● 08.11.15

● Links 11/8/2015: Linux 4.2 RC 6, 4.1.5, 3.14.50, and 3.10.86

Posted in News Roundup at 8:15 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux has gotten a lot of attention over the last ten years, but certain outdated myths still persist about it. TechRepublic has a list of these myths and explains why they simply aren’t true.

Desktop

• More exciting, however, is that Linux-based operating systems are optional as well. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu can be configured to meet your needs.

• There was no mistaking the ire in his voice. I pushed him to tell me what he didn’t consider junk. Instead he began walking down the west wall of the shop, pointing repeatedly at desktop after desktop. “Some of these machines are six years old. How are you ‘helping’ anyone by giving them these pieces of garbage?”

• The good host was completely gone from me now. All that remained was a dangerous anger I knew I had to control. I asked him just what kind of computers or laptops did he not consider to be junk. I asked him just where I was supposed to get computers that met his approval. I reminded him that we lived and died by the computers businesses and individuals donated, and that we upgraded every computer to its maximum potential before it left our facility.

Kernel Space

• So last week I wasn’t very happy about the state of the release candidates, but things are looking up. Not only is rc6 finally shrinking noticeably, the issues I was worried about had fixes come in early in the week, and so I don’t have anything big pending. Assuming nothing new comes up, I suspect we will end up with the regular release schedule after all (ie in two weeks). Knock wood.

• In -rc6 , the diffstat looks a bit odd, in that the ARC arch updates dominate (at around 30% of the diffs). That’s partly because the rest is pretty small, and partly because the llock/scond livelock fix wasn’t tiny. But I don’t find it in myself to worry about it.

• Apart from that ARC oddity, things look normal. Mostly drivers (gpu, sound, i2c, input, usb, thermal, you name it) and other architecture updates (mips and sparc). With some filesystem and VM fixes rounding up the changes.

• But please go out and test, and make sure all the issues really are solved. Ok?

• Linus

• Linus Torvalds just announced a few moments ago that Linux kernel 4.2 RC6 is now out and ready for testing. It’s a much calmer release, and it looks like the cycle is calming down.

• Ubuntu was the first Linux distribution I installed. During one of our operating system classes, the faculty taught us the steps for compiling a Linux kernel. The idea fascinated me, and I thought of giving it a try. It was my first attempt at kernel compilation.

Graphics Stack

• With The Khronos Group not declaring a new OpenGL version with the arrival of these new extensions, NVIDIA is calling this the “OpenGL 2015″ driver for the new ARB extensions. This new driver also supports the brand new OpenGL ES 3.2 specifications. The updated NVIDIA Linux beta is versioned 350.00.05 and supports the GeForce 400 “Fermi” GPUs and newer.

• The maintainer of AMD’s HSA Linux kernel driver (AMDKFD) and Pixman is now focusing his work on enabling and optimizing the Linux graphics stack for PowerPC 64-bit LE.

• The PowerPC 64-bit Little-Endian mode, as used by POWER8 and the focus of OpenPOWER, is what’s the focus for open-source Linux graphics stack improvements. The AMDKFD and Pixman maintainer, Oded Gabbay, is working on these improvements at Red Hat.

• In my last post, I mentioned that libvpx had rate control issues; or more accurately, that libvpx as used by VLC (through FFmpeg) had. Seemingly that was actually fixed a while ago by Ilkka Ollakka; VLC now (well, since late 2013) automatically sets half a second VBV by default. I normally use one, but half a second is totally fine, too, and it will keep the bitrate use from spiraling out of control when you switch from e.g. a static slide to a fade.

• There is indeed the support in place with the latest Git of the open-source AMD Linux driver code.

Applications

• And here we go again! We’re proud to announce the new version of Smuxi, release 1.0 “Finally”. During the development, 20 bug reports and 10 feature requests in 285 commits were worked on.

• As you may know, Phototonic is an image viewer and organizer for Linux systems, created in Qt and C++.

Proprietary

• Reuters is reporting tonight that since Opera missed their Q2 revenue forecasts and cut their full-year guidance, they’re now considering a sale of the company. A strategic review of the situation is expected to conclude by the end of the year. There’s supposedly interest in Opera from “a number of parties.”

