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● 08.31.17

● Links 31/8/2017: Linux Lite 3.6, PHP 7.2 Release Candidate

Posted in News Roundup at 1:50 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ How to get an open-source job

• As Dice, the leading technology job site, and The Linux Foundation recently found in their latest Open Source Jobs Survey and Report, there’s an abundance of open-source jobs. Here’s how you land one of them for yourself.

• First, simply having mad open-source developer skills or kick-ass Linux sysadmin abilities isn’t enough. You must be able to prove that you can actually walk the walk and not just talk the talk. There are several ways to do that.

• SUSE human resources expert Marie Louise van Deutekom said, “Let’s face it, open source is all about community. You can elevate your career through contributions to your community. SUSE looks at contributions as part of our recruitment strategy. Not to mention, it’s great to see how much people really do contribute to these communities over time, which in turn helps my team understand specific skill levels and where to place potential candidates.”

=> ↺ Too Few Candidates to Fill Growing Number of Open Source Jobs

• Open source hiring has been hampered by a lack of trained job-takers, according to The Linux Foundation, which released its sixth annual summary of career opportunities in open source last week. The report provides an overview of open source career trends, along with factors that motivate industry professionals, and methods employers use to attract and retain qualified talent.

=> ↺ Employers Seek Open Source Expertise — But You Should Already Know That

• The latest insight about demand for open source expertise among employers comes from the 2017 Open Source Jobs Report, which was sponsored by the Linux Foundation. Most previous iterations of the report were called the Linux Jobs Report, but they focused on the same themes.

Desktop

=> ↺ Tips for customizing your new Linux installation

• I recently installed the latest release of Fedora 26 from scratch on a brand new laptop. If you’ve been using Linux for a while, you may opt to do upgrades instead of fresh installs to keep your preferences and configurations intact. After all, who wants to go searching for customizations every time a new version of your favorite distribution (in my case, Fedora) comes out?

Server

=> ↺ Kolab for Open Power

• Among a variety of deliberations concerning the security and transparency of a little Kolab thing running anywhere — at home, rented space or hybrid cloud — this post is about the transparency of the hardware layer, and our ongoing efforts to make that so.

• We have said what, why and how on LWN, at events like FOSDEM (with a supplemental interview), at FSFE Summits, various other occasions, and perhaps your next opportunity to get acquainted with the message is at the OpenPOWER Summit in Barcelona — when I say “we”, I mean one of our most widely respected and prominent people, Georg Greve.

=> ↺ Ocado Technology’s Kubermesh

• Instead of relying on servers concentrated in one large data center, the new Kubermesh is designed to simplify data-center architectures for smart factories by elegantly and cost effectively leveraging a distributed network of computing nodes spread across the enterprise. Developed by Ocado Technology, a division of Ocado (the world’s largest online-only supermarket), the Kubermesh package uses container-based technology and the Kubernetes system to implement an on-premises private cloud architecture in which desktop computers can be configured as nodes supporting the compute or storage functionality typically delivered by high-performance servers in a data center.

=> ↺ DH2i Embraces Linux Containers as Enterprise Market Evolves

• DH2i is adding support for Linux-based containers to its traditionally Windows-centric container management platform, citing increased demand from enterprise customers.

• The company’s software is basically a container-as-a-service (CaaS) platform that now includes support for a broader range of container hosts. That expanded platform uses a unified interface to support various Linux-based permutations along with Microsoft container services.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ The Linux Foundation Announces 18 New Silver Members

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced that 18 new organizations have joined the Foundation as Silver members. Linux Foundation members help support development of the greatest shared technology resources in history, while accelerating their own innovation through open source leadership and participation.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ Power Use, RAM + Boot Times With Unity, Xfce, GNOME, LXDE, Budgie & KDE Plasma

• One of the first follow-on requests from this morning’s Razer Blade Stealth Linux testing was for on top of all the other data-sets shared in that article to also look at the RAM usage, battery power draw, and boot times for the different desktop options on Ubuntu 17.04. As the request came in from a Phoronix Premium supporter, I jumped on that and here are some of those numbers.

=> ↺ macOS 10.12.6 vs. Ubuntu 17.04 Benchmarks

• Each operating system was tested with its default file-system, compiler, and other packages for each platform as intended by the software vendor. The macOS and Linux benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated manner using the Phoronix Test Suite. Due to my limited access to Apple hardware, this is just a basic and quick comparison.

Applications

=> ↺ LibreOffice 5.4.1 Released with Over 100 Bug Fixes

• This is the first minor update since the LibreOffice 5.4 release earlier this month and offers a number of bug fixes and stability improvements.

=> ↺ Upterm is Part Terminal Emulator, Part IDE

• Upterm is billed as a ‘terminal emulator for the 21st century’ — a fairly bold claim.

• “An IDE in the world of terminals,” claims the Github project page; “Strictly speaking, it’s both a terminal emulator and an interactive shell based on Electron.”

• I spent some time playing with the app see if it offered anything new. And I’m happy to say it does.

=> ↺ QEMU 2.10 Released With Xen 9pfs Support, QCOW2 LUKS Encryption

• QEMU 2.10 is now available as the latest release for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

• QEMU 2.10 adds support for the Xen 9pfs back-end, a few new sub-commands, support for building QEMU without the TCG tiny code generator, support for the VXHS network protocol, QCOW2 now supports LUKS as an encryption format, various architecture-specific improvements, and more. Some of the arch-specific work includes support for enhanced virtual addressing (EVA) on MIPS, shadow registers and migration on OpenRISC, multi-threaded TCG is enabled for PowerPC, support for POWER9 guests with KVM, many s390 TCG code generation improvements, and some x86 enhancements. Those wanting to learn more about Xen 9pfs can do so here.

=> ↺ Cloud Explorer 11 is out!

• Cloud Explorer is a powerful Amazon S3 client with unique features. In case you missed it, I was able to talk about it briefly on Coder Radio. One thing that I forgot to mention is that a new release is coming! I am pleased to announce version 11 of Cloud Explorer! This release contains a lot of bug fixes and enhancements. I am always looking for feedback. If you have suggestions, please file an issue on the GitHub page.

=> ↺ Neofetch – Shows Linux System Information With ASCII Distribution Logo

• Neofetch is a cross-platform and easy-to-use command line (CLI) script that collects your Linux system information and display it on the terminal next to an image, either your distributions logo or any ascii art of your choice.

• Neofetch is a fast, highly customizable system info script through command line flags or the user config file. There are over 50 config options to play around with. Also it’s allow you to add your own custom info.

=> ↺ YouTube-DLG – A GUI App for YouTube-DL Video Downloader

• I am damn sure that a good number of you must be familiar with youtube-dl by now. It’s an open- source cross-platform CLI app for downloading videos from YouTube and a host of many other sites. It is written in Python and released to the public domain for interested parties to use and modify it however they like.

• Famous as it is, one cannot deny that it will be more convenient to have a GUI for it and that’s where YouTube-DL GUI comes in handy.

Proprietary

=> ↺ The Skype Redesign Everyone Hates Is Now Available on Linux

=> ↺ Skype’s new design lands on Linux

=> ↺ The new Skype experience is now available to try on Linux

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Securing haproxy and nginx via HTTP Headers

=> ↺ 20 Linux Command Tips and Tricks That Will Save You A Lot of Time

=> ↺ Kerberos explained in pictures

=> ↺ Time-series-based monitoring with Prometheus

=> ↺ Install Ubuntu 16.04 Persistently On A Usb Drive

=> ↺ How to Monitor Linux System Health and Performance with Netdata

=> ↺ How to Install Laravel on a DirectAdmin Server

=> ↺ Make a Github Pages blog with Pelican

=> ↺ How to Manage Nvidia Optimus Chipsets in Ubuntu with Bumblebee

=> ↺ Ceph storage driver in LXD

=> ↺ Running an Ubuntu mirror with Juju!

=> ↺ How To Install Budgie Desktop 10.4 On Ubuntu 16.04, 17.04, 17.10?

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ How do I run Windows software on Linux?

• So you’re ready to make the jump to Linux, but you’ve still got a handful of programs you’re just not quite ready to part with. Can you still run your Windows software on Linux?

• The answer might be yes, but, with some caveats.

• I want to draw an important distinction before we move on. It might seem obvious, but it bears repeating: Running a program on Linux does not magically make it open source, any more than running the program on Windows makes it closed source.

Games

=> ↺ And Now for Something Completely Different: Broforce

=> ↺ F1 2017 reviewed: Weeks of fun for the racing fan

=> ↺ Valve Slashes The Steam Controller Again To $35, Steam Link For $15

=> ↺ Timbertales, a turn-based strategy game with a nature theme now has Linux support on Steam

• Timbertales [Official Site, Steam, itch.io], from the one-man studio Rainware now has the Linux version available on Steam. This turn-based strategy game may not look graphically amazing, but it at least tries to be different.

