● 07.23.15

● Links 23/7/2015: New RHEL Release, Capital One Releases Code

Posted in News Roundup at 8:57 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• There are thousands of really good free software packages available for Linux whether you are looking for a word processing package, spreadsheet tool, graphics editor, audio player or email client.

• 10 years ago Windows was dominant. Now you don’t really need it. Don’t let Microsoft get away with treating their customers like mugs.

Desktop

• The only reason more people aren’t using Linux is because they can’t go to a big box store and purchase a computer with Linux pre-installed. If the masses could head over to Best Buy or Target and drop a few hundred dollars for a PC running Linux, they’d be using Linux. Why? Because they’d discover an operating system that includes the one tool they mostly use and won’t be plagued with the same tired issues they’ve faced over the last couple of decades.

• They’re called WuLUG, shorthand for Wichita State University Linux Users Group.

• And although they have the university in their name, they stress that they’re open to anyone who uses or is curious about Linux, a free computer operating system that started as a college project 24 years ago and has been built upon by countless volunteer programmers around the globe ever since.

• They should delete their OS-test. It’s none of their business what OS I run. Their stuff doesn’t run on my OS but on applications that run perfectly on my OS.

• The Linux desktop has changed considerably over the years, and today’s desktop developers have a considerably different mindset than in years gone by. Datamation takes a look at eight trends happening in today’s Linux desktop.

Server

• Linux container technology has evolved rapidly over the past year as adoption expands beyond large web companies to become the de facto way organizations are building distributed applications today. The technology has become more sophisticated to support multi-container, multi-host applications, and has even expanded beyond Linux to the Windows architecture, says Marianna Tessel, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Docker.

• Google and friends have announced the release of Kubernetes 1.0, which is great… if you know Kubernetes. If, like most folks, you don’t, then CoreOS’s new Tectonic program is here for you.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation is welcoming three new members to its ranks, as the organisation continues to grow Linux and collaborative development.

• The “Glados” codename for a Chromebook Skylake device has been talked about for months now ever since there were Skylake/Glados references within the Chromium OS code-base near the beginning of the year. With now seeing support in Coreboot, Glados is still on the table and it could be appearing sooner rather than later, especially with the initial Skylake launch expected in August.

• It is not widely known that the SUSE Performance team runs continual testing of mainline kernels and collects data on machines that would be otherwise idle. Testing is a potential topic for Kernel Summit 2015 topic so now seems like a good a time introduce Marvin. Marvin is a system that continually runs performance-related tests and is named after another robot doomed with repetitive tasks. When tests are complete it generates a performance comparison report that is publicly available but rarely linked. The primary responsibility of this system is to check SUSE Linux for Enterprise kernels for performance regressions but it is also configured to run tests against mainline releases. There are four primary components Marvin of interest.

• There’s a slow effort underway to allow virtually any part of the kernel to be extracted into its own shared library, thus enabling users to use any alternative subsystem they please. There’s a long history of this, going back to the debate between micro-kernels and monolithic kernels. Even Linus Torvalds, the proponent of the monolithic kernel, believes it’s better to abstract features out of the kernel, so long as it can be done without sacrificing speed, stability and other core requirements.

• We reported about a week ago, when the eight maintenance release of Linux kernel 4.0 was announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman, that Linux kernel 4.0.9 will be the last in the series and that all users are urged to move to the LTS Linux 4.1 kernel branch as soon as possible.

• Matias Bjørling continues tackling support for “open-channel SSDs” within Linux. His fourth revision to his Open-Channel SSD patch-set has been published and re-based against code in development for the Linux 4.3 kernel.

• Open-Channel SSDs refer to solid-state drives that expose the physical characteristics to the host. File-systems and applications are able to directly place and manage data on flash chips where they wish along with managing the garbage collection and other behavior. Tieing in with Open-Channel SSDs is the LightNVM specification for providing a common interface to the system for controlling the SSD characteristics.

• A new maintenance release of the long-term supported Linux 3.18 kernel series has been announced on July 21 by none other than its maintainer, Sasha Levin. Linux kernel 3.18.19 LTS is now available for download.

Graphics Stack

• The latest OpenGL 4.x extension wired up within Mesa and enabled for all present Mesa/Gallium3D drivers is GL_ARB_get_texture_sub_image.

