● 07.20.15

● Links 21/7/2015: Manjaro Linux 0.8.13, Kdenlive 15.08

Posted in News Roundup at 7:23 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Some very keen eyes from the Linux community noticed that the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition was no longer available for purchase. Being just a community with no available information, the rumors quickly got out of hand, but it turns out that Dell is just making some changes. Sure, they could have handled this situation a lot better and informed the users about their plans before implementing them, but that didn’t happen.

• Adobe Flash has been both a gift and a curse wrapped up in the same package. It’s a sluggish, often insecure and horribly bloated way to watch a video and play games on your computer. For years, Flash for Linux users was even worse: audio was out of sync with the video and you needed a special wrapper to play Flash videos on 64-bit Linux distributions. Even though things have gotten better in terms of compatibility, security still remains poor.

• Chromebooks have been big sellers on Amazon for a long time now, with prices running from $150 on up. But one Chrome OS redditor recently wondered if it was time for there to be a $99 Chromebook. He got some interesting answers from his fellow redditors.

Server

• Advocates of conventional VM environments have touted this as a key disadvantage of containers. If it is, then both VMs and containers share the problem. Virtual components are intended to be self-contained. Docker has begun to break through this barrier with its latest exploration of a plugins ecosystem. But even this may underscore the need for containers to report their health, and the opportunity for containers to one-up VMs yet again by beating them to a standard approach.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development announced today that PLUMgrid has joined the organization as a Gold member.

• Skylake is around the corner and now after an Intel engineer added Skylake SoC support to Coreboot, that work has been extended by adding support for the first Skylake motherboards in Coreboot.

• Recently you may have heard of OCZ launching their new Trion 100 series, which is the latest example of low-cost solid-state storage. The OCZ Trion 240GB costs just $90 USD and the larger capacities are also around $0.375 per GB. In having picked up one of these cheap SSDs for another Linux test system recently, I ran some basic open-source Linux benchmarks on the Trion 100.

• Jerome Glisse continues hacking on the very lengthy feature work item of adding Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) to the Linux kernel.

• We haven’t written about HMM for Linux since the end of last year when version seven of the patches were published. Today, HMM is up to its ninth patch revision. This latest revision incorporates feedback from earlier code reviews and reworks some of the patch structure.

• If you’ve noticed your 802.11 WiFi adapters on Linux tending to more often connect to 2.4GHz networks than 5GHz, you’re not alone, but improvements for 5GHz WiFi on Linux are forthcoming.

Graphics Stack

• The latest work that NVIDIA’s been working on for the open-source Nouveau driver is to enable VIC support.

• Patches are pending to remove GLAMOR support from the xf86-video-nouveau DDX driver and as a result to also drop the Maxwell hardware support.

• On a sort of completely different topic but related, the AMD Radeon R9 Fury (X) is still a tough fine and seems to be constantly out-of-stock at all major Internet retailers. I’m still working on buying one for a Radeon R9 Fury review under Linux, but no luck yet in finding any in-stock (sans NewEgg’s more expensive PC componet bundles). If any Phoronix readers manage to find any or have any other details, feel free to share in the forums.

• This weekend I had out the ASUS Zenbook ultrabook with Core i7 4558 “Haswell” processor that boasts Iris Graphics 5100. I figured I’d run some Mesa 10.5 vs. 10.7-devel and Linux 4.0 vs. 4.1 vs. 4.2 kernel graphics tests.

• Last month I wrote about the latest Linux kernel yielding better performance for Intel Bay Trail hardware. Those gains also carry over to Intel’s newest Braswell SoCs. Here are some tests with the newest Linux kernel and Mesa Git code when using the new Intel Braswell NUC with Celeron N3050.

• We’ve been hearing now for a few months that Imagination is working on some sort of new PowerVR Linux driver and at least larger components of it would be open-source. This new Imagination job posting seems to further confirm this work.

