● 08.14.14

● Links 14/8/2014: Kernel Summit Coming, KMix on KDE Frameworks 5

Posted in News Roundup at 11:30 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux. It’s been around since the mid ‘90s, and has since reached a user-base that spans industries and continents.

Server

• Linux virtualization startup CoreOS now offers an alternative to the private repositories offered by Docker Inc.

• Government IT managers interested in experimenting with Docker, but wary of its complexity, have a new resource with Panamax, a Docker management platform.

• Created by CenturyLink Labs, Panamax gives developers a single management platform to easily create, share and deploy any Docker-containerized application, the company said in its announcement.

Kernel Space

• Taking place next week is the Linux Kernel Summit in Chicago alongside the 2014 LinuxCon North America. We’ll be providing live coverage next week while one of the early kernel summit sessions already being discussed online is a goal of trying to further the Linux solution to the year 2038 problem.

• It turns out that this developer is a female student in India. She is learning by contributing to the Linux kernel! Look out world! She aims to succeed.

• Linux kernel 3.16 was released only a little over a week ago, so it stands to reason that an update was bound to appear sooner or later. Linus Torvalds also skipped the release of the first RC for Linux kernel 3.17 RC1, so this build is actually now the most advanced out there.

• IBM says the channel is in dire need of more professionals with mainframe server administration expertise, and just in time for the new school year, it is promoting a partnership with the Linux Foundation, Marist College and Syracuse University to deliver those skills through a new series of MOOCs on open source operating systems.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Time to get excited again Linux gamers! Dead Island has some hints that it will be coming to Linux! Yes it’s another Zombie game, but it’s a bit different. It has a big focus on melee combat and it can be quite brutal.

• Some fantastic news today folks as Reinhard Pollice from Nordic Games has let it slip that Darksiders 2 will join Darksiders in gaining a Linux version!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• It’s more than year of my encounter with source code of some real life application.(Thanks to KDE) I had never before seen such huge source code. The guidelines on techbase were so comprehensive that I didn’t even realize that I had started fixing imperative bugs. The best part was that KDE had all types of applications, under various categories like multimedia, education, games etc. So I could try my hand on many different applications and recognize my interest. I enjoyed hacking source code of Kstars the most. And I compiled the code with the help of instruction on techbase and KDE’s cool developers at IRC, who are always eager to help. I used to get fascinated on running those awesome application on my plasma desktop. I used to wonder how they work. The secret was revealed then. I sent mail in KDE developer’s mailing list that I want to contribute and how do I start even though answer was there on techbase. And reply came that I can search though bugs related to application of my interest on bugzilla and try to fix it. I did it. It was really so easy.

• All plugins from the old activity manager are ported to the new version.

• This means that one of the most requested features is coming back – you will be able to set custom keyboard shortcuts for individual activities as soon as Plasma 5.1 comes out.

• We all know that the ‘D’ in KDE originally stood for “desktop..

• The first update for Plasma 5 has arrived. 5.0.1, adds a month’s worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important such as fixing text which couldn’t be translated, using the correct icons and fixing overlapping files with KDELibs 4 software.

• KMix is now ported to KDE Frameworks 5. After a one day long porting effort, the basic functionality of KMix is available: Main Window, Systray, Volume Key Shortcuts, Sound Menu, volume save and restore. More sophisticated parts require more efforts and are currently missing, like the On-Screen-Display (OSD), which requires a port to Plasma 2.

Distributions

Slackware Family

• What relation does Christopher’s rant have to Slackware? After all, it’s Debian that got the flak, and in the comments section people indicate they intend to switch to Gentoo… forgetting that Slackware is a good systemd-free alternative (but hey! this automatic dependency resolution thingie that makes life so comfortable in Gentoo is not part of Slackware either).

• Last week I asked the SDDM developers to reconsider their decision no longer to support ConsoleKit because Slackware does not have systemd or logind and thus we need to keep using ConsoleKit. The answer could be expected: “answer is no because ConsoleKit is deprecated and is not maintained anymore” and therefore I had to patch it in myself.

Red Hat Family

• Ansible, a Durham-based IT automation startup with Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) roots, is doubling down on Bull City.

• That’s according to CEO Saïd Ziouani, who tells me the 30-employee shop will cross the 100 mark next year.

• “Our goal is to continue to grow aggressively in the Durham area,” he says, adding that all facets of the business can happen from Durham.

