● 08.06.15

● Links 6/8/2015: DebConf15, LibreOffice 5

Posted in News Roundup at 11:31 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Chromebooks have proven amazingly popular, with various models showing up on Amazon’s bestseller list. But how well does a Chromebook work as an ereader? One redditor asked about it and got some helpful answers in the Chrome OS subreddit.

Desktop

• Logic Supply, a hardware company known for being on the leading edge of technology with embedded and industrial computers powered by Linux kernel-based operating systems, such as Ubuntu, has announced that it now offers a full line of ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner) certified thin client computers compatible with ThinManager.

Server

• Cumulus Networks releasesd a free virtual appliance designed to simulate its traditional Cumulus Linux operating system environment for open networking.

Kernel Space

• Immediately after announcing the release of systemd 223 and details about the first-ever systemd conference (systemd.conf) at the end of July 2015, the systemd developers, through Kay Sievers, published a new release of the controversial init system and service manager used in numerous GNU/Linux distributions.

• Back in 2013 Facebook began poaching top Btrfs developers and last year we reported on Facebook trying out Btrfs on some servers. Now it seems they’re getting ready to utilize more of this next-generation Linux file-system in a production capacity.

• We reported here over the last couple of weeks that the Linux Foundation was bringing out its LFS201: Essentials of Linux System Administration course to Spanish speakers, today they announced that a Portuguese version is available. Speakers of these languages will also be able to take an LFCS exam in either Spanish and Portuguese too.

Benchmarks

• As such, I did run some common benchmarks on the NVIDIA 355.06 Beta driver and compared its performance to the 352.30 driver on different NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics cards. Ubuntu 15.04 was running on the system with the Linux 3.19 kernel.

Applications

• A new Armadillo release 5.300.4 was prepared by Conrad the other day, and we prepared a new corresponding RcppArmadillo release 0.5.300.4.0 which is now on CRAN and in way into Debian.

• Faitout is an application giving you full access to a postgresql database for 30 minutes.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The last two and a half weeks of testing were heavily occupied with attention to World of Tanks and World of Warships.

• CodeWeavers, the company behind projects like CrossOver and Wine, has announced that it’s making great progress with Microsoft Office 2013 and World of Tanks, among other things.

Games

• Homefront: The Revolution, the game now being developed by Deep Silver after Crytek’s financial woes last year, has a new trailer out for Gamescom this week in Germany.

• This CryENGINE-powered game is still anticipated to come to Linux and the PC debut is set for 2016. Today at Gamescom they put out a damn nice new trailer of this open world first person shooter. The trailer is embedded below.

• The trailer shows off what looks like quite an impressive game already, and with plenty of time left to polish it up. Due for release next year, I’m excited, cautiously excited. I don’t want to be negative, but it’s still entirely possible the Linux version won’t appear, but so far so good.

• It’s often said by Windows users that the reason they don’t want to use Linux is because it has no games, this isn’t true, since Steam launched on Linux over 1,000 games have arrived on the platform. At the end of July something happened which, if you keep your fingers crossed, may start trending in future.

• Cossacks 3 was a bit of a surprise announcement to be coming to Linux, and it looks fantastic. I decided to send over a few burning questions.

• GOG has just released Aquaria on their store, and included is the DRM free Linux version. A good chance to grab a copy if you still haven’t played it.

• A little under a year after its release, Feral Interactive have brought OS X and Linux users a new game to play… And thanks to Michael I spent all of Friday night and most of Saturday binge-playing Middle-Earth: Shadow Of Mordor.

• Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power is the latest in the puzzle platformer series by Frozenbyte, and they confirmed in their newsletter that the Linux and Mac versions are in development.

• Twin Robots, a new platforming game developed and published on Steam by a studio named Thinice, has been released for the Linux platform as well.

• We decided it was time to plug Shadow of Mordor again, only this time myself and Samsai have conducted some benchmarks across four different Nvidia GPU’s.

• I think it’s a great game, and the performance now I fixed the benchmarks is great (really it is), but the stability has been a problem. It was going to release for Linux on Monday the 10th of August, but that will be delayed so I can work with the developer to get the issues ironed out.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Emacs is known to be a fully-customizable text-editor that can yield crazy abilities from playing games to emulating vi/vim to being an “OS inside an OS” with Emacs Lisp. The latest feature for Emacs is serving as an X Window Manager.

