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● 06.26.17

● Links 26/6/2017: Lumina Version 1.3.0, Final Linux RC

Posted in News Roundup at 6:51 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ How Linux and makerspaces can strengthen our social fabric

• In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of makerspaces, a new social invention where people with shared interests, especially in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math), gather to work on projects and share ideas.

• I was intrigued when I learned about a makerspace in my community, because I had never heard of such a concept before. I’ve since learned that makerspaces offer so much more than just a place to learn and build. A well-run makerspace also knits together a community and its social fabric—and, most importantly, invites in people who might otherwise be marginalized.

=> ↺ ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE | An Open Letter to the Linux Community

Desktop

=> ↺ Dell Precision 5520 Developer Edition: An amazing Ubuntu mobile workstation

• The transformation of Dell into Linux hardware maker is nothing short of extraordinary. It started in 2012, when Dell’s Project Sputnik started to offer Ubuntu pre-installed on specific developer-class laptops, like the Dell XPS series. Five years later, Dell is offering Ubuntu on an even broader array of PCs, including the gorgeous Precision series.

• Dell’s Precision 5520 Ubuntu is a capable machine, with looks to match. But does this justify its astonishing pricetag, which depending on configuration, can soar past the $3,000 mark?

=> ↺ Lenovo Flex 11 Chromebook review: Tough, durable and inexpensive

• The Lenovo Flex 11 Chromebook is a consumer version of Lenovo’s very solid Chromebooks For Education products. It’s built tough — rated to take a 2.4-foot drop and has a water resistant keyboard tray to keep spills out, but still comes in at a very reasonable $279.99. Finding a “rugged” Chromebook that’s not EDU branded and uber-expensive isn’t a common thing, so we were instantly interested.

• After a bit of time with it, the strengths outweigh the drawbacks and we like the Flex 11. It’s not the most powerful Chromebook we’ve tried but it wasn’t made to be. It’s a decent, solid performer designed to take more abuse than most other products in its class.

• We think the durability factor and low price make the Flex 11 a great Chromebook for kids or someone who tends not to treat his or her stuff all that respectfully. And while the body is pretty darn durable, the keyboard leaves a lot to be desired. Read on for our full take.

=> ↺ Google’s Chrome OS Team Is Experimenting with Refreshed Sign-In/Lock Screens

• Google’s Chromium evangelist François Beaufort recently revealed that the Chrome OS team is currently experimenting with refreshed versions of the Sign-In and Lock screens in the operating system.

• In a Google+ post, the Chromium/Chrome OS developer published a screenshot of the proposed upcoming design of Chrome OS’ Lock and Sing-In screens, which reveals that fact that they’ve been updated to look good on both landscape and portrait modes.

• “The Chrome OS team is experimenting with a refreshed version of the Sign-In and Lock Screens in the latest Chrome Canary,” says François Beaufort. “Whether your device is in landscape mode or portrait mode, these screens look gorgeous in my opinion.”

=> ↺ A Linux laptop with security at its core: Purism’s Librem PCs now widely available

• US laptop maker Purism has announced the general availability of its privacy-focused Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops.

• The company ran two crowd-funding campaigns to launch its high-end Librem 15 in 2015, and, later that year, the slightly cheaper and smaller Librem 13.

• The laptops prioritize privacy, security, and open-source software, offering features such as dedicated camera and microphone kill switches, as well as its own Debian-based PureOS.

=> ↺ Purism offers reassurance with expanded access to security-minded Librem laptops

• More than ever before, it’s crucial for the average PC user to maintain their own digital security. The high profile Wannacry ransomware attack earlier this year was just one example of what can happen when hackers strike. With this in mind, privacy-minded laptop manufacturer Purism has announced an expansion to the availability of its Librem line.

• Purism launched its first wave of Librem computers in 2015 via a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign. The project raised $461,946 during its stint on CrowdSupply, a figure that has since swelled to over $2.5 million when subsequent donations and seed funding are taken into account.

=> ↺ You won’t have to wait too long for a Purism Librem Laptop anymore

• Although the chatter, whistleblowing, and mudslinging revolving around data privacy and security have somewhat died down, it hasn’t completely vanished and is perhaps more critical than ever before. That is perhaps why Purism, the folks behind the privacy-focused Librem Laptops, have decided to take a more mainstream approach to their sales, shipping the laptops in just weeks after paying for one instead of the months-long waiting period before.

=> ↺ An Early Look At Our 2017 Linux Laptop Survey Results So Far

• The full survey results will become available after the survey has ended. There’s still more than one week to go so make sure you fill out the survey.

=> ↺ Security-Focused Purism Librem 13 & 15 Linux Laptops Go Mainstream with Qubes OS

• Purism, the social purpose corporation focused on designing and manufacturing privacy-conscious hardware and software products, announced the general availability of their security-focused Purism Librem 13 and 15 laptops.

• Until recently, both Purism Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops were available only as made-to-order, which means that those who wanted to purchase either model would have to order it first and then wait a few months until the device arrived. And now, the company finally managed to scale the production to hold inventory of the laptops.

Server

=> ↺ Building Images with Dockerfile and Docker Hub

• In this series previewing the self-paced Containers for Developers and Quality Assurance (LFS254) training course from The Linux Foundation, we’ve covered installing Docker, introduced Docker Machine, and some basic commands for performing Docker container and image operations. In the three sample videos below, we’ll take a look at Dockerfiles and Docker Hub.

• Docker can build an image by reading the build instructions from a file that’s generally referred to as Dockerfile. So, first, check your connectivity with the “dockerhost” and then create a folder called nginx. In that folder, we have created a file called dockerfile and in the dockerfile, we have used different instructions, like FROM, RUN, EXPOSE, and CMD.

=> ↺ What can developers learn from being on call?

• We often talk about being on call as being a bad thing. For example, the night before I wrote this my phone woke me up in the middle of the night because something went wrong on a computer. That’s no fun! I was grumpy.

• In this post, though, we’re going to talk about what you can learn from being on call and how it can make you a better software engineer!. And to learn from being on call you don’t necessarily need to get woken up in the middle of the night. By “being on call”, here, I mean “being responsible for your code when it breaks”. It could mean waking up to issues that happened overnight and needing to fix them during your workday!

=> ↺ Making the Internet Archive’s full text search faster.

• The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library based in San Francisco. It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, books, documents, papers, newspapers, music, video and software.

• This article describes how we made the full-text organic search faster — without scaling horizontally — allowing our users to search in just a few seconds across our collection of 35 million documents containing books, magazine, newspapers, scientific papers, patents and much more.

=> ↺ DevOps: More Than Automation

• Type “devops” into any job search site today and the overwhelming majority of results will be for some variation of “DevOps Engineer”. The skills required will centre on tools like Puppet/Chef/Ansible, AWS/Azure, scripting in Python/Perl/Bash/PowerShell etc. Essentially, they’ve taken a deployment automation engineer role, crossed out “deployment automation” and written “DevOps” in its place.

=> ↺ Walmart takes its Amazon battle to the clouds

• When Amazon moved into brick and mortar with its Whole Foods purchase, many people assumed the battle between Amazon and Walmart for your retail dollar would move to the streets of America. The conflict will be fought there with drones, self-driving delivery trucks, and no-touch stores, but it will also be fought in Amazon’s stronghold: The cloud.

• While everyone knows about Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, Walmart hasn’t been neglecting the cloud either. Years ago, Walmart invested in the OpenStack cloud.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux Kernels 4.11.7 and 4.9.34 LTS Bring AMDGPU Improvements, Updated Drivers

• Renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the availability of two new stable kernels updates, for the Linux 4.11 and 4.9 LTS series.

• Linux kernels 4.11.7 and 4.9.34 LTS are now the latest builds of their respective branches, bringing lots of improvements, security fixes, and updated drivers. According to their appended shortlogs (here and here), Linux kernel 4.11.7 changes a total of 103 files, with 1039 insertions and 784 deletions, and Linux kernel 4.9.34 LTS changes a total of 85 files, with 447 insertions and 313 deletions.

• “I’m announcing the release of the 4.11.7 [and 4.9.34] kernel. All users of the 4.11 [and 4.9] kernel series must upgrade. The updated 4.11.y [and 4.9.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 git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.9.y,” says Greg Kroah-Hartman in the mailing list announcements.

=> ↺ EXT4 Is Working On A “Large Directory” Option, Parallel Discards

• It’s looking like the EXT4 file-system updates for the upcoming Linux 4.13 cycle could be a bit more interesting this time around.

• With EXT4 having proven itself and being quite mature at this stage, most merge windows aren’t too exciting for this evolutionary file-system that routinely just gets bug fixes and minor features. But the development work being queued up for EXT4 is a bit more exciting with the changes likely slated for the Linux 4.13 kernel.

=> ↺ XPad Updates, Google Rose Touchpad Support Heading To Linux 4.13

• A fair amount of new device support and other improvements are getting ready for the Linux 4.13 kernel via the HID and input trees.

• In the HID space, queuing up via for-next, is Google Rose Touchpad support, some multi-touch fixes/optimizations, support for the defunct Retrode2 joypad adapter, support for PTP stick and touchpad device in the HID multi-touch code, and other work. The Google Rose Touchpad presumably is for a Chromebook, but I haven’t been able to find much on “Rose” outside of these minor patches.

=> ↺ Linux 4.12-rc7

• It’s been another week, and we have another -rc.

• It’s fairly small, and there were no huge surprises, so if nothing untoward happens this upcoming week, this will be the final rc. But as usual, I reserve the right to just drag things out if I end up feeling uncomfortable about things for any reason including just random gut feelings, so we’ll see.

=> ↺ Linux 4.12-rc7 Released: Final Might Come In One Week

=> ↺ AES-128-CBC Support Coming To Fscrypt

• AES-128-CBC support is coming to fscrypt, the generic file-system crypto code in the Linux kernel that’s currently in use by F2FS and EXT4 for offering native file-system encryption support.

• Fscrypt currently makes use of AES-256-XTS/AES-256-CBC-CTS but the fscrypt design allows for supporting multiple encryption standards. Support for AES-128-CBC in file contents and AES-128-CBC-CTS for file names is being added namely for mobile/embedded hardware that may provide crypto accelerators for these standards.

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 4.12 Could Launch on July 2 as Linus Torvalds Announces Last RC

• Those wanting to always run the latest Linux kernel on their GNU/Linux distributions will be happy to learn that the Linux 4.12 series is almost here and could launch as soon as next week, on July 2, 2017.

• In a mailing list announcement, Linus Torvalds informed the community about the availability of what it appears to be the last RC (Release Candidate) of Linux kernel 4.12, which he considers a fairly small patch that doesn’t bring any huge surprises. Therefore, the final release of the Linux 4.12 kernel series could arrive next week.

=> ↺ Kernel prepatch 4.12-rc7

=> ↺ Stable kernel updates

=> ↺ [Older] [RFC PATCH] KEYS: Allow a live daemon in a namespace to service request_key upcalls

=> ↺ Huawei Continues Working On Protectable Memory Support For The Linux Kernel

• Igor Stoppa of Huawei continues working on a new kernel feature to provide read-only protection for dynamic data.

=> ↺ Linux Kernels 4.4.74 LTS and 3.18.58 Fix Memory Leaks and Add More Improvements

• Only two days after releasing the Linux 4.11.7 and 4.9.34 LTS kernel updates, Greg Kroah-Hartman is today announcing the availability of new maintenance releases for the long-term supported Linux 4.4 and 3.18 kernel series.

• Linux kernels 4.4.74 LTS and 3.18.58 are now available, shipping more than a week after their previous point releases to add various improvements and stability fixes to supported drivers, architectures, and filesystems. According to their appended shortlogs (here and here), a total of 50 files were changed in Linux kernel 4.4.74 LTS, with 253 insertions and 228 deletions, and Linux kernel 3.18.58 changes a total of 53 files, with 353 insertions and 271 deletions.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ 46-inch touchscreen AiO has optional mirror view for augmented reality

• Advantech’s “UTC-542” AiO PC runs Ubuntu or Android on Skylake, and offers hot-swap SATA and a 42.6-inch, IP65 touchscreen with optional mirror coating. Advantech announced a 42.6-inch, 16:9 aspect ratio, all-in-one (AiO) HD touchscreen computer designed for interactive display applications.

=> ↺ Intel Kabylake OpenGL/Vulkan Performance With Serious Sam 3 BFE 2017 Update

• This weekend I posted a comparison of OpenGL/Vulkan performance for Radeon and NVIDIA GPUs with Serious Sam 3: BFE now that it’s updated to the Vulkan-enabled “Fusion” 2017 update. For those curious about the Intel HD Graphics gaming potential for this game, here are some results.

=> ↺ P-State/CPUFreq Governor Tests With Linux 4.12 For OpenGL/Vulkan Games

• For those wondering about the impact on gaming of the different CPUFreq vs. P-State CPU frequency scaling drivers and their different governors, here are some fresh tests using an Intel Skylake CPU with Radeon RX Polaris graphics when using the latest Linux 4.12 kernel and Mesa 17.2-dev.

• We routinely run these CPUFreq/P-State comparisons and overall have found the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver to be maturing, but still not yet in a 100% ideal state. Each kernel release though does seem to improve P-State for helping modern Intel CPUs perform more admirably, especially with many Linux distributions defaulting to the Intel P-State Powersave combination for Sandy Bridge hardware and newer.

• For this testing today are Linux gaming benchmarks with P-State’s powersave and performance governors and then switching over to ACPI CPUFreq and testing ondemand, performance, schedutil, and conservative. All other settings remained the same throughout the entire testing process.

=> ↺ [Freedreno] long overdue update

• Since it has been a while since the last update, I guess it is a good time to post an update on some of the progress that has been happening with freedreno and upstream support for snapdragon boards.

=> ↺ Freedreno Continues Stacking On New Features For Open-Source Adreno

=> ↺ The Mesa OpenGL threaded dispatch code seems to now use a whitelist, improving some games performance

• It seems the OpenGL threaded dispatch code to speed up some games in Mesa now uses a whitelist, with a few games now able to make use of it. As a quick reminder, the OpenGL threaded dispatch code aims to reduce the CPU overhead of Mesa, resulting in better performance for some games.

• They seem to have gone for a whitelist, since not all games work with it. In fact, some games regress with it, so it’s a safer approach to allow it for games that are known to work better with it.

