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● 06.03.18

● Links 3/6/2018: Linux 4.17, Mesa 18.0.5, GitHub’s Death, FreeBSD 11.2 RC1

Posted in News Roundup at 9:15 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

=> ↺ Why is Linux Not More Widely Used Than It Is?

• Before KDE, GNOME, and other desktop environments came around Linux (specifically Interim Linux) was entirely CLI driven. By this time Macintosh and Windows had fully functional GUI software and those were more appealing to the average user. On this note, Linux got off on the wrong foot and this has come a long way to tarnish its image.

• Applications like the ones in Microsoft’s Office Suite and Adobe’s collection are still not available on the Linux platform without some type of hack and since most of mankind cannot be bothered but to try, they go for what they can easily work with.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux 4.18 To Ship ARM64 SSBD For Spectre V4 Mitigation, LSE Atomics By Default

• Since the unveiling of Spectre Variant Four last month ARM has been publishing patches for their mitigation for the 64-bit ARM CPUs. While the Intel/AMD and POWER mitigation landed for Linux 4.17, the SSBD work on AArch64 is landing for Linux 4.18.

=> ↺ Linux 4.17

• So this last week was pretty calm, even if the pattern of most of the stuff coming in on a Friday made it feel less so as the weekend approached.

• And while I would have liked even less changes, I really didn’t get the feeling that another week would help the release in any way, so here we are, with 4.17 released.

• No, I didn’t call it 5.0, even though all the git object count numerology was in place for that. It will happen in the not too distant future, and I’m told all the release scripts on kernel.org are ready for it, but I didn’t feel there was any real reason for it. I suspect that around 4.20 – which is I run out of fingers and toes to keep track of minor releases, and thus start getting mightily confused - I’ll switch over. That was what happened for 4.0, after all.

• As for the actual changes since rc7 – the shortlog is appended – it’s mostly drivers, networking, perf tooling, and a set of nds32 fixes. With some random other stuff thrown in. Again, the shortlog is obviously only the last calm week, the overall changes since 4.16 are much too big to list in that format.

• The big 4.17 stuff was mentioned in the rc1 email when the merge window closed, but I guess it’s worth repeating how 4.17 is actually a slightly smaller kernel than 4.16, thanks to the removal of a number of effectively dead architectures (blackfin, cris, frv, m32r, metag, mn10300, score, and tile). Obviously all the other changes are much more important, but it’s always nice to see spring cleaning like that.

• And with this, the merge window for 4.18 is obviously open. I actually have some travel the second week of the merge window, which is very inconvenient for me, but I do hope that we’ll get all the big stuff merged the first week and it won’t impact any release scheduling. But we’ll have to see.

• Linus

=> ↺ Linux 4.17 Kernel Released With Big Updates For AMDGPU, CPU Power-Savings

• While there was a lot of last minute changes this week, Linus Torvalds has just gone ahead and officially released the Linux 4.17 kernel.

• Linux 4.17.0 is now available as the latest stable kernel while this marks the opening of the Linux 4.18 merge window for a two week period. Linux 4.17 has some pretty great features especially on the AMDGPU front. See our Linux 4.17 feature overview for a complete overview of the major changes to find in this new kernel version. It’s certainly yet another very exciting release!

• The release announcement by Linus Torvalds is mostly the usual commentary. He does note that around Linux 4.20 is when he intends to declare the “Linux 5.0″ kernel, similar to Linux 3.20 becoming Linux 4.0.

=> ↺ The Best Features Of The Linux 4.17 Kernel: Power Savings, AMDGPU DC, ACPI TAD

• If all goes well, the Linux 4.17 kernel will debut as stable today. Linus Torvalds last week indicated that this next kernel stable release could be coming for this weekend, but there has been a lot of changes merged in recent days, so we’ll see if Linus is still leaning towards releasing today or instead opts for Linux 4.17-rc8. Whatever he ends up deciding, there are a lot of great changes with Linux 4.17.

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Linux Lite 4.0 Released, Linux Foundation’s Acumos AI Challenge, Fedora 29 Bootloader Debate and More

• The Linux Foundation yesterday announced the Acumos AI Challenge, sponsored by AT&T and Tech Mahindra. The challenge “is an open source developer competition seeking innovative, ground-breaking artificial intelligence (AI) solutions from students, developers, and data scientists”. The challenge is accepting submissions May 31 to August 5, 2018. The 1st place team will win $50,000, and the 2nd and 3rd place teams each will receive $25,000.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Weston Might Move To 4 Month Releases While Wayland’s Maturity May Stop Timed Cycles

• Derek Foreman at Samsung’s Open-Source Group has initiated a formal discussion over the Wayland and Weston release schedules.

• Due to the most recent Wayland/Weston release happening in April rather than their usual February release, if sticking to a six-month release cadence that means the next Wayland/Weston release will be in October.

=> ↺ GCN 1.1 On AMDGPU DRM Driver To Now Default To PowerPlay

• When using a GCN 1.1 CIK / Sea Islands GPU with the non-default AMDGPU DRM driver, it will soon begin defaulting to use PowerPlay for power management rather than the old DPM code.

• The AMDGPU PowerPlay support for Sea Islands is now in a state where using the newer PowerPlay support rather than the older Dynamic Power Management (DPM) code is in better shape. AMD plans to eventually drop this older DPM implementation from the AMDGPU kernel driver.

=> ↺ Clear Linux Now Offers Radeon Mesa Graphics Support, Yields Speed Advantage In Some Tests

• Intel’s Clear Linux distribution is quite performant as shown by our many Linux distribution benchmarks for delivering lightning-fast out-of-the-box Linux performance that is generally unmatched by other distributions. While the Clear Linux package (bundle) archive continues getting larger and more desktop packages are being included, one area that sadly had been left out up until recently was support for RadeonSI/RADV. Up until recently their Mesa build was just with the Intel OpenGL/Vulkan driver support as well as the software rasterizers, but now the open-source Radeon drivers are being included as well as Nouveau too for open-source NVIDIA driver support. I took Clear Linux’s Radeon stack for a whirl to check out the performance capabilities.

=> ↺ Another Week’s Worth Of AMDVLK Improvements Published, More Sparse Texture Work

• The AMD developers maintaining the PAL (Platform Abstraction Layer) and XGL components comprising the official AMDVLK Linux Vulkan driver have made public their latest code commits from the past week.

=> ↺ Red Hat Developer Posts DisplayLink DRM/FB Driver Improvements

• It’s been a while since last having any Linux driver progress to report on for the DisplayLink hardware that is found in many of the USB-powered displays. Fortunately, Red Hat developer Mikulas Patocka has posted a set of improvements to the DisplayLink kernel drivers of the UDL-KMS DRM driver and the UDLFB frame-buffer driver.

=> ↺ mesa 18.0.5

• Mesa 18.0.5 is now available.

• In this release we have:

• Mesa core fixes GL_UNSIGNED_INT64_ARB usage, get rid of leak when using glUseProgram(), add glUniform*ui{v} support for display lists, and fixes texture finalizing that were causing assertions in CTS tests.

• Several fixes for intel/i965 driver: support blits and clears in surfaces with offsets, several patches around buffer textures, support for 2×6 configuration l3 banks count, properly CCS_D buffers initialization, and properly rounding mode set.

• RADV also gets couple of fixes, for centroid interpolation and for SRGB compute copies.

• Finally, we have also several other fixes in different parts of the framework.

=> ↺ Mesa 18.0.5 Released, But It’s Now Time To Upgrade To Mesa 18.1+

• Mesa 18.0.5 is out as the latest point release for the Mesa 18.0 release from Q1’2018, but it also now marks the end of the series.

• The Mesa 18.0.5 update has several Intel i965 OpenGL driver fixes, some core Mesa fixes, a few updates for the RADV Vulkan driver, and other basic alterations. This though is the final planned point release now that Mesa 18.1.1 is out so users are encouraged to upgrade to this newer series, or if you enjoy the bleeding-edge graphics stack, you can always be riding Mesa 18.2-dev.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ A Look At The Intel UHD Graphics Performance On Clear Linux With Linux 4.16 + Mesa 18.2

• Yesterday I posted some Radeon graphics benchmarks under Clear Linux now that Intel’s performance-optimized Linux distribution ships with AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV support. While doing that comparison I also took the opportunity to run some fresh UHD Graphics “Coffeelake” benchmarks on Clear Linux against Ubuntu.

