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● 08.10.17

● Links 10/8/2017: Tails 3.1, GhostBSD 11.1 Alpha

Posted in News Roundup at 8:02 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Reconsidering the scheduler’s wake_wide() heuristic

=> ↺ A milestone for control groups

=> ↺ AWS joins Cloud Native Computing Foundation to promote open source projects

=> ↺ AWS joins CNCF to boost open source strategy

=> ↺ Amazon Web Services chooses its Kubernetes path, joins Cloud Native Computing Foundation

=> ↺ Cloud Native Computing Foundation Expands Developer Access to On-Demand Hardware with New Infrastructure Lab

=> ↺ Amazon jumps on Kubernetes bandwagon

• Kubernetes is the most popular open-source container manager. It’s been officially supported on every cloud platform you’ve ever heard of… with one big exception: Amazon Web Service (AWS). Now, AWS has got on board the Kubernetes bandwagon as well by joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a platinum member.

• With this move, all five of the largest cloud providers — AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix, and Alibaba Cloud — are CNCF members. Kubernetes has been validated as the DevOps tool for cloud native computing and containers.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ 16-Way GPU OpenCL Showdown With Radeon ROCm, NVIDIA 384 On Linux

• With earlier this week having delivered our very latest NVIDIA GeForce vs. Radeon OpenGL/Vulkan graphics benchmarks, I have now finished up the very latest OpenCL Linux compute numbers for both vendor’s graphics cards on their latest drivers. Radeon cards were tested with their latest ROCm packages on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS while on the NVIDIA side was their long-lived 384.59 driver release.

=> ↺ SUSE+NVIDIA Makes The Graphics Binary Driver Easier To Deploy On Tumbleweed

=> ↺ NVIDIA 384.59 Driver Is Playing Fine With Linux 4.13

=> ↺ With AMDGPU DC Not Aligning For Linux 4.14, 120 More Display Code Patches

Applications

=> ↺ Restarting the free accounting search

• ack in 2012, we started a quest to find a free replacement for the QuickBooks Pro package that is used to handle accounting at LWN. As is the way of such things, that project got bogged down in the day-to-day struggle of keeping up with the LWN content treadmill, travel, and other obstacles that the world tends to throw into the path of those following grand (or not so grand) ambitions. The time has come, however, to restart this quest and, this time, the odds of a successful outcome seem reasonably good.

• Accounting data is crucial to the proper operation of any but the most trivial of businesses. It provides metrics showing how well the business is operating, and a company’s duties to report to governments cannot be performed without it. Accounting is often tightly tied to a company’s day-to-day operations, such that a failure of the accounting system can bring the entire business down. Given that, one would think that businesses would demand open and free access to their own accounting data.

• Proprietary systems like QuickBooks do not provide that access; instead, accounting data is stored in a mysterious, proprietary file format that is difficult to access — especially if one is uninterested in developing on Windows using a proprietary development kit. Locking up data in this way makes moving to a competing system hard, naturally, though a number of (proprietary) alternatives have found a way. It also makes it hard to get company data into the system in any sort of automated way. LWN operates with a set of scripts that convert data into the IIF format for importing, for example.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to check drive space on Linux from the command line

=> ↺ The Recommended Way To Clean The Package Cache In Arch Linux

=> ↺ Sysdig – Linux System Exploration/Diagnostic And Troubleshooting Tool

=> ↺ Metamorphose 2 – Batch Rename Your Files and Folders on Linux

=> ↺ How to Remove a Directory in Linux

=> ↺ git ubuntu clone

=> ↺ pristine-tar and git-buildpackage Work-arounds

=> ↺ Building applications for other architectures with Flatpak

=> ↺ Docker without sudo on Centos 7

Games

=> ↺ We have two more XCOM 2: War of the Chosen videos for you, commander

• Commander, feast your eyes on two more teaser videos for the upcoming XCOM 2: War of the Chosen expansion [Steam].

=> ↺ Party game ‘Marooners’ has a big free expansion

• For those of you after a bit of fun with your friends either locally or online, you might want to take a look at ‘Marooners’ [Steam, Official Site], which recently gained a big free expansion.

=> ↺ Fun to Play Open Source First-Person Shooter Games

• This is a computer game genre focused on guns and other weapon-based fighting using a first-person perspective. They are a type of three-dimensional shooter game. Pick up your weapon, enter the battle arena, and take on your enemy in these fast and furious games.

• It’s sometimes claimed that the concept of a first-person shooter originated with the release of Doom, 20 years ago. While Doom was definitely not the first in this genre, although it was an important game in promoting the genre. One of the earliest FPS games was Spasim (“Space Simulation”) released in March 1974. The game included wireframe 3D graphics, local multiplayer, the first-person perspective, and ships and weapons based on Star Trek. The game was played on the PLATO computer system and was heavily influenced by another PLATO space multiplayer game Empire.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ GNOME 3.26′s Nautilus File Manager Gets Full-Text Search Support, Flatpak Builds

=> ↺ GNOME’s Epiphany Web Browser Enables Firefox Sync by Default for GNOME 3.26 Beta

• The first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.26 desktop environment is upon us, currently scheduled to land today, August 9, 2017, but most probably will be delayed a day or two as not all components have been released.

