● 07.31.15

● Links 31/7/2015: Lennart Poettering as ‘Linux Hero’ and systemd Conference Coming

Posted in News Roundup at 5:41 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Two years ago, TrackingPoint burst on to the scene with a Linux-powered smart sniper rifle that took the guesswork out of killshots. Now, however, a pair of hackers have figured out how to make it miss every single time.

• Amongst the top IT trends of the moment is the development of Linux Containers. Financial and technical investors, Linux software programmers and customers believe that Linux Containers will transform the way organisations manage their Linux environments from deployment to maintenance. A recent survey by Red Hat and Techvalidate says that 56% of the respondents plan to use Linux containers as vehicles for rolling out web and eCommerce over the next two years. The respondents included a number of Fortune 500 companies and public sector organisations. Any development in the world of e-Commerce is definitely worth taking a look.

• The internet is reeling today at the “news” that a rare make of computer-aided gunsight can under certain circumstances be hacked into, permitting a hacker to interfere with a suitably-equipped rifle’s aim.

• The gunsight in question is the much-hyped but seldom purchased TrackingPoint kit, a system with a Linux machine at its heart which can be fitted to a range of different rifles.

• The TrackingPoint (details on its capabilities are at the end of this article) is mainly a curiosity. People who would be interested in it – experienced long-range marksmen – basically don’t need it, and people who need it – those who have seldom or never fired a rifle – typically don’t want it. And very few in either group can afford it.

• Wow, it sure was a busy Thursday in the news feeds today. Windows 10 is getting a lot of headlines, some right in Open Source World. The Free Software Foundation issued a public statement urging folks to reject Windows 10 and LinuxBSDos.com advised dual-boot upgraders. The CEO of Mozilla even posted an open letter to Microsoft CEO concerning Windows 10. Elsewhere, Christine Hall blogged about the advancement of artificial intelligence, a LibreOffice update was announced, and Swapnil Bhartiya shared his pick of top five heros of Linux.

Desktop

• Chromebooks have proven to be undeniably popular, with various models getting rave reviews on Amazon’s bestselling Chromebook list.

Server

• Now, before I go any further with this, I should say that LaaS (Linux as a Service) is really not one of the acknowledged ?aaS acronyms. Linux servers in the cloud are generally considered PaaS (platform as a service) or IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offerings depending on how much control you need to exert over their configuration (the more you have to do, the more likely they’re IaaS). The distinction may not matter unless you’re setting up multiple systems in the cloud that need to interract with each other. In fact, Amazon doesn’t even use these terms to describe its EC2 offerings.

Kernel Space

• We’ve been covering a report from search provider Algolia pointing out a potential issue in Samsung SSDs’ TRIM implementation. More recently, Samsung itself reported that the bug actually resides in the Linux kernel, and that the company had submitted a patch for the problem.

• Now, we have more details of the bug. Samsung has provided us with internal documents detailing the exact cause of the issue, and the subsequent solution. We’re geting a bit technical here, so we’ll take some liberty to simplify. When Linux’s RAID implementation receives a sequence of read or write operations, it creates separate buffers in memory for each of them.

• Linux and open source is driven by passionate people who write best-of-breed software and then release the code to the public so anyone can use it, without any strings attached. (Well, there is one string attached and that’s licence.)

• Who are these people? These heroes of the Linux world, whose work affects all of us every day. Allow me to introduce you.

• The availability of a new project that promises to automatically swap Nvidia or AMD/ATI proprietary video drivers during the boot process of any GNU/Linux distribution that uses the controversial systemd system and service manager has been brought to our attention.

• David Herrmann announced the release of systemd 223 a couple of days ago, informing us all about its availability for download and the new features, improvements, and bugfixes it includes.

• Lennart Poettering, the creator of the controversial init system and service manager for Linux kernel-based operating systems, has had the great pleasure of announcing the first system conference event.

• Prolific systemd contributor David Herrmann announced the release of systemd 223 today.

• The systemd 223 release has code clean-ups, bug-fixes, and has more improvements to systemd’s networkd code.

Graphics Stack

• Thus if running the fresh Mesa code that will be formally released in September, there’s now OpenGL 4.1 exposed by default in the RadeonSI driver for AMD Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs and newer… Basically any AMD GCN GPU. The only exception to the OpenGL 4.1 support is that LLVM 3.7 or newer is also needed, which will be released at the end of August but is currently available via Git/SVN. LLVM 3.7+ is needed for the latest AMD GPU LLVM back-end to enable OpenGL 4.1 otherwise OpenGL 3.3 will be advertised.