=> ↺ Tower of Time, the game that blends RPG mechanics with real time combat is now officially available for Linux

• After myself and a few others tested it, Tower of Time [Steam] is now officially available for Linux. The game blends together an RPG with RTS mechanics and it’s quite interesting.

=> ↺ Need more meat? Super Meat Boy Forever announced, will have a Linux version

• Team Meat have announced Super Meat Boy Forever [Official Site], a sequel to the original and the good news is that it will have a Linux version.

=> ↺ Sunless Skies has released with day-1 Linux support, quick thoughts on this unfinished title

• Sunless Skies [GOG, Steam], the next game from the developer of Sunless Sea has released with day-1 Linux support. The title is still in-development, so it’s not yet a complete game.

=> ↺ SteamWorld Dig 2 to release in September with Linux support

=> ↺ Shovel Knight: King of Cards expansion announced to release in 2018

Distributions

New Releases

=> ↺ Linux Lite 3.6 Final Released

• Linux Lite 3.6 Final is now available for download. There have been a number of changes since the 3.4 release.

• In this release, we introduce two major new features. Firstly, Lite Sources is a repository selector that allows you to easily select a software repository nearest to you. When new versions of Linux Lite branded applications are released, you’ll now get much faster download speeds thanks to Lite Sources. The second newest feature for Linux Lite 3.6 is the inclusion of both an online and offline search engine for the Linux Lite Help Manual. Search results are highlighted to allow you to easily find the help content you need fast.

=> ↺ Linux Lite 3.6 Lightweight Distro Released With New Features — Download Now

• Linux Lite is often cited as one of the favorite newcomers in the overcrowded world of Linux distributions. It’s known to deliver a lightweight Linux desktop experience, coupled with a beginner-friendly working environment.

• Earlier this year in April, developers shipped Linux Lite 3.4 with Ubuntu 16.04.2 base and Linux kernel 4.4. Now, after five months of development work, Linux Lite 3.6 has been released.

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Red Hat Appoints Narendra Gupta as New Chairman of the Board

• Gupta, who has served on Red Hat’s board of directors since 2005, is a technology industry veteran with more than 40 years of experience. In 2006, he cofounded Nexus Venture Partners, a leading venture capital fund, and he currently serves as the firm’s managing director.

Finance

=> ↺ Can United Continental Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:UAL) or Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Climb The Ladder?

=> ↺ Active Stocks on Watch: Red Hat Inc (RHT) and Microbot Medical Inc (MBOT)

=> ↺ Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) and Nuance Communications, Inc. (NUAN) Go Head-to-head

=> ↺ How Does Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) Stack Up Right Now?

=> ↺ Intrust Bank NA Purchases New Stake in Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

=> ↺ Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Stock Closed 6.6% Above Its 50 Day Average

=> ↺ October 13th Options Now Available For Red Hat (RHT)

=> ↺ Red Hat Inc (RHT) Moves 0.36%

Fedora

=> ↺ Flock2017: day 1

• I found the premise interesting: That Fedora lives on the innovation curve at the very front left. A small bit behind the very bleeding edge, and back to where it starts getting boring. If thats true (and it seems likely), then we always need to be pulling in the very new stuff from one side and integrating it. So the state of things now is a bit on fire, but in a good way.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Ubuntu is adding a dock. Here’s why that’s important

• I know, it really doesn’t sound like a headline that should be taking up too much space or time. Ubuntu is adding a dock to GNOME. Big deal. It is, after all, nothing more than an extension that anyone can add from the GNOME Extension site.

• Or is it?

• I am actually one that believes this to be a very important move for Ubuntu. No matter how inconsequential it may be, to the world at large, this is all about one thing for Canonical.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Foundations Development Summary – August 30, 2017

• This newsletter is here to provide a status update from the Ubuntu Foundations Team. There will also be highlights provided for any interesting subjects the team may be working on. If you would like to reach the Foundations team, you can find us at the #ubuntu-devel channel on freenode.

=> ↺ Security Team Weekly Summary: August 31, 2017

=> ↺ Kernel Team Summary: August 30, 2017

• We intend to target a 4.13 kernel for the Ubuntu 17.10 release. The Artful kernel is currently based on Linux 4.12.9. The Artful staging kernel repository has been updated to 4.13-rc7. As a reminder, the Ubuntu 17.10 Kernel Freeze is Thurs Oct 5, 2017.

=> ↺ Ubuntu 17.10 Will Ship with GNOME Shell 3.26

• Most of us expected that Ubuntu 17.10 would manage to with GNOME Shell 3.26 on board — but it’s nice to hear it confirmed.

• A feature-freeze exception filed pending a package update last week has been approved, and now the first packages of GNOME Shell 3.26 are filtering out through the artful-proposed repository, ready for testing by users of the Ubuntu 17.10 daily builds.

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ Bodhi Linux 4.3.1 Unscheduled Update Released

• It seems like just yesterday that I was posting about Bodhi 4.3.0… Oh wait, it was just yesterday. In a friendly reminder that I am still human – we had a pretty major issue with one of the Bodhi 4.3.0 discs. Most issues we can simply patch via the package manager after the fact without releasing a new set of ISO images, but this issue was fairly unique. The new system was failing to add the official Bodhi repository to the installed system. Because of this I’ve published a set of discs with the 4.3.1 version number.

Devices/Embedded

Tizen

=> ↺ Gear S3 vs Gear Sport vs Gear Fit 2 Pro. Choose the right Tizen wearable for your wrist

• Samsung Electronics isn’t a brand that keeps quiet when the competition are gearing up with their arsenal of consumer electronics for launch. Here at IFA 2017, Samsung has updated its wearable product line up with the all new Gear Sport smartwatch and the Gear Fit2 Pro fitness band. The two Tizen wearable devices, despite being completely different from the outside, have some converging features within when it comes to fitness or health tracking. Moreover, the last Smartwatch from Samsung- Gear S3 is still a solid wearable device on its own and can easily take on any current generation smartwatch. All these similarities will certainly turn out to be confusing if you are out there in the market considering to either grab your first wearable device from Samsung or intending on upgrading your current Samsung wearable device.

Android

=> ↺ LG V30 takes on Galaxy S8 with “FullVision” display, dual cameras

=> ↺ Sony Xperia XZ1 and XZ1 Compact: Sony can do better than this

=> ↺ Hardening the Kernel in Android Oreo

• Android Oreo includes mitigations for the most common source of security bugs in the kernel. This is especially relevant because 85% of kernel security bugs in Android have been in vendor drivers that tend to get much less scrutiny. These updates make it easier for driver developers to discover common bugs during development, stopping them before they can reach end user devices.

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Powering Digital Transformation with In-Memory Computing and Open Source Software

=> ↺ GMO Blockchain Open Source Software project enters third phase

• Blockchain technologies keep conquering new territories. GMO Internet Inc. (TYO:9449) has just announced the launch of the third phase of GMO Blockchain Open Source Software Project, introducing its new Region Token. The open source Region Token is a program whereby municipalities and companies can issue their own tokens (points).

• Through storing processing rules of tokens in a blockchain without having to build a dedicated server for managing tokens and employing an administrator, it is possible to issue tokens and register shops as point service participants on the blockchain. The use of such a token is seen as a means for regional revitalization.

Events

=> ↺ How People Collaborate on Linux Kernel Mailing Lists

• Linux is one of the largest and most successful open source projects in history. According to a 2016 report from The Linux Foundation, more than 13,500 developers from more than 1,300 companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since tracking began 11 years ago.

• At Open Source Summit in Los Angeles, Dawn Foster, a part-time consultant at The Scale Factory and a PhD student at the University of Greenwich in London, will share her research into how these many developers and contributors collaborate on the Linux kernel mailing lists, including network visualizations of mailing list interactions between contributors.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Mozilla announces a ₹1 crore fund to support Open source projects in India

• Mozilla has announced the launch of “Global Mission Partners: India”, an award program specifically focused on supporting open source and free software.

• The new initiative builds on the existing “Mission Partners” program. Applicants based in India can apply for funding to support any open source/free software projects which significantly further Mozilla’s mission.

=> ↺ A ₹1 Crore Fund to Support Open Source Projects in India

• Today Mozilla is announcing the launch of “Global Mission Partners: India”, an award program specifically focused on supporting open source and free software. The new initiative builds on the existing “Mission Partners” program. Applicants based in India can apply for funding to support any open source/free software projects which significantly further Mozilla’s mission.

• Our mission, as embodied in our Manifesto, is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all; an Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.