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Invisible, Inc., a turn-based strategy game developed and published on Steam for Linux by Klei Entertainment, is now available at a 40% discount. The promotion will end in less than 12 hours.

• Dungeon Defenders II, an action tower defense game developed and published by Trendy Entertainment on Steam, will also get a Linux version.

• The newest game from Paradox Interactive is called Stellaris, and it is developed by the same team who also did the Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis series. Linux has been announced as a launch platform.

• In recent builds they have moved the save folder to conform to Linux standards (hooray!), improved performance, fixed lots of crashes and more. Remember you can see the changelog at any time here.

• It’s sad that it seems Valve aren’t supporting their Source Engine developers very well in some cases, and the Insurgency developers are going their own way to support us.

• Any website we track like GOG, Humble, GamersGate, Itch, GamesRepublic, ShinyLoot, Fireflower Games and IndieGameStand has feeds we use, but due to the mentioned issues above with character encodings, sometimes some sales may not appear.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Packages for the release of KDE’s desktop suite Plasma 5.3.2 and KDE’s Frameworks 5.12.0 are available for Kubuntu 15.04. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.

• Bugs in the packaging should be reported to kubuntu-ppa on Launchpad. Bugs in the software to KDE.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• It was a bit different from my usual ‘state of the union’ or ‘GTK+ roadmap’ presentations. Instead, I showed a selection of tips and tricks, things you perhaps didn’t know yet how to do with GTK+.

• Today, I want to seriously finish the works on preferences. I need to have a conversation with my mentor about how we solve that start of the day widget for time displaying, because it still makes me mad! And right after that, I’m turning to plugins, implementing it into the lovely preferences window, with some occasional turns back to editor or search, where I have some (yet!!!) unresolved issues which should be handled to provide GTG 0.4 with full stack of well-working features soon!

• I wanted to point everyone to Gina’s usability test results (part 1), as part of her internship with Outreachy. Gina has been working on a usability test of GNOME, and in this part of her analysis, Gina provides an overview of the usability test results: what went well, and where testers encountered difficulty.

• Clasen’s presentation covered scrollbar steppers, context menus on scrollbars, decorative overlays, custom spin buttons, discrete scales, markup in text views, and more.

Distributions

Reviews

• Zorin OS 10 Core feels solid, fast, responsive and powerful. I did not experience any crashes or lags when running it in the Live mode.

New Releases

• Because of the low system requrements Linux Lite can be installed and use perfectly without any issue with older hardware too. So if you want to try out Linux being on Windows you can dual boot Windows and Linux Lite or you can install it on your old pc or laptop.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Arch Family

• Manjaro 0.8.13 has received its eighth update, and it looks like developers have been quick to add some of the newest packages that landed in the previous week.

Red Hat Family

• The global chief information officer at Deutsche Bank, Kim Hammonds, has been named to Red Hat’s board of directors.

• The appointment of Hammonds, who also is co-head of group technology and operations at Deutsche Bank, was announced Monday by the Raleigh-based open source software company.

• The findings on the Internet of Things are particularly notable. IBM, in announcing its new $1 billion commitment to Apache Spark, also emphasized that it is focused on the Internet of Things, with enterprises in mind. As data and analytics are embedded into all kinds of objects and apps as part of the Internet of Things (IoT) push, IBM and Red Hat see enterprises gaining benefits.

Fedora

• DNF 1.1.0 was released today as the newest version of the Dandified Yum for package management on Fedora systems.

• DNF 1.1.0 brings support for the MIPS architecture, changes to RPM installation when running in the strict=0 mode, cosmetic improvements, documentation updates, and other changes.

• Fedora 23 Alpha is coming next week. Here’s a look at some of the new features to find with Fedora 23.

• We had a late-breaking problem with the cloud image and some drama with desktop wallpaper and with booting KDE on ARM, but the various groups involved in release logistics wrangled solutions and workarounds, so at today’s “Go/No-Go” meeting, we approved the Tuesday release. If you’re curious, see the meeting minutes for the process that Fedora goes through to make sure the release is ready.

Debian Family

• As you might have noticed, Debian sid is currently largely uninstallable, due to the GCC 5 transition, which also can be see in our reproducibility test setup. Please help!

