● 05.22.15

● Links 22/5/2015: Fedora 22 Final Release is Near, Canonical IPO Considered

Posted in News Roundup at 10:02 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Clear Linux, Intel’s new container-based distribution, bristles with ideas for how to run containers and perform OS management

• It’s been more than six months since the OpenWrt developers announced the release of the OpenWrt “Barrier Breaker” 14.07 custom firmware for routers, but today they’ve just informed us of the immediate availability for download of the first Release Candidate version of the upcoming OpenWrt “Chaos Calmer” 15.05 update.

• Android smartphones are becoming very powerful devices, and many of them can easily handle the word-processing, photo editing and other desktop PC-type tasks. So why not make your Android smartphone double as a desktop PC? Here we show you how to install the Linux variant Debian on your Android device, on which you can then install popular programs like LibreOffice and GIMP. Best of all, you don’t need to root your device to do this.

• The AndEX Live DVD that we introduced to you a few weeks ago has been updated today with new features, such as the latest Linux 4.0 kernel.

• Issue 6 of Linux Voice is now nine months old, so we’re releasing it under the Creative Commons BY-SA license. You can share and modify all content from the magazine (apart from adverts), even for commercial purposes, providing you credit Linux Voice as the original source and retain the same license.

Desktop

• Yesterday, Europe had an average of 2.29% page-views from GNU/Linux desktops according to StatCounter.

• This suggests the spiking systems are a single organization on a single schedule with a single system administrator… Sounds like schools to me but it could also be a large business or government or particular device sold in huge quantity without automatic updating. The 3 spikes on weekdays suggests to me it’s the schools.

• Yesterday, with nearly 2 billion citizens of the Internet, GNU/Linux desktops had 1.75%, ~35million. Chrome GNU/Linux had 0.46%, ~10million, with another 7million expected in 2015.

Server

• Intel reckons that’s harder to do with Linux containers as “underlying kernel still can be attacked from within the container.” That’s bad because it means “all containers on the same host can be compromised, regardless of the intended isolation between them,” making multitennacy risky and therefore unlikely.

• The biggest example is CoreOS, a heavily venture-backed startup based in San Francisco that has already gained some early attention as a potential alternative to Docker. The company’s open source project dubbed Rocket has won backing from powerhouses like Google and Intel and others like Red Hat and VMware.

• Intel has become the latest vendor to throw its weight behind the push to solve the security woes of containers with the launch of a new technology that promises to address the risks currently standing in the way of widespread production use from the hardware level up. It’s the latest fruit of the internal Clear Linux Project.

• The downside is that it does not work well with Linux containers as underlying kernel still can be attacked from within the container and all containers on the same host can be compromised.

• Containers are a solution to the problem of how to get software to run reliably when moved from one computing environment to another. This could be from a developer’s laptop to a test environment, from a staging environment into production and perhaps from a physical machine in a data center to a virtual machine in a private or public cloud.

Kernel Space

• Jiri Slaby, the maintainer of the 3.12 kernel series, announced earlier today that a new maintenance release is available for all users of this LTS (Long Term Support) Linux kernel.

• RAID bug can corrupt the filesystem, patches incoming, caution advised

• After yesterday’s announcement of Linux kernel 3.12.43 LTS, which got numerous changes, including a patch for the famous EXT4 data corruption issue that plagued almost all Linux kernel branches, today we can report that Linux kernel 3.18.14 LTS is out and it also includes a patch for the respective EXT4 bug.

• The lengthy list of changes to systemd 220 can be found via this mailing list post.

• Lennart Poettering had the great pleasure of announcing today, May 21, the immediate availability for download of a new release of his controversial systemd init system that is adopted by more and more Linux kernel-based operating systems.

• The Linux kernel continues advancing on many hardware fronts, among which is support for ACPI 6.0 and the kernel is making the new LIBND subsystem for non-volatile memory device support.

Applications

• Weblate 2.3 has been released today. It comes with better features for project owners, better file formats support and more configuration options for users.

