● 06.23.15

● Links 23/6/2015: Cinnamon 2.6.9, Red Hat Summit

Posted in News Roundup at 4:16 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• And look…this isn’t on Jonathan Nadeau, creator of the Sonar distro. Not at all. Jonathan is, in my eyes, one of the bravest people in the FOSS world. Being completely sightless, he’s put together a pretty good Linux distribution, not only for people with low or no sight, but which also includes software to help dyslexic people as well.Jonathan took the best available open source tools and built Sonar around them. It’s not a case of a distro being less than helpful due to difficult software; it’s a case of using the only open source software that is available. Unfortunately, much of that available software is not good enough.

• With the price and size of computer hardware steadily decreasing, it’s becoming more viable to use embedded Linux systems to control small robots and drones. There are plenty of projects for Raspberry Pi, but not everyone wants to build a drone from scratch. That’s why enthusiasts will be pleased to hear about the new drones from Parrot.

• Last week, the French firm released a range of 13 mini-drones. They are available to buy right now in France, and they will be released in the UK and Europe in July. Like most drones, they are remote-controlled; you can use your phone or tablet to control them via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

Server

• Linux system administrators are in high demand these days and many hiring managers say they’re having a hard time finding talent to fill their open positions. It’s critical, then, for companies seeking skilled admins to hone their recruiting process in order to stay competitive – and this starts with writing an effective job posting.

• Unfortunately, many companies aren’t hitting the mark. Job postings for sysadmin positions are largely similar; they’re boring and generic, according to New York City-based recruiter Steve Levy.

• When it comes to managing containers, everyone including the competition agrees that Google is the leader, which was evident from the way Kubernetes was received by the community. Google is leaving no stone unturned to make its cloud the best platform for running the containerized workloads and microservices. From orchestration to cluster management to private registry, Google Cloud Platform has all it takes to run complex distributed containerized applications.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative is taking on three new major open-source security projects and Linux security expert Emily Ratliff has been hired to oversee CII.

• Immediately after the release of the Linux kernel 4.1 by Linus Torvalds on June 22, Alexandre Oliva had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability of GNU Linux-libre 4.1.

• It would appear that Greg Kroah-Hartman is on an airplain right now at approximately 30,000 feet and he just announced that the recently released Linux 4.1 kernel will be the next LTS (Long Term Support) release maintained for the next two years.

• Linus Torvalds this week announced the release of the Linux kernel version 4.1, which will also form the basis of the next long term stable (LTS) kernel release. Linux 4.1 was also the first kernel release to include contributions from more than 1,500 developers (1,539 to be exact) — with about 270 submitting their first ever patch, according to LWN Editor Jonathan Corbet. The previous record for the most developer participation on a release was set last June with Linux 3.15, which boasted 1,492 developers submitting patches. (See his full 4.1 release report.)

• Here, Clarkson tells us more about how he learned Linux and software development, his career path to becoming an expert on hypervisors, and his hobby as a stand-up comedian.

• Two scholarships will be available for each of the seven categories. In addition to Linux Newbies and Teens-in-Training, you can apply for the Whiz Kids (for high school or college grads), Women in Linux, SysAdmin Super Stars, Developer Do-Gooder, and Linux Kernel Guru scholarship categories.

• The 4.1 release of the Linux kernel has hit, after what Linus Torvalds says was a “very quiet week” since Release Candidate 8 dropped.

• Torvalds’ brief announcement on the Linux Kernel mailing list also notes that “this obviously means that the merge window for 4.2 is open”.

• THE LINUX KERNEL has been committed again, this time to version 4.1. Linus Torvalds, or Mr Linux to you, announced the news on the mailing list as per.

• I am extraordinarily excited to be working with nearly every technology company on this project, which I think could be as important to the future of the Internet as intermodal containers have been to globalization. We expect to see a lot of the Open Container Project contributors at ContainerCon in August and look forward to the work ahead of us.

Applications

Mellanox

• LINBIT, a provider of Linux storage mirroring technology, Tuesday announced a new solution for data replication in collaboration with Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. (MLNX), a supplier of high-performance cloud networking solutions.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Dota 2 Reborn, the Dota 2 game remade with the Source 2 engine, has finally landed on the Linux platform, along with a ton of changes and improvements. It’s still a Beta release, but that doesn’t really matter.