Applications

=> ↺ Ardour Development Update

• It’s been a long time since the last release of Ardour, and there’s still no schedule or even vague sense of when the next release might appear. I (Paul) felt that our users, and particularly our subscribers, deserved some information about what is and has been going on with development over the last 8 months. I had promised to do this back in December, and it is now long overdue.

=> ↺ Ardour Digital Audio Workstation Is Going Through An Architectural Overhaul

• For those wondering what’s been going on with the Ardour digital audio workstation cross-platform, open-source software, their developers have posted a status update about their ongoing progress to the project.

• Ardour, for those that don’t know, is one of the leading (if not the leading) open-source digital audio workstation software for audio recording, editing, and mixing. It’s a mighty impressive piece of software currently, but the developers are working on making it even better.

=> ↺ libopus 1.3-rc

=> ↺ Opus 1.3 RC1 Released For Open-Source Audio Codec

• Nearly one year after the release of Opus 1.2, the Opus 1.3 release is happening quite soon with Friday marking the availability of the release candidate for this open-source and versatile audio codec implementation.

=> ↺ Best Free Linux Data Science Notebook Software

• A data scientist devotes considerable time and effort collecting, cleaning, and filtering data. The goal is to extract valuable insights and useful information from that data. Anything that speeds up that process is going to be desirable. Being able to interactively explore data helps streamline this process. An increasingly popular way to interact with data is with an interactive notebook. So what’s this type of notebook offer?

• A notebook interface is a virtual collaborative environment which contains computer code and rich text elements. Notebook documents are human-readable documents with the analysis description and the results together with the executable documents which can be run to perform data analysis. These documents can be saved as files, checked into revision control just like code, and freely shared. They run on any platform, thanks to their browser-based user interface. In essence, they are a virtual notebook environment used for literate programming. They offer a great developer experience and allow for rapid development and extensibility.

=> ↺ Free Video Editing Software Avidemux Is Now Available On Flathub

• Avidemux, a popular free video editor, is now available on Flathub, making the latest version easy to install on most Linux distributions.

• Flathub is a Linux app repository powered by Flatpak, which allows apps to run on almost any Linux distribution.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Installing Ubuntu 1804 With NVidia High End Graphics Card

=> ↺ APT for package self-builders

=> ↺ Pivoting airlines

=> ↺ How to change hostname on Ubuntu 18.04

=> ↺ Building Firefox Quantum

=> ↺ Change Default Applications on Trisquel 8.0

=> ↺ How to Install Android SDK Manager on Ubuntu 18.04

=> ↺ How to reset a KVM clone virtual Machines with virt-sysprep on Linux

=> ↺ Linux list a KVM vm guest using virsh command

=> ↺ LibreOffice Writer 6.0: Create Columns

=> ↺ How to execute command inside Docker container

=> ↺ Linux pstree Command Tutorial for Beginners (8 Examples)

=> ↺ Reproducible Windows builds

=> ↺ LibreOffice Calc: Open an XML Sitemap File as Table

=> ↺ Speeding Up Linux Kernel Builds With Ccache

=> ↺ TPM 2.0 in qemu

=> ↺ How to change hostname on Ubuntu 18.04

=> ↺ Remove all docker images to cleanup disk

=> ↺ Change Default Applications on Ubuntu 18.04

=> ↺ CentOS 7.4 & Realtek Wireless issues

=> ↺ Ubuntu 18.04: Install StarDict and Add Dictionary Files

=> ↺ What is Docker? Introduction guide to Docker

=> ↺ Kata Project Seeks to Improve Security with Virtualized Containers

Games

=> ↺ The original Doom, one of 64 Objects that shaped video game history

• Doom’s success lay not only with its addicting gameplay and technical innovations, such as its introduction of a portable game engine, but also in its innovative digital distribution. Note the prominent “shareware” advertisement on the top front of the game packaging. This groundbreaking game earned a spot in the inaugural class of the World Video Game Hall of Fame.

=> ↺ ‘Overload’ revives the cramped combat of classic shooter ‘Descent’ (Available for Linux on Steam!)

=> ↺ Plutocracy, a game about using wealth and power to rule from the shadows, is seeking additional funding

• Ever fancy using your vast wealth to hire lobbyists and manipulate the media to get politicians to do what you wanted while you crush your economic rivals? Plutocracy is a game that will allow you to live your wildest oligarchic fantasies but its developers are seeking to raise more funds to finish the game first.

=> ↺ Metanoia is a first person adventure in Early Access that is set within the mind

• Though there’s still a long way to go before the game is polished and complete, I found that the initial build has a few promising things that you can enjoy already.

=> ↺ Some thoughts on A Robot Named Fight, a fleshy metroidvania experience

• This metroidvania title has you facing off the scourge of biological life to save your robotic utopia. After spending my time blasting everything with a pulse I have a few thoughts to share.

=> ↺ The Arcan Display Server’s Progress With VR, Wayland Support & Security Experiments

• One of the most fascinating hobbyist projects of interest on Phoronix in recent years has been Arcan, the display server built off a game engine and that has been amassing an interesting feature set, and with it the project’s Durden desktop environment. The project is celebrating its two year milestone since going public so they have recapped some of their recent work.

=> ↺ Revisiting the Arcan Project

• Two years has passed since the public presentation where Arcan and its ecosystem of side projects and tools started to creep out of the woodworks; although the project had been alive and worked on for well-over a decade at that point. A lot of things have evolved and developed in a positive direction since the time of that presentation, and this post aims to provide an overview of those changes.

• But before that, the ‘elevator- pitch’ to the modern tweet-length attention spanned reader goes as follows:

=> ↺ 14 of the Best Free Games For Linux

• “Free” and “Linux” go hand in hand beautifully, like chips and a milkshake, and even though Linux isn’t widely seen as a gaming platform, there is a veritable wealth of free games you can get for it if you look in the right places. That’s in large part thanks to unpaid, open-source developers, who collaborate to bring classics (and new games) all together in Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ This week in Usability & Productivity, part 21

• Another week, another dose of Usability and Productivity in KDE land! We picked up a lot of great improvements to Discover, a much-requested change to allow Kate and Dolphin to be run with the root user account again, and quite a lot of important bugfixes.

=> ↺ A Progression of Drawing Devices

• Some time ago, I compared 2:1 devices, which was a new form factor back then. This time, triggered by an experiment with a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro during the last Krita sprint, I want to look into the various drawing devices I’ve used over the years, and which ones worked well, or not.

=> ↺ Other People’s Work

• Most of my writing on this blog is about FreeBSD, KDE, or Calamares. So it gives a bit of a one-sided view of what I do. There’s lots of pictures of rhubarb crumble, for instance, that never see the bloggy light-of-day. But I can build more than just software! Two months ago an unusually heavy storm blew down part of the fence in my back yard, which wasn’t really good for the privacy of that yard.

=> ↺ Not just Krita at the 2018 Krita Sprint

• At the 2018 Krita Sprint we had a special guest: Valeriy Malov, the maintainer of the Plasma Wacom tablet settings module. We’ve asked him to write about his experience at the sprint, so over to him!

• Hello,

• This is my Krita 2018 sprint report and general report / pre-release announcement for new version of wacomtablet.

=> ↺ The World and Calamares

• The timezone-selection widget in Calamares was borrowed from some distro installer a long time ago, and at some point the images were resized, and some math corrected to map image points to latitude and longitude on the map. The resizing introduced some aliasing artifacts, and then the math moved locations far north — where a typical map projection is “stretched out” to the wrong spot. Some time ago I fixed up things above 65 degrees north or so. Reykjavik is at 64-and-a-bit north, so wasn’t handled then. And it was a bodge anyway.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Bringing slow motion to Pitivi

• Last year, I worked on the project ‘Pitivi: Color correction interface using three chromatic wheels’ as part of my Google Summer of Code. This year again, I’m working on Pitivi under the GNOME organisation. Mathieu Duponchellle and Thibault Saunier are mentoring my project this time.

=> ↺ Input Event Handling in Nautilus

• Gestures like these is now how almost all input is handled in Nautilus. The exception is the stuff that has no event controller counterpart in GTK+ 3.

• This summer I’m working on porting Nautilus to GTK+ 4 as part of Google Summer of Code, and I’ve spent the entirety of the time on getting rid of deprecated 3.x API and obsolete ways of handling events. Despite slightly hack-ish ways of working around deprecations, it’s been smooth sailing so far – No Regressions™! Almost ready to switch†!