Benchmarks

• Besides serving as some fresh Linux 4K gaming performance results on the newest AMD/NVIDIA drivers, this is also our first comparison featuring the GeForce GTX 980 Ti now that the review sample arrived courtesy of NVIDIA.

Applications

• Roland McGrath of Google contributed a port of Native Client (NaCl) for running on ARMv7-A with this next release. Glibc had been ported to NaCl for x86 architectures for some years now while with the next release it’s getting support for ARMv7-A to ease the process of running GNU software via this Google sandboxing system on ARM hardware. Roland finished committing it on Tuesday.

• Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system that was built to handle small and very large projects with speed and efficiency. A new development version for the 2.5 branch has been released and it comes with an impressive number of changes.

• As you may know, G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic Image Converter) is a editing tool, that can be used with GIMP or as a standalone application, being available for both Linux and Windows. G’MIC provides a window which enables the users to add more than 500 filters over photos and preview the result, in order to give the photos some other flavor.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• After a long wait Mac and Linux users will finally be able to play the popular open-world building RPG, Terraria. According to several tweets from Re-Logic’s official Terraria Twitter account, an open public beta for the Linux and Mac version of the game will launch “sometime tomorrow.” More details will be released prior to the beta launch, according to Re-Logic’s tweets.

• It is clear that Steam for Linux is here to stay, and proof of that is that the Steam library of the open source platform has just passed 1,300 titles.

• So after what seems like years (well, at least three years) of rumour, speculation, sneak peaks, demos, SDKs and missed deadlines, punters can now pre-order Valve’s Steam Machine video PC-based games hardware, ahead of a full launch in November this year.

• Details, as ever, are still a little flakey, particularly with regards to the European launch – but it’s an interesting product that could make a significant and disruptive impact on the established PC and console games hardware and software markets in 2016.

• Valve has upgraded the stable branch of the Steam client and a version of the application has been released. There aren’t too many new features in this cycle, but some of the issues that have been corrected are pretty important.

• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords has been released by Aspyr Media for the Linux platform, and the game also received a huge and important patch that applies to all the OSes.

• Breach & Clear: Deadline is hybrid tactical strategy game developed by Mighty Rabbit Studios and Gun Media, and published on Steam by Devolver Digital. Linux is a launch platform for this game, which has landed with a 33% discount.

• Given that Aspyr had ported Civilization V: Beyond Earth, Bioshock Infinite, and other AAA games to Linux in the past, there was some hope it would be another thrilling game release. However, unless you’re a Star Wars fan, there isn’t much excitement over today’s new Linux game.

• Feral Interactive Games, the company that has ported games to Linux like XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Empire Total War and is doing the Batman Arkham Knight port, is teasing another upcoming Linux / OS X game release.

• GOG have expanded their Linux DRM free game library again. It’s a pretty good selection of games this time around too!

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Some time ago GNOME Flashback 3.16/3.17 packages landed in Debian testing and Ubuntu wily.

• The latest “GNOME Flashback” packages have landed within the Ubuntu Testing and Ubuntu 15.10 “Wily Werewolf” archives for those wishing to use this GNOME2-like session.

• Dmitry Shachnev has shared that GNOME Flashback 3.16/3.17 is available in Debian testing and also within Ubuntu Wily. GNOME Panel and GNOME Applets 3.16.1 are present while the GNOME Flashback 3.17.2 and GNOME Metacity 3.17.2 releases are the development version towards GNOME 3.18.

• After introducing GNOME To Do, it finished a very important cycle of development and we had a great set of fresh features for 3.17.4 release. Check them out:

• Polari 3.17.4 is around the corner. For this release, I have worked with Florian to get my work towards a better initial setup experience merged. As can be seen below the design has changed a bit too.

• The GNOME developers are hard at work these days, preparing to release the fourth snapshot of the highly anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due for release on September 23, 2015.

• Exactly one week ago, we reported news on the Tracker 1.5.0 open-source semantic data storage engine for desktop and mobile devices, which is being used as the main search engine for GNOME-based Linux operating systems.

• The GNOME developers are still finishing the latest bits for the upcoming GNOME 3.17.4 desktop environment, a snapshot towards GNOME 3.18, and they have just released the GNOME Boxes 3.17.4 open-source virtualization software based on the QEMU with KVM technology.

