update Now Rolling Out To Sony Xperia XA

=> ↺ Android 7.0 Released for Sony Xperia XA

=> ↺ This is the OnePlus 5

=> ↺ Google Pixel International Giveaway!

=> ↺ The case for killing off the Bixby button

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Nextcloud 12 Beta 2 out, get a t-shirt by finding upgrade issues!

• We announced Nextcloud 12 Beta 1 to a great deal of press attention. It is a revolutionary release, moving the goal posts for open source file sync and share solutions in terms of capabilities the way Nextcloud 11 raised the bar in terms of security and scalability to a level no other open source technology has caught up to.

=> ↺ An Interview with HashiCorp’s Armon Dadgar

• Our vision for HashiCorp was to change the way we build and deploy applications, from development through production. We had a certain set of philosophies we wanted to promote that we’ve published as our Tao of HashiCorp, most of which were not mainstream at the time. What really have us the confidence to even try was our early experiences in open source. Mitchell was the primary developer behind the very popular Vagrant tool, and I had a few small OSS projects mentioned before, and together that gave us the confidence to start HashiCorp.

=> ↺ How Liri came to Be

• We desired to make a nice desktop and apps using new and modern technologies like QtQuick without mixing it with QtWidgets or any compatibility shortcut in order to have a consistent, good looking and functional UI.

• For that purpose we needed a sound design language with well defined rules. Material Design is a complete design language made by talented professionals, its clarity and structure allow us to focus on the code.

• Liri officially debuted in January 2017 when we thought there was a solid groundwork to start from and let people be aware of our initiative.

=> ↺ Google Open Sources More, Machine Learning Computer Vision Technology

=> ↺ Google releases new TensorFlow Object Detection API

=> ↺ Google wants to speed up image recognition in mobile apps

=> ↺ Google designed an object-recognition program that won’t need the internet

• Artificial intelligence is giving a simple photograph the power to recognize objects, faces, and landmarks — sometimes with more detail than a set of human eyes can assign. Now, more of those features will be coming to mobile devices, thanks to Google’s release of MobileNets software.

=> ↺ AWS Blox enters crowded open source container market amid skepticism

• While much of the developer community turns to Kubernetes to schedule containers, open source AWS Blox could carve out a niche among container and serverless users.

• [...]

• Blox is available from GitHub, but AWS hasn’t provided the source code to an open source organization, in which groups of people can argue over what features or functions to include in the next release. Because AWS is not traditionally an open source contributor, this move has some experts questioning the true open source nature of the service. While Amazon will be a player in the container orchestration market, Blox might struggle to find a user base.

=> ↺ Introducing Reladomo – Enterprise Open Source Java ORM, Batteries Included! (Part 2)

=> ↺ More Librem 13 Enablement Lands In Coreboot

• Last week I wrote about Librem 13 v2 support landing in upstream Coreboot while now more work for this Purism laptop is now set in Git.

• It’s looking like the Purism Librem 13 v2 support in Coreboot is getting squared away with more of the functionality working under this open-source BIOS alternative. Among the most recent commits to Coreboot Git are now audio support for the laptop.

Events

=> ↺ Initial Keynote Speakers Announced for The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America 2017

=> ↺ Announcing QtCon Brasil 2017

• It’s been almost a year since I, Filipe and Aracele were having a beer at Alexander Platz after the very last day of QtCon Berlin, when Aracele astutely came up with a very crazy idea of organizing QtCon in Brazil. Since then, we have been maturing such an idea and after a lot of work we are very glad to announce: QtCon Brasil 2017 happens from 18th to 20th August in São Paulo.

=> ↺ Randa Meetings 2017 – Make KDE more accessible

=> ↺ GUADEC Talks Schedule Now Available

=> ↺ “They’re Watching You”

• “They’re Watching You” – Recorded live at LinuxFest NorthWest. May 6th, 2017.

=> ↺ Inkscape hackfest planned for late June in Paris

• Following productive hackfests in 2015 and 2016, the Inkscape team is meeting in Paris later this month for another hackfest. The event is taking place on June 27th through July 1st inside Paris’s modern science museum, Cité des sciences et de l’industrie.

• (Not quite) coincidentally, the venue is exactly where in 2008 part of the original documentation team met for the first time to work on the official user manual.

• So far the hackfest agenda seems to cover many topics from the official roadmap for the next major update of Inkscape: GTK+3 port, coordinate system flip, making C++11 compiler a requirement, splitting less-maintained extensions into an extra package, improving performance. Which is another reminder that should the team stick to the plan, they will need all the help they can get to prepare the next release in a sensible amount of time.

=> ↺ Workshop Session 1: 2. Building a local linux audio community – Daniel Appelt

=> ↺ Linux Audio Conference 2017 – May 19 AM

=> ↺ [Older] Hello Wayland, Goodbye X11 – The year of the Linux desktop! – Carsten Haitzler – FOSSASIA 2017

Web Browsers

Chrome

=> ↺ Chromium Mus/Ozone update (H1/2017): wayland, x11

• Since January, Igalia has been working on a project whose goal is to make the latest Chromium Browser able to run natively on Wayland-based environments. The project has various phases, requires us to carve out existing implementations and align our work with the direction Chromium’s mainline is taking.

• In this post I will provide an update on the progresses we have made over 2017/H1, as well as our plans coming next.

• In order to jump straight to the latest results section (including videos) without the details, click here.

Mozilla

=> ↺ Browse Against the Machine

• I head up Firefox marketing, but I use Chrome every day. Works fine. Easy to use. Like most of us who spend too much time in front of a laptop, I have two browsers open; Firefox for work, Chrome for play, customized settings for each. There are multiple things that bug me about the Chrome product, for sure, but I‘m OK with Chrome. I just don’t like only being on Chrome.

=> ↺ Firefox hogs less memory and gets a speed bump in its latest update

• In an attempt to even the playing field with competitors, Mozilla Firefox stepped up its game Tuesday by releasing an update that will increase browser speeds and cut down on memory usage.

• Firefox 54 has opened up its upper limit of processes from one to four, although users can customize it to be more by entering “about:config” in the address bar and adjusting the settings themselves.

• This new version of Firefox feels faster and it scores higher on an online browser speed test than Chrome or Safari, even after opening 20 tabs, although it still gives the old loading sign on all of the pages. Firefox product vice president Nick Nguyen calls this upgrade “the largest change to Firefox code in our history,” according to his blog post detailing the changes.

=> ↺ [Older] Firefox memory usage with multiple content processes

• My previous measurements found that four content processes are a sweet spot for both memory usage and performance. As a follow up we wanted to run the tests again to confirm my conclusions and make sure that we’re testing on what we plan to release. Additionally I was able to work around our issues testing Microsoft Edge and have included both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Firefox on Windows; 32-bit is currently our default, 64-bit is a few releases out.

• The methodology for the test is the same as previous runs, I used the atsy project to load 30 pages and measure memory usage of the various processes that each browser spawns during that time.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

=> ↺ LibreOffice Quality Assurance: six months in statistics (part 1)

• During the last six months (from 23 November 2016 to 21 May 2017), many things have happened in LibreOffice and in Bugzilla, its bug tracker, where bugs are reported by users, triaged by the quality assurance (QA) team and finally handled by developers, if needed.

CMS

=> ↺ Acquia CTO: killing the headless CMS horseman

• Dries Buytaert is the founder and project lead of Drupal an open source platform for building websites used by 2% of the world’s websites with 35,000 active contributors.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

=> ↺ Organizations Increase Reliance on Open Source and Acknowledge Risks, But Efforts to Secure and Manage It Effectively are Lagging

=> ↺ Microsoft-connected anti-FOSS firm

=> ↺ 2017 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis Report

=> ↺ Webinar: Application Security in the Age of Open Source

=> ↺ WhiteSource Raises $10 Million to Expand Market Leadership in Open Source Security and Compliance

=> ↺ WhiteSource is a parasite

=> ↺ Microsoft joins Cloud Foundry Foundation as gold member, strengthens open source push

=> ↺ Microsoft joins Cloud Foundry Foundation

=> ↺ Microsoft Boosts Container Focus With Nano Server, Linux Updates

=> ↺ tax it using patents

=> ↺ Facebook releases open source chatbot code

• Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) unit launched open source code and research focused on chatbots with the ability to negotiate.