• The developers of the open-source Enlightenment desktop environment used in numerous GNU/Linux distributions announced the immediate availability of the eighth maintenance release of the Enlightenment DR 0.19 series.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Qt Purchasing is a module designed to help app developers handle in-app purchases. At present this module supports integration with the app stores on Apple iOS and Android, while there’s already a patch pending to integrate support for the OS X App Store too. Other app store back-ends could be implemented for Windows, any Linux app store, etc.

• A few weeks back we wrote about Fiber, yet another web-browser for Qt/KDE, while today there’s a bit more information.

• KDE developer Ken Vermette who has been working on the Fiber project provided a brief update today. He’s been refactoring the existing code to fit Qt/KDE guidelines while now he’s trying to decide on the browser layout/rendering engine.

• On August 5, Martin Sandsmark informed us all that there’s a critical bug in the Intel graphics stack leading to a huge number of crashes for all users of the latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.

• As I had previously announced, I am resigning my active positions in Simon and KDE Speech.

• As part of me handing over the project to an eventual successor, I had announced a day-long workshop on speech recognition basics for anyone who’s interested. Mario Fux of Randa fame took me up on that offer. In a long and intense Jitsi meeting we discussed basic theory, went through all the processes involved in creating and adapting language- and acoustic models and looked at the Simon codebase. But maybe most importantly of all, we talked about what I also want to outline in this blog post: What Simon is, what it could and should be, and how to get there.

• As I had previously announced, I am resigning my active positions in Simon and KDE Speech.

• As part of me handing over the project to an eventual successor, I had announced a day-long workshop on speech recognition basics for anyone who’s interested. Mario Fux of Randa fame took me up on that offer. In a long and intense Jitsi meeting we discussed basic theory, went through all the processes involved in creating and adapting language- and acoustic models and looked at the Simon codebase. But maybe most importantly of all, we talked about what I also want to outline in this blog post: What Simon is, what it could and should be, and how to get there.

• So this was my very first Akademy, and I was excited about attending it ever since the beginning of when I started contributing to KDE a couple of years back. Feels great to have finally made it. Although I had some visa problems at the New Delhi airport because of which I reached A Coruna quite late and missed out on the entire first day of the conference, still I’m glad I could at least reach Rialta by sunset of that day and be able to attend the rest of all the days at Akademy.

• I also spent a good chunk of my time reading Qt and KDE coding guidelines and documentation on how files and classes should be structured, and then I applied that information to Fiber. The result now is well commented code, and consistent naming conventions in-line with other Qt/KDE projects.

• A week has passed since I’ve been back from Akademy, so it’s more than time to make a little report.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• A (older) GNOME bug report was pointed out to us in regards to the KDE experience now being degraded by GTK with the common oxygen-gtk theme breaking under modern versions of GNOME’s tool-kit. The oxygen-gtk theme is used by several distributions while running GTK applications under KDE in order to provide a better and more matching experience by being a port of the default KDE widget theme to GTK.

• This post is about my work on alarm component of gnome-clocks as a part of GSoC ’15. I’ll start with the current design of the alarm component in gnome-clocks.

Distributions

New Releases

• Today we have released Black Lab Enterprise Linux 6.6. Black Lab enterprise Linux 6.6 is a bug fix and application update for the Black Lab Enterprise Linux 6.x line. With this release we added full Docker integration and it also includes the Black Lab SDK 2.0. Black Lab Enterprise Linux 6.6 being based on LTS Technologies will continue to get security updates until 2021. All current licensees will be able to update through the updater or you can request the ISO file.

• Zorin OS is a friendly user interface Linux distribution that any beginner can hand on. Basing on Ubuntu gives full support to most hardware and reach to 40,000+ applications from software center. The latest Zorin OS 10 has been released recently with the new selection of default applications and other improvements. Let’s know more about Zorin OS.

• On August 5, Steven Shiau, the developer of the popular Clonezilla Live disk cloning utility, had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of Clonezilla Live 2.4.2-32, a new stable release of the project.