=> ↺ On Firefox Sync

• Epiphany 3.26 is, unfortunately, not going to be packed with cool new features like 3.24 was. We’ve just been too busy working on improving WebKit this cycle. But there is one cool new thing: Firefox Sync support. You can sync bookmarks, history, passwords, and open tabs with other Epiphany instances and as well as both desktop and mobile Firefox. This is already enabled in 3.25.90. Just go to the Sync tab in Preferences and sign in or create your Firefox account there. Please test it out and report bugs now, so we can quash problems you find before 3.26.0 rather than after.

=> ↺ GNOME Web 3.26 Adds Support for Firefox Sync

• Firefox Sync support will be the headline feature in GNOME Web 3.26, letting you sync browser tabs, history and other data between Epiphany/Web and Firefox.

=> ↺ GObject design pattern: attached class extension

• I wanted to share one recurrent API design that I’ve implemented several times and that I’ve found useful. I’ve coined it “attached class extension”. It is not a complete description like the design patterns documented in the Gang of Four book (I didn’t want to write 10 pages on the subject), it is more a draft. Also the most difficult is to come up with good names, so comments welcome

=> ↺ GUADEC 2017 presentation

• During GUADEC this year I gave a presentation called Replacing C library code with Rust: what I learned with librsvg. This is the PDF file; be sure to scroll past the full-page presentation pages until you reach the speaker’s notes, especially for the code sections!

=> ↺ At GUADEC 2017 in Manchester

• And not only I have participated in the Akademy 2017 conference but got to GUADEC 2017 all in the same week! And, god, I really loved it too because it’s the first GUADEC I attend since The Hague in 2010 and I loved to meet again with old friends of the Hispanic community. Important to say I missed a lot of you, guys. Hope we’ll fix this next year

• I should acknowledge the travel sponsorship by the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME Hispano association. Without them I couldn’t attend this year.

=> ↺ Living an extraordinary GUADEC

• It has been a really great pleasure to attend this GUADEC, where the 20th anniversary took place in Manchester. It started with a journey of almost three days traveling to get there, but this challenge was greatly rewarded! I celebrated with many friends during the Welcome Party. Thanks Sam, Lene and Javier Jardon to make it! CONGRATULATIONS!

=> ↺ GUADEC 2017

• I haven’t been blogging much lately but I couldn’t miss this opportunity of telling you about GUADEC 2017 in the hope that it is going to encourage you to attend our next year edition in Almería, Spain.

• Looking back at the six editions of GUADEC that I have attended so far, I can honestly say that we are getting better and better, edition after edition. You might disagree but it is quite clear to me that we are evolving in a very promising direction as a software project and as a community (despite the political turmoil that our world is under).

• The GNOME Way™ has shined as a promising path towards a sustainable and progressive community, where “It is a rejection of technological elitism. It is an egalitarian version of openness” that enables us to move forward in an ethical way.

Distributions

=> ↺ Finally, Solus Operating System Is Getting Support for Ubuntu’s Snap Packages

• You won’t believe this, but Canonical’s Snappy team announced on Wednesday that the Solus Project development team is working on bringing Snappy support to their Solus operating system.

=> ↺ How to find the right Linux distribution for you

• Which Linux distribution is right for you? It’s a question anyone in IT knows might come across their desk at some point. I’m going to make the answering of this question a bit easier. To reach a conclusion, you have to first ask yourself if you need commercial technical support. If the answer is “yes,” then you turn to Red Hat, SUSE, or Ubuntu. Know this: With both Red Hat and Ubuntu, support is an add on cost. SUSE, on the other hand, includes a certain level of support when you purchase their enterprise product.

• If commercial support isn’t of concern to you, your options are wide open. That also means the choice becomes a bit more challenging. Let’s make it a bit easier. Are you looking for a server platform with a user-friendly package manager? If so, look to Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, or openSUSE — any distribution that works with a either apt, dnf, or zypper. If you’re looking for a server distribution that offers next to no learning curve, you can pretty much narrow that down to Ubuntu. What about the desktop? That’s where the choice gets really challenging. The best way to choose is to find one that works with apt and then select the desktop that most appeals to you. If you want modern, look to any distro with GNOME or take a look at Elementary OS. If a more standard interface is up your alley, look no further than Linux Mint or Kubuntu.

New Releases

=> ↺ OSGeo-Live 11.0 Released

• Version 11.0 of the OSGeo-Live GIS software collection (http://live.osgeo.org) has been released, ready for FOSS4G which is the International Conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial ((http://2017.foss4g.org/) – 2017 in Boston, USA.

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Oracle Linux 7 Update 4 Reaches General Availability

• Oracle has released the latest update of its Oracle Linux operating system, providing organization with a freely-available, enterprise Linux operating system.

=> ↺ Tech Data Appointed as Distributor for Red Hat Mobile Application Platform

• “Recognizing mobility as one of the fastest growing next-generation technologies, Tech Data continues to invest in resources that help partners enhance and scale their mobility practices whilst driving digital transformation,” said Naresh Desai, vice president, specialist business, Asia Pacific at Tech Data. “In our experience, Red Hat Mobile Application Platform is an excellent solution for enabling partners to develop and manage mobile business applications quickly and cost-effectively. To support this innovation, partners, and their end customers, can also utilize Tech Data’s Asia Pacific Innovation Centers to access a wide array of technical resources, tools, skills and infrastructure to accelerate their solution design capabilities.”