• Oracle Linux is now generally available today. According to the company, the release builds on its approach to providing support for emerging technologies, such as OpenStack, while delivering new Linux innovations, tools, and features.

• “Oracle Linux continues to provide the most flexible options for customers and partners, allowing them to easily innovate, collaborate, and create enterprise-grade solutions,” said Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president of Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle. “With Oracle Linux 7, users have more freedom to choose the technologies and solutions that best meet their business objectives. Oracle Linux allows users to benefit from an open approach for emerging technologies, like OpenStack, and allows them to meet the performance and reliability requirements of the modern data center.”

Fedora

• Fedora 21 won’t even see its alpha release until September now, it’s been delayed by a month compared to when it originally shipped, and there’s no guarantee that this is even the last delay to be seen by this long-awaited release.

Debian Family

• Debian has yet to issue an announcement concerning these beta images for the Debian Installer for Jessie, but a sharp-eyed Phoronix reader pointed them out to us this evening, which can be found via Debian.org. Images are available in the plethora of architectures supported by Debian.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical is pushing hard to expand Ubuntu into new consumer markets. In the past year, we’ve seen shiny prototypes of Ubuntu-based mobile phones and tablets, and the company hasn’t given up on its 2012 vision of getting Ubuntu onto TVs either. What’s more, serious work is underway on converging all of these roles into a single chameleonic OS, something even Microsoft hasn’t tried to tackle.

Devices/Embedded

• MYIR announced a sandwich-style single board computer that runs Linux on a Freescale i.MX28x SoC and features -40 to 85°C operation and a CAN bus interface.

• MYIR specializes in low-power ARM single board computers (SBCs) and computer-on-modules (COMs), with the latter including the MYC-SAM9X5-V2 (using Atmel’s ARM9-based AT91SAM9X5) and MYC-AM335X (using TI’s Cortex-A8 based Sitara AM335x). With the new MYC-IMX28X COM and associated MYD-IMX28X development board, the company is mining the Freescale i.MX28x, a 454MHz, ARM9 system-on-chip that has been used in many embedded Linux boards, most recently including Technologic’s TS-7400-V2.

Phones

Ballnux

• So what’s the verdict? If you’re chasing screen real estate and resolution above all else then the LG G3 is certainly going to catch your eye. A larger screen without much extra bulk is an impressive achievement, although there are few situations where you can put all those pixels to good use. The combination of the removable battery, microSD slot and wireless charging will also seal the deal for some Android fans. LG’s G3 sits somewhere between the elegant HTC M8 and the brash Samsung Galaxy S5, perhaps offering the best of both worlds.

• Android 4.4.4 (KitKat) runs the device, which comes with 2 GB RAM, 32 GB internal memory and a 1,860-mAh battery. It also has real-time high-dynamic-range imaging, as well as an ultra-power-saving mode, private mode, the S Health app, and connectivity with the latest Samsung Gear Fit, Gear Live and Gear 2 wearables.

• The Galaxy Alpha will be available in early September; depending on the market, color choices will include charcoal black, dazzling white, frosted gold, sleek silver and scuba blue. Pricing has not yet been disclosed.

• Samsung have today officially unveiled the newest addition to their Galaxy smartphone range. The Galaxy Alpha has been expected for some time with details filtering through news agencies at a steady stream. However today was the first time we have actually had the images and details released by Samsung.

• The rivalry between Apple and Samsung in the mobile phone arena has been bitter and hard fought, with each side battling the other in court as well as in the smartphone market itself. Now Samsung has released the Galaxy Alpha phone and some think it bears a suspicious resemblance to Apple’s iPhone.

Android

• A couple of weeks ago we reported rumors were circulating that Motorola was building the next Nexus (6). Now we can add a little more speculation to the Nexus rumor mill for your enjoyment.

• There has been wide speculation that a device ‘Codename Shamu’ is the Nexus 6 although this has not been confirmed by either Google or Motorola. However Shamu suddenly appeared on the GFX Benchmark Database fuelling suggesting that the Nexus is getting nearer and nearer.

Free Software/Open Source

• I am constantly looking for ways to make my life easier whether it’s keeping track of my kid’s school activity schedule or not loosing my grocery list. For this, I often look for open source solutions. Why? Because most of the time the open source solution is simple and doesn’t have unnecessary bells and whistles that I don’t need, and even if I need those extra bells and whistles, I know that someone else out there also needs it and most likely has coded it already.