• With NVIDIA’s upcoming 355.xx Linux driver series they will be employing a new kernel module build system for their proprietary driver.

Benchmarks

• While a lot of results are produced on LinuxBenchmarking.com of daily automated open-source/Linux tests and separately on Phoronix.com, these results do not come free but require a great deal of resources to keep going.

• With the big Catalyst 15.7 Linux driver update released last week and the continued evolution of the open-source AMD Linux driver in the Linux kernel and Mesa Gallium3D, here are fresh benchmarks of six different AMD Radeon graphics cards when being tested on both the open and closed-source drivers to represent the AMD Linux gaming experience this summer.

• In the Phoronix server room for our Linux hardware testing and the LinuxBenchmarking.com daily performance tracker there are 16 of the 56 systems running Btrfs as their root file-system. While those systems have been chugging along for months and many of them running the latest daily Git kernel, I’ve finally had one of the systems run into some apparent Btrfs file-system issues.

Applications

• FFmpeg, a complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video, is now at version 2.7.2 and is ready for download.

• Version 0.6 of the GStreamer VA-API plug-ins is now available. These GStreamer plug-ins expose video encode/decode for GStreamer that’s backed by VA-API on supported graphics hardware/drivers.

Proprietary

• The Vivaldi developers have recently been happy to announce that a new snapshot release, version 1.0.228.3, is available for download and testing, introducing new attractive features, such as a new mode that has no user interface at all.

Instructionals/Technical

• To bridge the gap, I used a laptop computer running the Fedora 20-KDE distribution of Linux as a host, three digital signal processor boards as hardware interface processors (HIPs), a USB/RS422 converter that connects to an RS422 loop linking the HIPs together and some software that I call the Vehicle Monitoring and Control application.

Games

• Codename CURE is a new FPS co-operative zombie title developed and published Steam by Hoobalugalar_X. A Linux version of the game is also available.

• It is a realistic game, being played by both normal users and future airline pilots, because of its accurate details. It allows the user to fly aircrafts, helicopters, airliners or modern combat aircrafts on many tracks.

• Biodrone Battle, a 2D action game developed and publishes by voodoosoft on Steam, has been released for the Linux users as well.

• It’s difficult to pinpoint what type of gameplay genre for this game, which makes it interesting from the get go. It’s true that the Linux platform has more than enough action games, but one more that doesn’t fit any genre could be quite welcome.

• Guild Software announced this past weekend the immediate availability of a new maintenance release of their popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, Vendetta Online, for all supported platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android, and iOS.

• Reflex, a competitive arena FPS developed and published by Turbo Pixel Studios, is now available on Steam for Linux with a 50% cut and it’s only going to be available for the next few hours.

• Aspyr Media, the company that’s ported games like Civilization V: Beyond Earth to Linux and Borderlands 2, will be launching a new Linux game port on Tuesday.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Several of KDE’s frameworks have windowing system specific code. This means that they need adjustments if they should be run on more than just X11. The frameworks were already adjusted to only call into X11 specific code if they are used on the X11 platform, but a proper Wayland port was still missing.

• Kdenlive 15.08 will be released with KDE Applications 15.08. Beta version should be released next week.

• As you may know, Kdenlive is an open-source video editor, running on both Linux and FreeBSD and using FFmpeg, MLT video framework and Frei0r effects. It can be used for both basic video editing or semi-profesional work.

• Kdenlive 15.08 will feature a lot of code clean-ups, albeit the cleaning process is still ongoing and developers haven’t ruled out potentially seeing a few regressions in this new version.

Distributions

• Which route you take to Chrome OS depends on your needs. If you’re looking for Pure Chrome OS, you’ll want to go with Chromium OS. If you’re looking for a nearly-identical Chrome OS experience, with an additional boost from the Linux desktop, go with Solus. If you want the best of both worlds, give Chromixium a try.