BSD

=> ↺ Generating FreeBSD packages with CPack

• For software that uses CMake as (meta) buildsystem, and then gets packaged by distro’s — at least on FreeBSD — there’s something weird going on: the meta-buildsystem knows exactly what files are generated and where they get installed, but then knowledge about those files gets re-created outside of the meta-buildsystem in the ports tree, and that re-created information is used to do the actual packaging. To me, it feels like a duplication of effort, since CPack can be used to (re)use the information straight from the meta-buildsystem.

Public Services/Government

=> ↺ Meet G0v, the Open Source, Digital Community Transforming Democracy in Taiwan

• In 2014, a digital-driven movement emerged in Taiwan that challenged the former ruling party Kuomintang’s move to fast-track the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement. The members of the movement felt the trade deal between China and Taiwan would impinge on Taiwan’s sovereignty. The Sunflower Movement, a youth-driven, tech-savvy, cross-sectoral coalition, occupied the Taiwanese Parliament for more than three weeks. To the surprise of many, it was ultimately successful.

• [...]

• First of all, g0v does not have a “governance” structure. We consider ourselves as a community rather than an organization. Like other open-source tech communities, we believe everyone is equal to participate in the community. We welcome every citizen to join any projects since all our projects are all open online, including codes, documents, videos, and images, etc.

Licensing/Legal

=> ↺ [Older] U.S. District Court Denies Pre-Trial Motion to Dismiss GPL Infringement Case

• The District Court for the Northern District of California has denied a motion to dismiss a complaint of breach of contract and copyright infringement claims in a case regarding the GPL. The plaintiff, Artifex Software Inc., is the creator of Ghostscript, an AGPL-licensed PDF interpreter. In 2016, the company filed a lawsuit against Hancom, a South Korean software company that incorporated Ghostscript into its Hangul word processing software without complying with the GPL.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

=> ↺ German researchers release open-source tomato and wheat seeds to boost research

• Breeders from the Göttingen University and Dottenfelderhof agricultural school in Bad Vilbel, Germany, have released new varieties of tomato and wheat seeds. The catch? They’re free for anyone to use, ever, as long as the products of their work remain free to use. In essence, these are open-source seeds.

=> ↺ Expert Conversation: Using Open Source Drug Discovery To Help Treat Neglected Diseases

• The Open Source Drug Discovery project, launched in 2008 by biophysicist Samir Brahmachari, aims to develop low-cost treatments for neglected diseases using an open-source approach. Brahmachari is founding director of India’s Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology. He was interviewed by Gaëll Mainguy, director of development and international relations for the CRI (conversation has been edited and condensed for publication).

=> ↺ The Community Data Science Collective Dataverse

• I’m pleased to announce the Community Data Science Collective Dataverse. Our dataverse is an archival repository for datasets created by the Community Data Science Collective. The dataverse won’t replace work that collective members have been doing for years to document and distribute data from our research. What we hope it will do is get our data — like our published manuscripts — into the hands of folks in the “forever” business.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ ATMIA 2017 on 3D printing and Open Source

• During a talk at ATM&Cash Innovation 2017, taking place at the Lancaster Hotel, London on 14th June, Achim Boers, Head of Corporate Innovation at Prosegur, pointed towards 3D printing and open-sourcing when asked about his view on the biggest game-changers in the industry.

=> ↺ M3D Stays Low-Cost, Goes Industrial with Open-Source, Feature-Packed Promega 3D Printer

• M3D will always be known for the M3D Micro, the 3D printer that catapulted them to success with a multimillion-dollar Kickstarter campaign in 2014. The Micro was followed up with the Pro and the Micro+, released just recently, which continued the company’s mission of delivering affordable, low-cost, compact consumer 3D printers. Now M3D is introducing another 3D printer – but it’s quite different than anything they’ve produced so far as they step away from consumer orientation for the first time.

=> ↺ M3D launches the Promega, its first industrial open source 3D printer

• Having previously focused its products on the entry-level consumer 3D printing market, M3D has now introduced their first-ever industrial 3D printer – the Promega.

=> ↺ M3D Raised Millions On Kickstarter. Now Its Founder Is Launching His Own Crowdfunding Site

=> ↺ Open Source Digital Cinema

• Years in the making, Apertus has released 25 beta developer kits for AXIOM–their open source digital cinema camera. This isn’t your point-and-shoot digital camera. The original proof of concept from 2013 had a Zynq processor (a Zedboard), a super 35 4K image sensor, and a Nikon F-Mount.

• The device today is modular with several options. For example, there is an HDMI output module, but DisplayPort, 4K HDMI, and USB 3.0 options are in development. You can see several sample videos taken with the device, below.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Inkscape moves to GitLab

• The tools that projects use to manage code have changed in the last ten years and the Inkscape project has wanted to take advantage of the more advanced and modern systems available and encourage more contributions. But these newer platforms have involved a large step of exporting the code base and all of the many branches into a new system. But we needed to take the leap into a new system, because our code platform and repository system was putting off new contributors and made working on Inkscape harder for existing developers.

=> ↺ [Older] Perl 5.26.0 released

• We are thrilled to announce perl v5.26.0, the first stable release of version 26 of Perl 5.

=> ↺ [Older] GDB 8.0 released!

• Release 8.0 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, is now available via anonymous FTP. GDB is a source-level debugger for Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Pascal and many other languages. GDB can target (i.e., debug programs running on) more than a dozen different processor architectures, and GDB itself can run on most popular GNU/Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows variants.

=> ↺ GCC 7 – The importance of a cutting-edge compiler

• At first sight, it is not clear why the compiler warns if alloca was called to allocate memory which is automatically freed. It was called for sizes of 1kb and less, which is the limit implicit in “-Walloca-larger-than”. However, since n is signed, a negative value would result in a call to the function well in excess of the limit. Thus, the warning is triggered.

=> ↺ What Are Interfaces?

• This is a blog post about interfaces in Go. I wanted to write about a headscratcher that cost me several hours of work when I first started learning Go, and I figured I might as well start from the beginning and write the article on interfaces that I wish I had read back then. The story of my encounter with nil interfaces is coming soon, but for now, here’s a brief and hopefully accessible piece on interfaces in Go.

=> ↺ Go support in KDevelop. GSoC week 3. Why test coverage of parser matters?

=> ↺ The C standard committee effort to kill C continues

• So the intent of at least some members of the C standard committee is to make production C code fail in some unpredictable manner as an “optimization”. Despite the best efforts of developers of rival programming languages, C’s advantages have preserved it as an indispensable systems and applications programming language. Whether it can survive the C standards process is a different question.

Leftovers

=> ↺ 28 Hotspots Detected on Sumatra Island

• The hotspots were found in Aceh, North Sumatra, Riau, and Lampung provinces, Slamet Riyadi, head of the data section of the Pekanbaru meteorology station, said on Tuesday.

=> ↺ Don’t Use Bots to Engage With People on Social Media

• I am going to be honest with you, I am writing this post out of one part frustration and one part guidance to people who I think may be inadvertently making a mistake. I wanted to write this up as a blog post so I can send it to people when I see this happening.

• [...]

• Firstly, automated Direct Messages come across as spammy. Sure, I chose to follow you, but if my first interaction with you is advertising, it doesn’t leave a great taste in my mouth. If you are going to DM me, send me a personal message from you, not a bot (or not at all). Definitely don’t try to make that bot seem like a human: much like someone trying to suppress a yawn, we can all see it, and it looks weird.

=> ↺ CenturyLink made millions by ripping off customers, lawsuit claims

• CenturyLink customers have paid “many millions” of dollars for services they didn’t want because CenturyLink employees added services to their accounts without the customers’ authorization, a former employee alleges in a lawsuit against the company.

• Heidi Heiser worked from home as a customer service and sales agent from August 2015 to October 2016. She says she “was fired days after notifying Chief Executive Officer Glen Post of the alleged scheme,” Bloomberg reported in an article describing the lawsuit. The lawsuit against the landline phone and Internet provider was filed this week in an Arizona Superior Court.

Science

=> ↺ US Senators: Heartland Institute Mailings to Grade School Science Teachers ‘Possibly Fraudulent’

• If you teach science to American schoolchildren, there’s a good chance that you might open your mailbox soon and find a package containing a free, unsolicited 135-page book and 11-minute DVD, plus a cover letter from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free-market “think tank.”

• “How do you teach global warming?” the letter begins. “I am writing to ask you to consider the possibility that the science in fact is not ‘settled.’ If that’s the case, then students would be better served by letting them know a vibrant debate is taking place among scientists on how big the human impact on climate is and whether or not we should be worried about it.”