=> ↺ Tech Data serves up Red Hat Mobile Application Platform

• Tech Data’s Technology Solutions business has been appointed as a distributor for Red Hat Mobile Application Platform across Australia and parts of Asia.

• The deal will see Technology Solutions – previously part of Avnet – providing the vendor’s Mobile Application Platform which supports an agile approach to the development, integration and deployment of enterprise mobile apps – across Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.

Finance

=> ↺ Investor Watch on Shares of Red Hat Inc (RHT)

=> ↺ Gagnon Advisors LLC Has $7.26 Million Stake in Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

Fedora

=> ↺ Fedora ponders the Python 2 end game

=> ↺ Fedora 24 End Of Life

Debian Family

=> ↺ unifying OS installation and configuration management

• Three years ago, I realized that propellor (my configuration management system that is configured using haskell) could be used as an installer for Debian (or other versions of Linux). In propellor is d-i 2.0, I guessed it would take “a month and adding a few thousand lines of code”.

• I’ve now taken that month, and written that code, and I presented the result at DebConf yesterday. I demoed propellor building a live Debian installation image, and then handed it off to a volenteer from the audience to play with its visual user interface and perform the installation. The whole demo took around 20 minutes, and ended with a standard Debian desktop installation.

=> ↺ DebConf 17: Flatpak and Debian

• On Monday I gave a talk entitled “A Debian maintainer’s guide to Flatpak”, aiming to introduce Debian developers to Flatpak, and show how Flatpak and Debian (and Debian derivatives like SteamOS) can help each other. It seems to have been quite well received, with people generally positive about the idea of using Flatpak to deliver backports and faster-moving leaf packages (games!) onto the stable base platform that Debian is so good at providing.

Derivatives

=> ↺ Debian-Based Tails 3.1 Anonymous OS Debuts with Tor Browser 7.0.4, Linux 4.9.30

• Tails, the amnesic incognito live system, also known as the anonymous live operating system, has been updated today to version 3.1, a point release that fixes many security issues and updates important components.

=> ↺ Urgent: Upgrade to Tails 3.1 ASAP! Serious security holes found in the Linux distro

• Apple recently removed some VPN clients from the App Store in China at the request of the Chinese Government. Why? That country is largely anti-privacy, and it does not want its citizens bypassing its censorship of the web. If you live in China, the government can decide what you can and can’t view online. If you get caught circumventing these controls, the government can harshly punish you. Sad, right? This is why it is imperative that Linux-based privacy-centric open source operating systems such as Tails continue their development — you never know when it might be needed (including in the USA).

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ LibreOffice 5.4 Office Suite Is Now Available as Flatpak and Snap Packages

• The Document Foundation on Wednesday announced via the official Twitter account for the LibreOffice office suite that Flatpak and Snap packages of the latest 5.4 release are now available for GNU/Linux users.

=> ↺ Canonical Starts Work on a Linux 4.12 Kernel for Ubuntu 17.10 for Raspberry Pi 2

• Canonical on Wednesday announced that the Ubuntu Kernel Team had started work on a Linux 4.12-based kernel for the Raspberry Pi 2 variant of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.

• We’ve already told you a few weeks ago that Canonical’s Ubuntu Kernel Team plans to ship Ubuntu 17.10 with the Linux 4.13 kernel by default, and work on that front already started. They’re currently following the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.13 and recently rebased their builds on the RC4 milestone announced by Linus Torvalds this past weekend.

=> ↺ An Ubuntu Kernel Built With The Latest AMDGPU DC Support

• For those running Ubuntu or one of its derivatives that have been wanting to play with AMDGPU’s DC “display code” functionality but can’t be bothered to build the branched code, here’s a fresh kernel build.

=> ↺ Weekly Kernel Development Summary – Aug 9, 2017

=> ↺ Ubuntu 17.10 Wants to Ship Sushi By Default

• Ubuntu is considering adding the GNOME file preview utility Sushi as part of Ubuntu 17.10, the next stable release of the Linux distro due for release in October.

=> ↺ Simpler recipe on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher using Debian

• The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip), and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from scratch. I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or some other version skew problem. While trying to get this recipe working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour, and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the gr-gsm package. I also found out that the lead upstream developer of gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository. All I needed to do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.

=> ↺ 68% of businesses are struggling to hire talent for IoT

• Businesses are struggling to recruit employees with the skills needed to make the internet of things a success according to a new IoT Business Models report from Canonical – the makers of the IoT operating system, Ubuntu Core.

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ System76 Wants to Add Productivity Tools for Professionals to Pop!_OS Linux

• Just like Canonical, System76, the computer reseller specialized in the sale of laptops, desktops, and servers powered by Linux-based operating systems, is doing a great job at providing transparency to their development of Pop!_OS.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Snapdragon 212 SBC ships with 7-inch touchscreen

• Kaynes’ “SKATE-212” SBC runs Android Nougat or Linux on a quad -A7 Snapdragon 212 with WiFi, BT, GPS, LAN, IMU, dual MIPI-CSI, and a 7-inch touchscreen.