Reviews

• SolydXK is a desktop distribution based on Debian’s Stable branch. SolydXK originally began as an unofficial spin of the Linux Mint project, but has since grown into its own distribution with its own repositories. SolydXK is available in two editions, Xfce and KDE. While both editions strive to offer complete desktop solutions out of the box, the Xfce edition offers a faster, more resource friendly approach. The KDE edition provides more features and configuration options. At the time of writing, both editions of SolydXK appear to be offered as 64-bit x86 builds exclusively. I decided to try the project’s Xfce edition (SolydX) and found the distribution’s ISO was 1.4GB in size.

Arch Family

• The Manjaro Linux 0.8.13 distro has received its fifth update and it looks like we’re getting new versions for various desktop environments, not to mention the upgrades for the supported Linux kernels.

• That’s where my time with Manjaro Linux 0.8.13 “Ascella” KDE ended. Overall, this distribution is quite polished, it seems to cater to newbies well, and I can’t find much that is wrong with it. Of course, if I were to use it on a daily basis, there are other things that I’d have to get used to, such as the way KDE and its applications do things compared to MATE/Xfce, the way the KDE Kickoff menu is best used (because the KDE Lancelot menu does not appear to be available for KDE 5), and so on. In any case, though, I can heartily recommend it to newbies and more experienced users alike, and I would seriously consider using this on a daily basis.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• All the way back to Fedora 13 has been work on supporting Btrfs system snapshots / rollbacks using this Linux next-generation file-system’s CoW snapshot abilities. Those abilities were tied into a Yum plug-in for making a Btrfs snapshot whenever a Yum transaction would take place. Another alternative for Btrfs system snapshots on Fedora is by using Snapper.

• This week I started testing Intel’s new NUC5CPYH NUC as the first device with a Braswell SoC (not to be confused with Broadwell). The tests are progressing but the out-of-the-box experience hasn’t been one of the best for Intel.

• With using the MSI Z97-G45 GAMING motherboard that doesn’t require any BIOS/UEFI tweaks to run better on Ubuntu, it still was locking up some times as noted in the article yesterday, but it was better than the other Intel Z97 motherboards tested with this socketed Broadwell processor. On Ubuntu these problems persisted with various versions of the Linux kernel tried from Linux 3.19 through Linux 4.2 Git. Interestingly, these kernel panics have vanished when switching to Fedora 22.

• Recently, there has been a new wave of instant messaging services focused on the mobile world. Examples include Whatsapp, Messenger, Hangouts, and Viber. However, these are all closed and don’t have the best record of security and privacy. A new service with a different approach is Telegram. It’s developed and run by a non-profit organization, has an open API and protocol, provides open source clients, and stresses privacy.

Debian Family

• I am pleased to announce dgit 1.0, which can be used, as applicable, by all contributors and downstreams.

• Dgit allows users to treat Debian archives as Git repositories and to provide a “Git view” of any package. Dgit also allows building and uploading from Git. Dgit 1.0 adds anonymous read-only access support, among other changes.

Derivatives

• This version features a new LTS Kernel 3.18.16 which delivers better and more modern hardware support. We also did the biggest update in the graphicsstack since Neptune 4.0 by upgrading to XServer 1.17 and Mesa 10.5.8. This brings in support for modern graphiccards and better 3D performance. Old chips like voodoo or sis however aren’t supported anymore. We updated the Hplip driver to support newer hp printers.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Meizu and Canonical chose to bring the MX4 Ubuntu Edition in Europe in a different way.

• Last month, Canonical and Meizu announced the most advanced Ubuntu smartphone yet with the Meizu MX4 “Ubuntu Edition.” The device was only available through invitations, but now everyone within the EU borders can purchase it for only 299 euro. The Meizu MX4 is the third commercially available Ubuntu phone, and although it’s not as powerful as the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S6, it comes with relatively good specs for less than half the price of other flagships.

• While Android and iOS users have long taken device/shell rotation support for granted, with Ubuntu Phone OTA-5 there will finally be complete shell rotation support. The Ubuntu Phone side-bar buttons will finally be usable in landscape mode, gestures under rotation will now be routed correctly, and there’s support for limiting apps to certain orientations.

