● 07.01.15

● Links 1/7/2015: OpenDaylight Lithium, OpenMandriva Lx 2014.2

Posted in News Roundup at 2:51 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux computers are particularly prone to this, and last time several high-profile websites running databases such as Hadoop, including Linkedin, Reddit, and Yelp, were temporarily borked.

• GPS trackers don’t play nicely either and, given that their accuracy depends on the timings between receiver and satellite, it can make them inaccurate until the problem is addressed.

• I’m not going to lie to you, my transformation was not easy. It was a slow and painful process. But after I finished it, it felt like nothing before. Thanks to my stubbornness, I was able to truly embrace open source in my life. I gave some minor contributions to some of the worldly-known open source projects like Reddit and the Tor Project. I’m constantly writing about my open source experience on my blog. I started contributing to Opensource.com and to free software magazine written in Serbian language. I even became a guest blogger to a couple of blogs related to open source and IT in general.

• Windows 10 is about to launch in less than a month, and it’s going to be a very interesting release. We had a chance to play with the latest build, and at least a couple of things have jumped out that you could say are flattering towards Linux.

• Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, yet they both deserve to exist in this diverse desktop OS ecosystem. So this Windows vs. Linux post is going to be a little different. I will compare and contrast the technological aspects of the two operating systems, whilst also discussing channel opportunities.

• Linux, the operating system on which Android was built, is an attractive alternative to many developers and tech-savvy user who can’t get their kicks from Windows or OSX. Designed for open-source distribution, Linux was developed in 1991 and remains one of the most prominent examples of free software available. If you’re one of the folks that craves something “more” and have a desire to grow and learn, Linux is probably for you.

• HP credits the Linux community and Red Hat partners with its breakthrough x86 Superdome X server, which Distinguished Technologist Tom Vaden showed off to CRNtv at the recent Red Hat Summit in Boston.

Desktop

• My goal today was to help you better understand the risks of logging in as root, and how to better take advantage of built-in utilities to limit your rootly super powers. If you insist on having a root account, at least make use of the su – -c [command] option. When possible, make the best use of sudo to maintain tight control over access to super powers. Remember, with power comes responsibility. Use your super powers wisely!

Server

• If your Unix/Linux servers are to be involved in an ISO 27001 audit, there are a lot of things you should be doing ahead of time to ensure that they won’t end up generating findings. While there are many things you can do to secure the systems you manage, the key to getting a Unix system to pass an ISO 27001 audit is knowing what the auditors are likely to ask and what they will need to see.

• “Docker is Linux containers for mere mortals,” Boyd Hemphill is fond of saying. The Director of Evangelism at container application management startup StackEngine organizes Docker Austin meetups, DevOps Days Austin and Container Days events. He has recently given a number of Docker 101 workshops around the country aimed at introducing DevOps professionals to the business advantages of embracing containers and the disposable development environments that they enable.

• Container technology remains very big news, and in the container space ClusterHQ has been much in the news as the company announced the availability of Flocker 1.0. Flocker is an open source project that allows developers to run their databases inside Docker containers and make them highly portable. In addition to other annoncements, ClusterHQ is collaborating with EMC to enable Dockerized applications to use two EMC storage solutions suited for distributed applications: ScaleIO and XtremIO.

Kernel Space

• Adding to the already lengthy list of new features for Linux 4.2 is the Btrfs file-system updates that were sent in today by Facebook’s Chris Mason.

• The Btrfs file-system update for Linux 4.2 includes sub-volume quota updates, sysfs improvements, device management improvements, and various other changes. In total around 1,700 lines of Btrfs code were touched for this merge window.

• On the last days of June, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the availability of several maintenance releases for the Linux kernels 4.1, 4.0, 3.14, and 3.10. The seventh point release of Linux kernel 4.0 is a small one that brings mostly updated drivers.

• Sasha Levin, the maintainer of the Linux 3.18 kernel series, announced on the last day of June that the seventeenth maintenance release of the long-term Linux kernel 3.18 branch is available for download, urging all users to upgrade.