• Long-time Qualcomm partner Intrinsyc delivered the first SBC built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 212 SBC back in May with its $595 Open-Q 212. Now, as noted first by CNXSoft, Intrinsyc has some cheaper competition from a SKATE-212 SBC development kit from India-based Kaynes Technology that has gone on pre-order for only $349. The kit is designed for “industrial, medical, IIoT, mission critical, and surveillance verticals.”

=> ↺ 6 hardware projects for upgrading your home

• Every day, hobbyists and tinkerers are pushing the boundaries of what we can do with low-cost microcontrollers and mini-computers like the Arduino and Raspberry Pi. That trend doesn’t stop when it comes to IoT and home automation. In this article, I’ll round up six projects from Adafruit Industries that use open source hardware and software to improve home life (or at the very least, make more fun) in new and interesting ways.

Tizen

=> ↺ Imo video and call messaging app now available on the Tizen Store

• Today, Tizen smartphone users will rejoice as imo, one of the most requested instant messaging apps, that also has the ability for video & voice calls, has been released on the Tizen Store. We have already downloaded and installed it and the audio and video calls are of excellent quality, which is what our readers expect from this particular application.

=> ↺ Samsung Smart TV contents in Europe expand to UHD & HDR with TV Plus Launch

=> ↺ Tizen Experts now has a weekly round up video for you – Week ending 06 August 2017

Android

=> ↺ Google Maps beta adds news features, including Android O’s picture

=> ↺ ASUS ZenFone 3 Max Receives Official Update to Android 7.0 Nougat

=> ↺ Battery life: How to make your iPhone or Android last longer

=> ↺ ‘Google Play Protect’ Android Security Suite Is Now Rolling Out

=> ↺ Updated Svpeng Android Banking Trojan Has Keylogging Capabilities

=> ↺ Why some Android phones can charge so much faster than Apple’s iPhone

=> ↺ It’s August 2017 and your Android gear can be pwned by, oh look, just patch the things

=> ↺ Samsung has a browser, and maybe it now works on your Android

=> ↺ Android O is Almost Here, so Here’s Android Distribution Charted for the Past 5 Years

=> ↺ Amazon Joins Major Asian Backers of Android Creator’s New Phone

=> ↺ The best new features coming in iOS 11 and Android O

=> ↺ Nokia 3 officially confirmed to get the Android O update

=> ↺ Android Nougat Now Running on 13.5 Percent of Active Devices, Says Google

=> ↺ Google Maps v9.59 adds picture-in-picture support, Android O enhancements, driving stats

=> ↺ Amazon just backed the smartphone company created by the founder of Android

=> ↺ $200 Lenovo K8 Note launching with stock Android 7.1.1, dual cameras, 4000 mAh battery

=> ↺ Android O to Eliminate Insufficient Space Errors from OTA Updates

=> ↺ Which Android Tablets Should You Buy For Under $100?

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Open source is driving digital transformation, according to mainstream businesses

• Many of us declared victory for open source years ago, once it came to dominate key industry trends like big data, mobile, and cloud. But the real sign of winning is when mainstream enterprises talk about open source as part of their earnings calls. Once open source becomes a key component of financial performance, the momentum is unstoppable.

• Combing through the last few quarters of earnings transcripts, it’s clear that open source has arrived…but to very different destinations, depending on the company.

=> ↺ 7 open source Twitter bots to follow

• We are quickly entering a world in which you may spend more of your day communicating with robots than with humans.

• Don’t believe me? Ask yourself how many times you’ve used an automated checkout machine or ATM in lieu of a human, called the 1-800 number for a customer service need and been greeted by a machine, asked Google or Alexa what temperature to roast your brussels sprouts at, or interfaced with a website that gave you a personalized recommendation.

=> ↺ The best open source CRM software

• If you’re a small business looking to take the next step in your evolution, you may be looking at implementing a customer relationship management (or CRM) solution. But with enterprise-grade vendors like Oracle and Salesforce charging such a high premium for their services, how can smaller companies afford to get started with CRM software?

• The answer lies in open source. As with many kinds of software, there are multiple vendors who provide open source CRM solutions that are completely free to use. They may have restrictions on them, such as limited features and support, but for small businesses looking to try out CRM, they can be an excellent starting point.

=> ↺ All Parts Of The Paranoid Android ROM Are Now Open Source

• Paranoid Android, one of the most popular custom ROMs on the Android scene, is now completely open source, with all parts of it now available for members of the community to use and modify. All of Paranoid Android’s original features like the Color Engine and Accidental Touch are hence open to anyone and can be compiled right alongside stock AOSP or put into other ROMs. The full codebase is available on GitHub and can be contributed to with approval, integrated into original projects, or simply recompiled from scratch for just about any Android device. This means that AOSPA can now expand to any device with a willing maintainer, rather than only those that the official AOSPA team wants to support on their own.

=> ↺ Open source network tools compete with shrinking vendor equipment

• Vendor equipment consolidation does a lot of things — both good and bad — to the service-provider buyer. It also affects network design and deployment — including service automation and the tools that can make it happen — and the potential for vendor lock-in, unless operators back open source network tools.