Distributions

New Releases

=> ↺ ExTiX 18.6, Build 180602, with KDE 4.16.12 together with KDE Frameworks 5.44.0, Refracta Tools and kernel 4.15.0-23-exton

• I have made a new version of ExTiX – The Ultimate Linux System. I call it ExTiX 18.6 KDE Live DVD. (The previous version was 17.5 from 170508). The best thing with ExTiX 18.6 is that while running the system live (from DVD/USB) or from hard drive you can use Refracta Tools (pre-installed) to create your own live installable Ubuntu system. So easy that a ten year child can do it!

=> ↺ 4MLinux 25.0 STABLE released.

• The status of the 4MLinux 25.0 series has been changed to STABLE. Edit your documents with LibreOffice 6.0.4.2 and GNOME Office (AbiWord 3.0.2, GIMP 2.10.0, Gnumeric 1.12.40), share your files using DropBox 47.4.74, surf the Internet with Firefox 60.0 and Chromium 66.0.3359.26, stay in touch with your friends via Thunderbird 52.7.0 and Skype for Web, enjoy your music collection with Audacious 3.9, watch your favorite videos with VLC 3.0.2 and mpv 0.27.0, play games powered by Mesa 17.2.5 and Wine 3.8. You can also setup the 4MLinux LAMP Server (Linux 4.14.39, Apache 2.4.33, MariaDB 10.2.14, PHP 5.6.36 and PHP 7.2.5). Perl 5.26.1, Python 2.7.14, and Python 3.6.4 are also available.

=> ↺ ISO Refresh: antergos 18.6

Gentoo Family

=> ↺ Upstream release notification for package maintainers

• Repology is monitoring package repositories across Linux distributions. By now, Atom feeds of per-maintainer outdated packages that I was waiting for have been implemented.

• So I subscribed to my own Gentoo feed using net-mail/rss2email and now Repology notifies me via e-mail of new upstream releases that other Linux distros have packaged that I still need to bump in Gentoo. In my case, it brought an update of dev-vcs/svn2git to my attention that I would have missed (or heard about later), otherwise.

Arch Family

=> ↺ Arch monthly May

• Finally! A new pacman release, this version adds some critical bits for reproducible builds and the pacman repository has been shed of misc tools which are now in pacman-contrib.

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Red Hat is Working on Linux Support for the Dell Canvas

• Time after time the open-source software company steps up to make sure those of us who choose Linux aren’t left behind when new technologies, standards and devices emerge.

• Case in point today: the Dell Canvas.

• GNOME’s Christian F.K. Schaller has revealed that Dell and Red Hat developers are working together to add Linux support for the Dell Canvas to the Linux kernel.

Finance

=> ↺ Red Hat Inc. (RHT) Rises 3.37% for June 01

=> ↺ These 5 Top Stocks On This Elite Screen Are In Buy Range Now

=> ↺ 2 Stocks to keep an eye on Today: Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), Crown Holdings, Inc. (CCK)

Fedora

=> ↺ OpenShift in Fedora Infrastructure NEWS

=> ↺ Council Election: Interview with Till Maas (till)

=> ↺ F27 -> Fedora 28 Upgrade

=> ↺ Harish Pillay: And, they are online now

• I was very happy then (as I am now) that the code is out there even though none of us whose code was published in the newsletters had any notion of copyright. Code was there to be freely copied and worked on. Yes, a radical idea which in 1984 got codified by Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation (www.fsf.org).

Debian Family

=> ↺ Looking for a new Raspberry Pi image maintainer

• I started building Raspberry Pi images because I thought there should be an easy, official way to install Debian on the Raspberry Pi.

• I still believe that, but I’m not actually using Debian on any of my Raspberry Pis anymore¹, so my personal motivation to do any work on the images is gone.

• On top of that, I realize that my commitments exceed my spare time capacity, so I need to get rid of responsibilities.

=> ↺ I’m hosting a small Debian BSP in Brooklyn

• The time has come for NYC Debian folks to gather. I’ve bravely volunteered to host a local bug squashing party (or BSP) in late June.

=> ↺ My LTS work in May 2018

• Organizing the MiniDebConf 2018 in Hamburg definitly took more time than planned, and then some things didnt work out as I had imagined so I could only start working on LTS at the end of May, and then there was this Alioth2Salsa migration too… But at least I managed to get started working on LTS gain \o/

=> ↺ Free software log (May 2018)

• The wonders of a week of vacation that was spent mostly working on free software! The headline releases were remctl 3.15, which fixes a long-standing correctness bug on the server and adds more protocol validation and far better valgrind support, and podlators 4.11, which fixes a buncho f long-standing bugs in Pod::Text and its subclasses.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Launchpad news, May 2018

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ Ubuntu 18.10 Release Date, New Features & More

• We round-up the latest news about Ubuntu 18.10, including the release date, planned features, upgrade process, and more.

• You can consider this article your definitive guide to everything you need to know about the upcoming release of Ubuntu 18.10 ‘Cosmic Cuttlefish’.

• And as this post is kept up to date with the latest developments, features, and plans you can bookmark it now and check back again at a later date.

• Ready to dive in?

Devices/Embedded

Android

=> ↺ Google quietly killed its Android tablet web page (update: it’s back)

=> ↺ Google’s website shake-up almost kills off Android tablets

=> ↺ OnePlus 6 international giveaway!

=> ↺ Switching from an iPhone to an Android device

=> ↺ The ‘silk white’ model of this $570 Android smartphone will be the most beautiful smartphone phone you can buy when its released

=> ↺ Xiaomi Announces MIUI 10: Here Is Everything You Need To Know

• At an event held in China, Xiaomi unveiled the next version of its Android ROM — MIUI 10 — along with the launch of new smartphones variants: Mi 8, Mi 8 Explorer Edition, and the Mi 8 SE.

• The latest version of MIUI comes with some major design changes and new features. This update will bring performance improvements, several AI-based features and take advantage of the full-screen bezel-less displays. So let’s take a look at all new features in MIUI 10.

=> ↺ How to Stream Your PC Games to Android with Steam Link

=> ↺ What is Pro Mode in the Samsung Galaxy Camera, and What Can You Do With It?

• Samsung Galaxy smartphones typically have great cameras. Pro Mode lets you move beyond the simple “point and shoot” features by unlocking advanced adjustments like ISO and aperture settings, and letting you tweak just about every aspect of the photography experience. Here’s how to access and use it.

=> ↺ Tablet section abruptly dumped from Google’s Android website

=> ↺ Google’s website shake-up shows it’s giving up on Android tablets

=> ↺ How to Stream Your PC Games to Android with Steam Link

=> ↺ Rumor: Mid-range Pixel could launch with Snapdragon 710 in 2019

=> ↺ Five battery-saving Android features that will keep your phone alive

=> ↺ 5 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week!

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Release notes for the Genode OS Framework 18.05

• The driver behind the release 18.05 is the rapid evolution of the Sculpt general-purpose OS. Following the initial version from February, which was targeted at early adopters, the new Sculpt for The Curious (TC) introduces a much more welcoming and empowering user experience (Section Sculpt for The Curious).

=> ↺ Genode OS 18.05 Rolls Out Java Support, New NVMe Driver & Sculpt OS Update

• Version 18.05 of the Genode operating system framework is now available along with the second revision to its Sculpt OS, what desires to become a general purpose OS based upon Genode.

• The Sculpt operating system now has better customization abilities, support for hot-plugging of USB storage devices, support for NVMe devices now in addition to SATA, interactive WiFi configuration, UEFI boot support, and many other improvements.

=> ↺ ReactOS Is Finally Able To Build Itself

• ReactOS, the “open-source Windows” operating system re-implementation, is now able to finally self-host itself in fully compile ReactOS from ReactOS.

• ReactOS developer Pierre Schweitzer announced today that ReactOS is fully self-hosting.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Trying Firefox Variants: From Firefox ESR to Pale Moon to Quantum

• For the last year or so the Firefox development team has been making life ever harder for users. First they broke all the old extensions that were based on XUL and XBL, so a lot of customizations no longer worked. Then they made PulseAudio mandatory on Linux bug (1345661), so on systems like mine that don’t run Pulse, there’s no way to get sound in a web page. Forget YouTube or XenoCanto unless you keep another browser around for that purpose.