Derivatives

• For those who are starving for some updates while the big gcc5 transitions brings the rest of Debian/sid to a halt, here is some fresh meat, a new TeX Live checkout. Nothing spectacular new here, just the usual big bunch of updates of and several new packages. Maybe worthwhile mentioning is that luasseq has been reincorporated into the TeX Live packages. Thanks to the maintainer for his work till now!

Canonical/Ubuntu

• BQ has finally made its Ubuntu smartphone available in the US — but the handset doesn’t have 4G LTE, and it also won’t be compatible with the 3G bands in use.

• A single Cinder vulnerability has been found and repaired in Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) and a new patch has been made available in the official repositories.

• The Ubuntu Touch operating system will arrive in India in a couple of week aboard the BQ Aquaris E4.5 and BQ Aquaris E5 phones.

• When a new version of Ubuntu is released, commercial packages in the software center must be thoroughly checked for compatibility issues (the major open-source packages in the repos are audited before the distro version is upgraded). This introduces a bottleneck, with some applications waiting for months before they can be included in the store.

• Plex Media Server, a piece of software that allows users to play movies and TV shows on the computer and to connect to devices like smart TVs or tablets, has been upgraded to version 0.9.12.8 and is available for download.

• The BQ Aquaris E4.5 and E5 with Ubuntu Phone will soon launch in India, likely later this month. These phones will be preloaded with the “vanilla” Ubuntu Phone but there will be an Indian-specific App Store and India-related Scopes.

Flavours and Variants

• ExTiX 15.3 64-bit, a distribution based on Ubuntu 15.04 that uses the LXQt desktop environment, has been officially released and is now ready for download and testing.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Tizen

• Are you a developer? Based in China? Who wants to learn more about coding for the Tizen Operating System (OS)? Great. Make sure you are available for the Tizen Devlab that is coming to Shenzhen, China, on Saturday, August 22, 2015 between 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. The locations of the event will be the Shenzhen Langham Hotel (Shenzhen East Langham Hotels), Futian District, Shenzhen Shennan Road No. 7888 (Agriculture Xuan Hong Lin Road and Road intersection), Shenzhen.

Android

• BlackBerry will likely release its first-ever Android phone later this year and now CrackBerry has posted some new leaked photos of the new device. Among other things, it looks like the new phone will feature an Android version of the BlackBerry Hub messaging center and an 18-megapixel camera.

• Rumors have been swirling about an Android-powered BlackBerry for months, and now we may have our first look at it.

• Google is planning a major reset of Android One in India as well as a massive investment in coming years to boost connectivity in the country.

• A recent SMS vulnerability affects millions of Android smartphones. Jack Wallen explains the flaw and offers up a temporary (although not perfect) solution.

• Over the weekend, owners of the One M8 learned some frustrating news, as HTC’s Mo Versi tweeted that the Sense 7 update will be tied directly to the release of Android M. Back in April, HTC UK declared on Twitter that Sense 7 would roll out in August.

• “In a nutshell, advanced attackers could exploit this arbitrary code execution vulnerability to give a malicious app with no privileges the ability to become a “super app” and help the cybercriminals own the device,” said Or Peles, security researcher at IBM’s X-Force application security research team.

• Smartphone security called into question by researchers who discovered fingerprint data and sensors are often ‘world readable’ and easy to hack

• Following the popular Apple Pay and the recently introduced Samsung Pay, there soon will be an Android Pay. Meanwhile, LG’s Nexus 5 (2015), which is believed to be the successor to Nexus 6, is the talk of the industry. An earlier report pointed to an advanced fingerprint sensor on the upcoming device; now a new report from Korea says Google will introduce Android Pay alongside the Nexus 5 (2015).

• Despite BlackBerry indicating that it has no plans to build a device that runs on Android, some hoped for an about-face abrupt enough to see the popular operating system arrive on the Silver edition of the BlackBerry Passport. That didn’t happen, but a YouTuber is claiming to have loaded the Android OS on the recently launched BlackBerry Passport Silver Edition.

• A couple of months ago, Google created a visualization tool to understand how neural networks operate. It also open sourced the code for the Deep Dream project, allowing users to run images and video through it to get some interesting results.

• Almost a year after the release of Google’s latest Android software version, Android Lollipop has received a small bump in the number of consumer devices that have actually got it.