• Black Lab Software, through Robert Dohnert, had the enormous pleasure of informing Softpedia about the immediate availability of the Black Lab Linux Enterprise 6.6 LTS computer operating system.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Red Hat Family

• Based on the OpenStack community “Kilo” release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is a co-engineered solution that starts with the proven and trusted foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and integrates with Red Hat’s OpenStack technology to form a production-ready cloud platform. This combination addresses the critical dependencies OpenStack has on Linux and provides a highly scalable, fault-tolerant platform for building private or public clouds. Originally launched in 2013, this new release is Red Hat’s fifth iteration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, which has been successfully deployed worldwide by customers in key verticals including public sector, financial, telecommunications, and education. Version 7 includes several new features aimed at accelerating the adoption of OpenStack including:

• OPEN source vendor Red Hat Inc is betting Malaysia will be a growth centre, in line with its expansion plans for South-East Asia, according to its regional chief.

• Speaking at a media briefing recently, Damien Wong, senior director and general manager for Red Hat Asean, said Malaysia continues to be a growth region, as predicted by various independent market analysts.

• According to a recent survey, the mobile developer job market should continue to heat up as 50 percent of organizations plan to hire for mobile positions this year. Of those organizations, 32 percent are focused on skills related to front-end development, with 27 percent looking for back-end integration skills and 15 percent seeking DevOps for mobile. Nine percent of organizations are hiring specifically for mobile project management skills.

• The idea of an IoT gateway seems like a departure for Red Hat, which is more closely associated with its Red Hat Enterprise Linux product that powers everything from small businesses to CERN’s laboratories.

• On August 5, Red Hat, Inc. announced the general and official availability of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7, a release that introduces numerous new features and performance improvements.

Fedora

• Fedora Linux developers are looking at further demoting i686 hardware support by making bugs pertaining to x86 32-bit not release blockers.

• Most Linux distributions have been working to slowly phase out i686 support as 32-bit x86 systems haven’t been sold in large quantities in years and — except for some niche markets in parts of the world — most users out there are running x86_64 Linux. In reflecting the times, Fedora kernel developer Josh Boyer at Red Hat is working to gain support to make i686 a non-release-blocking architecture.

• Korora is an old GNU/Linux distribution (originated in 2005) that used to be based on ‘Gentoo’. But in 2007 the development of Korora was abandoned, yet in 2010, it was reborn, but this time it was based on ‘Fedora’, rather than ‘Gentoo’.

• But to be honest with you, I’ve never had used ‘Korora’ before. Yet, after installing ‘Korora 22′ (based on Fedora 22) and using it for the past three days, it’s goals became pretty clear to me. It is this good looking ‘Fedora remix’ that strives to be the ‘Fedora’ that hosts a mild attitude & a sense of practicality, although good folks at ‘Fedora’ don’t have that luxury. In a world that’s dominated by ignorance & selfishness, their struggle is a difficult one. I admire their courage.

• Fedora developer portal has arised as an idea from Josef Stribny and Petr Hracek. The aim of the portal is to give an overview about important development tools and projects in Fedora. Focus is targeted on beginners, advanced users and developers.

• As I said in my blog post about FUDCon, we wanted to continue the effort on reaching to new contributors. The Fedora 22 release event was the start. Last Saturday, on 1st August we had the event in the Red Hat Pune office. Around 17 people attended the event.

Debian Family

• Today in Linux news, the Debian Project today announced DebConf15, “the largest DebConf so far.”

• Elixir is a functional language built on top of the Erlang virtual machine. If features imutable data structures, interesting concurrency primitives, and everything else that Erlang does, but with a syntax inspired by Ruby what makes it much more aproachable in my opinion.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Erle-Spider is a new kind of drone, but it’s not one that flies. As the name implies, it’s a spider drone, and as it happens, it’s powered by Ubuntu.

• Canonical has released details about quite a few Oxide vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in a security notification.

• Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak has sent in his daily report after a short break because of health problems, which are now resolved, to inform us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers.

• Unity 8 is the desktop environment on Ubuntu for phones and it’s going to land on the desktop as well. Developers have published a few screenshots to let us know what kind of progress it’s been made.

• One of the issues that are still bothering Ubuntu users is the fact that apps still take a long time to load when they are opened for the first time. It might not seem like an important issue, but the make the platform feel laggy.

