● 07.06.15

● Links 6/7/2015: Linux 4.2-rc1, YotaPhone Picks Sailfish OS

Posted in News Roundup at 3:35 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• Today, containers are becoming the default way that people put apps on clouds. In no small part, that’s because containers didn’t become standardized until libcontainer appeared in 2014. But then Docker headed in its own direction, and others, starting with CoreOS, started splitting off. Fortunately, instead of forking themselves into irrelevance, almost all the containers powers got back on the same page with the Open Container Project (OCP).

• We recently released Docker Machine 0.3.0. I am a maintainer on the project, and I want to share with you some of the goodness that we have been working hard on integrating in the months since the previous release.

Kernel Space

• The ARC architecture updates for the Linux 4.2 kernel have landed.

• With the ARC architecture updates in Linux 4.2 comes support for HS38 cores, which in turn are based on the Synopsys next-gen ISA known as ARCv2. The ARCv2 ISA is faster and more feature-rich than their original instruction set architecture. The HS38 cores have a 10-stage pipeline core with MMU support, SMP up to four cores, and other new features. The HS38 processor is still 32-bit and is “optimized for high-performance embedded applications running Linux.”

• The Non-Transparent Bridge code is undergoing a big rework that has “already produced some significant performance improvements”, according to its code maintainer Jon Mason. For those unfamiliar with NTB, it’s described by the in-kernel documentation, “NTB (Non-Transparent Bridge) is a type of PCI-Express bridge chip that connects the separate memory systems of two computers to the same PCI-Express fabric. Existing NTB hardware supports a common feature set, including scratchpad registers, doorbell registers, and memory translation windows.” Or explained simply by the Intel Xeon documentation that received the NTB support, “Non-Transparent Bridge (NTB) enables high speed connectivity

• For the past four years in systemd there’s been a Udev accelerometer helper for exposing the device orientation as a property. With the upcoming systemd 222 release, that will change and instead users taking advantage of device orientation information should switch to iio-sensor-proxy 1.0+.

• I reached out to the intel_idle maintainer Len Brown and others to see if they had any leads, but given the US holiday weekend, I don’t expect much activity this weekend. Just posting this brief update in case anyone has encountered a similar problem or ideas. I’m quite excited to get the Core i7 5775C up for Linux benchmarking. I’m even half-tempted to see if the CPU plays nicely under FreeBSD to try to isolate it as a software or hardware trouble.

Graphics Stack

• While the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window isn’t even over yet, Intel developers already have new code ready for testing that will be merged eventually for Linux 4.3.

• With their updated -testing Git repository, there are DSI improvements, more enablement for Broxton hardware, Cherryview improvements, PPGTT polishing, the kernel mode-setting Kconfig option is no longer exposed as it’s a requirement, and there’s the continuing code churn around atomic mode-setting.

Benchmarks

• This week in celebrating 200,000 benchmark results in our LinuxBenchmarking.com test lab, I ran another large comparison against the latest spectrum of hardware/software in the automated performance test lab.

Applications

• Mapzen builds open-source mapping tools and collaborates on open geodata initiatives and one good choice is Tangram.

• VirtualBox, a virtualization application that allows users to run and install operating systems inside other OSes, has received a fresh RC for the new 5.0 branch.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• I am always wary of posting articles like this, but sometimes what developers with influence say needs pointing out. This time Jonathan Blow who created the hit indie game Braid has been blasting Linux gaming.

• Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri is a classic tactical shooter that now has a Linux version on GOG, and it’s highly rated. Originally released in 1996, it has been given new life on GOG’s digital shelves.

• It’s been a while, but Trine Enchanted Edition is finally available for Linux users on GOG. It’s well worth checking out, so hopefully a few more of you can play it now.

• It’s good to see another Daedalic published game made available for Linux.

• A recent article about Jon Blow has spurred other developers getting in touch, and one developer is Brushfire Games, the developer of Shipwreck. Their sales are looking good, and they have some thoughts.

• It’s really good to see games aimed at all ages coming to Linux, it will certainly help those of us with young families get into Linux. These games are powered by the open source ScummVM project, so thanks to those guys too. I plan to introduce my son to games like this when he’s old enough, and I can thank GOG for allowing me to do that easily.