• The climate “educational” supplies have already been mailed out to tens of thousands of science teachers — with 25,000 more planned every two weeks, the institute’s CEO told PBS in March.

• [...]

• The mailers were recieved positively by some science teachers, a Heartland spokesperson told Buzzfeed News, adding that they’d been invited to give classroom presentations by some educators. But many science teachers smelled something off about the book’s arguments on climate science.

• “It’s just loaded with citations,” Cheryl Manning, a Colorado science teacher at Evergreen High School who received the mailing told Buzzfeed. “But it’s circular. It’s all self-citations. Citing their own stuff instead of citing other people’s work.”

Hardware

=> ↺ You Can’t Open the Microsoft Surface Laptop Without Literally Destroying It

• The company, which provides repair tools and manuals for popular gadgets like the iPhone and PlayStation, has handed the Surface Laptop a score of 0 out of 10 in terms of user repairability, stating definitively that the laptop “is not meant to be opened or repaired; you can’t get inside without inflicting a lot of damage.”

=> ↺ 2017 Surface Pro least repairable ever; Surface Laptop is made of glue

• iFixit’s pictures, as ever, give a great look at the insides of the two machines. The Laptop has no external screws at all; to get into the system, iFixit had to peel off the glued-down fabric keyboard surround, an operation that obviously can’t be undone, producing a machine that offers essentially no serviceability whatsoever.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ Media Help Republicans Gut Obamacare Behind Closed Doors

• This is similar to a strategy Senate Republicans’ counterparts in the House used to jam a bill through last month, announcing the vote the night before so as to leave no time for meaningful public discussion or debate—or even a Congressional Budget Office score, as is customary.

• Congressional Republicans even attempted Tuesday to bar TV reporters from the halls of Congress so they couldn’t ask questions about the AHCA—only retreating from the plan after public outcry. One would think that after such transparent efforts to avoid meaningful public debate on the gutting of Obamacare—especially given the GOP ran the exact same playbook just last month—the press would be sounding the alarm nonstop on a potentially radical shift in policy affecting tens of millions Americans.

=> ↺ WHO Starts Work On Essential List Of Diagnostics To Facilitate Access, Lower Prices

• The World Health Organization announced yesterday that it has begun work on a list of essential diagnostics, as an echo of its Model List of Essential Medicines.

• According to a WHO release, the Essential Diagnostics List is indented to provide “evidence-based guidance to countries to create their own national lists of essential diagnostic tests and tools.”

=> ↺ Paul Ryan Says ‘Death Tax’ Hurts Wisconsin Small Businesses. IRS Data Shows Otherwise.

• Does the estate tax really hurt small businesses? House Speaker Paul Ryan thinks so.

• He revived this longstanding debate in a May 17 column in the Kenosha News, in which he defended the Republican plan to abolish the levy on inherited wealth. Ryan wrote that the “death tax” can “result in double, and potentially even triple, taxation on small businesses and family farms, both of which are prevalent in Wisconsin.”

• President Trump made a similar claim in his budget proposal a few days later, calling for repeal of the estate tax on the grounds that it “penalizes farmers and small business owners who want to pass their family enterprises on to their children.”

=> ↺ Mental help: the story of Gaza’s trauma unit

• Palestine has the highest rate of mental health disorders in the MENA region. Even though resources are limited, there are incredible people fighting for mental health in Gaza.

Security

=> ↺ [Old] Dirty COW and why lying is bad even if you are the Linux kernel

• Dirty COW (CVE-2016-5195) is one of the most publicised local privilege escalation vulnerabilities in 2016, courtesy to its catchy name, cute logo, potential damages, and the fact that it was discovered in the wild by a researcher Phil Oester, meaning it was already under active use at the time of discovery.

=> ↺ Now doctors need to be hackers, too

• Over 100 medical professionals, infosec professionals, policymakers, a few medical-device manufacturers, and a handful of law-enforcement officials attended the first-of-its kind event. (You can watch the keynotes here.) The results? Maybe you should make sure your doctor keeps a hacker on staff. Many at the Summit got a terrifying crash course and probably realized they need to add “hacking” to their list of possible problems to assess and diagnose.

=> ↺ Slides for NHSbuntu presentation at the Red Hat Open Source in the Public Sector Event, 13th June 2017

=> ↺ [Older] Apperta Foundation supports NHSbuntu development

• We’re very excited to be able to announce that the Apperta Foundation, (which was formerly the NHS England Open Source Programme) has agreed to provide NHSbuntu with initial support funding of £40k, in order to facilitate the initial few work packages required for NHSbuntu’s next few steps.

• Details of the work packages will be published shortly, and we are of course open to community suggestions for future work packages. Initially we’re focusing on setting up good tooling for reproducible automated builds of NHSbuntu, and adding some new features.

=> ↺ Oil changes, safety recalls, and software patches

• When critical patches occur frequently enough to become routine, alarm fatigue sets in and people cease to give the attention updates deserve, even if on a conscious level they still recognize the importance of applying updates. Easy problem to identify, hard problem to address: We need to start writing code with fewer security vulnerabilities.

=> ↺ From Debian to Devuan

=> ↺ Vulnerability hoarding and Wcry

=> ↺ WCry/WanaCry Ransomware Technical Analysis

=> ↺ WannaCry | For The Record

=> ↺ WannaCry and OS Security | Feedback Hangout

=> ↺ Thought leaders aren’t leaders

=> ↺ [Older] sHow Vulnerable is your Operating System, Application, and Hardware to Cyber-attacks?

=> ↺ Data protection fine shows security risks from using open source software cannot be ignored, says expert

• A six-figure fine issued to a local authority in England for a breach of UK data protection laws should serve as a reminder to all organisations of their need to manage the security risks inherent in using ‘open source’ software, an expert has said.

=> ↺ [Older] Linux distros patch highly severe Sudo vulnerability

=> ↺ Ops Engineer Explains Let’s Encrypt’s Automated TLS/SSL Certificate Issuance

• Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated and open Certificate Authority issuing digital certificates for website encryption globally. Let’s Encrypt is a service provided by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), a public benefit organization with a mission to reduce financial, technological, and education barriers to secure communication over the Internet. Let’s Encrypt secures communication for more than 40 million websites.

=> ↺ Rooting a Printer: From Security Bulletin to Remote Code Execution

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Islamist push blamed for Anzac Cove monument destruction

• Originally, the text read, “Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace.”

=> ↺ Historians outraged by destruction of Anzac memorials at Gallipoli

• Ataturk’s famous tribute to fallen Allied soldiers was gouged under so-called “restoration” works in Turkey, with up to 15 other memorials on one-time ­battlefields of the Gallipoli Peninsula slated to be “modernised” under orders by the fundamentalist Islamic government led by anti-West President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

=> ↺ Minorities Face Horrors as Bangladeshi Gov’t Colludes with ISIS: Report

• In an exclusive interview with Shipan Kumer Basu, head of the Hindu Struggle Committee, Kumer related that Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government has let Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) gain a foothold in Bangladesh in recent times. He reported that ISIS has committed numerous atrocities against the minority communities, such as grabbing lands, raping women and burning down homes while preaching jihad.

=> ↺ ISIS Fears Mean Finland, The World’s Safest Country, Is Raising Its Threat Level

• Finland, a country classified as the safest in the world, where people dog-sled, cross-country ski and enjoy saunas in peace, raised its threat level on Wednesday, citing small numbers of people inspired by jihadi groups such as the Islamic State (ISIS).

• The Finnish Security Intelligence Service, or SUPO, said it had obtained knowledge of extremism-related plans being made in the country. In response, it raised the threat from ‘low’ to ‘elevated.’

• “The most significant terrorist threat in Finland is still posed by individual actors or small groups motivated by radical Islamist propaganda or terrorist organizations encouraging them,” SUPO said in a statement.

=> ↺ ‘We will break every bone’: Islamist leaders threaten Bangladesh lawyer

• Human rights groups have warned about the safety of a prominent Bangladesh lawyer after Islamist leaders threatened to “break every bone” in her body for defending the installation of a Lady Justice statue outside the country’s supreme court.

=> ↺ Terrorists Kill 6 Policemen In South Kashmir’s Anantnag, Disfigure Faces With Bullets

• After the incident, clashes broke out between protesters and security forces at nearly a dozen places in the Valley, including downtown Srinagar, Tral, Pampore, Pulwama town and Anantnag in south Kashmir, Hajin in Bandipora and Sopore in Baramulla in north Kashmir.