• Many FTBFS have been fixed in the PPA, and other bugs have been filed upstream and in Debian. There’s still about 219 packages that FTBFS and haven’t been fixed yet, so we’re in the long tail. All help is of course appreciated!

• I wrote about Canonical’s Ubuntu IP policy here, but primarily in terms of its broader impact, but I mentioned a few specific cases. People seem to have picked up on the case of container images (especially Docker ones), so here’s an unambiguous statement:

• The Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition is the most powerful phone to date to ship with Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux-based operating system. Last month it went on sale in Europe, but only to customers that had an invitation. Now it’s available for anyone in Europe to buy.

• Last month, Canonical and Meizu announced the most advanced Ubuntu smartphone yet with the Meizu MX4 “Ubuntu Edition.” The device was only available through invitations, but now everyone within the EU borders can purchase it for only 299 euro. The Meizu MX4 is the third commercially available Ubuntu phone, and although it’s not as powerful as the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S6, it comes with relatively good specs for less than half the price of other flagships.

• Canonical has just released the OTA-5 updated for Ubuntu Touch, and the new version has also landed for the users of the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition.

Flavours and Variants

• I currently have nine desktops running in my office. They’re running Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 10 Build 10240, OS X Yosemite, OS X El Capitan beta, Ubuntu 15.04, Chrome OS, Fedora 22, and Linux Mint 17.2. Which one do I use on my main production desktop?

• Linux Mint 17.2 RC Rafaela has been released in the XFCE and KDE flavors, using Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr as code-base.

Devices/Embedded

• Adding a $50 Wink hub and a few connected LED bulbs just made Alexa our home’s newest addition. And we’re just getting started.

• Intel announced two models of the Intel Compute Stick, one with Windows and one with Ubuntu. For unknown reasons, Intel decided to make the Linux version a little less powerful, so people are thinking of buying the Windows version and just install Linux on it. As it turns out, it’s not that simple.

Phones

Android

• Some tablet deals can’t wait for Tuesday, so I hereby give you Tablet Monday…

• Ending Friday, and while supplies last, Staples has the refurbished NuVision TM1318 13.3-inch Android tablet for $109.99 shipped (plus tax). It’s available in your choice of black, blue or pink, and it comes with a matching carrying case/stand and a Bluetooth keyboard.

• I never thought I needed an iPhone, until I did — until all my friends had them and I listened to music all day, every day, everywhere. But that was three years ago, and now I’m thoroughly bored and almost stifled by Apple smartphones. After about a month of owning my iPhone 6, I found myself loathing iOS’s lack of freedom, limiting hardware and software, and boring ecosystem. Here’s why my next smartphone will run Android.

• Whether you have the newest, fastest Android phone available or an older device that’s starting to show its age in its declining performance, there’s a neat little trick that should speed up the overall feel of your Android phone.

• The Remix Mini, which is expected to ship in October, is Jide Tech’s second Android device launched on Kickstarter, following an 11.6-inch Remix Ultratablet running its Remix OS version of Android on an Nvidia Tegra 4. The China-based Jide Tech, which was started by three ex Google staffers, had some trouble with distribution, but it appears that the funders have finally received their tablets, according to Android Police. The story suggests that the higher new worldwide shipping fees, which now range from a $15 to $30, are designed to ensure that users can get their Minis in a more timely fashion.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source culture—in theory and largely in practice—is about as meritocratic as can be. Yet it’s also nearly as dominated by white males as can be. Why is that? It’s a question worth asking, especially in the wake of the Washington Post’s observations a few days ago regarding Silicon Valley’s “diversity problem.”

• Growing a project means eventually having to change a culture, and making a culture where people are already happy change is a challenge. Harvard Business School professor John P. Kotter has developed a set of eight steps for change and transforming an organization with it. Peters recommended a subset of these for growth of open source projects.