• A report from Google shows that the install base of devices running either Lollipop 5.0 or 5.1 has risen to 18.1%, a reasonable increase from the 12.4% share seen in reports this June.

• As before, we can make out a new curved display design that bears a striking resemblance to the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. Samsung may been keen to sell its AMOLED technology to other parties, but it is also possible that LG could be providing the display. A similar looking LG prototype display was spotted behind closed doors earlier this year.

• But neither one of these two phones was the first Android flip phone. That honor goes to the Sharp Aquos 007SH, which was launched in mid-2011 in Japan, costing the equivalent of $490. And for this amount of money, one got way more than a satisfying slap when hanging up on people. The phone had a 3.4-inch LCD display with 480 by 854 pixels of resolution and, picture this, support for glass-free 3D. In addition, there was a 0.7-inch OLED display on the outer side of the flip. Telling the time and displaying notifications were its jobs. On the back of the Aquos 007SH resided a whopping 16MP camera (remember, this was in 2011) with a CCD sensor. One also got a digital TV tuner, GPS, water-resistance, and Android 2.3 out of the box. Not bad of a package, don’t you think?

• News broke last week that Apple, Inc. was advertising for an applications SW engineer to work on Android apps, but given Apple’s reluctance previously to provide apps for the rival Android platform, has Apple finally realized that it can’t really on users of the iPhone to cross-sell its other products, such as the Apple Watch?

• According to the job listing, Apple is “looking for engineers to help [Apple] bring exciting new mobile products to the Android platform,” with, as 9to5Mac pointed out at the time, new being the only giveaway that Apple was planning to extend its range of Android apps from its current Move to iOS app and forthcoming release of Apple Music for Android.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Sailfish is a Linux-based operating system with an emphasis on gesture-based navigation (there are no physical navigation buttons), and support for both native apps and some Android apps.

Free Software/Open Source

• Pixar Animation Studios has announced that its proprietary Universal Screen Description (USD) software will be going open source by Summer 2016, providing computer animation studios with an incredibly powerful tool to manage scenes in large scale projects.

• In my experience (I was an open source community manager for several years and am deeply embedded in the community of people who do open source outreach), getting people into the funnel for your project as first-time contributors is a reasonably well-solved problem, i.e., we know what works. Showing up at OpenHatch events, making sure the bugs in the bug tracker are well-specified, setting up a “good for first-timers” task tag and/or webpage and keeping it updated, personally inviting people who have reported bugs to help you solve them, etc. If you can invest several months of one-on-one or two-on-one mentorship time, participate in Google Summer of Code and/or Outreachy internship programs. If you want to start with something that’s quantitative and gamified, consider using Google Code-In as a scaffold to help you develop the rest of these practices.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• It has been six weeks since the release of Firefox 39 and today Firefox 40 was pushed to the FTP servers and will roll out to users on August 11. Below is a compiled list of everything new you can expect to see in the release.

• Mozilla on Friday released security updates to fix a zero-day flaw in the Firefox browser. An exploit that searches for sensitive files and uploads them to a server — possibly somewhere in Ukraine — has surfaced in an ad on a Russian news site, Mozilla reported last week. The exploit impacts Windows and Linux users. Mac users could be hit by a modified version. The vulnerability stems from the interaction of Firefox’s PDF Viewer and the mechanism that enforces JavaScript context separation — the “same origin” policy, Mozilla said.

SaaS/Big Data

• Frank Karlitschek is a free software developer and privacy activist. He’ll be speaking at LinuxCon North America in August of this year. His topic, “Open source, safe and secure; A case for leaving data where it is,” is very timely given the rash of data breaches we’ve witnessed lately.

• Indeed, modularity is a hallmark of many open source platforms, ranging from Hadoop to Drupal to OpenStack, but it can introduce significant complexity.

Databases

• Still, the IT industry harbors misconceptions about how open-source software works, its performance, its benefits and its ROI. eWEEK, with input from open-source PostgreSQL database specialist EnterpriseDB, helps debunk some of the most common open-source database myths, including those about its costs and capabilities.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• For the past several months Caolán McNamara has been leading the charge for adding GTK3 tool-kit support to LibreOffice. With the new LibreOffice 5.0 that initial GTK3 support is in place that also brings initial Wayland support for this open-source office suite.