• The Orca open-source screen reader and magnifier software used in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu and other GNOME-based ones, has reached version 3.17.4 as part of the upcoming GNOME 3.17.4 desktop environment.

Distributions

New Releases

• Perhaps what is the most significant trinket in Solus is the desktop creation built into it from scratch. The developer created the Budgie Desktop as a new Linux environment written from the ground up. Budgie has grown from its inception in SolusOS through Evolve OS. Designed with the modern user in mind, Budgie focuses on simplicity and elegance. It has a plain and clean style. It is easy to use.

• The Solus operating system has received a set of updates and developers made some important changes, like the adoption of a new Linux kernel of a new GTK+ version.

• Clonezilla 2.4.2-21 has been released and is available for download. Clonezilla is a Linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux and it offers a Live (bootable) CD that features all the necessary utilities for cloning the content of hard drives.

Ballnux/SUSE

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat today is announcing the general availability of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 (RHEL) milestone. RHEL 6.7 has been in beta deployments since May and is the seventh update to RHEL 6 since the server operating system first debuted in November of 2010.

• On the heels of several big recent unveilings, Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7, the latest version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform. For enterprise IT teams running on RHEL, new capabilities facilitating cloud computing and Linux containers are growing in importance, and the new RHEL reflects these trends.

Fedora

• One of the change proposal I have submitted for Fedora 23 is about having systemd-netowrkd for network configuration. You can find the change page here. Instead of carrying the old network-scripts, we wanted to move to networkd, which is a part of systemd. Couple of the notable benefits are about how it will help us to keep the image size sane by not bringing in any external dependencies, and also about similarity between many different distribution based cloud images from users’ point of view. You can look into the discussions on the Talk page, and the trac ticket.

Debian Family

• While Debian 9.0 “Stretch” most likely will not be officially released until 2017 given that Debian 8 “Jessie” was just released a few months ago, the Debian Installer team has already put out their first alpha version for Stretch.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• On July 22, Canonical’s Jonas G. Drange informed us all that the Ubuntu Touch developers managed to finish the Wi-Fi Hotspot (also known as Internet Tethering) functionality for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.

• Today, July 23, was the last day when Canonical released security patches and software updates for its Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) operating system, as the distribution reached end of life.

• It was revealed last week that is policy breached the GPL and still leaves open numerous gaps in the ability of people to freely share, copy and modify Ubuntu. It is hurting the reputation of Ubuntu as a welcoming and functional free software project that respects the licence of the upstreams we depend on.

• GPS navigation is an important function for any smartphone, but there wasn’t anything for Ubuntu Touch until recently. As it happens, an application that’s called just that, GPS Navigation, has been released a few weeks back and now a new major update has been made available.

• As you may know, Sopcast is needed if you want to watch TV channels online. Actually, it is the best player (as I know of) that allows you to watch online television channels.

• The latest version available is Sopcast 0.8.5, which has been released a while ago. Recently, its PPA has received packages for Ubuntu Vivid.

• We reported last week that Kubuntu’s Jonathan Riddell expressed his feelings regarding Canonical’s IP (Intellectual Property) policy for the Ubuntu Linux operating system, which was updated on the same day his blog post was written, July 15, 2015.

Flavours and Variants

• elementary OS Freya has been around for a while now, but that is not stopping its developers to keep pushing new features and fixes all the time. The latest improvements have landed for the Greeter and Desktop.

Devices/Embedded

• Congatec announced its Linux-friendly Conga-IGX Mini-ITX boards in 2013, providing a choice of two dual-core and one quad-core models from the original AMD G-Series SoC family. Now, the company has expanded the product to feature two G-Series SoC models from the newer Steppe Eagle generation of G-Series SoCs. AMD’s Steppe Eagle is still 28nm, but is claimed to offer improved performance-per-Watt, a dedicated security coprocessor, and the feature touted by Congatec: configurable TDP (cTDP).

• One reason Linux — and by extension Android — have grown so quickly in embedded is that from very early on Linux was imbued with strong wireless support. Although ARM and others are working hard to improve wireless support on microcontrollers with efforts such as ARM’s Mbed OS, for the most part if your gizmo needs WiFi, you need to set aside MCUs and RTOSes and move to Linux or Android running on a faster processor.

Phones

Tizen

• Today, the Tizen Store has launched its paid service in Nepal, meaning developers can now sell paid applications to 4 countries – India , Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and now Nepal. Last week we spotted the firmware file for the Samsung Z1 Nepal and now with todays announcement the launch should be within a matter of weeks.