AMD

=> ↺ AMD/nVidia: The Share of Free and Proprietary Drivers

• Following our survey conducted back in the end of March 2017, we have collected a wealth of information regarding the usage pattern of Linux gamers from the Reddit communities (hopefully a representative sample of the larger Linux gaming audience). You can refer to last year’s survey results from 2016, and a couple of recent articles about the 2017 survey results (the wheels used by Linux gamers, or the top 20 games Linux gamers want to see ported). This time we will focus on the GPU market, and first, here are some figures about the share of each GPU Brand…

• [...]

• Among Linux AMD gamers, as you can the situation is almost the reverse of nVidia’s. 90% of them use Free Software drivers, and only 10% use Proprietary ones. Mesa has grown from leaps and bounds since the past few years, and it’s apparently what most AMD gamers use nowadays. I must admit I did not expect that figure to be so high, but then again Feral among others is mainly supporting the Mesa drivers when it comes to their ports (for example Dirt Rally).

=> ↺ 92 Patches Later: Experimental NIR Backend For RadeonSI

=> ↺ AMD Still Planning For Zen Scheduler In LLVM 5.0

=> ↺ AMD’s Plans For ARB_gl_spirv Support In RadeonSI

=> ↺ More AMD Stoney Ridge Code Lands In Coreboot

Applications

=> ↺ Essential Applications for GNU/Linux Users

• So, you’ve made the switch from Windows or MacOSX to GNU/Linux, congratulations!

• There is a good chance that you’ve also installed a distribution like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, or perhaps Manjaro; and so you have a wide range of software already installed. However, There are a number of applications that don’t always ship by default, that I feel every user should have or at least be aware of, and some that people have by default but have not ventured to use; so I thought a list of essential applications was in order!

=> ↺ 7 Great Linux Design Tools Digital Artists Should Know

• If you are a Linux user and a digital artist, there is good news for you – Linux offers some great design tools for digital artists to create outstanding designs, videos, animations, etc. Maybe you believe Mac and Windows are the platforms for artists. Not necessarily – you can do a lot with Linux digital art tools, too.

=> ↺ Frame queue management in Nageru 1.6.1

• Nageru 1.6.1 is on its way, and what was intended to only be a release centered around monitoring improvements (more specifically a full set of native Prometheus] metrics) actually ended up getting a fairly substantial change to how Nageru manages its frame queues. To understand what’s changing and why, it’s useful to first understand the history of Nageru’s queue management. Nageru 1.0.0 started out with a fairly simple scheme, but with some basics that are still relevant today: One of the input cards was deemed the master card, and whenever it delivers a frame, the master clock ticks and an output frame is produced. (There are some subtleties about dropped frames and/or the master card changing frame rates, but I’m going to ignore them, since they’re not important to the discussion.)

=> ↺ Obnam 1.22 released (backup application)

• I’ve just released version 1.22 of Obnam, my backup application. It is the first release for this year. Packages are available on code.liw.fi/debian and in Debian unstable, and source is in git. A summary of the user-visible changes is below.

=> ↺ VP9 Added To VA-API’s Encode Capabilities For FFmpeg

• VA-API VP9 encode capabilities were introduced last year to this Video Acceleration API to complement the existing VP9 decode support. GStreamer was quick to enable the VP9 encode support while now FFmpeg has finally supported it too.

=> ↺ [Older] Simplenote gives a new life to your notes

• If you haven’t tried it yet, Simplenote brings a solid note taking utility to your day-to-day open source toolkit. Don’t be fooled by a simple appearance, as it’s one of the most comprehensive editing suite around, especially for Markdown, with previews and extensive syntax support.

=> ↺ [Older] Best GIF Recorder Tools For Linux In 2017

• When we talk of screen recording tools for Linux, most of us think about video recording. But, for those who don’t know, there also is another way to record your desktop session, that is animated GIF recording.

=> ↺ Tomb File Encryption Tool Helps SparkyLinux Users Backup Their Secret Files

• After announcing last week the inclusion of an in-house built utility that notifies users of new updates for their systems, the SparkyLinux developers today announced the inclusion of the Tomb and Gtumb tools in the distro’s repos.

=> ↺ Nuvola Player 4.5 Integrates Progress & Volume Bars in Google Play Music, Deezer

• Jiří Janoušek was pleased to announce the release of Nuvola Player 4.5, a new stable update to the 4.x series of the open-source cloud music player for GNU/Linux desktops.

• The Nuvola Player project is designed as a wrapper for various cloud music services that runs as a web-based interface in a standalone app that fully integrates with your Linux desktop’s elements, such as the system tray area, notifications system, dock menu, and even Ubuntu’s sound menu.

=> ↺ GStreamer 1.12 Open-Source Multimedia Framework Gets Its First Point Release

• The GStreamer development team announced the availability of the first point release of the GStreamer 1.12 stable series of the popular and widely-used open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework.

• Even if it comes about one and a half months after the GStreamer 1.12.0 release, the 1.12.1 update is a small one that contains only bugfixes. These include improvements to the Meson build system, a fix for a memory leak on the gstptpclock related to the delay request message release, leaving the timeout source referenced.

=> ↺ MKVToolNix 13.0.0 Open-Source MKV Manipulation Tool Brings Small Enhancements

• MKVToolNix developer Moritz Bunkus is pleased to announce today the release and immediate availability of MKVToolNix 13.0.0, a new stable update of the open-source and cross-platform MKV (Matroska) manipulation utility.

• MKVToolNix 13.0.0 comes about one month after version 12.0.0 to add a handful of new features, and fix a bunch of bugs that have been reported by users during this period. The new version of MKVToolNix has been dubbed by the developer as “The Juggler” and it was built for GNU/Linux, macOS and Microsoft Windows platforms.

=> ↺ Parlatype is an Ace Audio Transcription App for Linux

• Whether you’re a student needing to take notes from a lecture you recorded or a blogger trying to transcribe an audio interview, the following little GNOME app can help.

• Turning an audio recording into text format is a time-consuming and sometimes tedious affair, with endless stop/starts as you hurriedly attempt to keep pace with the spoken word, rewind to double check, and so on.

=> ↺ PulseEffects is a Powerful GTK Audio Effects & Equalizer App for Linux

• If you’re on the hunt for an advanced audio equaliser for Ubuntu, you’re definitely going to want to check this app out.

• It’s called PulseEffects and it’s an equalizer, limiter, reverb, and compressor that works with Pulseaudio, the default sound server in Ubuntu.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Atollic TrueSTUDIO, the leading commercial GNU/Eclipse IDE for ARM devices is now available for use on Linux workstations

• Atollic TrueSTUDIO IDE has rapidly become the preferred Eclipse™/GDB/GCC-based software development environment for developers working with ARM-based devices. The Linux hosting announcement is expected to widely increase the popularity of this tool.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ [Older] Building Intel CPU Microcode Updates Directly into the Linux Kernel

=> ↺ Storing git passwords with GNOME Keyring

=> ↺ Google Summer of Code summary week 04

=> ↺ How to rescan disk in Linux after extending vmware disk

=> ↺ How to automatically create new MR on Gitlab with Gitlab CI

=> ↺ Secure XML Processing with JAXP on EAP 7

=> ↺ How To Add An Image Watermark In GIMP In Linux

=> ↺ Querying Policy Rules in OpenShift using jq

=> ↺ Mike’s monster list of docker tips

=> ↺ Wildcard SAN certificates in FreeIPA

=> ↺ When not to use a JavaScript framework

=> ↺ LFCS Regular Expression (Part 2)

=> ↺ 3 Easy Ways To Get A Summary Of Disk Usage (Directory & Folders Size) In Linux

=> ↺ Introduction to Bash shell redirections

=> ↺ How to use Evernote in Linux

• The browser-based version of Evernote is the only officially supported way of using the application on Linux. It works, but if you’re a tab hoarder like me, editing your notes in a tab in a sea of tabs can be a bit tricky. On top of that, there is the additional baggage of running a full-fledged web browser.

=> ↺ How to install Go 1.8 on Ubuntu 17.04

=> ↺ How to auto answer Yes or No to Linux-Unix commands.

=> ↺ Google Summer of Code day 18

=> ↺ How to display countdown timer in bash shell script running on Linux/Unix

=> ↺ How to Install Xampp on Ubuntu and Other Linux Distributions

=> ↺ Mutt: Fixing Erroneous Charsets, part 632

=> ↺ cron.weekly issue #86: Debian 9, Kernel vulnerability, Ubuntu, GitLab, casync, SSH tunnels & more

=> ↺ Debian build environment in a docker container

=> ↺ Creating a privileged container in OpenShift

=> ↺ Firmware Test Suite Text Based Front-End

=> ↺ Aggregate Blogs with Pelican

=> ↺ Installing OpenShift Origin via Ansible on Fedora 25

=> ↺ Recovering from an unbootable Ubuntu encrypted LVM root partition

=> ↺ Install Musicbrainz’s Picard with Flatpak

=> ↺ OpenShift Origin Default Auth

=> ↺ Building an antenna and receiving ham and shortwave stations with SDR

=> ↺ Late to the Raspberry Pi party

=> ↺ Cron jobs

=> ↺ Installing HAProxy for Load Balancing on CentOS 7

=> ↺ Using syslog-ng with SELinux in enforcing mode

=> ↺ Containerising the FSFE, aiming for Kubernetes & 2020

• When the FSFE started using virtualisation technologies on our servers, about 15 years ago, we decided to use Linux-Vservers, a budding project which Jacques Gélinas had started just a year or two prior. To those of us administering the FSFE machines at the time, it was quite like magic, being able to run several virtual containers on one machine, and being able to delegate control of them to different teams without fearing for the overall security or stability.

=> ↺ Benchmarking microSD cards and more

=> ↺ How to install latest kernel on CentOS Linux 7 using yum command

Games

=> ↺ GNU Multiplayer Strategy Game Sees First Update In Three Years

• GNU is home to a wide variety of free software projects, some more notable than others. One of the lesser known GNU projects is Motti, a “simple multiplayer strategy game.”

=> ↺ ‘HOOK’ is an extremely minimalistic but addictive puzzler that I wholeheartedly recommend

• The premise is extremely simple: by pressing a series of buttons (the dark circles) you will pull the rods attached to them via the strings, and once you do this with every one of them you’ll finish the level. But the challenge comes from choosing the correct order: you’ll be exercising a lot your perception and attention to detail, because if you’re sloppy the mechanism will get stuck and you’ll need to restart the level. If I had to risk an analogy, basically it’s like disassembling a device.

=> ↺ The Witcher 2 & Rocket League have fixes ready in Mesa-git

• The Witcher 2 & Rocket League now have some fixes available in Mesa-git ready for Mesa 17.2 that should give you a better experience. Note, that these are for the AMD radeonsi Mesa driver.

• Landing in the Mesa-git mailing list late Friday after I finished, the patches for Rocket League can be found here and here. This fixes up the grass rendering being a little off.

=> ↺ Space colony sim ‘Maia’ updated with lots of new goodies, screw the damn lava

=> ↺ Leaving Lyndow removes Linux support from Steam due to masses of bug reports

• Leaving Lyndow [Steam], the short, but impressive adventure game has officially removed Linux support on Steam due to the amount of bug reports.

=> ↺ Use your phone as a gamepad in The Crowded Party Game Collection, sadly broken right now

=> ↺ Feral Interactive are teasing a new Linux port, bring on the speculation

=> ↺ Micro Machines World Series will be a day-1 Linux release this Friday

• I already posted about Micro Machines World Series coming to Linux, but the release date for Windows & Linux didn’t match, as Virtual Programming’s message said the 30th and the Steam store still said the 23rd. Obviously the 23rd passed and nothing happened…

=> ↺ Serious Sam 3 – BFE: OpenGL vs. Vulkan With Fusion 2017 Update

• On Friday marked Croteam’s latest game update to their “Fusion” 2017 update, Serious Sam 3: BFE. Like the other Fusion 2017 game updates from Croteam, there are a number of engine-level updates and arguably most notable is the introduction of a Vulkan renderer. Here are some fresh NVIDIA/Radeon benchmarks of Serious Sam 3: BFE under OpenGL and Vulkan with this latest release.

Desktop Environments/WMs

=> ↺ Budgie Desktop / Solus: Minimal & Clean Desktop Environment

• You may have heard of (or currently use!) Budgie Desktop. It’s a minimal, but full featured, workspace currently based upon the GNOME/GTK stack. (The developer has announced they will be moving to QT in the future).

• Recently, the creator of Solus & Budgie, Ikey Doherty, left his job at Intel to work on the Solus Project full time. This, coupled with another developer, Stefan Ric, joining the team means that Solus users should prepare for an influx of new development.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ The achievements during the first GSoC period in KStars

• I was able to do major improvements to the build system of KStars.

=> ↺ Qt 5.7 submodules that didn’t make it to Stretch but will be in testing

• There are two Qt 5.7 submodules that we could not package in time for Strech but are/will be available in their 5.7 versions in testing. This are qtdeclarative-render2d-plugin and qtvirtualkeyboard.

=> ↺ KDE Plasma 5 Regional Settings Format Makes Me Happy Again

• Since my move from Windows to Linux, KDE has been my preferred desktop environment. I remember switching between Gnome and KDE for a while until I determined that KDE was for me (what I really wanted was Amiga Workbench). KDE’s strength has always been its flexibility and ease of customization. I value options which is why I value KDE.

• The transition from KDE 3.x to KDE 4.x was somewhat painful for me as for a while, many of the options that I became used to disappeared but later returned. Through the change, I never lost my ability to adjust how I wanted information displayed to me.

=> ↺ [Krita] That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for GSoC project.

=> ↺ Go support in KDevelop. GSoC week 4. DU-Chain time!

=> ↺ GSoC preparation – Plasma Toolicons – A journey down the rabbit hole

=> ↺ KMail Bug Sent Encrypted Emails in Plain-Text — for 4 years

• A KMail bug has inadvertently sent PGP encrypted emails in plain-text — for the past four years! A flaw in the ‘Send it Later’ feature, introduced in Kmail 4.11, allows users to schedule the time and date that emails are sent. Unfortunately, the feature was incompatible with the client’s OpenPGP implementation.

=> ↺ digiKam 5.6 Professional Photo Management App Released with HTML Gallery Tool

• The digiKam development team is pleased to announce the release of digiKam 5.6, a new stable update of the open-source and cross-platform professional photo management app for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows platforms.