• We know that many other software projects around the world, and particularly in India, share the goals of a free and open Internet with us, and we want to use our resources to help and encourage others to work towards this end.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

=> ↺ Facebook to open source LogDevice for storing logs from distributed data centers

• LogDevice is capable of recording data regardless of hardware or network issues. If something breaks, it will simply hand off the task of collecting logs. And when everything turns back on, LogDevice can restore records at between five and ten gigabytes per second.

=> ↺ LinkedIn Releases Kafka-monitoring Cruise Control to Open Source

• LinkedIn, well known inside the development community for its innovation, is probably most famous for its development of Kafka, an open-source stream processing platform that provides a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds.

=> ↺ Talend Launches New Developer Community for Open Source Cloud and Big Data Innovation

Public Services/Government

=> ↺ Open source pivotal in digital agenda of German party The Left

• One month before the German federal elections, which take place on 24 September, the socialist party Die Linke (The Left) presented its ’10 Points for a digital agenda’. Open standards and open source play a pivotal role in the transition to what the party calls “Social State 4.0″.

=> ↺ France: VAT fraud rules allow free and open source

• The French government has clarified its new rules on combatting VAT fraud to allow the continued use of free and open source software. In June, the Ministry of Public Action and Accounts confirms that the scope of the policy will be limited to cash systems and cash systems software. The update follows meetings with the April advocacy group, which worried that the rules could block the use of VAT systems based on free and open source software.

=> ↺ Open source helps Schiphol fly to multi-clouds

• Amsterdam airport Schiphol is utilising open source software to create and use a multi-cloud platform with an open API

• Schiphol airport, just south of Amsterdam, is on a journey underpinned by open source software, with Red Hat helping the Dutch airport along.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

=> The Hazy Glue Between Music & Technology ↺ Culture: The Hazy Glue Between Music & Technology

• Music industry people claim to know tech, and people who work at technology companies say they understand music. Regardless of how true that is in either case, it’s clear that music and technology are continuing to converge in entirely new ways in the 21st century. But there’s no way anyone can understand how music and tech work together without examining culture, the unifying, nebulous piece between them. After all, no matter how much a business spends on cultural marketing, culture still belongs to humans, not companies — and authentic cultural production happens on a street level, not in a conference room.

• [...]

• Technology advances quickly in large part because of its widely-used open-source cultural model, which encourages an environment where information is shared for the sake of innovation.

Open Access/Content

=> ↺ Colorado Looks at Open Source Materials to Cut Textbook Cost

=> ↺ State to study open source materials to lower textbook costs

• A statewide council is working on how to increase the use of open educational resource materials in colleges to address the high cost of textbooks.

• The council plans to create a digital repository of open educational resources for colleges and to determine how those resources are used in college classrooms across the state. It will make recommendations on how to increase their use.

• Open educational resources can be freely copied and distributed and potentially reduce what students pay each semester.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ XOD: A New Open Source Visual Programming Language

• To start let’s quickly go over some of the basic fundamentals of what exactly the XOD programming language is before we get into it more in depth. In short, it is a visual programming language that use nodes to allow you to build programs. A node would be any type of blocks that are some sort of a physical operating device (sensor, relay, motor are all types of nodes). So pretty much a node is anything that is a physical representation of many smaller levels of software/hardware working together to create an end, physical object.

=> ↺ PHP on the road to the 7.2.0 release

• Version 7.2.0RC1 is released. It’s now enter the stabilisation phase for the developpers, and the test phase for the users.

=> ↺ PHP 7.2.0 Release Candidate 1 Released

• The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.2.0 Release Candidate 1. This release is the first Release Candidate for 7.2.0. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.

=> ↺ PHP 7.2 Release Candidate Arrives

• PHP 7.2 has matured past the alpha and beta stages and is now out with its first release candidate.

• PHP 7.2 is being fitted with the new libsodium extension for better cryptography, a number of bug fixes, updated SQLite, improved error messages, DOM enhancements, and many other changes as outlined in the NEWS file.

=> ↺ 3 consequences of coding in the open

• I’d never rule out going back to anything closed source (not that I plan on leaving Reaction!), but working full-time in open source has opened my eyes to a whole new side of things that I’ve truly enjoyed. Absolute transparency has made me a better planner and developer. Having to express my ideas to the world before, during, and after implementing them changes the way I do things. The 24/7 availability is both engrossing and also overwhelming. And finally, working with not just the core team, but our GitHub community, pushes me to make decisions together and grow as a developer.

=> ↺ GStreamer Rust bindings release 0.8.0

• As written in the previous blog post, I’m working on nice Rust bindings for GStreamer. Now it’s finally time for the first release, 0.8.0.

• First of all, I should thank Arturo Castro a lot. He worked on the previous GStreamer bindings (versions < 0.8.0), which were all manually written instead of mostly autogenerated like the new ones. As such, the API is now completely different but the old bindings can still be found here.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Billionaire Brothers Want to Build a Cheaper Rival to Slack

• Flock has set its sights on disrupting a segment where Slack and Microsoft have staked out claims, said Neha Dharia, a senior analyst at Ovum Ltd and its global specialist tracking business collaboration and communication products. Flock’s monthly charges are $3 per user for its premium version while Slack’s per-user charges start from $6.67, according to its website. Both offer a free plan.

Science

=> ↺ [Older] This is why you can’t put down your phone

• When we stop working on a task to check emails it takes the brain about 23 minutes to get back into the task at hand.

=> ↺ Why I Stopped Using Multiple Monitors

• Many developers believe multiple monitors improve productivity. Studies have proven it, right? Well, keep in mind, many of those studies are commissioned from monitor manufacturers like Dell and NEC.

=> ↺ For politicians, the more data, the more they ignore

• There are few types of people we like to complain about more than politicians. They’re often painted as two-faced, blockheaded liars—with the possible exception of the ones you voted for. But politicians’ views are typically in line with the bulk of the people who identify with their party, and it’s not always clear whether the politicians are driving their party or if everyone’s just marching to the beat of the same drum.

• After all, politicians’ thought processes shouldn’t be much different from those of voters. All of us are subject to biases and cognitive cheats that block out information we don’t like. Is it fair to hold politicians to a higher standard, given that they’re the people we elect to process decisions carefully for the rest of us?

Hardware

=> ↺ Build your own 1TB SSD and save over £100

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ This miracle weed killer was supposed to save farms. Instead, it’s devastating them.

• Clay Mayes slams on the brakes of his Chevy Silverado and jumps out with the engine running, yelling at a dogwood by the side of the dirt road as if it had said something insulting.

• Its leaves curl downward and in on themselves like tiny, broken umbrellas. It’s the telltale mark of inadvertent exposure to a controversial herbicide called dicamba.

• “This is crazy. Crazy!” shouts Mayes, a farm manager, gesticulating toward the shriveled canopy off Highway 61. “I just think if this keeps going on . . .”

• “Everything’ll be dead,” says Brian Smith, his passenger.

• [...]

• After the Environmental Protection Agency approved the updated formulation of the herbicide for use this spring and summer, farmers across the country planted more than 20 million acres of dicamba-resistant soybeans, according to Monsanto.

• But as dicamba use has increased, so too have reports that it “volatilizes,” or re-vaporizes and travels to other fields. That harms nearby trees, such as the dogwood outside Blytheville, as well as nonresistant soybeans, fruits and vegetables, and plants used as habitats by bees and other pollinators.

• According to a 2004 assessment, dicamba is 75 to 400 times more dangerous to off-target plants than the common weed killer glyphosate, even at very low doses. It is particularly toxic to soybeans — the very crop it was designed to protect — that haven’t been modified for resistance.

=> ↺ The scheme to pump desert water to L.A. could destroy the Mojave. California’s Legislature needs to block it

• Cadiz Inc. wants to build a pipeline on a railroad right of way and pump groundwater from the Mojave to Los Angeles County and beyond. The company is proposing to drain 50,000 acre-feet of water every year for 50 years — more than five times the aquifer’s natural recharge rate, according to an independent analysis by the U.S. Geological Survey.

=> ↺ Column: Flint residents deserve results

• No amount of compensation can make up for the suffering, loss and devastation the people of Flint have endured over the last three years. However, strides can still be made to rebuild trust in the city’s leadership. That is, if officials are willing to finally take the steps necessary to fix Flint once and for all.

=> ↺ Researchers estimate lead released from Flint water pipes

• Now, chemical and microscopic analyses of the city’s water pipes reveal a pockmarked pattern that confirms the lead came from corrosion of the pipes. The analysis also allowed the researchers to estimate the amount of lead released into the city’s water system.

=> ↺ Flint’s water crisis killed people. Now Michigan officials face manslaughter charges

• Jonathan Masur, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who teaches both criminal and environmental law, told me the involuntary manslaughter charges are important are because they indicate the length Schuette is willing to go to hold public officials accountable for the water crisis.