Benchmarks

• Continuing on from yesterday’s first Linux review of the AMD Radeon R9 Fury, here are some more Catalyst Linux benchmarks from this $550 graphics card.

• Since yesterday’s review of the R9 Fury on Ubuntu Linux I have run some more tests covering a few other test profiles as well as delivering some more 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1440 (rather than 4K) benchmarks for those wishing to run their own side-by-side comparisons against this air-cooled Fiji graphics card with 4GB of High Bandwidth Memory.

• There’s also some tests that run fine under the Intel Windows 10 driver but not the Intel Linux driver at this time. As a reminder, the Intel Windows driver exposes OpenGL 4.3 and OpenCL 2.0 support while at the moment the Intel driver exposes OpenGL 3.3 (but 4.0~4.1 in the coming days) and OpenCL 1.2.

• These results were interesting for our first Windows 10 benchmarks, albeit the Intel Linux driver ended up being a little bit slower than the Intel closed-source Windows driver in many of these OpenGL tests.

Applications

• Finally, after many iterations, we have something that works! The ocs-server team (Claudio Desideri and Francesco Wofford) is therefore announcing the first release of ocs-server 0.1 technology preview.

• dmMediaConverter is described by its developer as an FFmpeg frontend (GUI), but regular users only need to know that it’s an application that allows them to quickly convert files from one format to another, in a simple and intuitive way. It’s not the best looking out there, but it gets the job done.

• On July 30, the developers of the Goggles Music Manager software, an open-source music collection manager and player that supports some of the most popular audio file formats, announced the release of version 1.0.7.

Proprietary

• Three years ago, when a user would attempt to download the Google Drive Sync Client, Google would bring them to the appropriate download page, which of course, is based off of the operating system that user is running on. If a user would attempt to download the Google Drive Sync Client while running on Linux, they’d land on a page where the message reads: “Not (yet) supported for Linux.” So, what’s the deal with Google not developing a sync client for Linux users, seeing as to how they build a lot of their things using Linux? There’s one simple answer to that, unfortunately. Windows is mainstream, so a lot of their focus is put on what a majority of people use. The bigger the market, the more money in their pockets, of course. But don’t fear, change is near!

Instructionals/Technical

• For various modules which use gtk-doc, it’s a bit of a rite of passage to copy some build machinery from somewhere to generate a version.xml file which contains your package version, so that you can include it in your generated documentation (“Documenting version X of package Y”).

Games

• The Xoreos project did their first release of this open-source game engine seeking to re-implement BioWare’s Aurora Engine.

• Retro City Rampage is a bit of a love letter to the 80′s and 90′s gaming, and it just had a surprise Linux release.

• Thanks to SteamDB it seems that Bound By Flame a graphically pleasing RPG may get a Linux version. It has mixed reviews, but it may be worth a look.

• If you see this entry on SteamDB, it seems Linux is currently in a “qa_test” phase. This could mean it’s close to release, but it could also be just the start of testing.

• Shadowrun: Hong Kong now has a release date, and it’s not far off at all. The game will release on the 20th of August!

• Feral Interactive have released an absolute whopper—Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is now actually available for Linux. This is a seriously good game!

• Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is the latest game ported to Linux (and Mac OS X) by Feral Games! This game is now natively available on Linux, but for now the AMD and Intel drivers are not supported.

• The history of Skullgirls for Linux is colourful, but it’s finally nearing release, and I am sure it will make a lot of people happy. I have been cleared to post this up on it (I checked to be sure), so enjoy a small preview.

• A little over 30 games are now available for between 33 and 80 percent off. No word yet on whether the games on sale will change day by day but current highlights include the recently updated Star Wars Knights Of The Old Republic 2, Outlast, Dead Island, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequal, Dying Light, Garry’s Mod, Middle-Earth: Shadow Of Mordor, Civilization 5, Bioshock: Infnite, Dying Light, Ark and Metro 2033 Redux.