• To start with the good, the first effect of network vendor equipment consolidation is a reduction in vendor costs, which is what drives consolidation in the first place. That lets prices fall. Obviously, the price-reduction effect of consolidation can’t last forever, which means, eventually, other pressures could make network vendor equipment consolidation a net risk to operators.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Mozilla Firefox 55 Brings Virtual Reality to the Web

• If you are setting up WordPress on a new Linux VPS for the first time you may face some problems like missing some PHP extensions. One example is missing the MySQL extension and this is a common problem since the extension doesn’t come by default with many operating systems. In this tutorial we will help you to fix the problem with the missing extension and complete the WordPress installation successfully.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

=> ↺ Waiting for AOO

• Eleven months ago, Dennis Hamilton, the chair of the Apache OpenOffice (AOO) project’s project management committee at the time, raised the idea of winding the project down. He worried that AOO lacked a critical mass of developers to keep things going, and that no new developers were coming in to help. At the time, various defenders came forward and the project decided try to get back on track. Nearly a year later, a review of how that has gone is appropriate; it does not appear that the situation has gotten any better.

• The project did manage to get the 4.1.3 bug-fix release — its first in nearly one year — out in October, but has not made any releases since. At the time, the plan was to move quickly to release 4.1.4, followed by a 4.2.0 feature release shortly thereafter. The 4.1.4 branch was created on October 11, shortly before the 4.1.3 release. Since then, it has accumulated 24 changesets (which map to about 30 changes in the original SVN repository). There have only been four commits to this branch since early February, at least one of which includes security fixes.

CMS

=> ↺ Liferay Puts Open Source Community In the Driving Seat with New Tools and Developer Relations Team

• Liferay, Inc., which makes digital experience software for enterprises, today announced a new initiative intended to reinvent the Liferay open source community experience to better support its growing international needs.

Education

=> ↺ Italy’s Trento province to boost open source in schools

• The autonomous province of Trento (Italy) is revitalising its promotion of the use of free and open source software in education. In the coming months, the province will provide schools with training on free software and open standards.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

=> ↺ Is the end of open source VoIP in sight? Five reasons why it’s on the way out

BSD

=> ↺ GhostBSD 11.1 Enters Alpha: FreeBSD 11.1 Paired With MATE, Xfce Desktops

• While TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD) is arguably the most well known desktop variant of FreeBSD, GhostBSD has been gaining ground as well as a FreeBSD-based desktop-friendly operating system. Today marks the availability of GhostBSD 11.1 Alpha.

=> ↺ GhostBSD 11.1 ALPHA1 is ready!

• This first alpha development release of GhostBSD 11.1 is ready for testing. All MATE and XFCE image is available with i386 and amd64 architectures. We hope to see a lot of people helping to test this next release.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ JDK 9: First Release Candidate

• There are no unresolved P1 bugs in build 181, so that is our first JDK 9 Release Candidate.

=> ↺ Java JDK 9 Sees Its First Release Candidate

• The first release candidate of Oracle’s Java JDK 9 is now available for testing.

• Java 9 is running behind schedule compared to its plan to ship in July but now available is the first release candidate of JDK 9. Delays of Java 9 have happened largely because of “Project Jigsaw”, Java’s new module system.

=> ↺ NASA/EOSDIS Earthdata

• he book, it goes without saying, focused on Python for the analysis and interpretation of satellite data (in one of the many topics covered). After that I spent some time working with satellite and GIS data in general using Erlang and LFE. Ultimately though, I found that more and more projects were using the JVM for this sort of work, and in particular, I noted that Clojure had begun to show up in a surprising number of Github projects.

=> ↺ Making pay transparent at Basecamp retains talent

• There are no negotiated salaries or raises at Basecamp. Everyone in the same role at the same level is paid the same. Equal work, equal pay.

• We assess new hires on a scale that goes from junior programmer, to programmer, to senior programmer, to lead programmer, to principal programmer (or designer or customer support or ops . . .). We use the same scale to assess when someone is in line for a promotion.

• [...]

• No scheme of pay is perfect, but at least with a model like this, nobody is forced to hop jobs just to get a raise that matches their market value. Which is reflected in the fact that we have lots of people at Basecamp who’ve been here for a long time with no plans to leave.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ A Chinese billionaire may get a monopoly on a cancer drug backed by U.S. taxpayers

• The U.S. National Institutes of Health plans to award an exclusive license for promising medical technology that was funded by U.S. taxpayers to a company controlled by a Chinese billionaire.

Security

=> ↺ Security updates for Wednesday

=> ↺ Mastering matplotlib: Acknowledgments

=> ↺ More Details on the PACER Vulnerability We Shared with the Administrative Office of the Courts

• PACER/ECF is a system of 204 websites that is run by the Administrative Office of the Courts (AO) for the management of federal court documents. The main function of PACER/ECF is for lawyers and the public to upload and download court documents such as briefs, memos, orders, and opinions.

• In February we reported that we disclosed a major vulnerability in PACER/ECF to the AO. The proof of concept and disclosure/resolution timeline are available here.

=> ↺ Endpoint security firm leaking terabytes of data

• Endpoint security software vendor Carbon Black has been found to be exfiltrating data from several Fortune 1000 companies due to the architecture of its Cb Response software, the information security services and managed services provider DirectDefense claims.

=> ↺ Teenagers charged over allegedly running huge DDoS operation

• Two Israeli teenagers, who have been alleged to have co-founded and run a company used for launching distributed denial of service attacks, have been arrested and indicted on conspiracy and hacking charges.