• Librarians Registration Council of Nigeria (LRCN) in collaboration with the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has organized a skill gap workshop in information and communication technologies for librarians.

• According to the organizers, the joint workshop with special focus on application of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in library operations was aimed at equipping librarians with skills to measure up new challenges in the ICT sector and be able to deploy and apply the knowledge to improve the lot of all information seekers.

• Umbrella Company Employees specialising in IT contracting would do well to acquire skills in open source technology, according to a poll of 300 IT professionals by CWJobs.co.uk.

• Nearly half (48%) of the respondents believe that more open source jobs and contracts are available today than a year ago, and 71% are confident that it will be widely required in the future. Currently, however, 62% of those surveyed believe that businesses are missing out on open source’s potential.

• At the time Kurt Bieg, CEO of Simple Machine, explained their reasoning in doing so: “we believe ownership is becoming obsolete, this is our way of inspiring young and old people to read, learn, and ultimately manipulate code that came from a studio known for taking chances and innovating puzzle games.”

• Collaboration is at the heart of the open source movement, and when the biggest names in the technology sphere join forces, massive steps forward can be made. The world certainly witnessed this in July this year, when Red Hat worked together with none other than Google on a high-profile project.

• In the end, the move to an open source architecture makes iovation a more nimble, scalable, and better performing service provider. The upgrade is ultimately an investment in the company’s future and a commitment to providing world class services to customers.

Web Browsers

Chrome

SaaS/Big Data

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems back in 2010 the company said it would continue to invest and push Sun’s SPARC silicon forward. Four years later and Oracle continues to deliver on that promise with a continued march of SPARC silicon innovation.

Business

• As of March, only a third of 1,589 urban co-operative banks that have been told by the central bank to migrate to a core banking system have done so. The rest of the market is up for grabs.

• “Open source-based products, which could bring down the total cost of ownership, have become a credible alternative for decision makers,” said Aniruddha Paul, CIO of ING Vysya.

• The bank which has over 500 branches in the country started upgrading its core banking platform last year and completed the project in February.

Project Releases

• Things have been rolling along here at the ManageIQ community, and we’re proud to announce that the first release candidate is now ready. The first release for ManageIQ is called “Anand”, named after world champion chess player Viswanathan Anand.

Public Services/Government

• Just because a trust has taken an open source approach, it does not mean you have to take all that work, control, ownership immediately – you can take as much as time as you want to develop those abilities. Also, with a community interest company in place to support the management of the code, there will be a structure in place for clinicians to really have some input into the way the system is developed, whilst maintaining the integrity of the code for better patient experience and outcomes.

• Yesterday the National Democratic Institute launched a suite of web-based applications created for their partner organizations, mostly pro-democracy groups and political parties around the world. These “DemTools,” which are ready-to-use but can also be customized, will give organizations in developing countries some of the capabilities that political activists and parties in the United States have had for years. Moreover, since the National Democratic Institute (NDI) is making the promise to host partner organization’s applications in the cloud essentially forever, they hope these applications will help usher in a period of more sustainable tech.

• The federal government is the single largest purchaser of code in the world. So why is this code—taxpayer-funded and integral to the day-to-day working of our democracy—so often hidden from public view? There are two sides to answering that question: Why does the government so often build on closed platforms, and once built, why isn’t the code released to the public?

Licensing

• The case is complicated and likely will undergo much procedural maneuvering before the court will get to the substance of the case. However, a key question that the courts will likely look at is whether a violation of GPLv2 gives a plaintiff a right to a contractual remedy or a claim for copyright infringement.

• I’ve been writing about free software for nearly 20 years, and about Microsoft for over 30 years. Observing the latter deal with the former has been fascinating. At first, the US software giant simply dismissed free software as unworthy even of its attention, but by the early years of this millennium, that was clearly no longer a viable position.

Standards/Consortia

• The Khronos Group who oversee OpenGL development have announced not only OpenGL 4.5, but they are also encouraging others to come forward to join them in building the next generation of OpenGL.

• It’s been a turbulent time for graphics API development with AMD announcing Mantle, and even Apple bringing their own API to the table called Metal. We have then had lots of back and forth between developers putting up blog posts discussing the good and bad for OpenGL itself. Now we are here for the future of OpenGL and it’s all good news.