=> ↺ The Myth of Hiroshima

• With rare exception, the question of whether the atomic bombs were necessary to end World War Two is debated only deep within the safety of academic circles.

• Could a land invasion have been otherwise avoided? Would more diplomacy have achieved the same ends without the destruction of two cities? Could an atomic test on a deserted island have convinced the Japanese? Was the surrender instead driven primarily by the entry of the Soviets into the Pacific War, which, by historical accident, took place two days after Hiroshima—and the day before Nagasaki was immolated?

• [...]

• For President Obama to visit Hiroshima without reflecting on the why of that unfortunate loss of lives, acting as if they occurred via some natural disaster, is tragically consistent with the fact that for 71 years no American president felt it particularly important to visit the victimized city. America’s lack of introspection over one of the 20th century’s most significant events continues, with 21st century consequences.

=> ↺ My Father’s Gun Charge Almost Ruined My Family. Fair Sentencing Saved It.

• My dad pulled a gun on a man who threatened my little sister.

• My sister was 17-years-old at the time. There was a block party on our street, and my father was listening to his music very loudly. He exchanged unpleasant words with a visitor to a neighbor’s house. When my father went into the house to grab meat for the grill, the visitor began arguing with my sister. He was a grown man. She was a teenage girl.

• Afterward, a few witnesses said a knife was pulled on my sister. Others say the knife was being used by the man to prep food for barbecuing. All my father heard was my sister screaming bloody murder and the word “knife.”

• My dad rushed out as my sister cried and the man screamed at her. Our German shepherd was barking. Neighbors were staring. It was bad situation. My dad made it worse. He got a gun, and put it on his waist. He walked out and lifted his shirt to intimidate the man.

=> ↺ Moral Injury and Hooper’s War

• Moral injury differs from PTSD in that it is tied to the parts of a person that decide right and wrong, and applies guilt, regret or shame as a penalty. PTSD is fear-based, and includes stresses like hyperalertness that worked well over there in war (quite valid adaptations in the mind and body, such as hitting the ground when hearing loud noises, to the real situation of other people trying to kill you), but are dangerous, exhausting, and frightening back here. The flight-or-fight response just won’t shut off, even in the absence of threat. PTSD to many is a loss of safety, but not a loss of self. Moral injury might be thought of as a disconnect between one’s pre-war self and a second self develops in the face of death, action, or inaction. Moral injury jumbles these two selves which cannot in fact live well together inside one body.

=> ↺ On the Ethics of Hell

• The ethics of hell come into play when we think a bit on what those flyers were doing in the skies over Fukuoka: dropping bombs in hopes of burning, shredding or maiming as many Japanese as possible.

• The U.S. at this late stage of the war was as a strategy not discriminating between “military” and “civilian” targets, and often conducted mass firebombing raids over cities. Thousands of incendiaries were dropped simultaneously in hopes of creating a firestorm, a conflagration that burned hot and long enough to literally suck the oxygen out of the air and kill everything beneath it.

=> ↺ Brad Pitt’s “War Machine” Offers an Absurd and Scathing Critique of America’s Delusional Generals

• How do military leaders persuade their soldiers to fight an insane war?

• Here’s one way. The setting is a bitter outpost of the American war in Afghanistan. The years-long nightmare has no prospect of ending so long as American troops stay in a country that has a nearly unblemished record of grinding foreign armies to ashes. A bullish general is trying to generate a dose of enthusiasm in the hearts and minds of his unenthusiastic men.

=> ↺ What It’s Like Being A Student In An ISIS-Controlled School

• Drone strikes, at least, are frequently used as a recruiting tool by terrorist groups. Meanwhile, at least some evidence seems to suggest that more kids making it to secondary school “has a negative impact on the supply of terrorism.”

=> ↺ Swedish brewery names beer ‘F*** you I’m Millwall’ in tribute to man who fought London Bridge attackers

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Why My Heart Stands With Julian

• Many people have courage and strength in their convictions. But how many people have stood up to the ultimate bully, a superpower, with 1200 military bases all around the world? When the courage of their convictions would bring them into conflict with the United States government, how many people would have stuck to their principles and refused to stand down?

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ As homelands devastated, Indonesian tribe turns from animism to Islam

• Yusuf’s group converted to Islam, the predominant faith in Indonesia, and gave up their nomadic ways in January in a bid to improve livelihoods that have been devastated by the expansion of palm oil plantations and coal mines into their forest homelands.

=> ↺ Poll shows trust for NASA on climate, but some put Fox News in second

• There are plenty of places where you can find dodgy information about climate change. If you’re the arguing (“debating”) type, you have likely, at some point, been exasperated by the obviously low quality of the sources cited by your opponent (or uncle). Setting aside the occasional conspiratorial mind who believes “those scientists” can’t be trusted, who does everyone else actually trust on the topic?

• A survey project led by the University of New Hampshire’s Lawrence Hamilton and Jessica Brunacini and Stephanie Pfirman of Columbia University asked about 700 people in the US this question. Specifically, they asked whether people trusted the leaders in their political party, their faith, their friends and family, websites they frequent, science agencies like NASA, or Fox News.

Finance

=> ↺ [Older] For an Inclusive Culture, Try Working Less

• “You know what we call people who work past 5:00pm?” he said.

• “What?”

• “Chumps.”

=> ↺ Trump is selling a privatization scam and calling it an infrastructure plan

• In reality, Trump’s jobs agenda is a sham that does not involve a trillion dollars, won’t do much for the country’s infrastructure and won’t create many jobs.

=> ↺ Trump’s Business Ties in Persian Gulf Raise Questions About His Allegiances

• Stepping away from management without giving up ownership does not diminish Mr. Trump’s financial incentives or conflicts, as the director of the Office of Government Ethics warned before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

=> ↺ Housing Regulation

• …I do agree with David Lammy that there is potential criminal culpability…

=> ↺ Blockchain Primer: Where’s Blockchain Headed?

• The distributed database technology Blockchain has the potential to disrupt business and finance in profound ways. To explore the topic, I spoke with Bernard Golden, CEO at Navica. Golden, who Wired magazine lists as one of the top ten experts in cloud computing, has created an online training module called Blockchain and Beyond.

=> ↺ Grenfell Tower and the politics of needless death

• As the body count rose from the Grenfell Tower fire, sensible people warned us not to rush to judgement. Activists, mainly from the left, denounced a complacent housing bureaucracy at the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, and a Conservative government, which had refused in its laissez-faire way to regulate rented housing.

• The warnings sounded sensible. At the time of writing, I still do not know for sure why the fire spread with such ghastly effectiveness. Why rush to judgement and into print? In any case, is there not something wrong with people whose first reaction to a disaster is to take cheap shots?

• But sensible points can be beside the point. From the moment I heard the accents of the survivors on yesterday morning’s news, I understood that the fire was inescapably political.

=> ↺ Grenfell Tower disaster, a symbol of broken Britain

• This was a disaster with political consequences. A symbol of a Britain in which something isn’t right.

• For an extra £5,000 during recent refurbishments, it was claimed on the front page of the Times, the 24-story Grenfell Tower in west London could have been clad in fireproof panels. Instead, the contractors went for the cheaper option — a decision which may have contributed to the deaths of at least 30 people in Wednesday’s deadly blaze and probably many more.

=> ↺ Europe: the Danger of the Center

• The good news out of Europe is that Marine Le Pen’s neo-Nazi National Front took a beating in the May 7 French presidential election. The bad news is that the program of the winner, Emmanuel Macron, might put Le Pen back in the running six years from now.

• Macron pledges to cut 120,000 public jobs, reduce spending by 60 billion Euros, jettison the 35-hour workweek, raise the retirement age, weaken unions’ negotiating strength and cut corporate taxes. It is a program that is unlikely to revive the morbid French economy, but it will certainly worsen the plight of jobless youth and seniors and hand the National Front ammunition for the 2022 election.

=> ↺ China is great again, but how is Britain dealing with globalisation’s new champion in the age of Brexit?

• In the “golden age” of UK-China relations, foreign policy is as important as domestic policy.