• digiKam 5.6 is here about three and a half months after the previous release, which means that the development team had the time to implement all sort of new features and functionality to enhance the abilities of the image manipulator and organizer applications. Of course, as with any new version, there are various performance optimizations and bug fixes.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Code Search for GNOME Builder: Indexing

• Goal of Code Search for GNOME Builder is to provide ability to search all symbols in project fuzzily and jump to definition from reference of a symbol in GNOME Builder. For implementing these we need to have a database of declarations. So I created a plugin called ‘Indexer’ in Builder which will extract information regarding declarations and store them in a database.

=> ↺ [Older] Plans for the next GNOME docs hackfest

• The GNOME documentation team started planning the next docs hackfest after some (rather long) months of decreased activity on that front. The previous docs sprint was actually held in Cincinnati, OH, in 2015, produced lots of content updates and we’d like to repeat that experience again this year from August 14th through 16th, 2017.

=> ↺ [Older] New Simple Scan designs

=> ↺ [Older] Recently released applications in GNOME Software

=> ↺ [Older] Interview With Maria Glukova: Debian GNOME Outreachy Intern

• I shared an interview with GSOC Winners a while back. In the same tradition, please allow me to share the interview of one of the four Debian Interns who were part of GNOME Outreachy the last season, Maria Glukova (shortening to Maria for convenience).

=> ↺ Recurring Events Coming to GNOME Calendar

• The GNOME Calendar app is to gain support for recurring calendar events in GNOME 3.26.

• Developer Yash Singh is working to add the relevant code necessary to support recurring events as part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2017.

• “Support for recurrent events already exists in Evolution calendar but it is lacking in GNOME Calendar. For example, right now, for a weekly repeating event, users have to manually add that event every week which is very inconvenient and time consuming,” he explains.

=> ↺ Stuck in the Challenge

• My Sunday days are reserved for the GNOME Peru Challenge 2017-1 and one key action to success is to get an application running, to fix a bug. In this matter, jhbuild and GNOME Builder are the way to achieve it.

Distributions

Reviews

=> ↺ Liri – Loves me, loves me not … at all

• What does the world of Linux need more? Desktop environments? Nope. Ah, well, you’d be surprised, because a fresh new challenger appears! Its name is Liri, and it is the presentation layer for the namesake operating system being baked in the forges of community creativity as we speak. Sounds potentially interesting, but then we must be wary.

• I’ve trawled through the obscure, uncharted waters of Budgie, Razor-Qt and more recently, and with much greater attention to detail, LXQt, and in all of these cases, I was left rather dissatisfied with the end product. Not enough cohesion, quality, future roadmap, and most importantly, the finesse that you expect from polished, professional products. Then again, building a desktop environment is a huge undertaking, probably even more complex than spinning a new distro, and so, it’s not a coincidence that there are few serious contenders in this space. But Liri comes with enticing artwork, a promise of Material Design for the desktop, and so here we are, trying to get the first feel of what it does.

New Releases

=> ↺ SolydXK 9 Linux Distributions Enter Beta Based on Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch”

• The developers of the Debian-based SolydX and SolydK GNU/Linux distributions announced today that the upcoming SolydXK 9 stable release entered Beta phase with Live ISO images available now for public testing.

• Based on the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system, SolydXK 9 promises to add a new look and feel to both SolydX and SolydK variants by implementing light or dark themes that users can choose during first boot or afterward.

• For SolydXK 9, the developers worked on a graphical user interface for the in-house built Solydxk Systems tool, which now lets users encrypt their partitions, select the closest repositories to their location, hold back packages from upgrade, localize or cleanup their system.

=> ↺ Ultimate Edition 5.5 Linux Distro Out Now Based on Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus)

• TheeMahn is pleased to announce the release of Ultimate Edition 5.5, a new stable build of his GNU/Linux distribution, this time based entirely on the Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system.

• Built using Tmosb 1.9.9, TheeMahn’s operating system builder utility, which is pre-installed in the distribution and can be used to build your own Ubuntu flavor, Ultimate Edition 5.5 is here with up-to-date components and applications, and has been fully synced with the upstream repositories to include all the latest security updates.

• “Ultimate Edition 5.5 was built from the Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus tree using a combination of Tmosb (TheeMahn’s Operating System Builder) and work by hand,” says the developer. “This release IS NOT a Long Term Supported (LTS) release, was built in anticipation of the Ryzen build, same as Ultimate Edition 5.4, both rock on AMD Ryzen.”

=> ↺ VOYAGER 9 Debian Stretch

=> ↺ Voyager 9 Linux Distro Is Based on Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” and Xfce 4.12

• The developer of the Voyager Linux distro was pleased to announce the release and immediate availability of Voyager 9, a Debian-based variant derived from the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system.

• Voyager 9 enter development at the end of February when the first Beta milestone arrived as an experimental build for those wanted to help the developer fix any annoyances of bugs. It’s built around the latest Xfce 4.12 desktop environment and runs on top of a long-term supported Linux 4.9 kernel used by Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch”.

Arch Family

=> ↺ Manjaro 17.0.2 released (G, K, X)

• Manjaro Gellivara was a great release! Now we are proud to announce v17.0.2, which fixes a lot of issues we had with our original release of Gellivara. It took us almost three months to finish this updated version. We improved our hardware detection, renewed our installer (Calamares), added the latest packages available to our install media and polished our release as a whole. Everyone, who used older install media than this release, should read also this announcement about password weakness and follow its advice to secure your systems.

=> ↺ Manjaro Linux 17.0.2 Released With Various Updates And Security Fixes, Download Here

=> ↺ Manjaro Linux 17.0.2 Arch-based operating system is here with GNOME, KDE, and Xfce

• Many Linux snobs push the Arch operating system as the greatest thing since sliced bread. In fact, some members of the Arch community (not all of them) can be downright mean and unpleasant to non-users. Not using Arch? Ugh. Peasant! In reality, while Arch is a fine OS (stable and fast), it can be very hard to install and set up, and quite frankly, often not worth the hassle. People have lives to live, and sometimes it is easy to forget that an operating system and associated computer are tools — not a religion.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

=> ↺ SUSE CaaS Platform

• There are a lot of decisions to be made before enterprises are ready for production and deployment of container apps, asserts SUSE. To help enterprises derive full value from containerized apps and not “re-create the wheel”, the SUSE engineering team is busy creating the next-generation application development and hosting platform for container applications and services.

=> ↺ SUSE software-defined infrastructure kicks CaaS

=> ↺ [Older] Friends, syslog-ng, Package Hub, ARM: openSUSE conference 2017

• Being a long-time openSUSE user, I visit the openSUSE conference not only to present on one of its components – syslog-ng – but also to meet friends and learn about new technologies and the plans for the upcoming year. Some talks, like those about Package Hub, were very interesting and important also from a syslog-ng perspective. Of course, I also joined a few talks for my personal interest, like the one on the new ARM devices supported by openSUSE.

Slackware Family

=> ↺ What if gcc 7 gives you headaches?

• In Slackware-current we use version 7.1.0 of the gcc compiler suite. These advanced compilers can sometimes be quite a bit more strict about what they accept as valid code. As a consequence, you will regularly run into compilation issues with software. Not just the software made with the scripts on slackbuilds.org, but also some of the software in the Slackware core distribution requires patches in order to get them to compile.

• Until now, I have been lucky to find the patches I needed in the repositories of other distributions, or else developers patched their software themselves. But there will be corner cases where solutions and patches are not readily found, or the developers will simply not support gcc 7. Pale Moon is such a piece of software where the developers recommend compiling with gcc 4.x or as a last resort, gcc 5.

=> ↺ Plasma 5 for Slackware – June release

• Slackware64 14.2 users will have to wait another day, but I have uploaded my latest set of Plasma 5 packages for Slackware-current to the ‘ktown’ repository. KDE 5_17.06 contains: KDE Frameworks 5.35.0, Plasma 5.10.2 and Applications 17.04.2. I based this new release on Qt 5.9.0 (at least for Slackware-current… for 14.2 I will stick to Qt 5.7.1). NOTE: I will no longer be releasing Plasma 5 packages for 32bit Slackware 14.2.

=> ↺ LibreOffice 5.3.4 packages for -current

• When looking for package updates in preparation for a new Slackware Live PLASMA5 edition, I noticed that the Document Foundation had released LibreOffice 5.3.4 without updating their blog with the news – it’s only mentioned on the download page. I have built and uploaded Slackware-current packages for libreoffice-5.3.4. If you are on Slackware 14.2 you will probably have to skip this one, as I will not have time for compiling packages the coming weeks (allocates one virtual machine for one day per build, since I can only check on progress in the evenings). The package for -current needed to be (re-)built anyway because of the library issue with Slackware’s updated libGLEW which prevented Impress to start.

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Red Hat Unveils Open Source Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Offering

• Red Hat on Thursday jumped into the hyper-converged infrastructure market with the introduction of what it’s calling the first open source hyper-converged infrastructure software stack.

• The new stack, called Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure, combines four of the company’s technologies into an integrated offering targeting cloud deployments, said Ross Turk, director of product marketing for the Raleigh, N.C.-based cloud and virtualization technology vendor.

• The components include Red Hat Virtualization, the company’s hypervisor based on open source KVM technology; Red Hat Gluster storage, a scale-out file system based on the GlusterFS project; the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, operating system; and the Red Hat Ansible automation platform and deployment framework.

=> ↺ Open source is no longer only an IT initiative: Red Hat India’s Rajesh Rege

• Besides lower infrastructure and software costs, it allows enterprises to innovate in a scalable, open and flexible environment, Rajesh Rege tells Sangeeta Tanwar What are the key technology enablers that support digital transformation across industries? Digital transformation has become an integral part of a growth strategy for every organisation.

=> ↺ Aeroflot Airlines uses Linux based entertainment system provided by Red Hat Inc.

=> ↺ Red Hat Unveils Open Source HCI Platform

• Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is all the rage these days. But there are two primary means of achieving it that IT organizations need to consider. They can either acquire an HCI appliance or license software that turns existing servers or infrastructure acquired separately into an HCI appliance.

=> ↺ UK Army to Use Red Hat OS, Automation Platform for Private Cloud Needs

Finance

=> ↺ Delving Into The Numbers For Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

=> ↺ [Older] Karp Capital Management Corp Buys New Stake in Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

=> ↺ [Older] Red Hat Inc (RHT) Receives Neutral Rating from Bank of America Corporation

Fedora

=> ↺ Upcoming Fedora Atomic Host lifecycle changes

=> ↺ GSoC2017 (Fedora) — Week 3&4

=> ↺ [Older] CI and infrastructure hackfest 2017

=> ↺ [Older] Scribus 1.5.3 available on COPR repository

=> ↺ [Older] Printing Improvements for Fedora 27 Workstation

• Fedora 26 is not out yet, but it’s already time to think about how to improve the Workstation edition of Fedora 27. One of the areas my team is focusing on is printing (the desktop side of it). For GNOME 3.24 and Fedora 26 Workstation we landed a new interface for the printing module in GNOME Control Center. It gives a much cleaner overview of printers that are set up on your system.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Debian 9 Review: Stable Like Ever, Better Than Most

• Debian is one of the oldest and most famous Linux distributions of all time. Its development started back in 1993 by its founder Ian Murdock who passed away in 2015. It’s also known to be the mother-distribution of tens of other Linux distributions such as Ubuntu.

• Debian has a strict policy on software packages. It only ships free software by default. It doesn’t even ship non-free firmware and drivers. If you want, you can enable the non-free package repository later to install those packages. But you won’t find it there by default.

• Debian is well-known for its stability. They don’t ship new updates to users unless it was tested. Which is why you may notice some very old package versions when using Debian. It’s correct that they are old, but they are also tested and secure. Most discovered vulnerabilities get patched in Debian in a matter of hours or few days.

• Those users who would like to get latest and most updated software could switch to using the testing or unstable branch. Both contain more modern software according to a different policy.

• The effort which is being done by the Debian project for each release is huge. Currently, they offer 25000 source packages and 51000 binary packages. Getting all of those software from upstream projects, packaging them, testing them, debugging issues and fixing them is definitely not something you hear about everyday.

=> ↺ Upgrade to Debian Stretch – GlusterFS fails to mount

=> ↺ Debian 9 ‘Stretch’ Offers Improved Security on Multiple Architectures

=> ↺ My Debian Activities in May 2017

• This month I only marked 39 packages for accept and rejected 5 packages.

=> ↺ [Older] My Free Software Activities in May 2017

=> ↺ [Older] Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2017

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Conjure-up dev summary: Week 25

• We recently switched over to using a bundled LXD and with that change came a few hiccups in deployments. We’ve been monitoring the error reports coming in and have made several fixes to improve that journey. If you are one of the ones unable to deploy spells please give this release another go and get in touch with us if you still run into problems.

=> ↺ We’re looking for Ubuntu 17.10 wallpapers right now!

• Submissions will be handled via Flickr at the Ubuntu 17.10 Free Culture Showcase – Wallpapers group, and the submission window begins now and ends on July 3rd.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Linux-ready PC/104 board runs on 6 to 7 Watts

• Win Enterprises announced a “MB-83310” PC/104 SBC with a Vortex DX3 SoC, GbE, Fast Ethernet, SATA, M.2, and a -20 to 70°C operating range.

=> ↺ [Older] The Turtlebot 3 has launched

• If you’re familiar with ROS (Robot Operating System), chances are you’re also familiar with the Turtlebot. The first version of the Turtlebot was created back in 2010 to serve as an inexpensive platform for learning ROS. This was followed in 2012 by the Turtlebot 2, which has since become the reference platform for learning ROS. We have a number of them here at Canonical, and we love them, although we have one issue with them: they’re just a tad too big. Taking them on a plane requires one to decide what one loves more, one’s belongings, or the Turtlebot, and to check the other.

=> ↺ Ubuntu ranked as 2nd most used IoT OS by Eclipse Foundation survey

Phones

Tizen

=> ↺ Samsung to train students of Moscow University of Technology on IoT

• Samsung and Moscow University of Technology (Technical University) recently reached an agreement to set up an Internet of Things (IoT) academy called “Samsung IoT Academy” which will be launched in September 2017. The basis of this agreement is to train professionals in the consistently growing field of information technology.

=> ↺ Samsung launches new Family Hub Refrigerator in the U.S with more features

• Samsung Electronics America has unveiled its next generation of Family Hub refrigerator which presents with some advancements of the roles the gadget plays in modern family life. The new Tizen-powered refrigerator model is a testament of Samsung’s reputation as the fastest growing appliance brand in America for the fifth straight quarter because the company is building upon consumer insights and feedback over the past year to include new features in the latest model.

