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● 08.16.17

● Links 16/8/2017: Ardour 5.11, 24th Birthday of Debian

Posted in News Roundup at 7:12 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ GNU/Linux for beginners: How Audio Works

• One of the things that I found pretty confusing about GNU/Linux during my transition from using Windows as my primary OS to using GNU/Linux, was how audio worked.

• In Windows, you don’t really have to think about anything, or know how to configure any specific utilities for the most part; audio just works. You might need to install a driver for a new headset or soundcard but that’s about as heavy as things get.

• Audio in GNU/Linux has come a long way and nowadays functions fairly well when it comes to the simplicity that users migrating from Windows are accustomed to; but there are still some nuances and terms that new users may not be familiar with.

=> ↺ For Fun and Profit: A New Book on the History of Linux and Open Source

• Sure, you can explain Linux’s popularity today in terms of factors that exist in the present — its technical features, the dynamism of the open source community, the corporate backing that Linux enjoys today, and so on.

• But, to understand what really launched Linux into the position it enjoys today, however, you need to know the history of Linux — as well as the history of the larger free and open source software universe.

Desktop

=> ↺ Review: System76’s Galago Pro solves “just works” Linux’s Goldilocks problem

• The Linux world has long maintained a very specific rite of passage: wiping the default operating system from your laptop and plugging in a USB stick with your favorite distro’s live CD. Some of us get a little, dare I say, giddy every time we wipe that other OS away and see that first flash of GRUB.

• Of course, rites of passage are supposed to be one-time events. Once you’ve wiped Windows or OS X a time or two, that giddiness vanishes—replaced by a feeling of annoyance, a kind of tax on being a Linux user.

Server

=> ↺ RancherOS: A tiny Linux for Docker lovers

• Like the various Linux server and desktop distributions, the container-oriented Linux distributions mix and match various projects and components to construct a complete container infrastructure. These distros generally combine a minimal OS kernel, an orchestration framework, and an ecosystem of container services. RancherOS not only fits the mold, but takes the minimal kernel and the container paradigm to extremes.

=> ↺ Docker Announces New Release of Docker Enterprise Edition to Modernize Windows, Linux and Mainframe Applications in Hybrid IT Environments

=> ↺ Docker Enterprise now runs Windows and Linux in one cluster

• With the newest Docker Enterprise Edition, you can now have Docker clusters composed of nodes running different operating systems.

• Three of the key OSes supported by Docker—Windows, Linux, and IBM System Z—can run applications side by side in the same cluster, all orchestrated by a common mechanism.

=> ↺ How to explain microservices in plain English

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Intel ANV Vulkan Driver Now Supports External Semaphores

• Intel’s open-source “ANV” Vulkan Linux driver has picked up support for the VK_KHR_external_semaphore extensions.

=> ↺ More AMDGPU DRM Updates Sent In For Linux 4.14 DRM-Next

• Alex Deucher sent in more Radeon/AMDGPU feature material today for DRM-Next of new code that in turn is being queued up for the Linux 4.14 kernel cycle.

• At the end of July was the first AMDGPU feature updates for in turn targeting the Linux 4.14 kernel. That included reducing the internal GART, initial support for 2MB huge pages, a rework of the buffer object migration logic, improvements/fixes around Vega support, PowerPlay fixes, SR-IOV improvements, and more.

=> ↺ Trying amd-staging-drm-next With The Radeon RX Vega

• With my Radeon RX Vega benchmarks so far this week I have been using the amd-staging-4.12 tree that contains the DC display code and Vega support. Though even with fresher code is amd-staging-drm-next, so here are some benchmarks.

=> ↺ Vega Performance Counters Now Exposed For RadeonSI

• The latest Mesa patches provide support for the GFX9 performance counters of Radeon RX Vega GPUs for those wishing to profile the driver or games/applications on these newest AMD GPUs.

=> ↺ RADV Vulkan Driver Begins Seeing Fixes For Vega

• David Airlie has begun fixing up the open-source “RADV” Radeon Vulkan driver so it can properly work with the newest Radeon RX Vega graphics cards.

Applications

=> ↺ Ardour 5.11 released

• We are pleased to announce the availability of Ardour 5.11. Like 5.10, this is primarily a bug-fix release, though it also includes VCA automation graphical editing, a new template management dialog and various other useful new features.

=> ↺ Ardour Digital Audio Workstation 5.11 Released

• For audio engineers and musicians making use of the cross-platform, open-source Ardour Digital Audio Workstation, its 5.11 release is now available.

=> ↺ RFC: Seamless OpenBenchmarking.org Comparisons For The Phoronix Test Suite

=> ↺ WeatherDesk – Change Wallpapers Based on Current Weather Conditions

• Today we have quite a nifty Linux tool for you, it’s called WeatherDesk. If you have always wanted to be able to set your desktop wallpapers based on the weather conditions in your area then today is your lucky day.

=> ↺ Track your creative projects with mind-map software

• I’m a huge proponent of using mind maps in creative work, which you may know if you’ve read any of my previous articles or follow my podcast.

• Most folks know mind maps are great for organizing your thoughts and brainstorming ideas for a project. The semi-free-flowing, branched structure of a mind map really lends itself to helping you wrap your brain around whatever it is you’re planning to work on. But it doesn’t end there. Modern digital mind maps give you so much more. In fact, for me, mind maps are a critical tool for managing my creative projects. A mind map is not just an idea board, it’s a living document, a dashboard for planning my projects and tracking my progress.

• For the examples in this article, I’ll be using a handy little open source mind-mapping program called VYM, short for “View Your Mind.” If you’re interested, I have a pretty thorough podcast episode covering my fairly extensive hunt for a new mind-mapping application. Whether you use VYM or FreeMind or XMind, the approach I cover here should work.

Proprietary

=> ↺ TeamViewer Linux Host

• At last abandoning WINE and launching native Linux support, TeamViewer announced the availability of a new preview version of its Linux Host with native Linux support. The new release of TeamViewer, a solution for remote support, remote access and online meetings, addresses additional critical system administrator requirements, including support of Wake-On-LAN, assignment of TeamViewer accounts via GUI and additional regulation capabilities. Wake-On-LAN support givers users the power to wake up Linux devices that are in standby mode and connected to a power supply.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to install and use docker-compose to deploy containers in CentOS 7

=> ↺ How to write better error messages

=> ↺ How to Use Let’s Encrypt to Install Free SSL Certificates on Your Linux VPS

=> ↺ How to Scan Your Linux Computer for Viruses and Rootkits

=> ↺ How to secure your LAMP server

=> ↺ Setup Dual Boot Linux And Remix OS With GRUB Customizer

=> ↺ Learn the basics of the ZSH shell

=> ↺ Git helpers – Simplify your git workflow

=> ↺ Securing Kubernetes Cluster Networking

=> ↺ Docker Commands for Development to Deployment

=> ↺ FreeNAS and check_mk

=> ↺ Nagios with PNP4Nagios on CentOS 6.x

=> ↺ GSoC Week 11.5: Success!

• Newsflash: My Jingle File Transfer is compatible with Gajim!

Games

=> ↺ ARK: Survival Evolved updated with the latest ‘Unreal Rendering code’, still terrible on Linux

• ARK: Survival Evolved [Steam] has a big update, this time finally updating their Unreal Engine code, but the Linux version is still quite broken graphically.

=> ↺ We Happy Few to launch on April 13th 2018, Linux release will be ‘on or shortly after’

=> ↺ Wednesday Madness, a quick look at some good Linux gaming deals

• Welcome to another Wednesday Madness article here at GOL. Another quick look at some good deals you shouldn’t pass up! The “I finally remembered to do this on a Wednesday edition”.

=> ↺ Black Mirror, a gothic-horror adventure series re-imagining releases in November with Linux support

• THQ Nordic has announced Black Mirror [Official Site], a re-imagining of the acclaimed gothic-horror adventure series being developed by KING Art and it seems it will support Linux.

=> ↺ A new Steam Client Beta fixes DualShock 4 gamepads with recent Linux Kernels and more

• Another Steam Client Beta has released, one of the important fixes here is that the DualShock 4 gamepads should now work with recent Kernel versions.

=> ↺ A new The Escapists 2 video shows off moving prisons in the latest teaser

=> ↺ Burst The Game, a free to play FPS arrives with Linux support this month

• Linux could use a few more even reasonably good shooter, especially of the more realistic and modern variety. I don’t have massively high hopes, but graphically it does look quite nice. They claim it has a full customization system (think Call of Duty-like) along with the ability to lean and vault over objects.

=> ↺ Ashes of the Singularity Gets Vulkan Port Next Week, Linux Remains M.I.A.

• The high profile real-time strategy game Ashes of the Singularity are seeing their Vulkan port released next week.

• Ashes of the Singularity will see their Vulkan renderer debut in their v2.4 update set to be released on 24 August. Sadly, no confirmation yet from Stardock Entertainment about seeing a Linux port following this Vulkan renderer. But this does make the threshold for seeing a Linux port lower as up to now it was bound to DirectX 12. But the Vulkan news is interesting anyhow for me as Ashes was the first game using DirectX 12 and it will be very interesting to see how the performance compares when using this new Vulkan renderer. Curiosity may get the best of me and I may even be tempted to do some of my own DX12 vs. Vulkan tests with th

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Thank you all!

• When we went public with our troubles with the Dutch tax office two weeks ago, the response was overwhelming. The little progress bar on krita.org is still counting, and we’re currently at 37,085 euros, and 857 donators. And that excludes the people who sent money to the bank directly. It does include Private Internet Access‘ sponsorship. Thanks to all you! So many people have supported us, we cannot even manage to send out enough postcards.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ GNOME desktop environment for Linux and BSD is 20 years old today

• When many people think of Linux, they incorrectly assume it is an operating system. Actually, Linux is merely the kernel which many operating systems leverage. An actual operating system is compromised of many things, including a user interface — after all, users need to interface with their computer!

• Most computer users will obviously want a graphical UI nowadays, and for BSD and Linux-based operating systems there are many such desktop environments from which to choose. One of the most popular environments is GNOME. Not only is GNOME a DE, but it has evolved into much more, such as a collection of apps and design rules (Human Interface Guidelines). Today, GNOME is celebrating a very important milestone — it is an impressive 20 years old!