• Politics is always entwined with economics and often produce strange and unforeseen results. With the UK withdrawal of membership from the European Union and Donald Trump’s isolationist US policies, it seems they have both relinquished their role as leaders of the globalisation process. On the other hand, in this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Chinese President Xi Jinping strongly defended free trade and urged the world to say “no to protectionism” in his speech addressing the world’s elite. That message was repeated last Sunday in Beijing when Xi addressed a host of heads of states and high profile delegates at the high-profile Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. China, which will celebrate the Communist Party’s 100th year anniversary in 2020, is fast earning the recognition of being the new champion of globalisation. When China joined the World Trade Organisation in December 1991, there were many predictions that it would be the number one economy in the world in the 21st Century. What it achieved during this early stage as the second biggest economy is staggering. The weekend summit was the global unveiling of Xi Jinping’s multibillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative. The hugely ambitious foreign policy initiative and infrastructure enterprise will connect Asia to Europe and beyond. It consists of two main components: first is the land-based “Silk Road Economic Belt” (SREB) and, second, the oceangoing “Maritime Silk Road” (MSR). The ‘belt’ includes countries situated on the original Silk Road through Central Asia, West Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The Maritime Silk Road, as a complementary initiative, is aimed at investing and fostering collaboration in Southeast Asia, Oceania, and North Africa, through projects around the South China Sea, the South Pacific Ocean, and the wider Indian Ocean area. UK Chancellor Philip Hammond represented the UK at the summit and the UK have already upped the ante to cement the “golden age” of UK-China relations by launching the first direct cargo train laden with British goods bound for China last April. The train, which regally departed from just outside of London, traveled over 12,000 kilometers and nine countries to Yiwu with 32 matching royal blue China Railway Express shipping containers.

=> ↺ Jeremy Corbyn under pressure to change course as poll shows Labour voters want soft Brexit

• Jeremy Corbyn came under fresh pressure to force the government to pursue a soft Brexit last night after a new poll revealed that he is at odds with Labour voters.

• A YouGov survey found that Corbyn supporters believe tariff-free trade is more important than controls on immigration.

• Corbyn’s policy is to leave both the single market and the customs union, which implies an end to free movement of people and tariff-free trade.

=> ↺ The British Ruling Class Is in Full Panic Mode

• The first lesson is that it’s not enough to have the combination of a strong leader and a well-worked-out program. The left also needs a ground game. We have this movement called Momentum, a movement to get support within the party. That movement was able to have a million conversations with voters in the space of six weeks, talking to people on their doorsteps, just the way the Sanders people did. Then Jeremy Corbyn in the last days of the election campaign stepped out of the role of party leader and started to speak on behalf of the nation. He’d absorbed so much pressure, so much vitriol, and so many attacks—he assured people that it was possible to go beyond the pain barrier. I think the Sanders movement, or whatever comes after it, has to do popular politics. It’s not the same as populism. It’s like gaming. You go into the dungeon and you kill the boss. You need someone who can do that. And Corbyn proved he could do it.

=> ↺ Former fire chief says Melbourne’s Lacrosse tower still poses risk

• The former head of Victoria’s Metropolitan Fire Brigade has said he would not allow his children to live in a Melbourne apartment block that caught fire in a similar manner to London’s Grenfell Tower, and it remained a fire risk.

• Peter Rau was chief fire officer of the MFB in November 2014 when a cigarette burning on an eighth floor balcony of the Lacrosse building in Docklands sparked a fire that raced up the aluminium-clad walls to the 21st floor within 11 minutes.

• [...]

• Despite concerns raised several times by the MFP, and an order from the City of Melbourne that the panels be removed, the cladding on the Lacrosse building remains in place and a battle over who has responsibility for paying the replacement costs is now before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.

=> ↺ Shameless Tory council leader blames Grenfell Tower block residents for lack of sprinklers claiming they didn’t want ‘disruption’

• A shameless Tory has blamed Grenfell Tower block residents for the lack of sprinklers in the building.

• Nick Paget-Brown, the Conservative leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council, claimed tenants didn’t want the ‘disruption’ of them being fitted.

=> ↺ Grenfell Tower fire: Jeremy Corbyn calls Government’s response an ‘unacceptable failure’

• The Government has been accused of an “unacceptable” failure by Jeremy Corbyn after a promise made just 24 hours earlier to rehouse all Grenfell fire victims near their old homes began to crumble.

• On a day when thousands of people took to the streets to demand answers and justice over the deadly blaze, the Labour leader said ministers had a duty to stick to their guarantee, but officials attempting to find places for those displaced gave the impression of being overwhelmed.

=> ↺ Experts warned government against cladding material used on Grenfell

• The government’s building safety experts warned last year that the drive for greater energy efficiency meant more and more buildings are being wrapped in materials that could go up in flames.

• In a report compiled before the Grenfell Tower disaster on Wednesday, the Building Research Establishment, which works for the Department of Communities and Local Government on fire investigations, said attempts to innovate with insulation were leading to an “increase in the volume of potentially combustible materials being applied” to buildings.

=> ↺ The politics of a tragedy

• WE USE the phrase “death-trap” all too lightly. But a death-trap is exactly what the 24-storey Grenfell Tower in West London became when it caught fire in the early hours of June 14th. The fire, thought to have started when a fridge exploded in a fourth-floor flat, spread quickly as the building’s cladding caught fire. Dozens of residents were unable to reach the internal staircase. There was no external fire-escape to take them to safety, no sprinkler system to dampen the advancing flames, no smoke alarms to wake people. For some, the only way to escape was to jump and hope for the best: seventeen bodies of jumpers have been found on the ground. Several eye-witnesses report that a baby was thrown from a mid-floor window and caught by people standing below.

=> ↺ Grenfell Tower resident praises Jeremy Corbyn saying, ‘he is one of us’

• A resident of Grenfell Tower has praised Jeremy Corbyn and labelled him “one of us” after he came to visit the local community.

• The man, who said his name was Nadir, was critical of Theresa May’s response to the fire that that ripped through a 24-storey building in Kensingston.

• But he was full of praise for the Labour leader who spent time talking to those in the area who had been affected by the incident.

=> ↺ Has the UK made a U-Turn over the Brexit timetable?

• Back on 14th May 2017, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union David Davis was bullish: the Brexit timetable will be the ‘row of the summer’.

• The EU wanted a phased approach, with certain issues dealt with before any trade agreement is discussed. The latter would only happen once there was sufficient progress on the former.

=> ↺ Amazon to buy Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion

• Amazon said Friday it has agreed to buy Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion, a stunning move to boost its grocery business even as the brick-and-mortar retail sector continues to sink under the weight of e-commerce.

=> ↺ When Does Amazon Become a Monopoly?

• On Friday morning, Amazon announced it was buying Whole Foods Market for more than $13 billion. About an hour later, Amazon’s stock had risen by about 3 percent, adding $14 billion to its value.

• Amazon basically bought the country’s sixth-largest grocery store for free.

=> ↺ Slack Is Said to Be in Talks to Raise $500 Million

• The company is on track to generate more than $200 million in revenue this year, but it is not profitable.

=> ↺ Germany threatens retaliation if U.S. sanctions harm its firms

• Germany threatened on Friday to retaliate against the United States if new sanctions on Russia being proposed by the U.S. Senate end up penalizing German firms.

• The Senate bill, approved on Thursday by a margin of 98-2, includes new sanctions against Russia and Iran. Crucially, it foresees punitive measures against entities that provide material support to Russia in building energy export pipelines.

• Berlin fears that could pave the way for fines against German and European firms involved in Nord Stream 2, a project to build a pipeline carrying Russian gas across the Baltic.

• Among the European companies involved in the project are German oil and gas group Wintershall, German energy trading firm Uniper, Royal Dutch Shell, Austria’s OMV and France’s Engie.

=> ↺ Jeremy Corbyn: Weakened and divided, Tory government is in no position to negotiate a good Brexit deal for Britain

• Ten days ago, Labour achieved the biggest increase in its share of the vote since 1945, and I would like to thank to all those who supported us and voted Labour.

• The Tories lost their majority at the general election, and Theresa May ’s government is now struggling to carry out its responsibilities.

• She has so far been unable to stitch together a workable deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party to stay in power. She has had to postpone the Queen’s Speech to this Wednesday to put together even the most basic programme for parliament.

• And she has failed in any way adequately to respond to the terrible Grenfell Tower fire in London.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Donald Trump ‘yells at TVs in the White House’ about Russia investigation

• Donald Trump has reportedly been yelling at TV sets in the White House as he becomes “increasingly angry” about an investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the US presidential election.