Android

• Android M isn’t going to be a massive game-changer like Android 5.0 Lollipop was. However, it will have some small-but-important tweaks and improvements that will noticeably improve the consumer experience. Green Bot recently put together a slideshow of the small changes Google has made with Android M and we’ve picked out five of them that we think Android diehards will love. Check them out below and be sure to check out Green Bot’s full slideshow by clicking here.

• The device, named the “Commodore PET,” runs Android 5.0 Lollipop, and has a 5.5-inch full HD 1920 x 1080 IPS OGS display.

• It has a 1.7-GHz 64-bit octa-core CPU, up to 3 GB of RAM, an earphone jack, a microUSB slot, dual SIM cards, and a 3,000 mAh removable battery.

• The PET runs on 4G LTE, GSM and WCDMA networks.

• Huawei in a press conference on Tuesday in China launched a new smartphone under the Honor brand, the Honor 4A. The entry-level offering by the smartphone maker is priced at CNY 599 (roughly Rs. 6,100) for 3G variant, and CNY 699 (roughly Rs. 7,200) for the 4G LTE version only. There is no word as to when the handset would reach other regions outside China.

• Surprisingly, it may not be be juggernaut Xiaomi to first crack 100 million smartphone shipments for a China-based company. Huawei is on the move.

• This is the Ubik Uno, another addition to the growing list of 5.5-inch Android smartphones being sold for an attractive price. The device launched on Kickstarter today, and early backers can get in for $280 — not bad for an unlocked phone that the company claims rivals big-name flagships. The idea of “crowdfunded smartphone” is something no company has been able to nail down. Ubik is giving it a shot, and is dreaming up even bigger ambitions for what’s next.

• As of this writing, the Remix Mini Kickstarter stands at almost $600,000. That’s more than 10 times their $50,000 goal. And that’s barely a week since it launched, with 38 days left before the campaign ends. With a little over 9,000 backers, the Kickstarter success seems to be sending a message. Forget Android TV or Android Auto or maybe even Android Wear. An Android PC is the next best thing. Or is it? How has personal computing changed over the past years since Android came on the scene and is an Android PC really a logical evolution of the platform?

• Google took the wraps off its Android M Developer Preview at Google I/O 2015. Here we reveal exactly what to expect from Android M – and when. Android M UK release date and new features.

• In case you’re looking to get even more mileage from your brand new or old-and-struggling Android device, there’s a hidden trick you can do that should improve the overall performance of your device and make it even faster than it currently is.

• We don’t normally find ourselves getting worked up over device concept renders. Sure, they can be fun. But more than often they’re little more than a tease meant to give us Android blue balls. Nobody likes that. Still, we couldn’t help but take notice at a new one by designer Pierre Cerveau making its way around the net. Dubbed the Nintendo Smart Boy, this Game Boy inspired concept design shows us what could have been had Nintendo entered the smartphone race.

• Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is apparently limbering up for his presidential race by testing the waters in an only slightly less contentious two-party system: iPhone versus Android. The hawkish 60-year-old legislator (who sits on the Appropriations, Armed Services, Budget, and Judiciary Committees) is “probably getting a new phone,” now that fellow presidential candidate Donald Trump has given out his private number as part of the escalating rivalry between them. And he’s looking for suggestions from the true demos: random internet strangers. We’d like to oblige him.

• On July 22, Arne Exton, the developer of several GNU/Linux and Android-x86 distributions, announced that he updated his Android-x86 KitKat 4.4.4 distro to build 7, a release that brings Linux kernel 4.0.8, Mesa 10.5.9, and other goodies.

• Don’t think I’ll find where a show is available online? Just watch me. There’s an app or two for that, and now that JustWatch has brought its search engine to Android and iOS, there’s another one. And it’s capable of searching through Amazon Instant Video, Crackle, HBO Now, Hulu, iTunes, Netflix, Play Movies, PlayStation, Showtime, Vudu, Xbox, and a couple other online streaming services.

• And that operating system continues to be on a tear. As of this May, Android phones accounted for 79% of global shipment volumes in 2015 alone, according to a survey from IDC.

Free Software/Open Source

• At OSCON today, Capital One will be unveiling Hygieia, a comprehensive DevOps dashboard that its agile teams developed, as its first open source product.

