● 08.13.15

● Links 13/8/2015: KDE Frameworks 5.13.0, Red Hat Satellite 6.1

Posted in News Roundup at 4:22 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• We’re looking for someone who is both a great writer and knows their way around a Linux distro, along with the ability to write a bit of code and use a Raspberry Pi. Not only will you be tasked with writing articles for the magazine and website, you’ll also be able to pitch your own features for every part of the magazine that could make it to the cover.

Desktop

• Windows 10 is out, and everyone is talking about it. It’s clear that Microsoft did something right for a change and that the latest version of the OS is better than the previous releases. This is actually a good thing.

• Libreboot support makes the C201 a fairly free-software-friendly device plus that it uses Google’s embedded controller that’s backed by free software. One hairy part about this device is the Broadcom BCM4354 for WiFi and Bluetooth does require a proprietary firmware module in its open-source driver.

• Chromebooks and Chromeboxes have done very well in terms of sales at Amazon and other retailers. But what about Chrome OS itself? Google has made some changes to it over the years and one redditor is wondering if Chrome OS has become ugly.

• The $64,000 question is the operating system. The ThinkPad P Series comes with Windows 10, of course, but Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux are also available.

Kernel Space

• The Ubuntu Kernel Team is still preparing to land Linux 4.2 within Ubuntu 15.10 “Wily Werewolf” for its release in October.

• There are many new features to Linux 4.2 and the Ubuntu Kernel Team has been working to get their packages into shape so it can be incorporated into Ubuntu 15.10.

• Online retailer and cloud computing provider Alibaba has joined the Linux Foundation as a silver member, and its cloud computing subsidiary, Aliyun, is a new Advisory Board member of the open-source Xen hypervisor, which is hosted at the Linux Foundation.

• I spend a lot of my day working on framework software for other programs to use. I enjoy this plumbing, and Red Hat gives me all the time I need to properly design and build these tricky infrastructure-type projects. Sometimes, just one person isn’t enough.

Applications

• In my discussion on IRC with “bkidwell” (see the Non-Linux FOSS article for more on our talk), we were discussing how we connect to IRC. My main method is to SSH in to my co-located Raspberry Pi in Austria and connect to a screen session I have running that is constantly connected to IRC with Irssi. This works really well for me, and I never miss messages when I’m away. The big problem I have is occasionally I’m away from a laptop, and so I can’t efficiently use the terminal to chat. It might be technically possible to IRC chat via an SSH app on my phone, but it would mean super-tiny text and awkward keyboard shortcuts.

• The open-source container technology now benefits from technology that can digitally sign and verify application containers.

• Server and cloud developers love Docker and containers, but they’re also more than a little worried about container security. Now, in its latest release, Docker 1.8, Docker is tackling the problem head on with Docker Content Trust (DCT).

Instructionals/Technical

• I’ve started to use Pocket a few months ago to store my backlog of things to read. It’s especially useful as I can use it to read content offline since we still don’t have any Internet access in places such as airplanes or the Paris metro. It’s only 2015 after all.

• [...]

• Yesterday, I thought about that and decided to start hacking on it. LWN provides a feature called “Subscriber Link” that allows you to share an article with a friend. I managed to use that feature to share the articles with my friend… Pocket!

• As doing that every week is tedious, I wrote a small Python program called lwn2pocket that I published on GitHub. Feel free to use it, hack it and send pull requests.

Games

• While the game came out back in May of 2011 on PC, it has since been ported to almost every other platform imaginable, including Playstation 3, Playstation 4, PS Vita, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and finally iOS and Android.

• Good news VR fans, it seems the HTC Vive plans to have Linux/SteamOS support included for day 1 at release.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Frameworks 5.13.0 has just been released by the KDE Community, and developers have made a large number of changes and improvements.

• As retrofitting high DPI support into such a large range of both KDE and third party applications is risky to do without breakage, progress is deliberately slow and gradual in order to do this right.