Android

=> ↺ Android 7.1.1 Nougat Is Rolling Out to Sony Xperia X and X Compact Smartphones

• After seeding the Android 7.0 (Nougat) software update to Sony Xperia XA, Xperia XA Dual SIM, Xperia XA Ultra, and Xperia XA Ultra Dual SIM models, Sony Mobile is now rolling out the Android 7.1.1 (Nougat) update to Xperia X and X Compact phones.

• Announced last year in May, the Sony Xperia X and Xperia X Compact smartphones came with Google’s Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) mobile operating system, and they were later updated to Android 7.0 (Nougat), a major update that added multi-window support, longer battery life, and Messaging improvements.

=> ↺ [Older] HTC U11 hands-on—A squeezable, all-glass device with dual hotword support

=> ↺ [Older] “Android Go” will strip Android down for ultra-low-budget phones

=> ↺ The Nokia 6 comes to the US for $229

=> ↺ HTC needs more than great hardware to make a comeback

=> ↺ WorldRemit launches Android Pay

=> ↺ Sony Xperia X, X Compact get Android Nougat 7.1.1

=> ↺ Nokia 3, Launched as Offline-Exclusive, Now Available Online in India

=> ↺ Sega Forever on Android and iOS Isn’t the Netflix of Retro Gaming

=> ↺ Xiaomi Mi Max starts receiving Android 7.0 Nougat stable beta update

=> ↺ Nokia 6 Android Smartphone Arrive Stateside As Amazon Exclusive In July

=> ↺ Android ALERT – These Google Play apps can take control of your phone without you noticing

=> ↺ How I’m reliving my childhood through Android apps

=> ↺ iOS and Android security: A timeline of the highlights and the lowlights

=> ↺ How to use picture-in-picture with Google Chrome on Android O Developer Preview

=> ↺ Android O will introduce an animated Clock app icon in launchers

=> ↺ Android O Introducing an Animated Clock Icon, Soon Available in Custom Launchers

=> ↺ Want your Pixel photos to be seen by millions? So does Google

=> ↺ Android O brings some significant improvements for VR

=> ↺ Lenovo Tab 4 can now be pre-ordered from Amazon and Newegg, $129 for 8″ and $179 for 10.1″

=> ↺ Xavier Android Ad Malware Steals User Data Then Plays Hide And Seek

=> ↺ OnePlus 5 International Giveaway!

=> ↺ Help Me, Tom’s Guide: Which Is Better — Android or iPhone?

=> ↺ Best new iOS and Android games of the week: June 25

=> ↺ Dangerous Android malware can steal login data from 40 retail, banking, social media apps

=> ↺ Google Chrome adds support for picture-in-picture video on Android O

=> ↺ How to give your Galaxy S8 that clean, stock Android look, no rooting required

=> ↺ Moto C Plus review: Buy it only for Stock Android

• What is the Moto C Plus? Who is it aimed at? Lenovo claims that the C Plus is aimed at the youth who want an affordable smartphone with excellent battery life, the latest software, expandable storage and a premium design. So basically, the whole package. That is a pretty high standard to set.

• So does the Moto C Plus succeed on these counts? It does achieve some of the goals Lenovo set out to achieve with it, but also stumbles quite a bit on others. The other challenge that the phone faces is the strong competition in this segment. There are phones like the Xiaomi Redmi 4, which seem to make all the right compromises in order to achieve their low price tag. So how does Motorola competes in the segment? The company is banking on the combination of stock Android and great battery life to help it fight. Does it succeed? Let’s find out.

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ 18 open source translation tools to localize your project

• Localization plays a central role in the ability to customize an open source project to suit the needs of users around the world. Besides coding, language translation is one of the main ways people around the world contribute to and engage with open source projects.

• There are tools specific to the language services industry (surprised to hear that’s a thing?) that enable a smooth localization process with a high level of quality. Categories that localization tools fall into include…

=> ↺ Windstream joins Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project to accelerate adoption of open standards for SDN/NFV automation

=> ↺ Locks in the classroom – 2017

• For the fifth year now, our grade nine students have been doing 3D modeling using Blender. Our students finished up their first assignments over a month ago, but it’s taken this long for me to get the top models together. So, with no further delay, here are the top models from each of the three grade nine classes (click on the pictures for Full HD renders).

=> ↺ Set the WABAC to 1984: Henry Spencer getopt, and the roots of open source

• I excavated a bit of hacker history from old memories today. Not dead history either, but an important beginning of some large good things.

• Here’s how it happened. I got email from a person requesting me to identify a source for the following allegedly famous quote: “All operating systems eventually turn into Unix

=> ↺ Traveling “Kodi Repair Men” Are Apparently a Thing Now

• With all the chaos and upheaval in the Kodi addon scene recently, many ‘pirate’ devices have stopped performing as they did before. This is a problem for the thousands of people who bought their devices ready configured, since they have no idea how they work. Enter the traveling ‘Kodi repair men,’ who will fix your box in the pub or even your own home.

Events

=> ↺ [Older] PyCon Pune 2017

=> ↺ [Older] My lightning talk in Django Girls PyCon

• In the weekend before PyCon US, we had a Django Girls PyCon workshop in Portland on 12th-13th May. On 12th there were a few lightning talks, and installation before the actual workshop started on 13th.

=> ↺ Dreams don’t cost a penny, mumma’s boy

• In the dream, I am going to a Debconf, get bursary and the conference is being held somewhere in Europe, maybe Paris…

=> ↺ First Round Talks of Fedora + GNOME at UPN

• Today our local group has traveled many miles to the north of Lima to present our lately work by using Fedora and GNOME as users and developers. Thanks to the organizers of the IT Forum to invite us and support our job as Linux volunteers and very nice potential contributors to GNOME and Fedora and the group we have formed.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

=> ↺ LibreOffice 5.3.4 immediately available for download

• The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the availability of LibreOffice 5.3.4, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 5.3 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. LibreOffice 5.3.4 integrates over 100 patches, with a significant number of fixes for interoperability with Microsoft Office RTF and OOXML documents.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

=> ↺ [Older] Microsoft rolls out not one but two bad builds to the Windows Insider program

=> ↺ SUSE Linux distributions now available for Windows 10 in the Store, but only for Insiders

• If you are like me and you aren’t running an Insider build because you prefer a stable experience, you are out of luck for now. Sigh.

=> ↺ SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and openSUSE are now on the Windows Store

=> ↺ SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and openSUSE Leap come to the Windows Store for Insiders

=> ↺ Two SUSE Linux Environments Come to Windows 10 Insider Preview

=> ↺ Windows 10 news recap: SUSE brings Linux to the Windows Store, Wall Street Journal ending its app, and more

=> ↺ [Older] Microsoft Is Now Using Linus Torvalds’ Open Source Tool For Windows Development

=> ↺ Windows 10: Now SUSE Linux comes to Windows Store for Insiders

=> ↺ openSUSE Leap 42 And SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Finally Come To Windows Store

=> ↺ VMware’s profile in wireless rises as operators move toward virtualization

• But one of the misconceptions VMware is often faced with is the idea that there’s an open architecture out there that competes with VMware. Case in point: OpenStack is often pointed out as competition for VMware, when in fact, “that is not true,” Ayyar told FierceWirelessTech.

• [...]

• The short answer is “no,” it does not compete with open source. It does have proprietary components to its architecture that it monetizes as part of a full solution set, but, Ayyar contends, it actually ends up being the way service providers want it because there are areas where they don’t necessarily want to go in and create code from scratch or rely on the open source system at large.

=> ↺ SalesAgility launches SuiteASSURED, the world’s first warrantied open source CRM

=> ↺ Black Duck

• SuiteASSURED is the world’s first assured and warrantied open source CRM. It offers protections and guarantees more usually associated with proprietary software while maintaining the quality, freedoms and innovations of open source software. SuiteASSURED provides assurances that include indemnifications in case of IP issues, and warranties for the performance, security and reliability of the software.

• For compliance driven organisations such as financial services and healthcare, open source can be a challenge to adopt because of the explicit lack of warranties and indemnities in most open source licences. SuiteASSURED is a game changer for such organisations. It enables faster innovation at greatly reduced costs as well as contractual guarantees more usually associated with proprietary vendors.

BSD

=> ↺ [Lumina] Version 1.3.0 Released

• I am pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.0 of the Lumina desktop!

• This release has a large number of updates and improvements, particularly to desktop utilities under the Lumina “umbrella” project.

=> ↺ Lumina 1.3 Desktop Environment Released

Public Services/Government

=> ↺ Italian municipality calls for sharing of IT solutions

• The council of Mappano (Italy) is calling for public administrations to share their IT solutions. The Mappano municipality is starting from scratch, and the new council has decided to build its IT infrastructure, and offer its eGovernment services, using free and open source software.

Licensing/Legal

=> ↺ [Older] Does Valve really own Dota? A jury will decide

• The case could also take an interesting open source-based turn thanks to a September 23, 2004 forum post that could be seen as Eul giving up his claim on any rights to Dota. “From this point forward, Dota is now open source,” he wrote. “Whoever wishes to release a version of Dota may without my consent, I just ask for a nod in the credits to your map.”

• This post “might mean that anyone had permission to build their own versions of Dota on any platform—and to sell their versions of Eul’s creation,” as Breyer puts it. Or it might simply mean that Eul was just granting a “limited license” intended for other mod-makers, not for standalone games based on Dota.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

=> ↺ Innersource: A Guide to the What, Why, and How

• In a nutshell, ‘innersource’ refers to bringing the core principles of open source and community collaboration within the walls of an organization. This involves building an internal community, collaborative engineering workflow, and culture.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ PDP-8/e Replicated — Introduction

• I am creating a replica of the DEC PDP-8/e architecture in an FPGA from schematics of the original hardware. So how did I end up with a project like this?

• The story begins with me wanting to have a computer with one of those front panels that have many, many lights where you can really see, in real time, what the computer is doing while it is executing code. Not because I am nostalgic for a prior experience with any of those — I was born a bit too late for that and my first computer as a kid was a Commodore 64.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ LLVM/Clang Picks Up Support For The Ananas Operating System

• The LLVM Clang compiler toolchain now has mainline support for the Ananas platform.

• Ananas? It’s pronounced as “Pineapple” and is self-described as “[consisting] of a kernel, a loader, assorted builds scripts and a standard C library (which is based on the Public Domain C Library, PDCLib). Ananas has a clear goal: technology-wise to be the easiest-to-understand operating system in existance, and license-wise to be the most free operating system imaginable.” Ananas is under the liberal Beer-Ware License.

=> ↺ anytime 0.3.0

=> ↺ Ubuntu ranked as 2nd most used IoT OS by Eclipse Foundation survey

=> ↺ an early look at p4 for software networking

• As you know at work we have been trying to find ways to apply compilers technology to the networking space. We will compile high-level configurations into low-level network processing graphs, search algorithms into lookup routines optimized for the target data structures, packet filters into code ready to be further trace-compiled, or hash functions into parallel AVX2 code.

=> ↺ A C++ developer looks at Go (the programming language), Part 1: Simple Features

• I’m reading “The Go Programming Language” by Brian Kernighan and Alan Donovan. It is a perfect programming language introduction, clearly written and perfectly structured, with nicely chosen examples. It contains no hand-waving – it’s aware of other languages and briefly acknowledges the choices made in the language design without lengthy discussion.

• As an enthusiastic C++ developer, and a Java developer, I’m not a big fan of the overall language. It seems like an incremental improvement on C, and I’d rather use it than C, but I still yearn for the expressiveness of C++. I also suspect that Go cannot achieve the raw performance of C or C++ due to its safety features, though that maybe depends on compiler optimization. But it’s perfectly valid to knowingly choose safety over performance, particularly if you get more safety and more performance than with Java.

Leftovers

Science

=> ↺ Turkey Drops Evolution From Curriculum, Angering Secularists

• Turkey has removed the concept of evolution from its high school curriculum, in what critics fear is the latest attempt by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government to erode the country’s secular character.

=> ↺ Millennials are the most likely generation of Americans to use public libraries

• A new analysis of Pew Research Center survey data from fall 2016 finds that 53% of Millennials (those ages 18 to 35 at the time) say they used a library or bookmobile in the previous 12 months. That compares with 45% of Gen Xers, 43% of Baby Boomers and 36% of those in the Silent Generation. (It is worth noting that the question wording specifically focused on use of public libraries, not on-campus academic libraries.)

=> ↺ Self-driving cars are safer when they talk to each other

• Most current self-driving technology relies on cameras, radar and lidar. These sensory devices serve as eyes for the car, mimicking what a human driver can see. But a University of Michigan public-private partnership called Mcity is testing V2V, or vehicle to vehicle communication, and has found that it makes their autonomous prototypes even safer.

• V2V works by wirelessly sharing data such as location, speed and direction. Using DSRC, or Dedicated Short Range Communication, V2V can send up to 10 messages per second. This communication allows cars to see beyond what is immediately in front of them — sensing a red light around a blind curve, or automatically braking for a car that runs a stop sign.

• Mcity is also using a new augmented reality system to test their cars equipped with V2V. They’ve created virtual vehicles equipped with the technology that can communicate with their actual prototypes. This allows them to test scenarios that are cost-prohibitive or too dangerous for real-world trials.

=> ↺ [Older] Killer antibiotic now 25,000× more potent—and resistant to drug resistance

• With clever chemical tweaks, an old antibiotic can dole out any of three lethal blows to some of the deadliest bacteria—and give evolution one nasty concussion.

• The antibiotic, vancomycin, has always been a heavy hitter against odious germs; it uses one crafty maneuver that can take out even drug-resistant foes and is often used as a last resort. But, with three chemical modifications, reported this week in PNAS, the drug now has three distinct molecular moves to take out pathogens. The menacing modifications render vancomycin at least 25,000 times deadlier. And with that level of potency, dazed bacteria stumble at developing resistance when given the chance in lab experiments.