• The US leader thinks he is the victim of a conspiracy aimed at discrediting his leadership and ending his time in the White House, according to the Associated Press.

• Confidants and advisers close to Mr Trump said his fury was mounting at the probe and he had been yelling at TV sets about its press coverage.

=> ↺ May: a leader who stands for nothing

• Katie Perrior, a communications executive who used to work with May and her team in Downing Street, wrote in The Times on Saturday about her experiences with the apparently brash Hill and Timothy: ‘What I could never work out was whether Mrs May condoned their behaviour and turned a blind eye or didn’t understand how destructive they both were.’ She went on to say that the PM rarely stood up to her advisers, even when they came up with ‘batshit crazy ideas’.

• It’s not that May was somehow under her advisers’ control. Rather, it is her lack of conviction that made her overly reliant on them. Despite the media attention May has received over the past year, it’s still not clear what she thinks about anything. Her deadening repetition during the campaign of the ‘strong and stable’ slogan was a reminder of this. Subsequent reports have claimed she did not like the slogan, but carried on with it anyway, apparently at the insistence of campaign guru Lynton Crosby.

=> ↺ Why Trump’s drug addiction task force should freak you out

• But many health professionals and cannabis advocates are wary of Trump’s task force. Nearly all the members selected to the committee have spoken out against marijuana legalization — which runs counter to the overwhelming majority of the American people. Christie, an ardent longtime opponent of cannabis regulation, will lead these members:

=> ↺ Republicans are trying to pass Trumpcare in secret, here are simple resources to fight that

• Senate Republicans are currently working in secret on a bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act and overhaul the American health care system. The process is so secretive, in fact, that even Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price hasn’t seen what’s in it yet.

=> ↺ Democratic Congress Members Raise Alarm About Security at Trump Properties

• Two dozen House Democrats have sent a letter to White House counsel Donald McGahn, warning that digital security holes at the Trump Organization’s clubs and hotels are risks to national security and the secrecy of classified information.

• “The White House must act immediately to secure the potentially sensitive information on these systems,” said the letter, which was signed by 24 Congress members and went to McGahn last week.

• Their concerns were in response to an article published last month by ProPublica and Gizmodo that documented the cybersecurity vulnerabilities at properties the president has frequented since being elected. Our reporting found unencrypted login pages, servers running outdated software, accessible printers, and Wi-Fi networks that were open to anyone close enough to access them.

=> ↺ Richard Branson: The world should not ‘kowtow’ to ‘dangerous’ Donald Trump

• Mr Trump had been going through one of his bankruptcies at the time and spent much of the lunch with Mr Branson discussing “five people who he’d asked for help who’d refused to help him — and how he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying those five people,” the entrepreneur said.

=> ↺ BBC Desperately Tries to Re-Assert Old Political Spectrum

• The BBC is institutionally incapable of reacting to the shift in the political spectrum revealed by the last election.

• Astonishingly on Marr the papers are being reviewed by Toby Young (far right), George Osborne (right) and Polly Toynbee (Blairite right ). The old politico/commentariat bubble is entirely intact as far as the BBC is concerned. We are going to have Michael Fallon in a minute.

• Finally, Jeremy Corbyn will be invited on. He is the one person who articulates what half the country believes, and whose existence the BBC cannot entirely ignore. But the straining and stressing as the BBC try to heave the Overton window back into place is palpable.

=> ↺ Action Alert: With Sleazy Innuendo, NYT Lays Virginia Attack at Bernie Sanders’ Feet

• New York Times reporter Yamiche Alcindor (6/14/17) started with a false premise and patched together a dodgy piece of innuendo and guilt-by-association in order to place the blame for a shooting in Virginia on “the most ardent supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders.”

• We learned in the wake of an attack on Monday that left five injured, including Republican House Whip Steve Scalise, that the shooter, James T. Hodgkinson (who was subsequently killed by police), had been a Sanders campaign volunteer, and that his social media featured pictures of the Vermont senator and his brand of progressive, anti-Republican language. This was enough for Alcindor to build a piece based on the premise that Sanders’ “movement” had been somehow responsible for the attacks, and was thus “tested” by them.

=> ↺ The Bleating of the Blairites

• A sleepless night and day of drama over, I should congratulate Jeremy Corbyn and his team on a fantastic job done. This really was a watershed election. I suspect that what happened is that the mainstream media realised it is losing influence, and tried to compensate by becoming so shrill and biased it simply lost all respect. This election may be the one where social media finally routed the press barons. They may in turn start to wonder if it is worth sinking millions into a newspaper if it can’t buy an election

• New media beat old media, the insurgents routed the establishment, the young insisted the old also consider their opinion, hope beat fear, altruism wrestled with selfishness, and I would personally go so far as to say good stood up to evil. The result against the combined power of state and media was fantastic. We have nonetheless still got Theresa May as PM propped up by climate change denying, misogynist, creationist, homophobe, anti-abortion terrorist-linked knuckle-draggers from the DUP. But cheer up, it won’t last long.

=> ↺ Europe Discovers a Volatile Populism

• European politicians are finding it tricky to “play the populist card,” as U.K. Prime Minister May discovered when her Conservative Party stumbled over its support for more austerity, writes Andrew Spannaus.

=> ↺ Red Alert: Russian Focus Might Save Trump’s Hide

• The “historic” appearances of James Comey Chameleon and Jefferson Davis Andersonville Sessions before a Senate committee have come and gone, leaving us … pretty much where we were before. Trump was made to look stupid and thuggish (not exactly front-page news); his GOP apologists and enablers employed even more ludicrous justifications for said stupidity and thuggery (“Hey, the kid is still green, he didn’t know he was doing anything wrong — not that he did do anything wrong, mind you.”); media outlets reaped tons of ad revenue; twittery was rampant on every side. We all had a jolly good time. But as for the ostensible object of the exercise — learning more about possible Russian interference in the electoral process, and any part Trump’s gang might have had in colluding with this and/or covering it up — there was not a whole lotta shaking going on.

=> ↺ Every Person You See on Air, Someone Chose to Put Them There

• Former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly is best known to some for her harassment claims against her former boss, Roger Ailes. But NBC hired her to host a primetime news program, presumably based on her journalistic record at Fox—which included questioning whether education, marriage and employment are “valued in the black communities, in the inner cities,” wherein it might be “cool” to “be somebody who doesn’t necessarily prize being there for your family.”

• And her famously adamant argument that Santa Claus is “just white,” that “Jesus was a white man too” and, to the African-American writer who dared to broach the issue, “just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change.”

• Of her new NBC gig, Kelly has said, “It’s allowed me to open up more and show more of who I am through my interview subjects.” So NBC is now getting what it either wanted or should have expected: controversy, complete with advertisers pulling out—due to Kelly’s surprising-only-to-those-who-are-easily-surprised decision to devote an early show to a tete-a-tete with noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whose right-wing nuttery is popular with Donald Trump, among others, despite Jones’ own attorney’s contention, in a child custody battle, that it’s all really a kind of performance art.

=> ↺ Corbyn’s Labour: now look outwards

• The first pointed to “a niggling sense that something may be developing under the surface that could break through even in the short time left” (see “The Corbyn crowd, and its signal”, 18 May 2017). It seemed implausible, given that most opinion polls were showing a Conservative lead well into double figures. But a few days later the lead was beginning to narrow.

• The second column noted that “Labour supporters began to sense a previously heretical notion that the Conservatives might not even gain an overall majority…” (see “Corbyn, and an election surprise”, 26 May 2017).

• The third column further explored this possibility, though I have to admit that my own sense on election day was that the surge in Labour support had probably come too late. What the column did try to do, though, was link the election with the urgent need to review the handling of the war on terror in light of the Manchester and London Bridge attacks (see “Britain and ISIS: a need to rethink”, 7 June 2017).

=> ↺ Theresa May Avoids Survivors of Grenfell Tower Fire During Visit to Scene of Disaster

=> ↺ Jeff Sessions Can’t Remember Anything

=> ↺ Pamela Anderson brands Theresa May the worst Prime Minister in living memory

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Comodo DNS Blocks TorrentFreak Over “Hacking and Warez“

• At TorrentFreak, we write about website blocking on a weekly basis, but it’s not often that we are the target ourselves. This week we are, as major computer security vendor Comodo has decided to block direct access to our site, claiming that we might offer illegal access to copyrighted software or media. Interestingly. Comodo’s DNS blocking doesn’t prevent users from accessing The Pirate Bay and other known pirate sites.