• Total War: WARHAMMER is the upcoming strategy game from Creative Assembly, and as the name suggests, it’s based on the Warhammer Fantasy universe. It’s built by the same studio that got famous for the Total War franchise, Creative Assembly.

• Project Cars 2 is a new game announced by Slightly Mad Studios, and it’s being funded through the World of Mass Development portal. A SteamOS version has been promised, but it’s a weird announcement since the first games still don’t have a Linux version despite being promised as well.

• Even though Project Cars hasn’t been released on Linux, that hasn’t stopped the developers claiming the second one will too. Oh and yeah Project Cars 2 is a thing now.

• Space Colony: Steam Edition is revamp of Space Colony HD found on GOG, and previously the developers were only hopefully to do a Linux version. It seems like they are in progress right now!

• The newer Steam version includes goodies like Steam Workshop support, so you can download community made campaigns.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I am happy to announce that Qt 5.5 Release Candidate is now available.

• So the fourth week is over and the mid term evaluations are upon us and I have to say, I didn’t even realize how quickly the last four weeks have gone by

• I am happy to say that Pre-Alpha edition of ‪Kexi‬ 3.0 runs nicely already after like 3 weeks of porting! Especially its tabular view work out of the box for me after fixing the last compilation error with zero fixes needed in the functionality.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Ever since GNOME 3 release, I was looking for good personal task managers. Specially now that I’m working on a big project a.k.a. Summer of Code, I feel a real need to stay organized.

• The development cycle of the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment continues these days with the third milestone, dubbed 3.17.3, for which many of the GNOME’s core components have been updated, including the Evince document viewer software.

Distributions

New Releases

• Neophytos Kolokotronis from the Chakra GNU/Linux project had the great pleasure of informing all Chakra users about the immediate availability of a new update for the rolling-release distribution.

• Papyros is getting closer to working release, and the developers are putting the final touches. We’ll soon be able to play with the new distro, even if it’s going to be just a development version.

• GParted Live, a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86-based computers that can be used for creating, re-organizing, and deleting disk partitions has been upgraded to version 0.22.0-3 and is now available for download.

Arch Family

• We are happy to announce our first update for Manjaro 0.8.13.

• One week passed after we released Manjaro 0.8.13 to the public. We had already over 38.900 downloads so far. With almost 23.000 downloads just for or Xfce edition we see that we did a great job on our flagship edition. Still we had over 12.600 downloads for KDE5 so far. Regardless these stats Manjaro continues to get better each day. 0.8.13 was a good release, but still there are some bugs we try to fix now with regular updates.

• The Manjaro development team, through Philip Müller, had the great pleasure of announcing that the first update pack for the recently released Manjaro Linux 0.8.13 distribution is now live.

Red Hat Family

• So with Fedora 22 well and truly out for both ARMv7 and aarch64 lets have a look at the release in general and also at the 4.0 kernel it ships.

• Firstly I’d like to shout out to the AMAZING job done by the web team on the new sites for Spins, ARM and Labs. They really do look awesome!

• This week heralded the announcement of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for ARM Development Preview 7.1, the next milestone in Red Hat’s exploring the potential for ARM servers. There is a lot in a name, and this one is a mouthful.

• The Linux kernel is famous – it is the namesake of the complete operating system, but it does not exist on its own. A complete OS runs on hardware, starts out in firmware, loads the kernel, which in turn loads a software and service initialization system, all of which require function libraries, all of which were built with compiler tools that do the magic conversion from human readable source code to machine readable binaries. When ARM designed the AArch64 architecture, they also had to provide ports and specifications for the firmware, the kernel, the libraries, the compiler, and so on. Hundreds of packages were affected. Not only did they need to provide ports, those ports needed to be designed, written correctly, in a style acceptable to each of the communities whose coding standards are frequently rigorous, distinct, and strictly enforced. To top it all off, this work needed to be done before the actual hardware existed, necessitating writing software simulators to check all the work and extensive documentation to empower community collaboration.