=> ↺ Happy birthday, GNOME!

• The GNOME desktop turns 20 today, and I’m so excited! Twenty years is a major milestone for any open source software project, especially a graphical desktop environment like GNOME that has to appeal to many different users. The 20th anniversary is definitely something to celebrate!

=> ↺ Linux desktop GUI GNOME celebrates its 20th birthday

• By 1997, there had long been graphical Unix and Linux graphical user interface (GUI) desktops, but none of them had gathered much support. KDE, which was destined to become a major desktop, had started in 1996, but it was still facing opposition for its use of the Qt license. The GNOME Project, founded by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero on August 15, 1997, was created to build a GUI without the use of any non-General Public License (GPL) software. Thus, a struggle began between the two Linux desktops, which continues to this day.

=> ↺ Didier Roche: Ubuntu GNOME Shell in Artful: Day 3

• After introducing yesterday a real GNOME vanilla session, let’s see how we are using this to implement small behavior differences and transforming current Ubuntu Artful. For more background on this, you can refer back to our decisions regarding our default session experience as discussed in my blog post.

Distributions

New Releases

=> ↺ Solus 3 released

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Red Hat banishes Btrfs from RHEL

• Red Hat has banished the Btrfs, the Oracle-created file system intended to help harden Linux’s storage capabilities.

• The Deprecated Functionality List for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 explains the decision as follows…

=> ↺ Red Hat enhances cloud-native security

• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.6 offers an enterprise-ready container platform based on Kubernetes 1.6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the integrated docker container runtime.

Finance

=> ↺ Trading Earnings Optimism With Options in Red Hat Inc

=> ↺ Df Dent & Co Inc Decreases Its Investment in Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) Stock Last Quarter

Fedora

=> ↺ LxQT Test Day: 2017-08-17

=> ↺ Bodhi 2.9.1 released

=> ↺ A proposal: Ambassadors and Fedora strategy

• Fedora is big. We are a huge community of people with diverse interests. We have different ideas for what we want to build, and we want different things in return from our collective effort. At the same time, we are one project with shared goals and limited resources. We are more effective in this competitive world when we agree on common goals and work towards those, rather than everyone going in the direction each person thinks is best individually.¹

=> ↺ Fedora Council Summer 2017 Election Results

• The results for the Fedora Council Summer 2017 Election are published. Congratulations to Justin W. Flory for winning! He is very committed and I am looking forward to his efforts to improve communication in Fedora.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Debian Celebrates Its 24th Birthday

• Yesterday marked GNOME turning 20 while today Debian developers and users have its 24th birthday of the project to celebrate.

=> ↺ Happy 24th Birthday, Debian!

• Today, August 16, 2017, Debian, the universal, Unix-like computer operating system powered by the Linux kernel turns 24 years of existence since the late Ian Murdock first announced the Debian Project back in 1993.

• Since then, the Debian Project decided to set the day of August 16 as the Debian Day, to celebrate the project’s anniversary each year with organized social gatherings in various parts of the world.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Ubuntu sends trash to its desktop’s desktop

• Canonical is shifting around the trash can icon on the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 release, which might give some a sense of déjà vu.

• Apple kicked off the trash in the corner trend in 1983, with an easily accessible icon for storing junk on its Lisa computer. In 1995, Microsoft added a “recycle bin” to the DOS replacement, Windows 95.

• Moving on, in 2000 Apple unveiled Mac OS X and relocated its trash can to the infamous Dock.

=> ↺ Ubuntu 17.10 Rebased on Linux Kernel 4.12, Final Release to Ship with Linux 4.13

• As of today, August 16, 2017, the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system has been rebased on the current stable Linux kernel series, namely Linux 4.12.

=> ↺ Ubuntu 17.10 to Allow Users to Amplify the Sound on Laptops Through Media Keys

=> ↺ Ubuntu Server Development Summary – 15 Aug 2017

=> ↺ Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 516

=> ↺ Kernel Team Summary- August 16, 2017

• We intend to target a 4.13 kernel for the Ubuntu 17.10 release. The artful kernel is now based on Linux 4.11. The Ubuntu 17.10 Kernel Freeze is Thurs Oct 5, 2017.

=> ↺ GPD Pocket, The 7-Inch Ubuntu Laptop, is Now Shipping

• Ubuntu fans with small fingers and big pockets will be pleased to hear that the GPD Pocket Ubuntu edition has begun shipping.

• Demand for the diminutive device has been huge. In all, the GPD Pocket raised $3,509,253 via IndieGoGo — a staggering 1516% of its original $200,000 goal!

• And that excludes purchase made through third-party resellers like GearBest, who’ve been stocking the Windows version of the device for a little while.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Module offers 16-core Atom C3000 and four 10GbE ports

• Portwell’s “PCOM-B701” is a COM Express Type 7 with an up to 16-core Atom C3000 plus 4x 10GbE-KR, a GbE port, 20x PCIe lanes, and industrial temp support.

• Like the PCOM-B700G module that Portwell unveiled last month, the PCOM-B701 adopts the 125 x 95mm COM Express 3.0 Type 7 Basic form factor. Instead of supporting Intel’s 5th Gen Xeon or Pentium CPUs, however, it uses Intel’s new, up to 16-core Atom C3000 server-class chip, which we first saw in June on DFI’s similarly Type 7 DV970.

=> ↺ Thin Mini-ITX duo serves up Apollo Lake and Skylake-U

• Avalue’s EMX-APLP and EMX-SKLUP are thin Mini-ITX boards that tap Intel’s Apollo Lake and Skylake-U CPUs, respectively, each with triple displays and 4K.

• Avalue has launched a pair of “thin” Mini-ITX boards supporting Intel processors. The company never mentions the vertical dimension on the 170 x 170mm EMX-APLP and EMX-SKLUP motherboards, but the photos suggest they fit the general description. No OS support is listed, but Linux and Windows should run with no problems.

Tizen

=> ↺ Monetize Your Gear Apps: Integrate In App Purchase (IAP) with your Apps

=> ↺ Get more adventurous, combat and war 3D Games in Tizen Store

Android

=> ↺ Oh, it’s Android O… me want cookie

• Android is set for an update and the next version is codenamed “O”.

• The Google-developed mobile operating system has been in open beta for some time now, reaching alpha stage developer preview status in March of this year 2017.

=> ↺ Google Allo arrives on the web, only pairs with Android phones at launch

=> ↺ Android OS problems and how to fix them

=> ↺ The massive Android upgrade you probably didn’t notice

=> ↺ Chrome 61 beta allows sites to open Android share sheet, automatic video fullscreen, more

=> ↺ Avoiding Android ‘drive-by’ malware

=> ↺ Android manufacturers are already working out how to copy the

=> ↺ Truecaller Request Money Feature Added for Android Users

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Army reaps benefits of open-source policy

• The Army’s decision to formalize its open-source software development policy is paying off. At least two major projects have benefited from the policy announced this spring, with open source helping to speed development and save taxpayer dollars, according to officials from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

=> ↺ Hortonworks’ Shaun Bierweiler: Open Source Tech to Support Gov’t Cultural Shift Toward Data-Driven Ops

=> ↺ Minoca OS 0.4 Has X.Org Support, Available As A Coreboot Payload

• The Minoca operating system is a “general purpose operating system written from scratch” but has a POSIX-like interface and is SMP-ready, network-capable, event-driven, and other modern features.

• Minoca OS so far supports some x86 hardware and ARM SBC boards. At the end of June marked the Minoca OS 0.4 release to not a lot of attention. Minoca OS 0.4 added support for X.Org as well as fceux as a Nintendo NES emulator.

=> ↺ Fraunhofer HHI releases update to open-source radio channel model QuaDRiGa

• The open source MATLAB / Octave implementation is freely available at http://quadriga-channel-model.de

=> ↺ Power-packed — and open source — project management tools for enterprises

• Project management is a tough nut to crack. Multilevel tasks, complicated methodologies, large team sizes, geographically separated resources, office politics (have you seen the show “The Good Wife”?), progress tracking, reporting, analytics, planning – you get the idea. Intuitive and simplified project management tools were never such necessary arrows in the quiver of project managers.

Events

=> ↺ The Need for Connection: Building Habit-Forming Open Source Products

• With the increasing use of connected devices and the growing presence of online distractions, it’s important to understand the ideas behind habit-forming technologies. Nir Eyal, author of the best-selling book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, will be delivering a keynote presentation based on his book at Open Source Summit in Los Angeles.

Web Browsers

Chrome

=> ↺ An ancient Chrome tab trick just blew my mind

Databases

=> ↺ Database provider MongoDB has filed confidentially for IPO

=> ↺ Report: Open-source database firm MongoDB submits confidential IPO filing

=> ↺ Open-source NoSQL database company MongoDB files for IPO

• MongoDB, the NoSQL open-source database company founded in 2007, has filed for IPO in a public share offering that is expected to value the company at $1.6bn or more.

• The filing, made confidentially under a provision of the 2012 JOBS Act, was made within recent weeks, with the intention of going public before the end of the year. It comes after the Wall Street Journal reported in May that the company had hired Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to underwrite an imminent share issue.

CMS

=> ↺ Ghost, the open source blogging system, is ready for prime time

• Four long years ago John O’Nolan released a content management system for bloggers that was as elegant as it was spooky. Called Ghost, the original app was a promising Kickstarter product with little pizazz. Now the app is ready to take on your toughest blogs.

• O’Nolan just released version 1.0 of the software, a move that updates the tool with the best of modern blogging tools. You can download the self-hosted version here or use O’Nolan’s hosting service to try it out free.

• “About four years ago we launched Ghost on Kickstarter as a tiny little prototype of an idea to create the web’s next great open source blogging platform,” said O’Nolan. After “2,600 commits” he released the 1.0 version complete with a new editor and improved features.

=> ↺ SerenataFlowers.com and Hipper.com Extend Support to Open Source through OSI Sponsorship

• SerenataFlowers.com’s Managing Director, Martin Johansson, emphasized the company’s investment, “We actively use a large number of open source software in our website front-end and back-end development. Examples include, Snowplow Analytics, Metabase, Joomla, foundation framerwork, MySQL, and many others.” Johansson added, “Open source software is one of the cornerstones upon which our business is built. We believe open source software is both more secure and more efficient than their closed-source counterparts and we are actively looking to replace as many closed-source technologies for open source equivalent technology.”