• The OpenDayLight Project today announced its Lithium release, marking the third major platform release for the open-source Software Defined Networking (SDN) effort since the project was first created in April 2013.

• The AllSeen Alliance is expanding the reach of its AllJoyn Internet of Things framework with bridging software that lets other types of devices look like part of the same family.

Graphics Stack

• The hour draws nigh. Valve recently announced the first few Steam Machines available for pre-order, and beyond SteamOS itself, each one had something in common: The first announced Steam Machines from Alienware and Syber all have Nvidia graphics hardware.

Applications

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

• I was called in after the NAS had been rebooted when it was refusing to recognise the RAID. The first thing that occurred to me is that maybe RAID-5 isn’t a good choice for the RAID. While it’s theoretically possible for a RAID rebuild to not fail in such a situation (the data that couldn’t be read from the disk with an error could have been regenerated from the disk that was being replaced) it seems that the RAID implementation in question couldn’t do it. As the NAS is running Linux I presume that at least older versions of Linux have the same problem. Of course if you have a RAID array that has 7 disks running RAID-6 with a hot-spare then you only get the capacity of 4 disks. But RAID-6 with no hot-spare should be at least as reliable as RAID-5 with a hot-spare.

Games

• Distance is a beautiful neon survival racer that I finally had a chance to play, and what I found really did surprise me.

• It got a massive 1.3 update and features a SteamOS (Linux) version, which is a Steam exclusive and has a couple of exclusive voiced lines.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Tuesday, 30 June 2015. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.3.2. Plasma 5.3 was released in April with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

• This year marks my first year as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentor, and it has been an exciting experience thus far. I have been a KStars developer for the last 12 years and it is amazing what KStars has accomplished in all those years.

• Krita is by far the most complete digital painting tool developed on Linux.

• KDAB are pleased to announce that the Qt 5.5.0 release includes a Technology Preview of the Qt3D module. Qt3D provides a high-level framework to allow developers to easily add 3D content to Qt applications using either QML or C++ APIs. The Qt3D module is released with the Technology Preview status. This means that Qt3D will continue to see improvements across the API design, supported features and performance before release. It is provided to start collecting feedback from users and to give a taste of what is coming with Qt3D in the future. Please grab a copy of the Qt 5.5.0 release and give Qt3D a test drive and report bugs and feature requests.

• On X11 the daemon uses the X11 core functionality to get notified whenever key events it is interested in happen. Basically it is a global key logger. Such an architecture has the disadvantage that any process could have this infrastructure and it would be possible for multiple processes grabbing the same global shortcut. In such a case undefined behavior is triggered as either multiple actions are triggered at the same time or only one action is triggered while the others do not get informed at all.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• This GNOME release cycle (3.18), we plan to do the last ever release of gnome-common. A lot of its macros for deprecated technologies (scrollkeeper?!) have been removed, and the remainder of its macros have found better replacements in autoconf-archive, where they can be used by everyone, not just GNOME.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• Today in Linux news Kate Lebedeff announced the release of OpenMandriva Lx 2014.2, a major update to 2014.1 released September 2014 and the first to support UEFI. In other news, Douglas DeMaio announced openSUSE 42, the next release of the gecko emblazoned Linux due in November. Elsewhere, Jack Germain reviewed Makulu 9 Aero and Alap Naik Desai reported Friday Microsoft hinted at a Linux OS at Microsoft Ignite in Chicago last month.

• The OpenMandriva community, through Kate Lebedeff, has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the OpenMandriva Lx 2014.2 Linux operating system.

Red Hat Family

• Security is key part of the open source Linux operating system that Red Hat delivers to its customers. Yet despite the fact that security is baked into the operating system, Red Hat doesn’t currently have a separate security offering.

• During the Red Hat Summit last week, the vendor provided roadmaps for its Ceph and Gluster storage software products including unified management technology and expanded protocol support for Ceph.