Hardware

=> ↺ The PowerPC Notebook campaign has just started

• We are very happy to announce that our funding campaign has just started. Starting today, we will accept donations through our campaign page with the objective of collecting funds to establish a contract with Acube Systems to design the PowerPC Notebook motherboard.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ Bill Clinton issues warning on opioid crisis: ‘It’s going to eat us all alive’

=> ↺ The word “women” literally never appears in the US Senate’s 142-page health-care bill

• Women have babies. If they didn’t, first the economy would collapse, and then the species would die out. But because they do, from their late teens to their early forties, women have higher health-care costs than men of the same age. Carrying and birthing a child is a sometimes difficult, dangerous, complicated business, and one that, in America, can be incredibly expensive. Despite the incontrovertible fact that men are biologically just as responsible as women for a pregnancy happening, before the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, women in the US paid more for health care and insurance because they are the ones who can get pregnant. Specifically, American women of child-bearing age paid somewhere between 52% and 69% more in out-of-pocket healthcare costs then men.

=> ↺ Murder charges for doc who prescribed alleged “horrifyingly excessive” opioids

• An Oklahoma doctor is facing five counts of second-degree murder charges following the opioid overdose deaths of her patients.

• Prosecutors charged osteopathic physician Regan Ganoung Nichols, 57, on Friday in Oklahoma County District Court. Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter told reporters that Nichols prescribed trusting patients a “horrifyingly excessive” amount of opioid medications. “Nichols’ blatant disregard for the lives of her patients is unconscionable,” he said.

Security

=> ↺ Discord: Rise Of The Bot Wars

• The problem is that the armies of spambots that were once reserved for the big servers are now so easy and so trivial to make that they’re beginning to target smaller servers, servers that don’t have the resources or the means to deal with that kind of large scale DDoS attack. So instead, I have to fight the growing swarm alone, armed with only a crippled, rate-limited bot of my own, and hope the dragons flying overhead don’t notice.

=> ↺ Kaspersky may be collateral damage in US-Russia stoush

• Kaspersky Lab may have been targeted by the US government as part of retaliatory measures taken by the Obama administration after it allegedly discovered that Russia had made plans to influence the 2016 US elections.

=> ↺ Cyberattack Hits U.K. Parliament, Limits MPs’ Email Access

=> ↺ Russian hackers {sic} are reportedly trading in UK MP’s email addresses and passwords

• Mark James, security specialist for ESET has given this thought and decided that this could be a considerable problem for people who reuse passwords, which from here looks like everyone.

=> ↺ Blackmail fears after Parliament hit by ‘sustained and determined’ cyber attack leaving MPs unable to access their emails remotely

• Parliamentary officials were forced to lock MPs out of their own email accounts as they scrambled to minimise the damage from the incident.

=> ↺ Microsoft confirms some Windows 10 source code has leaked

• A portion of Microsoft’s Windows 10 source code has leaked online this week. Files related to Microsoft’s USB, storage, and Wi-Fi drivers in Windows 10 were posted to Beta Archive this week. Beta Archive is an enthusiast site that tracks Windows releases, and asks members to donate money or contribute something Windows-related if they access a free private FTP full of archived Windows builds. The leaked code was published to Beta Archive’s FTP, and is part of Microsoft’s Shared Source Kit.

=> ↺ OpenVPN taken to task after audit ignores remote code execution flaws

• A researcher has revealed four dangerous bugs, among others, in OpenVPN which two recent audits of the virtual private network’s code failed to find.

• According to security expert Guido Vranken, he independently used a fuzzer to cut through OpenVPN’s code to find the bugs.

• The first vulnerability, CVE-2017-7521, is a set of issues found in the extract_x509_extension, in which attackers can create a remote server crash and memory leaks.

=> ↺ Debian Warns Of Hyper Threading Issue With Intel Sky/Kaby Lake CPUs

=> ↺ Debian Devs Urge Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake Users to Disable HyperThreading

• Debian developer Henrique de Moraes Holschuh is warning users of the popular GNU/Linux distribution about a new security flaw that affects Intel’s 6th and 7th generation Skylake and Kaby Lake processors supporting HyperThreading.

=> ↺ Debian Linux reveals Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake processors have broken hyper-threading

• Do you have an Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake processor under your computer’s hood? Have you experienced unexplained application and system hiccups, data corruption, or data loss? It could be because your chipset has hyper-threading enabled and the chips are malfunctioning.

• Henrique de Moraes Holschuh, a Debian Linux developer, revealed the Intel chip problem on the Debian developer list. Officially, Intel hasn’t acknowledged the problem, but engineers at Dell and Intel have told me that the problem, and its fix, exists.

=> ↺ [WARNING] Intel Skylake/Kaby Lake processors: broken hyper-threading

• This warning advisory is relevant for users of systems with the Intel processors code-named “Skylake” and “Kaby Lake”. These are: the 6th and 7th generation Intel Core processors (desktop, embedded, mobile and HEDT), their related server processors (such as Xeon v5 and Xeon v6), as well as select Intel Pentium processor models.

• TL;DR: unfixed Skylake and Kaby Lake processors could, in some situations, dangerously misbehave when hyper-threading is enabled. Disable hyper-threading immediately in BIOS/UEFI to work around the problem.

=> ↺ [Older] WannaCry ransomware slipped in through slow patching

=> ↺ [Older] World braces for more cyberattacks as work week begins

• Russia’s interior ministry said some of its computers had been hit, while the country’s banking system was also attacked, although no problems were detected, as was the railway system.

=> ↺ Two days after WCry worm, Microsoft decries exploit stockpiling by governments

=> ↺ Microsoft Is PISSED OFF At The NSA Over WannaCry Attack

=> ↺ a partner/supplier of the NSA

=> ↺ Fearing Shadow Brokers leak, NSA reported critical flaw to Microsoft

=> ↺ [Older] You know how to fix enterprise patching? Please tell me more!!!

=> ↺ Victoria Police to Withdraw 8000 Traffic Tickets After Roadside Cameras Infected with WannaCry Virus

=> ↺ Operational Security and the Real World

• An important part of the OPSEC approach to security is implementing compartmentation to limit the damage of any one penetration or compromise. This is sometimes referred to as impact containment.

=> ↺ When in doubt, blame open source

• Nothing is special, open source is no better or worse than closed source software. If you build something why would open source need more responsibility than closed source? It doesn’t of course, it’s just an easy target to pick on. The real story is we don’t know how to deal with this problem. Open source is an easy boogeyman. It’s getting picked on because we don’t know where else to point the finger.

• [...]

• I’d like to end this saying we should make an effort to have more honest discussions about security incentives, but I don’t think that will happen. As I mention in my previous blog post, our problem is a lack of leadership. Even if we fix security incentives, I don’t see things getting much better under current leadership.

=> ↺ [Older] Reproducible Builds: week 107 in Stretch cycle

=> ↺ [Older] The RHSA notifications you want, right in your Inbox

=> ↺ Linux security modules, round two.

• So recently I wrote a Linux Security Module (LSM) which would deny execution of commands, unless an extended attribute existed upon the filesystem belonging to the executables.

=> ↺ OneLogin suffers breach—customer data said to be exposed, decrypted

• OneLogin has admitted that the single sign-on (SSO) and identity management firm has suffered a data breach. However its public statement is vague about the nature of the attack.

=> ↺ Election hacking {sic} fears turn heat on Homeland Security

• Now, lawmakers concerned about future foreign interference in U.S. elections are pressuring the department to offer more help to states and provide more details about what happened in 2016.

=> ↺ Paper ballots are hack-proof. It’s time to bring them back.

• We like to tell citizens that every vote counts. But actually, no vote counts unless it is counted. And even if it’s counted, it still doesn’t really count if it’s changed by hackers {sic}, or canceled out by someone else’s fraudulent vote.

=> ↺ Security updates for Monday

• Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (kernel, linux-zen, and tcpreplay), Debian (drupal7, exim4, expat, imagemagick, and smb4k), Fedora (chromium, firefox, glibc, kernel, openvpn, and wireshark), Mageia (mercurial and roundcubemail), openSUSE (kernel, libmicrohttpd, libqt5-qtbase, libqt5-qtdeclarative, openvpn, and python-tablib), Scientific Linux (sudo), and SUSE (firefox).

=> ↺ Qualys discovers new vulnerability ‘Stack Clash’ in Linux

=> ↺ Dealing with NIST’s about-face on password complexity

• In the last few years, we’ve been seeing some significant changes in the suggestions that security experts are making for password security. While previous guidance increasingly pushed complexity in terms of password length, the mix of characters used, controls over password reuse, and forced periodic changes, specialists have been questioning whether making passwords complex wasn’t actually working against security concerns rather than promoting them.

=> ↺ Some beers, anger at former employer, and root access add up to a year in prison

• The Internet of Things’ “security through obscurity” has been proven once again to not be terribly secure thanks to an angry and possibly inebriated ex-employee. Adam Flanagan, a former radio frequency engineer for a company that manufactures remote meter reading equipment for utilities, was convicted on June 15 in Philadelphia after pleading guilty to two counts of “unauthorized access to a protected computer and thereby recklessly causing damage.” Flanagan admitted that after being fired by his employer, he used information about systems he had worked on to disable meter reading equipment at several water utilities. In at least one case, Flanagan also changed the default password to an obscenity.

=> ↺ Microsoft recommends you ignore Microsoft-recommended update

=> ↺ Honeypots and the Internet of Things

• There were a number of incidents in 2016 that triggered increased interest in the security of so-called IoT or ‘smart’ devices. They included, among others, the record-breaking DDoS attacks against the French hosting provider OVH and the US DNS provider Dyn. These attacks are known to have been launched with the help of a massive botnet made up of routers, IP cameras, printers and other devices.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Europeans learn to live with — and adapt to — terror attacks

• The jihadis’ targets in Europe are depressingly repetitive: the Brussels metro, the Champs-Elysees in Paris (twice), tourist-filled bridges in London (twice) and a UK rock concert. And that’s just the past few months. The steady stream of attacks on centers of daily life have drawn pledges from Europeans not to let terrorists change how they live, but in ways large and small they already have.

=> ↺ At center of Qatar crisis, a $1 billion ransom

• But a report from the Financial Times earlier this month pointed to a nine-figure sum that was paid in a hostage deal as the catalyst for the crisis.

• The money allegedly went to an al-Qaeda affiliate fighting in Syria, along with Iranian security officials, according to the report.

=> ↺ Theresa May is booed and heckled with shouts of “shame on you” during Armed Forces Day parade in Liverpool

• Theresa May was heckled with shouts of “shame on you” and boos as she visited Liverpool.

• The Prime Minister was jeered as she walked through the city for its official Armed Forces Day parade this afternoon.

• Dozens of people could be heard shouting angrily at her, but she continued to make her way through the crowds with a smile on her face.

=> ↺ Trump‘s Red Line

• The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives. Details of the attack, including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all U.S., allied, Syrian and Russian Air Force operations in the region.

=> ↺ CIA Chief: Intel Leaks on the Rise, Cites Leaker ‘Worship’

• CIA Director Mike Pompeo says he thinks disclosure of America’s secret intelligence is on the rise, fueled partly by the “worship” of leakers like Edward Snowden.

• “In some ways, I do think it’s accelerated,” Pompeo told MSNBC in an interview that aired Saturday. “I think there is a phenomenon, the worship of Edward Snowden, and those who steal American secrets for the purpose of self-aggrandizement or money or for whatever their motivation may be, does seem to be on the increase.”

=> ↺ [Older] As The Battleground For Warfare Moves To Cyberspace, DOD Contemplates Altering Recruitment Requirements

• While we’ve viewed much of the hyped up discussions about cyberwarfare with some trepidation here, we now live in a reality where it would be clearly silly to suggest that the internet and internet-connected devices are not an emerging battleground for rival nations. While much was made these past few years about what mostly amounted to the penetration of private business networks, the discussion about several democratic elections throughout the country and the clear interference in them, potentially by state actors, has pushed the overdrive button on all of this. As you can imagine, groups in charge of defense for the nations of the world have been paying attention, including the US Department of Defense.

=> ↺ Israel Gives Secret Aid to Syrian Rebels

• Israel has been regularly supplying Syrian rebels near its border with cash as well as food, fuel and medical supplies for years, a secret engagement in the enemy country’s civil war aimed at carving out a buffer zone populated by friendly forces.

• The Israeli army is in regular communication with rebel groups and its assistance includes undisclosed payments to commanders that help pay salaries of fighters and buy ammunition and weapons, according to interviews with about half a dozen Syrian fighters. Israel has established a military unit that oversees the support in Syria—a country that it has been in a state of war with for decades—and set aside a specific budget for the aid, said one person familiar with the Israeli operation.

• Israel has in the past acknowledged treating some 3,000 wounded Syrians, many of them fighters, in its hospitals since 2013 as well as providing humanitarian aid such as food and clothing to civilians near the border during winter. But interviews with half a dozen rebels and three people familiar with Israel’s thinking reveal that the country’s involvement is much deeper and more coordinated than previously known and entails direct funding of opposition fighters near its border for years.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Trump CIA Director Mike Pompeo says leaking on rise thanks to ‘worship’ of Edward Snowden

• Besides Snowden, who leaked documents revealing extensive U.S. government surveillance, WikiLeaks recently released nearly 8,000 documents that it says reveal secrets about the CIA’s cyberespionage tools for breaking into computers. WikiLeaks previously published 250,000 State Department cables and embarrassed the U.S. military with hundreds of thousands of logs from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ The hunt for offshore oil is killing tiny sea creatures that are key for healthy oceans

• “Plankton underpin whole ocean productivity,” lead author Robert McCauley, an associate professor at Curtin University in Australia, said in a statement. “Their presence impacts right across the health of the ecosystem so it’s important we pay attention to their future.”

=> ↺ France to ban all new oil and gas exploration in renewable energy drive

• France is to stop granting licences for oil and gas exploration as part of a transition towards environmentally-friendly energy being driven by Emmanuel Macron’s government.

=> ↺ Quarter of England’s rivers at risk of running dry, finds WWF

• Freedom-of-information data reveals threat of drought that would devastate wildlife, with government slow to act on water management.

=> ↺ [Older] Nitrogen oxide from diesel vehicles killed a lot of people in 2015, study says

• When Volkswagen’s diesel scandal broke in 2015, much was made of how the cars spewed the pollutant nitrogen oxide (NOx) in dramatic excess of regulators’ standards during real-world driving. But that wasn’t what ultimately got VW Group in trouble with officials from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and European Union regulators. The key problem was that diesel VWs, Audis, and even Porsches included undisclosed “defeat devices,” or lines of code in the car’s software, that regulators didn’t know about. This code permitted the diesel cars to run cleaner in a lab than on the road.