=> ↺ HashiCorp Vault Brings Disaster Recovery to Secrets Management

• HashiCorp has released new versions of both its open-source and enterprise editions of its Vault secrets management platform, providing new scalability and security operations capabilities.

• Vault helps organizations securely store and access application tokens, passwords and authentication credentials, which collectively are commonly referred to as “secrets” in an information security context.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ The Madman With Nuclear Weapons is Donald Trump, Not Kim Jong-un

• FOR ONCE, Donald Trump has a point. “We can’t let a madman with nuclear weapons let on the loose like that,” he told Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, according to the transcript from their bizarre phone conversation that was leaked to The Intercept in May.

• The madman the U.S. president was referring to, of course, was North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. The madman the rest of us should be worried about, however, is Trump himself, who — lest we forget — has the sole, exclusive and unrestricted power to launch almost 1,000 nuclear warheads in a matter of minutes, should he so wish.

=> ↺ 9 Ways Trump Has Endangered National Security

=> ↺ ISIS Remote Control Agent OPSEC

• From a security point of view, they are a disaster — because as they migrate from civilian to terrorist, their journey is easily spotted and tracked by security forces. Security for an illicit group is partially a factor of how much communication traffic it generates. The less traffic there is to monitor, the more secure they are. A remote control agent requires a huge amount of traffic, from recruitment to training to badgering and cajoling them into taking action. This is an operational security nightmare. So, lets look closer at how ISIS has implemented their operational security for handling remote control agents.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Alaskan towns at risk from rising seas sound alarm as Trump pulls federal help

• The US government’s withdrawal from dealing with, or even acknowledging, climate change may have provoked widespread opprobrium, but for Alaskan communities at risk of toppling into the sea, the risks are rather more personal.

• The Trump administration has moved to dismantle climate adaptation programs including the Denali Commission, an Anchorage-based agency that is crafting a plan to safeguard or relocate dozens of towns at risk from rising sea levels, storms and the winnowing away of sea ice.

• Federal assistance for these towns has been ponderous but could now grind to a halt, with even those working on the issue seemingly targeted by the administration. In July, Joel Clement, an interior department official who worked with Alaskan communities on climate adaptation, claimed he had been moved to a completely unrelated position because of the administration’s ideological hostility to the issue.

Finance

=> ↺ Gina Miller afraid to leave her home after threats of acid attacks

• Gina Miller, the campaigner who won a Brexit legal challenge against the government, has revealed that she has been receiving threats of acid attacks for months and is afraid to leave her home.

• The businesswoman said that if the threats continued and became too much to bear she would “seriously consider” leaving the UK.

• “I have been getting threats of having acid thrown in my face for months and months now. When I see someone walk towards me on the street with a bottle of water or something, I just freak out,” she told Verdict magazine.

• With the backdrop of a spate of acid attacks across the country, she said: “My life has completely changed.”

=> ↺ VR rail monopoly to end – Six effects of the coming transport reform {sic}

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Media scholar on Trump TV: “This is Orwellian, and it’s happening right now, right here”

• “What makes Trump different,” he told me, “is that he’s systematically trying to delegitimize the news as an institution because they won’t cover him the way he wants to be covered. That’s what’s different here.”

=> ↺ A terrifying axis of idiocy: Kim Jong-un baits Trump, who falls for it

• Choosing national leaders isn’t a game or a whimsical matter. We shouldn’t be casting our votes just to troll people we don’t like on Facebook. And now we’re learning why.

=> ↺ How America Lost Its Mind

• [...] If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong and between wise and foolish.

• We need to adopt new protocols for information-media hygiene. Would you feed your kids a half-eaten casserole a stranger handed you on the bus, or give them medicine you got from some lady at the gym?

=> ↺ In internal memos, CIA Inspector General portrayed the media as Agency’s “principal villains”

• A series of 1984 memos from the CIA Inspector General’s (IG) office reveals some alarming views on the press and how to deal with them. mong other things, the memo shows that 33 years before the Agency declared WikiLeaks a hostile non-state intelligence service, they were viewing the general press in the same terms.

=> ↺ Fleeing Trump: Couple leaving the Carolinas for Canada

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ The Google memo and the new blacklisting

• Google’s sacking of Damore matters not only because the tech giant is so well-known, and has been accused of sexist hiring practices (31 percent of its employees are women). It resonates with wider society because it suggests that there is only one ‘correct’ view on certain topics, like diversity, and that if you dare to question the ‘correct’ line you should be punished. Indeed, it has been striking to see that so many, including self-described progressives, rushed to denounce Damore’s memo and applaud Google for wielding the axe.

=> ↺ INTERNAL MESSAGES SHOW SOME GOOGLERS SUPPORTED FIRED ENGINEER’S MANIFESTO

• My biggest concern is the number of people who don’t understand how distribution differences aren’t stereotypes and can’t be applied to individuals. It’s basic statistical logic.

=> ↺ Australian Public Servants Warned Against Liking Social Media Posts That Are Critical Of Government Policies

• The Internet effectively turns everyone into a publisher, able to promulgate their ideas in a way that was not open to most people before. That’s great for the democratization of media — and terrible for governments that want to control the flow of information to citizens. The Australian government is particularly concerned about what its 150,000 public servants might say. It has issued a “guidance” document that “sets out factors for employees to consider in making decisions about whether and what to post”.