• Analyst Brian White expects the Red Hat story “to shine bright” at the Summit, with the company’s expanding portfolio opening up “new growth opportunities within the open source world.” With the rising importance of software versus hardware in next generation data centers as well as open innovation gaining momentum, Red Hat appears to be “an attractive play on the open source software movement.”

• A new partnership with open-source software giant Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) could propel TransCirrus – a small, 10-person Research Triangle Park-based startup, into the big leagues when it comes to cloud computing.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that leading global companies, including AMD, American Product Distributors, Avianca, Color Line, and Telegraph Media Group, have deployed Red Hat’s open source integration technology to become more agile and competitive in the fast-paced digital marketplace.

• Red Hat said Monday that Frank Calderoni, former chief financial officer of Cisco, will be its new chief financial officer.

Fedora

• A new proposal has been submitted today, June 22, on the mailing list of the Fedora Linux project, which includes details about the implementation of the recently released Unicode 8.0 standard in the upcoming Fedora 23 distribution.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak is back at work after a short break at the end of last week, and he just informed us about the new features implemented in the development version of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system for Ubuntu phones.

• The Ubuntu platform is moving towards its convergence goal, and the developers are getting closer to it. Applications like Ubuntu Notes show just how close the mobile and desktop platforms are, in terms of the underlying code and design.

• Details about GNU patch vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS have now been published by Canonical in a security notification.

• Canonical is taking a shot at dealing with virtual machine address scaling problems, and reckons it can do so without resorting to software-defined network approaches.

• The company reckons its scheme, The Fan, gives “any cloud user 250x the number of addresses they would normally have access to in a cloud environment”.

• A privilege-escalation vulnerability released earlier this week was found in a few versions of Ubuntu. The operating system fails to check permissions when users are creating files, resulting in the bug. When a file needs to be writable it is copied from the lower directory to the upper file system where is can be modified.

• Today, Canonical introduces the Fan overlay network system in Ubuntu in test images for Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine, delivering the fastest and most scalable address expansion mechanism in the container world. The Fan enables cloud users to grow the number of Docker and LXD containers they can address in a single cloud environment.

• On June 22, Canonical, the company behind the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu, and Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, had the great pleasure on introducing the Fan overlay network system in Ubuntu Linux.

Flavours and Variants

• Clement Lefebvre and the great team of developers behind one of the most acclaimed, modern, and lightweight open-source desktop environments for GNU/Linux operating system published a new maintenance release for Cinnamon 2.6.

Devices/Embedded

• For Raspberry Pi users out there, the default firmware branch has changed to using the Linux 4.0 kernel.

• The source tree with Linux 4.0 has been available for a while now and is already used by some RPi Linux distributions while now the default firmware branch has made the move. Confirmation was posted to the Raspberry Pi forums.

Phones

Android

• These days there are hundreds and thousands of apps on the Google Play Store for Android smartphones and tablets, and it’s hard to sort through them all and find games worth downloading, playing, or paying for. For those who love to get headshots and get in the action, here are 10 or so of the best shooter games for Android.

• If you liked what you saw with the reveal of Fallout Shelter but don’t have an iOS device, never fear. Bethesda has confirmed that its surprise mobile hit will be released for Android. It just asks that you wait “a few months.”

• Google released a standalone clock in the Play Store this week. While Mountain View has been keen on serving up pieces of the Nexus experience (read: unskinned Android) for a while now, this latest release provides more evidence that the company is going all-in on a la carte apps. For users of devices other than a Nexus or Moto X — which also offers a nearly bloat-free OS — this means they can take advantage of the core pieces of Android and the larger Google ecosystem. In other words, you can customize a Samsung or HTC device how you see fit. It’s like Google is making what we commonly refer to as “stock” Android another skin, but in separate apps so that users can choose exactly what they want. Since last April, users have been able to install a standalone Camera app built by Google, while Gmail, Maps, Messenger and Calendar have their own individual software, too.

• Late last month Google announced the next version of Android and its successor to Lollipop, currently going by the name of Android M. And while the Android M update doesn’t look to be a significant software update, it is loaded with tweaks, performance improvements, and a few important new features. Here we’ll go over five features Android owners will love, and can look forward to.