=> ↺ Exxon investors clash with executives, vote in favor of annual climate report

• On Wednesday, 62.3 percent of investors in oil giant Exxon Mobil voted for the company to produce an annual report on the impacts of climate change policies on the company’s business. The resolution, which was opposed by Exxon leadership, passed by a large margin compared to last year, when a similar resolution garnered only 38 percent of the investor vote.

=> ↺ Michael Gove could use Brexit to shelve key plan to protect the environment, critics fear

• Green campaigners and political rivals have raised concerns that Michael Gove’s return to the cabinet has led to a key environmental plan being shelved.

• The 25-year Government plan for the environment was first promised two years ago and had finally been expected in 2017, but officials told The Independent they now cannot guarantee it coming this year.

• News of a potential further delay follows fears that Mr Gove’s appointment as Environment Secretary would mean a rowing back of protections, with Brexit providing the perfect cover.

Finance

=> ↺ Why Grenfell Tower Burned: Regulators Put Cost Before Safety

• Residents of Grenfell Tower had complained for years that the 24-story public housing block invited catastrophe. It lacked fire alarms, sprinklers and a fire escape. It had only a single staircase. And there were concerns about a new aluminum facade that was supposed to improve the building — but was now whisking the flames skyward.

=> ↺ How not to end up like Uber

• One of the major things a startup has to focus on from the beginning is company culture, or the environment in the workplace, which includes the mission, ethics, communication and more.

=> ↺ Uber doesn’t want to pay its drivers more — it wants its customers to do it instead

• While Uber’s tipping option will certainly help many drivers earn extra money, it comes out of consumers’ pockets, rather than the considerably deeper pockets of the company, which is now valued at $50 billion. Indeed, the tactic seems designed as a way to boost driver income without Uber having to pay its drivers more.

• [...]

• As a money-losing operation, Uber is under intense pressure from its private equity backers, including Menlo Ventures, Fidelity Investments and Benchmark, to grow sales, lower expenses, and eventually file an initial public offering.

=> ↺ [Older] Uber lost another $708 million in the first three months of the year

• Uber’s chief financial officer is leaving the company amid yet another loss-making quarterly result, according to the Wall Street Journal. In the first three months of 2017, the company lost $708 million on revenues of $3.4 billion. That might sound disastrous, but it’s actually an improvement for the ride-hailing company, which has posted billions of dollars of losses since 2014. Excluding the money the company didn’t earn in China, it lost $2.8 billion in 2016.

=> ↺ [Older] Malta’s Prime Minister Sues Panama Papers Journalist For Defamation; Gets Facebook To Delete His Reporting

• You recall, of course, the Panama Papers? The massive leak of documents about offshore shell companies last year, that a large coalition of reporters worked on for many months before releasing a bunch of stories at the same time. The documents were leaked from a law firm, and highlighted more than a few cases of what appeared to be questionable activity by the rich and powerful in moving money around in offshore accounts. Apparently the subject of one such story, Malta’s Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, wasn’t happy that he and some of his colleagues were mentioned in some of the reporting on this, and filed a defamation case against Matthew Caruana Galizia, the reporter who wrote up some stories, using the Panama Papers, arguing that Muscat and his chief of staff were involved in a scheme to get kickbacks on the sale of Maltese passports.

• [...]

• But there are two larger issues here: First, this appears to be a classic SLAPP-style lawsuit, in which reporters are being sued as an attempt to chill free speech on reporting that the subject doesn’t like. I’m no expert in Maltese defamation law, but it does appear that there has been a lot of concern about abuse of Maltese defamation law to intimidate reporters and chill speech (amusingly, that article focuses on Daphne Caruana Galizia who has been sued a few times for defamation, and who appears to be Matthew’s very proud mother). There have also been attempts to update defamation law in Malta, but there appears to be nothing akin to a an anti-SLAPP provision. Indeed, it’s not even clear if there’s a “truth” defense.

=> ↺ Desperate man cries at food bank after eating his first proper meal in two weeks

• Food bank officials have told how a man burst into tears after he ate his first proper meal in two weeks.

• Charity staff at The Store House in Skegness, Lincolnshire, say demand for food parcels is soaring with referrals more than tripling since May last year.

• Co-ordinator Debby Harland said a man broke down in tears after he arrived on Wednesday having not eaten a proper meal for a fortnight, Lincolnshire Live reports.

=> ↺ What Amazon’s Purchase of Whole Foods Really Means

=> ↺ [Older] Amazon workers worldwide denounce dictatorial working conditions

• Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is able to make over $25,000 each minute through the exploitation of Amazon workers in every country, forcing them to toil under constant monitoring and work long hours for low wages, subjecting them to constant surveillance by management, and firing them for the slightest sign of opposition.

=> ↺ Indian outsourcer Wipro has a problem with bugs. Bed bugs

• The Indian outsourcing company Wipro has a problem with bugs. Not software bugs, but rather bed bugs, which are causing its employees in Chamblee, Georgia, a great deal of grief.

=> ↺ Farms hit by labour shortage as migrant workers shun ‘racist’ UK

• Farms have been hit with a shortage of the migrant workers that Britain relies on to bring in the fruit and vegetable harvests, according to a series of new reports.

• There was a 17% shortfall in May, leaving some farms critically short of pickers, according to a new National Farmers Union (NFU) survey. The decline is blamed on Brexit, with the vote to depart the EU leaving the UK seen as “xenophobic” and “racist” by overseas workers, according to the director of a major agricultural recruitment company.

• The UK requires about 80,000 seasonal workers to pick the vegetable and fruit harvest and virtually all come from eastern Europe. Just 14 of the 13,400 workers recruited between January and May this year were British, the NFU survey found. Three-quarters of the workers came from Bulgaria and Romania, and almost all the rest from other eastern European countries.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Isn’t Trump supposed to be commander-in-chief?

• Donald Trump, not exactly a man of focus and wisdom, should surprise no one with his continual exhibition of administrative imbecility. America’s passivity in the face of Trump’s dangerous deference to the military on matters of war and peace is an altogether different cause for alarm.

=> ↺ The right wing war on facts: The new partisan divide that’s destroying our nation

• Forget red state vs. blue state. Now the line of separation runs between those who prefer facts to fantasy

=> ↺ US lawmakers urge Trump to press Modi on trade, say many sectors in India ‘unjustifiably protected’

• They said the barriers covered multiple sectors and included high tariffs, inadequate protection of intellectual property {sic} rights, and inconsistent and non-transparent licensing and regulatory practices.

=> ↺ Trump accuses Obama of inaction over Russia meddling claim

• President Donald Trump has accused his predecessor Barack Obama of inaction over alleged Russian interference in the US election in 2016.

• Mr Trump said Mr Obama had learned well before the 8 November poll about the accusations and “did nothing”.

• His comments followed an article in the Washington Post which said that Mr Obama learned last August of President Vladimir Putin’s “direct involvement”.

• The alleged meddling is the subject of high-level investigations in the US.

=> ↺ Bernie and Jane Sanders, under FBI investigation for bank fraud, hire lawyers

• Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and his wife, Jane Sanders have hired prominent defense attorneys amid an FBI investigation into a loan Jane Sanders obtained to expand Burlington College while she was its president, CBS News confirms.

=> ↺ The Rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the Death Throes of Neoliberalism

=> ↺ New U.K. Government Held Together by Fear — of a Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn

• AFTER WEEKS OF WRANGLING, Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party agreed on Monday to give Prime Minister Theresa May the votes she needs to stay in office and push through legislation ensuring that the United Kingdom exits the European Union.

• While the Democratic Unionist leader, Arlene Foster, spoke of the deal being “in the national interest” of the U.K. as a whole, commentators pointed to what looked like a massive concession to Northern Ireland’s local government — an additional 1 billion pounds in social welfare spending.

=> ↺ What the DUP have negotiated is much smarter than many predicted

• The dramatised, contemporary version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale currently being shown on Channel 4 offers British viewers a dark, dystopian vision into life within a Christian fundamentalist state, where women retain little autonomy over their bodies and where homosexuality is punishable by death.

• With publication of the ‘Confidence and Supply’ deal between the Conservatives and Democratic Unionist Party, fears that any agreement hinged upon the Government’s acquiescence to a series of social reforms demanded by the Unionist party, transforming the United Kingdom into our own Republic of Gilead, appear to have been unfounded.

• Instead, the deal, as predicted in my article for this site after the general election result, essentially amounts to a bill of up to £1.5 billion for the British taxpayer.

=> ↺ New Ban, Same Story: Trump’s Immigration Ban Excludes Countries With Business Ties

• After his first immigration ban faced obstacles in federal courts, President Trump has signed a new executive order that bans citizens from six Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East from entering the U.S. for 90 days. The new order excludes Iraq, which fell under the first ban, and makes other changes to specify who can and can’t enter the U.S. But one thing hasn’t changed: His proposed list doesn’t include Muslim-majority countries where his Trump Organization has done business or pursued potential deals. Properties include golf courses in the United Arab Emirates and two luxury towers operating in Turkey.

=> ↺ Republicans are the primary beneficiaries of gerrymandering

• As the Supreme Court makes ready to rule on the blatant gerrymandering in Wisconsin, the AP has conducted a study using “a new statistical method of calculating partisan advantage” to analyze “the outcomes of all 435 U.S. House races and about 4,700 state House and Assembly seats up for election last year” and report “four times as many states with Republican-skewed state House or Assembly districts than Democratic ones.”

• Both parties have engaged in gerrymandering, but in many Republican strongholds, the GOP attains majorities and supermajorities despite capturing a minority of the vote, in a way that is unmatched by Democrats in states where they dominate.

=> ↺ How the Tory election machine fell apart

• In September 2015, a few months after the Conservatives had won that year’s general election, more comfortably than even their most optimistic supporters had hoped, a veteran Tory politician and journalist was waiting to appear on a BBC radio show. Still smiling about the election, he was in expansive mood. The party’s targeting of voters had become so precise, he told me, thanks to the latest marketing software, that it would take Labour many years to catch up.

• During this year’s general election, as in 2015, Tory activists across Britain were supplied with computer-generated lists of amenable voters by Conservative campaign headquarters in London. But this time, many canvassers got a shock when they knocked on doors. “The data was only 65% accurate,” says a local Tory organiser who has worked in the party’s heartlands in southern England for decades. “In the marginals, it was less than 50%.” In some cases, canvassers were accidentally sent to the addresses of activists for rival parties. The organiser says: “I despair of our national campaign.”

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Without telling media, Arizona judge orders dozens of articles to be deleted

• In 2013, Megan Welter had a really bad night.

• Welter, at that time a cheerleader for the Arizona Cardinals, got into a drunken fight with her boyfriend. It ended with her calling 911 and reporting him for domestic violence. Welter’s boyfriend was a professional fighter, who “smashed [her] head into the tile” and put her in a “choke hold with his legs,” she told the 911 dispatcher.

• When the police showed up, they found out that wasn’t true. Welter’s boyfriend, Ryan McMahon, showed video on his cell phone verifying that it was Welter who had attacked him. She was arrested and charged with assault.

• The arrest came just days after Welter and her team, the Cardinals, kicked off a PR blitz pushing a positive story about her to various television and print news outlets. Welter wasn’t just a pretty face—she was an Iraq war veteran who led troops in a signal unit of the US Army.

• [...]

• Last year, Welter sought to change her unflattering history. She turned to the firm of Kelly/Warner Internet Law, who promote their attorneys’ abilities to be “Online Reputation Fixers.”

• Welter’s lawsuit (PDF) didn’t include a named defendant. Instead, she accused “John and Jane Does 1-10, ABC Partnerships 1-10, XYZ Corporations 1-10, and DEF Limited Liability Companies 1-10″ of defaming her online.

• “Defendants posted voluminous false, damaging, misleading, and defamatory statements about Plaintiff on the Internet, located at numerous web links,” wrote Welter’s attorney, Raees Mohamed.

• The complaint included an exhibit (PDF) with 98 links to different Internet articles, ranging from nationally known news outlets to little-known sports and culture blogs. Also included were nine links to YouTube videos about Welter.

=> ↺ Wisconsin Speech Bill Tries To Keep Universities Neutral On Public Policy Debates, Which Is Batshit Crazypants

• As you are likely already aware, there is something of a debate about debates that occur on college campuses these days. Amidst a climate of ultra-polarized politics, there have been several high profile incidents on college campuses involving a revolt by student bodies — and, allegedly, outside troublemakers — over specific speakers invited onto campus and topics opened for debate. In reaction to these revolts that generally end with colleges uninviting speakers, some states have decided to try to legislate against this sort of thing in the name of free speech. It’s one of those unhappy circumstances in which everyone on every side appears to be wrong. Student revolts and petitions to uninvite speakers are themselves a form of speech and worthy of protection, even if that sort of thing is antithetical to the university experience and ultimately works counter to the aims of the students doing the revolting. Meanwhile, the uninvited and their supporters are shouting about censorship in a way that suggests their views must be tolerated without reaction, which is a complete misunderstanding of how free speech works. As for the politicians, the haphazard decision to legislate on matters of speech in this matter betrays a lack of understanding of how sacred our free expression laws are in America and the care with which any lawmakers ought to take on the topic.

=> ↺ Germany Raids Homes of 36 People Accused of Hateful Postings Over Social Media

• In a coordinated campaign across 14 states, the German police on Tuesday raided the homes of 36 people accused of hateful postings over social media, including threats, coercion and incitement to racism.

• Most of the raids concerned politically motivated right-wing incitement, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office, whose officers conducted home searches and interrogations. But the raids also targeted two people accused of left-wing extremist content, as well as one person accused of making threats or harassment based on someone’s sexual orientation.

=> ↺ [Older] EU judges to tackle ‘right to be forgotten’ again

=> ↺ [Older] New EU Lawsuit Claims Google Failed To Forget ‘Sensitive’ Information, Such As Their ‘Political Affiliation’

• For years, we’ve pointed out that the “Right to be Forgotten” (RTBF) in Europe is a dangerous tool that has been and will continue to be abused as a tool to censor freedom of expression, while hiding behind a claim that it is to protect “privacy.” While the concept has been around for a while, it really took off online with a EU Court of Justice (CJEU) ruling from three years ago, saying that Google’s search results index counted as a data repository on someone, and thus, an individual could force Google to “delink” certain results from searches on their names. But, the court left some leeway to Google to decide whether or not the requests were valid. Basically, if the information is no longer relevant for the public to know about the person, then Google should delink it. Now, obviously, that’s a horribly subjective standard, and Google has had to staff up on people to determine whether or not any requested delinking qualifies.