• Anno Online is getting destroyed by the reviews on Steam, so naturally I need to see what all the fuss is about for this Linux game from Ubisoft & Blue Byte.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Do you prefer the modern desktop environments with maybe less flexibility but perhaps better desktop integration and slightly more intuitive or do you like things more traditional with menus and panels? Maybe you don’t care so long as you can make it the way you want it. Let me know in the comments below.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The KDE community recently announced a new version of KDE Plasma, 5.3.2, and that version has been already implemented in the upcoming Kubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf).

• The task involves making a KVTML editor for LibKEduVocDocument which will be available to all the applications using it. For that I have been moving the editor of Parley to the library. I had started off with moving the model classes, and after that moved on to the view/delegate classes and the various widgets, and simultaneously updating Parley to use the newly moved classes of the library. Currently I am moving the main Editor Window, and I expect to complete it soon enough.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Up until now, Boxes’ stopped machines were represented by a black box. It was nice as it represented the idea of a shut down screen, but it was pretty hard to differentiate a stopped machine from a running one displaying a black screen. This was stated in bug #730258 where Jimmac suggested to follow this design where thumbnails are draw as gray frames with a medium sized emblem in their center, using the system-shutdown-symbolic icon to suggest the stopped state.

• The GNOME Foundation and the Wau Holland Foundation (Wau Holland Stiftung; WHS) have recently reached an agreement that will significantly improve the way donations to GNOME within the European Union (EU) are received and managed.

Distributions

• Clarence Siew was very proud Softpedia earlier today, July 4, about the immediate availability for download of the final version of his illume OS 3 distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux.

New Releases

• The Parsix GNU/Linux developers were happy to announce that the first snapshot towards the anticipated Parsix GNU/Linux 8.0 distribution is now available for download and testing.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

Arch Family

Red Hat Family

• Mellanox, Red Hat, Seagate, and Supermicro are also in an ongoing Red Hat Ceph Storage benchmarking project to demonstrate the performance with various combinations of flash and hard drives.

• Red Hat Inc logoJPMorgan Chase & Co. restated their overweight rating on shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) in a research note issued to investors on Thursday, Analyst Ratings Net reports. The firm currently has a $85.00 price target on the open-source software company’s stock, up from their previous price target of $82.00.

• Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, explains how OpenStack is defining infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

Debian Family

• I’m the current Debian Project Leader—which is a very impressive title that boils down to being a figurehead for the Debian project.

• I first started getting involved with Debian in 2003, and have wended my way through various roles in the project, from designing t-shirts to being the Release Manager for the last three releases, Lenny, Squeeze and Wheezy.

• In my day job, I’m the engineering manager for Collabora, an open source software consultancy which is fairly similar—basically making sure that all the engineers are happy and helping unblock any problems that come along.

• The first upload of new packages after TeX Live 2015 hit unstable. Against my expectations, the bugs didn’t come in in the thousands, more or less there were only some fixes necessary in the binary package, which lead to a few updates over the last week. This upload fixes an RC bug (missing replaces), and also takes a step further in the Debianization of the packages: I finally removed texconfig and texlinks programs, as they are not useful on Debian, and should actually not be used.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical has just announced that Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) will reach end on life in just a couple of weeks, on July 23.

• Canonical’s Alejandro J. Cura had the great pleasure of reporting a few hours ago that the upcoming OTA-5 update for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system will get some attractive new features in the Unity 8 user interface.

• Nicholas Skaggs had the great pleasure of announcing a couple of days ago yet another innovation from Canonical, Snappy Open House, a new way for Ubuntu developers, contributors, and members of the community to get familiar with the Snappy technology created by Canonical for its Ubuntu Linux operating system.

• Canonical has just announced that an Ubuntu version of the Intel Compute Stick, on sale this coming week and priced around $110. The Intel Compute Stick is a small HDMI dongle that you plug into a TV or monitor and provides a full PC experience. It’s a great idea as something falling between a Chromecast device and a full media centre…

Flavours and Variants

• Now that Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” has been officially released, both for the MATE and Cinnamon flavors, the upgrade path has been opened for the users of older versions.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• You may not have heard of them but Yota is a Russian company who dared to be different with their YotaPhone 2 smartphone. While most manufacturers tend to stick to tried-and-tested designs, Yota took a risk with the YotaPhone 2 and if you somehow haven’t heard of it, the dual-screen smartphone was one of the most unique Android devices ever made.