• Mozilla’s Webmaker project has been running for three years. Its stated goal is to “help millions of people move from using the web to making the web.” It tries to do this by providing a few web-based tools to let non-programmers create web pages with images, audio, and video. This week, the project introduced a beta release of Webmaker for Android, which it describes as a “tool to help smartphone users of any skill level read, write and participate on the Web. The app makes creating original content in your local language simple — you can drag, drop and personalize photos, text and more to build unique projects like interactive scrapbooks, comic strips, games and memes.”

• Android’s market share globally is closely tied to the spending power of a particular market and it dominates in low-income countries, a survey of real-time usage has confirmed.

• Here’s some bad news for Android users. Security researchers have discovered 100+ more apps that fail to encrypt your login data properly, making it frightfully easy for hackers to steal your password. What’s worse: the vast majority of the app makers aren’t doing anything about it.

• Actually, yes: AT&T now carries a projector that’s also a tiny, LTE-equipped Android tablet. The movies are built in. That’s better—but I’m still not sure who this clever projector is for. Cinephiles on the go? Business men that need to be able to whip out a projected slideshow at a moment’s notice? I spent a week with it to try and find out.

• Android 5.1.1 for smartwatches has been out for a little while now, but Motorola took some extra time to make sure it was ready for the Motorola Moto 360. It’s finally rolling out now. This might be the biggest update Android Wear has seen to date. There are many new features and improvements that make the whole experience feel much more mature. Let’s take a look at some of the best new things.

• The company launched a preview edition of Fire OS 5.0 on Friday that is built upon Android 5.0 software, also known as Lollipop. To help developers prepare for the change, Amazon is offering $50 off up to two Fire HD 7 tablets to programmers.

• Where there’s smoke, there could be fire as well, that is why we asked you last week whether you would be interested to get a new BlackBerry handset if it ran Android. After all, the rumors are for flagship specs like a QHD display, and a Snapdragon 808 chipset, which might be one more thing to tip the scale for a switch. Surprisingly enough, more than two thirds of our respondents are willing to give BlackBerry the benefit of the doubt, with just a third categorically saying no to the premise.

• Some people claim that children shouldn’t get a phone when they are so young that it will just be a toy. That’s interesting given the dramatic increase in the amount of money spent on toys for children in recent times. It’s particularly interesting when parents buy game consoles for their children but refuse mobile phone “toys” (I know someone who did this). I think this is more of a social issue regarding what is a suitable toy than any real objection to phones used as toys. Obviously the educational potential of a mobile phone is much greater than that of a game console.

• Intel is giving Android users a free way to control their PCs from a smartphone or tablet.

• Android Wear is just a few days away from its first anniversary. Also, it now has a lot of apps under its belt. We decided to sift through the tons of apps out there for your smartwatch and present to you the apps that we think are a must have for your Android Wear device.

• Got a ton of tunes stashed in the cloud? DoubleTwist’s new Android app can play it all, with support for multiple storage services as well as your local media.

• The news about Android M coming out is legit. A new upgrade is expected to roll out this current year, but there are a lot of enthusiasts out there who are already giving it a go. Courtesy of Google’s developer preview, this can now be set up. But because this is destined for developers only, if you are curious to see how it works you will be setting it up on your own risk. Because it is not complete, some features might not be working properly or they might be missing completely. So, if you cannot control your enthusiasm and wish to set up Android M right at this very moment, we strongly advise you to use an older device and not something that you’re using on a daily basis. Just keep in mind that a Nexus device will be required to test out the Android M. But we’re betting that there are others out there who are already working on other types of devices for Android M to operate on.

• Spring has come and gone without any sign of Sony’s promised X900C and X910C TVs, but those super-thin 4K sets are finally on their way… well, almost. The slimmest of the bunch, the 0.19-inch thick X900C series, is now slated to arrive in July at hefty prices of $2,499 for a 55-inch model, and $3,999 for its 65-inch counterpart. Determined to go bigger? You’ll have to wait longer, and pay a pretty penny.