• Yesterday Feral Games released Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor for Linux and Mac OS X. Since its release, I’ve been very busy working to get some benchmark results produced for this AAA game that’s out for Linux one year after the Windows released. Included in these initial results for Shadow of Mordor are benchmark results for a few modern high-end graphics cards plus looking into the warning issued by Feral about the lack of AMD support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Second Alpha of Wily (to become 15.10) has now been released!

• We launched Plasma Mobile at KDE’s Akademy conference, a free, open and community made mobile platform.

• The KDE-Solaris site has been shuttered. The subdomain now redirects to KDE techbase, which documents the last efforts related to KDE on then-OpenSolaris. From the year 2000 or earlier until 2013, you could run KDE — two, three or four — on Solaris, either SPARC or (later) x86. I remember doing packaging for my university, way back when, on a Sun Enterprise 10000 with some ridiculous amount of memory — maybe 24GB, which was ridiculous for that time. This led — together with some guy somewhere who had a DEC Alpha — to the first 64-bitness patches in KDE. Solaris gave way to OpenSolaris, and Stefan Teleman rebooted the packaging efforts in cooperation with Sun, using the Sun Studio compiler. This led to a lot of work in the KDE codebase in fixing up gcc-isms. I’d like to think that that evened up the road a little for other non-gcc compilers later.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The development team of the open-source Gnumeric spreadsheet editor software used in numerous GNU/Linux distributions announced the immediate availability for download of Gnumeric 1.12.23.

• Three years ago this week was GUADEC 2012 where GNOME 4.0 was proposed along with GNOME OS. While GNOME 4.0 was supposed to materialize in 2014, that obviously didn’t happen, but at least GNOME 3.x has matured a lot and garnered much better support than it had years ago.

• All of these changes will appear in GTK+ 3.18 in September. And we are not quite done yet – we may still get a modernized path bar this cycle, if everything works out.

• The improvements that I have presented here are not all my work. A lot of credit goes to Allan Day, Carlos Soriano, Georges Basile Stavracas Neto, and Arc Riley. Buy them a drink if you meet them!

Distributions

New Releases

• The Apricity OS team is incredibly proud to announce the release of Apricity OS 07.2015 Beta, a new Arch Linux based distribution.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Red Hat Family

• We’re happy to announce the general availability of Oracle Linux 6 Update 7, the seventh update release for Oracle Linux 6. You can find the individual RPM packages on the Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) and our public yum repository and ISO installation images are available for download from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud.

• Oracle, through Michele Casey, had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the Oracle Linux 6.7 computer operating system based on the freely available sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7.

• In The Open Organization, Jim Whitehurst says leaders should be “catalysts.” Jim and other Red Hat leaders frequently talk about our high-level strategy—the areas on which we need to focus in order to be successful as a company. Jim isn’t telling everyone what to do; he is simply painting the picture of how he thinks we can be successful, hoping to “light little sparks and see what passionate fires erupt from there.” Departmental leaders have the challenge of determining how their teams can most effectively contribute to that success. Nobody is telling me (a middle manager at Red Hat) what my team needs to focus on—that’s part of the open organization culture. I get hints about where to focus by looking at our company strategy, listening to our leaders, getting feedback and context from internal stakeholders, and by talking with customers. My role is then to convey to the team what I’m learning in a way that translates to the work they are doing every day.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) has received a top Growth Style score from Zack’s Research. The growth score is based on company financials as well as the company’s prospects for future growth. The score is a result of analysis of various aspects of the Balance Sheet, Cash Flow Statement and Income Statement. Stocks that are given a high growth score tend to have the characteristics resulting in market outperformance.

Fedora

• Lennart Poettering announced today that KDBUS is now in Rawhide. “Josh [Boyer] thankfully added it to the Rawhide kernel packages, and our systemd RPMs come with built-in support, too now. If you are running an up-to-date Rawhide system adding “kdbus=1″ to your kernel command line is hence everything you need to run kdbus instead of dbus-daemon. (No additional RPMs need to be installed.) If you do, things should just work the same way as before, if we did everything right. By adding or dropping “kdbus=1″ to/from the command line you can enable kdbus or revert back to dbus1 on each individual boot.”

• It looks like reworking the Fedup upgrade tool may still happen for Fedora 23. The upgrade to this upgrade tool would involve relying on DNF and systemd functionality to provide more reliable Fedora system upgrades.

• Earlier this year was talk of replacing Fedup in Fedora 23 to overcome existing problems with this upgrade tool that’s been affected by issues in the past. Because of Fedup reliability concerns is also why I haven’t upgraded to Fedora 22 on my main workstation over Fedup frights.