• The Khronos Group released OpenROAD today at SIGGRAPH 2014 showing off all of their cross-platform, industry-standard APIs.

• OpenROAD is an animated video featuring all of the royalty-free APIs out of Khronos working together in an “open ecosystem”. There’s OpenCL, OpenCL, OpenSL ES, OpenMAX, OpenVX, WebGL, and WebCL.

Leftovers

• Sarah Palin was incoherent and some are alleging that she was possibly drunk on her TV channel as she babbled nonsensically in a response to Elizabeth Warren. Palin made little sense as she trailed off numerous times and looked rather bleary-eyed at the camera. The clip has gone viral on Facebook, and people have been sending around memes with the text from the clip, which is as follows:

Science

• If there were some simple things you could do that would make you smarter, you’d do them, right? Unfortunately, it’s difficult to guarantee that a particular activity will actually cause you to be smarter. If you’ll settle for a nice correlation, though, there are plenty of things to try!

Security

• Once upon a time, we used to think in terms of one hardware server equals one server operating system. Then, along came KVM, Hyper-V, VMware, and all the rest of the virtual machine (VM) hypervisors and more recently Docker with its containers. Now the idea of a single server operating system on a solo box is downright quaint.

• No week is busier in the calendar year for information security professionals than the week of the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences. Black Hat USA this year ran from Aug. 5 to 7 at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay, which is a venue change from Caesars Palacewhere the event has been held for the previous decade. Among the big topics of conversation at Black Hat 2014 was a keynote presentation by respected digital security expert Dan Geer who advocated that the U.S. government buy up all the security vulnerabilities in order to corner the market. Another big topic discussed at Black Hat is the issue of automotive security. Security researchers Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller detailed their concerns and also outlined a new technology approach that could be used to limit risks. The issue of government surveillance was once again a hot-button topic at Black Hat as well as at Defcon. The Defcon conference ran from Aug. 7 to 10 at the Rio hotel in Las Vegas. At Black Hat, Alex Stamos, Yahoo’s new chief information security officer (CISO), detailed his plans for improving user privacy, including an effort to provide end-to-end encryption for Yahoo mail users. Flip through these slides for a look at some of the sights from the two conferences.

• Dan Geer is world-renowned cyber security researcher. He’s Chief Information Security Officer at In-Q-Tel, a non-profit venture capital firm. Hid company invests in technology to support the CIA. He’s knows his shit. And he uses a pager instead of a smartphone.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The battle against autonomous, robotic killing machines just got its first robotics company partner, as Canada-based Clearpath Robotics pledged its support to the international campaign calling for a ban on fully autonomous weaponized robots.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Fossil sources of energy will begin to experience sharp decline in 35 years’ time, a professor in land policy at the Michigan State University, United States, John Hannah, has disclosed.

Finance

• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is warning the public that bitcoin and other virtual currencies are a risky “Wild West” in the financial markets.

• It’s that impossible there that’s at issue. And I’m afraid that it is possible for wealth in Sweden to be more unequally held than wealth in the UK, even while income inequality is smaller. We know this to be true for we can go and look up the wealth gini for Sweden as we can do for the UK. They’re listed here (a secondary source but good enough for us here). With the gini a higher number means more unequal: Sweden 0.742, UK 0.697. Wealth is distributed more unequally in Sweden than in the UK.

• Like many states, Rhode Island has been placing growing slices of its pension funds into higher-risk investments, entrusting the money to Wall Street financial managers who capture hefty fees. Yet the state has rebuffed requests to disclose the details of the management contracts.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• For many years, we’ve talked about the very questionable practice by the USTR to set up “Industry Trade Advisory Committees” (ITACs), who had full access to the various documents concerning the trade agreements that were being negotiated. Obviously, for big companies, being one of the very small group of people on the inside, helping to shape trade agreements, is enormously powerful — especially since industries long ago learned that you can “launder” policy changes that Congress doesn’t want to make via the international trade agreement process, thereby putting pressure on Congress to act. It’s why we’ve pointed out that it seems rather unfair that the RIAA has direct access to the TPP agreement, but Senate staffers (including experts on international trade) have been refused access.

Privacy

• Democracy Now! this morning (8/13/14) talking about his new piece in the Intercept (8/12/14) critical of an NPR report (Morning Edition, 8/1/14) describing “tangible evidence” of a “direct connection” between Edward Snowden’s revelations of unchecked National Security Agency spying and increased Al-Qaeda efforts to protect its communications via cryptography.