• Nowadays, Social platforms are making the biggest impact in both professional and personal life of all. We’re all virtually connected with each other using Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, G+, and Linkedin etc. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a business man, a student or whoever, the Social platform takes most part in your self or business promotion. Using social media, anyone can easily collaborate with anyone and spread their business promotions, ideas, features or whatever to the world. So, implementing your own social platform for your oraganization is a good practise to communicate globally. There are may collaboration tools out there. Today, In this tutorial, we are going to discuss such kind of collaboration tool called ‘eXo platform’.

• A year ago, I started working on a new storage library for low-level operations with various types of block devices — libblockdev. Today, I’m happy to announce that the library reached the 1.0 milestone which means that it covers all the functionality that has been stated in the initial goals and it’s going to keep the API stable.

• No new functionality was introduced so this is a good candidate for a stable release.

• Apparently, no one can stop the ever growing “Popcorn Time” community of movie pirates, as after an iOS Installer was released to allow users to install the Popcorn Time app on their iPhone or iPad devices from a Mac or Windows machine, there’s now a browser-based video streaming service too.

• As you may know, Enpass is a free, multi-platform password manager available for the main desktop and mobile platforms: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. It uses SQLCipher (open source extension to SQLite) for the 256-bit AES encryption of database files.

• Note that if you use multiple monitors, the tray will only show up on the primary monitor!

Instructionals/Technical

• The first time I used vi was in a college programming course. It was the default editor on the computer lab’s UNIX systems we used to compile our assignments. I remember when our professor first introduced vi and explained that you used the hjkl keys to move your cursor around instead of the arrow keys. Before this point, I was a pico user (that dates me a bit now), and it seemed so backward to me that vi used hjkl instead.

Games

• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is the huge Kickstarter from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night developer Koji Igarashi. I spoke to the developer to clarify about their Linux support.

• Gas Guzzlers Extreme was causing major excitement when it was planned for Linux, but sadly things didn’t turn out so well.

• Greedy Guns is a fast paced action platformer with exploration, ability upgrades and loads of bullets. It’s available in a free and open beta on Itch.io.

• As you probably noticed that SuperTuxKart 0.9 released ~ 1 month ago. I tried to build it in the same day, but build failed on ARM architecture.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Right from the start, we at KDAB have had lots of fun playing a leading role – and as the Qt experts, we look forward to continuing to contribute to the growing Qt community.

• We found out that the German Discworld covers were made with Krita, and had the privilege to ask the artist to talk about her work.

• The other day I introduced a new Rust code completion plugin for Kate, powered by Phil Dawes’ nifty Racer. Since then there’s been a whole bunch of additional developments!

• So what is exactly new in this build? Especially interesting are all the improvements to PSD import/export support. Yesterday we learned that Katarzyna uses PSD as her working format when working with Krita – we still don’t recommend that, but it’s easier now!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Tarballs are due on 2015-05-25 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.17.2 unstable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.17.2. If you are not able to make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late, please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll the tarball for you!

• While we are eagerly waiting for the final release of the Cinnamon 2.6 desktop environment to become available in the main software repositories of our favorite Linux distributions, Clement Lefebvre has announced that we can install it in a Beta form in Linux Mint.

• The GNOME developers are trying all kinds of interesting interactions with devices outside the desktop environment, and now they are working on a way to get the GPS locations of an Android phone.

Distributions

• Foresight Linux is shutting down after not being able to generate enough participation to warrant its continued development.

OpenVZ

• This OpenVZ template comes with slackpkg pre-configured, using the generic URL “mirrors.slackware.com” so that your packages will always be downloaded from a mirror near you. OpenVZ is a bit peculiar in the sense that it knows a little bit about how Linux distros are being configured. So the OpenVZ control panel is the place where you configure the hostname, IP address and root password of your VPS. In order to make the Slackware installation internet-aware out of the box, I added two Google DNS IP addresses to its “/etc/resolv.conf” file. The result? Once provisioned, the VPS starts fast and mere seconds after booting I was able to login as root to my new machine.

• Just wanted to share my answers to the, “What features are absent in OpenVZ from your point of view?” question.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Today at Fedora 22 Final Go/No-Go meeting it was decided that Fedora 22 Final is No-Go. More details in meeting minutes [1].