• For those reasons I’d been avoiding the Firefox upgrade, sticking to Debian’s firefox-esr (“Extended Support Release”). But when Debian updated firefox-esr to Firefox 56 ESR late last year, performance became unusable. Like half a minute between when you hit Page Down and when the page actually scrolls. It was time to switch browsers.

=> ↺ Opting into European mode

• Trans Europa Express was covered on ghacks.net. This is an experimental Firefox extension that tries to get web sites to give you European-level privacy rights, even if the site classifies you as non-European.

=> ↺ “Will we complete this sprint in time?”: Modifying GitHub To Work For Us

• My team estimates the time to complete an issue using “T-shirt sizing”: we assign size labels “S” (<= 1 day), “M” (2-3 days), and “L” (4-5 days). One quick, albeit rough, way to estimate the amount of time it’d take to complete a sprint is to sum together the number of days these size labels represent (we use the upper bounds to be safe) to find out the number of “engineering days” it’ll take to complete the sprint. To find out if you’ll complete the sprint on time, this number can be subtracted by the number of engineering days until the deadline: the number of days until the deadline multiplied by the number of engineers you have.

=> ↺ Inside Firefox’s DOH engine

• DNS over HTTPS (DOH) is a feature where a client shortcuts the standard native resolver and instead asks a dedicated DOH server to resolve names.

• Compared to regular unprotected DNS lookups done over UDP or TCP, DOH increases privacy, security and sometimes even performance. It also makes it easy to use a name server of your choice for a particular application instead of the one configured globally (often by someone else) for your entire system.

• DNS over HTTPS is quite simply the same regular DNS packets (RFC 1035 style) normally sent in clear-text over UDP or TCP but instead sent with HTTPS requests. Your typical DNS server provider (like your ISP) might not support this yet.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

=> ↺ Best diagramming software: Top Microsoft Visio alternatives

• LibreOffice Draw is a vector graphics and flowcharts design tool that’s part of the free and open source LibreOffice software suite.

• Draw uses smart connectors that make it diagramming simple. Users can define where these connectors adhere to and automatically calculate and display the linear dimensions of their designs to build a variety of different charts and diagrams regardless of skill level.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

=> ↺ Microsoft is Looking to Buy GitHub for $5 Billion

• Not the first time Microsoft tries to buy GitHub

• This is not the first time that Microsoft attempts to buy GitHub. Back in 2016 when GitHub was raising the second round of fundings, Microsoft saw an opportunity for itself. GitHub denied the ‘rumors’ and Microsoft declined to comment on it.

=> ↺ Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub

• GitHub is a vast code repository that has become popular with developers and companies hosting their projects, documentation, and code. Apple, Amazon, Google, and many other big tech companies use GitHub. Microsoft is the top contributor to the site, and has more than 1,000 employees actively pushing code to repositories on GitHub. Microsoft even hosts its own original Windows File Manager source code on GitHub. The service was last valued at $2 billion back in 2015, but it’s not clear exactly how much Microsoft has paid to acquire GitHub.

=> ↺ Microsoft has been talking to GitHub about possible acquisition: Report

=> ↺ Microsoft is reportedly talking about buying GitHub, a platform for software developers last valued at $2 billion

=> ↺ Microsoft buying GitHub doesn’t scare me

=> ↺ Microsoft Reportedly Set to Acquire GitHub, Deal Could Happen Monday

=> ↺ Microsoft Has Reportedly Reached A Deal To Acquire GitHub

=> ↺ Microsoft has been talking about buying GitHub, a startup at the center of the software world last valued at $2 billion

=> ↺ Microsoft Wants to Buy GitHub, and FOSS Fans are Freaking Out

• Microsoft only has to sneeze in the direction of a company or service favoured by open source enthusiasts for placards bearing “embrace, extend, extinguish” to be thrust passionately in the air.

BSD

=> ↺ FreeBSD 11.2-RC1 Now Available

• The first RC build of the 11.2-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

=> ↺ FreeBSD 11.2 RC1 Brings WoL Support To Newer Intel Systems, Other Fixes

• Ahead of its expected release by month’s end, FreeBSD 11.2 is now in the release candidate phase of development.

• In the changes over the past week from beta 3 to RC1 there are more bug fixes and minor enhancements. Some of the enhancements include now supporting Wake-On-LAN for Intel Icelake and Cannonlake hardware, flushing of caches before carrying out an Intel CPU microcode update, using MBR rather than GPT for AMD64 memstick installers, restoring the disc1.iso image to be under 700MB again, and then the usual variety of bug fixing.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

=> ↺ GIMP now hosted by GNOME on GitLab

• Just yesterday, we shared that The GNOME Project moved to GitLab. This was a major score for GitLab, but also, an important move for GNOME as well — it should greatly improve collaboration between its contributors. GNOME is not alone in its move to that Git-repository manager, however, as GIMP (plus the babl and GEGL libraries) also made the transition. Actually, believe it or not, GNOME is hosting GIMP there.

• If you aren’t familiar with GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), please know that it is an open source image/graphics editor/manipulator. It is very similar to Adobe Photoshop, although GIMP is totally free. In fact, the open source Photoshop alternative is a cross-platform affair, available not just on Linux, but macOS, and Windows too. It is an extremely important program for the open source community — right up there with LibreOffice.

=> ↺ GIMP has moved to Gitlab

• Along with the GEGL and babl libraries, GIMP has moved to a new collaborative programming infrastructure based on Gitlab and hosted by GNOME.

=> ↺ GIMP Jumps Aboard The GitLab Bandwagon

• The 2018 trend of migrating open-source project infrastructure to GitLab continues.

• Following the GNOME project as well as FreeDesktop.org and other notable open-source projects migrating to GitLab for their project infrastructure with code hosting, bug management, etc, The GIMP has completed its migration too over to the popular alternative to GitHub.

=> ↺ Someone Set us Up the Compiler Bomb

• Despite the general public’s hijacking of the word “hacker,” we don’t advocate doing disruptive things. However, studying code exploits can often be useful both as an academic exercise and to understand what kind of things your systems might experience in the wild. [Code Explainer] takes apart a compiler bomb in a recent blog post.

• If you haven’t heard of a compiler bomb, perhaps you’ve heard of a zip bomb. This is a small zip file that “explodes” into a very large file. A compiler bomb is a small piece of C code that will blow up a compiler — in this case, specifically, gcc.

=> ↺ FSFE is hiring: EU public policy programme manager

• We are looking for a programme manager for our policy work. The person will work 35 hours per week with our team in the FSFE’s Berlin office.

Tesla

=> ↺ Tesla Is Releasing Open-Source Code, Including Autopilot System Image

• Tesla has finally decided to release some of the Linux open-source code used by the Model S and Model X.

• Under open-source licenses, the electric automaker is obliged to release its software to the public but up until now, hasn’t done so. ZDNet reports that the code has been released for the Model S/X 2018.12 software release and includes the system image for Tesla Autopilot, the kernal sources of its underlying software, and Tesla’s code for its infotainment system.

• In a statement, Tesla said it intends on releasing more of its open-source code in the near future.

• “Work is underway on preparing sources in other areas as well, together with a more coordinated information page.

• “We wanted to let you know about this material as it is available now while work continues on the other parts,” Tesla revealed.

=> ↺ Tesla can change so much with over-the-air updates that it’s messing with some owners’ heads

• This week was different, though, because it showed just how far the company can go with those updates. With a swift change in the software, the company showed it can reach as deep as the systems that control the brakes. It creates the feeling that you could get out of your car one night, and by the time you get back in the next morning, the car could do some things — maybe everything — in a totally different way.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

=> ↺ Upcoming ICO: Open Source University to launch ICO

• Certificate and acquired skills database Open Source University will on Monday (June 4) launch its ICO (initial coin offering), during which it hopes to raise as much as 34,000 Ether (Ethereum’s native currency), or roughly £15.1 million, at time of writing.

• [...]

• The World’s Academic & Career Development Ledger. Empowering 7 billion learners to connect to world’s top academic education and professional development opportunities on the Ethereum blockchain.

• We apply principles of open source to re-engineer the current-state educational model by building a system to enable better business and education sectors collaboration.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Ruby 2.6.0-preview2 Released

• We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 2.6.0-preview2.

• Ruby 2.6.0-preview2 is the first preview toward Ruby 2.6.0. This preview2 is released earlier than usual because it includes an important new feature, JIT.

=> ↺ Ruby 2.6 Preview Rolls Out With JIT Support

• The first preview release of Ruby 2.6 is now available and its big change compared to its earlier releases is a just-in-time (JIT) compiler.