• It’s actually a little more complicated than that. I started to work on the KF5 port of KSnapshot (EDIT: no, contrary to what Phoronix claims this port is not my work; I simply wanted to fix anything that needed fixing) sometime in early March this year, before I realised that the codebase, while perfectly in order for being a X11-only screenshot taker for KDE (yes, KSnapshot actually has a complete and fairly decent KF5 port in its frameworks branch on KDE Git), was in need of a major overhaul if we were going to get proper Wayland support in.

• It has been one month exactly, since my previous update. This was due to opening fall semester of my college on mid-July, then went to participate at hackIndia, where we developed Corazon, Corazon-backend and at last conducted Mozilla Marketplace Day.

• Now you might say we already have KNotifications, that’s right. KNotifications is awesome if you are a KDE application and running in a Plasma setup. Snorenotify aims at providing less features than KNotifications but also at being standalone and being directly integrated in an application.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• I was lucky enough to get a chance to interview Colin and find out more about his upcoming LinuxCon talk, what he hopes his audience will gain from attending, and his fresh, diverse viewpoint on disability—as well as why accessibility is actually an integral part of the open source community.

• [...]

• Part of accomplishing this is about having a good design, but it would be silly to have to implement text to speech conversion, alternative controls, screen magnification, etc. in every application you build. Luckily there are accessibility APIs that can facilitate communication between your application and assistive technologies that provide those additional functions. The people working on GNOME created open accessibility APIs (ATK and AT-SPI) to facilitate that communication and to give an open source friendly alternative to the APIs created by Microsoft and Apple. Though you can implement the calls to and from those APIs yourself, QT and GTK+ both implement them with all the widgets they provide, so if you are working within one of those frameworks a lot of work has been done for you.

• This Saturday the GNOME Project celebrates its 18th birthday, over the years it has gone from being the top dog in desktop environment land to seeing a slump in usage after launching GNOME 3 (although this has somewhat recovered now), its usage share has also not been helped with the two most popular Linux distros, Ubuntu and Linux Mint, shifting to Unity and Cinnamon respectively.

• This is a great chance to tell the world why you love GNOME, inspire others to give it a try, give back to the community, and just wish GNOME a happy birthday.

Distributions

Reviews

• The antiX distribution is a lightweight operating system based on Debian. The latest release was put together using packages from Debian 8 “Jessie” and ships with SysV init software instead of systemd. The latest release, antiX 15, is available in three editions: Core-libre (233MB), Base (582MB) and Full (686MB). There are 32-bit and 64-bit x86 builds of each edition. The antiX wiki tells us that the Core edition ships with virtually no software pre-selected for us, allowing us to customize the operating system to our needs. The Base edition is for older computers, like Pentium II and Pentium III machines, while the Full edition is for more modern computers and people who want a complete desktop experience. I opted to download antiX’s Full edition.

New Releases

• Kali Linux 2.0 is released on today (August 11, 2014 EST). I downloaded 64-bit full version and installed it on VirtualBox 5.0. The host computer has Intel Celeron(R) CPU N2930 @ 1.83GHz × 4 and 8 GB RAM. I assigned 5 GB RAM to Kali Linux 2.0. It is quite slow for it to run with 5GB RAM on my VirtualBox 5.0. Meanwhile, the sound always mute on every start up even you have set it before.

• Kali, formerly known as BackTrack Linux, has long been one of the most popular security focused Linux distributions. Kali Linux is Debian based and now with Kali LInux 2.0 it’s moving to Debian Jessie as a base for a rolling distribution.

• The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.2.3 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

• This is a bugfix release of the v3.2 musl based branch. This release is based on the 3.18.20 kernel which has some critical security fixes.

Arch Family

• Manjaro GNOME, a Linux distribution based on Arch Linux and fully compatible with the Arch repositories, has been finally upgraded to version 0.8.13.1 and is now ready for download.