• “Most DevOps tools only cover a portion of the pipeline,” the company explains in a press release, “for example quality or environment health, but they don’t offer a comprehensive view.” Hygieia provides “customizable widgets for all of the steps in the software development lifecycle.” It’s available on GitHub and is released under the Apache 2.0 license.

• CloudBees, the Enterprise Jenkins Company and continuous delivery leader, in collaboration with the Jenkins open source community announced today the delivery of three Kubernetes plugins to assist in the continuous delivery of containerized applications with Jenkins.

• Kicking off theCUBE’s third year of coverage of the MITCDOIQ Symposium, Wikibon chief analyst Dave Vellante and SiliconANGLE enterprise editor Paul Gillin discuss how the role of the CIO is changing due to the impact of open source on the tech industry.

• “I’ve never seen a more disruptive time in the IT industry,” says Gillin. “Open source is a big factor. This last year has been the year of open source.”

• That’s right, DevOps. The term that launched a thousand flamewars. Personally, I’m allergic to flamewars, and if my work as a scrum master (retired) taught me anything, it’s that how you implement DevOps is really up to you: Take what you need, don’t worry about what you don’t, as long as your heart is in the right place!

• We’ve seen a remarkable growth in community all over the world—people are getting together to make things, do things, hack, etc. This simple idea of people getting together to make communities makes Jono Bacon excited (me too). He hosted a half-day workshop at OSCON about community management, where he shared with us his packaged thoughts on building strong communities.

• We chose to hone in on one particular plugin to highlight how even the very specific domain of marine navigation software is following the same evolutionary pattern as other open source domains: they are extending beyond the simple sharing of code and coding practices to include information repositories. The amount of collective knowledge shared by millions of boaters around the world could not be possibly generated, let alone owned, by a single organization. It needs to be a shared asset.

• Other problems include delaying releases with critical bug fixes, making breaking changes in minor releases, and not providing an upgrade path between versions. Not mentioning known limitations of a software project is also a problem.

• Maintainers also can ruin the integrity of code by introducing legal ambiguity and not applying a proper open source license, Keepers said. Violating patents, copyrights, or trademarks also are issues.

Events

• OSCON is always seen as a good event to announce new products and initiatives of an open source nature. OSCON was, after all, the place where Rackspace and NASA chose to announce the OpenStack cloud initiative several years ago. This year’s event had nothing of quite that importance, but still some brought about some interesting announcements.

SaaS/Big Data

• IBM has set up a new code repository that aims to foster collaborative development of enterprise open source software—and it may also drum up interest in its own Bluemix platform services.

• IBM has seeded the site, called DeveloperWorks Open, with more than 50 IBM open-source projects.

• People in the Big Data and Hadoop communities are becoming increasingly interested in Apache Spark, an open source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley, and IBM recently announced a major commitment to Spark, billing it as “potentially the most important new open source project in a decade that is being defined by data.”

• With data stores continuing to grow exponentially, data scientists increasingly need the ability to perform robust analysis of that data at massive scale. Cloudera, which has always specialized in analytics powered by Apache Hadoop, has announced a number of new initiatives to enable data scientists to take advantage of big data and Hadoop for analytics with more complex workflows. Here are details.

• The growing buzz around big data may have contributed to the concept that it is only applicable for large enterprises.

Databases

• Details about a number of MySQL vulnerabilities have been published by Canonical for its Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• A few days ago was the milestone of LibreOffice starting to work on Wayland and now it seems the support seems good enough for day-to-day use.

• Going back to early 2012 has been DocumentFoundation.org Bug #48903 for tracking Wayland support. Over three years later, the bug is done and marked “RESOLVED FIXED.”

• Although Oracle has its own Linux operating system, it continues to push forward on its Solaris Unix OS. Oracle recently rolled out a beta preview release of the next-generation Solaris 11.3, which builds on improvements and innovations that Oracle has been developing since the Solaris 11 release in November 2011. The Solaris 11.1 debuted in October 2012 and provided incremental updates to the Unix platform. The Solaris 11.2, which debuted in July 2014, included an integrated OpenStack Havana cloud distribution. In Solaris 11.3, Oracle is updating the OpenStack distribution to the Juno cloud milestone. While the cloud is a key focus in all Solaris 11.x releases, so too is file system performance with Oracle’s ZFS, or Zettabyte File System. In Solaris 11.3, ZFS is enhanced with LZ4 compression support to further boost storage capabilities. While Solaris can run on both x86 and on Oracle’s Sparc silicon, only Sparc users will benefit from Solaris 11.3′s new application data integrity (ADI) feature. ADI works with the SPARC M7 processor and can help detect common memory errors. Take a look at key features in Oracle’s Solaris 11.3.