=> ↺ Theresa May wants tech companies to censor terrorists, but will they play ball?

=> ↺ Court Orders Google to Remove Links to Takedown Notice

• A German Court has ordered Google to stop linking to a takedown notice received by the company. The search engine regularly publishes links to takedown notices to increase transparency, but the court ruled that this can go too far. The case in question deals with defamation, but many copyright holders who’ve complained about Google’s “transparency” efforts will likely welcome the order.

=> ↺ California’s Anti-SLAPP Law Saves Another News Publication From Bogus Lawsuit

• In March we wrote about the unfortunate situation of two news publications in nearby Santa Clara, California in court in what appeared to be a clear SLAPP suit. The more established publication, “Santa Clara Weekly” and its publisher Miles Barber, had sued a new upstart, “Santa Clara News Online” and its publisher Robert Haugh. It seemed fairly clear that Barber didn’t like the fact that Haugh had been criticizing the Weekly, and the lawsuit was just filed to make a nuisance for Haugh. It was notable that the complaint didn’t cite a single blog post by Haugh or even quote him. It just paraphrased (badly) a bunch of clearly opinion statements from Haugh. Haugh got assistance from Ken “Popehat” White, who asked the court to strike the lawsuit for violating California’s anti-SLAPP law.

=> ↺ Fake Libel Court Order Used In (Failed) Attempt To Vanish Sexual Battery Conviction

• People who do not have a legal reason to have content delisted are still trying to trick Google into compliance with various illegal actions. So far, we’ve seen bogus lawsuits filed by fake plaintiffs against fake defendants, slid by inattentive judges to secure takedown orders. We’ve seen people trying to limit negative search engine results by forging judge’s signatures on fake orders. We’ve seen people assemble fake news sites to post copies of negative content solely for the purpose of targeting the original posts with fraudulent takedown orders.

=> ↺ Another libel takedown order

• This might raise all sorts of interesting questions: Should 47 U.S.C. § 230 allow injunctions ordering websites to remove material that had been found to be defamatory? Should the injunctions be binding on Google and similar sites, even if they weren’t named as defendants (a question pending before the California Supreme Court, in Hassell v. Bird)? If they aren’t (and this order indeed doesn’t claim to bind Google), should Google voluntarily deindex sites found to be defamatory? Should Google be suspicious of default judgments, because of the possibility that the defendant wasn’t properly served?

=> ↺ UK and France propose automated censorship of online content

• Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron’s plans to make Internet companies liable for ‘extremist’ content on their platforms are fraught with challenges. They entail automated censorship, risking the removal of unobjectionable content and harming everyone’s right to free expression.

=> ↺ Threats to Campus Speech Don’t Alarm Media When They Come From the Right

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Aadhaar-less bank accounts will be shut down after December 31

• Bank accounts that are not linked to Aadhaar will be frozen and no new accounts can be opened without the 12-digit biometric identity number after December 31, according to new government rules.

=> ↺ Aadhaar: Ushering in a Commercialized Era of Surveillance in India

• Since last year, Indian citizens have been required to submit their photograph, iris and fingerprint scans in order to access legal entitlements, benefits, compensation, scholarships, and even nutrition programs. Submitting biometric information is needed for the rehabilitation of manual scavengers, the training and aid of disabled people, and anti-retroviral therapy for HIV/AIDS patients. Soon police in the Alwar district of Rajasthan will be able to register criminals, and track missing persons through an app that integrates biometric information with the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network Systems (CCTNS).

• These instances demonstrate how intrusive India’s controversial national biometric identity scheme, better known as Aadhaar has grown. Aadhaar is a 12-digit unique identity number (UID) issued by the government after verifying a person’s biometric and demographic information. As of April 2017, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has issued 1.14 billion UIDs covering nearly 87% of the population making Aadhaar, the largest biometric database in the world. The government asserts that enrollment reduces fraud in welfare schemes and brings greater social inclusion. Welfare schemes that provide access to basic services for marginalized and vulnerable groups are essential. Unlike countries where similar schemes have been implemented, invasive biometric collection is being imposed as a condition for basic entitlements in India. The privacy and surveillance risks associated with the scheme have caused much dissension in India.

=> ↺ Supreme Court Will Hear Significant Cell Phone Tracking Case

• Today the Supreme Court announced it will review United States v. Carpenter, a case involving long-term, retrospective tracking of a person’s movements using information generated by his cell phone. This is very exciting news in the world of digital privacy. With Carpenter, the Court has an opportunity to continue its recent pattern of applying Fourth Amendment protections to sensitive digital data. It may also limit or even reevaluate the so-called “Third Party Doctrine,” which the government relies on to justify warrantless tracking and surveillance in a variety of contexts. EFF filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to take Carpenter and a related case, so we’re hopeful the Court will rule in favor of strong constitutional protections.

=> ↺ Why was Dmitry Bogatov jailed for sharing a Kanye video?

• Dmitry Bogatov was arrested in Russia on April 6, accused of inciting terrorist activity by posting “extremist” materials online. There is significant doubt surrounding the legitimacy of the charges that led to Bogatov’s arrest, which primarily relate to his supposed sharing of the video for Kanye West and Jay-Z’s ‘No Church in the Wild’. Yet, if convicted he may face a 20-year sentence. Dmitry’s supporters are calling for support from the international community, to join them in protesting his unjust detention on June 19 and 20.

• I interviewed Raymond Johansen, a high profile writer and activist, who sits on the board of Pirate Parties International, about why he’s supporting the protest for Impolitikal.

=> ↺ Government and Main Parties Point the Finger at Social Media for Terrorist Attack

• Despite both campaigners and business professionals warning against it, the government is locked on this dangerous course.

• We will continue making the case that by providing an easy way around encryption, you make the service far less secure and put the public at risk. Encryption saves lives. It keeps our bank information and our location, or typical locations, secure. It protects who we talk to – friends, parents, and our children. It provides a safe way to communicate after and during an attack like the ones we saw in Manchester and earlier this year, in Westminster.

=> ↺ As a Provider Fought a Secret Surveillance Order, Court Denied It Access to Relevant Law

• The U.S. government’s foreign surveillance law is so secretive that not even a service provider challenging an order issued by a secret court got to access it.

=> ↺ European Parliament Committee Recommends End-To-End Encryption For All Electronic Communications

• The European Parliament’s (EP’s) Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs released a draft proposal for a new Regulation on Privacy and Electronic Communications. The draft recommends a regulation that will enforce end-to-end encryption on all communications to protect European Union citizens’ fundamental privacy rights. The committee also recommended a ban on backdoors.

=> ↺ Swedish commuters can use futuristic hand implant microchip as train tickets

• The tiny chip has the same technology as Oyster cards and contactless bank cards – NFC (Near Field Communication) – to enable conductors to scan passengers’ hands.

=> ↺ Facebook takes on TV and YouTube with long-form video push

• But for Facebook, maintaining or increasing the time users spend on the network is key. If consumers want to watch more TV online, the social network wants to build a home for it. “We’re in an absolute war for time. This is just one more part of it,” says Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG.

=> ↺ Facebook to venture into scripted television with comedy series

• Facebook is apparently planning to dive into scripted television with Nicole Byer comedy series Loosely Exactly Nicole.

=> ↺ Facebook Chases TV’s $70 Billion Stash With Its Own Video Series

• With the $70 billion TV advertising market in its sights, Facebook Inc. is starting to bankroll the creation of video series that will begin to appear on the world’s largest social network later this year.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Uber’s scandals, blunders and PR disasters: the full list

• Here is a timeline of some of the most consequential controversies.

=> ↺ Texas Makes Child Marriage Under 18 Illegal

• Child marriage is still shockingly common in the United States, with 57,800 children ages 16-17 marrying in 2014, many of them against their will.

=> ↺ Jay Z Criticizes ‘Exploitative’ Bail Bond Industry in Father’s Day Essay

• “If you’re from neighborhoods like the Brooklyn one I grew up in, if you’re unable to afford a private attorney, then you can be disappeared into our jail system simply because you can’t afford bail,”

=> ↺ The Police Officer Who Killed Philando Castile Is Found Not Guilty

• Even a liberal enclave like the one Castile lived in, even having a licensed gun, like Castile had, cannot bring worth to a black man’s life in the eyes of our racist justice system.