=> ↺ CDC investigating rare Salmonella outbreak across 13 states—linked to turtles

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced an investigation Tuesday into an ongoing outbreak of a rare subtype of Salmonella enterica linked to exposure to pet turtles.

• So far, the outbreak involves 37 cases of Salmonella enterica serovar Agbenia infections across 13 states, which led to 16 people being hospitalized. Overall, 12 of the sickened people are children aged five or younger, an age group particularly vulnerable to the bacteria. No deaths have been reported.

Security

=> ↺ Angelfire

• Today, August 31st 2017, WikiLeaks publishes documents from the Angelfire project of the CIA. Angelfire is an implant comprised of five components: Solartime, Wolfcreek, Keystone (previously MagicWand), BadMFS, and the Windows Transitory File system. Like previously published CIA projects (Grasshopper and AfterMidnight) in the Vault7 series, it is a persistent framework that can load and execute custom implants on target computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system (XP or Win7).

• Solartime modifies the partition boot sector so that when Windows loads boot time device drivers, it also loads and executes the Wolfcreek implant, that once executed, can load and run other Angelfire implants. According to the documents, the loading of additional implants creates memory leaks that can be possibly detected on infected machines.

• Keystone is part of the Wolfcreek implant and responsible for starting malicious user applications. Loaded implants never touch the file system, so there is very little forensic evidence that the process was ever ran. It always disguises as “C:\Windows\system32\svchost.exe” and can thus be detected in the Windows task manager, if the operating system is installed on another partition or in a different path.

• BadMFS is a library that implements a covert file system that is created at the end of the active partition (or in a file on disk in later versions). It is used to store all drivers and implants that Wolfcreek will start. All files are both encrypted and obfuscated to avoid string or PE header scanning. Some versions of BadMFS can be detected because the reference to the covert file system is stored in a file named “zf”.

• The Windows Transitory File system is the new method of installing AngelFire. Rather than lay independent components on disk, the system allows an operator to create transitory files for specific actions including installation, adding files to AngelFire, removing files from AngelFire, etc. Transitory files are added to the ‘UserInstallApp’.

=> ↺ WikiLeaks ‘hacked’ as OurMine group answers ‘hack us’ challenge

• The group appears to have carried out an attack known as “DNS poisoning” for a short while on Thursday morning. Rather than attacking WikiLeaks’ servers directly, they have convinced one or more DNS servers, which are responsible for turning the human-readable “wikileaks.org” web address into a machine-readable string of numbers that tells a computer where to connect, to alter their records. For a brief period, those DNS servers told browsers that wikileaks.org was actually located on a server controlled by OurMine.

=> ↺ More Than 700 Million Passwords Exposed in Massive Spambot Data Breach

• In one of the largest data breaches in history, a misconfigured spambot computer program publicly leaked more than 700 million email addresses and passwords, though experts say that repeated or fake email addresses could reduce the number of real people impacted.

=> ↺ Eureka! The Intel Management Engine can finally be disabled, thanks to the NSA

• Researchers from security firm, Positive Technologies have just stumbled upon something truly phenomenal. They have found a method to disable the much hated Intel Management Engine (ME) in a way that still allows the computer to boot up. This discovery could potentially secure many businesses and state institutions from being compromised by highly sophisticated malware.

=> ↺ A Workaround To Disable Intel Management Engine 11

• Positive Technologies is now reporting on a discovery by one of their researches to be able to disable Intel Management Engine 11 (Skylake era) after discovering an undocumented mode.

• The security researchers discovered “an undocumented PCH strap that can be used to switch on a special mode disabling the main Intel ME functionality at an early stage.” Those wanting to learn more can read this blog post.

=> ↺ Security updates for Thursday

=> ↺ Quebec man fights back after dealer remotely disables car over $200 fee

• A car dealership in Sherbrooke, Que., may have broken the law when it used a GPS device to disable the car of a client who was refusing to pay an extra $200 fee, say consumer advocates consulted by CBC News.

• [...]

• “To turn off somebody’s vehicle after he had already paid off the loan is clearly illegal … it’s not your car anymore,” Iny said.

=> ↺ 465k patients told to visit doctor to patch critical pacemaker vulnerability

• Talk about painful software updates. An estimated 465,000 people in the US are getting notices that they should update the firmware that runs their life-sustaining pacemakers or risk falling victim to potentially fatal hacks.

• Cardiac pacemakers are small devices that are implanted in a patient’s upper chest to correct abnormal or irregular heart rhythms. Pacemakers are generally outfitted with small radio-frequency equipment so the devices can be maintained remotely. That way, new surgeries aren’t required after they’re implanted. Like many wireless devices, pacemakers from Abbott Laboratories contain critical flaws that allow hijackers within radio range to seize control while the pacemakers are running.

=> ↺ FDA alerts on pacemaker recall for cyber flaw

• The FDA issued an alert Aug. 29 regarding manufacturer Abbott’s recall notice affecting six pacemaker devices. The recall is for firmware updates that will “reduce the risk of patient harm due to potential exploitation of cybersecurity vulnerabilities,” the FDA wrote in its alert.

=> ↺ FCC “apology” shows anything can be posted to agency site using insecure API

• The Federal Communications Commission’s website already gets a lot of traffic—sometimes more than it can handle. But thanks to a weakness in the interface that the FCC published for citizens to file comments on proposed rule changes, there’s a lot more interesting—and potentially malicious—content now flowing onto one FCC domain. The system allows just about any file to be hosted on the FCC’s site—potentially including malware.

=> ↺ Inside an Epic Hotel Room Hacking {sic} Spree

• Even after my article on Brocious’ lock hacking and his high-profile Las Vegas reveal, Onity didn’t patch the security flaw in its millions of vulnerable locks. In fact, no software patch could fix it. Like so many other hardware companies that increasingly fill every corner of modern society with tiny computers, Onity was selling a digital product without much of a plan to secure its future from hackers. It had no update mechanism for its locks. Every one of the electronic boards inside of them would need to be replaced. And long after Brocious’ revelation, Onity announced that it wouldn’t pay for those replacements, putting the onus on its hotel customers instead. Many of those customers refused to shell out for the fix—$25 or more per lock depending on the cost of labor—or seemed to remain blissfully unaware of the problem.

• [...]

• and demanded Cashatt’s entire communication history from Facebook.

=> ↺ How I lost 17,000 GitHub Auth Tokens in One Night

• Turns out that there was a bug in my logic but not necessarily my code. After all, it did run flawlessly for a few years. So if my code was fine, where was the bug?

• Looking at the update time of some of the records, I was able to place them roughly around the time of another event: A GitHub outage.

=> ↺ 7 Things to Know About Today’s DDoS Attacks

• Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks continue to be a weapon of choice among threat actors seeking to extort money from victims, disrupt operations, conceal data-exfiltration activities, further hacktivist causes, or even to carry out cyberwar.

• What was once a threat mostly to ISPs and organizations in the financial services, e-commerce, and gaming industry, has become a problem for businesses of all sizes. A small company is just as likely these days to become a target of a DDoS attack, as a big one — and for pretty much the same reasons.

=> ↺ Security ROI isn’t impossible, we suck at measuring

• As of late I’ve been seeing a lot of grumbling that security return on investment (ROI) is impossible. This is of course nonsense. Understanding your ROI is one of the most important things you can do as a business leader. You have to understand if what you’re doing makes sense. By the very nature of business, some of the things we do have more value than other things. Some things even have negative value. If we don’t know which things are the most important, we’re just doing voodoo security.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Is it Wrong to Blame Islam?

=> ↺ Myanmar: 71 Die in Militant Attacks on Police, Border Posts

• Muslim militants in Myanmar staged a coordinated attack on 30 police posts and an army base in Rakhine state on Friday, and at least 59 of the insurgents and 12 members of the security forces were killed, the army and government said.

=> ↺ All Europe can bring itself to do is “pray for Barcelona”

• But not because Islamic fanatics dream of regaining Spain or killing Westerners on the Ramblas. We are finished because it has become fashionable in the West to romanticize the Islamic past of Spain, to treat the Catholics of Reconquista as fanatics and to present the lost caliphate as a paradise of tolerance. Islamic fanatics consider history, culture, religion and symbols much more seriously than we do. In this sense, we are finished!

=> ↺ Kenyan Christians killed for refusing to recite Islamic Shahada

• The three men were held at machete point and ordered to recite the Shahada. When none of them did, the attackers began to tie them up. When the men resisted, they were hacked to death. Then the attackers went to the home of Joseph’s older brother, Charo, who was in his late forties, and killed him.