• The kids over at Addappt are back with a new build of their contact app for Android, so I snagged Mrinal Desai, a founder of the startup to dig into just what is new, why we might care, and where the company is headed.s

• At this year’s I/O, Google again made a developer preview of the upcoming version of Android available for download. Thing is, it only ran on Nexus phones and tablets. Today Sony has announced plans to release a test build of Android M for Xperia products in the Sony Open Device program as well. Here we see it running on an Xperia Z3 Compact.

• We’ve been living with the refreshed and refined Android Wear on the LG Watch Urbane for a while now. So it’s good news for Moto 360 owners that you can finally get in on the action – the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update is currently rolling out to all Motorola smartwatches.

• Top 10 Best Android Music Player Apps 2015: Music always plays an important role in our life while listening to our favorite music makes us happy and give us relief. These days smartphones and tablets are very common because they are very cheap and easy to use, that’s why everyone love to listen their their favorite songs on Android devices. With the rise of smartphones, new and free android applications have been added on play store and we carry our smartphones everywhere is also our primary media player. On android platform, a huge community of developers create apps that gives us better user experience with latest functions.

• Android Wear aficionados already have more than 1,500 watch faces to choose from, but Google’s thinking that you can never have too much of a good thing. That’s why it’s rolling out 17 more ways for you tell time on your fancy smartwatch, with watch faces that feature cartoon characters like Angry Birds and Hello Kitty to more refined designs from the likes of Bang & Olufsen and Muji. Check them all out here in the gallery below, or if you have your very own Android Wear watch, head over to Google Play to download your favorites.

• Sometimes an Android version comes along later. Other times not at all. It’s a serious drag, especially given Android’s dominant market share. It’s even more puzzling that this is still the habit of some large companies, as evidenced by Twitter’s slow rollout of Periscope and Spotify’s new feature set that’s still nowhere to be found on Android.

• Looking for an alternative to Nvidia’s Shield Portable? There aren’t a lot of options stateside, but fortunately Chinese OEMs are happily churning out new models all the time — models like the GPD XD, which looks an awful lot like Nintendo’s new 3DS XL.

Free Software/Open Source

• The main purposes of open source are overt in the name itself. The biggest differentiator of open source is its innate openness, or transparency. Not only is the source code available, but so too are the other aspects. This characteristic contrasts with the often clandestine processes of proprietary vendors. Open-source products are thus easier to evaluate to determine whether they are right for a specific enterprise.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• Adobe has announced “Photoshop Design Space,” a new interface for Photoshop geared toward professional app and Web designers. The company calls the new interface “a companion experience” to the normal Photoshop UI, which is a streamlined interface consisting of the most-needed tools for app and Web design. The most interesting thing, though? Adobe designed this new interface in HTML5, and it’s open source.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Hello free software supporters, my name is Adam Tobias Leibson. I’ve been an avid GNU/Linux user since my first year of high school. Around that time, I read Cory Doctorow’s book Little Brother. That book challenged me to think more deeply about the effects of mass surveillance on society, and brought about my interests in privacy and cryptography.

Public Services/Government

• The Russian Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications has announced a plan to replace proprietary software with open source and locally produced software. The plan is one of the measures aimed at promoting sustainable economic development and social stability announced earlier this year.

Openness/Sharing

• With Tesla’s opening of their automotive patents last year, the auto industry was turned upside down, with the effects increasingly being felt across the industry. Tesla opening their patents was seen by some in the automotive industry as inexplicable: Why would anyone give open access to people wanting to know how their cars were made? Wouldn’t this encourage theft of Tesla’s intellectual property?

Open Data

Leftovers

Security

Censorship

• A controversial bill to allow websites to be censored has been passed by both houses of the Australian parliament. The Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015 allows companies to go to a Federal Court judge to get overseas sites blocked if their “primary purpose” is facilitating copyright infringement.

• Dr Matthew Rimmer, an associate professor at the Australian National University College of Law, points out that there is a lack of definitions within the bill: “What is ‘primary purpose’? There’s no definition. What is ‘facilitation’? Again, there’s no definition.” That’s dangerous, he believes, because it could lead to “collateral damage,” whereby sites that don’t intend to hosting infringing material are blocked because a court might rule they were covered anyway. Moreover, Rimmer told The Sydney Morning Herald that controversial material of the kind released by WikiLeaks is often under copyright, which means that the new law could be used to censor information that was embarrassing, but in the public interest.