• Mark Shuttleworth has been quoted as saying he’s considering taking Canonical public. He needs to talk to “his team,” but Shuttleworth thinks the time is just about right. Speaking of Canonical, Jack Wallen today said that poor little Canonical is just picked on by the Linux community and the Linux community is only hurting itself. On the other side of town, Fedora 22 is a No-Go tonight, but getting revisited tomorrow.

• Fedora 22 is scheduled to be released next week but for that to happen there’s still a number of blocker bugs that need to be addressed. The second release candidate of Fedora 22 Final is now available for those wishing to stress this major update of the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.

• At today’s Go/No-Go meeting it was decided that Fedora 22 Final is not ready for release. However, tomorrow that decision will be re-evaluated.

• During today’s Fedora 22 Final Go/No-Go meeting, the Fedora Linux developers did not approve the launch of the final version of the Fedora 22 Linux distribution, which already got a one week delay from the initial schedule.

Debian Family

• I wanted to upgrade my server to Jessie, and didn’t want to keep the 3.2 kernel indefinitely, so I had to update to at least 3.14, and find something to make my life (and maybe some others) easier.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical and Ubuntu have been around for more than a decade, but not everyone knows that the company is privately owned and not publicly listed. It looks like Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, might consider filing for an IPO, which means making the company public.

• Shuttleworth, who has funded the popular Linux company out of his own pocket since its founding in October 2004, said that while a final decision has not been made, “He’s seriously thinking about taking Canonical public.” The decision won’t be entirely his. “I need to talk it over with my Canonical team.” He also said that the idea has been being seriously kicked around internally for the last several months.

• Because it is in its early development stages, Ubuntu Desktop Next 15.10 it does not bring too many changes to Ubuntu Desktop Next 15.04, but however, if you want to test it, I recommend you do this in a virtual environment.

• Ubuntu 15.10 has been dubbed “Wily Werewolf” and a release date has been set for it. You can expect Ubuntu 15.10 to be available on October 22, according to Softpedia.

• The UK government releases every year a security guidance that details various problems and security problems that are identified in systems used by the authorities. They also revealed some issues with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, although it’s not something major.

Devices/Embedded

• Aaeon’s AIOT-X1000 SBC runs Wind River Linux on an Intel Quark chip, and offers dual Ethernet, dual mini-PCIe, and optional WiFi, BT, ZigBee, and 3G.

• Last year, Taiwan based Aaeon debuted the AIOT-X1000 SBC as the guts of its AIOT-X1000 IoT Gateway. Now the 3.5-inch board is available on its own for a wide range of IoT applications. The name combines the prefix “Aaeon Internet of Things” with the board’s single-threaded Intel Quark X1000 system-on-chip, which here runs the Yocto-based Wind River Linux. The low power, Pentium ISA-compatible SoC can be clocked at up to 400MHz, and has no GPU.

• You should know that there’s an on-going Indiegogo campaign (with flexible funding) for a new computer board called Lemon Pi and developed by the EMBEDSTUDIO Chinese company.

Phones

Tizen

• The Top 20 most popular Samsung Z1 apps to be downloaded from the Tizen store during April 2015 have been released. Many favourites are still there this month like WhatsApp, Opera Mini, McAfee AV, Trucaller and LockApps. Notable new ones are the highly requested MX Player and Speed Truck which made it to #3 position.

Android

• Google may be the next big company to take on the internet of things, giving it an entry into the world of connected everyday objects. According to The Information, Google has developed software that can run on low-power devices and give them the ability to communicate with other connected devices nearby. Internally, the software is reportedly being called “Brillo,” but it may debut under an Android name next week, at Google’s I/O conference. The Information reports that the software could be used on everything from major home appliances like refrigerators to smaller tech like garden monitors.

• The biggest updates for Android user is the version upgrade, and we’re already at v5.0! Google every year comes out with an update for the Android OS which helps them update the users’ Operating System of the phone.

• Google continues adding new “micro features” that continue to bridge the gap between desktop and mobile. Jack Wallen believes these features that have helped to crown Google the King of Mobility.