• Ubuntu Touch might be an operating system for mobile devices for now, but first and foremost, it’s a Linux distribution. And like any Linux distro out there, it’s really good at connecting to other devices, in this case a PC via the FTP protocol.

Devices/Embedded

• Olio has opened pre-orders for a luxury round-faced Linux smartwatch that shows Bluetooth notifications from mobile devices and offers 50M water resistance.

• Aside from the Tizen-based Samsung Gear and Blocks watches, we haven’t seen too many Linux smartwatches that don’t run Android Wear or other Android variants. Exceptions include the LG Watch Urbane and Leikr sportswatch. Now, a San Francisco startup called Olio Devices Inc. has opened pre-orders on a Linux-powered luxury watch called the “Olio Model One.”

• Seeed Studios is shipping its $39 “Green” version of the BeagleBone, which loses the micro-HDMI port but adds a micro-USB port and Grove sensor interfaces.

• The Raspberry Pi has spawned a number of hardware near clones, including the Banana Pi and Orange Pi SBCs, and now it’s time for the Beagleboard.org’s Linux-oriented BeagleBone to enjoy the sincerest form of flattery. The BeagleBone Green was announced by Seeed Studios, the company behind the popular line of Grove sensor devices, back in May. This was just in time to mention it in our joint LinuxGizmos/Linux.com 2015 hacker survey, in which the BeagleBone Black once again came in second place. Seeed’s BeagleBone variant was expected to ship in mid June, but has only now become available.

Phones

Tizen

• Developers attending the Tizen Developer Summit Bengaluru India were lucky enough to receive the Samsung TM1 (the offical name) as the developer giveaway device. The device has Tizen 2.4 Beta loaded on it and not Tizen 3.0 that has previously been reported by other websites, when will they learn !!! As with any dev device its purpose is to assist developers in creating new apps or porting their existing apps to the Tizen Platform.

Android

• Inherent to Android is a world of phones and tablets in different sizes, using different technology, and with different features and sensors. While that’s led to fragmentation issues that can make life harder for developers, it’s also led to a wealth of interesting hardware, with manufacturers competing to be the best at both budget and premium prices. Over the past several years, that landscape has continued to shift. Sure, Samsung may still be the biggest name around, but there are now a huge number of small manufacturers that have thrown their hats in the ring.

• Google today updated Google Slides for Android with support for streaming via Google Hangouts; you can download the new app now directly from Google Play. The company also updated Google Keep for Android with an option to export notes to Google Docs — that new version is also available on Google Play.

• “My guess is that this is the single largest software update the world has ever seen,” said Adrian Ludwig, lead engineer for Android security at Google. “Hundreds of millions of devices are going to be updated in the next few days. It’s incredible.”

• Dutch wags decide to upload Android onto an iPhone and tell Apple faithful that it’s iOS 9. Boy, do they love it.

• For many the Apple iPhone’s famous operating system remains a clear front runner in the tech race against Android.

• But as this video shows, fans of the pioneering company may have simply lost all sense of objectivity after being blinded by loyalty.

• A group of Dutch pranksters have put fans to the test by installing Android on an iPhone and convincing them it is iOS9 – Apple’s highly anticipated new operating system.

• In June we reported that the US Supreme Court denied Google’s request to review the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to overturn a previous ruling that said Google did not violate Oracle’s copyright by using 37 Java APIs.

• Google introduced Android TV a little more than a year ago, but I still manage to forget that it actually exists. It doesn’t get nearly as much fanfare as some of the other Android branches, like Android Wear and Android Auto, but it’s just as important to the Android family—especially if your goal is to have all of your Android-powered devices working together harmoniously.

• If you miss the good ol’ days when mobile phones actually looked different from each other, you’re in luck: the new LG Wine Smart features a clamshell form factor so you can flip your phone open to answer calls, just like classic handsets from the 90s.

• Lately extravagant smartphone shapes have been mostly forgotten, but some manufacturers are yet to give up on them. LG recently released one such device – the Android-powered LG Gentle in Korea and while it was initially thought to remain an exclusive to the market, the company has now changed its mind.

• Parrot cancels plans to sell its Android Auto- and Apple CarPlay-compatible media receiver to the aftermarket.