• With all of the Mesa OpenGL 4 happenings — and most recently OpenGL 4.1 for RadeonSI — you may be wondering how to run this latest code prior to its official release in September.

• As my first job as Red Hat design intern I received from Mo a task to create some icons for Fedora LiveUSB Creator. The liveusb-creator is a cross-platform tool for easily installing live operating systems on to USB flash drives. A Live USB system stored on flash memory, sometimes called a stick, lets you boot any USB-bootable computer into a Fedora operating system environment without writing to that computer’s hard disk.

• And also according to the feedback it has also been suggested to use a footer similar to the one in getfedora.org. Hence the modified design of the footer is also depicted in the mockups below. And as always feedback on these are welcome.

• One aspect of open source that appeals to many people is the idea that anyone can contribute. All it takes is a great idea, a little bit of work, and you can have fame, glory, and more conference t-shirts than you know what to do with. The reality is often not quite as simple for many reasons. A common complication is software licencing. There are plenty of other locations talking about open source software licencing and the complications there of so this one will be narrowly focused and have a simple request: When submitting patches for the Linux kernel, whether to official kernel mailings lists or to Fedora, please remember sign off your patches.

• A couple of days ago, Dennis Gilmore from the Fedora Project posted news about some interesting aspects of the development cycle of the upcoming Fedora 23 Linux operating system, due for release later this year, on October 27, 2015.

• Kevin Fenzi posted a new message on the Fedora devel-announce mailing list a couple of days ago, informing all users and developers about a new proposal for the upcoming Fedora 23 Linux operating system, called DNF System Upgrades.

Debian Family

• We are working on getting plasma-desktop to transition to testing as soon as possible (hopefully in 2 days time), which will resolve both those issues. We appreciate that the transition to KF5 is much rougher than we would have liked, and apologize to all those impacted.

• Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Derivatives

• Elive, a Linux distribution based on Debian that uses Enlightenment as the default desktop environment, is now at version 2.6.8 and it’s ready for download and testing.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The second alpha of the Wily Werewolf (to become 15.10) has now been released!

• This alpha features images for Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Kylin and the Ubuntu Cloud images.

• Pre-releases of the Wily Werewolf are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu flavor developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting and fixing bugs as we work towards getting this release ready.

• Canonical, through Martin Wimpress, announced on July 30 that the second and last Alpha builds of the Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, and Ubuntu Cloud 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating systems were available for download and testing.

• For those interested in porting HTML5 games to Ubuntu Phone, Alan Pope has written a blog post about this relatively easy process. With having a redistributable HTML5 game, the “porting” to Ubuntu Phone mostly comes down to packaging it up via creating the manifest JSON file, adding a security profile, making a standard desktop file, building the resulting Click package, and then testing it out on an Ubuntu device — followed by ultimately uploading it to the Ubuntu Store.

Flavours and Variants

• Martin Wimpress has announced that Ubuntu MATE 15.10 Alpha 2 (Wily Werewolf) has been released, and it comes with some pretty interesting changes. The biggest one is the removal of the Ubuntu Software Center.

• The development team behind the Ubuntu Kylin computer operating system have announced earlier today the immediate availability for download and testing of the second Alpha build of the upcoming Ubuntu Kylin 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) distro.

• The development team behind Lubuntu, an open-source and freely distributed flavor of the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, announced a few minutes ago the release of the second Alpha build for the upcoming Lubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) distribution.

Devices/Embedded

• Acrosser has introduced a pair of COM Express Type 6 Basic modules based on circa-2013 Core i7/i3 CPUs from Intel’s extended lifecycle, embedded roadmap.

Phones

Tizen

• At the Tizen Developer Summit 2015 (TDS) event in Bengaluru, India July 30-31, Samsung has announced new Tizen SDKs for their Smartphones, Smartwatches, and Smart TVs. The Summit is focused in helping to grow the Tizen ecosystem by educating developers to the Tizen Operating System. Samsung are still offering developers 100% revenue for their apps until January 2016, making it an attractive proposition.

• AIDA64 is a Hardware and software information utility for tizen based devices. Based on the extensive hardware knowledge of the AIDA64 for Windows application, AIDA64 for Tizen is capable of showing various diagnostic information for the phones and tablets including:

Android

• The Moto X was the best smartphone of 2014, and this year’s version is getting a significant upgrade.