BSD

=> ↺ t2k17 Hackathon Report: Bob Beck on buffer cache tweaks, libressl and pledge progress

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

=> ↺ Where does our money go?

• Each year, the FSFE spends close to half a million Euro raising awareness of and working to support the ecosystem around free software. Most of our permanent funds come from our supporters — the people who contribute financially to our work each month or year and continue to do so from month to month, and year to year. They are the ones who support our ability to plan for the long term and make long term commitments towards supporting free software.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Google is paying Apple billions per year to remain on the iPhone, Bernstein says

• Google will pay Apple about $3 billion this year to remain the default search engine on iOS devices, Bernstein says.

• The licensing payments make up a large bulk of Apple’s services revenue.

=> ↺ Reynolds: Google needs a new CEO, but dumping Sundar Pichai is not enough

• Various people (most of whom, as The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf noted, seem not to have read Damore’s actual memo, but rather to have been responding to an imaginary document instead) demanded that Damore be fired. CEO Sundar Pichai complied and gave Damore the boot. For this egregious piece of mob-induced misjudgment, Pichai must go. But that’s the least of the problems for Google, and Silicon Valley.

=> ↺ Dirty NYC dwellers are using AirDrop to send unwanted wang shots to women

• The report notes that the dirty trend was first spotted in London in 2015, but has since made its way to New York.

=> ↺ The Snopes Fight Is Even Way More Complicated Than We Originally Explained

• If you read our post a few weeks ago about the very messy legal fight between Snopes and Proper Media, you may recall that we spent many, many words explaining how the story was way, way, way more complicated than most in the media were portraying it. And significantly more complicated than how Snopes was portraying it. And we thought we did a pretty good job explaining all of that. Indeed, one of our commenters noted: “Wow. This couldn’t possibly get any messier.”

• He was wrong. It turns out it’s even messier. And it involves accusations of tax scams and shell companies, none of which came out in the last discussion on all of this. So, buckle in.

Science

=> ↺ Implication of our technological species being first and early

• Here we argue that this suggests that the typical technological species becomes extinct soon after attaining a modern technology and that this event results in the extinction of the planet’s global biosphere.

=> ↺ [Older] By convicting an honest statistician, Greece condemns itself

• Georgiou’s prosecution also raises questions about the integrity of Greece’s institutions. Four times in the past four years, public prosecutors have concluded Georgiou is innocent of charges raised against him, and yet these rulings have been discarded and the trials have continued. That suggests the possibility of some degree of political interference in the judicial system — something potential foreign investors will be watching with concern.

=> ↺ A Greek Statistician’s Cautionary Tale

=> ↺ What Developers Need to Consider When Exploring Machine Learning

• There are many reasons why startups might struggle to fulfill their potential for financial and technological success. Among the many unique challenges they face from initial concept through to expansion, a lack of scalability can be one of the most difficult to overcome. In this section, we’ll focus on the capabilities and practical application of machine and deep learning, the frameworks and technologies you need to know about, and the ways that the community can help from the very beginning.

=> ↺ A Dangerous Nuclear Ignorance

• Writing in a publication by scientists, read by many scientists and lovers of science, Shermer is indeed apologizing for war crimes and providing a method for other scientists to treat this as a non-scientific issue. Decades of aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki sufferings tell us otherwise, and demand better from scientists. Currently, American denial of climate destruction and nuclear warfare are endorsed at the highest level of government. The US State Department is openly considering changing its stated priorities from “democracy” to “security, prosperity and interests of the American people globally”. American scientists cannot take a backseat and claim moral indifference. The species depends on it.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ Oregon Lauded as Progressive Model for Reproductive Healthcare Reform

• As Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed on Tuesday a law that bans state insurance providers from covering abortion, pro-choice advocates celebrated a bill signed by Oregon Gov. Kate Brown that proponents are calling the nation’s most progressive reproductive healthcare policy.

=> ↺ Racism and Capitalism: the Barriers to Decent Health Care

• Capitalism exists to make profits. This is not a moral statement, but the underlying mechanism of the system, for a business must be successful at not only making, but maximizing profits, or it will lose out to competitors. Profits are derived from the difference between the value of goods produced and the investment in the means of production, ie labor, machinery, advertising, etc. It is the cost of labor where the major flexibility lies, and wages depend on the costs of maintaining the worker in working condition, providing training, and replacing workers lost to disability or retirement. Thus a low-skilled worker in a time of high unemployment, when he or she can be easily replaced, is much less valuable and is paid less than a highly trained one with scarce skills.

=> ↺ CBO: Trump’s Plan to Sabotage ACA Would Skyrocket Premiums

• The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Tuesday that premiums for many Americans would go up by 20 percent in 2018, should President Donald Trump follow through on his threats to stop paying the Affordable Care Act’s cost-sharing subsidies to insurance companies.

• The subsidies allow insurance companies to reduce costs for low-income Americans who rely on the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Following the Republican party’s failure to pass a bill repealing the healthcare law, Trump has said he may end the payments in order to allow the ACA to collapse.

• According to the nonpartisan CBO, doing so would seriously hurt people who rely on the plans covered by the law and harm the U.S. economy as well. The loss of the $7 billion payments would cause the federal deficit to rise by $6 billion in just one year, and $195 billion over the next decade.

=> ↺ Donald Trump Could Personally Cost Americans Thousands of Dollars in Bigger Health Care Bills

=> ↺ Deadly drug-resistant fungus sparks outbreaks in UK—and it’s stalking US

• More than 200 patients in more than 55 UK hospitals were discovered by healthcare workers to be infected or colonized by the multi-drug resistant fungus Candida auris, a globally emerging yeast pathogen that has experts nervous.

• Three of the hospitals experienced large outbreaks, which as of Monday were all declared officially over by health authorities there. No deaths have been reported since the fungus was first detected in the country in 2013, but 27 affected patients have developed blood infections, which can be life-threatening. And about a quarter of the more than 200 cases were clinical infections.

=> ↺ “Alternative” medicine’s toll on cancer patients: Death rate up to 5X higher

• Unproven alternative treatments are clearly risky. Some carry the risk of direct harms, such as improperly diluted homeopathic tablets, blinding stem cell injections, contaminated supplements, or tainted placenta pills. And others, such as magic healing crystals and useless detoxes, may risk indirect harm by taking the place of evidence-based treatments.

• However obvious the risks, measuring them has been tricky. For one thing, patients aren’t always eager to provide data, let alone admit to their doctors that they’ve ditched conventional therapies. But, by digging into the National Cancer database, researchers at Yale have finally quantified one type of risk for cancer patients—the risk of death. And the results are grim.

=> ↺ New Drone Footage Exposes the Scale of Factory Animal Farming Like Never Before

• The animal agriculture industry spends millions on deceptive advertising to persuade consumers that farmed animals roam freely on bucolic pastures. But I’ve been piloting drones over animal agriculture facilities for several years, and the video I’ve captured tells a far different story. Nearly all animals raised and slaughtered for food in the U.S. live in factory farms––facilities that treat animals as mere production units and show little regard for the natural environment or public health. Instead of creating widgets, these factories confine, mutilate, and disassemble animals who feel pain and pleasure just like our dogs and cats.

• Aerial views of the first factory farms I visited—pig facilities—didn’t capture grass and rolling hills, but instead exposed rows of windowless metal buildings. Each confined thousands of intelligent, sensitive pigs who spent their lives on concrete floors in crowded pens. The footage also reveals what appear to be red lakes but are in fact giant, open-air cesspools. Waste falls through slats in the pigs’ concrete flooring and is flushed into these massive pits, which sometimes have the surface area of multiple football fields. To lower the levels of these cesspools, many facilities spray their contents into the air where they turn into mist and drift into neighboring communities.

Security

=> ↺ How to configure your Chromebook for ultimate security

=> ↺ Government Changes Its Tune about MalwareTech

• Marcus Hutchins, AKA MalwareTech, just plead not guilty at his arraignment in Milwaukee, WI. After the hearing, his attorney, Marcia Hofmann, called him a “hero” and said he would be fully vindicated.

=> ↺ NHS cyber-defender Marcus Hutchins back online

• He must surrender his passport and will be tracked in the US via GPS during his release.

• [...]

• He added: “I’m still on trial, still not allowed to go home, still on house arrest; but now i am allowed online. Will get my computers back soon.”

=> ↺ Marcus Hutchins pleads not guilty to FBI malware charges

• British security researcher Marcus Hutchins, who came to prominence after he inadvertently stopped the spread of the WannaCry ransomware in May, has pleaded not guilty to writing the code that was used to create the banking trojan Kronos.

=> ↺ WannaCry ‘hero’ Marcus Hutchins pleads not guilty to Kronos malware charges

• Hutchins is now out on bail awaiting trial. Under his bail conditions, he will not be allowed to leave the US or to use the internet. He will also have to wear a GPS tag and, as a non-US national, won’t be allowed to work, and will therefore be reliant on family and charity to sustain himself.

=> ↺ WannaCry ‘saviour’ Marcus Hutchins pleads not guilty to malware charges

• His trial has been scheduled to start in October. If Mr Hutchins is convicted he could face 40 years in prison.

=> ↺ 2016 Open-Source Repo Continues to Fuel the PHP Server Ransomware Scene

• A PHP ransomware project open-sourced on GitHub is still spawning active threats, more than a year after it was released in early 2016.

• The project, unimaginatively named “Ransomware,” is the work of an Indonesian hacker who goes by the name of ShorTcut (or Shor7cut), a member of two hacking crews named Bug7sec and Indonesia Defacer Tersakiti.

=> ↺ New Data Security Network Launches to Champion and Promote Data Sanitization Best Practices

=> ↺ Security updates for Wednesday

=> ↺ Red Hat Secures Networking Flaws in OpenStack, the Linux Kernel

• Red Hat has fixed an important vulnerability in the OpenStack subsystem that’s used to manage network connectivity to and from virtual machines. If left unpatched, it could allow an attacker to access network resources from virtual machines.