• The Ruby 2.6 JIT compiler is designed to improve the performance of program execution — its approach used is converting to C code, dumping to the disk, and uses a C compiler (GCC or Clang) to generate the native code.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Selenium’s WebDriver is now a W3C Recommendation!

• We are really excited to announce that Selenium’s WebDriver has become a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation today, May 31st.

• Selenium is a free software project that has been a Conservancy member since 2011. It’s a suite of tools that enables browser automation across most modern browsers and operating systems. Selenium is also the core technology in many other types of browser automation tools, APIs and frameworks. Selenium’s WebDriver is particularly innovative because it binds tightly to a browser implementation, enabling web developers to run tests as if they were the actual user on many different environments in parallel.

Leftovers

Science

=> ↺ Ted Dabney, a Founder of Atari and a Creator of Pong, Dies at 81

• Samuel F. Dabney, an electrical engineer who laid the groundwork for the modern video game industry as a co-founder of Atari and helped create the hit console game Pong, died on May 26 at his home in Clearlake, Calif. He was 81.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ Breathing Mumbai’s air as bad as puffing 4 cigarettes a day, Delhi worse at 7.7

• Breathing Mumbai’s air has the same effect on your body as smoking four cigarettes a day. In Delhi, it’s 7.7 cigarettes. Other big Indian cities aren’t far behind, with the effect ranging from two to eight cigarettes a day.

=> ↺ Death toll from romaine lettuce E. coli outbreak rises

• Four more people have died because of the E. coli infection spread by romaine lettuce and 25 more illnesses have been reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

• The outbreak is over and romaine lettuce is no longer on the warning list, but reports of cases in three more states have emerged, the agency said Friday.

• A total of five people have died and 197 got sick in the outbreak this spring, which originated in Yuma, Ariz. It is considered to be the largest E. coli outbreak in the U.S. in more than a decade, the CDC said.

Security

=> ↺ ​Security alert: Watch out for password-stealing malware says FBI

• The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI said that North Korean hackers have been using both Joanap, a remote access tool (RAT), and Brambul, a Server Message Blockworm, since at least 2009 to target companies working in the media, aerospace, financial, and critical infrastructure sectors.

• [...]

• The malware gives North Korea’s hackers — which the agencies refer to by the code-name ‘Hidden Cobra’ — the ability to steal data, run further malware and initialise proxy communications on a compromised Windows device. Other functions include file management, process management, creation and deletion of directories and node management.

=> ↺ Lynis – Automated Security Auditing tool for Linux Servers

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ U.S. Pacific Command renamed U.S. Indo-Pacific Command

• The United States on Wednesday renamed its strategically important Pacific Command (PACOM) the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, in a move widely seen as a public expression of America’s keenness to count India as key partner in its strategic planning. The Donald Trump administration has been using the term Indo-Pacific instead of Asia-Pacific in official documents already.

=> ↺ Release of 40 radicalized prisoners a ‘major risk’ – French counter-terrorism prosecutor

• Molins’ worry that prisoners could become more radicalized [sic] in prison is a legitimate one, according to reports in the French press which say that more than 1,200 people who have been imprisoned for non-terrorism crimes have become radicalized while behind bars. Molins says prisons serve as “incubators” by allowing interactions to take place between radicalized [sic] and non-radicalized prisoners.

=> ↺ MP: Bajrang Dal Cadres Get Secret Arms Training To ‘Tackle Anti-National, Love Jihad Elements’

=> ↺ Man urged jihadists to attack UK football stadiums, court hears

• A man accused of encouraging would-be lone wolf [sic] attackers to target Prince George at school also suggested they kill fans at UK football stadiums, a court has heard.

=> ↺ Angola Destroys Thousands Landmines of War

• The mines are a deadly remnant of the civil war, one of the longest in Africa, which ended in 2002.

=> ↺ US military killed almost 500 civilians in 2017 – Pentagon report

• The Pentagon has told Congress that the US military killed almost 500 civilians and injured a further 169 in 2017. The civilians were killed in operations around the world, from Somalia to Yemen to Syria.

• “[The Department of Defense] assesses that there are credible reports of approximately 499 civilians killed and approximately 169 civilians injured during 2017,” reads the Pentagon’s report to Congress, as per CNN.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Not in the clear, but Assange should come home to Australia now

• Julian Assange has been detained in the Ecuadorean embassy for the best part of six years now. He is more isolated than ever with the Ecuadorean government cutting his access to the Internet in April. And the Americans are baying for his blood, some might say literally. Attorney-General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have made no secret of their desire to shut down WikiLeaks which the latter calls a “hostile non-state intelligence service”, and to see Assange arrested. This week, the senior Democrat congressman on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, rebuffed overtures to meet Assange with the statement that he would only do so when Assange was in US custody.

• [...]

• There is an opportunity for Australia to help resolve matters, particularly given that the reason for the reticence on Canberra’s part to involve itself in the Assange case has now gone.

• While Assange has been granted Ecuadorean citizenship he remains an Australian citizen and has familial ties to this country. Assange has strong family ties to Australia: both his parents live here and are aging, and this is the country he grew up in and lived in for the first two and a bit decades of his life. Up until 2010 this was home.

=> ↺ Chelsea Manning loses appeal in WikiLeaks case

• The U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals has upheld the conviction and sentencing of Chelsea Manning, the former soldier responsible for sourcing hundred of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents published online by WikiLeaks.

• In a 26-page opinion issued Thursday, a three-judge appellate panel affirmed the results of the 2013 court-martial that ended with the Army intelligence analyst being ordered to spend 35 years in military prison.

• “We are confident that based on the entire record and appellant’s course of conduct, the military judge would have imposed a sentence of at least that which was adjudged,” Senior Judge Col. Lorianne Campanella wrote on behalf of the panel.

=> ↺ Supporters to hold vigil for Reality Winner, accused NSA leaker, on anniversary of her arrest

• Relatives of Reality Winner, an Air Force veteran charged with leaking classified National Security Agency material, plan to hold a candlelight vigil Sunday exactly one year after she was taken into custody.

• Supporters of Ms. Winner, 26, are expected to commemorate the anniversary of her June 3 arrest outside the Lincolnton County Jail in Lincolnton, Georgia, north of Augusta, where she remains in detention awaiting trial.

• “I would invite everyone to come together to support my daughter Reality
 on this one-year anniversary of her arrest and jailing,” said Billie Winner Davis, Ms. Winner’s mother. “I do not want
 the world to forget her,” she said in a statement.

=> ↺ Whatever You Think of the Trump-Russia Investigation, Whistleblower Reality Winner Deserves Your Support

• By this weekend, Reality Winner, the former NSA contractor accused of releasing national security information to the media, will have been in jail for more than a full year without being convicted of a crime. Her trial, originally scheduled for October 2017, has been pushed back multiple times and is now on the docket for October 2018. It’s anyone’s guess whether the case will drag on even longer.

• [...]

• Winner, unfortunately, is caught between two camps — a whistleblower without a constituency — even as her alleged transgression proved a pivotal moment in the hot-burning media story of the investigation into potential attempts by Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.

=> ↺ WikiLeaks: 25 most corrupt ministers and public figures in Zimbabwe

• These individuals will never be prosecuted by the Mnangagwa government because he is involved with entirely all of them. Either they were in the deal together or they know too much of his own dirty deals or assassination assignments. These individuals have larger than life expenditure and live beyond any business means in Zimbabwe. Their corruption cases are widely known yet they walk freely abusing state resources daily.

=> ↺ ‘Wish You Were Here’: Roger Waters displays pro-Assange message at Berlin gig (PHOTOS)

• The neon red text, which read “Resist the attempted silencing of Julian Assange,” was projected onto a black backdrop before his concert on Saturday night. Waters, who is known for making radical political statements on stage, is an admirer of Assange and has previously featured images of the whistleblower in his shows.

=> ↺ Roger Waters Supports Assange During Berlin Concert (PHOTO)

• Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters used his concert in Berlin Saturday night as an opportunity to show support for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

• The neon red text, which read “Resist the attempted silencing of Julian Assange,” was projected onto a black backdrop before the concert.

• Waters, who is an admirer of Assange, has previously also featured images of the whistleblower in his shows.