=> ↺ Boko Haram militants ramp up attacks on refugee shelters in northeast Nigeria

• The Islamists are seeking softer targets – such as camps hosting the displaced – as Nigeria’s military offensive against the group intensifies, said the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

=> ↺ Exclusive: Nigeria’s Chibok girls say kidnap by Boko Haram was accidental

• A few others have escaped or been rescued, but about 113 of the girls are believed to be still held by the militant group.

=> ↺ The Same Ol’ Afghan War Fallacies

• Trump used the term safe haven four times in his speech. He declared that the basic purpose of the military expedition in Afghanistan was, “We must stop the resurgence of safe havens that enable terrorists to threaten America.”

• One hears this same idea over and over. The current U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, General John W. Nicholson, Jr., says, “The requirement to keep pressure on these terror groups to prevent another attack on our homeland .?.?. fundamentally, that is why we are here.” Such statements — and not only about Afghanistan — are minor rephrasing of the old notion of “fight them over there or else we’ll have to fight them at home.”

=> ↺ US Military Battles Syrian Rebels Armed by CIA

• US ground troops were attacked outside of the Syrian city of Manbij today, according to coalition spokesman Col. Ryan Dillon. They came under fire from Syrian rebels allied with Turkey, and US forces returned fire before fleeing back into Manbij.

=> ↺ NYT Only the Latest Corporate Media Outlet to Give Free Publicity to Mercenary Profiteer

• The New York Times (8/30/17) decided to turn over a large chunk of the most precious opinion space in the English-speaking world to mercenary entrepreneur Erik Prince, so he could promote his plan to privatize and profit from the US occupation of Afghanistan.

• Though the Times did disclose in its bio of Prince that he was “the chairman of Frontier Services Group,” and “founded the company formerly known as Blackwater, a security contractor,” it never specified his direct profit motive in the plan. Perhaps it was thought to be implied, since Prince says the strategy is his, but the average reader could understandably miss what, exactly, “Frontier Services Group” does to generate revenue.

=> ↺ Gov’t Must Pay Legal Fees In Court Battle Over ‘Secret’ Drone Docs Gov’t Couldn’t Stop Talking About

• The government will be paying its opponent’s legal fees after needlessly drawing out FOIA litigation, the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has decided [PDF]. The First Amendment Coalition sued the Department of Justice after it refused to produce documents discussing the legal rationale for extrajudicial drone strikes targeting American citizens.

• The legal memo FAC sought was the same legal memo the ACLU and New York Times sued the DOJ for refusing to release. (Or so the FAC thought. But its litigation — along with the ACLU/NYT litigation — made it clear the government was holding on to more than one legal memo.) In the NYT/ACLU case, the Second Circuit Court told the DOJ to cough up its justification for killing Anwar al-Awlaki, pointing to several public comments made about the drone strike by prominent US government officials. The court wasn’t interested in the DOJ’s arguments something publicly discussed frequently would be too “sensitive” to put in the hands of the ACLU and New York Times.

• The DOJ made the same arguments in this case, but the Second Circuit decision undoes its attempt to fend off FAC’s legal fees claims. Factoring into the Ninth’s conclusions is the leak of a white paper by the US government providing its legal analysis of extrajudicial drone strikes. This was then followed by an official release of the same white paper.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ FBI says lack of public interest in Hillary emails justifies withholding documents

• Hillary Clinton’s case isn’t interesting enough to the public to justify releasing the FBI’s files on her, the bureau said this week in rejecting an open-records request by a lawyer seeking to have the former secretary of state punished for perjury. Ty Clevenger has been trying to get Mrs. Clinton and her personal attorneys disbarred for their handling of her official emails during her time as secretary of state. He’s met with resistance among lawyers, and now his request for information from the FBI’s files has been shot down.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Kuwait’s inferno: how will the world’s hottest city survive climate change?

=> ↺ California Proves That Environmental Regulations Don’t Kill Profits

• For the past nine years, a Golden State-centric think tank Next 10 has been releasing its California Green Innovation Index. The results this year show a continuing trend: For two and a half decades, California’s GDP and population have continued to rise, while per capita carbon dioxide emissions have stayed flat.

=> ↺ Feds urge judge not to shut down Dakota Access pipeline during review

• Government lawyers are urging a federal judge not to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline while regulators conduct a new environmental review of the project because there is a “serious possibility” the review will reaffirm the pipeline’s earlier permits.

=> ↺ Dakota Access Pipeline Owner Sues Greenpeace For ‘Criminal Activity’

• The developer behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, which for months drew thousands of protesters, has sued Greenpeace and several other environmental groups for their role in delaying the pipeline’s construction. In the racketeering lawsuit it filed in federal court Tuesday, Energy Transfer Partners alleges these groups inflicted “billions of dollars in damage” with their “criminal activity and campaigns of misinformation” against the pipeline.

=> ↺ Port: Whoa: Dakota Access Pipeline owners file racketeering lawsuit against #NoDAPL activists

• Anyway, today Energy Transfer Partners (the company behind DAPL) filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing some of the environmental groups involved in the protests of racketeering.

=> ↺ Dakota Access owner accuses green groups of inciting terrorism

• The owner of the Dakota Access oil pipeline sued environmental groups Tuesday, accusing them of fraud, racketeering, inciting terrorism and other charges stemming from their opposition to the project.

=> ↺ In the heartland, a David and Goliath battle over a pipeline

• Nebraska is just about the last bureaucratic hurdle before giant excavators begin to slice open the ground to insert 1,179-miles of 36-inch pipe four feet underground. An outnumbered but stubborn group of farmers, ranchers, Native Americans, and environmentalists staged a furious last-stand defense of their pipeline opposition this month in Lincoln, where the Nebraska Public Service Commission held hearings.

=> ↺ Public transportation is key to honoring the Paris Agreement

• We know that making the switch to public transportation can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by providing a low-emissions alternative to driving. The average passenger vehicle produces about 1 lb. of carbon dioxide per mile traveled whereas bus transit only produces .18 lbs. of CO2 at full capacity. By the year 2020, when the first round of long-term plans are due from countries participating on the Paris Agreement, it’s estimated that more than 50 percent of carbon emissions could be abated by “the combined impact of second-generation biofuel, traffic flow, shifts to public transportation, and eco-driving measures.”

=> ↺ Brazilian court blocks abolition of vast Amazon reserve

• A Brazilian court has blocked an attempt by the president, Michel Temer, to open up swaths of the Amazon forest to mining companies after an outcry by environmental campaigners and climate activists.

• The federal judge Rolando Valcir Spanholo said the president went beyond his authority in issuing a decree to abolish Renca, an area of 46,000 sq km (17,760 sq miles) that has been protected since 1984.

• Approving an injunction requested by public prosecutors, the judge said the dissolution of Renca (more formally known as the National Reserve of Copper and Associates) could only be done by Congress.

=> ↺ Mosquitoes with West Nile virus found in 4 more Pittsburgh neighborhoods

• Recent samples of mosquitoes collected from the North Side, Lawrenceville, South Side Slopes and Knoxville tested positive for the virus, according to a county news release.

=> ↺ Worries about a Galveston Bio-Lab

• Concern is rising for the safety of a biological lab containing deadly diseases on Galveston island, which has been hit by the massive storm devastating southeast Texas.

• The Galveston National Laboratory on the campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch contains samples of hundreds of viruses, insects and microbes, which could spread extreme danger if they were to escape. There are several Bio-safety Level 4 labs at Galveston. BSL-4 is the highest level precaution taken for work with agents that can be transmitted through the air and cause fatal diseases in humans for which there are no known cures.

=> ↺ 538 hot spots detected as Indonesia gears up for peak of dry season in September

• The bulk of the fires were detected in West Kalimantan province (193 hot spots) and Papua (143), while the areas closest to Singapore, such as South Sumatra (8), Riau (3) and Jambi (1), were largely spared, according to figures released by the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) on Tuesday (Aug 22) .

=> ↺ Central Kalimantan latest Indonesian province to declare state of emergency on forest fires

• Hotspots have also continued to increase across the archipelago.

=> ↺ Sixth Indonesian province declares emergency as fires spread

• The number of dry season fires burning across Indonesia has jumped to more than 500 and a sixth province has declared a state of emergency, the disaster mitigation agency said Tuesday.

=> ↺ >Alaska’s Permafrost Is Thawing

• Once this ancient organic material thaws, microbes convert some of it to carbon dioxide and methane, which can flow into the atmosphere and cause even more warming. Scientists have estimated that the process of permafrost thawing could contribute as much as 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit to global warming over the next several centuries, independent of what society does to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels and other activities.

=> ↺ It’s Time To Ditch The Concept Of ‘100-Year Floods’

• [...] a “100-year flood” is not a flood that you should expect to happen only once every 100 years. Instead, it refers to a flood that has a 1 percent chance of happening in any given year. Over the course of a 30-year mortgage, a house in a 100-year floodplain has a 26 percent chance of being inundated at least once.