• Red Hat demonstrated the new unified capabilities that will allow users to install, manage and monitor Red Hat’s Gluster and Ceph storage. Additional capabilities targeted next year for Red Hat Ceph Storage include support for iSCSI and NFS and improved multi-site capabilities, according to Neil Levine, a Red Hat director of product management.

• According to Wall Street, Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) is expected to report earnings per share for the current fiscal quarter of $0.29. This is the consensus mean estimate based on the individual covering sell-side analysts’ reported numbers. The company last reported earnings for the period ending on 2015-05-31 of $0.31.

• Sarah Sharp, embedded software architect at Intel, and Kesha Shah, a student at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology have been named as the first winners of Red Hat’s Women in Open Source Awards.

Fedora

• Fedora is a big community that includes contributors and users from many different countries, each with their own experiences and historical backgrounds that contribute to a diverse mix of cultural, educational, and behavioral norms. To continuously create and foster an inclusive environment in the Fedora community, it’s important to respond to the needs of existing contributors and users, and welcome new contributors and users from diverse backgrounds.

• In order to prevent users from being overwhelmed by a fire hose of notifications from the hubs they’re subscribed to and from all the other apps connected to Fedora Hubs, we decided to design a filtering system.

• So what is Pinos? One of the original goals of Pinos was to provide the same level of advanced hardware handling for Video that PulseAudio provides for Audio. For those of you who has been around for a while you might remember how you once upon a time could only have one application using the sound card at the same time until PulseAudio properly fixed that. Well Pinos will allow you to share your video camera between multiple applications and also provide an easy to use API to do so.

• I had to spend some time understanding how to use docker-storage-setup on an Atomic host. The tool docker-storage-setup comes by default and makes the configuration of storage on your Atomic host easier. I didn’t read any of the provided documentation (although that probably would have helped) other than the script itself. So, pardon me if this is a duplicate of other info out there. It was a great way to learn more about it. The goal here is to add more disk space to an Atomic host. By default, the cloud image that you download has one device (vda) that is 6GB in size. When I’m testing many, many docker builds and iterating through the Fedora-Dockerfiles repo, that’s just not enough space. So, I need to know how to expand it.

Debian Family

• I have now been using Debian for a few weeks and it is therefore time for me to write a review of my experience thus far.

• Debian has been around for what seems like forever now and it is the base for so many other Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Mint, SolydXK and Knoppix.

• I think that the general consensus amongst Linux users is that Debian is stable, dependable and a good environment on which to build upon.

• Does that mean it is suitable for Everyone?

• I think it primarily comes down to flexibility—the ability to get things working how you want them, how you can fix issues that are annoying you and then feed that back to the community so that others can also benefit.

• Secondly, it’s about trust. The difference between using free software and proprietary software is important—knowing exactly what is running on your computer leads to a safer and more secure environment.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu is about to undergo a dramatic overhaul.

• No, I don’t mean the huge shift to a converged Unity 8 desktop with the Mir display server, although that’s also coming. Ubuntu is going to move past Deb packages and apt-get in favor of Snappy, which is currently used for cloud images.

• Canonical’s Ubuntu isn’t the only project looking to replace Linux packages with something better. The GNOME project is working on a sandboxed, cross-distribution application package framework.

• The Movilforum website had the great pleasure of interviewing Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical and founder of the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu Linux.

• The UbuTab is a tablet that was supposed to ship with either Windows or Ubuntu, and had some pretty sweet hardware specs, including 1TB of storage space. As some of the users have suspected in the first place, this is very close to being confirmed as a scam.

• Now that Ubuntu Touch is in the hands of actual users, one of the most common critiques is that it doesn’t feel like a finished product and it cannot compete with the likes of Android or iOS. The problem is not Ubuntu, but the comparison itself.

• Unsettings is an application that allows users to customize the Unity desktop environment by exposing options that are not usually available by other means. It has a lot of features, and it’s one of the best that you can find.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” Cinnamon has been officially announced by Clement Lefebvre, the leader of the project, and it brings numerous upgrades for the desktop environment and the underlying operating system.