Tizen

• Samsung’s partnership with members of the Linux Foundation appears to be bearing fruit. The partnership’s mobile operating system — dubbed Tizen — is Linux-based. Samsung’s initial Tizen phone rollout was rocky: The company’s highly anticipated Samsung Z launch in Russia was quickly canceled last year, and the company blamed concerns about the ecosystem for the delay. Unfortunately, in many cases, ecosystem development presents a “chicken and egg” problem: Developers won’t build apps until you have users, and users won’t select your product until you have apps.

• The annual Tizen Developer Conference (TDC) will be held 17-18 September 2015 in Shenzhen, China. The conference will feature keynotes from industry leaders, as well as technical talks for app developers, platform designers, independent software developers (ISV), OEMs, hardware and software vendors. This conference is for open source and app developers who are interested in contributing to the growth of the Tizen ecosystem worldwide.

Android

• Domestic smartphone maker Lava, in collaboration search engine giant Google, is prepping the stage for the launch of new Android One 2.0 series smartphone later this month.

• Lava will host an event on 14 July in New Delhi to unveil the new Android One series smartphone, reported The Economic Times (Tech).

• The first wave of Android One devices launched in India in September 2014. The selection of low-end phones was supposed to help Android tackle “the next billion users”—people in developing countries who had never owned a smartphone before. The devices were spec’d about as low as possible—4.5-inch 480p screens, 1.3GHz MediaTek processors, and 4GB of storage—which gave them a really low price of about $105. According to the report, this new wave of devices sits a lot higher on the price spectrum: about $189 (Rs 12,000).

• A report published on Friday says that a new Android One handset will be unveiled in India on July 17. A local handset manufacturer, Lava International, is producing the model which will be priced at the equivalent of $189 USD. According to those familiar with Google’s thinking, version 2.0 of Android One will be aimed at those who have used a smartphone before. Previously, the low priced Android One models were designed for first-time smartphone buyers in emerging markets.

• Google is said to be testing the upcoming Android M operating system for Nexus 4, Nexus 7 (2012) and the Nexus 10.

• Too many Android phones are running old software with security flaws, according to Dutch consumer association Consumentenbond, which wants manufacturers to update their phones’ software more often, and for longer.

• The association tested 171 Android smartphones that it had acquired over the last two years, applying the latest software update provided by the manufacturer.

• Noted internet tipster Evan Blass has revealed two details about BlackBerry’s upcoming smartphone plans, and the focus on increased Android support.

• The first is the news that the BlackBerry Venice handset will be powered by Android, and one of the slider keyboard based handset will be sold by AT&T later in the year. That Venice will be Android-powered matches previous rumors, but the news of AT&T’s adoption of the Venice makes sense. AT&T has a long associated with BlackBerry, and has already taken a number of the new BB10 powered handsets and requested tweaked designed for its customer base.

• We’ve expected for a month or so that BlackBerry is working on an Android phone with a “dual curved display” that slides up to reveal a physical keyboard underneath. It is supposedly based on a device that was originally announced at Mobile World Congress back in March, and back then the best image we had to go off of was a low-resolution snapshot of the device being held up on stage. Now, Evan Blass (aka @evleaks) has posted a high-resolution render of the device, codenamed Venice, to Twitter.

• At Google’s recent I/O developers’ conference, Google’s leadership clearly stated that they want Android to be the dominant OS for connected devices and Internet of Things. Like Windows, Android is hardware-agnostic and can easily be applied to any mobile or IoT device. Even more important is that Android serves as Google’s OS/UI to its overall cloud vision, and it is building most of its worldwide ecosystem of products and services channeled through Android.

• We’ve written about Dolphin before: it’s an extremely popular emulator for the Nintendo Gamecube and Wii that runs well on modern gaming PCs. The developers have been trying to get it running reliably on Android for years. They’re not quite there yet – the software needs a lot of work, and we still need more powerful devices to get a true one-to-one gaming experience. But the NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV, with its ridiculously powerful and video-focused Tegra X1 system-on-a-chip, is getting pretty close.