=> ↺ 23-year old Hindu girl stabbed as she refused sexy Ramadan marriage proposal.

=> ↺ Saudi Arabia: Release blogger Raif Badawi, still behind bars after five years

=> ↺ UNHRC: Free Raif Badawi, Wang Binzhang, Leopoldo Lopez & Eduardo Cardet

• Council member Saudi Arabia gave that pledge, yet tomorrow marks five years that Raif Badawi has been imprisoned for the crime of being a blogger who called for a free society. Why is this Council silent?

=> ↺ Who needs jihad?

• The authors show Islam embodies a long-standing doctrine of emigration, called Al-Hijra, designed to expunge, not tolerate, other creeds. Islam rejects outright diverse ‘melting pot’ societies such as those that have emerged across the New World. Al-Hijra is as important to Mohammed’s vision for an Islamic State as is militant jihad.

• Al-Hijra actually predates jihad. It was the crucial opening gambit in Islam’s expansionism that began with Mohammad’s leaving Mecca for Medina in 622 AD.

=> ↺ PA Fatwa Council: “Breaking fast is one of the greatest sins”

• At the beginning of the current Muslim fast month of Ramadan, the official PA daily reprinted an article by Rafiah District Mufti and member of the PA’s Supreme Fatwa Council Sheikh Hassan Ahmed Jaber, in which he warns readers that breaking the Ramadan fast “is one of the greatest sins.” It is so great that the fast breaker’s “blood is permitted,” and it constitutes “renouncing Islam,” he said, quoting Islam’s Prophet Muhammad:

=> ↺ Attorney: Mosque paid doctor to perform genital cuttings on girls

• A local mosque was paying a physician to perform female genital mutilation on young girls, an attorney serving as a guardian for the doctor’s children alleged in court Tuesday.

=> ↺ Michigan Mosque Paid for FGM, Lawyer Alleges

• Dr. Juama Nargarwala, 44, an emergency room doctor, is accused of performing FGM on two young girls from Minnesota, although prosecutors said in court that she may have cut up to 100 girls over the past 12 years.

=> ↺ New Blasphemy Laws for Canada?

• Criticizing Islam in Canada should not be illegal or disliking it should not be classified as a phobia. A “phobia” is a type of mental disorder. Isn’t the “Islamophobia” motion, which was unanimously passed by the Canadian government and calls for limiting the rights of Canadians to criticize Islam, contrary to Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms? What is the purpose of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms then?

=> ↺ Trump To Reverse Obama Openings To Cuba Under the False Flag of Human Rights

• In the days following the death of Fidel Castro, then-President-elect Donald Trump did exactly what one might expect: He took to Twitter. Trump condemned the “deal” the Obama administration put in place over the course of its normalization process with Cuba. “If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate deal,” Trump tweeted.

=> ↺ One Hundred Years of the Espionage Act

• One hundred years ago, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act into law, and since then it has been used to criminalize the disclosure of national defense and classified information.

=> ↺ The Espionage Act: One Hundred Years of Murky Law

• While no reporter has ever been charged with violating the statute, this is hardly the first time, as we reported in 2012, that the government has threatened to pursue Espionage Act charges against journalists who base their reporting on leaked classified documents.

=> ↺ The Supreme Court Strikes Down a Nationality Law That Treated Fathers Differently Than Mothers Based on Outdated Stereotypes

• Under the law, mothers could more easily transfer citizenship to their children born abroad than could their fathers.

• In a step forward for gender equality, the Supreme Court struck down yesterday a nationality law that treated U.S. citizen fathers and mothers differently. The law — first enacted in 1940 — is one of the few federal laws that continue to explicitly discriminate based on sex.

• The case centered on Luis Ramon Morales-Santana, a U.S. resident for more than 40 years, who was born in the Dominican Republic in 1962. His father, a U.S. citizen, later married his mother, a citizen of the Dominican Republic, and they moved to the United States.

• At the time of Morales-Santana’s birth, the statute provided that the child of an unmarried U.S. citizen mother living abroad automatically became a U.S. citizen, so long as the mother previously lived in the U.S. for one year at any age. On the other hand, an unmarried U.S. citizen father could transmit citizenship to his child born abroad only if the father had resided in the U.S. for 10 years, with five of those years occurring after the father was 14 years old.

=> ↺ 1,700 people detained at Russia’s anti-corruption protests

• This Monday, Russian authorities detained protesters en masse in Moscow and St Petersburg. Now, they’re handing down administrative sentences against people exercising their right to freedom of assembly.

=> ↺ On “regulation”

• This post is therefore about dergulation in general, whether or not deregulation caused the the tragedy at the Grenfell tower block.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ We need to protect net neutrality now!

• If you are not a technologist please just hang on a second because this is important for you too. So what is net neutrality in a nut shell? It’s making sure that all users have an open and consistent access to resources on the internet. The internet is essentially just a platform that delivers data to your computer. Your ISP ( cable company, telco) controls the flow of data to your house because they sit directly between you and the internet.

=> ↺ Cable Industry Lobbyist Proclaims Cable TV Industry ‘Failing’ While Advocating Against Broadband Consumer Rights

• I’ll forgive our dear readers if they don’t have the name Matthew Polka floating in their memories right at this moment. As a refresher, he’s the CEO of American Cable Association, the lobbying group that represents smaller cable and broadband providers. One would think that a group like this would be very interested in breaking up the near-monopolies held by the larger players in this industry and fostering more competition within the marketplace, except that Polka has literally said the opposite. The ACA has also been involved in battles against any sort of regulation in the broadband industry, against privacy rules with any real teeth, and against the plan to require cable companies to open service to third-party cable boxes.

Intellectual Monopolies

=> ↺ Intellectual Property Is Real Money

• In the last four decades, US policymakers have taken major steps to strengthen and lengthen patents, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property (IP). The normal duration of patents and copyrights have been extended, and patents have been expanded to cover life forms, software, and business methods. This strengthened IP regime has been supported by both political parties and has gone largely unquestioned in public debate.

• That’s unfortunate, because there is an enormous amount of money at stake, and an enormous amount of money that is being redistributed from the bulk of the population to those in a position to benefit from owning intellectual property. While far from flashy, intellectual property rights have wide-ranging implications. They should be front and center on any progressive agenda.

Trademarks

=> ↺ Comicmix Wins Against Dr. Seuss Estate On Trademark Infringement Claim, Copyright Claim In Serious Jeopardy

• Last year, Mike wrote about an interesting case between a small group of enterprising comic artists and Dr. Seuss Enterprises. Comicmix artists had created a parody mashup of Dr. Suess’ Oh The Places You’ll Go and the Star Trek universe to create Oh The Places You’ll Boldly Go, a rather sweet take on both franchises. The creators of this new work setup a crowdfunding campaign, which the Dr. Seuss estate halted with takedown notices. The case ended up in court, with the Seuss estate claiming that the new work infringed both its copyright and trademark rights. The creators, along with Ken “Popehat” White, claimed all of this was well within the boundaries of Fair Use.

=> ↺ Kiss singer seeks trade mark registration for hand gesture

• On Monday, the infamous Gene Simmons (better known for his work as the co-lead singer of the band Kiss) applied to the USPTO to register as a trade mark a hand gesture commonly known as the “devil’s horns” on the rock scene. In the application, the sign is described as “a hand gesture with the index and small fingers extended upwards and the thumb extended perpendicular”. The registration is sought in relation to the international class 41 targeting among other things “services having the basic aim of the entertainment, amusement or recreation of people” and the “presentation of works of visual art or literature to the public for cultural or educational purposes”. The application further identified the types of services for which registration is sought as “entertainment, namely, live performances by a musical artist; personal appearances by a musical artist”.

Copyrights

=> ↺ “Kodi Boxes Are a Fire Risk”: Awful Timing or Opportunism?

• This week the world looked on in horror as a huge London tower block burned with residents still inside. Just a day later, a headline in UK tabloid The Sun declared “Kodi Boxes” a fire hazard and a risk to public safety. Was that awful timing? Cautionary advice? Or flat-out anti-piracy opportunism?

=> ↺ Alleged KickassTorrents Owner Considers ‘Voluntary Surrender’ to the US

• Artem Vaulin, the alleged owner of KickassTorrents, is wanted by the US Government. The Ukrainian is currently fighting an extradition request in Poland. But, according to paperwork submitted to an Illinois District Court this week, he’s considering surrendering voluntarily under the right conditions.

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