• Soon after LG launched its Android 5.1 Lollipop-based Gentle flip phone, Samsung has followed its South Korean counterpart with the launch of the Galaxy Folder flip phone. The new Samsung clamshell smartphone has been launched in South Korea at KRW 297,000 (approximately Rs. 16,350). The smartphone is expected to go on sale next month in Korea.

• Gionee has launched its new Pioneer-series smartphone, the Pioneer P2M, priced at Rs. 6,999. The new Gionee smartphone will be available in India via online and offline retailers.

• Motorola announced three new Android 5.1.1 (Lollipop) phones on Tuesday, including a high-end model that will be sold this fall in the U.S. as the Moto X Style Pure Edition, starting at the low price of $400 unlocked.

• Imagine you’re at a family get-together. For the first time all day, everyone is in the perfect position and smiling, just waiting for you to snap the picture. You position your Android’s camera and click.

• Tablets and smartphones are invaluable parenting resources, whether it’s providing new ways of educating and informing kids or simply entertaining them. Learning apps, creative thinking games, and streaming video apps make your Android device an incredibly handy thing to have around (even if you’re trying to limit screen time).

• At an event in California earlier today, Volkswagen officially announced that upcoming 2016 VW models will be Android Auto-ready. Which models? For now, what we know is this: most model year 2016 VWs at “SE” trim and above will likely pack the generation two MIB infotainment system, which has Android Auto (and Apple CarPlay). There are 6.5″ and 8″ versions of MIB 2, but both offer the same Auto experience.

• HTC’s One M8 flagships will not be receiving the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update. Instead, the Taiwanese tech giant is heavily speculated to directly roll out the Android M upgrade later this year for both the handsets.

• Angry Birds 2, the first official follow-up to the immensely popular 2009 game, has been released on iOS and Android.

• As we saw in previous leaks, the update brings a full fledged Android Wear app which allows users to select accounts, browse and view entire conversations, as well as reply by either voice, emoji, or canned response. What wasn’t known is whether or not Android Wear users would be able to actually initiate a message using an “Ok Google” voice command on their smartwatch. We are now able to confirm in our version, this does, in fact, work.

• Motorola announced brand new Android hardware on Tuesday, including the sleek and affordable Moto X Pure Edition phablet and the significantly updated budget-friendly Moto G. But there’s also one other thing Motorola plans to do starting with these phones in order to fix the most annoying thing about Android.

• Toyota and Telenav are announcing today that certain 2016 vehicles will be the first to support Scout GPS Link, a feature that ferries route and destination information between the dashboard and a version of Telenav’s Scout app for iPhone and Android. Scout already has an in-car turn-by-turn mode that you can use directly on your phone, but this makes it easier — all the interactions (including voice commands) happen through the car’s display and audio system instead of the phone’s.

• The Android 5.1.1 Lollipop is gradually being rolled out to different Samsung flagships. The firmware update is not a major update but brings fixes for various bugs that came along with the previous Android builds.

• Sony’s Z3 is a good phone, handicapped with a skinned version of Android that looks dated, and comes with a dump-truck of superfluous crap. Thanks to this quietly-leaked Sony Android Concept, which strips away all the junk and leaves a experience that looks plain fantastic.

Free Software/Open Source

• Security researchers have long known about the vulnerabilities of the RFID readers that many buildings use instead of door locks, but facilities managers have been slow to upgrade to more secure systems.

• To draw attention to the problem, at next week’s Black Hat conference, Accuvant researchers will be releasing an open source piece of hardware that can be used to circumvent these readers.

• Veterans Affairs Department Secretary Bob McDonald voiced his support for open source technology July 30, as he outlined a broad reform plan that includes streamlining information technology and taking a more “holistic” look at customer service.

• “We have over 200 databases with customer information. That means if you want to change your address, you have to go to at least nine places to change your address at VA,” said McDonald during a morning keynote July 30 at a conference in Bethesda, Md.

• Dotcom’s first file locker, Megaupload, saw him accused of knowingly hosting, and indeed encouraging the upload and distribution of, stolen films and music. From his new home in New Zealand, he’s fought a long legal battle on numerous fronts, fending off extradition attempts, accusing kiwi authorities of working without warrants end even trying, and failing miserably, to promote a political part .