=> ↺ JOHN PILGER AND ROGER WATERS BACK JUNE VIGILS AND RALLIES FOR JULIAN ASSANGE

• On 19 June 2018, it will be six years since Julian Assange was forced to take refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. He had been warned that the US planned an extradition warrant for his arrest. His ‘crime’ was that of a scrupulous editor – WikiLeaks had revealed the war crimes of the US. Today, Julian has never been more isolated, and his health is failing.On Sunday 17 June, the SUP will stage a rally for Julian in the heart of Sydney, Australia, his homeland. This is backed by John Pilger, Roger Waters, Julian Burnside QC and Terry Hicks, father of former Guantanamo prisoner, David Hicks. John Pilger will address the rally from the steps of Sydney Town Hall, which starts at 1pm.On Tuesday, June 19, there will be a rally and vigil outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, beginning at 6pm. Other vigils will be held outside British embassies around the world on the same day. In Dublin, Nobel Peace Prize winner Mariead Maguire and members of the Irish parliament, Clare Daly & Mick Wallace, will speak in support of Julian outside the British embassy.The above image shows a salute to Julian Assange by Rogers Waters at a recent concert.

=> ↺ Military court rejects Chelsea Manning’s appeal

• The US Army Court of Criminal Appeals has upheld Chelsea Manning’s convictions and sentencing, in a 26-page ruling released this week. The ruling will not have come as a surprise to Chelsea’s lawyers, Vincent Ward and Nancy Hollander, have indicated that the appeal will now go to the next stage, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.

• Chelsea’s legal team, supported with amicus briefs from the EFF, ACLU, and Amnesty International, contested Chelsea’s conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Espionage Act, as well as the amount of time she was credited for abusive prison conditions before trial. The appeals court struck down each argument, fully affirming the military judge’s decision – with the minor exception being that the court was not convinced that the Global Address List, containing 74,000 military addresses, exceeds the value of $1,000 necessary to qualify as felony theft.

• Manning’s defense argued that Chelsea did not “exceed authorized access”, which constitutes a CFAA violation, by viewing the documents she ultimately sent to WikiLeaks, and that using a program (Wget) to download them quickly did not change the nature of her access. The EFF’s supporting brief similarly argued that this is a question of “use”, not “access.” The EFF also argued that the CFAA was written to criminalize “hacking,” not the “use” issues at play here, and that the CFAA has been rendered unconstitutionally broad. The court disagreed on all counts.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Hurricane Maria May Have Killed More Than 4,000, According to a Harvard Study

• At least 4,645 people in Puerto Rico died in 2017 as a result of Hurricane Maria, according to estimates in a new study that tracked deaths between the hurricane’s landfall on September 20, 2017, until the end of the year. Published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the Harvard-funded study indicates that the more comprehensive death toll as a result of Hurricane Maria is more than 70 times the government’s official death toll of 64. The study says this new figure is “conservative” and likely an “underestimate.”

=> ↺ After a decade of dithering, the US east coast went all in on offshore wind power this week

• On May 23, Massachusetts’s awarded its first offshore-wind contract to Vineyard Wind for a 800 MW, 100-turbine farm to be built further offshore then previous projects were planned for, in order to avoid local opposition. It will fulfill the first half of a legal commitment, made in a 2016 energy law, by the state to purchase 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind.

=> ↺ Keeping USA Wasteful, Again

• Trump breaks things. He’s not a deal-maker. He’s a deal-breaker. Producers of electricity have realized coal is too inefficient and dirty to be continued but Trump wants to keep his ill-considered promise to keep coal going and is considering ordering industries to keep buying coal.

=> ↺ Three US states will spend $1.3 billion to build more electric vehicle charging

• Three US states announced major investments in charging infrastructure for electric cars on Thursday. In total, California, New York, and New Jersey will put $1.3 billion on the table in the coming years to help chip away at one of the biggest barriers standing in the way of widespread EV adoption.

• [...]

• All three investments are some of the biggest these states have committed to regarding building EV charging infrastructure. But while they might not directly affect the other 47 states, there’s reason to believe this news could help influence the spread of EVs around the country, according to Karl Brauer, executive publisher of Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book.

=> ↺ California PUC Approves Massive Transportation Electrification Program

• California is at the forefront of US states when it comes to reducing carbon emissions. Nearly 40% of those emissions come from the state’s transportation sector. Not only has California always been ground zero for car culture, it also is home to several of the largest ports in America whose operations depend on heavy duty trucks powered by diesel engines.

• [...]

• At the end of May, the California PUC approved a sweeping initiative proposed by the utility companies it regulates that will push the cause of vehicle electrification forward farther and faster than anyone thought possible. “What we’re seeing is one of the largest and most well-thought-out approaches to advancing electrification of vehicles,” Adrian Martinez, an attorney for Earthjustice tells Green Tech Media. “I think a lot of other utility commissions and other folks across the country are going to be looking at this.”

Finance

=> ↺ Visa card payments system returns to full capacity after crash

• Major retailers had earlier confirmed that card purchases were failing. Queues built up at petrol stations and shopping was left at supermarket tills as customers were unable to pay.

=> ↺ Payments with less of the evil

• Card networks are generally not great because they end up being moderators for content that passes through their network.

=> ↺ Student debt crisis watch: pay $18,000 of your $24,000 loan, owe $24,000

• Kaitlin Cawley finished grad school with $95,000 in student loans, including a $24,000 variable-rate loan that started at 9.4% and now stands at 11%, a loan that the US government lender Sallie Mae brokered for her when she was 20.

• Sallie Mae’s portal makes it almost impossible to find out how much you’ve paid into your loans; after a lengthy runaround, Cawley found that she had paid back $18,000 of her $24,000 loan, but that she still owed the full amount, thanks to sky-high interest and stiff penalties the government assessed against her because she opted to save tens of thousands of dollars by going to grad school outside of the USA.

• Cawley comes from a working-class background and her family was not able to substantially offset the expense of her university. She attended anyway, convinced that postsecondary education was the path to social mobility. Despite an advanced degree, Cawley lives in relative penury, largely thanks to her student debt.

=> ↺ Socialism Is on a Winning Streak

• Four candidates backed by Democratic Socialists of America won Pennsylvania primaries Tuesday, and come November they could all be legislators.

=> ↺ After dispute on freeway, Uber driver shot his passenger, who died soon after

• Hancock is believed to have shot and killed his passenger with his Ruger SR40 in the early hours of Friday morning while they were driving down Interstate 25, a primary north-south artery in the city.

=> ↺ Uber driver fatally shoots passenger on Denver interstate, police say

• This is just the latest troublesome incident for the ride-hailing company in Denver and the state of Colorado. In April, Denver law professor Nancy Leong fired off a series of tweets describing how her Uber driver told her he was going to take her to a hotel instead of the Denver International Airport. At a stop light, she said she screamed and pounded on the vehicle windows until nearby construction workers noticed and the driver then unlocked the doors and Leong got out.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Google Started a Political Shitstorm Because of Its Over-Reliance on Wikipedia

• The information on these cards is often taken from Wikipedia entries, which is what seems to have happened here. Six days ago, someone edited the Wikipedia page for “California Republican Party” to include “Nazism,” something that wasn’t changed until Wednesday, Wikipedia’s edit logs show. Google’s artificial intelligence pulled that data, displayed it under search, and now Republicans have more ammo in their ongoing Google-is-biased crusade.

=> ↺ Ex-Lowestoft Tory mayor ‘suspended over Islamophobic post’

• Mark Bee, Conservative leader of Waveney District Council, said: “The allegation was made to Brandon Lewis [MP for Great Yarmouth] regarding Stephen Ardley about comments alleged to have been made on social media two years ago.

=> ↺ Citing ‘Fox & Friends,’ Trump attacks ex-CIA head John Brennan after biting op-ed

• After former CIA director John Brennan penned a scathing op-ed in The Washington Post attacking President Trump, the commander-in-chief fired back on Twitter Saturday, citing one of his favorite cable news shows, Fox & Friends.

• “John Brennan, no single figure in American history has done more to discredit the intelligence community than this liar,” Trump tweeted quoting conservative commentator Dan Bongino who appeared on the TV show early Saturday. “Not only is he a liar, he’s a liar about being a liar.”

=> ↺ Trump tweets quote calling ex-CIA chief a ‘liar’ after he wrote scathing op-ed

• “John Brennan, no single figure in American history has done more to discredit the intelligence community than this liar,” Trump tweeted. “Not only is he a liar, he’s a liar about being a liar.”