• You know you spend a lot of time on your smartphone, but what are you doing with it? It’s a question QualityTime (Android 4.0+) attempts to answer, monitoring activity on your handset and revealing the apps that you just can’t pull yourself away from. Here’s how to get the app up and running on your device.

• As per user reports, Sony has finally started rolling out the Android Lollipop update to its Xperia Z and Xperia ZR handsets, specifically Android 5.0.2. The Japanese tech giant also announced it was rolling out a firmware update for its Xperia Z1, Xperia Z1 Compact, and Xperia Z Ultra smartphones with several bug fixes.

• Sling TV, Dish Network’s Internet TV service designed for cord cutters, is now available on the Android TV platform, the company is announcing this morning, including Google’s Nexus Player. This addition expands the service’s already fairly extensive lineup of devices it supports, which today includes Roku and Roku TV, Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, Xbox One, as well as iOS and Android phones and tablets, and Mac and PC desktops.

• Google has begun rolling out the latest version of its Lollipop operating system to a few new Android devices this week, including the Nexus 4, Nexus 5 and Nexus 9 tablet with LTE capabilities. If you own any of these devices, you should be able to download the 5.1.1 update over-the-air in the coming days, but we’ve included direct links below if you’d rather not wait.

• Setting a timer or alarm has been one of my favorite conveniences since I started using a Wear device regularly 6 months ago. Granted, they aren’t must-haves in my life, but they do come in handy occasionally, and I find myself using them on Wear more often than I would on my phone.

• Google I/O will be here in mere days, and that means it’s time for the 2015 edition of our Google Tracker. If you’re new to the series, Google Tracker is a running list of all the projects going on at Google HQ. We do bi-annual installments—one at the beginning of the year and one just before I/O—making this the fourth edition on Ars.

• If you recently sold your old Android phone, chances are your text messages, emails, pictures and Facebook key are still in there, even if you wiped its memory clean.

• We’ve gotten a few reports today of a new feature hitting the YouTube app, and it’s a big one. After an extended public outcry, Google appears to be adding support for 60fps video to Android. Videos shot in 60fps look much smoother and more realistic, but this doesn’t seem to be live for everyone yet.

• Asus has announced that the ZenFone 4, ZenFone 5, and ZenFone 6 smartphones’ scheduled Android 5.0 Lollipop update has been delayed.

• Google appears to be on the brink of revamping Chrome OS to broaden its appeal and give it a whole new kind of life. The evolution is happening on a few different fronts, many of which we’ve seen the beginnings of in bits and pieces already. Soon, though, the big picture should start to become clear.

Free Software/Open Source

• I’m likely on the hook for providing a version of my “WhyWeFOSS” as an example, so stay tuned for that post in the near-ish future.

• At the Vancouver OpenStack summit, software-defined storage company Nexenta announced the general availability of its NexentaEdge Block and Object Storage platform, as well as a strategic alliance agreement with Canonical and its Ubuntu OpenStack.

• The combination of open source and open standards ensures long-term preservation of electronic records and prevents IT vendor lock-in, says Luciano Ammenti, head of the IT department at the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana) in Vatican City.

• If your next software development project is going to be successful, be it a simple Java EE deployment or a full-scale role out of a private cloud initiative based on OpenStack, a tremendous amount of code has to be written. The sad state of affairs enterprise organizations need to reckon with is that there is no way all that code can be written by the internal development team.

• So what’s an organization to do? According to Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, successful organizations reach out to the open source community. “There is too much software to be written for any one organization to write this software on its own,” Zemlin said. “Open source allows businesses to focus on only the most important aspects of their technology stacks; only the things that truly differentiate the organization.”

• Jim Whitehurst recently wrote about the performance management approach we use at Red Hat for the Harvard Business Review. In his article, Whitehurst details one aspect of the performance management process that differentiates Red Hat from other companies—its flexibility.

• We have a system for tracking performance (called Compass), and we have expectations for when Compass reviews are performed (at least annually, preferably quarterly). But the details and structure of implementation are up to individual managers or teams. I lead a team of more than 100 people at Red Hat, and I’d like to share how I measure and manage performance the open source way.