• The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2017-7543 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database, is located in openstack-neutron, a “pluggable, scalable and API-driven” component of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform that’s used to provision networking services to virtual machines.

=> ↺ Atomicorp Releases First Kernel-Level Docker Security and is Available Today Through AWS, Azure and Direct

=> ↺ Shadow Brokers Eternal Exploits expected to remain effective

• The Shadow Brokers also leaked exploits such as EternalRomance which is similar to EternalBlue but targets Windows 7 SP1 machines using SMBv2 and targets a vulnerability in the process of handling SMBv1 transactions, EternalSynergy which uses a packet type confusion vulnerability, and EternalChampion which takes advantage of a race condition in transaction hand.

=> ↺ Shadow Brokers EternalPulsar malware: All you need to know about the leaked NSA SMB exploits

• Cylance researchers said the DoublePulsar backdoor, which experts previously said had successfully infected around 100,000 computers shortly after the exploit was leaked in April, functions as a backdoor providing hackers with secret access to Windows systems.

=> ↺ IoT Security for Developers

• Previous articles focused on how to securely design and configure a system based on existing hardware, software, IoT Devices, and networks. If you are developing IoT devices, software, and systems, there is a lot more you can do to develop secure systems.

• The first thing is to manage and secure communications with IoT Devices. Your software needs to be able to discover, configure, manage and communicate with IoT devices. By considering security implications when designing and implementing these functions you can make the system much more robust. The basic guideline is don’t trust any device. Have checks to verify that a device is what it claims to be, to verify device integrity, and to validate communications with the devices.

=> ↺ Powerful backdoor found in software used by >100 banks and energy cos.

• For 17 days starting last month, an advanced backdoor that gave attackers complete control over networks lurked in digitally signed software used by hundreds of banks, energy companies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers, researchers warned Tuesday.

• The backdoor, dubbed ShadowPad, was added to five server- or network-management products sold by NetSarang, a software developer with offices in South Korea and the US. The malicious products were available from July 17 to August 4, when the backdoor was discovered and privately reported by researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. Anyone who uses the five NetSarang titles Xmanager Enterprise 5.0, Xmanager 5.0, Xshell 5.0, Xftp 5.0, or Xlpd 5.0, should immediately review posts here and here from NetSarang and Kaspersky Lab respectively.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Media monsters: militarism, violence and cruelty in children’s culture

• Who would ever have thought that there would be torture scenes in G and PG-rated children’s films, or that video games would allow someone to feel the rush of killing, or that the Disney corporation would try to trademark ‘SEAL Team 6’ so that they could use it for toys, Christmas stockings and snow globes after this elite military group had killed Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani compound?

• Who could have imagined that a child would write a few loving words on her desk and then be arrested in front of her classmates, or that the U.S. government would torture real children in the ‘war on terror?’ Alexa Gonzalez, a 12-year old girl from Queens, doodled “I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here. 2/1/10,” adding a smiley face for emphasis. The next thing she knew she was escorted from school in handcuffs and detained for hours.

• And what of 14-year old Mohammed El-Gharani, who was subjected to sleep deprivation and hung from his wrists while a U.S. soldier threatened to cut off his penis with a knife? Welcome to the new face of childhood in America.

=> ↺ A Ukraine Link to North Korea’s Missiles?

• U.S. intelligence analysts reportedly have traced North Korea’s leap forward in creating an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking U.S. territory to a decaying Ukrainian rocket-engine factory whose alleged role could lift the cover off other suppressed mysteries related to the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev.

• [...]

• Kolomoisky, who has triple citizenship from Ukraine, Cyprus and Israel, was eventually ousted as governor of Dnipropetrovsk (now called Dnipro) on March 25, 2015, after a showdown with Ukraine’s current President Petro Poroshenko over control of the state-owned energy company, but by then Kolomoisky’s team had put its corrupt mark on the region.

• At the time of the Kolomoisky-Poroshenko showdown, Valentyn Nalyvaychenko, chief of the State Security Service, accused Dnipropetrovsk officials of financing armed gangs and threatening investigators, Bloomberg News reported, while noting that Ukraine had sunk to 142nd place out of 175 countries in Transparency International’s Corruptions Perception Index, the worst in Europe.

• Even earlier in Kolomoisky’s brutal reign, Dnipropetrovsk had become the center for the violent intrigue that has plagued Ukraine for the past several years, including the dispatch of neo-Nazi militias to kill ethnic Russians who then turned to Russia for support.

=> ↺ Among the Racists

• But, like those crude black-and-white mosquito-Jew cartoons, the Final Solution never changes. Hanging them from lamp-posts. Gassing them with Zyklon B. (Arcane debates about the efficacy of various gaseous poisons are common.) Rendering them into lampshades. It’s a nonstop tape-loop of race-hatred and genocide-dreams. And this is where the outsider—no matter how well-versed in the rhetoric, no matter how he steels himself against it—begins to falter. I was an eager infiltrator, but this is where I lost heart. Because to live through that ongoing conversation–and not just to endure it, but to be a laughing participant in it–is something that my nervous system was not wired for. The synapses of any faintly decent human being are wired to short out and shut down at this point. You have to keep kick-starting your brain. And in the end it’s too exhausting.

=> ↺ Charlottesville: Outrage, Hypocrisy & Obama’s Betrayal

• It is simply untrue to claim that the United States has a problem with white supremacy. It is untrue because the United States is synonymous with white supremacy; it is a nation founded and established by white supremacists, whose constitution was written by white supremacists, and in which white supremacy is wedded into the cultural and social fabric, not forgetting its very institutions.

• While it may be tempting to dismiss 500 knuckle-dragging racists marching through Charlottesville waving Confederate flags as unrepresentative of a nation that takes pride in values of tolerance and racial equality, it would be wrong. Those who took part in those ugly scenes are the reality rather than the myth of America. They know that the American exceptionalism which Obama, while president, declared he believed in with every fiber of his being, is in truth white exceptionalism – ‘white’ in this context being not only a racial construct but also an ideological construct.

=> ↺ Pentagon Ready for “Full Range” of Options, Despite South Korea Pleas to Rule Out War

• The highest-ranking US military officer again warned that the Trump administration stands ready to attack North Korea, despite pleas for peace from South Korea.

• Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Joseph Dunford on Monday said that the Pentagon is prepared “to use the full range of military capabilities to defend our allies and the US homeland.” Dunford made the comments in Seoul while meeting with South Korean civilian and military officials.

• South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Monday urged the sabre-rattling to stop, declaring “there must not be another war on the Korean Peninsula.”

• President Moon also vowed to work with the US “to safeguard peace,” according to the AP, and told Pyongyang to “stop issuing menacing statements and provoking.”

• “Whatever ups and downs we face, the North Korean nuclear situation must be resolved peacefully,” Moon also stated.

=> ↺ In the Wake of Charlottesville, Let’s Call for Structural Transformation

• Critiques of Trump focused on his days-long inability to reference Neo-Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan, eventually forcing him to deliver a new statement. But what is the point of pushing Trump to denounce white supremacists, when he clearly does not have the moral authority to criticize them? Trump helped popularize birtherism, which offered a basis for Republican Party obstructionism during the Obama era. Trump-fueled birtherism also helped delegitimize certain policies, such as the Affordable Care Act.

=> ↺ Taking Nuclear War Seriously

• With remarkably little public debate, the U.S. government has raised the risk of a nuclear conflagration with face-offs against Russia and now North Korea, an existential issue that Dennis J Bernstein discusses with journalist John Pilger.

=> ↺ Cataclysmic Risks of North Korean Crisis

• A lot of people in Congress were very concerned about Trump’s remarks. That was true around the world, as well. Moon Jae-in won the election based on his policy of wanting to engage again with North Korea. The last two presidents had rejected engagement and the situation had become very tense because of their hard-line policies.

=> ↺ The Agony of ‘Regime Change’ Refugees

• European nations have been thrown into a political crisis by the hundreds of thousands of migrants coming north from the Middle East and Africa. The number has grown in recent years, due to a mix of wars and poverty, resulting in a visible increase of the influx of foreigners across Europe, and a popular backlash that has political institutions scrambling to find a way to stem the flow and lessen the sense of emergency.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Stories Claiming DNC Hack Was ‘Inside Job’ Rely Heavily On A Stupid Conversion Error No ‘Forensic Expert’ Would Make

• While we wait for the Mueller investigation to clearly illustrate if and how Russia meddled in the last election, there’s no shortage of opinions regarding how deep this particular rabbit hole goes. While it’s pretty obvious that Putin used social media and media propaganda to pour some napalm on our existing bonfires of dysfunction, just how much of an impact these efforts had on the election won’t be clear until a full postmortem is done. Similarly, while Russian hackers certainly had fun probing our voting systems and may have hacked both political parties, clearly proving state involvement is something else entirely.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ At ITC hearing, two US solar manufacturers ask for tariffs on imported cells

• A US-based solar-panel components maker called Suniva filed a petition with the International Trade Commission (ITC) this spring, alleging unfair trade practices after the company declared bankruptcy. It was later joined in its petition by SolarWorld America, another US-based solar cell manufacturer. Today, the two companies pleaded their case (PDF) in front of the ITC and are asking for tariffs to be placed on solar-panel materials imported to the US.

=> ↺ Trump Has Broad Power to Block Climate Change Report

• Earlier this month, someone involved in the government’s latest report on climate change provided The New York Times with a copy of the version submitted to the Trump administration for final approval. The main intent of the leak, according to several people tracking the report, was to complicate any attempt to suppress the study or water down its findings.

• Publication of the document inflamed an already-fraught debate about climate change. Administration officials and Republican lawmakers accused the leaker and journalists of manufacturing a dispute. They said the report, which was required by law, was moving through a normal process of White House review.

=> ↺ Ignoring Threat of Rising Seas, Trump Eliminates Flood Risk Standards

• Reuters, New York Times, and the Washington Post reported that Trump’s order “revoked an Obama-era executive order that required strict building standards for government-funded projects to reduce exposure to increased flooding from sea level rise and other consequences of climate change.”

=> ↺ Trump Signs Order Rolling Back Environmental Rules on Infrastructure

=> ↺ Does Game of Thrones Contain a Stark Warning About Climate Change?