• Users of Linux Mint outhouse looking for a new operating system, might be interested to know that a couple of new versions of Linux Mint have been made available today in the form of Linux Mint 17.2 with the Cinnamon or MATE desktop environments.

Devices/Embedded

• We no longer cover every Android media player or HDMI stick that comes around, but the new Tronsmart “Orion R68″ certainly caught our attention. (So did its similar predecessor, the quad-core Rockchip RK3288 based Orion R28). First, it runs Android 5.1, a bug-fixed and more secure version of Android 5.0 Lollipop, on a new Rockchip RK3368 system-on-chip, which combines eight Cortex-A53 cores clocked at up to 1.5GHz.

• Adlink’s “Matrix MXE-100i” gateway runs Wind River’s Linux-based IDP XT IoT gateway stack on an Intel Quark processor, and offers multiple wireless options.

• The Matrix MXE-100i is a spinoff of the Matrix MXE-200i gateway computer announced by Adlink in February. Like the MXE-200i, the identically sized, 120 x 100 x 55mm MXE-100i comes preloaded with a Linux-based Internet of Things gateway software stack from Intel subsidiary Wind River, called Wind River Intelligent Device Platform XT.

• The Wallpad is a 7″ touch computer powered by HIO Project’s modular expandable hardware platform. It can mount on a standard 2-gang electrical box, is powered by a Freescale ARM processor, supports Power over Ethernet (PoE) and comes with either Yocto Linux or Android preinstalled.

Phones

Tizen

• The Tizen-distro is now synchronized with the meta-tizen needed to build Tizen-Common Q1 2015 with Yocto tools. A branch named ‘tizen_3.0.2015.q1_common’ has been created on both git trees for this release.

Android

• MICROSOFT MIGHT GIVE UP on Windows Phone and adopt Google’s Android software for future smartphone devices, according to rumours.

• Twitter leakster MSNerd said that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and his senior leadership team (SLT) are discussing potentially dropping Windows Phone from the firm’s smartphones and smaller tablets.

• Instead, the tweets claim, Microsoft will offer Android with its own apps and services pre-loaded. The firm has already signed deals with Dell and Samsung to load its apps onto the companies’ respective Android tablets.

• BlackBerry 10 is an immense platform, almost without equal. But sources are now claiming BlackBerry could augment it with Google’s Android OS in a bid to make its future devices more attractive to consumers.

• When Google announced Android Auto at Google I/O 2014, I was already sold. And by “sold,” I mean I fully expected it to be something I’d want [were I in the market to buy a car that had it]. And while I don’t actually plan on buying a car with Auto any time soon, after spending a week with it, I do feel pretty OK with that gut feeling. We reviewed Auto earlier this month on a Pioneer head unit, but I figured I’d also share my own thoughts on it.

• Officers from a UK-based Regional Organized Crime Unit (ROCU), the Government Agency Intelligence Network (GAIN) and the Federation Against Copyright Theft have carried out more raids in pursuit of ‘pirate’ Android TV boxes. More than a thousand devices were seized in two locations this morning and at least two people have been arrested.

• During the past two months many manufacturers have been busy pushing out updates to the latest Android 5.1 Lollipop update Google released back in March, and then again in April, and this week we’ve finally received a few details about the incoming HTC One M9 Android 5.1 Lollipop update.

• After research firm comScore released data last month indicating that Android’s share of the US smartphone OS market dropped 1 percent during the three months ending in April, Kantar Worldpanel has its own research out which says the OS is gaining momentum stateside again.

• Samsung’s Galaxy S6 helped boost Android’s market share in the U.S. over the past three months according to data released on Tuesday by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

• Razer’s open source virtual reality project will support Android, which opens up the future of this mind-altering world to multiple devices.

Free Software/Open Source

• Many organisations have a wide array of open-source applications and code in use today – whether it be at the infrastructure and application layers, or in development frameworks and GitHub repositories.

• However, the applications developer and infrastructure teams come under increasing pressure as organisations rush to develop new services for customers, comply with growing amounts of industry regulation, or simply strive to meet the needs of the information generation.