• That crazy DrumPants wearable tech we first saw in ’07 — the same one that raised 75 grand on KickStarter and was featured on Shark Tank in 2014 — is back. Its creators have now turned to Indiegogo to fund the mass production of DrumPants version 2.0, which they claim is faster and stronger than its predecessor. Plus, it’s now open source. The wearable, for those who’ve only just heard of it, isn’t actually a pair of pants with drums (sorry to disappoint). It’s a set of accessories comprised of two elongated drum pads and two foot pedals you can use to play different kinds of instruments, along with a knob that lets you choose between samples and musical scales. You can wear them over your clothes, or under, like the jamming dude in the GIF above.

Events

• We have been back from Libre Graphics Meeting 2015 in Toronto for 2 weeks now. It is time for a report!

• I’ve started the day with the session called “Crack, Train, Fix, Release” by Chris Heilmann. While it was very interesting for some unknown reason I was expecting a talk more closely related to software testing. Unfortunately at the same time in the other room was a talk called “Integration Testing from the Trenches” by Nicolas Frankel which I missed.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• The code behind Google’s Chrome browser has always been open source—it’s known as the Chromium project. The Android port has thus far been more locked down, but that changes today with a big commit from the development team. Chrome for Android is now almost entirely open source, and that could mean some cool new browsers are on the way.

• Google has uploaded the majority of the remaining Chrome for Android code into the open-source Chromium repository. In other words, Chrome for Android now matches Chrome for desktop in terms of available open source code, letting anyone examine, modify, and compile the project.

SaaS/Big Data

• There are not enough OpenStack experts to go around. At OpenStack Summit, there is literally not a single company here that is not looking for more programmers, architects, and engineers.

• But, they’re coming. OpenStack is now backed by more than 200 vendors, including Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Oracle, RackSpace Red Hat, and VMware. Is there any enterprise out there which doesn’t have a working relationship with at least of one of these companies?

• This is making OpenStack deployment easier. If your company doesn’t have the talent it needs to do it in-house, Canonical, Red Hat, and Mirantis, to name but three of the leading OpenStack deployment firms, are all ready to jump in and help you get up and running. In short, you can pay cash today and have a working OpenStack cloud tomorrow.

• CDW is out with its Cloud 401 report, based on interviews with more than 1,200 IT managers from many industries. The report finds that more than a third of all computing services today are delivered throughthe cloud. It also determined that organizations are actively pursuing new services: Thirty-five percent of respondents say they plan to shift new IT services to the cloud.

• In one recent survey, IT managers said that the most important project their teams are working on for 2015 is cloud computing. And IDC predicts that by 2018, the worldwide market for public cloud services will be worth more than $127 billion, accounting for “more than half of worldwide software, server and storage spending growth.”

• “The moment we stop listening to users and it’s just a vendor-to-vendor conversation, or it’s just a developer-to-developer conversation and the user doesn’t have a seat at the table, that would leave us with a vulnerability that could undo all the good work we’ve done,” Collier said. “We just have to keep listening to users and we’ll be ok.”

• Building a company from freely available software might not seem like the most logical idea, but it’s one that is working for many vendors in the OpenStack cloud ecosystem. In a panel session at the OpenStack Summit here, the founders of cloud storage vendor SwiftStack, cloud database vendor Tesora, cloud vendor Piston Cloud Computing and cloud service provider Blue Box Cloud as well as the CEO of DreamHost, Simon Anderson, detailed their experiences and challenges in building OpenStack-powered businesses.

• David Ward, Development CTO and Chief Architect at Cisco, has been thinking a lot about how networking works in the cloud era, and he shared some of those thoughts at the OpenStack Summit here.

• Just a year into their production use of OpenStack for powering their internal cloud, they are leveraging it for everything from video to networking to deploying web applications, all on an in-house OpenStack cloud spread across two data centers. And this rapid change is getting noticed inside the company.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• This is an in-progress scratch-pad of notes to build release notes from as and when we release. Please do not list features that are to be shipped already in the 4.4 release! Please do not add wish-list features that you hope will be implemented, but only what actually is implemented already.