• Many people who care about climate change often complain that although the issue may get discussed in the inside pages of serious news publications it rarely cuts through to popular culture. For something as momentous as humans threatening the habitability of the only planet suitable for human habitation, climate change hasn’t really had the airtime one would expect.

• However, scratch under the surface and we can see that one of the biggest small screen blockbusters of the last few years, Game of Thrones, is an almost perfect metaphor for the politics of the climate crisis.

• The popular adaptation of author George R.R. Martin’s fantasy epic A Song of Ice and Fire has been showing its potential as a modern-day climate fable, but it really hit home last week.

• In the seventh season’s third episode, “The Queen’s Justice,” hero Jon Snow, asks Tyrion Lannister: “How do I convince people who don’t know me that an enemy they don’t believe in is coming to kill them all?” Well quite Jon. We environmentalists feel your pain.

Finance

=> ↺ From supply chain to equity: real-world uses of the blockchain today

• A blockchain is a digital ledger that is available for all parties to see, providing transparency across the chain – and businesses in financial trading, insurance, and supply chain management are all taking notice.

=> ↺ Bitcoin, Fake News, and the Illusion of Money

• Bitcoin’s value is an illusion of money. But so is all governmental money, all central-bank money. All governments always knew that the value of money is an illusion: they could just not fathom a day would come when they would no longer be in complete control of that illusion.

=> ↺ Pro-EU activists to stage ‘stop Brexit’ march during Tory conference

• Pro-EU campaigners are planning to stage one of their biggest “stop Brexit” marches outside the Conservative party conference this autumn.

• Campaigners said their aim was to make the party “face up to the reality of Brexit” when they march to the conference centre to make sure their voices are heard by delegates inside.

• Thousands are expected to turn out for the rally, starting in Platt Fields in Manchester on the first day of the conference – the same day as the traditional anti-Tory and anti-austerity protests held outside the gathering, which begins on 1 October.

=> ↺ As Billionaire Apple Heiress Laurene Powell Jobs Buys the Atlantic, Will Her Fierce Charter School Advocacy Be on the Agenda?

=> ↺ Gates Makes Largest Donation Since 2000 With $4.6 Billion Pledge

• Gates has made the majority of his donations to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the charity he and his wife use to direct their philanthropic {sic} efforts.

=> ↺ Labour calls for benefit shakeup to be halted after £3,100 a year impact on single parents revealed

• Ministers should halt the rollout of the Government’s flagship welfare reform, Universal Credit, Labour warned today.

• Hard-up families could have lost huge amounts of cash are being switched onto the benefit, which rolls six working-age handouts into one payment, a report warned.

• Analysis from the House of Commons Library shows falling incomes for both public and private sector workers, with real wages stagnating and a reduction in in-work support.

=> ↺ The government’s customs union plan is an absolute dog’s breakfast

• It’s hard to know where to start with the customs union position paper. It is such a mess, such a full-spectrum catastrophe of ineptitude and wishful thinking, that it’s honestly quite difficult to choose which bits of it to single out for criticism.

• On Sunday, Phillip Hammond and Liam Fox wrote a joint piece for the Sunday Telegraph agreeing that the UK would not stay in the customs union during transition. There is no particular reason to do this, except for the religious zeal of hard Brexiters. Staying in would allow British business to enjoy certainty and consistency as we left the EU and reduce the amount of work the UK government has to do before Brexit day. But regardless, that is not happening, so now we are full steam ahead to leave, even in the transition period.

• [...]

• The streamline option recognises that the UK and the EU would be third parties, but tries to simplify customs arrangements so that they are as frictionless as possible. This is done through continuing “some existing arrangements”, “reducing or removing” other barriers, and a variety of highly optimistic IT solutions. There’d be a waiver on entry and exit requirements, a mutual recognition agreement for authorised economic operators, technology-based solutions for roll-on-roll-off ports, and some other initiatives. Lastly, and with no small hint of irony, the UK would join the Common Transit Convention, a transit procedure used between the EU and the Efta states which Britain refuses to join for transition.

• [...]

• Through it all, one question sticks with you: Why the hell are we doing this? This is not even about Brexit. It’s about leaving the customs union, which is a frankly insane thing to do. Officials defending these plans say that leaving the EU means leaving the customs union. It does not. That is a choice taken by the British government. This dog’s breakfast is the result. Imagine what else we could be doing with our time.

=> ↺ Irish border pulls UK toward softer Brexit

• The key thing to understand about the British stance on the Northern Ireland border, set out in a new position paper Wednesday, is the extreme importance the government is attaching to maintaining the peace process.

• The border was a conflict zone within the lifetime of most of the people now making decisions about its future. Avoiding a return to those days is a responsibility not borne lightly by any serious British politician.

=> ↺ In rare rebuke of Trump, PM May says leaders must condemn far-right views

• British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Wednesday there was no equivalence between fascists and those who opposed them, a rare rebuke of U.S. President Donald Trump by one of his closest foreign allies.

• Trump inflamed tensions after a deadly rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, by insisting that counter-protesters were also to blame, drawing condemnation from some Republican leaders and praise from white far-right groups.

• “There’s no equivalence, I see no equivalence between those who propound fascist views and those who oppose them and I think it is important for all those in positions of responsibility to condemn far-right views wherever we hear them,” May told reporters when asked to comment on Trump’s stance.

=> ↺ Lenin Moreno, Rafael Correa and the bull in the China shop

• As a consequence the governing party’s candidate in the last presidential elections, Lenin Moreno, barely scraped over the line, and did so principally because he was not Rafael Correa. He promised a different style of government. And after the first two months we can clearly say that we have exactly that. Strangely, that has made a lot of people within the governing Alianza País unhappy. Moreno has been called a traitor, weak, a liar, a neoliberal, a sellout to the Right, and all this by those who are his own side, including the ex-president himself. Correa has actively gone after his successor, taking a leaf out of Donald Trump’s book, twittering on a daily basis and causing a great deal of damage by blundering about in his own china shop.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ ‘Bernie Bros’ and ‘Alt-Left’ Are Propaganda Terms Meant to Disempower

• The 2016 Presidential Primaries ended more than a year ago, but the divisive and destructive rhetoric that was developed during it remains prevalent. During the battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the Bernie Bros narrative, a resurfacing of the Obama Boys narrative used during the 2008 Primaries by Clinton supporters, became a novelty for political opponents of Bernie Sanders. It served as an easy smear campaign that could be exploited and touted without citing any actual evidence to corroborate the claims behind it.

=> ↺ Trump Inner-Circle Privately “Appalled” and “Disgusted.” Publicly? Dead Silent

• While the New York Times’ Glenn Thrush reported he had it from “three people with knowledge” that Gary Cohn, chair of President Donald Trump’s National Economic Council, was “upset” and “disgusted” with his boss’s defense of white supremacists during an “unhinged” performance at a Tuesday press conference, Cohn has yet to speak publicly about such feelings.

• In response to Thrush, many people asked why, if Cohn felt the way he did, would he remain silent or continue to stand with the president? “So he’s resigning…” begged one. “That’s nice,” quipped another. “The exits are clearly marked and not hard to find.”

• Cohn’s private feelings were also reported by Axios on Wednesday, where journalists Mike Allen and Jonathan Swann were “told” that Cohn’s reaction to Trump’s remarks were “somewhere between appalled and furious.”

=> ↺ The Racism at Charlottesville is a Symptom of a Nation Built on White Supremacy

• The racism and white supremacy that were on full display at the Charlottesville white supremacist rally is symptomatic of a United States culture that has whitewashed its history, ignored it’s rampant human rights abuses and stowed away the darkest corners of its past to formulate a distorted view of American exceptionalism predicated on white supremacy. America was built on slavery, genocide, violence, and white male supremacy that exploited others for profit and power for centuries, and still do to this day. The moral high ground of American exceptionalism that some people have taken to condemn the rally’s hate, with claims of “this is not America,” demonstrate a historical obliviousness or refusal to accept responsibility for this history.

=> ↺ After Charlottesville

• Racism, exposed once more in the terror visited on Charlottesville, Va., still scars America. Hundreds of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, klansmen and other fervid racists gathered — some armed with assault rifles, wearing camouflage. They marched with lit torches, yelling Nazi slogans, looking for trouble. They provoked the violence, terrorized a city, and took the life of Heather Heyer and injured many more. In the reaction to those horrors, character is revealed.

=> ↺ Antifa: A Look at the Anti-Fascist Movement Confronting White Supremacists in the Streets

• President Trump is facing widespread criticism for his latest comments on the deadly white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia. Speaking at Trump Tower on Tuesday, Trump said the violence was in part caused by what he called the “alt-left.” President Trump’s comment were widely decried. Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney wrote on Twitter, “No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.” We look at one of the groups who confronted the white supremacists in the streets: the anti-fascists known as antifa. We speak to Mark Bray, author of the new book, “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.”

=> ↺ A Call for Self-Defense in the Face of White Supremacy

• In order to self-defend, groups targeted for violence by white supremacists have to first acknowledge in ourselves that we are worthy of defending. Those of us who experience the daily damages of white supremacy and desire its end deserve a world without it.

=> ↺ ‘Embarrassing’ for US, Trump Defense of Neo-Nazi Rally Stuns People Worldwide

• Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) charged President Donald Trump with “embarrassing” his own country during a press conference on Tuesday—and the overnight evidence suggests he’s exactly right.

• President Donald Trump’s defense of last weekend’s violent neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia was met with shock across the country and around the world on Wednesday, with some of the strongest criticism coming from his hometown of New York City.

• A day after Trump was greeted by hundreds of his former neighbors chanting “New York hates you,” and as protesters gathered outside Trump Tower for more demonstrations, the New York Daily News and New York Post offered clear summations of the city’s position on the president.

=> ↺ Centrist Pundits Paved Way for Trump’s ‘Alt-Left’ False Equivalence

• President Donald Trump sparked outrage Tuesday afternoon after he equated Nazis and counter-protesters in Charlottesville. To do so, he referred to the anti-racist activists as the “alt-left,” with the implication that they were the equivalent of the “alt-right,” two sides to the same coin, showing there was, in his words, evil “on both sides.”