Ballnux/SUSE

• SUSE may not get the headlines, but it’s still a major Linux server power. That’s why the news that SUSE is enabling its customers to use its SUSE Manager in the public cloud via SUSE’s “bring-your-own-subscription” program is a big deal.

• As a preview of next week’s LinuxCon in Seattle, we asked keynote speaker Michael Miller of SUSE to answer some questions about openness in IT infrastructure and what it means for Linux and SUSE.

• For more from Michael Miller, check out his keynote presentation at LinuxCon, “Open Source Code: It’s in our DNA,” in which he will talk about open source, the progress that has been made, and why now is the perfect time to be building the future of open source together.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Satellite 6.1 is Red Hat’s systems management solution for managing Red Hat servers and services. It’s not been that long since Red Hat Satellite 6.0 appeared — in September 2014. But, Red Hat’s push into the cloud, DevOps, and containers combined to make the need for an update urgent.

• The CEO of Tesora, whose new round of funding totals $5.8 million, explains where containers will play a role in the future of cloud databases. Cloud database-as-a-service (DBaaS) vendor Tesora today announced that it has completed a new round of funding, bringing in $5.8 million. The new round included the participation of Red Hat, Rho Canada Ventures, and existing investors General Catalyst and Point Judith Capital. Total funding to date for Tesora now stands at $14.5 million.

• Coming almost a year after the original product’s launch, Satellite 6.1 will extend the service’s core capabilities to container deployments, which isolates software to maintain performance across different environments and to protect data.

• Thinking about all the current and future employees who join Red Hat directly out of school is exciting. By starting their careers at Red Hat, they will hopefully avoid some of the corporate frustrations I experienced throughout my 20s. They will understand the power of intentional corporate culture, transparency, and open communication. Their careers will be rooted in a non-traditional understanding of corporate organization. As they become the future leaders at Red Hat and elsewhere they will bring this perspective with them. The Henry Ford era of management philosophy may finally begin to change.

Fedora

• The Free Software Foundation today announced their 30th birthday party to take place in Boston, Massachusetts in October. Also celebrating is GNOME, who turns 18 this Saturday, August 15. Elsewhere, Kali Linux 2.0 was announced, but one early review says it’s not ready. Fedora 23 Alpha arrived yesterday as well bringing “wide changes” and Italo Vignoli looks at the numbers from LibreOffice 5.0 a week after its announcement.

• For now, Chromium is not added to the default Fedora repositories because it does not respect the distro’s policy about bundling of system libraries, but some developers are already working towards achieving this. The issue is caused by the fact that Chromium depends on its own libraries and FFmpeg, which is also absent from the repos.

• Fedora 23 is scheduled for a release at the end of the October. Among many other improvements, this release will include new version of NetworkManager, the service that manages network connectivity.

• Fedora 23 final is not due until the end of October but today the project released the Alpha build for early adopters and developers to test out. This release will be succeeded by a Beta release next month which will ship with patches for bugs found in the Alpha, the Beta will also be code complete and resemble what a user will find in the final release.

• Fedora 23 development is moving on and the time to release is not long anymore, so it is time to open the submission phase for Fedora 23 Supplemental Wallpapers.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Ubufox package has been upgraded by Canonical for the Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

• BQ has created an Ubuntu global store where people from around the world can buy an Aquaris Ubuntu Edition handset.

• This follows the successful European launches of the BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition and it’s slightly larger brother, the BQ Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition.

• The Ubuntu developers have set up a dedicated PPA for proprietary drivers, and for now, only the Nvidia video cards are supported. This is a great step forward made by Canonical, but a lot more work needs to be done.

• The Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) development cycle is powering on and it looks like Canonical is determined to have Linux kernel 4.2 available as soon as possible.

Flavours and Variants

• Bodhi Linux has had some hard times a period, when the main developer has dropped the project, but he came back and things got returned to normal.