• Innovation is the new currency in today’s Idea Economy. In recognition of the leaders who are disrupting our tech-driven world, the editors at thought leadership site PSFK.com partnered with HP Matter to create the Innovators Index, a roster of digital pioneers making a global impact. This week we’ve featured Peter Semmelhack for designing open source tools that empower the next generation of innovators.

• Chinese technology giant Huawei has frequently been the subject of suspicion and sanction, particularly in the United States. But it’s also a company that produces key pieces of technology infrastructure, and an active contributor to various international open source initiatives. This week, at OSCON in Portland, Huawei announced the release of a new open source project, Astro. Astro tightly integrates the database capabilities of Apache HBase with the online query and analytics power of Apache Spark, potentially bringing Spark-powered data science a step closer to the huge structured data stores locked up inside many global enterprises.

• One person with intimate knowledge of those key differences is Heather Kirksey, director of NFV for the Open Platform for NFV Project Inc. , the Linux Foundation -backed open source effort. As someone directly involved in developing a recent and enduring telecom standard, TR-69, Kirksey has seen firsthand how both processes work and knows why open source is faster, as the result of a different kind of cooperation.

• The Open Source Initiative® (OSI) this week welcomed The Mifos Initiative as the latest Affiliate Member to join the global non-profit focused on promoting and protecting open source software, development and communities.

• Earlier this year pixar released a free, non-commercial version of Renderman, their photo-realistic 3D rendering software used within the company’s animated movies. Coming out now thanks to work by Pixar and the community is a Blender-to-Renderman exporter plug-in.

• Haiku OS, the BeOS-inspired open-source operating system, has reached the point of being feature-complete for launch_daemon, their new boot/service manager partially inspired by systemd.

SaaS/Big Data

• The good news is that free and low-cost training offerings for Hadoop are proliferating in both classroom settings and online. Here are just a few opportuntities you can take advantage of.

• Hadoop, or formally Apache Hadoop, is the popular software for creating clusters of computers to handle large data sets, known familiarly as big data. It is an open source project that has gathered support from Yahoo! (where it began as a project in 2005), Cloudera, Hortonworks, Twitter, LinkedIn, VMware, Intel, and others.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation announced this week that ODF (Open Document Format) v1.2 has been published as an international standard by the ISO/IEC.

Funding

• Software in the Public Interest (SPI), the organization that represents the finances for Arch Linux, Debian, FreeDesktop.org, and other countless other free software projects, has published their annual report that offers a glimpse into the financials of these open projects.

BSD

• The upstream Linux kernel has had its upstream Valley View DRM graphics support for a few years now for the HD Graphics found within Intel’s Atom/Celeron “Bay Trail” SoCs. The DragonFlyBSD kernel as of today has finally managed to put its Linux-ported Intel DRM driver into a state that it too can support Valley View.

• AMD’s Tom Stellard has added a basic AMDGPU toolchain driver to the Clang compiler.

• The Clang front-end is now able to target the AMDGPU (formerly known as R600) toolchain with its LLVM back-end that has long been in development. The small commit sets the AMDGPU target, sets the default integrated assembler, and uses lld for linking.

Public Services/Government

• It always helps adoption of FLOSS and GNU/Linux to have an inside man who loves to pinch pennies. Thus it is appropriate in 2015 to have such a guy rise to the top of IT in the German government in 2015.

Openness/Sharing

• In his autobiography, Just for Fun, Linux creator Linus Torvalds argues that the open source process tends to mirror the scientific enterprise. “Science was originally viewed as something dangerous, subversive, and antiestablishment—basically how software companies sometimes view open source,” he writes. And like science, Torvalds suggests, open source drives innovation: “It is creating things that until recently were considered impossible, and opening up unexpected new markets.”