=> ↺ Ex-CIA director Brennan blasts Trump’s ‘highly abnormal behavior’ in op-ed

• Former CIA Director John Brennan sharply criticized President Trump in a Washington Post op-ed published on Friday.

• The president “has shown highly abnormal behavior by lying routinely to the American people without compunction, intentionally fueling divisions in our country and actively working to degrade the imperfect but critical institutions that serve us,” Brennan writes.

=> ↺ Former CIA chief’s selective outrage over Trump

• To hear the former CIA director turned NBC pundit John Brennan tell it, Donald Trump has destroyed the prestige of American presidency. Intent on playing his part in the #Resistance, Brennan glosses over some genuine horrors.

• The career spy, who led the CIA during President Barack Obama’s second term (2013-2017) penned an angry op-ed in Thursday’s Washington Post, blasting President Trump’s character and temperament and lavishing praise on his predecessors.

=> ↺ Hillary Clinton’s ‘a**-covering’ on bin Laden raid ‘rattled’ Joe Biden, new book says

• Biden’s reservations for the raid are laid out in the book, the excerpt shows. “My sense is that [Clinton] was not sold on the idea either,” David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama, said in the book excerpt.

• Biden didn’t rule out a 2020 presidential bid in an April interview with MSNBC’s Rev. Al Sharpton, saying then he still needs time to decide. “You’re not ruling me out. You’re not telling me no,” Sharpton said to Biden. “No,” replied Biden. “No, I’m not.”

=> ↺ Amid ‘Russiagate’ Hysteria, What Are the Facts?

• We must end this Russophobic insanity.

=> ↺ Italy: The Center Cannot Hold

• The traditional governing parties, center “left” and center “right” all follow the same neoliberal policies and constitute the self-designated “center.” Mainstream media enforce center right claims to authority on the base of orthodox economic expertise, while the center left derives its authority from its “values,” centered on an identity politics version of human rights. “Center” sounds so reasonable, so safe from dangerous “extremes” and unpredictable populism. Against such threats, the Center presents itself as the champion and safeguard of “democracy.”

• How true is this?

• World Values Survey results indicate that in Europe and the United States, people who describe themselves as “centrist” on the average have less attachment to democracy (e.g. free and fair elections) that those on the left, and even those on the far right. This is not as surprising as it may seem at first, since “centrists” are by definition attached to the status quo. In European countries, the authoritarian neoliberal “center” is institutionalized in the European Union, which imposes economic policy over the heads of the parliaments of the member countries, dictating measures which conform to the choices of Germany and northern Europe, but are increasingly disastrous for the Southern EU members.

• [...]

• Italian disillusion is particularly significant. Italy was an exceptionally enthusiastic founding member of the unification begun with the 1957 Treaty of Rome. And yet, Italy’s own history illustrates what can go wrong with such unification, since the 19th century political creation of a unified Italy centered in Turin led to the enrichment of the industrial north at the expense of southern Italy, where the splendor of Naples declined into chronic poverty, crime and corruption. Now Italy itself is “the south” in the periphery of a European Union centered around Germany.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Video killed the censorship tsar: the VCR recalled

• Twenty years ago, on June 1, 1998, the DVD format launched in Ireland, sounding the death knell for the video cassette.

• Shortly after, as he cleared his shelves of the last VCR machines, one big retailer observed: “We’re saying goodbye to one of the most important products in the history of consumer technology.”

• He was not exaggerating. The DVD provided a better picture quality, and wasn’t prone to spaghetti tape snarl-ups, but it was merely an evolution. The VCR which it extinguished had been a revolution, and its impact on Ireland had been more revolutionary than just about anywhere else.

• The video cassette was revolutionary in that it transformed viewing habits unchanged since the birth of TV. Prior to its arrival, all viewing was strictly in real time. If you wanted to watch the football, or catch that soap cliffhanger, you had to be perched in front of your TV as it happened. Miss it, and it was gone forever from a world where broadcasters and viewers alike believed that screening repeats was short-changing the public. Offering the ability to record in your absence and watch at your leisure, the VCR was a magical game-changer.

• [...]

• The Free State quickly appointed its first film censor, James Montgomery, who worked tirelessly to turn back the tide of foreign filth. Montgomery proudly boasted: “I know nothing about films but I do know the Ten Commandments.”

=> ↺ Filmmakers call for reform of Film Censorship Act

• In line with the new government’s commitment to freedom of speech and expression, a group of filmmakers and human right activists are urging for the Government to reform the Film Censorship Act 2002.

• The Freedom Film Network (FFN) has called on Home Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin and Minister of Communications and Multimedia Gobind Singh Deo to enable an environment where independent film makers can flourish.

• “FFN would also like to see the de-politicisation of film regulating bodies such as Lembaga Penapisan Filem and FINAS, who should be made independent and transparent in all their dealings,” FFN said in a statement on Sunday (June 3).

=> ↺ ‘Everybody Is Scared’: Pakistani Media Fighting — And Losing — Battle With ‘Extreme’ Censorship

• Military rule, religious extremism, and war have long made Pakistan one of the world’s toughest beats for journalists.

• But Pakistani reporters say free media is now being shackled like never before, as veteran reporters have been leaving after experiencing threats, the nation’s most popular TV station was forced off the air, and nationwide distribution of Pakistan’s oldest newspaper has been halted.

• The developments are threatening the independence of the already depleted ranks of free-press torchbearers, who have come under pressure from the all-powerful army, hard-line religious groups, and militant groups.

=> ↺ Everpress and Amnesty International collaborate on anti-censorship T-shirt collection

• Global marketplace Everpress and Amnesty International have linked up to release a line of artist-led T-shirts designed to raise awareness about censorship.

• With 50 young artists and designers tapped for the 50/50 Project, T-shirt contributors include the likes of Octavian, Liam Hodges, Dexter Navy and more.

• Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen explained via a press release, “Censorship is often the thin end of the wedge when it comes to human rights violations. Time and time again, we’ve seen cases of brave human rights defenders in repressive countries being subjected to censorship, then threatened and harassed, and then finally jailed or even killed.” She added, “We’re delighted to be working with Everpress and this incredible array of designers to raise awareness of the evils of censorship.”

=> ↺ Fox News and the Lurking Specter of Censorship

• For more than 15 years, Fox News has become the posterchild when it comes to hush-money payouts to former employees and other litigants. Almost all of the “button-your-lip” settlements involve sexual misconduct and harassment by men in power positions at the cable network.

• [...]

• Turn the clock back to the late evening of July 25, 1967 in Phoenix, where racial tension had been festering for years amid allegations of police brutality. The city schools were segregated, poverty and joblessness were endemic. I was working the late-night shift at the AP Bureau, when violence erupted in the heart of the city’s black neighborhood, the start of a three-day rampage. Our six-man bureau would be put to an unexpected and unwanted test as a result of a decision by media mogul, Eugene C. Pulliam.

=> ↺ Devin Nunes hammers Twitter for censoring Drudge Report

• House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes condemned Twitter on Sunday for continuing to apply a layer of censorship on the Drudge Report.

• About two months after the California Republican raised the alarm about Drudge Report “being censored by Twitter,” Nunes again nailed the social media platform for putting up a wall separating users from the top right-leaning news aggregator. “I just looked on Twitter,” Nunes said on “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo.” “The Drudge Report is being censored today, so for the last three or four days I haven’t been able to get on the Drudge Report because it’s being censored on Twitter.”

=> ↺ Spotify rescinds hateful conduct policy in wake of censorship controversy

• Spotify has formally halted its hate content and hateful conduct policy, just weeks after the streaming giant ceased promotion of R. Kelly and XXXTentacion‘s music following sexual misconduct and domestic abuse allegations made against both artists. Although R. Kelly’s music continued to perform well in spite of its removal from all Spotify branded algorithmic and curated playlists, the policy that deemed both R. Kelly and XXXtentacion to be in conduct related violation proved to be controversial among many who accused Spotify of practicing censorship through the policy. Kendrick Lamar notably threatened to pull his music from the platform if Spotify continued to enforce the policy.

=> ↺ Spotify makes U-turn on policy

=> ↺ Top Dawg on Spotify Reversing Hateful Conduct Policy: ‘It’s a Slippery Slope If You Start Censoring Music’

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Leaks Connected to Edward Snowden Are Still Trickling Out — 5 Years After His NSA Document Dump

=> ↺ Five years on, the U.S. government is still counting the costs of Edward Snowden’s NSA leak

=> ↺ 5 years on, US government still counting Snowden leak costs

• Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the lid off U.S. government surveillance methods five years ago, but intelligence chiefs complain that revelations from the trove of classified documents he disclosed are still trickling out.