• Bodhi is an operating system based on Linux that uses a new desktop environment named Moksha. Bodhi Linux 3.1.0 is the first release in the series to use Moksha.

Devices/Embedded

• The Raspberry Pi crew is looking to add a firmware driver for their hardware to the Linux 4.3 kernel.

• The Raspberry Pi firmware driver is needed for communicating with the VPU, which in turn has exclusive control of some peripherals. It was Eric Anholt that sent out this RPi firmware driver per this mailing list post.

• This Raspberry Pi DRM/KMS driver makes use of the RPi firmware driver and why hours ago it looked like the new driver was on approach, and now it’s panned out with the latest mailing list activity. However, for easing review, Eric posted just the basic VC4 DRM driver support that brings up frame-buffer console support over KMS and utilizes the xf86-video-modesetting driver on X.Org.

• As we continue to see how Artificial Intelligence can make our lives easier including everything from natural language processing to self-driving cars, it was only a matter of time before the technology broke out of the private domain of large companies and into the world of open source.

• Aaeon’s rugged “FWS-2260″ network appliance runs Yocto Linux on a 14nm Intel “Braswell” SoC and has six GbE ports, SATA and CFast, and dual mini-PCIe slots.

Phones

Android

• Hardkernel’s Odroid project is shipping a replacement for its community-backed Odroid-C1 single-board computer, which debuted last December, and came in fourth place in this June’s LinuxGizmos/Linux.com Linux/Android SBC reader survey out of a field of 53. According to the project, the $37 C1+ “replaced” the original $35 C1 as of July, and the original cases and heatsink will not work with the C1+. Otherwise, processor, memory, and other details are the same, including the 40-pin GPIO connector, which is said to be compatible with later generation Raspberry Pi SBCs.

• Android was created as an open and flexible platform, giving people more ways to come together to imagine and create. This spirit of invention has allowed developers to push the boundaries of mobile development and has helped make Android the go-to platform for creative projects in more places—from phones, to tablets, to watches, and beyond. We set out to find a way to celebrate the creative, experimental Android work of developers everywhere and inspire more developers to get creative with technology and code.

• Android Wear owners will gain several new features in a future firmware update, including interactive watch faces, an updated Weather app and a way to share information with others who have an Android Wear watch.

• Google is rolling out new Android 5.1.1 builds to its Nexus devices and the Nexus 5 is on the list. With an OTA underway, we want to take a look at the most important things to know about this new August Nexus 5 Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update and its release.

• At a time when even a company the size of Microsoft cannot succeed in the smartphone market, a new company called Nextbit thinks it can join Apple and Samsung at the top table. Headed by former HTC and Google staff, it has a secret weapon in the form of a phone that it says will get better with age.

• The 2010s have not been so kind to BlackBerry, but the company could be close to readying a phone that could put it back on the map. BlackBerry’s first Android smartphone, codenamed “Venice,” might have just made its debut on Twitter.

• Back in July, we got our first look at a BlackBerry handset running Android. Or, at least, an artist’s rendering of what it might look like. The phone we’re seeing today looks quite different, to say the least. It features a display that curves around its edges, much like Samsung’s Galaxy S6 Edge. The most notable difference is that the Venice is said to offer a slide-out keyboard in case you don’t want to type on the screen. It just wouldn’t be BlackBerry without some sort of physical keyboard.

• The Ouya. The Nexus Player. The Fire TV. The Shield TV. The Forge TV. These devices run the gamut from “unmitigated disaster” to “pretty decent set-top box,” but each one raises the same question: What is the point of an Android console?

• I wish there were a more “official” way to go.

• Motorola took to Twitter earlier where it said “On Sep 3, you’ll see what real love is like. Choose #MotoX for a more powerful connection.” It later then revoked the tweet for an unknown reason.

Free Software/Open Source

• Earlier, Bassel won the Index on Censorship Digital Freedom Award, which helped get him moved from a horrifically bad jail to a less hostile Adra Prison. Winning this award will further increase the spotlight on Bassel, which increases the pressure to release him, your fellow Free Software engineer and Creative Commons activist.