=> ↺ New study: We’re outpacing the most radical climate event we know of

• If we want to know what to expect from our climate as it continues to warm over the next few centuries, looking at similar examples of climate change in Earth’s past would be helpful. But there certainly haven’t been any similar temperature excursions in the instrumental record. Using indirect measures, we can tell that there probably haven’t been any since the last ice age. Even the exit from that ice age isn’t especially relevant; while the planet warmed considerably, it was driven by a complicated mixture of orbital changes, greenhouse gases, and melting ice.

=> ↺ Power company kills nuclear plant, plans $6 billion in solar, battery investment

• On Tuesday, power provider Duke Energy Florida announced a settlement with the state’s public service commission (PSC) to cease plans to build a nuclear plant in western Florida. The utility instead intends to invest $6 billion in solar panels, grid-tied batteries, grid modernization projects, and electric vehicle charging areas. The new plan involves the installation of 700MW of solar capacity over four years in the western Florida area.

• There’s excitement from the solar industry, but the announcement is more bad news for the nuclear industry. Earlier this year, nuclear reactor company Westinghouse declared bankruptcy as construction of its new AP1000 reactors suffered from contractor issues and a stringent regulatory environment. Two plants whose construction was already underway—the Summer plant in South Carolina and the Vogtle plant in Georgia—found their futures in question immediately.

• At the moment, Summer’s owners are considering abandoning the plant, and Vogtle’s owners are weighing whether they will do the same or attempt to salvage the project.

Finance

=> ↺ Corporate Tax Cuts Don’t Create Jobs, They Enrich CEOs

• A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies shows this isn’t true. US companies are already paying minimal amounts in corporate taxes, and the ones most likely under Republican theory to pour tax savings into job creation have instead been more likely to cut their workforce over the past nine years. The data shows that low corporate tax rates more often lead to increases in CEO pay and boosts for shareholders.

=> ↺ Will Brexit Lead to a ‘Brexodus’?

• When Britons voted to leave the European Union last year, they did so in part so they could have more control over European immigration into the United Kingdom—giving them the power to decide who can come live and study and in the U.K., and who can’t.

• “We are not leaving the European Union only to give up control of immigration again,” Prime Minister Theresa May, whose Conservative party pledged to reduce overall immigration to below 100,000 per year, told fellow Tory lawmakers at their party’s conference in October. “We have voted to leave the European Union and become a fully independent, sovereign country. We will do what independent, sovereign countries do. We will decide for ourselves how we control immigration.”

=> ↺ Theresa May wants to copy and paste deals the EU has already signed after Brexit

• Britain wants copycat trade deals which have been shaped by the EU, Theresa May admitted today.

• The Prime Minister laid out Brexit plans to copy and paste a raft of pacts signed by Brussels with other nations – rather than negotiate specialised arrangements.

• The switch – announced as Mrs May jetted on a trade trip to Japan – marks the latest blow to Tory boasts about Britain striking out on its own after Brexit.

• In a second blow, the government conceded reports that Japan is prioritising an EU deal over any trade pact with Britain. “It is right Japan focuses on concluding that deal,” a government spokesperson said.

=> ↺ Brexit-fuelled energy efficiency myths

• Despite negative reports in the British press, EU regulations that cut the amount of energy wasted by household appliances are overwhelmingly popular throughout the UK, writes Dr Jonathan Marshall.

• Dr Jonathan Marshall is an energy analyst at the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, a non-profit organisation. This opinion piece was first published on the ECIU’s blog.

• As reliable as night following day, or Arsenal’s first capitulation of the season pushing fans over the edge, the Daily Express is outraged by ‘bonkers’ EU energy efficiency regulations.

=> ↺ UK Brexit charm offensive falls flat

• It was meant to be a charm offensive directed at national capitals across Europe to help smooth the Brexit negotiations — but the British government’s decision to hold confidential briefing sessions for EU ambassadors in London appears to have fallen flat.

• In the last two weeks, the U.K. held two such events in a bid to explain London’s negotiating positions on key issues ahead of the latest round of Brexit talks, which are now underway in Brussels. If the effort was intended to win a sympathetic ear, it flopped.

=> ↺ Now Comes the Uncomfortable Question: Who Gets to Rebuild After Harvey?

• In the decade-plus since Katrina, Houston has been debating what it needs in order to protect itself from a catastrophic weather event. While that conversation has gone on, the city did what most cities do, carried on business as usual, constructing more than 7,000 residential buildings directly in Harris County’s FEMA-designated flood plain since 2010.

• That kind of construction spree, which was detailed in a prescient investigation by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune last year, is not just head-slapping in hindsight, it actually produces its own greater risks, as it means paving over the kinds of wetlands that can help buffer against extreme flooding events.

• But from a financial perspective, there was a logic behind those 7,000 buildings, as each is eligible for subsidized flood protection through the National Flood Insurance Program, a federal program that just so happens to be expiring at the end of September, meaning debate over its re-authorization will compete for time with everything else on a packed fall congressional calendar.

=> ↺ A new t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers

• Sewing simple items of clothing is one of those repetitive, labor-intensive tasks that seems like it would have been automated ages ago. But getting a robot to do it right is tricky. Fabric stretches, especially the comfy, flexible knits used for t-shirts. A human can easily adjust on the spot, guiding the fabric as it moves around to make sure seams stay straight, but robots aren’t always great at that sort of improvisation. (Putting shoelaces on sneakers is similarly challenging.)

=> ↺ Why male unemployment rates should scare women

• ‘Money is power, and when men are denied power in one area, they’ll try to claim it in another’

=> ↺ When Male Unemployment Rates Rise, So Do Sexual Harassment Claims

• Controlling for the change in the number of other types of discrimination complaints made to the EEOC (race discrimination complaints are the most common type), a higher level of unemployment among married men leads to more sex discrimination complaints — but only when their unemployment is equal to or higher than that of women. For instance, if women have an unemployment rate of 6% (right around the mean for the time period covered), there are fewer sex discrimination complaints in the state than in the previous year if men have an unemployment rate of 2% or 4% — but there’s more reported sex discrimination than in the previous year if men have an unemployment rate of 6% or 8%.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Saudi Arabia ‘bribes’ Egyptian journalists with free Hajj visas

• Saudi Arabia is giving free Hajj visas to 1,000 Egyptian journalists and their families in an attempt to lobby media coverage on the handing of two Red Sea islands to the kingdom, a source at the Saudi embassy in Cairo told The New Arab.

=> ↺ The Democratic National Committee’s abysmal fundraising

• The committee has also seen its debts rise to $3.4 million. Combining its cash on hand with its debt, the DNC was $7.4 million in the black shortly after Perez took over at the end of February and is now just $3.4 million in the black.

=> ↺ Gerrymandering is ruining our democracy. Will television news ever care?

• A yearlong Media Matters study found that cable news shows brought up gerrymandering in only five segments between July 1, 2016, and June 30, 2017. During that same time period, broadcast morning news programs and nightly newscasts didn’t discuss gerrymandering at all. And this isn’t a new trend; for years, media have shown a reluctance to discuss gerrymandering and redistricting. Given the outsized influence partisan and racial gerrymandering has on American democracy, these issues deserve more coverage.

=> ↺ Turkey’s Erdogan calls German leaders ‘enemies’

• Germany will hold a general election on 24 September, and about one million ethnic Turks living in Germany can vote. A majority of them backed Mr Erdogan in an April referendum.

=> ↺ Iran-born AfD politician investigated over Islamophobia accusations

• Hadjimohamadvali was born in Iran and has said that she fled to Germany to get away from Islam in the 1980s after the 1979 Iranian Revolution led to the establishment of an Islamic Republic.

=> ↺ The Sordid Double Life of Washington’s Most Powerful Ambassador

• Roman Paschal recalled about seven women to choose from. They dropped their long cloaks, he said, revealing “nightclub clothes” underneath. He picked a woman who turned out to be from Romania.

• Paschal had been flown to the United Arab Emirates by his friend Yousef Al Otaiba, in whose apartment they were gathered. It was the winter of 2003-2004, and Otaiba was a rising star in the UAE, though still a few years away from becoming the nation’s ambassador to the United States.

• He had recently befriended Otaiba at a Washington, D.C., strip club, quickly becoming a charter member of a tightknit crew that the Emirati once affectionately referred to as “team ‘Alpha.’” This was Paschal’s introduction to the high-flying life Otaiba led. And it wouldn’t be his last. For four years, he partied with Otaiba in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and Abu Dhabi, with Otaiba footing the eye-popping bills.