Open Hardware

• Thanks in large part to open hardware platforms like BITalino, biosignals are no longer bound to the walls of a medical practice; whether you’re looking for the next cool project or to learn something new over summer vacation, physiological computing has plenty to offer. This article highlights a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

Programming

• Pyston, the Dropbox-backed open-source Python implementation that leverages LLVM for greater performance, is continuing to tweak its implementation for maximum performance potential.

• The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0 Beta 1. This is the third pre-release of the new PHP 7 major series. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Cars will be banned from Stockholm city centre for the first time on September 19th as the Swedish capital takes part in a Europe-wide initiative to encourage greener travel.

• In normal years, California residents get about 30 percent of their drinking water from underground aquifers. And in droughts like the current one—with sources like snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountains virtually non-existent—groundwater supplies two-thirds of our most populous state’s water needs. So it’s sobering news that about 20 percent of the groundwater that Californians rely on to keep their taps flowing carries high concentrations of contaminants like arsenic, uranium, and nitrate.

• More than 60,000 people have signed a petition calling for Jeremy Hunt to resign or be removed as health secretary over his seven-day NHS comments, less than 24 hours after it was set up.

• On Sunday Harry Leitch, a research fellow at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, launched a petition on Change.org saying the document should act as “a vote of no confidence in his leadership from the NHS and from the public”.

• On the website Mr Leitch said that Mr Hunt’s “out of touch policies” and “flippant remarks” about the NHS had “angered” NHS workers for a long while, but his recent speech on seven day working was the “last straw”.

Security

• After a brutal month of Flash zero-day exploits, there is light at the end of the tunnel as Google discloses new techniques to help secure Adobe’s Flash.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• A 72-year-old Marine veteran who volunteered to protect a sea turtle nest got beaten and shot in the butt for his troubles. Turtle-hater Michael Q. McAuliffe was arrested.

• The top war-monger in Congress has been Senator John McCain, Republican from Arizona, seeker of the Republican presidential nomination. In one rhetorical bombing run after another, McCain has bellowed for “lights out in Belgrade” and for NATO to “cream” the Serbs. At the start of May he began declaiming in the US senate for the NATO forces to use “any means necessary” to destroy Serbia.

• These efforts are not exactly a secret to US corporate media; the Washington Post and Boston Globe jointly broke the news that the UN’s UNSCOM inspection program in Iraq had been used for US military espionage on January 6, 1999 (written up by Seth Ackerman in FAIR’s Extra!, 3-4/99, 11-12/02). In the Globe‘s words, UNSCOM concealed “an ambitious spying operation designed to penetrate Iraq’s intelligence apparatus and track the movement of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.”

• [...]

• So it wasn’t considered debatable at the time—though a few years later, when the US was gearing up for an invasion of Iraq, US media started treating it as an allegation made by Iraq rather than an actual operation that had been exposed by leading US papers (as Ackerman documented—Extra!, 11-12/02).

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Fox News hosted Roger Stone to defend Donald Trump’s inflammatory remarks about Sen. John McCain’s military service. Neither Fox nor Stone disclosed that Trump’s presidential campaign pays Stone, who is reportedly a “top” Trump adviser.

Privacy

• Paul Sperry, a fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has raised alarm that the Obama administration is secretly amassing a database of sensitive personal information about Americans broken down by race for the purpose of engineering what the administration describes as “racial and economic justice.”

• Agents of the administration, according to the report published by the New York Post, are mining sensitive personal data — health, housing, financial, and employment — for the purpose of documenting and analyzing social, cultural, political, and economic “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

• SPIEGEL: Who uses these methods?

• Assange: The British GCHQ has its own department for such methods called JTRIG. They include blackmail, fabricating videos, fabricating SMS texts in bulk, even creating fake businesses with the same names as real businesses the United Kingdom wants to marginalize in some region of the world, and encouraging people to order from the fake business and selling them inferior products, so that the business gets a bad reputation. That sounds like a lunatic conspiracy theory, but it is concretely documented in the GCHQ material allegedly provided by Edward Snowden…

• SPIEGEL: What does this “colonization” look like?