• Following yesterday’s LibreOffice 5.0 branching in Git, the first beta for LibreOffice 5.0 is now available for testing.

• The Document Foundation announced on their blog the availability of the first beta for LibreOffice 5.0, which will be officially released around the end of July or early August.

Healthcare

• Everyone wants personalized healthcare. From the moment they enter their primary care clinic they have certain expectations that they want met in regards to their personalized medical care.

• Most physicians are adopting a form of electronic healthcare, and patient records are being converted to a digital format. But electronic health records pose interesting problems related to sorting through vast amounts of patient data.

• This is where open source programming languages come in, and they have the ability to radically change the medical landscape.

Business

• This is the second article in a series all about open source business models, specifically around open source platforms.

Licensing

• For months now Allwinner has been violating the GPL and have attempted to cover it up by obfuscating their code and playing around with their licenses while jerking around the open-source community. At least today they’ve made a positive change in open-sourcing more of their “CedarX” code.

Openness/Sharing

• There was a time when a reporter was called a hack.

Open Hardware

• The Pi-Top is an open source DIY laptop made using the latest in kitchen table manufacturing technology

• Last Monday marked the start of the RoboUniverse Conference and Expo at The Javits Center in New York City. Twelve companies vied for a single cash prize, as well as complimentary investment and legal services. Voxel8 was the winner of the competition, and while all the entrants gave fascinating rapid-fire pitches for their startups, there was one company that stood out for me and has seemingly slipped under the radar in the 3D printing space. The company I’m speaking about is Ragnar Robotics.

• The Luka EV is an all-electric, street legal vehicle designed and built as an open-source experiment. Currently, the vehicle is targeting a single-charge range of around 186 miles, with a top speed of about 81 mph. The Luka’s price should land in the area of $22,445 when all is said and done. The creators are aiming at a design and build time of less than a year, and are using a FRP body based on a Solidworks model of a video game car.

Programming

• Remembering what the programming world was like in 1995 is no easy task. Object-oriented programming, for one, was an accepted but seldom practiced paradigm, with much of what passed as so-called object-oriented programs being little more than rebranded C code that used >> instead of printf and class instead of struct. The programs we wrote those days routinely dumped core due to pointer arithmetic errors or ran out of memory due to leaks. Source code could barely be ported between different versions of Unix. Running the same binary on different processors and operating systems was crazy talk.

Leftovers

Security

• The University of London’s Computing Centre (ULCC) has recovered from a major cyberattack that cut dozens of UK institutions from the institution’s IT services for five hours this morning.

• The incident appears to have started around 7am and by 9am ULCC said it was looking into a firewall issue. By 10am, engineers had reset its firewalls and core routers but had been unable to solve the issue.

• By mid-day, the assessment had become clearer. “All our services are now up and running again! The networking issue was caused by a cyber attack,” read an update on the institution’s website.

• ​Dennis Fisher talks with security pioneer Marcus Ranum about writing an early Internet firewall at DEC, the security gold-rush era of the 1990s and early 2000s, why he never patented most of the ideas he has come up with and how he found peace of mind.

• Google analyzed hundreds of millions of password security questions and answers, revealing how startlingly easy it is for would-be hackers to get into someone else’s account.

• [...]

• With ten guesses, an attacker would have a near one in four chance of guessing the name of an Arabic speaker’s first teacher. Ten guesses gave cyber criminals a 21 percent chance of guessing the middle name of a Spanish speaker’s father.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Bill Kristol, the Weekly Standard editor who predicted in 2003 that proponents of the U.S. invasion of Iraq would be “vindicated” upon the discovery of weapons of mass destruction there, is holding fast to the idea that the deadly and expensive conflict was the right move. Kristol’s justifications for the war, however, have changed dramatically.

• In a May 20 op-ed for USA Today, Kristol argued that U.S. intervention in Iraq was justified in 2003 “to remove Saddam Hussein, and to complete the job we should have finished in 1991.” Kristol added that “we were right to persevere” in Iraq, “even with the absence of caches of weapons of mass destruction.”