• The Android 5.1 Lollipop update for the Motorola Droid Turbo, Moto X 2013 and Moto X 2014 is now going to be rolled out, much to the delight of Motorola smartphone users. Since it is going to be a phased role out, not all users will be able to enjoy what the update has to offer at the time that it is released to the public.

Free Software/Open Source

• Most recently, Facebook released the source code for its new static analyzer dubbed “Facebook Infer.”

• At OSCON in Portland this year, Donna Benjamin and Gina Likins are combining forces to talk about a topic that is sometimes easily dismissed: conflict resolution. Given the growing need to address conflict in technology, and that even popular projects like the Linux Kernel adopting codes of conduct, it’s no surprise that conferences feature talks on human interaction.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• After a delay a couple of days ago, Firefox 39 has finally released. With this release OS X and Linux versions of Firefox are playing catch-up to Windows, they finally received support for SafeBrowsing which helps users identify if a download is malware.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The release of the next major version of LibreOffice, the 5.0, is approaching fast. In several ways this is an unique release and I’d like to explain a bit why.

CMS

• This month marks the third birthday of edX, the online learning platform developed jointly by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In that short time, usage of the edx.org site has exploded. Over 4 million students have taken one of the hundreds of free online courses provided by dozens of prominent universities. Individual courses have had tens of thousands of enrollees in a session.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• The Austrian Graph Integration Platform (GIP) has made its national transport graph available to the public for re-use. Although some of this information was already exported for specific applications, the data will now be published in full under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, allowing for any re-use — even commmercial — as long as the source of the information is specified.

• Open Data and citizen participation, two core principles of Open Government, will be priorities in the eGovernment Action Plan 2016 – 2020 of the European Commission.

Open Hardware

• As he explains to 3ders.org, this unusual idea actually grew out of the ambitions of one of his professors. ‘The idea behind creating the printer was mainly my supervisor’s (Mats Høvin). He wanted a student to build a 5-axis machine with some sort of tool. Together we decided it would be interesting to try creating a 5-axis 3D printer since that had not been done at that time, with the exception of DMG Mori’s Lasertec 65 3D and others 5-axis metal printers,’ Grutle explains.

Programming

Standards/Consortia

• France has updated its guidelines on the accessibility of public administration’ websites. The rules now include recommendations on the use of modern web technologies (HTML5) and come with improved tools for testing website accessibility. The website for the guidelines itself has also been revamped, providing easier access to the documentation.

• Two weeks ago, I got a call from a reporter who had stumbled on two pieces I wrote in praise of new releases of the Unicode, the first in 2003 (on the occasion of the release of Unicode 4.0, referred to above), and the second in 2006, two releases later. The reason for the call was the release of Unicode version 8.0 by its stewards, the Unicode Consortium.

Leftovers

• Since her husband, Iain, died seven months ago, Caroline Twigg has had to face an unexpected problem – what to do with his online legacy

Robbert Barons

• Billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates has 30 days to pay $30,600 in Wellington to clear up code violations involving a misplaced manure bin.

• A trust affiliated with billionaire Bill Gates will pay a $30,000 fine over horse manure in a settlement expected to be approved on Thursday by a special magistrate in the affluent south Florida village of Wellington.

• Bill Gates and Melinda Foundation is working on a birth control chip that can be remote controlled. The birth control chip can be implanted into people’s body – in hip, inside arms or even beneath the back – and can be used for 16 years. The research on birth control chip was kept a secret until now, before the spokesperson for Bill Gates and Melinda Foundation confirmed that the beta testing for the birth control chip would be starting towards the end of this year and that they need volunteers to assist in real life testing of the chip.

Security

• This morning, in America, it is Independence Day, not the Fourth of July. Many of our ancestors fought, and many died to put a stop to political repression such as we see today in Brazil.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its “free fire zones”, “body counts” and “collateral damage”. In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians (“gooks”) were murdered by the US; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot.