Databases

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle is the latest company to get on the Docker bandwagon, having announced support for the application container technology to come in a future version of Solaris Unix.

• Docker arose out of the Linux world, and its original implementation takes advantage of a number of Linux kernel features, including LXC, cgroups, and namespaces.

• Solaris, meanwhile, has had native support for containers since 2005, in the form of Solaris Zones. Rather than aping how Docker handles containers on Linux, Oracle plans to stick with this arguably superior technology.

CMS

• Lakhani’s current role involves promoting the use of applications like Drupal, WordPress, Magento, and Redline through free tools and services. But, this Denver-based executive’s experience shows most in forming the global, distributed team of developers and support staff inherent to success.

BSD

• OpenBSD is going through something of a minimalist phase right now, but that wasn’t always the case. There was definitely an era of aggressive importation as well. Times change, priorities change, projects change. I wasn’t involved with OpenBSD during the early years, but I think I can explain the shift in attitudes. This is part three of an apparently ongoing series that started with Pruning and Polishing and out with the old, in with the less.

• One of our new developers, Alexandr Nedvedicky (sashan@), writes in to tell us about his trip to the lovely locale of Calgary for c2k15.

Public Services/Government

• The Bulgarian government has added open source as a requirement to its ‘Preliminary criteria for the eligibility of eGovernment projects’.

• Two IT trade associations in the Slovak Republic are objecting the renewal of a proprietary software licence contract negotiated by the country’s Ministry of Finance for all government organisations. Instead of continuing to rely on proprietary office suites, the groups want the Slovakian government to explore a transition to open source alternatives.

Standards/Consortia

• Through their brief webinar Marijke and Marco will share with the audience how the Dutch Government is promoting the adoption of open standards through BOMOS, a method (initiated by Dr. Erwin Folmer, TNO with contribution from Marijke) which describes how to maintain and manage open standards.

Leftovers

Security

• Serialization and, more importantly, deserialization of data is unsafe due to the simple fact that the data being processed is trusted implicitly as being “correct.” So if you’re taking data such as program variables from a non trusted source you’re making it possible for an attacker to control program flow. Additionally many programming languages now support serialization of not just data (e.g. strings, arrays, etc.) but also of code objects. For example with Python pickle() you can actually serialize user defined classes, you can take a section of code, ship it to a remote system, and it is executed there.

• The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has introduced ‘software security requirements’ obliging WiFi device manufacturers to “ensure that only properly authenticated software is loaded and operating the device”. The document specifically calls out the DD-WRT open source router project, but clearly also applies to other popular distributions such as OpenWRT. This could become an early battle in ‘The war on general purpose computing’ as many smartphones and Internet of Things devices contain WiFi router capabilities that would be covered by the same rules.

• The Jeep Cherokee brought to a halt by hackers last week exposed wireless networks as the weakest link in high-tech vehicles, underscoring the need to find fast over-the-air fixes to block malicious intrusions.

• Features that buyers now expect in most modern automobiles, such as driving directions and restaurant guides, count on a constant connection to a telecommunications network. But that link also makes cars vulnerable to security invasions like those that threaten computers in homes and businesses.

Censorship

• PRIME MINISTER David Cameron is looking to ensure that adult websites, the sort that MPs like, will abide by age verification standards and make sure that fumbling punters are of adult age.

• Cameron has a thing about these sites, as does a huge chunk of Westminster, and would like to see adult content subjected to bondage and inspection. He would like to give it a firm political going over and a good legislative seeing to. He wants to take it in hand.

Civil Rights

• Following the grisly killing of Cecil the Lion we’ve heard many tone-deaf responses from celebrities including Mia Farrow. Add one more to that list, because the gun-slinging NRA member Ted Nugent has just weighed in and he’s pretty sure everything you know about Cecil’s death is wrong.

• In a post on his zine “True to You,” Morrissey alleged that he was sexually assaulted by a security officer at San Francisco airport on July 27th. The British singer claims that an airport officer grabbed his genitals following a security check.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The Federal Communications Commission received about 2,000 net neutrality complaints from consumers over a one-month period, according to a National Journal article today. The overarching theme of the complaints is that customers are fed up with their Internet service providers, often due to slow speeds, high prices, and data caps. In a sampling of 60 complaints, the most frequent targets were AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon.

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