• Paschal dropped out of the group of friends in 2007, but the lifestyle from their days together would eventually collide with Otaiba’s public life. In 2008, Otaiba hired an original member of his partying crew, his college buddy Byron Fogan, to run a personal foundation with millions of dollars in UAE funding. He also arranged for Fogan to be simultaneously employed by the embassy as a legal adviser, and by the Washington public relations firm, The Harbour Group, working on behalf of the UAE.

• After Fogan was arrested for pilfering more than $1 million dollars from the foundation, he told prosecutors that secret alcohol and gambling addictions had driven his crime. With the foundation defunct, Otaiba paid Fogan’s legal bills and kept him on in his two remaining roles with the embassy as he awaited sentencing. Emails obtained by The Intercept, spanning more than a decade of Otaiba’s interactions with Fogan, suggest the ambassador was anything but unaware of Fogan’s habits.

=> ↺ May Says She’ll Run for Re-Election. Tories Laugh in Reply

=> ↺ Weather Underground Members Speak Out on the Media, Imperialism and Solidarity in the Age of Trump

• Seven months into the so-called administration of President Donald Trump, things are going further off the rails with each passing day. From the fires of war to attacks on health care to the stoking of the white supremacist far right, living in the bowels of a rotting empire has, perhaps, never been as intense.

• As questions swirl around the nature of contemporary resistance, another period of rising protest comes to mind: the Vietnam-war era, when radical political activism in this country reached new levels.

• In 1970, the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), a group that emerged out of Students for a Democratic Society, issued a “Declaration of a State of War” against the US government, and shortly thereafter began carrying out bombings against symbols of US Empire, including even the Pentagon itself. Targeting mostly government buildings and several banks — and taking care not to injure human beings — the actions were designed to “bring the war home” in order to highlight imperial injustices against the oppressed, and the egregious violence of US imperialism.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ A lesson for the left about censorship

• Linksunten.indymedia (‘bottom-left independent media’) was founded in 2009, and served as a platform for anti-globalisation campaigners, members of the anarchist black bloc, animal-rights activists and other fringe groups. Posts were often anonymous, and occasionally claimed responsibility for illegal actions. In one instance, ‘comrades’ were called upon to bring fireworks instead of bottles to the G20 demonstration: ‘What is a scratched helmet compared to an acoustic trauma?’

=> ↺ MP shares tweet saying abuse victims should ‘shut their mouths for good of diversity’

=> ↺ There is no place in academia for craven submission to Chinese censorship demands

• The scale of disagreements in academia over fairly basic analytical points reveals something frightening: even for western-based scholars who have no fear of a knock at the door, constructing a basic mental model of the Chinese economy, its troubled banking system, its corrupt elite and its enigmatic leadership is an unsolved task.

=> ↺ Housewife jailed for blasphemy in Indonesia

• “What she has committed is an insult to our religion. She is dangerous for a religious city like Mataram,” Mr Didiek Jatmiko, presiding judge at Mataram district court in West Nusa Tenggara province, told AFP.

=> ↺ Christian boy in Pakistan faces death penalty for allegedly burning Quran

• “When the police took the suspect into custody and brought him to a police check post, a crowd of around 200 men gathered outside… demanding the culprit be handed over to them,” local police official Pervaiz Iqbal told the AFP news agency.

=> ↺ 5 Huge Real-World Problems Hollywood Completely Ignores

• [...] there are a few huge blind spots in our pop culture

=> ↺ Iran claims Twitter and Instagram are willing to bow to morality rules to censor content

• Iran’s new telecommunications minister Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi wants to restore banned platforms across the country as long as the tech giants tow-the-line and adhere to the country’s “morality” rules.

=> ↺ Promoting good science without censorship

• My last two posts summarized the extent to which the First Amendment should constrain the government when it seeks to censor weak scientific claims. To the extent that the government uses advertising restrictions in order to promote good science, free speech doctrine has already begun to get in the way.

=> ↺ Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant

• “Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings,” Mr. Lynn said. “People are so afraid of Google now.”

=> ↺ Google-Funded Think Tank Fired Google Critics After They Dared Criticize Google

• The New America Foundation’s Open Markets group was a rare, loud voice of protest against Google’s ever-growing consolidation of economic and technological power around the world. But New America, like many of its fellow think tanks, received millions in funding from one of the targets of its anti-monopoly work, and according to a New York Times report today, pulled the plug after the company’s chief executive had enough dissent.

=> ↺ How I Got Fired From a D.C. Think Tank for Fighting Against the Power of Google

• In 2010, while I was pushing to break up big banks because they had become too powerful, I started to realize that the problem in America wasn’t just big banks, it was corporate monopolies. But it was hard to find a strong contemporary voice writing about it or thinking about it — without going back a few generations.

• Then I found Barry C. Lynn and the Open Markets team at the New America Foundation in Washington D.C. They were doing deep investigations into the agriculture industry, looking at Monsanto and Tyson, and they were looking into how big companies privatize courts through arbitration. They were also looking at a troubling new feature of our digital economy – the great power wielded by a handful of tech companies, including Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google. The Open Markets team was grounded not only in critique, but solutions: showing how old antitrust laws and principles could address the political and economic distortions caused by monopolies in our turbulent era.

=> ↺ Google-funded think-tank sacks critic of… Google

• The New America Foundation, a think-tank which received large infusions of funds from Google, sacked the head of its Open Markets group after he cheered the European Union for hitting the search firm with a fine of US$2.7 billion in June.

=> ↺ Google-funded think tank fires prominent Google critic

• The New America Foundation, a prominent DC think tank that’s heavily funded by Google, has parted ways with one of its most influential scholars after he criticized Google’s growing monopoly power.

• The scholar is Barry Lynn, founder of New America’s Open Markets program and a leading advocate of stricter enforcement of antitrust laws. Since the Reagan years, federal antitrust regulators have been more likely to approve mega-mergers and less likely to launch major antitrust lawsuits. Scholars at the Open Markets program have made the case that the US economy would benefit from a return to the more rigorous antitrust regime of the mid-20th century.

=> ↺ Kremlin calls Serebrennikov’s case control over state expenditures

=> ↺ Kremlin – no politics behind arrest of prominent director

=> ↺ Kremlin says top theatre director Kirill Serebrennikov’s arrest ‘not censorship’

=> ↺ Kremlin says top theatre director’s arrest ‘not censorship’

=> ↺ Anti-Censorship Bot For Detecting Deleted Posts on Reddit Gets Censored

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Air Force Vet Admitted To Leaking NSA Documents, But Her Confession Might Not Count In Court

=> ↺ Fmr. NSA contractor in leak case wants FBI admission suppressed

• A former government contractor charged with leaking classified U.S. documents is asking a federal judge to rule that comments she made to FBI agents before her arrest can’t be used as evidence.

• Reality Winner is charged with copying a classified report and mailing it to an online media organization. The initial criminal complaint against the former Air Force linguist says she admitted to leaking the documents in a June interview with FBI agents serving a search warrant at her apartment in August, Georgia.

=> ↺ Low-tech privacy breach earns Aetna lawsuit for revealing HIV patients

• It seems like we hear about a new data breach every day. Today, we’re bringing news of yet another—but this one happened in the old-school sense of the term. And it has earned the Aetna insurance giant a class-action lawsuit.

=> ↺ Federal Court Says Warrants Are Needed For Stingray Deployment

• The DOJ — despite issuing its own guidance requiring warrants for Stingrays in 2015 — argued in court earlier this year that no warrant was needed to deploy the Stingray to locate a shooting suspect. It actually recommended the court not reach a conclusion on the Fourth Amendment implications of Stingray use, as it had plenty of warrant exceptions at the ready — mainly the “exigent circumstances” of locating a suspect wanted for a violent crime.

• Unfortunately for the federal government (and all other law enforcement agencies located in the court’s jurisdiction), the court declined the DOJ’s offer to look the other way on Constitutional issues. It found a Stingray’s impersonation of cell tower to obtain real-time location information is a search under the Fourth Amendment.

=> ↺ Tech giants will learn to respect Indian laws, says Ravi Shankar Prasad

• The order said that called for need to regulation regarding the extent to which information of a person can be stored, processed and used by non-state actors. “There is also a need for protection of such information from the State,” the apex court said. Prasad said that the government has formed a committee to give its recommendation for a robust data protection framework in the country.

=> ↺ Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana are going to work together

=> ↺ Microsoft and Amazon link to create Alexa and Cortana Inception Metacrisis

• We’re still completely at a loss as to who this actually helps.

=> ↺ Student Privacy Tips for Teachers

• The new school year starts next week for most schools across the country. As part of the first line of defense in protecting student privacy, teachers need to be ready to spot the implications of new technology and advocate for their students’ privacy rights.