• Not all public exploits get patches—and sometimes there are even good reasons why. That’s the case with a flaw in Chromecast that was demonstrated at last year’s Black Hat security conference.

Free Software/Open Source

• Let’s look at five best practices for working with security in open source programming. When you write software, there’s a high likelihood that you’ll have to include some kind of security. Plenty of open source libraries are available to help you add security, but you have to do it right. Otherwise, you’ll be asking for big trouble later, which might include your client getting featured on the national news.

• Software developers obviously love open source. They get to collaborate, build on top of work already done by others instead of constantly building from scratch, and add features they need to existing solutions. Innovation often happens faster in open source communities than it does behind closed doors of corporate development departments.

• 18F released last week a style guide for its open-source documentation, in an effort to make communication as clear as possible between the often disparate parties that pitch in on open-source projects.

• The organization, which is the in-house innovation lab at the General Services Administration, seeks collaboration from government and nongovernment partners. To that end, the lab saw a need for clearer dialogue between parties when describing projects as well as their purposes, needs and other aspects.

• Sometimes a new idea or product can burst into the world fully-formed, but more often than not it takes time for things of value to evolve, improve, emerge and find an audience.

• [...]

• “Commercial products, out of the box, are only as good as their latest security update,” said Anita Nikolich, a program director at NSF. “Bro, on the other hand, looks at what’s unique about your network and tailors its defenses based on one’s needs.”

• [...]

• NCSA’s network, for instance, passes 100,000 packets per second over its 450 Gigabit/second network, delivering data to thousands of users. Bro looks over every one of those packets, automatically raising an alert or triggering an external action like a block when it sees evidence of an attack, with very few errors in its automated judgment.

• Black Hat keynoter Jennifer Granick, director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, discusses the need for legal and policy change to defend Internet freedom.

• IBM has launched two new community spaces within its Web-based developerWorks network: one to support developers of open-source enterprise software; one to support Internet of Things (IoT) developers. Both sites will provide resources and networking opportunities for developers working in those specific areas, the company says.

• The leader of the FFmpeg open source project has resigned amid ongoing turmoil among the project’s developers.

• FFmpeg, a set of cross-platform, open source libraries for playback of video formatted according to standards created by the MPEG organization, was founded in 2000 by French developer Fabrice Bellard, working under the pseudonym Gerard Lantau. Since 2004, however, it has been led by Michael Niedermayer.

SaaS/Big Data

• Ultimately open-source OpenStack can provide numerous benefits, including added developer productivity toward business growth and initiatives, plus the ability to create a technology environment that can keep pace with your developer’s desire for progress and innovation. If coupled with the savings of allowing hardware and hypervisor providers to compete for your business, adopting open-source OpenStack almost unfailingly moves your business in a positive direction. This all translates positively to the bottom line and is only one illustration of why open-source OpenStack is a better and ultimately lower-cost option compared to proprietary solutions.

Databases

• The release of an increasing number of benchmarks isn’t surprising.During early phases of NoSQL adoption, benchmarks were somewhat less important because most users were experimenting with NoSQL or using it on lightweight applications that operated at small scale.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 5.0 builds on the success of the 4.x family, which has been deployed by over 80 million users (source: TDF estimate, based on users pinging for updates), including large organizations in Europe and South America.

• The latest major release of LibreOffice FOSS package brings a streamlined look, bug fixes, performance tweaks and a lot of new cross-compatibility.

• Today we release LibreOffice 5.0.0, a new foundation for ongoing work over the next months and years. It also has a fine suite of new features for people to enjoy – you can read and enjoy all the great news about the user visible features from so many great hackers, but there are, as always, many contributors whose work is primarily behind the scenes, and a lot of work that is more technical than user-facing. That work is, of course, still vitally important to the project. It can be hard to extract those from around eleven thousand commits since LibreOffice 4.4 was branched, so let me try to expand:

• The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release since the launch of the project and the first of the third development cycle. LibreOffice is a full feature open source office suite which compares head to head with every product in the same category, while it stands out for superior interoperability features.

BSD

• PC-BSD 10.2-RC1 was released this morning and is based off FreeBSD 10.2 while bringing many improvements to its installer, uses iocage for its jail management backend, the disk manager GUI is now available via the installer GUI, there’s improved fonts and better support for 4K displays, an enterprise package repository option that’s locked to consistent package versions, and various other package updates.