=> ↺ [Older] NY Senate Passes Bill That Would Add Cops And Firemen To List Of Protected Classes Under State’s Hate Crime Law

• This is followed by a bunch of anecdotes about officers and first responders being on the receiving end of supposedly “targeted” violence. It adds nothing to the “justification” but a few presentation-worthy stories to sway emotions of fellow legislators. It doesn’t make the preceding statement any more correct. It’s actually misleading and wrong in equal parts.

• First off, an increase in “mortality rates” is not the same thing as an increase in violence directed at law enforcement officers. The stats legislators are attempting to point to include all deaths in the line of duty, whether they were at the hands of civilians or not. So, this stat is already sort of misleading, albeit only because of the way this bill’s sponsors have phrased it.

=> ↺ For one year, the internet in a town in Bahrain has been switched off every day

• Every day for the past year, the government of Bahrain has shut off the internet in Duraz between 7PM and 1AM, making this the longest internet shutdown in the history of the region, and one of the longest internet shutdowns in world history.

=> ↺ Bahrain Internet Shutdown Hits One Year Mark, Longest in Region’s History

• Our research revealed the presence of a device on Batelco’s Internet backbone that disrupts certain Internet traffic to and from Duraz between 7PM and 1AM, while leaving other traffic undisrupted. We concluded that it is possible that the disruptions were a result of a Service Restriction Order (SRO) from the Bahrain Government.

=> ↺ Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and the free press collide in a riveting new Netflix documentary

• After the trial, it was revealed that the prosecution had been bankrolled by Thiel, probably as an act of revenge for a story that Gawker published about him several years prior. And the trial’s eventual outcome, after Hogan was awarded $115 million in compensatory damages, was that Gawker went bankrupt and shut down — leaving even those observers who hated Gawker uncomfortable with the implications of living in a world where people with deep pockets and a grudge could take out media outlets for personal reasons.

=> ↺ German police raid 36 homes over hateful postings on social media

=> ↺ Facebook’s New Mission

=> ↺ Facebook Briefed U.K. Government on Counter-Terrorism Effort

• In response, Facebook has announced a series of new initiatives, including greater use of artificial intelligence to find and block terrorist content. It is also hiring 3,000 more people to review posts that users flag for promoting extremism, adding to the 4,000 contractors it already has reviewing content worldwide.

=> ↺ Facebook launches drive in UK to tackle online extremist material

• As well as providing training and a dedicated support desk, Facebook will offer organisations the opportunity to promote campaigns against extremism through its own platforms and provide financial support for academic research into online and offline patterns of extremism and how to respond to it.

=> ↺ Facebook brings its anti-extremism initiative to the UK

• While full details of the initiative remain unclear, Facebook said that it would effectively give free ads to NGOs trying to counter hate speech, and will help fund academic research into “online and offline patterns” of extremism

=> ↺ [Older] Judge Refuses To Fix His Rubber-Stamping Of A Fraudulently-Requested Court Order

• Over the past year or so, we’ve seen reputation management efforts slide into even shadier territory. Apparently frustrated by Google’s unwillingness to humor bogus DMCA notices, rep management con artists began fraudulently obtaining court orders to get content delisted. The process involved fake defendants, fake plaintiffs, and, occasionally, fake lawyers. In one particular case, it involved forged judges signatures.

• Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen, along with Eugene Volokh (of The Conspiracy), have performed some masterful detective work to uncover at least one of the people behind this new wave of fraudulent delistings. Richart Ruddie, who has already been hit with a $70,000 settlement in one of his bogus libel lawsuits, appears to be reluctant to live up to the terms of the deal he struck with Levy. According to that, Ruddie — who is under investigation by the US Attorney’s office — was to start withdrawing his bogus lawsuits.

=> ↺ [Older] Thailand Demands More Proxy Censorship From Facebook

• More foreign censorship is coming to American social media companies. Back in January, Facebook hinted it would be at least partially receptive to the government of Thailand’s desire to be free from criticism. Fortunately, the Thailand government has been slightly more rational than, say, Austria’s by not demanding offending content be removed everywhere. So far, it seems amenable to Facebook just preventing Thailand’s citizens from seeing anything deemed insulting to their rulers (dead or alive).

=> ↺ [Older] Thailand warns Facebook to block content critical of the monarchy

• Authorities in Thailand have warned Facebook to take down content critical of the monarchy, or face legal action.

• The social media giant has been given until next Tuesday to remove more than 130 items from pages viewable in Thailand.

=> ↺ Texas Court Orders Sports Streaming Sites To Be Blocked In Anticipation Of Piracy

• A few years ago, we wrote about HBO and Showtime’s somewhat novel decision to file a lawsuit against two sports streaming sites for copyright infringement that both claimed would happen… in the future. The lawsuit was filled with understandably novel language, but the fact remained that this was something akin to pre-crime enforcement, best demonstrated in the film Minority Report. One of the chief axioms of American law is that a crime must have occurred for punishment to be doled out. Injunctions are a departure from that, but actually suing for infringement when that infringement hadn’t happened yet and, indeed, when the content to be infringed didn’t even yet exist, seemed like a departure from the way the law works.

=> ↺ [Older] Well, Duh: Facebook’s System To Stop ‘Fake News’ Isn’t Working — Because Facebook Isn’t The Problem

=> ↺ [Older] Facebook promised to tackle fake news. But the evidence shows it’s not working

=> ↺ You won’t believe why Facebook will block this headline

=> ↺ [Older] Judge Dumps Two Lawsuits Attempting To Hold Facebook Responsible For Acts Of Terrorism

=> ↺ [Older] Terrorism victims can’t hold Facebook liable for Hamas’ use of the platform

• Two lawsuits seeking to hold Facebook responsible for terrorism groups’ use of the social media platform have been dismissed by a federal judge.

=> ↺ Licensing Body Agrees To Temporarily Allow Man To Criticize The Government Without A License

=> ↺ Chinese Government Enforces Censorship by Targeting Local Broadcasters

=> ↺ Turkish filmmakers fear the spectre of censorship

=> ↺ Konkona Sensharma On Censorship, Meaningful Cinema and Women Representation In Bollywood

=> ↺ Fighting censorship online: ‘It’s an ongoing race’

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Defense contractor stored intelligence data in Amazon cloud unprotected

• On May 24, Chris Vickery, a cyber risk analyst with the security firm UpGuard, discovered a publicly accessible data cache on Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage service that contained highly classified intelligence data. The cache was posted to an account linked to defense and intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. And the files within were connected to the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the US military’s provider of battlefield satellite and drone surveillance imagery.

=> ↺ [Older] ISP-Loyal Marsha Blackburn Pushing New Broadband Privacy Law, But It’s A Hollow PR Show Pony With No Chance Of Passing

• You might recall that Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn recently played a starring role in gutting FCC consumer broadband privacy protections using the Congressional Review Act. It was one of the more bare-knuckled examples of pay to play government in recent memory, and many of the straight GOP-line voters have been getting an earful from their constituents back home. Utterly unmoved, most of those lawmakers have quickly shifted on their heels and are now busy trying to gut net neutrality with the same blatent disregard for public opinion they showed while killing privacy protections.

=> ↺ Court: Dead daughter’s parents have no right to access her Facebook account

• A German appeals court on Wednesday rejected the pleas from a dead girl’s parents who wanted access to the 15-year-old’s Facebook account. The social networking site fought the parents, claiming that opening the account would breach the privacy of the girl’s contacts.

=> ↺ Russian Military Apparently Using Cell Tower Spoofers To Send Propaganda Directly To Ukrainian Soldiers’ Phones

• We’ve often discussed the darker side of the repurposed war tech that’s made its way into the hands of local law enforcement. Much like backdoored encryption (something some in law enforcement would like to see), rebranded war surveillance gear like Stingrays may sound great when touted by good guys, but we should never forget bad guys have access to the same equipment.

=> ↺ UK gave Google’s DeepMind access to patient data without legal basis

• Google’s DeepMind AI wing was given access to the personal medical records of 1.6 million NHS patients on an “inappropriate legal basis,” the UK’s top data protection adviser to the health service has said.

• In a letter sent to the Royal Free Hospital’s medical director professor Stephen Powis, and seen by Sky News, the National Data Guardian Dame Fiona Caldicott—whose job it is to scrutinise the government when it hands over NHS patient records to private companies—concluded that the decision to share the data under implied consent was wrong.

=> ↺ [Older] Latest FISA Court Order Details Why NSA Didn’t Get Any 702 Requests Approved Last Year

=> ↺ [Older] Inspector General’s Report Shows Section 702 Isn’t The Only Thing Being Abused By The NSA

=> ↺ NSA Boss: Section 702 Should Be Renewed Because It Helped Prove Russia Hacked Election

• The push for a smooth Section 702 renewal continues. The never-not-abused surveillance program has received some vocal support in recent weeks. Former FBI Director James Comey’s Senate testimony began with his praise for Section 702, despite there being about a million investigation-related questions Senators were dying to hear answers to.

=> ↺ [Older] Why snafus like HP’s keylogger will happen again

• The keylogger is built into a device driver supplied to HP by Conexant Systems. It places every single keystroke you make in a log file on the computer. The file is deleted and a new one is started every time you log on to Windows, but if you use an incremental backup system or rarely reboot, there’s a good chance that every password, credit card number, personal detail, and regretted communication you ever typed is stored safely waiting for a hacker or subpoena to make it public.

=> ↺ [Older] Sixth Circuit Appeals Court Latest To Say Real-Time Cellphone Location Tracking Not A Fourth Amendment Issue

• This decision [PDF] isn’t too surprising considering the court reached the same conclusion last year in a similar case. The difference between the two is the latest case deals with real-time collection of GPS data, rather than historical GPS records. But that’s the only difference. The Appeals Court believes the same holds true for real-time location info, although it cites something other than 1979′s Smith v. Maryland in its analysis.

=> ↺ Australia advocates weakening strong crypto at upcoming “Five Eyes” meeting

• Two top Australian government officials said Sunday that they will push for “thwarting the encryption of terrorist messaging” during an upcoming meeting next week of the so-called “Five Eyes” group of English-speaking nations that routinely share intelligence. The move indicates that Canberra is now running ahead with what the FBI has dubbed “going dark” for several years now. This is the notion that with the advent of widespread, easy-to-use strong encryption on smartphones and other devices, law enforcement has been hindered. Many experts say, however, that any method that would allow the government access even during certain situations would weaken overall security for everyone.

=> ↺ Australia to seek greater powers on encrypted messaging at ‘Five eyes’ meeting

• Australia said on Sunday it will push for greater powers to tackle the use of encrypted messaging services used by terrorists and criminals at an upcoming meeting of ministers from the “Five Eyes” intelligence network.

• The United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, will meet in the Canadian city of Ottawa next week, where they will discuss tactics to combat terrorism and border protection, two senior Australian ministers said.

• Australia has made it clear it wants tech companies to do much more to give intelligence and law enforcement agencies access to encrypted communications.

=> ↺ Australia To Push For Encryption Backdoors At Next ‘Five Eyes’ Meeting

• There’s been no unified push for encryption backdoors from world leaders, but the number of those suggesting it might be a good idea has increased in recent months. UK Prime Minister Theresa May recently said terrorists shouldn’t be allowed to use Whatsapp to hide their conversations from law enforcement even as her own party members routinely use the app to engage in secure communications. Newly-elected French president Emmanuel Macron said basically the same thing while campaigning, stating a preference for compelled access to encrypted communications.

• Shortly before he was shown the exit door, former FBI director James Comey floated the idea of an “international framework” for encryption backdoors. It appeared Comey realized he wasn’t going to be able to sell this idea at home, so perhaps a little international peer pressure would push US legislators towards mandating lawful access.

=> ↺ Court Says Password Protection Doesn’t Restore An Abandoned Phone’s Privacy Expectations

• In a decision reached recently by a Florida federal court, a person has no expectation of privacy in a phone that was thrown away. [h/t Orin Kerr] In this case, the defendant was sought in connection with a missing child investigation. He was questioned by police and released. A few days later (when he was supposed to be meeting detectives at his house), the defendant (allegedly) went for a walk in the rain and got lost. He discovered his phone was wet and, according to his testimony, threw the phone in a ditch because he believed the wet phone was completely useless.

• The defendant’s phone was recovered by someone else. The police traced the phone back to the phone’s (temporary) new owner. The phone was then subjected to a warrantless search. Police were hoping to find information about the missing child as phone records obtained earlier showed the defendant’s phone had been in the area. (They also exposed inconsistencies in the defendant’s assertions about where he had and hadn’t been.)

=> ↺ [Old] How to permanently delete your Facebook account

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Thoughts on the Latest Development in the U.S. Administration Travel Ban case

• This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to hear the lawfulness of the U.S. Administration’s revised Travel Ban. We’ve opposed this Executive Order from the beginning as it undermines immigration law and impedes the travel necessary for people who build, maintain, and protect the Internet to come together.

• Today’s new development means that until the legal case is resolved the travel ban cannot be enforced against people from the six predominantly Muslim countries who have legitimate ties or relationships to family or business in the U.S. This includes company employees and those visiting close family members.

=> ↺ Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Asra Q. Nomani Respond to Readers

• “When it comes to the pay gap, abortion access and workplace discrimination, progressives have much to say. But we’re still waiting for a march against honor killings, child marriages, polygamy, sex slavery or female genital mutilation.”

=> ↺ To Keep The Skies Safe, The TSA Wants To Know What You’re Reading

=> ↺ TSA considers forcing airline passengers to remove books from carry-ons

• “[B]ooks raise very special privacy issues,” senior policy analyst Jay Stanley wrote. “There is a long history of special legal protection for the privacy of one’s reading habits in the United States, not only through numerous Supreme Court and other court decisions, but also through state laws that criminalize the violation of public library reading privacy or require a warrant to obtain book sales, rental, or lending records.”

=> ↺ TSA officer steals passenger’s money during pat down at OIA, police say

• A review of surveillance footage shows Johnson reaching into Duddleston bag, taking the money and putting it into his pocket, an arrest report said.

=> ↺ Making America scared again won’t make us safer

• That’s a problem for several reasons. First, it’s fiscally irresponsible and undermines public safety. Since 1980, the U.S. prison population has exploded from 500,000 to more than 2.2 million, resulting in the highest incarceration rate in the world and costing more than $80 billion a year. The federal prison population has grown 700 percent, with the Federal Bureau of Prisons budget now accounting for more than 25 percent of the entire Justice Department budget.