• A few minutes ago Australia passed controversial new legislation which allows for overseas ‘pirate’ sites to be blocked at the ISP level. Despite opposition from the Greens, ISPs and consumer groups, the Senate passed the bill into law with a vote of 37 in favor and 13 against. Expect The Pirate Bay to be an early target.

• Why is it that many efforts made “for the children” are so stupid most tweens could point out the obvious flaws? Back during the discussion of the UK’s now-implemented ISP porn filtration system, Rhoda Grant of the Scottish Parliament wondered why the internet couldn’t be handled the same way as television, where all the naughty “programming” isn’t allowed to take to the airwaves until past the nationally-accepted bedtime.

• GOOGLE HAS STARTED accepting takedown requests for so-called revenge porn, following in the footsteps of Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.

• Google announced that users can now request that sexually explicit images shared without their consent are removed from search results, despite the firm having generally resisted efforts to limit what is viewable in search.

Privacy

• Documents from the National Security Agency and the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden reveal that the two agencies—and GCHQ in particular—targeted antivirus software developers in an attempt to subvert their tools to assure success in computer network exploitation attacks on intelligence targets. Chief among their targets was Kaspersky Labs, the Russian antivirus software company, according to a report by The Intercept’s Andrew Fishman and First Look Media Director of Security Morgan Marquis-Boire.

• When the Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab disclosed recently that it had been hacked, it noted that the attackers, believed to be from Israel, had been in its network since sometime last year.

• The company also said the attackers seemed intent on studying its antivirus software to find ways to subvert the software on customer machines and avoid detection.

• Now newly published documents released by Edward Snowden show that the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, were years ahead of Israel and had engaged in a systematic campaign to target not only Kaspersky software but the software of other antivirus and security firms as far back as 2008.

• The documents, published today by The Intercept, don’t describe actual computer breaches against the security firms, but instead depict a systematic campaign to reverse-engineer their software in order to uncover vulnerabilities that could help the spy agencies subvert it. The British spy agency regarded the Kaspersky software in particular as a hindrance to its hacking operations and sought a way to neutralize it.

• The National Security Agency and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, have worked to subvert anti-virus and other security software in order to track users and infiltrate networks, according to documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

• The spy agencies have reverse engineered software products, sometimes under questionable legal authority, and monitored web and email traffic in order to discreetly thwart anti-virus software and obtain intelligence from companies about security software and users of such software. One security software maker repeatedly singled out in the documents is Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, which has a holding registered in the U.K., claims more than 270,000 corporate clients, and says it protects more than 400 million people with its products.

• Following on a ruling nearly two months ago, where the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal — for the very first time — found that GCHQ had broken the law with its surveillance of client/attorney communications, now the IPT has ruled against GCHQ again. The IPT says that GCHQ held emails of human rights activists for too long — but found that the initial collection of those emails was no problem at all.

• GCHQ’S SPYING on two international human rights groups was illegal, according to a ruling by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) which is responsible for handling complaints against the intelligence services.

• The court case was raised by a number of privacy groups and challenged how GCHQ surveys similar groups. It found that the government body operated in breach of its own rules.

• The decision in the High Court on Monday followed concerns raised by groups including long-time snooping critics Privacy International, Liberty, Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union.

• The IPT ruled that British spies had breached Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that GCHQ had retained emails for longer than it should and violated its own internal procedures.

• The Supreme Court gave a big boost to privacy Monday when it ruled that hotels and motels could refuse law enforcement demands to search their registries without a subpoena or warrant. The justices were reviewing a challenge to a Los Angeles ordinance requiring hotels to provide information to law enforcement—including guests’ credit card number, home address, driver’s license details, and vehicle license number—at a moment’s notice. Similar ordinances exist in about a hundred other cities stretching from Atlanta to Seattle.

• Los Angeles claimed the ordinance (PDF) was needed to battle gambling, prostitution, and even terrorism, and that guests would be less likely to use hotels and motels for illegal purposes if they knew police could access their information at will.