Business

• For small-to-medium-sized businesses, establishing an online presence to sell products or services is an absolute must to stay competitive in today’s (and tomorrow’s) marketplace.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Project Releases

• Once a ‘final’ version is released some new bugs and/or problems usually appear out of nowhere, and last release was no exception. Even though tens of thousands of users were already testing the 15.0 version before release, as soon as million started using it, some problems we either did not think of or which we did not notice popped up. To counter some of these new issues, we’re bringing you this maintenance release candidate called 15.1 RC1 which has some additional fixes on top of the 15.0 release.

Public Services/Government

• Change management is the key to successfully replacing proprietary software by free and open source alternatives, says Eric Ficheux, IT project manager working for the administration of Nantes. In 2013, France’s sixth largest city began switching to LibreOffice, replacing a proprietary suite of office productivity tools. “Any organisation considering a similar switch should brush up on change management.”

• Yes. Replacing a non-Free office suite with LibreOffice makes sense. It’s FLOSS. You can run, examine, modify and distribute the software under the accompanying licence. There’s no need to budget for licensing. There’s no contract. There’s no dependency on someone out to get you. LibreOffice is a cooperative product of the world, not enslavement/lock-in/a burden indefinitely. It’s easy too. After all, LibreOffice is descended from StarOffice and OpenOffice.org designed from the beginning to be easy to use even for those familiar with M$’s product.

Openness/Sharing

• Around the world, young people are turning to farming and the food sector as viable career options. However, the next generation of food system leaders often lacks access to the latest data and technologies that are vital to the success of farm businesses. Projects such as Open Ag Toolkit (OpenATK), a new platform for managing agricultural tasks, and FarmBot, an open-source community for small-scale precision farming, are working to democratize innovations in agriculture by improving data transfer and small-scale technologies through open-source models.

Open Hardware

• Capable of monitoring Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), basic particulate matter, carbon dioxide, temperature and humidity, it takes care of the basic metrics to measure the air quality of a room.

Programming

• That’s right, boys and girls, a compiler with a bigger resident size than Firefox. Three times bigger.

Leftovers

Science

• According to the U.S. Department of Labor, only 26% of people employed in computer and mathematical occupations are women. While that figure may be staggering, I don’t believe the way to fix it is by simply hiring more women. A meritocracy requires that the most qualified candidates are selected for positions in every industry, regardless of gender. But we can level the IT industry’s playing field by educating young women and girls about potential career possibilities.

Health/Nutrition

• Last week, we wrote that among the final obstacles to completing the TPP agreement was the issue of enhanced protection for drugs. More specifically, the fight is over an important new class of medicines called “biologics,” which are produced from living organisms, and tend to be more complex and expensive to devise. The Conversation has a good feature looking at this issue in more detail.

• [...]

• As that makes clear, data exclusivity is a kind of super-patent in that it can’t be challenged or revoked: if a drug company has run clinical trials to establish the safety of its new drug, it has an absolute and irrevocable monopoly on the use of that data — for five years in the case of Australia, Chile, Singapore and New Zealand. This is obviously an incredibly powerful form of monopoly, so perhaps it’s no surprise that US pharmaceutical companies want TPP to require signatories to grant an even longer period — 12 years of data exclusivity — for biologics.

• That’s useful for them, because even after drug patents have expired, and generic manufacturers can theoretically offer the same products without paying licensing fees, there remains the barrier of clinical testing. If the generic manufacturers can’t point to the original clinical trials as proof that the drug is safe, they will need to carry out their own, which will take time and cost money. In practice, they are more likely to wait until the period of data exclusivity is over, effectively extending the original manufacturer’s monopoly beyond that provided by patents alone.

Security

• A pair of researchers from Trend Micro set up honeypots to look at what kind of attacks are targeting gasoline pumps and related technology.

• They added that the servers, used by 4,000 government workers, were shut down in response, but that no classified information was seized or compromised during the attack.

• Does this mean you should go out and buy a new car? Probably not. Now that the technology is readily accessible, I suspect manufacturers will try their damnedest to get workarounds and improvements onto the market in order to prevent the inevitable class-action lawsuits that will result.