Business

• ServiceStack is a good alternative for alternative to popular Microsoft technologies used for building services like WCF and WebAPI because of its simplicity, high performance, and true platform independence and less configuration. I have been exploring ServiceStack these days and would like to present a discussion on it in this article.

Semi-Open Source

• MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade eXpress (CGX) builds upon and subtracts from its commercial-grade MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) for networking and server applications. The CGX spinoff supports Internet of Things devices, 5G carrier grade telecom infrastructure, and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) solutions, says Cavium-owned MontaVista Software. More specifically, CGX supports networking and communications, instrumentation and control, aerospace and defense, SOHO, medical electronics, and other IoT devices.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The MIPS M51xx is Imagination’s entry-level Series 5 Warrior M-class CPU cores. The M51xx consists of two processor cores and are superset extensions of the MIPS microAptiv family, as explained on the Imagination Tech web-site. This MIPS Release5 Architecture processor family is designed for embedded applications ranging from IoT to automotive to wearables. The hardware was announced back in 2014.

Public Services/Government

• The SGI study 2015 is published by the Bertelsmann Foundation, a German think tank promoting good governance and sustainable development. It is the fourth edition of the study, the first Sustainable Governance Indicators were published in 2009.

• Promoting the use of collaborative platforms to encourage citizen participation, opening data on the Web and encouraging the re-use of open data in mobile applications are among the 10 ideas for an open City Council, listed in a report from the Regional Observatory of the Information Society of Castile and Leon (ORSI).

Licensing

• System security researcher Colin Mulliner said in a blog post on Tuesday that he discovered his open-source creations were being used — without notice or permission by Hacking Team — after individuals on Twitter pointed it out and he received a flood of emails and personal notifications.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• For years, meteorology students learned their craft at the tip of a colored pencil, laboriously contouring observed data by hand. While many forecasters still practice this art, computers have changed operations, research, and education. Open source software and open data are poised to bring more changes to the field.

Standards/Consortia

• I recently launched the Open Source Protocol (OS Protocol), a standard that can be used to link to where the code for a website is hosted. The protocol is fairly simple—all it involves is metatags, and most websites will only need two or three lines of code to be compliant.

• OS Protocol is based on Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol (OGP) and Twitter’s Card protocol. Both of these use metatags in an HTML document’s header to help their crawlers get metadata about a website; the site name, picture, a description. What I envision is a different sort of crawler that can identify the source of a page.

Leftovers

Security

• Two researchers with the University of Leuven have developed a new, more practical attack technique that exposes weaknesses in the RC4 encryption algorithm.

• Two hackers, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, in collaboration with Wired have demonstrated something truly worrying, something that will become more prevalent in future… remotely taking control of a car (Jeep Cherokee) via unfixed bugs in the car’s software.

• Andy Greenberg was speeding along a busy interstate in St. Louis recently when he suddenly lost control of his vehicle. The accelerator abruptly stopped working. The car crawled to a stop. As 18-wheelers whizzed by his stalled vehicle, Greenberg began to panic.

• However, the part that I wanted to focus on is related to a discussion we were just having a few weeks ago, in which General Motors (which was not the target of this particular hack) claimed that any sort of tinkering with their software, such as to discover these kinds of security holes, should be considered copyright infringement, thanks to Section 1201 of the DMCA. Section 1201, also known as the anti-circumvention provision, says circumventing “technological protection measures” (TPMs) — even for reasons that have nothing to do with copyright — should be deemed copyright infringement and subject to all the statutory damages (up to $150k per violation!) that copyright allows. Some have been pushing for an exemption for things like security researchers tinkering with new connected car systems to make sure they’re safe. And GM and other automakers have said “no way.” GM’s argument is, more or less, that the company would prefer to put its head in the sand, and not have security researchers help it discover security flaws in its systems — leaving only malicious attackers to find those.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The mighty Central Valley hogs the headlines, but California’s Salinas Valley is an agricultural behemoth, too. A rifle-shaped slice of land jutting between two mountain ranges just south of Monterey Bay off the state’s central coast, it’s home to farms that churn out nearly two-thirds of the salad greens and half of the broccoli grown in the United States. Its leafy-green dominance has earned it the nickname “the salad bowl of the world.” And while the Central Valley’s farm economy reels under the strain of drought—it’s expected to sustain close to $2.7 billion worth of drought-related losses—Salinas farms are operating on all cylinders, reports the San Jose Mercury News.