• The software, s2n, is a new implementation of Transport Layer Security (TLS), a protocol for encrypting data. TLS is the successor of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), both of which AWS uses to secure most of its services.

• Etsy, the leading marketplace for handmade goods, has grown by leaps and bounds over the past five years. During that time they’ve iterated on their model, their strategy, and their mission. One thing that’s driven the success of those changes is their open workplace culture.

• I talked to senior engineering manager John Goulah about what it means to fail faster at Etsy, and he shared with me some interesting insights into the communication techniques Etsy uses to empower their associates and improve the experience of buyers and sellers on the site.

SaaS/Big Data

• It was back in June of 2013 when TheServerSide was first introduced to OpenStack, Red Hat’s ambitious attempt to do for cloud computing what they did with the open source Linux model, that is, make a commodity out of it leverage it as a major revenue stream. From the 2013 Red Hat Summit, we first floated the basic What is OpenStack? articles, while asking questions such as Will the Red Hat model work for IaaS cloud computing?

• CBR spoke with Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis about the challenges facing OpenStack and how operating as an independent company means it can offer what the customer wants, rather than just its own solution.

Databases

• Ingo is a senior solutions architect at MongoDB. He is active in many open source projects, and is the author of Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source, a book on open source community ethics and business models.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation today announced LibreOffice 4.4.4, the latest update to the 4.4 branch. Today’s release brings 74 bug fixes including several crashes and import/export bugs. The announcement today also brought news of version 5.0 as well as reminders for the LibreOffice Conference in September.

BSD

• The PC-BSD development team today announced their 10.2 pre-release, which continues to be derived from FreeBSD. Additionally they’ve also announced new 11.0-CURRENT images for those wishing to get a look ahead at FreeBSD/PC-BSD 11.0.

• The PC-BSD 10.2 pre-release / 11.0 current announcement didn’t offer many details about all of the changes in store, but once PC-BSD 10.2 and PC-BSD/FreeBSD 11.0 are officially out, you can expect lengthy write-ups on Phoronix.

• More details via the PCBSD.org blog.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• We believe package management and reproducibility are key topics for HPC research. We are glad to have this opportunity to discuss the subject with researchers of the field.

Public Services/Government

• First, the good news: members of the House of Representatives in the US Congress are now allowed to use open source technology in their offices, rather than the very limited list of proprietary offerings they were given in the past. Second, the bad news: how the hell is it 2015 and this is only becoming an option now? I guess we can’t change the past, and so let’s celebrate the House of Reps finally getting to this point — which just happens to coincide with the upcoming launch of the House Open Source Caucus (led by Reps. Blake Farenthold and Jared Polis).

• Traditionally, members of the House of Representatives have been presented with a limited plate of options when choosing technology to run their offices and manage their web presences. Members that wanted to take advantage of open source solutions — which are restriction-free, reusable and frequently more cost-effective — faced significant uncertainty and were pushed towards a small selection of proprietary options.

• Advocates of free software are protesting a tender by the school board of the Spanish region of Extremadura requesting proprietary software licences. The advocacy group, Extremadura Focus Initiative, is supported by the new, incoming government of the region and by several of Extremadura’s school teachers.

Licensing

Openness/Sharing

• So come be a part of our culture YaWiO as we are open sourcing our codex.

Open Data

• The Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has established an award for innovative open data applications. The Stuiveling Open Data Award, which is named after Saskia Stuiveling, the outgoing President of the Dutch National Audit Office (Court of Audit), was announced by Rutte at her final symposium ‘The art of open data’ last month.

• Alexander De Croo, Belgium Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Development Cooperation, Digital Agenda, Telecom and Postal Services, will force the National Railway Company of Belgium (NMBS/SNCB) to make its timetable information available as open data. This will allow software developers to create alternatives to the official app.