• It has been scarcely five months since the Government last passed legislation designed to combat the terrorist threat – in February’s Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. Yet already, following Seifeddine Rezgui’s bloodletting in Tunisia, David Cameron, Theresa May, and other senior ministers have offered fresh promises to ratchet up measures in the fight against extremism and in preventing ideological radicalisation.

• Moral panic, rather than sober politics, is at work here. Rezgui was not radicalised in Britain, and his attack tells us precisely nothing about whether UK domestic counter-terrorism policies are currently adequate or inadequate. The concrete implications of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act are not even clear yet – universities, for example, are still awaiting guidance on what it requires of them. But elements of the Government’s Prevent strategy, combined with the post-Tunisia rhetoric, hint at a misguided ambition to make universities and schools part of a state-directed ideological campaign against the amorphous spectre of “violent or non-violent extremism”. One Prevent consultation, for example, implied that universities may soon be obliged to censor the activities of university societies, monitor students for any “opposition to fundamental British values”, maintain records of those students who do so, and unequivocally denounce or exclude such views wherever they are expressed.

• Medea Benjamin discusses issues from drone warfare to the recent fast track trade vote.

Transparency Reporting

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange denied claims he filed a request for political asylum in France after he published a letter in a French newspaper suggesting otherwise.

• Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has denied making an unsuccessful asylum request to France.

• An open letter, written by Assange to Francois Hollande, the French president, was published in the French daily Le Monde.

Finance

• Not for many years has the issue been posed as clearly as it will be on July 5 in Greece’s referendum: European capitalists, the political leaders whom the capitalists’ money controls, and the austerity they together impose will be judged by the people most savaged by that austerity.

• The Greek people were informed that the financial maneuvers made by Europe’s biggest banks, biggest industrial capitalists, and the usual political elites (shamefully including Greeks and “socialists”) in 2008-2009 would absolutely require massive losses of Greek jobs, incomes, property, and financial security for many years to come. Recycling Margaret Thatcher’s words, they were told “there is no alternative.” Other Europeans (and Americans, etc. too) were told the same although their austerities were less bleak (so far).

• Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis accused Athens’ creditors of “terrorism” in an interview, a day before Greeks vote in a high-stakes referendum on the conditions of the country’s bailout.

• “What they’re doing with Greece has a name – terrorism,” Varoufakis told the Spanish El Mundo daily on Saturday.

• “What Brussels and the troika want today is for the “Yes” (vote) to win so they could humiliate the Greeks.”

• “Why did they force us to close the banks? To instill fear in people. And spreading fear is called terrorism,” he said, referring to the IMF, European Central Bank and the EU.

• After failing to reach a deal with its creditors last weekend on an extension of its bailout programme Greece’s radical leftist government closed the country’s banks and imposed capital controls until July 6.

• Politics can be merciless, and the IMF is political even if it’s not a country. IMF chief Christine Lagarde suggested in an interview with UK’s Guardian that the Greeks should pay their taxes. It turns out Ms. Lagarde—legitimately—doesn’t pay them herself.

• In fact, her IMF salary of $467,940 plus an $83,760 additional allowance is not subject to any taxes. See Christine Lagarde, Scourge of Tax Evaders, Pays No Tax. No taxes is the norm for most United Nations employees covered by a convention on diplomatic relations signed by most nations. If you look at salaries, those working for the IMF, World Bank, and UN can stretch their dollars.

• When Times correspondent George Steer entered the city of Guernica in April 1937, what struck him were the incongruities. He noted precisely the bombing tactics “which may be of interest to students of the new military science”. But his report begins with a long paragraph describing the city’s ceremonial oak tree and its role in the Spanish feudal system.

• Sitting in Athens this week, I began to understand how Steer felt. Sunday’s referendum will take place under a kind of financial warfare not seen in the history of modern states. The Greek government was forced to close its banks after the European Central Bank, whose job is technically to keep them open, refused to do so. The never-taxed and never-registered broadcasters of Greece did the rest, spreading panic, and intensifying it where it had already taken hold.