• Lightning Network is a proposal for an off-blockchain network that would support super-fast transactions and boost Bitcoin scalability. Wednesday, miner hosting company HashPlex unveiled an alpha Lightning Network hub implementation, as developers continue to refine the layer (sometimes called layer-2) on testnets.

• The word “Kubernetes” may not roll off the tongue as easily as the word “Google,” but it is nonetheless an important project many outside the software community have probably not ever heard of.

• The investment bank is giving away some of its trading technology to clients through open source software, according to The Wall Street Journal.

• Market researchers are predicting that by 2020, more than 20 billion devices will be connected to the Internet. These objects and devices will produce massive amounts of data 24-7, which will be a pain in the backbone to manage, unless tackled efficiently. To a great extent, the solution to the influx of IoT data rests in the effectiveness of the data infrastructure supporting cross-device communication—or, in other terms, in the effectiveness of IoT middleware. I firmly believe that in order to succeed in its purpose, this infrastructure should be founded on open-source platforms and technologies.

• The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to be one of the most powerful technological innovations to date. In fact, its reach will be so extensive—encompassing billions of connected endpoints across the globe—that it will completely change the way companies and consumers connect with one another and share information.

• For about a year, a small dedicated team has been building the Guardian’s new image management service.

• From the beginning, the vision was to provide a universal and fast experience accessing media that is well organised and using it in an affordable way to produce high-quality content.

• Effective open source advocacy on Twitter requires you to go wide. You need to find and participate in communities of people who are not focused on open source. Maybe people passionate about arts education. Public health advocates. Bicycling enthusiasts or bridge players or pet rescuers or Habitat for Humanity people or meditation people or Esperanto speakers or folk music singer/songwriters.

• The increasing number of open-source initiatives in existence leads some to catch a dose of initiative-fatigue. What’s really going on here?

• To open source or not to open source, that is the question for many IT teams that are struggling with deciding on the best approach to mobile application development. There is no doubt that today’s broad array of open source offerings appear to offer development nirvana – free, community driven, customizable software.

• Non-profit foundations can help encourage fully open source software (FOSS) collaboration across industry and community. A relative newcomer is the prpl Foundation, an open-source non-profit foundation focused on enabling next-generation datacenter-to-device portable software and virtualized architectures. One of prpl’s focus areas is OpenWrt, a Linux distribution for embedded devices. Industry and community collaboration on a common FOSS baseline software stack can help facilitate new IoE products, applications and technologies, and enable easier connectivity and data exchange across a variety of platforms in the market.

Events

• There are many similarities between Linux and the blockchain and so I was thrilled that Greg Maxwell, one of the core Bitcoin maintainers and a long term open source and cryptogrophy developer, accepted my invitation to keynote LinuxCon this year. I recently caught up with him to talk about his speech and the potential he sees for the Blockchain.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has already announced the launch of Firefox 41 Beta and opened up the final cycle to the upcoming version of the famous web browser.

• Mozilla has released Firefox 40, featuring a new look for Windows 10, better protection against uncertified add-ons, and an attempt to resist Microsoft’s effort to make Edge the default browser.

SaaS/Big Data

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Saying LibreOffice or OpenOffice to people can lead to interesting reactions. For some people, LibreOffice is the darling of the open source world, and for others, it is a crappy Microsoft Office alternative that they look down on.

• I believe that LibreOffice plays an important function in the world, and one that spans beyond the mere function of an office suite. Before we get to that though, I think looking back through the tremendous journey that led to the LibreOffice project we know today is important.

• Following the announcement, donations have doubled in comparison to the previous weeks. As a consequence, we have reached the threshold of 150,000 donations since May 2013, when we started keeping track of the numbers. A huge thanks to all donors! With their money, they make LibreOffice sustainable, supporting the costs of the entire organization.