=> ↺ Facing libel lawsuit, Techdirt takes large donations to broaden coverage

• In the wake of an ongoing, expensive libel lawsuit that could drag on for years, Mike Masnick, the founder of Techdirt, announced Wednesday that his website would accept more than $250,000 in donations “to further reporting on free speech.”

=> ↺ Facebook, Twitter Consistently Fail At Distinguishing Abuse From Calling Out Abuse

• Time and time again, we see that everyone who doesn’t work in the field of trust and safety for an internet platform seems to think that it’s somehow “easy” to filter out “bad” content and leave up “good” content. It’s not. This doesn’t mean that platforms shouldn’t try to deal with the issue. They have perfectly good business reasons to want to limit people using their systems to abuse and harass and threaten other users. But when you demand that they be legally responsible — as Germany (and then Russia) recently did — bad things happen, and quite frequently those bad things happen to the victims of abuse or harassment or threats.

• We just wrote about Twitter’s big failure in suspending Popehat’s account temporarily, after he posted a screenshot of a threat he’d received from a lawyer who’s been acting like an internet tough guy for a few years now. In that case, the person who reviewed the tweet keyed in on the fact that Ken White had failed to redact the contact information from the guy threatening him — which at the very least raises the question of whether or not Twitter considers threats of destroying someone’s life to be less of an issue than revealing that guy’s contact information, which was already publicly available via a variety of sources.

=> ↺ North Carolina Passes An Entirely Misguided Restore Campus Free Speech Act

• You will recall that we were just discussing a proposed law in Wisconsin that sought to do a number of things on college campuses, including limit the ability to protest and shout down controversial speakers, as well as mandating quite insanely that school administrations must “remain neutral” on the “controversial” topics of the day. It’s a source of frustration for me that it’s not immediately clear how bad an idea this is for any number of reasons. My two chief complaints about the law, built upon a legislative proposal from the Goldwater Institute, are how broad a range of topics this could conceivably cover and how it quite plainly seeks to favor one form of speech over another. Put simply, giving state governments oversight about which topics a university administration is allowed to opine while also mandating punishments for students who protest to shout down speakers is about as anti-free speech as it gets, even as the proponents of the legislation attempt to shroud themselves in that most sacred of American ideals.

=> ↺ ACLU of Maine Sues Paul Lepage For ‘Facebook Censorship’

=> ↺ Maine Governor Sued for Deleting Facebook Comments

=> ↺ Maine Gov. LePage Illegally Censoring His Facebook Page, ACLU Claims

=> ↺ ACLU of ME sues Gov. LePage over ‘Facebook censorship’

=> ↺ ‘Censorship is for losers’: Assange offers fired Google engineer job at WikiLeaks

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Complaint Filed Over Sketchy VPN Service

• VPNs are important… for some situations. Unfortunately, the message that many have received in hearing about the importance of VPNs is that they somehow “protect your privacy.” But that’s always been wrong. They just move the privacy questions somewhere else. And sometimes it’s a sketchy place. A few months back we discussed this very issue with some security experts on our podcast. All VPNs do is create a secure tunnel from where you are to somewhere else. That’s useful if you don’t want other people sitting in the Starbucks with you to pick up your unencrypted traffic (or other people in your hotel on the hotel WiFi), but it doesn’t solve anything on larger privacy questions.

=> ↺ 70% of Windows 10 users are totally happy with our big telemetry slurp, beams Microsoft

• Microsoft claims seven out of ten Windows 10 users are happy with Redmond gulping loads of telemetry from their computers – which isn’t that astounding when you realize it’s a default option.

• In other words, 30 per cent of people have found the switch to turn it off, and the rest haven’t, don’t realize it’s there, or are genuinely OK with the data collection.

=> ↺ Disney sued over potential child data harvesting apps

• The perennially popular Walt Disney Company is being sued by parents in California because of concerns that otherwise apparently children-friendly apps are actually data vacuums that know more about your kin than you do.

=> ↺ ACLJ Sending Legal Demands to NSA

• Reports just this month reveal that Samantha Power – President Obama’s Representative to the United Nations – is believed to have requested hundreds of so-called “unmaskings” of United States persons.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Extraordinary renditions and arbitrary detentions

• As a legalized concept of international acceptance, Human Rights is considered a ’modern’ instrument, brought by the United Nations in 1948 after the ‘horrors of the Second World War’. However, the legal protection of individuals under arrest can be traced centuries before. Persian king Cyrus the Great issued 2559 years ago a law establishing civil rights for all, to be applied event to those defeated in war, which included the detainees. The Romans followed suit in its “natural law” codex, then the Magna Carta of 1215, the French Revolution’s ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ of 1789, etc.

• Through that historical context, it is difficult to find a more flagrant – and also a more comprehensive– violation to the individuals’ civil rights, than the practice of ‘extraordinary renditions’. In essence, ‘extraordinary rendition’ is about the kidnapping of a foreign citizen by Intelligence or enforcement government agencies, act which is perpetrated in yet another country. This practice was commenced by the US government in 1987, with the abduction of a Lebanese citizen from a yacht that was in Italian waters.