• Lest this seem too diabolical to be plausible, this is the basic lending model that has been used by Western banks and backed by Western governments and the ‘independent’ institutions they control for some six decades now. The U.S., Germany or France have long lent money for infrastructure projects, agricultural ‘upgrades’ like the Green Revolution and direct purchases of technology and / or munitions. This indebted the citizens-by-degree of both internally and externally organized nation-states while making large profits for the corporations who could sell their wares thanks to the ‘largesse’ of Western states and banks. This practice in some measure explains how corrupt and / or incompetent government officials and plutocrats in Greece managed to line their own pockets while permanently indebting the good citizens of that storied nation.

• I suppose it’s no surprise that Greece’s corporate class is deeply unthrilled by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s leftist government, and would be happy to see him humiliated and tossed out of office. I assume that they also prefer the devil they know—grinding European-imposed austerity for years—to the devil they don’t—exiting the euro amid chaos and eventually rebuilding their economy with a devalued drachma. After all, they’ll stay rich either way, and sticking with their fellow European moguls probably seems the better bet by far.

• The bias toward the “yes” side reflects the fact that many of Greece’s biggest news outlets are owned by corporate titans and other “oligarchs” whose business interests would be directly threatened by a “no” victory and the potential abandonment of the euro in favor of the drachma, Leontopoulos said.

• European authorities have set out to deliberately humiliate Greece for electing a left-wing anti-austerity Government, the Green Party’s MP has said.

• Speaking at a Greece solidarity rally in London Caroline Lucas argued that the “deluded” policy coming out of the eurogroup was designed to punish the Syriza-led government.

• Greece’s conservative opposition chief Antonis Samaras on Sunday announced his resignation after the country appeared set to reject further austerity cuts in a referendum.

• In a forceful interview with German newspaper Die Zeit, the star economist Thomas Piketty calls for a major conference on debt. Germany, in particular, should not withhold help from Greece.

• The head of a small Ottawa-based charity is in Geneva this week to complain to a United Nations committee about the Canada Revenue Agency’s program of political-activity audits.

• Harriett McLachlan, president of Canada Without Poverty, is pleading her case before the UN Human Rights Committee, arguing that a special audit program launched by the tax agency in 2012 violates Canada’s international commitments on human rights.

• There is (another) very important plenary vote in the European Parliament on TTIP this Wednesday, when the European Parliament will vote on a resolution concerning TTIP. The first time around, the vote was pulled for tactical reasons by the pro-ISDS camp, rightly afraid that the European Parliament would reject the inclusion of this anti-democratic idea in TTIP. Now they have cobbled together a “compromise” on ISDS which simply calls it something else, without solving the fundamental problem, which is that it gives corporations unique rights to sue entire nations, with us, the public, footing the bill.

• TiSA is arguably the most important – yet least well-known – of the new generation of global trade agreements. According to WikiLeaks, it “is the largest component of the United States’ strategic ‘trade’ treaty triumvirate,” which also includes the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP).

• “Together, the three treaties form not only a new legal order shaped for transnational corporations, but a new economic ‘grand enclosure,’ which excludes China and all other BRICS countries” declared WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in a press statement. If allowed to take universal effect, this new enclosure system will impose on all our governments a rigid framework of international corporate law designed to exclusively protect the interests of corporations, relieving them of financial risk, and social and environmental responsibility.

• [...]

• But that is just the tip of the iceberg. According to the treaty’s Annex on Financial Services, we now know that TiSA would effectively strip signatory governments of all remaining ability to regulate the financial industry in the interest of depositors, small-time investors, or the public at large.

Censorship

• In a letter to the Prime Minister on Saturday, a group of members of the public, which include parents and prominent members of the community, have expressed concerns over the “harsh treatment” of 16-year old video-blogger Amos Yee.

• Prominent Singaporean intellectuals, artists and activists today criticised the government’s “harsh” treatment of a teenage boy behind online attacks on the late former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew.

• Freedom of expression in Singapore is not only repressed by the powerful, but also frowned upon by citizens and policed by individuals, said a panel at a free speech event on Saturday.

Privacy

• Wikileaks published more damning details of U.S. spying on Brazil’s government Saturday, just days after President Dilma Rousseff said she had faith Washington has rolled back snooping.

• The latest release includes a list of the NSA’s top targets in Brazil, with the agency taking a particular interest in key financial and economic figures in what Wikileaks described as “intensive interception.”

• [...]