• Greenwald called the report, by NPR reporter Dina Temple-Raston, “a pure and indisputable case of journalistic malpractice and deceit.” It’s hard to say he doesn’t have a point.

• If your irony detector seems to be malfunctioning, this video of Los Angeles police officers confronting some activists flying a drone over a LAPD parking lot should reset it. At the very least, it should at least indicate whether the batteries need to be changed, as any powered irony detector should have the needle buried within minutes.

• Los Angeles authorities are weighing whether they may legally block hobbyists from flying camera-equipped drones over police stations.

• The inquiry was prompted Friday after the LAPD confronted a Southern California man outside its Hollywood station. The cops told him he was trespassing for using a drone to capture footage of the station’s parking lot, and ordered him to stop. The incident is posted to YouTube.

• Long time NSA watcher James Bamford spent a bunch of time with Ed Snowden in Moscow recently, leading to an absolutely fascinating story in Wired. There’s lots of interesting stuff in there, but this seems particularly interesting.

• Edward Snowden claims the United States is deploying “MonsterMind,” an immense cybersecurity program that might breach the rights of U.S. citizens.

• …makes it easier for people who don’t have technical training to buy software…

• Facing rising competition, Cisco has announced another round of layoffs – 6,000 – in financial results that beat analyst expectations but were still flat.

• Presenting the company’s latest quarter results, CEO John Chambers announced the latest round of layoffs, but was at least able to give a sliver of good news, with revenue dipping 0.5 per cent in the quarter to US$12.4 billion, while Wall Street had expected the number to be $US12.1 billion.

• Recently declassified documents show that the NSA’s system of almost limitless collection of data through the PRISM and Boundless Informant programmes was highly criticised by the court responsible for approving its surveillance methods.

• The 117-page decision by Judge John Bates of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (pictured) slammed the NSA for its “systemic over-collection” of metadata from online communications. One of the programmes that was the most heavily criticised was subsequently scrapped by the NSA after a 2011 review deemed it to be failing its mission.

• Shocking revelations this morning in a new interview with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, which revealed a bungled attempt by the NSA to install malware on a key Syrian router bricked it and blacked out internet to most of the country.

• Why one of the nation’s most important issues isn’t driving one of its most important races

• The case of John Schindler is a curious one. A former NSA analyst and, until recently, a professor at the US Naval War College, he resigned on Tuesday following a college investigation into whether a widely circulated picture of his penis was actually his.

• After months of virtual appearances at TED conferences and SXSW, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden finally sat down for a print media profile. The honor went to Wired’s Jim Bamford, who met with Snowden three times over the course of several weeks in Moscow.

• Edward Snowden has just been granted three more years of asylum in Russia, and the former NSA contractor-turned-whistle-blower is understandably choosy about whom he meets with in person. In June, he gave top NSA expert James Bamford a good deal of his time for an in-depth Wired story, and Bamford didn’t waste it.

• Spying by the National Security Agency and increasing demands by the feds for client data continues costing U.S. IT giants billions in lost revenue while also damaging reputations of the American company’s themselves.

• Michael Dearing has been around the Silicon Valley tech scene for some time, as an executive at eBay, an associate professor at Stanford and a successful angel investor and founder of the Harrison Metal micro-venture firm.

• Despite that, he managed to keep a relatively low profile until learning last year that the U.S. government has been using Silicon Valley technology for spying.

• In an exclusive interview with Wired.com, Snowden said that NSA’s earlier announced number of 1.7 million secret documents allegedly leaked by him was an overestimated figure

• After President Obama delivered a speech in January endorsing changes to surveillance policies, including an end to the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ domestic calling records, John Napier Tye was disillusioned.

Civil Rights

• As Jamilah King explains, Michael Brown’s death at the hands of police officers isn’t an isolated incident in Ferguson, Missouri—where black residents face disproportionate stops, searches and arrests. The community has come out into the streets in protest to Brown’s killing, but it seems authorities don’t yet have a basic understanding about the outrage residents are feeling.

• Fox News host Martha MacCallum hyped fears that the New Black Panther Party is pushing racial violence following an FBI report that one member of the group was on the ground in Ferguson, Missouri following the tragic shooting death of an unarmed black teenager.