Finance

• US trade officials pushed EU to shelve action on endocrine-disrupting chemicals linked to cancer and male infertility to facilitate TTIP free trade deal

Censorship

• One of Finland’s largest festivals, Helsinki’s World Village, is a celebration of multicultural tolerance and respect. The free annual two-day event, known as Maailma kylässä in Finnish, has attracted more than 80,000 visitors in recent years.

Privacy

• Global intelligence agencies, including the US National Security Agency, planned to hijack millions of Android smartphones with spyware.

• The National Security Agency and its closest allies planned to hijack data links to Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware, a top-secret document reveals.

• Canada and its spying partners exploited weaknesses in one of the world’s most popular mobile browsers and planned to hack into smartphones via links to Google and Samsung app stores, a top secret document obtained by CBC News shows.

• As the Senate does its little song and dance today over surveillance reform, kudos to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board for producing what has to be one of the most ridiculous opinion pieces on this debate to date. It’s called The Anti-Surveillance Rush, and its main argument is that the Senate shouldn’t be “rushing” through this debate, and that it should instead simply do a clean extension of section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to allow for further debate. This is wrong and it’s clueless. The WSJ editorial board can be nutty at times, but the level of cluelenssness displayed here really takes it to another level. Let’s dig in.

• Reform Government Surveillance, an organization that represents large technology companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft, on Tuesday pressed the U.S. Senate not to delay reform of National Security Agency surveillance by extending expiring provisions of the Patriot Act.

• As the deadline ticked closer to the expiration of the NSA’s powers of mass phone record collection, the Senate locked itself into chaotic wrangling over two competing surveillance bills on Thursday.

• Social media. So popular. And so very, very incriminating. The less-than-illustrious history of many a criminal who felt obliged to generate inculpatory evidence via social media postings has been well-detailed here. But what if you want to hide your indiscretions and malfeasance? If you’ve posted something on any major social network, chances are it will be found and used against you.

• A report by the FBI’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) on the agency’s use of Section 215 collections has just been released in what can only be termed as “fortuitous” (or “suspicious”) timing. Section 215 is dying. It was up for reauthorization on June 1st, but the Obama administration suddenly pushed that deadline up to the end of this week. Sen. Mitch McConnell took a stab at a clean reauth, but had his attempt scuttled by a court ruling finding the program unauthorized by existing law and the forward momentum of the revamped USA Freedom Act. And, as Section 215′s death clock ticked away, Rand Paul and Ron Wyden engaged in a filibuster to block any last-second attempts to ram a clean reauthorization through Congress.

Civil Rights

• The Florida mailman indicted for flying his unregistered gyrocopter through restricted airspace and landing on the U.S. Capitol lawn last month pleaded not guilty to six charges on Thursday.

• Doug Hughes appeared in federal court in Washington, D.C., where he entered his plea. He faces nearly a decade in prison if convicted on the two felony counts and four misdemeanors.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• What began as some squabbling over the definition of net neutrality in India has evolved into a global public relations shit show for Facebook. As we’ve been discussing, India’s government has been trying to define net neutrality ahead of the creation of new neutrality rules. Consumers and content companies have been making it very clear they believe Facebook’s Internet.org initiative violates net neutrality because it offers free, walled-garden access to only some Facebook approved content partners, instead of giving developing nations access to the entire Internet.

• Internet.org partners began dropping out of the initiative, arguing they don’t like any model where Facebook gets to decide which content is accessed for free — and which content remains stuck outside of Internet.org. Facebook so far has responded by trying to claim that if you oppose Internet.org you’re the one hurting the poor, because a walled garden is better than no Internet at all. Of course that’s a false choice; Facebook could simply provide subsidized access to the entire Internet, but that wouldn’t provide them with a coordinated leg-up in the developing nation ad markets of tomorrow.

DRM

• Digital Right Managements (systems preventing you from copying a movie or a song you bought, print an ebook you paid… and sometimes even read these!) are a real nuisance and we should fight them. But we believe here that fighting only is not enough. We should also propose constructive alternatives, new ways to produce, share and enjoy media and arts.

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