• We reported the other day on the immediate availability of the Lumina Desktop 0.8.6 desktop environment for the PC-BSD 10.2 and FreeBSD 10.2 operating system, which introduces a great number of new features and under-the-hood improvements.

• We have a platinum donor. The OpenBSD Foundation has announced the name of the first platinum donor…

Public Services/Government

• Finally, bean-counters in the government of the UK have seen the light. Spending by governments on non-Free software licences is obscene, particularly in comparison to the availability of good Free Software like GNU/Linux and Postgresql. It’s not the job of government to route taxpayers’ money towards monopolies. That’s stupid, unwise, wasteful and harmful to the economy.

• The Government of India (GOI) has adopted a comprehensive and supportive open source policy. It builds on their earlier efforts to adopt open standards for procurement.

• As we’ve seen in other regions, the adoption of such policies often brings out concerns from some quarters who want to spread ‘fear and doubt’ about the policy. So, what are the facts about the policy, and how does it fit into India’s broader economic development strategy?

Openness/Sharing

• The Food and Drug Administration is launching a new, open-source platform to allow community sharing of genomic information. It’s called precisionFDA, and will be the newest cog in the White House’s Precision Medicine Initiative.

Open Data

• The Belgian Council of Ministers has accepted a new federal open data strategy. The strategy includes several actions to be taken over the next five years, aiming to strengthen the Belgian digital ecosystem, and to evolve towards a leaner, more efficient and more modern government.

Open Hardware

• For those of us who love space and space exploration but are currently earthbound for the time being, the next best thing is to have a professional-grade telescope that ‘transports’ us into space while keeping our feet firmly planted on the ground. The only problem of course, has been in handing over the many thousands of dollars needed to purchase an automated robotic telescope that’s capable of providing clear images of the outer cosmos automatically.

• In an era when digital tools allow anyone to make practically anything, inscribing the words “do not duplicate” on a key only invites ambitious lock pickers to do exactly that. Now one group of researchers has released a piece of software that makes copying purportedly uncopyable keys easier than ever.

Programming

• GameAnalytics, maker of a free analytics platform, has recently open sourced gascheduler an Erlang library that provides a generic scheduler for parallel execution of distributed tasks. InfoQ has spoken to Chris de Vries, one of gascheduler’s creators.

Leftovers

Security

• The best part of running your own server is definitely reviewing the logs.

• Java-based expression languages provide significant flexibility when using middleware products such as Business Rules Management System (BRMS). This flexibility comes at a price as there are significant security concerns in their use. In this article MVEL is used in JBoss BRMS to demonstrate some of the problems. Other products might be exposed to the same risk.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Here’s your US foreign policy puzzler for the day: When is regime change not regime change?

• When the regime stays in power but loses its ability to rule. This is the current objective of US policy in Syria, to undermine Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s ability to govern the country without physically removing him from office. The idea is simple: Deploy US-backed “jihadi” proxies to capture-and-hold vast sections of the country thereby making it impossible for the central government to control the state. This is how the Obama administration plans to deal with Assad, by making him irrelevant. The strategy is explained in great detail in a piece by Michael E. O’Hanlon at the Brookings Institute titled “Deconstructing Syria: A new strategy for America’s most hopeless war”.

• A joint US-European mission to Libya involving soldiers from six countries is being hatched under the pretext of combating Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and with the aim of establishing a pliant pro-Western government and “stabilising” the country.

• Tony Blair could be made to stand trial for war crimes, according to the current Labour leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn.

• The veteran left winger said the former prime minister was reaching the point when he was going to have to deal with the consequences of his actions with the coming Chilcot inquiry report.

• “I think it was an illegal war,” he said in an interview with BBC2′s Newsnight adding that former UN secretary general had confirmed that. “Therefore he (Blair) has to explain that,” Corbyn said.

• Part of the aircraft wing found on Reunion Island is from the missing MH370 plane, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has confirmed.

• Mr Najib said international experts examining the debris in France had “conclusively confirmed” it was from the aircraft.

• The Malaysia Airlines plane carrying 239 people veered off course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014.