Open Hardware

• 5axisaniWhen we think of desktop FDM/FFF 3D printers, we typically picture a gantry style Cartesian-based machine, or a Delta robot style printer. These machines are capable of 3D printing objects based on three axes: X, Y, and Z. The X and Y axes make up the two-dimensional plane, while the Z axis is the third dimension, allowing for objects to be built up one layer at a time. For one University of Oslo Master’s student, named Øyvind Kallevik Grutle, this just wasn’t enough.

Programming

• The ancient Library of Alexandria may have been the largest collection of human knowledge in its time, and scholars still mourn its destruction. The risk of so devastating a loss diminished somewhat with the advent of the printing press and further still with the rise of the Internet. Yet centralized repositories of specialized information remain, as does the threat of a catastrophic loss.

• So what is R? The R programming language is a free and open source programming language for statistical computing and provides an interactive environment for data analysis, modeling and visualization. The language is used by statisticians, analysts and data scientists to unlock value from data.

• A science center in Johannesburg, South Africa, has opened the doors to a five-month course in Linux-based Web apps and entrepreneurial skills. The training is available free of charge to underprivileged students from nearby townships; if it’s successful, it will be rolled out nationwide.

• A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have come up with a way to use ‘donor’ programs to improve the functionality and reduce system errors and flaws in open-source programs.

• Outlined in a paper dubbed “Automatic error elimination by horizontal code transfer across multiple applications,” MIT researchers describe the Code Phage system, which automatically transfers code from donor programs to other applications which have buggy code and errors.

• The Fedora PHP SIG (Special Interest Group) is back / working.

Standards/Consortia

• Last weekend I attended EdgeConf, a conference populated by many of the leading lights in the Web industry. It featured panel talks and breakout sessions with a focus on technologies that are just now starting to emerge in browsers, so there was a lot of lively discussion around Service Worker, Web Components, Shadow DOM, Web Manifests, and more.

• EdgeConf’s hundred-odd attendees were truly the heavy hitters of the Web community. The average Twitter follower count in any given room was probably in the thousands, and all the major browser vendors were represented—Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera. We had lots of fun peppering them with questions about when they might release such-and-such API.

Leftovers

• A man in Louisiana is asking for an explanation from Walmart after his request for a Confederate flag cake at one of its bakeries was rejected, but a design with the ISIS flag was accepted.

• Chuck Netzhammer said he ordered the image of the Confederate flag on a cake with the words, “Heritage Not Hate,” on Thursday at a Walmart in Slidell, Louisiana. But the bakery denied his request, he said. At some point later, he ordered the image of the ISIS flag that represents the terrorist group.

Science

• You just had one of the longest hours of your life. At midnight GMT, clocks added an extra second to allow atomic clocks to stay in sync with the Earth’s rotation. Will the internet fall apart? Follow all the latest developments on our live blog

Health/Nutrition

• Even by the standards of newsweekly hyperbole, this is ridiculous. In the piece, Stein writes that “in the US, doctors performed over 15 million cosmetic procedures in 2014, a 13 percent increase from 2011 and more than twice as many as in 2000.”

• The population of the United States is now 319 million, so 15 million is about 5 percent per capita.

• Even that overstates how big “everyone” is, since most of those procedures are injections like Botox–a muscle relaxant that has to be readministered as often as four times a year. Coupled with the fact that Botox can be used on multiple parts of the body—each of which may be considered a different “procedure”—the “everyone” who “gets work done” turns out to be a tiny fraction of the population.

Security

• I’m a huge PKI (public key infrastructure) fan. I love the beauty of the mathematics and cryptography. I love its myriad uses and scenarios.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• I knew with certainty that the BBC and official line of a lone gunman being responsible for the Tunisian attacks was a lie, because one of the victims of one of the “other” gunmen was my dear niece Kirsty.

Transparency Reporting

• The McKinney (Texas) Police Department is under lots of outside scrutiny, thanks to the racially-tinged antics of its police force — namely the since-departed Officer Eric Casebolt, who barrel rolled into infamy in a cell phone-captured video that culminated in him pinning down a 14-year-old girl while waving a gun at two teens.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Pollution restrictions would prove almost impossible to meet, while new runway would restrict economic growth elsewhere, green groups warn

• …hottest recorded weather in the UK in nine years.