• After 2001, the U.S. implementation of ‘extraordinary renditions’ has required the secret collaboration of some EU governments and others around the world. For instance, Sweden collaborated secretly with the CIA in the rendition of two refugees that were transported from a Stockholm airport to a torture site in Egypt. Because of that, the United Nations HR sanctioned Sweden for violating the UN’s Absolute Ban on Torture. Furthermore, Lithuania and Poland had faced denounces of arbitrary detention and renditions before the European Court of Human Rights. These last named were two countries in Europe where CIA secretly held its prisoners, the so called ‘black sites‘.

=> ↺ North Korea: Pastor Lim Hyeon-soo released after more than two years of imprisonment

• Amnesty International welcomes the release of Lim Hyeon-soo to receive urgent medical treatment. The Canadian pastor and humanitarian worker has been detained in North Korea for the past two and a half years.

=> ↺ Indonesia Again Silences 1965 Massacre Victims

• Indonesian police and military personnel last week forced the cancellation of a public workshop on financial compensation for victims of the country’s 1965-1966 mass killings. Security forces “interrogated and intimidated” workshop organizers, claiming they lacked a permit.

• The strong-arm reaction reflects a tenacious, decades-long official taboo on public discussions of the massacre as part of efforts by successive governments to absolve those responsible. That’s because in October 1965, the government gave free rein to soldiers and local militias to kill anyone they considered a “communist.” Over the next few months, at least 500,000 people were killed (the total may be as high as one million). The victims included members of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), ethnic Chinese, trade unionists, teachers, activists, and artists.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ AT&T Lies Again, Insists Net Neutrality Rules Will Hurt First Responders

• So one of AT&T, Comcast and Verizon’s favorite bogus claims about net neutrality rules is that such consumer protections will somehow prevent the sick or disabled from getting the essential internet connectivity they need. For example, Verizon once tried to claim that the deaf and disabled would be harmed if large ISPs weren’t allowed to create fast or slow lanes, or prioritize emergency traffic over say — Netflix streams. Comcast recently tried to argue something similar, again implying that the hearing-impaired could be harmed unless ISPs are allowed to prioritize or deprioritize select classes of traffic.

• [...]

• Right, “not even considered.” Except for the fact that it was painstakingly considered, and AT&T knows it. It’s a little grotesque to use the specter of 9/11 to attack popular net neutrality protections, but that’s well in line with AT&T’s behavior on this subject (including its recent use of the net neutrality protests to con its own customers into opposing net neutrality. In reality AT&T isn’t worried about net neutrality rules harming medical services, since they’ve long-been exempted. AT&T’s worried about one thing: any rules stopping it from abusing a lack of broadband competition to drive up prices and engage in anti-competitive behavior.

=> ↺ [Older] Internet giants need to be reined in for the public good

• A much bigger issue is the social cost of information monopolies. Facebook’s footprint as a distributor of news, for example, is expanding without any of the oversight you might expect from a press freedom watchdog. Yet we know that Facebook is a prolific vehicle for fake news, and that political agitators exploit the platform for their own ends (something that also makes Bannon’s position appear incongruous, given that he practically invented the genre).

=> ↺ As net neutrality dies, one man wants to make Verizon pay for its sins

• Nguyen is a recent college graduate living in Santa Clara, California. And for much of 2015, he spent his time digging through years of Verizon’s public statements and actions, assembling more than 300 citations into a 112-page document that could well have been his master’s thesis. (In fact, he studied computer science.) The document catalogs a dozen questionable actions Verizon has taken since 2012, assembling a body of evidence in an attempt to prove that the carrier has violated a number of open internet protections.

=> ↺ Maybe Americans don’t need fast home Internet service, FCC suggests

• Americans might not need a fast home Internet connection, the Federal Communications Commission suggests in a new document. Instead, mobile Internet via a smartphone might be all people need.

=> ↺ Demand That Congress Fight for Net Neutrality

• Take Action Now gives you three meaningful actions you can take each week—whatever your schedule.

=> ↺ Don’t Let Congress Compromise on Net Neutrality

• Next month, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will host a hearing on net neutrality. It has invited all of the major Internet service providers, as well as large Internet businesses like Facebook, Google, and Netflix, to come and testify. While it may be encouraging to see Congress turning its focus to net neutrality, it’s troubling that lawmakers appear to be more interested in the thoughts of a handful of large corporations than those of the public that’s been overwhelmingly calling for the preservation of existing net neutrality protections.

DRM

=> ↺ Disney Pulls Content From Netflix As Users Face An Annoying, Confusing Rise In Streaming Exclusivity Silos

• On one hand, the increasing number of independent streaming services is certainly a good thing. This increase in competition is finally starting to apply pressure on incumbent cable TV providers to offer greater programming flexibility and to compete on price, even though many cable and broadcast execs falsely believe they can ignore the threat and do the exact opposite. But as everybody and their mother jumps into the streaming game, we’re facing a new threat: the rise of fractured exclusivity silos that make consumers hunt and peck to obtain their favorite programs.

=> ↺ Disney Ditching Netflix Keeps Piracy Relevant

• Disney announced that it will end its US distribution deal with Netflix in 2019. This means that many titles won’t be available on the popular streaming service but through a new Disney-branded platform instead. While the media giant expects to profit from the strategy, more fragmentation is not ideal for the public. In a way, one can argue that it keeps piracy relevant.

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