• We’ve been debating internally whether or not to cover the mess that is currently going on in Ferguson, Missouri. There has been plenty of attention paid to the protests and the failures by police there — and we frequently cover problems with police, as well as the militarization of police, which was absolutely on display in Ferguson (if you’ve been under a rock, police killed an unarmed teenager there last week, leading to protests over the past few days — and the police have been handling the situation… poorly, to say the least). However, the situation was changing so rapidly, it wasn’t entirely clear what to cover. The pictures from Ferguson of a very militarized police force were disturbing, and we’ve been thinking about writing something on that (and we may still). However, this evening, things got even more ridiculous, as not only did the SWAT team show up, but it then arrested two of the reporters who had been covering the events: Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post and Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post. Both had been vital in getting out the story of what was happening on the street.

• A New York Times reporter facing jail for refusing to reveal his source for leaks about the CIA was awarded the Newspaper Guild’s press freedom prize yesterday.

• James Risen won the Herbert Block Freedom Award for having “risked his own freedom to protect the principles that are essential for a truly free press,” said a statement from the Newspaper Guild.

• CIA spying on the Senate is the constitutional equivalent of the Watergate break-in. In both cases, the executive branch attacked the very foundations of our system of checks and balances.

• We’ve written numerous times about how one of the major problems of the Espionage Act, which the Obama Administration has used more than twice as many times as all previous administrations combined, is terrible in part because there is no whistleblowing defense. In fact, any and all evidence of the public interest in revealing the information is inadmissible as evidence. Instead, the Act just focuses on whether or not information was released. For hopefully obvious reasons, this has tremendous (and dangerous) implications for free speech and whistleblowing (something President Obama claims to strongly support).

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Okay, so we debunked this silly argument back in 2006 (and again in 2008), but it appears to be back again now that the net neutrality battle is heating up: it’s the idea that because we have CDNs, the internet has never been neutral (for those who don’t know, a CDN is a Content Delivery Network — a system, like Akamai, that allows internet companies to distribute their content geographically, so that download speeds are slightly shorter across the network, since physical distance is not as far). But that’s based on a bogus definition of “net neutrality” that only telco shills or very confused people make. The simplest way of explaining this is as follows: CDNs make the surfing experience better for everyone, by better distributing content to speed delivery to everyone. The efforts by big broadband to break net neutrality is to set up a tollbooth so that they get to pick winners and losers. In short: CDNs benefit end users. Breaking net neutrality only benefits the big broadband gatekeepers. This is about the power of big broadband to pick winners and losers.

• [...]

• Again, (yes, I’m on repeat here), CDNs are about improving access for everyone. As others have pointed out, a CDN doesn’t degrade other traffic. It improves the overall experience by moving content closer to the edges of the network. The efforts by Comcast, Verizon and AT&T are entirely different. They’re looking to reallocate traffic to burden some players in favor of those who pay. That’s picking winners and losers. The impact is wholly different. A CDN benefits everyone. The gatekeeper broadband providers are looking to hinder some sites in order to favor those who pay.

• The New York Times Editorial Board comes out in support of using Title II authority to enact stronger net neutrality rules. T-Mobile and Sprint are asking the FCC to reconsider its rules for the upcoming spectrum auction. Edward Snowden claimed a cyberdefense system dubbed “MotherMind” is in the works at the NSA, and accused the agency of inadvertently causing an Internet blackout in Syria in 2012.

• It seems unlikely to expect FCC boss Tom Wheeler to say much that really matters concerning the key issues the FCC is facing until the final decisions are made (and, if history is any indication, even when those decisions are made, the statements will be bland nothingness), but it’s still worth noting that he recently responded to two very different letters from members of Congress. The first was a letter from a number of Senators coming out strongly in support of reclassifying internet access under Title II, basically defining it as a common carrier service, and creating real rules that prevent broadband providers from picking winners and losers. Wheeler’s response could be summed up as “Yeah, we’re considering it.” But that’s about it.

• Between trying to negotiate disputed charges with increased levels of internet service, releases of customer retention employee handbooks that are hella damning, and the release of a recording with a customer retention rep that alarmed even the most cynical of us, Comcast hasn’t had an easy go of it lately. Two things have become pretty clear as these stories have rolled out to the public. First, thou shalt always record your conversations with Comcast reps (local/stupid two-party consent laws apply) or thou shalt be forever filled with regret. Second, Comcast really needs to change the way its customer service reps handle calls.

DRM

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