• [...]

• Temperatures of 30C today and 35C tomorrow are likely to cause transport delays, particularly in the south east and London.

• Speed restrictions are already in place on Britain’s railways as temperatures soar to 95F (35C)

• A heatwave in Spain and Portugal has triggered alerts across the region, with temperatures soaring above 40C and warnings of risks to residents’ health.

• It’s good news for cattle, but bad news for commuters, as the heatwave currently hitting London will mean the temperatures on some tube trains tomorrow will exceed the legal limit for transporting cattle.

Finance

• With bank doors slammed shut, frantic Greeks are turning to online trading platforms to see if the digital money Bitcoin is a better bet than the euro.

• In fact, central banks have not spent this money, they have lent this money, mostly by buying government bonds. This matters hugely, because lending is a much more indirect way to boost the economy than spending.

• Lending by central banks is supposed to boost growth by lowering interest rates. This encourages borrowing in the public and private sectors. This helps to explain the growth in debt in recent years: Rather than indicating a troubling situation, this was actually the point of the policy.

• Rather than focus on the amount of debt countries, companies and individuals have incurred, it would be more reasonable to examine their interest burdens. These are mostly quite low.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Between 2010 and 2015, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) awarded Colorado $46 million under the Charter Schools Program. Part of the reason the state landed the competitive grant was that charters are free to hire unlicensed teachers and then fire them at will, documents reviewed by CMD show.

• Designed to create and expand “high-quality” charter schools, the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year program has been repeatedly criticized by the watchdogs at the department’s Office of the Inspector General watchdog for suspected waste and poor financial controls.

• In early 1989, seven weeks after his father moved into the White House, Jeb Bush took a trip to Nigeria.

• Nearly 100,000 Nigerians turned out to see him over four days as he accompanied the executives of a Florida company called Moving Water Industries, which had just retained Bush to market the firm’s pumps. Escorted by the U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, Bush met with the nation’s political and religious leaders as part of an MWI effort to land a deal that would be worth $80 million.

• 43 Percent Of Newspaper Coverage Failed To Note That Candidates’ Climate Statements Conflict With Scientific Consensus. From March 23 — when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) became the first candidate to announce his presidential bid — to June 22 of this year, newspapers and wire services surveyed by Media Matters published 54 news stories (in print and online) that included a presidential candidate denying either that climate change is occurring or that human activity is largely responsible for it. But the newspapers and wires failed to indicate that the candidate’s position conflicts with the scientific consensus in 23 of those stories, or 43 percent of the coverage.

Censorship

• Banned Books Week celebrates the freedom to read by encouraging read-outs, displays, and community activities that raise awareness of the ongoing threat of censorship. Last year, tens of thousands of people participated in Banned Books Week online. More than 500 videos were posted in a virtual read-out, and thousands participated in hundreds of events in bookstores, libraries, and schools and universities across the country.

Privacy

• Yet also today, the lower house of France’s legislature, the National Assembly, passed a sweeping surveillance law. The law provides a new framework for the country’s intelligence agencies to expand their surveillance activities. Opponents of the law were quick to mock the government for vigorously protesting being surveilled by one of the country’s closest allies while passing a law that gives its own intelligence services vast powers with what its opponents regard as little oversight. But for those who support the new law, the new revelations of NSA spying showed the urgent need to update the tools available to France’s spies.

• The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled late Monday that the National Security Agency may temporarily resume its once-secret program that systematically collects records of Americans’ domestic phone calls in bulk.

• A secret US tribunal ruled late Monday that the National Security Agency is free to continue its bulk telephone metadata surveillance program—the same spying that Congress voted to terminate weeks ago.

• Congress disavowed the program NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed when passing the USA Freedom Act, which President Barack Obama signed June 2. The act, however, allowed for the program to be extended for six months to allow “for an orderly transition” to a less-invasive telephone metadata spying program.