=> ↺ Uber criticized for standing by executive accused of ignoring discrimination claim

=> ↺ [Older] Richard Dawkins slams Islam as ‘most evil religion,’ then Trump for travel ban rhetoric

• The biologist, on hand Sunday for the June 6-11 event, said it would be a mistake to create a moral equivalence between religions.

• “It’s tempting to say all religions are bad, and I do say all religions are bad, but it’s a worse temptation to say all religions are equally bad because they’re not,” the “Science in the Soul” author said, the U.K. Telegraph reported Sunday. “If you look at the actual impact that different religions have on the world, it’s quite apparent that at present the most evil religion in the world has to be Islam.”

=> ↺ The Arab World Is A Political Problem Because It Has A Religious Problem

• Islam will not allow minorities to have their own land and to rule themselves. That’s why even if partitioning Syria happens, it likely won’t go well.

=> ↺ Off-duty St. Louis officer injured by ‘friendly fire’ after police chase of stolen car

• An off-duty officer was wounded by “friendly fire” as police looked for suspects after a stolen vehicle fled police and crashed late Wednesday.

• The injured off-duty officer was treated at a hospital released on Thursday. The suspect was also treated, and released into police custody.

• At Barnes-Jewish Hospital early Thursday, Interim Police Chief Lawrence O’Toole told reporters the off-duty officer had come out of his home to help after the stolen car crashed nearby, and was hit in the crossfire between officers and suspects who had been in the car.

=> ↺ Activists protest at alleged restrictions on use of Finnish in Sweden

• Finnish-language researchers and activists in Sweden say that it’s getting more difficult to use Finnish in everyday life. They claim that use of Finnish in schools is restricted, and that Finnish-language media offerings have been cut back in recent years.

• They say that some teachers have banned students from speaking Finnish during breaks, even though Finnish is an official minority language in Sweden. Some Finnish-speaking teachers have also been banned from speaking Finnish to each other in their cafeteria, some asked to switch to Swedish in the staff room.

• “This is happening now,” reads the op-ed. “All Finnish teachers are not treated in this way, but it is happening across the country, from the north to the south.”

• The authors of the letter include Satu Gröndahl of Uppsala University and Sirpa Humalisto, of the union of Finnish teachers in Sweden. They cite a survey conducted by union.

=> ↺ [Older] Linguistic analysis of body-cam footage shows police bias against black people

• The first major US study of body-cam footage concluded that police, at least in Oakland, California, showed more respect to white people than to black people.

• The study from Stanford University researchers analyzed the transcribed text from 981 traffic stops caught on body cams by 245 Oakland Police Department officers in 2014. White people pulled over were more likely to be called “ma’am” or “sir,” and they were more likely to hear the words “please” and “thank you” from police officers. Black people, however, didn’t get as much respect, and they were more likely to be called by their first names and even “my man.”

=> ↺ [Older] DA’s Office Facing Multiple Lawsuits Related To Its Use Of Fake Subpoenas To Intimidate Witnesses

• The Louisiana district attorney whose office issued bogus subpoenas to trick witnesses into “volunteering” their testimony is now facing multiple lawsuits. DA Leon Cannizzaro’s office was sued on May 12th by the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Foundation for its refusal to turn over copies of every fake subpoena it has issued.

=> ↺ [Older] ACLU sues DA Cannizzaro’s office to learn which lawyers used bogus subpoenas

• A label at the top of the notices read, “SUBPOENA: A FINE AND IMPRISONMENT MAY BE IMPOSED FOR FAILURE TO OBEY THIS NOTICE.” But the notices carried no such legal authority because a judge had not signed off on the request.

• The DA’s office said it has replaced the forms with new letters labeled “notice to appear,” without threatening jail time. Bowman has said no witnesses who received the invalid “subpoena” notices had been jailed. He said such notices are sparingly used, but can work in the interest of public safety in a city where witnesses too often refuse to cooperate in criminal prosecutions.

=> ↺ [Older] Magical Cop Detects Drugs Better Than Blood Tests; Continues To Lock Innocent People Up

• In court filings, testimony, and warrant affidavits, law enforcement officers refer constantly to their “training and expertise.” Given enough time on the job and enough laser-printed certificates, any law enforcement officer can be an “expert” in anything… even detecting nonexistent drug impairment.

=> ↺ [Older] ‘The Drug Whisperer’ | Drivers arrested while stone cold sober

• Drunk driving arrests are down sharply after decades of aggressive enforcement, while drugged driving arrests are climbing.

• Georgia now has more than 250 officers with special ‘drug recognition expert’ training.

=> ↺ [Older] Appeals Court Pretty Sure DOJ Use-Of-Force Guidelines Don’t Violate Police Officers’ 2nd And 4th Amendment Rights

• A few years ago, some Seattle police officers came up with a novel plan to battle DOJ-imposed limits on their use-of-force. Since their union wisely decided to steer clear of this ridiculous legal battle, the officers chose to crowdfund their way into the federal court system.

=> ↺ [Older] BBC Says It May Contact Your Boss If You Post Comments It Finds Problematic

• To be fair, it does seem to limit this to cases where it believes you’ve violated the law, but even so, it seems like a stretch to argue that the BBC should be calling your boss to tell on you for being a dipshit online, even if you break the law. We’ve all seen the stories of people actually confronting their own trolls or, better yet, the mothers of their trolls, but to make it official BBC policy seems to be going a bit far. Sure, if someone is breaking a criminal law, informing the police sounds perfectly reasonable, but your boss or your school?

=> ↺ [Older] US & EU Not Banning Laptops On Planes… Yet

• Apparently, the decision not to implement the ban came because EU officials were not thrilled with the idea and wanted to discuss — leading to a series of meetings. Of course, that also allowed time for the airline industry to snap to attention and announce that such a ban might cost travelers around $1 billion. Admittedly, there may be some dubious math involved… but it’s fairly obvious that such a plan would lead to all sorts of problems for travelers — from general lost productivity, to delays and confusion around checking the laptops, to broken, lost or stolen computers and more.

=> ↺ Appeals Court: An IP Address And Some Alternative Facts Are A ‘Reasonable’ Basis For A Search

• The Eighth Circuit Appeals Court has handed down a judicial shrug [PDF] in a case where police decided an IP address was pretty much all they needed to search eleven occupants and their devices for child porn. Qualified immunity is upheld, despite the fact the officers searched rooms they possibly had no Fourth Amendment permission to search and despite the fact that no child porn was discovered anywhere on the multiple devices they seized.

=> ↺ Inspector General Report Shows DEA Covering Up Its Role In A Shooting That Left Four Foreign Citizens Dead

• Here’s the latest on how we’re winning the Drug War, stripped of the DEA’s deceit and spin by the Office of the Inspector General. The report [PDF] takes a look at three incidents the DEA was involved with in Honduras during 2012. The DEA’s FAST (Foreign-Deployed Advisory and Support Team) team was supposed to help Honduran drug warriors (TRT– Tactical Response Teams) fight the local drug war. It was only supposed to act in an advisory role, but it took a much more hands-on approach.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ How 7 words unfit for TV fostered an open Internet 20 years ago today

• Twenty years ago today the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision and unanimously overturned congressional legislation that made it unlawful to transmit “indecent” material on the Internet if that content could be viewed by minors. The justices ruled that the same censorship standards being applied to broadcast radio and television could not be applied to the Internet.

• “The record demonstrates that the growth of the Internet has been and continues to be phenomenal,” the high court concluded. “As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that government regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it.”

=> ↺ [Older] Title II hasn’t hurt network investment, according to the ISPs themselves

• The Federal Communications Commission’s primary justification for eliminating Title II net neutrality rules is that broadband network investment has tanked since the rules were implemented two years ago.

=> ↺ [Older] It’s Time For The FCC To Actually Listen: The Vast Majority Of FCC Commenters Support Net Neutrality

=> ↺ [Older] FCC Ignores The Will Of The Public, Votes To Begin Dismantling Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Private Internet Access shines the cat signal for net neutrality

• We, the people of the Internet, have stopped these draconian attempts to close our access to the open internet in the past, and we must do so again each time. Join us at the Internet Defense League for this and future actions.

=> ↺ Verizon reportedly tried to buy #2 cable company Charter, was rejected

=> ↺ [Older] [Lie] A Trump FCC advisor’s proposal for bringing free Internet to poor people

=> ↺ [Older] Cable Industry’s Own Survey Shows Majority Support Net Neutrality Rules

• The broadband industry is continuing its brave campaign to convince the public that gutting all oversight of growing monopolies like Comcast somehow ends well for the American consumer and smaller Comcast competitors. Last week this involved the cable industry’s top lobbying organization (the NCTA) working with the Daily Caller on a poll the industry clearly hoped would show that the public really hates net neutrality protections. The full survey of 2,194 Americans (pdf) uses omission and leading questions to nudge participants toward taking the view that net neutrality protections are “burdensome regulations” imposed by an out of control government.

=> ↺ [Older] Consumers Who Had Their Identities Stolen By A Spam Bot Demand FCC Investigate Bogus Net Neutrality Comments

• Shortly after the FCC voted to begin killing net neutrality earlier this month, we noted how a mysterious bot began spamming the FCC comment system with posts favoring the dismantling of net neutrality. Analysis of the bot indicates it has simply been pulling names from a hacked database of some kind, posting the same exact missive over and over again. The scale of the informational assault isn’t subtle; one estimate suggests that more than 40% of the nearly 3 million comments filed so far are courtesy of this bot, the operator of which still hasn’t been identified.

=> ↺ [Older] Senators want FBI to find out who attacked net neutrality comment system

=> ↺ [Older] Netflix Admits It Doesn’t Really Care About Net Neutrality Now That It’s Big

• So if you’ve been watching the Trump administration’s attempt to kill net neutrality, you’ve probably noted that one-time net neutrality supporters Google and Netflix have been notably absent from the debate, leaving small companies and consumers outgunned and outspent in the attempt to protect the rules. If you’re a regular Techdirt reader, you’ll recall that despite still favoring a reputation as a consumer ally, Google hasn’t really given much of a damn about protecting net neutrality since around 2010 or so. Its interest waned even further once the company launched its own ISP, Google Fiber.

Intellectual Monopolies

=> ↺ [Older] Techdirt Podcast Episode 123: No, The MP3 Isn’t Dead

=> ↺ [Older] The MP3 Is About As ‘Dead’ As Pepe The Frog

• Last week, there were two widely reported “deaths” on the internet: Pepe The Frog and the MP3 audio codec. Most people seemed to understand what was meant by the former headline — that you cannot in fact kill a meme, no matter how distasteful its use, and the death of Pepe in an official cartoon strip was a symbolic disavowal of the character by its creator. But on the MP3 issue people seem a bit more confused.

• Here’s what happened: in late April (not sure why there was such a big delay in the explosion of blog posts) Fraunhofer IIS, the research company that holds the patents on MP3 encoders and decoders, announced that it had terminated the licensing program for those patents, for the stated reason that the format has been surpassed by alternatives like AAC (which is also patented and licensed by Fraunhofer). For some reason, a whole lot of media outlets have accepted this at face value and reported that the format is now officially on its way out.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Copyright Office Realizes The DMCA Fucks With Security Research While The W3C Still Doesn’t See It

• Last week, the Copyright Office finally released a report that it had been working on for some time, looking specifically at Section 1201 of the DMCA. In case you’re new around here, or have somehow missed all the times we’ve spoken about DMCA 1201 before, that’s the “anti-circumvention” part of the DMCA. It’s the part that says it’s against copyright law to circumvent (or provide tools to circumvent) any kind of “technological protection measures,” by which it means DRM. In short: getting around DRM or selling a tool that gets around DRM — even if it’s not for the purpose of infringing on any copyrights — is seen as automatically infringing copyright law. This is dumb for a whole host of reasons, many of which we’ve explored in the past. Not only is the law dumb, it’s so dumb that Congress knew that it would create a massive mess for tons of legitimate uses. So it built in an even dumber procedure to try to deal with the fact it passed a dumb law (have you noticed I have opinions on Section 1201?).

=> ↺ [Older] Telenor Looks To Lead The Anti-Troll Fight In Europe

=> ↺ [Older] Copyright Troll’s Tech ‘Experts’ Can Apparently Detect Infringement Before It Happens

• When you sue Does en masses for copyright infringement with no more evidence than an IP address, you’re going to run into problems. Those who aren’t intimidated by baseless federal court filings fight back. The problem with every troll is they’re completely unequipped to handle actual litigation.

=> ↺ [Older] Japanese Music Collection Society Demands Copyright Fees From Music Schools For Teaching Music

• A brief review of our past stories about copyright collection societies should paint you a fairly complete picture on how these businesses operate. While they pimp themselves as proxies for content creators to police the known world for unauthorized use of that content, as well as operators working to license the use of that content, instead these companies work as syphons sucking money from both sides. They will be genuinely creative in their attempts to find infringement everywhere, liberally interpreting copyright law and what constitutes requirements for various licenses for things like art and music, while at the same time often being found to feign brain-death when it comes to paying the copyright holders’ share for the money they collect.

=> ↺ [Older] French Theater Owners Freak Out; Get Netflix Booted From Cannes Film Festival

=> ↺ [Older] Judge Alsup Threatens To Block Malibu Media From Any More Copyright Trolling In Northern California

• Yeah. So. It was probably a good thing that, a year and a half ago, the Chief Judge in the Northern District of California, said that any new Malibu Media copyright trolling cases had to go in front of Judge Alsup. Malibu Media, of course, is the US’s biggest copyright troll, responsible for a fairly insane percentage of all the copyright infringement lawsuits filed in the US. We’ve had a ton of stories about the company and some of its fairly shady practices in copyright trolling. Malibu Media, of course, is also a sleight of hand, as it’s actually the porn company better known as X-Art. It’s also been connected to the famous “international men of mystery”, often referred to as Guardaley — a German company, that’s gone through various name changes, and seems to be behind numerous copyright trolling operations.

=> ↺ Court Hands Internet Textbook Pirates Suspended Sentences

• Three men have received conditional jail sentences for selling online access to pirate textbooks. The trio, aged between 26 and 71-years-old, scanned and made available at least 198 books without copyright holder permission in exchange for a $45 per semester fee.

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