• Our student privacy report offers recommendations for several stakeholder groups. In this post, we’ll focus specifically on teachers. Teachers play the role of intermediaries between students and the technology being deployed in classrooms. In addition to administering technology directly to students, teachers can integrate digital literacy and privacy education across their existing curricula.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Why 1 Anarchist Is Choosing Jail Over Grand-Jury Testimony

• Aside from Liberia, the United States is the only country under common law to continue to use grand juries in order to bring criminal indictments.

=> ↺ Draconian Immigration Law Hangs in the Balance as Texas Recovers from Harvey

• When a storm like Hurricane Harvey hits, it’s not easy for impacted communities to get back on their feet. In addition to dealing with the potential mental and physical trauma that comes with the storm, they have to assess damage to their houses and cars and file endless insurance claims. But in Texas, where 1.7 million people are immigrants without proper legal documents, there’s one more thing to worry about: an anti-immigrant law that will outlaw so-called sanctuary cities is set to kick in Friday, September 1.

• The ACLU has challenged the law, and a ruling is expected before he end of the week.

• Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 4 into law in a Facebook broadcast May 7, sparking outrage from cities across the state, immigrants’ rights activists, and even some police officers. The law, similar in many respects to Arizona’s infamous 2010 “Show Me Your Papers” law, requires local law enforcement agencies to comply with all immigration detainer requests to transfer detained immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. It also bars municipalities and local and campus police from prohibiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The law specifically requires local entities to allow officers to ask those they arrest or lawfully detain about their immigration status, to share information and cooperate with immigration authorities, and to allow immigration authorities into jails.

• Sheriffs, police chiefs, and jail administrators face misdemeanor charges and fines up to $25,500 for violating the law.

=> ↺ The media highlights ‘terrorism’ but not bee stings: an interview with Mo Dawah

=> ↺ Here’s “Rape Culture” For You: Cops Cavity-Searching Women On The Roadside

• When Corley refused to remove her clothes in the dimly lit parking lot where she was being detained, one of the officers threw her to the ground, pushed her partially underneath her own car, and yanked Corley’s pants down to her ankles. For the next 11 minutes, dash cam video of the incident shows, she was held down by two officers while being searched. Corley claims that fingers repeatedly probed her vagina and that the officers ignored her protests. A third officer stood nearby holding a flashlight. No drugs were found on Corley’s person.

=> ↺ Women in small Muslim sect say they have had FGM in Canada

• The first research of its kind to probe the practice within this tightly knit South Asian community, the study found that 80 per cent of Bohra women surveyed have undergone FGM and two of the study’s 18 Canadian participants said it happened within Canada’s borders.

=> ↺ Need To Go Beyond Triple Talaq, Abolish Sharia Law, Says Taslima Nasreen

• Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen today reacted to the Supreme Court verdict abolishing triple talaq, saying while it was “definitely not women’s freedom” there was need to go beyond by doing away with “1400 yrs old Quranic laws”.

=> ↺ Why Is the Southern Poverty Law Center Targeting Liberals?

=> ↺ Migrant crisis: Facebook publishes torture used to extort ransom

• People smugglers and slave trading gangs are using Facebook to broadcast the abuse and torture of migrants to extort ransom money from their families.

=> ↺ Sex offender may face deportation after York sex attack

• He then sexually attacked her and offered her money for sex, according to a CPS summary given to York magistrates two days later.

=> ↺ Christian child forced into Muslim foster care

• The five-year-old girl, a native English speaker, has spent the past six months in the care of two Muslim households in London. The foster placements were made, against the wishes of the girl’s family, by the scandal-ridden borough of Tower Hamlets.

=> ↺ Yet Another Defeat Of The Inhumane Trumpists

• The state of Texas tried to enforce Trumpist treatment of citizens and others by cities refusing to enforce federal rules about immigration. The cities rebelled at a proposed new law and sued. They won an injunction preventing enforcement tomorrow.

=> ↺ No Immunity For Cops Who Arrested Man Recording Them For Obstruction

• A case involving a bogus arrest stemming from a citizen’s attempt to record officers has resulted in the denial of qualified immunity to the officers involved. The Eighth Circuit Appeals Court upheld the lower court’s decision on both First and Fourth Amendment issues.

=> ↺ Feds: Man jailed for not decrypting drives has “chutzpah” to ask to get out

• Federal prosecutors wrote to a US judge Wednesday saying that a child-porn suspect jailed for nearly two years for refusing to decrypt his hard drives should remain jailed until he complies with a court order to unlock them. The defendant has a lot of “chutzpah” to even ask to get out of jail while he appeals the contempt-of-court order to the US Supreme Court, prosecutors said in a new court filing.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ 98.5% of unique net neutrality comments oppose Ajit Pai’s anti-Title II plan

• A study funded by Internet service providers has found something that Internet service providers really won’t like.

• The overwhelming majority of people who wrote unique comments to the Federal Communications Commission want the FCC to keep its current net neutrality rules and classification of ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act, according to the study released today.

• The study (available here) was conducted by consulting firm Emprata and funded by Broadband for America, whose members include AT&T, CenturyLink, Charter, CTIA-The Wireless Association, Comcast, NCTA–The Internet & Television Association, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), and USTelecom.

=> ↺ 98.5% Of Original Comments To The FCC Oppose Killing Net Neutrality

• Let’s not mince words: the FCC’s plan to gut net neutrality protections in light of severe public opposition is likely one of the more bare-knuckled acts of cronyism in modern technological and political history. That’s because the rules have overwhelming, bipartisan support from the vast majority of consumers, most of whom realize the already imperfect rules are some of the only consumer protections standing between consumers and giant, uncompetitive companies like Comcast. Repealing the rules only serves one interest: that of one of the least liked, least-competitive industries in America.

=> ↺ AT&T absurdly claims that most “legitimate” net neutrality comments favor repeal

• Despite a study showing that 98.5 percent of individually written net neutrality comments support the US’s current net neutrality rules, AT&T is claiming that the vast majority of “legitimate” comments favor repealing the rules.

• The Federal Communication Commission’s net neutrality docket is a real mess, with nearly 22 million comments, mostly from form letters and many from spam bots using identities stolen from data breaches. AT&T is part of an industry group called Broadband for America that just funded a study that tries to find trends within the chaos.

DRM

=> ↺ Sega Releases ‘Sonic Mania’ Without Informing PC Customers Of Denuvo Inclusion And Always Online Requirements

• Searching for stories about Sega here at Techdirt results in a seriously mixed bag of results. While the company has managed to be on the right side of history on issues like SOPA and fan-made games, it has also managed to be strongly anti-consumer on game mods and has occasionally wreaked havoc on the YouTube community, all in the name of copyright protectionism. Despite all of this, Sega has gone to some lengths to successfully craft for itself a public image more accessible and likeable than its long-time rival Nintendo.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ Between Human Rights And IP: An Interview With Laurence Helfer, Co-Author Of Guide To Marrakesh Treaty Implementation

• When in 2013, in Marrakesh, Morocco, a new World Intellectual Property Organization treaty establishing exceptions and limitations for people with visual impairment was adopted, it was hailed by some as a miracle. Entered into force in 2016, the way states implement the treaty is of major importance for the World Blind Union (WBU) so that the treaty serves its purpose to expand access to books for visually impaired people. On 14 August, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) held its 18th session. During the session, Laurence Helfer delivered a statement [doc] on behalf of the WBU, calling on states to ratify the treaty, and to avoid implementing two optional clauses that permit states to restrict or condition the exercise of the rights granted by the treaty.

=> ↺ New Guide Shows How Best To Implement Marrakesh Treaty So Books Are Accessible To Visually Impaired

• The World Blind Union (WBU) has recently issued a guide to the World Intellectual Property Organization treaty providing copyright exceptions for visually impaired people. The treaty was widely hailed, but the way it is implemented could be a gamechanger, and the WBU provides advice to all stakeholders, and in particular governments, so that the treaty is interpreted and implemented to the best interest of the visually impaired. The union also warns against the implementation of two optional provisions, which they say could run counter to the aims of the treaty.

=> ↺ Developer Puts Game On The Pirate Bay Because Steam Key Resellers Are The Bigger Evil

• Leaving aside the AAA publishers for a moment, the video game industry is actually starting to get really good on recognizing better ways to react to copyright infringement other than pounding their fists on their tables and knee-capping their customers with DRM. This still occurs, of course, but we’ve also seen stories of publishers treating pirates as potential customers with whom it’s worth connecting, giving away Steam keys on torrent sites, or just playfully messing with pirates instead of screaming at them. These efforts generally are done to the tune of great PR and the humanization of a content company that can only help their businesses.

=> ↺ Kim Dotcom Wants K.im to Trigger a “Copyright Revolution”

• Kim Dotcom hopes that his new file-sharing service K.im will create a “copyright revolution.” The platform will offer a secure platform for people to share files and get paid for them while offering copyright holders the option to monetize piracy.

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