• Assange: These corporations establish new societal rules about what activities are permitted and what information can be transmitted. Right down to how much nipple you can show. Down to really basic matters, which are normally a function of public debate and parliaments making laws. Once something becomes sufficiently controversial, it’s banned by these organizations. Or, even if it is not so controversial, but it affects the interests that they’re close to, then it’s banned or partially banned or just not promoted.

• I used to think that the idea of banning encryption was too absurd for discussion. Whenever a politician or government official suggested it, I figured it to be a ploy covering the real desire, which was not to ban encryption, but to require backdoors that would allow encrypted content to be accessed by government agencies.

• So it goes in the United Kingdom, where the government of Prime Minister David Cameron seemed to be pushing for an outright ban. But now we hear from Cameron’s spokespeople that they don’t really want to ban encryption; instead, they would like to be able to decrypt anything they want at any time.

• This happens every few months — whenever there’s a flare up of “bad behavior” on the internet. Some genius thinks he can solve everything by just “getting rid of online anonymity.” The latest to step into this well trodden, widely debunked, canyon of ridiculousness… is Lance Ulanoff over at Mashable. He seems to think that he’s the first person to seriously consider the idea of doing away with online anonymity, and it only serves to show that he’s barely thought through the issue at all. First off, it’s simply wrong to associate anonymous comments with trollish comments. Yes, some anonymous comments are trollish, but most are not. And, in fact, many trollish, harassing comments come from people who have their real names attached to them. This has been studied widely, but Ulanoff doesn’t even bother to look for evidence, he just goes with his gut. The largest single platform for harassment online… has been Facebook, which famously requires “real names.” That hasn’t stopped harassment, and nor would it do so on Reddit.

Civil Rights

• Last week, a class action lawsuit was filed against Sling Media Inc., the maker of a device called Slingbox that streams digital TV, alleging the company streamed advertisements without permission from consumers.

• Cameron said that parents would in effect have the right to cancel the passports of their children under 16 to prevent them from travelling to war zones.

• Today, Monday 20 July at 1800 CEST, WikiLeaks publishes evidence of National Security Agency (NSA) spying on German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier along with a list of 20 target selectors for the Foreign Ministry. The list indicates that NSA spying on the Foreign Ministry extends back to the pre-9/11 era, including numbers for offices in Bonn and targeting Joschka Fischer, Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister from 1998 to 2005.

• Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., hands me a copy of a letter from James Clapper in which the director of national intelligence complains to two members of the House Intelligence Committee about Massie’s recent attempts to reform one of the NSA’s massive surveillance programs.

• On the top right, in curly script, Massie has written his response: “Get a warrant.” It’s in red ink. He’s underlined it.

• “If you assume the worst” about the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices, Massie tells me, “it’s not a bad position to take, given what we’ve found out.”

• Indeed, for Massie, as with so many others, the information NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave journalists two years ago about the extraordinary sweep of U.S surveillance programs was a huge eye-opener.

• Prior to the Snowden revelations, Massie says, he knew almost nothing about the NSA’s implementation of the tools Congress gave it to protect national security.

• Back in May, we wrote about the European Commission’s sharing “concerns” about corporate sovereignty chapters in trade agreements. The Commissioner responsible for trade, Cecilia Malmström, even went so far as to say that the present investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system was “not fit for purpose in the 21st century.” But rather than removing something that is unnecessary between two economic blocs with highly-developed and fair legal systems, she instead proposed to “reform” it, and to start working towards an international investment court.

• That idea was dismissed almost immediately by the US Undersecretary for International Trade at the Commerce Department, Stefan Selig. Despite that, the EU seems set on replacing today’s corporate sovereignty with some kind of court. In a non-binding but important set of recommendations to the European Commission regarding TTIP, the European Parliament called for the following…

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• People who pirate music and films on a “commercial scale” could face up to 10 years in prison, under new government plans

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.