• A smallish victory for Fourth Amendment protections comes today as the Supreme Court has struck down a Los Angeles ordinance that allowed police warrantless, on-demand access to hotel/motel guest records. This win is very limited, and the court’s discussion of the issue at hand pertains solely to the Los Angeles statute and doesn’t address the potential unconstitutionality of other, similar records sweeps granted by the Third Party Doctrine. Nor does it address the potential Fourth Amendment violations inherent to “pervasive regulation” of certain businesses — like the records legally required to be collected and handed over on demand to law enforcement by entities like pawn shops, junk yards and firearms dealers.

• Concerns over pervasive surveillance are often shrugged off with “ends justify the means” rationalizing. If it’s effective, it must be worth doing. But as more information on domestic surveillance programs surfaces, we’re finding out that not only are they intrusive, but they’re also mostly useless.

• TrapWire — software produced by Stratfor and used by security and law enforcement agencies around the world — utilizes facial and pattern recognition technology to analyze CCTV footage for “pre-attack patterns,” meshing this information with other law enforcement databases, including online submissions from citizens reporting “suspicious behavior.”

Civil Rights

• A 4-year-old child was struck by a bullet fired from a Columbus Police Officer’s gun, reports CBS affiliate WBNS.

• According to the station, a patrol officer was answering a call Friday afternoon when a family in the area started screaming for help because of a medical emergency.

• A Florida postman who flew a gyrocopter through some of America’s most restricted airspace before landing at the US Capitol said he rejected a plea offer on Monday that would have involved several years in prison.

• Douglas Hughes, 61, of Ruskin, Florida, said he rejected the offer because no one got hurt during his stunt.

• Hughes was arrested on April 15 after he took off in his gyrocopter from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and landed on the Capitol’s West Lawn in his bare-bones aircraft.

• A Los Angeles Police Department officer shot a man in the head after he attempted to flag down officers for help with a towel in his hand.

• Officers responded to the scene following an officer-needs-help call in the area, CBS Los Angeles reported.

• The officers believed the man was holding a gun and, after ordering him to drop the alleged weapon, officers fired four shots. One of the rounds appeared to shoot the suspect in the head. A motorist posted graphic video of the scene online — which was widely shared on social media — showing the man rolled over and cuffed by police.

• “The officers stopped to investigate and see what was needed,” LAPD spokesman John Jenal told NBC Los Angeles. “This person then extended their arm, which was wrapped in a towel.”

• LAPD Commander Andrew Smith told the Los Angeles Times that the officers were following standard procedure for cuffing the man who seemingly had a gaping gunshot wound to the head with blood pouring from it.

• Mr Smith said the man was standing on the side of the road asking for the officers’ help yelling: “Police, police.”

• However, police said no weapons were found and only a towel was recovered from the scene.

• The unnamed pair were held by guards at the site, now a museum, on Monday and are in custody, police told AFP.

• They took artefacts belonging to prisoners held there during World War Two, including buttons and pieces of glass, a museum spokesman told AFP.

• The UK Foreign Office confirmed two British nationals had been arrested.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• An interesting and melancholy event is taking place not far away from me. An honest-to-goodness independent movie rental store is closing its doors with much fanfare and a going-out-of-business sale.

• This is a small business that has been around almost since the advent of the VCR and rolled right through the dawn of the Internet and into the era of widespread streaming content — by renting videos. If you wanted to watch a movie, you drove down to the store, hoped there was a copy on the shelf, rented it on the contract you’d signed possibly decades ago, and returned it within a day or two.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• In the previous instalment of the long-running saga involving alleged pirates of the Dallas Buyers Club film in Australia, the court agreed that Australian ISP iiNet should hand over information about its customers. But it added an important proviso: the letter and telephone script to be used to contact and negotiate with them had to be approved by the court first in an effort to prevent “speculative invoicing” of the kind all-too familiar elsewhere.

• So why did Apple think for one second that it could get away with not paying Taylor Swift?

• Libgen, the largest online repository of free books and academic articles, has pretty much vanished from the Internet. Earlier this month the site’s operators were sued by academic publishing company Elsevier, who asked a New York federal court for a preliminary injunction hoping to keep the site down for good.

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