• It’s important to remember that the “alt-left” rhetorical gambit—deliberately equating leftists with the alt-right, itself a euphemism for internet-savvy racism—was popularized by centrist pundits and Democratic Party apparatchiks in an attempt to stigmatize and smear those challenging the center-left establishment. As it turns out, there’s no way to suggest that unruly leftists are as bad as neo-Nazis without suggesting that neo-Nazis are no worse than unruly leftists.

=> ↺ ‘This Is a Company That Is Essentially Producing Trump TV’

• Sinclair Broadcasting Group is already the largest owner of television stations around the country, with some 173. But it’s looking to increase that dominance by taking over Tribune Media, which owns stations in key markets like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. The deal would mean Sinclair would own more than 220 stations, reaching some 72 percent of US TV households.

=> ↺ Reactions to the Charlottesville White Nationalist Rally

• President Donald Trump doubled down on his comments that there are “many sides” to blame for the violence in Charlottesville during an Aug. 15 press conference at Trump Tower.

=> ↺ Trump Asks, ‘What About the Alt-Left?’ Here’s an Answer

=> ↺ Trump blows up damage control as he blames ‘both sides’ for Charlottesville

• It took President Donald Trump two days to explicitly call out the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who engaged in violent protests over the weekend that resulted in the death of a 32-year-old Charlottesville woman.

• It took him less than 24 hours to undo the damage control that had been foisted upon him by teleprompter-wielding, crisis-managing aides.

=> ↺ Everyone working for Trump knows his Charlottesville response is an abomination

• Now that President Trump has reverted to his earlier position that “many sides” are to blame for the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, the dismay of senior people very close to him is suddenly getting smuggled out to the rest of the world, as if by magic. We are told that Gary Cohn, a top economic adviser to the White House, was “disgusted” and “upset.” We learn that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have been urging moderation. We are informed that Trump’s top aides were “stunned” by Trump’s comments, and that new chief of staff John F. Kelly was “very frustrated” by them.

• At yesterday’s presser, the president adamantly defended his original statement that the fault lies with bigotry on “many sides” and reiterated that “there’s blame on both sides” for what happened. He said that the rallying white supremacists and Nazis had been treated “unfairly” by the media, and that there “were very fine people on both sides.” No doubt, many of the top officials around Trump are deeply disturbed or horrified by all of this.

=> ↺ Intel CEO is the latest to leave Trump’s manufacturing council

• Intel CEO Brian Krzanich has become the third top business leader to step down from President Trump’s manufacturing council on Monday.

• He follows the chiefs of Merck (MRK) and Under Armour (UA), who announced their decisions earlier Monday amid the fallout over Trump’s response to violence over the weekend at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

• “We should honor — not attack — those who have stood up for equality and other cherished American values. I hope this will change, and I remain willing to serve when it does,” Krzanich wrote in a blog post on the Silicon Valley company’s website late Monday.

=> ↺ Donald Trump’s failure in Charlottesville wasn’t political — it was moral

• Donald Trump is who we thought he was. After a campaign gestated in birtherism, Trump was slow to condemn the likes of white supremacist David Duke, routinely spoke in coded racial language to energize a segment of people angry about the changing face of the country and condoned violence against those who disagreed with him, Trump, over the last four days, has proven that he is that same person as president. And that person is the opposite of a leader. And that person is dangerous to this country’s well-being.

=> ↺ Treason And Other High Crimes And Misdemeanors Demand Trump Be Impeached

=> ↺ Repugnant

• Make no mistake about it; today’s statement was deliberate. Trump’s entry into the political fray was as a leader of the so-called birthers, questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship. His announcement of candidacy was a full-throated anti-immigrant stance, which he never moderated and has not changed.

• Yes, previous American presidents have been racist, some of them proudly so. But since the Civil War we have not seen — until today — a president of the United States throw his political lot in with white nationalists and neo-Nazis. Good people voted for this man, hoping that he would shake things up in Washington. Good people cannot stand by statements such as Trump made today.

• It is time for the Congress to censure this President. The statements made today are morally bankrupt, and are intolerable. Good people do not march with neo-Nazis, and good people cannot let statements such as those made today, stand.

=> ↺ Trump Ends C.E.O. Advisory Councils as Main Group Acts to Disband

=> ↺ ‘Shame! Shame!’: New Yorkers Surround Trump Tower to Protest President’s Return

• Protesters on Fifth Ave. in New York City shouted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” as President Donald Trump returned to Trump Tower Monday night for the first time since he took office in January. Thousands of people—and an inflatable rat designed to resemble Trump—filled the streets of Midtown letting the president know “New York hates you!”

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ When Europe outsources censorship to Facebook and Twitter, who upholds free speech? And where’s the outrage?

• The European Commission is circumventing bans on governmental censorship by asking communciations platforms like Facebook and Twitter to agree to “voluntary codes of conduct”, which all users would be held to. As these are private platforms, they are not subject to the laws that limit what governments can do, and can impose any terms and conditions they like. But when it’s not really an option to be on these platforms in someone’s daily life, doesn’t it leave a very sour taste when governments are starting to limit speech – limit legal speech – by calling it “voluntary agreements”?

=> ↺ Service Provider Boots Hate Site Off the Internet

• In a surprise move, the web services company Cloudflare appears to have ended its relationship with The Daily Stormer, taking the leading neo-Nazi site off the internet for the second time this week.

• Cloudflare protects websites against common forms of attack, including denial of service, which is known as DDOS.

• [...]

• Cloudflare joins a long list of services from which the site has been banned. PayPal, GoDaddy, Google and Twitter have all previously suspended The Daily Stormer in one way or another. Many did so after the site posted a story mocking the appearance of Heather Heyer, the young woman killed after a white supremacist in Charlottesville drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters.

=> ↺ Tech companies in the crosshairs on white supremacy and free speech

• The neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer had its internet domain registration revoked twice in less than 24 hours in the wake of the weekend violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, part of a broad move by the tech industry in recent months to take a stronger hand in policing online hate-speech and incitements to violence.

=> ↺ GoDaddy and Google have refused service to a notorious neo-Nazi site

=> ↺ Tech companies block neo-Nazi groups after Charlottesville rally

• Technology companies have cracked down on neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups online following the Charlottesville rally, blocking content, users and websites deemed to be offensive.

=> ↺ Tech companies turn on Daily Stormer and the ‘alt-right’ after Charlottesville

• The internet has long been a gathering place for white supremacists. But in the wake of the Virginia attack, some are reconsidering their willingness to host hate.

=> ↺ Neo-Nazi site moves to dark web after GoDaddy and Google bans

=> ↺ One Twitter Account’s Mission To Make White Supremacists Very, Very Famous

• After the ugly stain that was this past weekend, when a group of “protestors” took to the streets of Charlottesville to “protest” the removal of a statue commemorating some loser who lost a war because he was a loser, there has been an unfortunate strain of calls to crack down on speech rights of these imbeciles. It’s exactly the wrong sort of reaction for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that starting down the road to relieving the rights to speech you don’t like today can come back and bite you in your ass tomorrow. Our own Tim Cushing’s take on how important it is to defend the speech rights of those we dislike the most is among the best I’ve read, but it focuses on the need to rally support for speech rights in the face of outrage. Left unsaid is at least one potential solution to the speech polution that occurrs when a bunch of race-obsessed jackwagons decide to throw a party: more speech and expression.

=> ↺ Charlottesville is reshaping the fight against online hate

• This morning, the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer dropped off the internet, the result of sustained campaigning by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups. In the wake of a killing and widespread violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, web services company GoDaddy announced it was dropping the Daily Stormer as a client, leaving the site without a registrar. After a brief stay at Google, the site dropped off the web entirely. As of press time, requests to dailystormer.com are simply timing out, although a replica site has already been established as a Tor Hidden Service.

=> ↺ Racist Daily Stormer moves to Russian domain after losing .com address (updated)

=> ↺ The withdrawal of the Mandela book was nothing short of censorship

• “Mandela’s Last Years”, written by retired military doctor Vejay Ramlakan, has become a sought after commodity since the publisher, Penguin SA, withdrew it from the shelves in July. Ramlakan was the head of the medical team that looked after Nelson Mandela until his death in 2013.

• The withdrawing and pulping of a book represents a huge expense for a publisher, as well as a source of some embarrassment. So why did the publisher do it?

• Soon after the book was published, members of the Mandela family, led by his widow Graça Machel, threatened legal action. It must be admitted that the basis for any legal action wasn’t clear, although it was probably linked to defamation. The book, Machel argued, constituted “an assault on the trust and dignity” of her late husband.

=> ↺ International report – ‘The Internet has no borders’: worldwide de-indexing injunction upheld against Google

=> ↺ An open letter to Stapleford Parish Council after disgraceful censorship of emergency meeting about travellers

=> ↺ Whistleblower Chelsea Manning, Techdirt Founder Mike Masnick, and Free Expression Defender Annie Game Named Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award Winners

=> ↺ As Trump Adds Fuel to the Fire, Baltimore Removes Confederate Statues in Dead of Night

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ A.B. 375, California’s Broadband Privacy Act, Very Close to Becoming Law

=> ↺ Proposed Law Would Turn US Borders Into Unblinking Eyes With A Thirst For Human DNA

• Some senators are looking to turn US borders into the equivalent of London: cameras everywhere and a host of new incursions into travelers’ and visitors’ privacy. Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica “outed” the not-yet-introduced bill — titled “Building America’s Trust Act” [wtf] — since the supporting lawmakers have yet to formally announce their plans to make the US a worse country to live in, much less visit.

• The one-pager [PDF] for the bill [PDF] (which is 186 pages long) makes it clear what the objective is: more surveillance, more boots on the ground, and green lights for law enforcement agencies located anywhere within 100 miles of the nation’s borders. The bill calls for more judges, prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and inspectors, as well as walls, levees, fences — whatever might further separate the US from its bordering neighbors (but only the southern one, apparently).

=> ↺ Trump DOJ Wants Info on Every Person Who Visited Anti-Trump Protest Site

• Decrying it as “investigatory overreach” and a “clear abuse of government authority,” web hosting provider DreamHost is challenging a request it received from the Justice Department for information about visitors to a client’s site used to organize protests against President Donald Trump on his Inauguration Day.