• That includes recent reporting on a mass surveillance program run by close U.S. ally Japan, and on how the NSA targeted bitcoin users to gather intelligence to counterterrorism, narcotics and money laundering — both stories published by The Intercept, an investigative publication with access to Snowden documents.

• The top U.S. counterintelligence official said journalists have publicly released only about 1 percent taken by the 34-year-old American, now living in exile in Russia, “so we don’t see this issue ending anytime soon.”

=> ↺ 5 years on, US government still counting Snowden leak costs

=> ↺ FIVE YEARS AFTER SNOWDEN LEAK: U.S. government still counting the costs

=> ↺ Edward Snowden’s lawyer warns of ‘databases of ruin’ as Big Tech ousts Big Brother in surveillance debate

• A few months after Edward Snowden emerged from the shadows of America’s espionage world to shine a light on the murky business of mass surveillance, the NSA contractor said he never set out to upend the system.

• “I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself,” the former intelligence agent said in Russia, where he has been living since leaking thousands of classified documents in the summer of 2013.

• Five years on, it seems society no longer fears Big Brother so much as Big Tech.

=> ↺ iPhones might get three cameras, and Apple surprises Valve

• Dual cameras, schmual cameras — how about three? A new analyst report speculates that the 2019 iPhone will have one telephoto lens and two more to create a depth map for AR.

=> ↺ DHS found evidence of cell phone spying near White House

• Again, IMSI catchers have been known to be active in Washington for some time. In 2014, researchers with the security company ESD America detected IMSI catchers scattered across Washington, DC in the vicinity of the White House, the Russian Embassy, and Capitol Hill. Some of these may have been operated as part of counterintelligence or law enforcement activity, but some portion of the devices detected in 15 areas of interest by ESD America may have been operated by foreign intelligence organizations. The technology required to create IMSI catcher devices has only become more accessible over the past four years.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Teenage wife killed for not giving birth to baby boy

• “I’ve implored the political administration to arrest the culprits but the police have not taken any action as they say it is de-facto tribal area,” he said.

=> ↺ Man saves minor girls from becoming human sacrifices, is awarded by police

=> ↺ Child marriages rampant in KP, says study

• Child marriages are rampant in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa mainly due to poverty, revealed a recent research.

=> ↺ Video shows cop punching woman during beach arrest

=> ↺ Cop punches young woman in the head for underage drinking on the beach

• Emily Weinman, a smidge under drinking age at 20 years old, went to the beach in Southern New Jersey to enjoy Memorial Day with her daughter, her daughter’s father, and a friend. A police officer suspected her of underage drinking, and he didn’t take kindly to her screaming when he tried to arrest her, so he punched her a couple of times.

=> ↺ Kurds attacked in Greek camp, accused of not fasting on Ramadan

• The attacks on Kurds caused hundreds of Kurdish refugees to flee the camp and head toward the town of Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos. According to tweets by Michael Raber, who posted photos online, the people who fled included secular Kurdish refugees who warned “of rising influence from Daesh [ISIS].”

=> ↺ For women mango protectors, it’s double the work, half the pay

• Sarita Thapa’s day is gruelling – cooking, chores, childcare and up to 12 hours in the field. But because she is ‘accompanying’ her husband, she earns only half as much as he does.

=> ↺ Prison or Deportation: Sweden Addresses ‘Moral Police’ Amid Migrant Crisis

• The Conservatives also want to weed out informal “moral police” who monitor how women and girls in Swedish suburbs appear before the public eye and see to it that they are “correctly” dressed and behave themselves accordingly.

• Individuals suspected of involvement with “moral police” will be refused access to certain premises. According to Tobé, such refusals will be issued immediately, without having to wait for a court order, and will first and foremost affect people patrolling the streets.

=> ↺ UK spies ‘still share intelligence gained abroad by torture’

• Britain’s spies stand accused of continuing to share intelligence obtained under torture, in breach of official guidance. The damning claim, outlined in a letter to the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, is made by his Labour shadow, Emily Thornberry, and the shadow attorney-general, Shami Chakrabarti.

• They point to hitherto unpublicised figures buried in the latest annual report from the Intelligence Services Commissioner (ISC), who has a statutory duty to review the way MI5, MI6 and GCHQ share intelligence.

• The use of intelligence obtained abroad is governed by an official document, the Consolidated Guidance on the Detention and Interviewing of Detainees Overseas.

• According to the latest ISC report, released in the run-up to last Christmas, in 2016 the three agencies and the Ministry of Defence felt a need to consider the guidance in 921 cases – more than double the number the previous year.

=> ↺ Cops probing use of Scottish airports for CIA ‘torture flights’ have no idea of cost to taypayer

• Police have said they have no idea how much a five-year probe into the use of Scottish airports by CIA torture flights has cost the taxpayer.

• An investigation into so-called rendition stopovers was ordered in 2013 by then lord advocate Frank Mulholland.

• Police Scotland and the Crown Office said the investigation is “ongoing”.

• But police said they did “not hold information” on the cost – stating “officers involved in this inquiry are not required to collate timesheets detailing how their time is spent between this inquiry and other policing business”.

=> ↺ British spies are accused of sharing intelligence obtained under torture by foreign states including US and Libya

• Britain’s spies have been accused of continuing to share intelligence obtained under torture by foreign states.

• Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry, and Shadow Attorney-General, Shami Chakrabarti made the damning claim in a letter to Boris Johnson – citing unpublicised figures from the latest annual report from the Intelligence Services Commissioner (ISC).

Intellectual Monopolies

=> ↺ IP Activity in U.S. & China cover AirPlay 2, Siri High Sierra, Heart Study, the word ‘Promotion’ & Grotesque Monsters for Face ID

• This week there was IP activity in both China and U.S. covering a wide range of trademarks (filings and RTMs) and design patents covering the Siri app icon for macOS High Sierra; AirPlay 2; the word ‘Promotion’; Face ID covering ‘Monsters’ and more; and Apple’s ‘Heart Study’ icons in color and black & White.

=> ↺ Citing to Published Applications

• The USPTO only began publishing applications in 2001 and so growth was expected. Published patent applications are especially useful because their timing of publication (18 months after filing) corresponds well with the prosecution timeline (First action at approximately 15 months). For patent applications that never issue as patents, the publication does more than simply shift-back timing — those patent documents would have never entered the public domain. I have not yet gone back to research what percentage of cited published applications fall into this second category of published-but-never-patented.

=> ↺ Regeneron

• Over on the main page, Dennis has mentioned the Regeneron cert petition. The CAFC found a patent unenforceable because of a sanction for litigation misconduct.

• Maybe, but what I find troubling about the case is that the Federal Circuit’s opinion — which is literally in many respects a cut-and-paste job of the district court’s opinion — makes factual statements about specific lawyers and their intent. But, as part of the sanction for litigation misconduct, the trial court precluded those lawyers from testifying about why they had not disclosed certain information to the USPTO.

Copyrights

=> ↺ ISP Questions Impartiality of Judges in Copyright Troll Cases

• As a staunch defender of privacy and serial critic of copyright trolling activities, Bahnhof has carved out a niche as one of the most customer-friendly ISPs in Sweden. The company certainly isn’t scared of speaking its mind and in a new broadside, it targets several of the country’s judges, questioning their impartiality for supporting pro-copyright groups while presiding over important copyright cases.

=> ↺ The Best Places to Find Free Audiobooks (Legally)

• Audiobooks are great for commutes, long trips, and dull tasks. Here are a number of places you can download Audiobooks legally, and for free. And they’re not all public domain stuff.

• Many of the audiobook sites you can find on the internet let you download classic books in the public domain for free, but some sites have better quality books than others. We’ve rounded up some of the best of those sites, plus some ways you can get other kinds of audiobooks for free, too.

=> ↺ “Fight Club” Author Chuck Palahniuk Apologizes For Piracy Rants

• As it turns out someone was stealing ‘for real.’ Not by sharing copies of books, but by messing with royalties, as the New York post explains in detail.

• The alleged mastermind is Darin Webb, an accountant who’s accused of embezzling millions of dollars from the prestigious literary agency Donadio & Olson. Webb was indicted by the US Government and confessed his wrongdoings in a video interview, according to the complaint.

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