• The list itself includes 29 phone numbers – all linked to high level Brazilian officials. Many of the numbers are identified as being associated with senior figures in Brazil’s finance ministry, along with the head of the country’s central bank.

• [...]

• Brazilian ambassadors in France, Geneva, Germany and the United States also make the list, indicating their private communications have been monitored by the NSA. The publication comes less than a week after Rousseff said during a visit to the White House that “things had changed” between the United States and Brazil.

• Aside from listening in on Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s phone calls, US spies also targeted top political and financial officials, according to new information released by WikiLeaks on Saturday.

• The whistle-blowing website published a National Security Agency list of 29 Brazilian government phone numbers that the American spy group monitored.

• Whistle-blower Web site WikiLeaks has published the names of more than 29 members of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s administration who were spied on by the US National Security Agency at the start of her first term in office, which began in January 2011.

• The release of the list of phone numbers on Saturday linked to high-level Brazilian officials comes just days after Rousseff, who was reelected to a second term late last year, and US counterpart Barack Obama met in Washington to end bilateral tensions stemming from previous revelations about NSA eavesdropping on Brasilia.

• WikiLeaks disclosed documents Saturday detailing the National Security Agency’s wiretapping of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

• They said the NSA also spied on Rousseff’s secretary, her chief of staff and other top Brazilian government officials, according to USA Today.

• Top secret data from the National Security Agency, shared with The Intercept by WikiLeaks, reveals that the U.S. spy agency targeted the cellphones and other communications devices of more than a dozen top Brazilian political and financial officials, including the country’s president Dilma Rousseff, whose presidential plane’s telephone was on the list. President Rousseff just yesterday returned to Brazil after a trip to the U.S. that included a meeting with President Obama, a visit she had delayed for almost two years in anger over prior revelations of NSA spying on Brazil.

• But there was no indication in the list that the spying took place more recently than 2013, and Brazilian officials brushed it aside as old news.

• Virtual Private Network (VPN) services can be used for circumventing Internet censorship and accessing blocked content, but researchers warn that you shouldn’t believe the companies’ claims that they offer privacy and anonymity.

• Cameron wants security services to read your private chats on social media by getting tech firms to drop encryption. The former leader of the Pirate Party, Loz Kaye, thinks Cameron’s anti-encryption moves are ill-thought out, and could spell disaster.

Civil Rights

• If Donald Trump’s anti-Latino rhetoric was an attempt at gaining electoral ground among U.S. conservatives in recent weeks, the backlash appears to have united the country’s large and diverse Latino population.

• Weeks after Donald Trump labeled U.S.-Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and criminals, Latino leaders and artists in U.S. are standing up to the billionaire showing who, in fact, is boss.

• We’re kicking off this milestone in two ways: a membership drive and a party and minicon in San Francisco on July 16. We’re asking people to donate and become members because we fight passionately for the rights of individuals—and in turn, rely deeply on individuals to strengthen our work as we confront threats from powerful institutions and as technology transforms our lives. We’re throwing the party to celebrate 25 years of work in the digital world and imagine what the next 25 years ought to look like. More information on our anniversary activities is below.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the nonprofit group that manages Internet addresses for Canada, most Caribbean countries, and the United States, announced that it has activated its Unmet Request Policy. What that means is that there are no longer enough IPv4 address blocks available for the demand.

DRM

• Because Apple Music is a cloud based service, adding favourite tracks and playlists in Apple Music will add them to your collection in the cloud. If you don’t turn on Apple Music, you don’t have access to your musical cloud record, and the only way to listen to the music is to stream tracks while online. No offline copies, no playlists, and no bookmarks (just the struggle to remember your favourite albums you’ve recently been listening to).

• Apple’s iCLoud Music Library is apparently causing anger in the Apple community. The iCloud Music Library feature was released just a few days ago with the 12.2 release of iTunes. The paid service which comes part of an Apple Music subscription syncs all of you music to iCloud so you can listen to it on any device, sounds good right? Wrong, it adds DRM to all your music.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• After a prolonged legal battle, last year several leading Austrian ISPs were ordered to block major streaming sites Movie4K.to and Kinox.to. All but one of the ISPs appealed but now the Supreme Court has not only ruled against them, but ordered them to pick up the cost of blocking sites in the future.

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