• In a blog post titled “We Fight for the Users,” the DreamHost wrote on Monday evening that the DOJ had demanded personal information of more than 1.3 million people who visited disruptj20.org, where they could find information about where anti-Trump events were taking place on January 20.

=> ↺ A Sweeping Search Warrant Targets Anti-Trump Website in Clear Threat to the Constitution

• One of the core principles enshrined in the Fourth Amendment is a prohibition on general searches — meaning, the government cannot simply go fishing for a wide range of information in the hope that some kind of useful evidence will turn up. But that’s exactly what the government appears to be doing with a newly revealed search warrant seeking reams of digital records about an Inauguration Day protest website that could implicate more than 1 million users.

• We first learned yesterday that within days of President Trump’s inauguration, the web server hosting company DreamHost received a subpoena from the government seeking records about a website hosted on its servers. Now the government has followed up that initial demand with a search warrant seeking a huge array of records “related to” the website. Those records would include the IP addresses of over 1.3 million visitors to the site.

=> ↺ Letter to Metropolitan Police: Scrap Notting Hill Carnival automated facial recognition plans

• We are writing to express our concern regarding the Metropolitan Police’s plans to use mobile facial recognition at this year’s Notting Hill Carnival.

• We are calling on you to scrap plans to use automated facial recognition at Notting Hill Carnival and to urgently start a dialogue with civil society and Parliament about the use of this technology.

=> ↺ Tech companies, law profs agree: The Fourth Amendment should protect data

• A group of prominent tech companies and lawyers has come together in new friend-of-the-court filings submitted to the Supreme Court on Tuesday. The group is arguing in favor of stronger legal protections for data generated by apps and digital devices in an important privacy case pending before the court.

• The companies, which include Apple, Google, and Microsoft among many others, argue that the current state of the law, which distinguishes between “content” (which requires a warrant) and “non-content” (which does not) “make[s] little sense in the context of digital technologies.”

=> ↺ Don’t let Trump get his hands on our data – Sign now!

• “I have made it clear in my campaign that I would support and endorse the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.” – Donald Trump, 15/2/2016

• President Trump now has unrivalled access to data collected by UK intelligence agencies. And thanks to the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act, the UK is collecting huge amounts of data about all our lives in Britain and around the world – in bulk.

• Trump has threatened to use torture, ban Muslims from entering the US, and expand use of the death penalty. He plans to ban most refugees and suspend visas for people coming from majority-Muslim countries.

=> ↺ Trump’s NAFTA Renegotiations Could Put Canadians’ Personal Data At Risk

• Canada and the US are getting ready to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—something president Trump has been vocal about changing—and on the table are rules defining where online information will be stored. Privacy experts are concerned American law enforcement or spy agencies could get access to Canadians’ sensitive information, while others point out that Canada already shares plenty of data with the US.

=> ↺ Real people don’t (just) need encryption

• Because real people don’t just need encrypted messaging apps that offer end-to-end protection, they also need end-point security — the kinds of thoughtful design and expedient updating and transparent code that enables them to defend their devices from attackers who gain access to their messages by compromising their phones and computers.

=> ↺ End-to-end encryption isn’t enough security for ‘real people’

• Government officials continue to seek technology companies’ help fighting terrorism and crime. But the most commonly proposed solution would severely limit regular people’s ability to communicate securely online. And it ignores the fact that governments have other ways to keep an electronic eye on targets of investigations.

=> ↺ Justice demands 1.3M IP addresses related to Trump resistance site

• “In essence, the Search Warrant not only aims to identify the political dissidents of the current administration, but attempts to identify and understand what content each of these dissidents viewed on the website,” the company’s general counsel, Chris Ghazarian, said in a legal argument opposing the request.

=> ↺ Court orders web host to hand over IP addresses of anti-Trump website visitors

• A search warrant, dated 12 July from a District of Colombia court, said that visitors to the disruptj20.org site, hosted by Dreamhost, must be available as they constitute “the individuals who participated, planned, organized, or incited the January 20 riot,”.

=> ↺ We Fight for the Users

• At the center of the requests is disruptj20.org, a website that organized participants of political protests against the current United States administration. While we have no insight into the affidavit for the search warrant (those records are sealed), the DOJ has recently asked DreamHost to provide all information available to us about this website, its owner, and, more importantly, its visitors.

=> ↺ Uber settles claims that it mishandled private information about users and drivers

• “Uber failed consumers in two key ways: First by misrepresenting the extent to which it monitored its employees’ access to personal information about users and drivers, and second by misrepresenting that it took reasonable steps to secure that data,” said FTC acting chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen in a statement. “This case shows that, even if you’re a fast growing company, you can’t leave consumers behind: you must honor your privacy and security promises.”

=> ↺ Google, Facebook ask Supreme Court to protect cellphone data under Fourth Amendment

• Apple, Facebook, Google and other major technology companies asked the Supreme Court late on Monday night to rule that their users’ data should be protected from warantless search and seizure by the government.

=> ↺ Americans Love Ordering Pizza on Facebook

• TGI Fridays’ Perdue joined the company earlier this year from Taco Bell, which was a pioneer in letting customers order with their phones. Now, TGI Fridays has become the first restaurant chain to let people pay with their Amazon accounts — a new wrinkle in the convenience wars. Rather than fumbling with wallets and finding credit cards, customers use the Amazon app on their phones.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Julian Assange, a Man Without a Country

• Still, his legal circumstances had barely changed. Scotland Yard was maintaining an arrest warrant for him, based on the violation of his bail. Assange was fighting the warrant, but he told me that even if it was dropped immediately he would not walk out. What he wanted, it seemed, was immunity: a guarantee that he would never be called to the United States to face any trial. Without it, he was going to stay put.

=> ↺ Twitter User Sparks Controversy for Outing Virginia Protesters

• So far, at least two people who attended the protest have been revealed and one lost his job, according to the Twitter feed. Critics on the right and left said it was too easy to identify a photo incorrectly and ruin someone’s reputation.

=> ↺ Saudi Government Looking To Jail More Citizens For ‘Harming Public Order’ With Their Religious Tweets

• The internet may be an amazing communication tool, but it’s also a handy way for governments to keep an eye on their citizens. Saudi Arabia uses the internet for multiple things — mainly monitoring dissent and controlling communication.

• An expansive cybercrime law, coupled with longstanding statutes outlawing criticism of the official religion, have made it easy for the Saudi government to jail critics and cut off communications platforms. Bloggers have been imprisoned and encrypted services asked for technical details presumably in hopes of inserting the government into private conversations.

=> ↺ American accused of faking eBay sales to fund US terror pleads guilty

• A 32-year-old American man accused of using an eBay account for fake computer-printer transactions to raise funds for a US terror plot pleaded guilty to federal terrorism-related charges Tuesday.

• Mohamed Elshinawy, whom the government said pledged allegiance to ISIS, told the authorities that the up to $8,700 he received via PayPal was to be used for “operational purposes” (PDF) in the US, like conducting a terror attack. However, he also told the authorities, according to court documents, that he was just ripping off overseas ISIS operatives and had no intention of carrying out an attack in the US.

=> ↺ The Joe Arpaio I Knew

• The former Maricopa County sheriff made his name in part by targeting immigrants — even after a judge ordered him to stop. As President Trump considers a pardon, it’s worth remembering precisely what Arpaio did in his decades in law enforcement.

=> ↺ They Got Hurt at Work. Then They Got Deported.

• How insurance companies use a Florida law to get undocumented immigrants arrested and deported when they get injured on the job — and what it means in Trump’s America.

=> ↺ “Honour killings” in Russia’s North Caucasus

• “You can’t say that Sultan Daurbekov ended his daughter’s life, that he killed her.” This is how Ilyas Timishev began his defence of his client. “What you have to say is that he took her away from life, so that she couldn’t bring shame to herself, her father and her entire family. That’s the correct description.” Timishev’s client, Sultan Daurbekov, a resident of Chechnya, was on trial for the murder of his daughter, Zarema. In April 2015, this “honour killing” case, held in Grozny’s Staropromyslov District Court, was drawing to a close, and the public prosecutor had already requested an eight year sentence in a high security prison colony.

• According to witnesses, Zarema Daurbekova “led an immoral life”. Reflecting on whether Zarema’s father deserved to be punished for killing her, Timishev remarked that the man was being judged under laws which belonged in a different cultural tradition.

• “Our lawmakers are, in general, members of the Russian-speaking population. They will find this father’s actions unacceptable. Why is this?’ asked the defending counsel before immediately answering his own question: “Because they don’t have any traditions.”

=> ↺ Equality, Justice and the First Amendment

• While the events of this weekend — with white supremacists holding lit torches — frightened and outraged many Americans, we can never underestimate the impact of these images on African-Americans. That rally reflected this nation’s history of slavery, racial violence, and terrorism, which has left an indelible mark on our democracy to this day. As employees, members, or supporters of an organization dedicated to racial justice, we are all affected. Many of us are even more directly affected because we and our family members are the direct targets of the white supremacists. I know that speech alone has consequences, hurtful and deep, and that’s why I believe it’s important to place the ACLU’s representation of white supremacist demonstrators in Virginia in the broader context of the values and principles that have guided this organization for nearly a century.

=> ↺ Our Fight Against Fascism

• When editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg asserted that “the struggle in Charlottesville is a struggle within our own civilization, within Trump’s own civilization,” and that in the wake of such events “an American president should speak up directly on behalf of the American creed, on behalf of Americans who reject tribalism and seek pluralism, on behalf of the idea that blood-and-soil nationalism is antithetical to the American idea itself,” who, exactly, can place his logic?

• It reads nicely, and it seems a conscionable thought to have after a woman dies fighting Nazis on American soil. But, really, what history books has Mr. Goldberg been reading?

• “Our civilization’s” ongoing genocide against indigenous groups and the violently enforced systematic oppression of Black Americans notwithstanding, the US government – of which Trump is now Commander-in-Chief – has a storied and bloody history of assassinating foreign heads of state precisely because, democratically, a body of citizens or voters “seeking pluralism” elsewhere in the world had commenced down an antifascist political path that did not suit Washington’s interests.

=> ↺ Trump and Charlottesville

• There was a time in the United States when a violent gathering of neo-Nazis and their cohorts would have been condemned from the highest offices in the land. The Ku Klux Klan, white supremacists and others of their ilk would hardly dare to march publically, and if they did, every politician in government would weigh in with criticism, if for no other reason than to get their name in the news.