• Cryptolocker comes in a number of versions, the latest capitalising on the release of Windows 10.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• On 9 August 1945, between 40,000 to 80,000 people were killed in the nuclear explosion that left much Nagasaki entirely pulverised.

• New reports coming out of ISIS territory suggest that they have carried out a mass execution of 300 former employees of the Iraqi Supreme Electoral Commission, with ISIS accusing them of being “infidels.” Some 50 of the slain were reported to be women.

• It’s no surprise that David Cameron’s five year plan to deal with Islamic extremism at home pins all the blame on the Muslim community.

Transparency Reporting

• Swedish prosecutors’ plan to question WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at Ecuador’s embassy in London has stalled as Ecuador has demanded Sweden give him asylum as a condition of the meeting, a Swedish official said on Friday.

• “You can’t give anyone asylum at another country’s embassy, that’s against international law,” Cecilia Riddselius at the Justice Department said. “If he wants asylum he has to come to Sweden.”

• The Private Sector Council was established in 2013 to engage businesses and entrepreneurs in promoting open governance, economic growth, and local innovations. The Council forms a group external to the OGP and coordinates private sector participation in OGP.

Finance

• Conservative economics wrecks lives and destroys people: Just look at the impact of brutal UK austerity policies

• That’s because being poor comes with an unexpected plethora of bizarre side effects, like an intricate chain of dominoes that fall to form a giant dick-shaped torpedo aimed straight at your mental and physical well-being. For instance …

• The Russians had mined the cinnabar for mercury but the pit had lain abandoned for some time. I was there with a dozen other environmentalists in a training workshop to identify polluted sites. This place certainly qualified. High levels of mercury had been found in the soil of a nearby village; we were there to assess the risk. My biggest concern at the moment, however, was keeping myself from slipping on the icy edge of the mine and falling in. One glance was enough to tell me it was a long way down, and dark.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• In order to counter what it delicately called “Russian messaging,” the US State Department has announced a $500,000 grant to a non-profit that offers an “innovative” journalist training program for “credible” news reporting in the Baltic states.

• Washington has announced, via its embassy in Lithuania, that public and private non-profit organizations have until the end of August to apply for the grant entitled “Investigative Journalism Training to Counter Russian Messaging in the Baltics.”

• The program offers financial aid for the training of early-career Russian-language journalists in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia so they can become providers of a “fact based and credible” take on world events.

• BuzzFeed News reported that Breitbart.com may be accepting “financial backing” from GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump in exchange for “fawning headlines,” according to sources inside the conservative outlet.

Privacy

• The National Informatics Centre, software solution provider of the government, has withheld information on who altered the Wikipedia page of former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and posted scandalous information about him on the grounds it may have “security implications”.

• Call for greater penalties as examples include child protection files left on train, worker using CCTV to watch a wedding and another digging into benefit claims

• He was fully aware of his statement’s implications.

• “I found myself wishing that my life would be constantly and completely monitored,” he continued. “It might seem odd that a self-professed libertarian would wish an Orwellian dystopia on himself, but here was my rationale: If people knew a few things about me, I might seem suspicious. But if people knew everything about me, they’d see they had nothing to fear. This is the attitude I have brought to SIGINT work since then.”

• When intelligence officials justify surveillance, they tend to use the stilted language of national security, and we typically hear only from senior officials who stick to their platitudes. It is rare for mid-level experts — the ones conducting the actual surveillance — to frankly explain what they do and why. And in this case, the candid confessions come from the NSA’s own surveillance philosopher. The columns answer a sociological curiosity: How does working at an intelligence agency turn a privacy hawk into a prophet of eavesdropping?

Civil Rights

• Did you hear the one about the cops not wanting to use a store’s surveillance tape to help solve a crime?

• Who could blame these Santa Ana cops? Video shows them smashing surveillance cameras, badmouthing a woman in a wheelchair, and perhaps even munching on marijuana-infused products after they stormed a medical marijuana shop in Southern California, which was being investigated for allegedly operating unlawfully in the city.

• Three of the unidentified cops are demanding that a judge block the police department from using the tapes against them as the department investigates the officers’ conduct during the May raid. The cops at the center of the investigation say the Sky High Medical Marijuana Dispensary illegally recorded them because the officers believed they had disabled all the store’s cameras and therefore had an expectation of privacy “that their conversations were no longer being recorded,” according to the cops’ Aug. 5 lawsuit. (PDF) The suit says the tapes were also “edited” and cannot be relied upon.