Finance

• Those folks at the Wall Street Journal are really turning reality on its head. Today it ran a column by Robert Ingram, a former CEO of Glaxo Wellcome, complaining about efforts to pass “transparency” legislation in Massachusetts, New York and a number of other states.

• This legislation would require drug companies to report their profits on certain expensive drugs, as well as government funding that contributed to their development.

• [...]

• This would eliminate all the distortions associated with patent monopolies, such as patent-protected prices that can be more than 100 times as much as the free-market price. This would eliminate all the ethical dilemmas about whether the government or private insurers should pay for expensive drugs like Sovaldi, since the drugs would be cheap. It would also eliminate the incentive to mislead doctors and the public about the safety and effectiveness of drugs in order to benefit from monopoly profits.

• In May 2012, when Mitt Romney was campaigning for president, he made a statement that summed up his economic views — and came to define his run for office:

• “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” he said. These people “are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them … I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

• Germany’s current leaders — and most of Europe’s, as well — seem to fully agree with this philosophy. They treat Greece exactly as though the country fit Romney’s description of that lazy, greedy 47 percent of Americans. And Greece’s experience prefigures what looms elsewhere: like Romney, many European leaders appeal to their publics to embrace that perspective, often effectively. This involves leading the hard-working 53 percent to rise up and refuse to pay taxes that sustain the lazy and irresponsible, recipients of public support and overindulged public employees who deliver it. Romney’s portrayal of the 47 percent matches, in words and tone, many European leaders’ portrayal of Greeks (and also Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Irish and the peoples of whatever other country happens to be in an economic rut.)

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Tony Blair’s criticism of the SNP for having a “cave man” ideology is ridiculous considering his “primitive” policy on Iraq, one of the Scottish nationalists’ rising stars has said.

• The former prime minister said on Wednesday morning that Scottish nationalism was “reactionary” and consisted of “blaming someone else” for Scotland’s problems.

• School vouchers were never about helping poor, at-risk or minority students. But selling them as social mobility tickets was a useful fiction that for some twenty-five years helped rightwing ideologues and corporate backers gain bipartisan support for an ideological scheme designed to privatize public schools.

• Fox & Friends has emerged as Donald Trump’s biggest cheerleader and defender in the media, a role the presidential candidate is rewarding with lavish public praise.

• NBC’s David Gregory said the international community, divided on many things, are united on this: “They think Iran is up to no good and wants to build a nuclear weapon.”

• US corporate media have a habit when discussing Iran, though not only then, of presenting what are overwhelmingly US points of view as those of the whole world–a less-than-helpful quality as we try to understand the deal with Iran currently making headlines.

• Here to help us sort through it is investigative journalist Gareth Porter, author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare and a regular contributor to Middle East Eye.

Censorship

• Videos on Facebook are big business. As well as drugged up post-dentist footage, there is also huge advertising potential. Now Facebook has announced a new set of options for video publishers — including the ability to limit who is able to see videos based on their age and gender.

• Having lived in Australia this Kat tries to turn his attention to the Land Down Under as often as he can. Although the Australian intellectual property law regime takes a lot from its UK and common law counterparts, they have often been a step ahead (or to the side, depending on your perspective) in one way or another. Recently the Australian Parliament passed the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015, which aims to give the Australian courts more tools to combat online copyright infringement, or the facilitation thereof. While the provision is not necessarily hugely pertinent to those of us working here in the UK, it is still an interesting one.

Privacy

• The founder of Wikipedia accused David Cameron of “technological incompetence” on Tuesday, telling the British Prime Minister the idea of banning encryption was “just nonsense.”

• Speaking on HuffPost Live in New York, Jimmy Wales responded to a question about the British government’s push to gain access to encrypted sites for reasons of security.

• He called increased online security of “critical importance” in the face of “real threats from cyber crime.”