Transparency Reporting

• A new internal note reveals renewed efforts by a small group of member states to take Council transparency forward.

• On 8 July, the European Parliament voted in favour of measures to increase the transparency of the finances of multinational corporations, requiring EU-based multinational companies (MNCs) to reveal details of tax payments to governments around the world. The measures were voted through as part of the Shareholders’ Rights Directive (SRD), which amends two existing directives on long-term shareholder engagement and corporate governance.

• Sciencewise is a BIS funded programme to improve Government policy making involving science and technology by increasing the effectiveness with which public dialogue is used, and encouraging its wider use where appropriate. We provide co-funding and specialist advice to help Government Departments and Agencies develop and commission public dialogue.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• In a paper published at Energy & Science Engineering, expert and gas industry consultant Touché Howard argues that a much-heralded 2013 study by the University of Texas relied on a faulty measurement instrument, the Bacharach Hi-Flow Sampler (BHFS), causing its findings to low-ball actual emission rates “by factors of three to five.”

Finance

• The unions did not make themselves popular with business leaders in the capital when they announced 24-hour action starting on Wednesday from 6.30pm. The move follows a previous 24-hour stoppage in July.

• The four unions organising on London Underground – RMT, TSSA, ASLEF, and Unite – have balloted their members for strikes. ASLEF’s ballot has been returned with a 98% majority in favour of strikes on an 81% turnout, and the union has scheduled a 24 hour strike over 8/9 July. The three other unions have their ballots due back on 30 June, and are almost certain to coordinate with ASLEF’s date if they receive majorities in favour of strike action. Coordinated action by all four Tube unions is almost unprecedented.

• You can’t do anything about the strikes, but you can banish the complaints from your social networks.

• With some tweaks to your settings and a couple of browser extensions, you can easily get rid of the most annoying posts.

• I’m a ticket officer and station assistant on London Underground, and I’ll be taking 24 hour strike action this evening alongside members of my union, TSSA, and unions representing other tube staff, ASLEF, RMT and Unite. We’re in dispute over the move to all-night running at weekends, starting in September.

• That’s not because we oppose all night trains at weekends. They’re a great idea, and will give London a real boost. What we oppose is the way this is being rushed in to meet political aims, without thought for tube workers’ family lives, and without the negotiation that could help find a fairer way.

• I currently work 35 to 40 hours a week, doing shifts of 7 1/2 hours. Currently they start as early as 5am, and finish as late as 1am. The changes London Underground Ltd wants won’t mean me working more hours, but they will alter my shift patterns, making me work more unsocial hours to cover the new all-night shifts, some of which would be 12 hours long.

• Since 2001 my hours have become less social, my breaks shorter, and my weekends are about to become almost non-existent

• As London gears up to weather another Tube strike, misconceptions about the strikers – and their industrial action – are gaining pace.

• A spokesperson for Unite, one of the four unions taking part in the strike across London, explained why their members were striking and what the action really meant.

• Conspiracy theorists allege that the world’s most rich and powerful people have secret meetings at places like Bilderberg or Bohemian Grove, or that one can find rooms on Wall Street or in DC where world-changing deals go down amidst a cloud of cigar smoke.

• While there is still debate as to the true extent of the above claims, even the most skeptical of us can agree that the most powerful executives between Wall Street and the biggest corporations in America are intimately connected. Government officials are also in that web, but that’s a project for another day.

• The above visualization looks at the directors of 30 of America’s largest publicly traded corporations on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Of this group, there are a grand total of three companies that do not share board members with other companies in the index.

Privacy

• This has led to some surprise among people who don’t follow this that closely, that “even Homeland Security” doesn’t like the bill. But that’s really ignoring history and what this fight has always been about. Going back many, many years we’ve been highlighting that the truth behind all of these “cybersecurity” bills is that it’s little more than a bureaucratic turf war over who gets to control the purse strings for the massive, multi-billion dollar budget that will be lavished on government contractors for “cybersecurity solutions.” That the bill might also boost surveillance capabilities is little more than a nice side benefit.