• How times have changed! All it takes is the election of one of their own, for racism to become fashionable again. As a candidate, Donald Trump did nothing to temper his feelings of hostility towards most people who didn’t fit into the white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant mode. Of course, with a Jewish son-in-law, he did make some exceptions. But for Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, gays, transgender people, women – the list of those he holds in disdain is endless.

=> ↺ ‘This Is Sick’: Unscripted and Unhinged Trump Reverts to Defending Neo-Nazis

• After largely sticking to the script on Monday, President Donald Trump “showed his true colors” once again at an impromptu press conference Tuesday at Trump Tower, where he suggested that white supremacists and counter demonstrators were both to blame for the deadly violence that broke out in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend, and argued that torch-wielding neo-Nazis were merely expressing peaceful disagreement with the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.

=> ↺ Ahead of Charlottesville, Trump Cut Funds for Group Fighting White Supremacy

• A few weeks before Heather Heyer was murdered and many others were injured after a coalition of hate groups gathered violently in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Trump administration—under guidance from trusted aides such as Katharine Gorka—revoked a $400,000 federal grant from a U.S. nonprofit dedicated to rehabilitating former white supremacists and other extremists.

• Just before President Donald Trump took office in January, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that Life After Hate would receive funding from the $10 million appropriated by Congress for the department’s Countering Violent Extremism Grant Program (CVE).

=> ↺ Ta-Nehisi Coates on How Cities & Municipalities Are Winning Reparations for Slavery at Local Level

• The white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend came after thousands of neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and other white nationalists descended on Charlottesville to protest the city’s plan to remove a Confederate statue of Robert E. Lee. The effort to remove this statue was spurred in part by the African-American city Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy, who convinced his fellow city councilmembers not only to vote to remove the statue, but also to create a “reparations fund” for Charlottesville’s African-American residents. For more, we speak with award-winning author and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who in 2014 penned the influential piece for The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.”

=> ↺ Overcrowding in Nebraska’s Prisons Is Causing a Medical and Mental Health Care Crisis

• Nebraska’s prison conditions are inhumane and unconstitutional, and ultimately, they hurt public safety. We can’t reduce recidivism rates among former prisoners if, instead of being given rehabilitation opportunities, they have been horribly traumatized during incarceration.

• According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Nebraska’s prison system is one of the most crowded in the nation. All but one of our state prisons are over capacity — some are at 200 percent of capacity, and one is at more than 300 percent. The system is supposed to house approximately 3,275 people and is currently housing 5,228 people.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ GOP lawmakers shamed on billboards for trying to repeal net neutrality rules

• Pro-net neutrality activist group Fight for the Future has put up a series of billboards shaming Republican members of Congress who want to eliminate the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules and classification of broadband providers as common carriers.

• The billboards in the lawmakers’ home states urge people to contact their elected officials and say that a net neutrality repeal will lead to “slower, censored, and more expensive Internet.” The signs were paid for by hundreds of small donations, the group said. Broadband providers Comcast, Verizon, and Charter get shoutouts on the billboards as well.

=> ↺ Billboards target neutracidal congresscreeps

=> ↺ Net neutrality activists launch crowdfunded billboards targeting key members of Congress during August recess

• Billboards in six states single out lawmakers who support the FCC’s plan to gut key safeguards preventing ISPs from charging new fees, slowing traffic, or blocking websites

=> ↺ Google is eating the open internet

• The benefits of operating within a regulated walled garden are obvious. The open web tends to be a wild and messy place, whereas closed platforms allow companies to control, track, and potentially monetize every part of their user experience and behavior.

=> ↺ FCC Begins Weakening The Definition Of Quality Broadband Deployment To Aid Lazy, Uncompetitive ISPs

• You may be shocked to learn this, but like most U.S. regulatory agencies, the FCC’s top Commissioner spots are occassionally staffed by individuals that spend a bit too much time focused on protecting the interests of giant, incumbent, legacy companies (usually before they move on to think tanks, consultant gigs, or law firm policy work financed and steered by those same companies). In the telecom market these folks usually share some fairly consistent, telltale characteristics. One, they’re usually comically incapable of admitting that there’s a lack of competition in the broadband market.

• Two, they go to great, sophisticated lengths — usually via the help of economists hired for this precise purpose — to obfuscate, modify, and twist data until it shows that broadband competition is everywhere and the market is functioning perfectly. After all, if the data shows that there’s no longer a problem — you can justify your complete and total apathy toward doing anything about it.

=> ↺ “I closed my eyes and waited for the bullet”

• A month later, on 15 September 2012 we were near the koppie with Paulina Masuhlo, an ANC councillor and our good friend. The police had weapons and fought the mine workers near the koppie. They killed Paulina. I don’t know how I (Primrose) survived because I was next to her. I just took my hood and closed my eyes and then I waited for the bullet. We took Paulina to hospital where she died.

• After Paulina’s death, we met again as women and formed an organisation called Sikhala Sonte (We Cry Together). We organised as women in solidarity with those who died. They were brothers, fathers, friends, they were related to us. As women, we gathered together in the hospitals, funerals, prisons and courts.

• Sikhala Sonke is now a registered non-profit organisation and last year filmmaker Aliki Saragas approached us about documenting our community’s struggle for justice. We are in the UK to show the finished film, called Strike a Rock, and to represent the mine workers, widows, orphans and everyone in our community. We are demanding action from Lonmin because they promised to help the widows, to compensate them, to compensate Paulina’s family, but they’ve said nothing about her since.

Intellectual Monopolies

=> ↺ Whispers From the Void – When nothing is going on in tech, a few brief observations on the occasional news tidbits

• Talking of Nokia, haha, this is the ‘real’ Nokia not HMD – Apple reached settlement to pay $2B yes BILLION in royalties to Nokia out of iPhone patent infringements and a long-running lawsuit. Yes. Apple admits by this action (while not admitting in public) that it had been stealing from Nokia intellectual property {sic} for YEARS.

=> ↺ Aarhus University and industry open patent-free playground

• Along with a number of leading Danish industrial companies, Aarhus University has opted out of the rat race in a new collaboration on industrially relevant basic research. Researchers and companies from all over Denmark publish all their results and data on the innovative Open Science platform, where the information is available free of charge to everyone interested.

Trademarks

=> ↺ Ninth Circuit Holds that “Reverse Confusion” Need Not Be Pled with Specificity

• A plaintiff seeking to prevail on a trademark infringement claim needs to establish that there is some likelihood of confusion between its mark and that of the defendant. Generally, a plaintiff establishes that there is “forward” confusion by showing that customers believed they were doing business with plaintiff but because of a confusion in their respective marks, were actually doing business with the defendant. Sometimes, however, a plaintiff will seek to establish “reverse confusion” in that a customer believing they were doing business with a defendant actually ends up doing business with the plaintiff. The Ninth Circuit, in the case Marketquest Group v. BIC Corp. (decided July 7, 2017), was faced with the issue as to whether a plaintiff seeking to prevail under a theory of “reverse confusion” is required to plead that theory with specificity.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Copyright Needs Radical Reform

• Copyright is back in the news in Europe. In the UK, the Digital Economy Bill proposes to increase the maximum prison sentence for online copyright infringement to ten years. Meanwhile, an extensive modernisation of copyright for the EU is also in progress, with a goal of making the treatment of copyright the same across Europe, especially in relation to digital media.

• None of the proposals I have seen address the most significant issue we face today; that copyright was never meant to apply to things you and I routinely do. It was a law made in the context of the end of general censorship and the rise of the printing press. It was intended to protect the weak from the powerful and the powerful from each other. It never applied to people who read printed works, only to those who printed them. That’s why the penalties associated with infringement are so disproprotionate; they are meant to influence magnates, not minnows.

• We’ve seen the immense harm that’s resulted from the semantic sleight-of-hand that justifies the violation of our rights because the phrases “war on drugs” and “war on terror” includes the word “war”. A similar, more cunning sleight-of-mind observes that every enjoyment of a work in the digital age requires a “copy”. Use of that word is taken to mean copyright law applies, and thus a license is required by the consumer to waive the monopoly which copyright grants.

=> ↺ Spinrilla Refuses to Share Its Source Code With the RIAA

• Spinrilla, a popular hip-hop mixtape site and app, is refusing to share its source code with the RIAA. The major record labels want to use the code as evidence in their ongoing piracy lawsuit against the company. Spinrilla notes, however, that handing over its “crown jewel” goes too far, while stressing that the RIAA’s piracy claims are overblown.

=> ↺ Court rejects LinkedIn claim that unauthorized scraping is hacking

• The case pits a business analytics startup called hiQ against the Microsoft-owned behemoth LinkedIn. HiQ scrapes data from publicly available portions of the LinkedIn website, then sells reports to employers about which of their employees seem to be looking for new jobs. LinkedIn sent hiQ a cease-and-desist letter warning that continued scraping could subject hiQ to liability under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the anti-hacking legislation Congress enacted in 1986.

=> ↺ U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

• A U.S. federal judge on Monday ruled that Microsoft Corp’s (MSFT.O) LinkedIn unit cannot prevent a startup from accessing public profile data, in a test of how much control a social media site can wield over information its users have deemed to be public.

=> ↺ Court Says CFAA Isn’t Meant To Prevent Access To Public Data, Orders LinkedIn To Drop Anti-Scraper Efforts

• Some good pushback against the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) has been handed down by a federal court. LinkedIn, which has frequently sued scrapers under both the CFAA and DMCA, just lost an important preliminary round to a company whose entire business model relies on LinkedIn’s publicly-available data.

• hiQ Labs scrapes LinkedIn data from users whose accounts are public, repackages it and sells it to third party recruiters and HR departments, allowing companies to track employee skills and get a read on which employees might be planning to jump ship.

• LinkedIn didn’t care much for another business piggybacking on its data (and likely cutting back ever so slightly on the number of third parties it sells this data to), so it sued hiQ, alleging the scraping of publicly-available data violated the CFAA. This has completely backfired. hiQ has obtained an injunction preventing LinkedIn from blocking its scraping efforts. [h/t Brad Heath]

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