• “That means end-to-end encryption everywhere. That’s what he [Cameron] should be campaigning for,” Wales said.

• “The idea that you could ban encryption… it is just nonsense, it’s impossible, it’s math, you can’t ban math,” he added.

• The Washington Post again demanded that tech companies create special ‘golden keys’ for authorities to keep and use for access to private communication. Protected by a warrant, of course. For the benefit of this discussion (which is really getting old), I just put together the reasons why it is a dumb idea.

• On March 20, 2000, as part of a trip to South Asia, U.S. President Bill Clinton was scheduled to land his helicopter in the desperately poor village of Joypura, Bangladesh, and speak to locals under a 150-year-old banyan tree. At the last minute, though, the visit was canceled; U.S. intelligence agencies had discovered an assassination plot. In a lengthy email, London-based members of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, a terrorist group established by Osama bin Laden, urged al Qaeda supporters to “Send Clinton Back in a Coffin” by firing a shoulder-launched missile at the president’s chopper.

• The successful judicial review was brought by Liberty, represented by David Davis MP and Tom Watson MP, with ORG and PI acting as intervenors.

• In brief, these masked cards are burner card numbers that are linked to your real credit card—but the third-party site will have no access to your personal information (though Abine will have all your data stored—so, just hope they don’t ever get hacked). A masked card lets you use any name you want (e.g. Joe Smith, Kevin Bacon, Barack Bush—go nuts), and for the billing address, you just use Abine’s address in Boston. The cost on your real credit card will just show up as “Abine” on your card statement.

Civil Rights

• We spend the hour with Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of “Between the World and Me,” an explosive new book about white supremacy and being black in America. The book begins, “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” It is written as a letter to his 15-year-old son, Samori, and is a combination of memoir, history and analysis. Its publication comes amidst the shooting of nine African-American churchgoers by an avowed white supremacist in Charleston; the horrifying death of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American woman in Texas who was pulled over for not signaling a lane change; and the first anniversary of the police killings of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson. Coates talks about how he was influenced by freed political prisoner Marshall “Eddie” Conway and writer James Baldwin, and responds to critics of his book, including Cornel West and New York Times columnist David Brooks. Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues.

• According to newly released police video, a Texas trooper threatened Sandra Bland with a Taser when he ordered her out of her vehicle during a traffic stop on July 10, three days before she was found dead in a county jail.

• Bland — a 28-year old African American woman — was stopped for failing to signal while changing lanes, but the routine traffic stop turned confrontational after the officer, Brian Encinia, ordered Bland to put out her cigarette.

• It turns out, according to Vargas, that white students are eligible for 96 percent of scholarships and are more than 40 percent more likely to receive private scholarships. As Katy comes to terms with reality, she begins to see her frustrations for what they truly are: resentment about limited resources in the academic arena. The fact that these statistics were so readily available to Vargas also potentially points to Katy’s poor research abilities, which may be a factor in her inability to find scholarships. What is truly frightening—but not at all shocking—is the tendency for the white millennials in the film to place blame on minorities before engaging in critical research to substantiate their beliefs.

• Ava DuVernay, who directed the Oscar-nominated civil rights movement film Selma, suggested on Tuesday that the dashboard camera footage of Sandra Bland’s arrest earlier this month was altered.

• Glenn Greenwald (The Intercept, 7/21/15) traces the transmission of a demonstrably false claim–that ISIS’s “top leaders now use couriers or encrypted channels that Western analysts cannot crack to communicate” as a result of “revelations from Edward J. Snowden”–from nameless “intelligence and military officials” to a front-page piece by the New York Times‘ Eric Schmitt and Ben Hubbard (7/20/15) to other journalists gleefully retweeting and reprinting the false claim as fact.

• One of the very few Iraq War advocates to pay any price at all was former New York Times reporter Judy Miller, the classic scapegoat. But what was her defining sin? She granted anonymity to government officials and then uncritically laundered their dubious claims in the New York Times. As the paper’s own editors put it in their 2004 mea culpa about the role they played in selling the war: “We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.” As a result, its own handbook adopted in the wake of that historic journalistic debacle states that “anonymity is a last resort.”

• Stossel: “You’re Citing Statistics From The Center For Immigration Studies … They Spin Them”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• United Kingdom Government planning to consider jail term of up to 10 years for online pirates

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