• According to an announcement from the site, Rights Alliance lawyer Henrik Pontén recently approached Cloudflare in an effort to uncover Sparvar’s email address and the true location of its servers. The discussions between Rights Alliance and Cloudflare were seen by Sparvar, which set alarm bells ringing.

• The Government’s planning to publish a draft of a new law that’s likely to extend the surveillance powers of the police and GCHQ in early autumn.

Civil Rights

• Fox News Latino’s coverage of NBC’s decision to sever ties with Donald Trump differed dramatically from Fox News’ rush to defend the presidential candidate’s incendiary remarks about Mexican immigrants. While Fox hosts praised Trump’s stance and reticence to apologize, Fox News Latino characterized NBC’s move as a victory for Latino media advocacy leaders.

• NBCUniversal announced Monday that it would sever ties with Trump after he characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists,” explaining in a statement: “At NBC, respect and dignity for all people are cornerstones of our values. Due to the recent derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants, NBCUniversal is ending its business relationship with Mr. Trump.”

• A federal judge has just ordered the government to return $167,000 it took from a man passing through Nevada on his way to visit his girlfriend in California. The officers really wanted that money, too. They used two consecutive stops to jerry-rig some probable cause… even though at that point they thought they were only dealing with $2000. From the original stop forward, the entire situation was deplorable, indisputably showing that everyone involved was more interested in taking (and keeping) a bunch of cash than enforcing laws or pursuing justice.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Announced on Tuesday, the tech giant said the move will accelerate the development of the Cisco Cloud Delivered Security Portfolio, and OpenDNS will prove a boost to advanced threat protection services for Cisco clients.

• A two-tier Internet will be created in Europe as the result of a late-night “compromise” between the European Commission, European Parliament and the EU Council. The so-called “trilogue” meeting to reconcile the different positions of the three main EU institutions saw telecom companies gaining the right to offer “specialised services” on the Internet. These premium services will create a fast lane on the Internet and thus destroy net neutrality, which requires that equivalent traffic is treated in the same way.

• After months of negotiations behind closed doors between the Council of the European Union, the European Commission and the European Parliament (trialogue), the very positive text on Net Neutrality adopted by the European Parliament in April 2014 has become more ambiguous and weaker. Net Neutrality deserves more guarantees and La Quadrature du Net is regretting a third-rate agreement.

• A federal court has set a schedule for the legal case over the Federal Communications Commission’s controversial net neutrality rules.

• The telecom companies, trade groups and individuals suing the FCC must submit briefs to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia by July 30. Their supporters have until August 6 to submit their own filings.

• Following a mammoth negotiating session that ended in the early hours of this morning, the European Union (EU) has released their long awaited rules on Net Neutrality.

• The EU Commissioner’s tweet and an accompanying press release proclaimed the rules as strong protection for net neutrality, but we’re not so sure. In fact, our initial response is one of disappointment. As others have pointed out, the proposals are unclear. At best they will lead to disputes and confusion, and at worst they could see the creation of a two-tier Internet. If enacted, these rules would place European companies and citizens at a disadvantage when compared to countries such as Chile and the USA.

• It seems the European Union has learned little from the hard-won fight in the United States to preserve net neutrality. Today, the European Commission announced an agreement between the European Parliament and EU Council that—on the surface—claims to promise to protect net neutrality, while simultaneously allowing for exceptions that would threaten its very existence.

• Data roaming charges associated with using your mobile phone while travelling abroad within the 28 member countries of the European Union will be a thing of the past as soon as June 2017. After that, consumers will pay the same price for calls, text messages and internet surfing throughout the EU.

• [...]

• The commission said it would also reserve the right to control traffic if it was in the public interest, for example, to combat child pornography or a terrorist attack.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) rejected Google’s petition for certiorari in its long copyright dispute over Oracle’s Java application programming interface (API)s. That ruling upheld a potentially deadly 2014 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that held the Java APIs can be copyrighted.

• The decision curtails Google’s efforts to avoid paying Oracle licensing fees for using Java code in the Android mobile operating system.

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