• The death of an unarmed white teenager who was shot by a white police officer in South Carolina has sparked a debate as to why the incident has not generated the same outrage as the deaths of other unarmed black Americans.

• Zachary Hammond, 19, was on a date with Tori Morton, 23, when he was shot twice in the back by a police officer last month.

• Mother Jones obtained more than 450 police department requests for armored tactical vehicles from the Pentagon. Did your police force request one? Browse all of them here.

• One year ago this week, hundreds of camouflaged officers in Ferguson, Missouri bore down on residents protesting the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown.

• A University alumnus was removed from his position as ethics director of the American Psychological Association last month after an independent review alleged that he collaborated with the Department of Defense to enable torture.

• German prosecutors have dropped a much-criticised treason investigation into two journalists who reported on secret plans to expand online surveillance in the country.

• Prosecutors notified Netzpolitik.org in July that its founder, Markus Beckedahl, and fellow journalist Andre Meister were under investigation, triggering widespread criticism from free-speech advocates. The website specialises in coverage of online privacy and digital culture.

• U.S. prosecutors want Ali Charaf Damache in the worst way.

• An Irish resident originally from Algiers, Damache, 50, is accused of using online chat rooms to recruit American women into a would-be terrorist cell operating in this country and Europe.

• One man and two women, including Damache’s wife, have already been convicted in U.S. courts of providing material support to terrorists. And Damache was captured by Irish authorities in 2010 in Dublin on a separate charge of making a telephone death threat and held without bail.

• A renewed push by the White House to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has been bogged down by an internal disagreement over its most controversial provision — where to house detainees who will be brought to the United States for trial or indefinite detention, according to U.S. officials.

• The Defense Department expects to present a plan to close Guantanamo Bay to lawmakers after the August recess, a spokesman said on Monday.

• Defenders of press freedom have accused the Pentagon of endangering journalists with new legal guidelines that liken war correspondents to spies and say they can be treated as “unprivileged belligerents” in some circumstances.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• This misconception owes to mobile carriers’ longstanding practice of offering discounts on phones for customers who agree to a two-year contract. For years, the deal was generally this: You go to a company like Verizon or AT&T, you sign some paperwork locking yourself into 24 months of wireless service, and Verizon or AT&T gives you a shiny new phone at a subsidized price—or even free, if you opt for less than the very best hardware.

• Rosanne Siino finds it amusing when students interrupt one of her lectures at Stanford University to ask: “So, what is Netscape?”

• “Wow, how long has it been?” Siino, one of the first hires at Netscape, recalls telling a student. “Boy, you have no idea how much the world changed just before you were born.”

• It was 20 years ago today that Netscape went public, setting off what we now know as the first dot-com boom.

• We’re in the runup to the 20th anniversary of the “Netscape Moment” of 1995, the day when a California startup’s eye-popping market debut illuminated the World Wide Web for millions of people otherwise only vaguely familiar with its potential and promise.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• “Jay Z spent $100 million of his own money to build his own service. We have to show support for artists who are trying to own things for themselves,” singer says of joining Tidal

• Two days after Prince announced that he would release his new album HitNRun exclusively to Tidal, the singer revealed the reason he is sidestepping a record label and offering the LP directly through Jay Z’s streaming service. “Record contracts are just like — I’m gonna say the word – slavery,” Prince said. “I would tell any young artist… don’t sign.”

• In its ongoing war against online piracy, the MPAA is currently hoping to recruit a software developer. The Hollywood group is looking for savvy candidates who can help develop data gathering tools for enforcement purposes and to monitor, investigate and report on copyright infringement.

• Several users of popular porn streaming site Pornhub have received settlement demands for thousands of dollars after uploading videos to the site without obtaining permission. How the users are being tracked down by the copyright troll involved remains somewhat of a mystery, but several theories persist.

• Hollywood studio Warner Bros. and the Tolkien Estate are cracking down on a British couple building a “Hobbit house” campsite. The pair are being forced to change the project’s name and remove all Hobbit references from their Kickstarter campaign. According to Tolkien’s lawyers even words that rhyme with Hobbit are not permitted.

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