• The key players in this turf war? The NSA and Homeland Security (with the Justice Department occasionally waving its hand frantically in the corner shouting “don’t forget us!”). From the beginning, one of the key questions people have asked is “who gets the data?” Obviously, “none of the above” is probably the best answer, but of the remaining options, Homeland Security tends to be the least worst option out of a list of three really bad options. And, so far, the White House has repeatedly pushed to put DHS in charge, giving it more power over the budget. However, CISA does not put DHS in charge.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), privacy company Disconnect and a coalition of Internet companies have announced a stronger “Do Not Track” (DNT) setting for Web browsing—a new policy standard that, coupled with privacy software, will better protect users from sites that try to secretly follow and record their Internet activity, and incentivize advertisers and data collection companies to respect a user’s choice not to be tracked online.

• Intelligence agencies’ secretive techniques for spying on mobile phones are seldom made public.

• But a UK security firm has shown the BBC how one tool, sold around the world to spooks, actually works.

• It allows spies to take secret pictures with a phone’s camera and record conversations with the microphone, without the phone owner knowing.

• Hacking Team’s software was recently stolen from the company by hackers and published on the web.

• Almost any data on a phone, tablet or PC can be accessed by the tool and it is fascinating how much it can do.

• According to Nature, this was the first GINA case to go to trial since the law was enacted in 2008. Atlas tried to argue that the law didn’t apply in this case, because it wasn’t seeking medical information about its employees, just trying to find out who was pooping by the produce. Leaving aside that the mere fact someone is deliberately defecating outside a bathroom may signal some mental health issues, GINA says that it is “an unlawful employment practice for an employer to request, require, or purchase genetic information with respect to an employee.” (“Genetic information,” according to the statute, includes “genetic tests,” not necessarily limited just to ones that reveal medical information.)

• A treason investigation against two German journalists claimed its first casualty Tuesday — the country’s top prosecutor who ordered the probe.

• Justice Minister Heiko Maas announced he was seeking the dismissal of Harald Range hours after the chief federal prosecutor accused the government of interfering in his investigation.

• Maas said he made the decision in consultation with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office, indicating that the sacking was approved at the highest level.

Civil Rights

• On the evening of July 26, Zachary Hammond pulled into the parking lot of a Hardee’s in Seneca, South Carolina. Seated next to him was a young woman who had arranged to meet someone there to sell a bag of weed. It’s unclear what Hammond knew about the transaction, but neither the 19-year-old nor his passenger had any idea that the buyer was actually an undercover police officer. Moments later, another officer fatally shot Hammond.

• What we know about how Hammond ended up dead in a minor marijuana sting depends on whom you believe.

• This was an extraordinarily-fast resolution to an excessive force lawsuit, especially considering it took a trip to the appeals court.

• The culprit here is Polk County Sheriff’s Deputy Anthony Burgess (presumably no relation except for the ultraviolence). Burgess works for Techdirt favorite Sheriff Grady Judd, a man who’s more showboat than sheriff and who has frequently mistaken his Florida office for an episode of “To Catch a Predator.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• So says Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, who gave the keynote address at the (somewhat infamous) Black Hat security conference today. Once, techno-utopians could say things like “The Internet treats censorship as damag e and routes around it” with a straight face. Today, though, the ongoing centralization of the Internet in the name of security and convenience “increasingly facilitates surveillance, censorship, and control,” to quote Granick again.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Last week, as you might have heard, negotiators on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement gathered in Maui to try to finalize the agreement. Many believed that negotiators would more or less finish things up in that meeting. Earlier reports had suggested that everyone was “weeks away” from finishing, and many had said that the only thing holding back a final agreement was fast track authority (officially “trade promotion authority”) from the US government to make sure that the USTR could negotiate an agreement without further interference from Congress. And, as you’ll recall, Congress voted in favor of fast track after a long fight.

Copyrights

• Adult movie studio Malibu Media has asked the Indiana federal court to ban negative terms during an upcoming trial against an alleged BitTorrent pirate. According to the copyright troll, descriptions such as “copyright troll,” “pornographer” and “porn purveyor” could influence the jury.

• The RIAA has asked uTorrent creator BitTorrent Inc. to come up with ways to stop infringement of its members’ copyrighted content. In a letter sent to BitTorrent Inc’s CEO, the RIAA’s Executive Vice President of Anti-Piracy points to BitTorrent’s DHT system and asks the San Francisco-based company to live up to its claim of not endorsing piracy.

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