• LibreOffice, the non-Microsoft and (to many) beloved office suite, has reached a new milestone with the release of version 5. It’s of particular interest to Linux mavens, but the rest of LibreOffice users will benefit as well, thanks to an impressive boost in performance through GPU hardware and some interesting new features.

CMS

• The Czech government-owned public TV broadcaster Česká televize has switched to using the open source content management system Drupal for its CT 24 news website, it announced on 6 August. One month earlier, the government-owned Český rozhlas (Czech Radio) also began using Drupal.

Funding

• Open-source app management startup WSO2 raised $20 million in funding on Thursday to expand the company’s global operations.

BSD

• We’re quickly approaching our two-year anniversary, which will be on episode 105. To celebrate, we’ve created a unique t-shirt design, available for purchase until the end of August. Shirts will be shipped out around September 1st. Most of the proceeds will support the show, and specifically allow us to buy additional equipment to record on-site interviews at conferences.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Richard Stallman, the father of the Free Software movement and president of the Free Software Foundation, will participate on the 8th edition of the International Workshop on eHealth in Emerging Economies,IWEEE 2015, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, on September 26th.

Licensing

• These facts brought to you by “let me just stick the GPL in an ACPI table so I can install the damn thing already”.

Programming

• I’ve used Perl for several years, beginning in 2002 on Solaris, then moving to Debian and working on Koha in 2008. Surprisingly (bafflingly, in retrospect), I had not connected with the larger Perl community at all in that time, choosing to stay within the smaller communities I was already embedded in.

• Whether you’re a TDD zealot, or you just occasionally write a quick script to reproduce some bug, it’s a rare coder who doesn’t see value in some sort of automated testing. Yet, somehow, in all of the new-age “Infrastructure as Code” mania, we appear to have forgotten this, and the tools that are commonly used for implementing “Infrastructure as Code” have absolutely woeful support for developing your Infrastructure Code. I believe this has to change.

• Inspired by Quora’s Moving Fast With High Code Quality post, we are thus implementing a review routing system – the code is live on GitHub at phabricator-utils. It’s written in Python (hey, we’re a Java/JS/Python shop), though we do plan to contribute closer to the Phabricator codebase itself and that will be in PHP.

Leftovers

Science

• Vinter acknowledged that MassCAN’s campaign is driven in part by self-interest: Google and other companies are worried about a lack of programmers and developers, specialists that are highly in demand in the booming Massachusetts tech industry.

• I think we can all agree that open source is a good way to spread knowledge and empower people in many different ways, but it’s also true that competition, natural in a meritocracy, can and often does privilege those who can invest in the competition itself; minorities are being outspent and thus left aside by those who can afford to work, basically, for free.

Security

• Once upon a recent time, Linux was more secure than it is today. Only the root user could mount external device, and in many distributions new users were automatically assigned a few groups that limited the hardware they could access. Distributions followed the principle of least privilege (aka least access), under which users, applications, and devices receive only the access to the system that they absolutely require.

• Why do they do it? Run “2003” in 2015! It’s not cost, because Debian GNU/Linux would cost $0. It’s lock-in whether by habit or by application. Lots of folks have invested heavily in applications that still work so they are willing to risk everything, perhaps by adding other layers of security. Why?

• Visiting Las Vegas can feel a bit like being a metal sphere in a pinball machine—you’re tossed from bright lights to blaring shows and back again until you eventually (hopefully) emerge out a hole at your home airport. When you visit Vegas with a swarm of hackers and security researchers, the dizziness gets amped up tenfold and can be laced with a dose of dark mischief.

• An attacker can swap out the device’s firmware with altered, malicious software.

• It’s one thing to talk about security vulnerabilities in a product, but another to provide a proof-of-concept demonstration showing the device being hacked.

• That’s what occurred last month when BlackBerry Chief Security Officer David Kleidermacher and security professional Graham Murphy showed how easy it is for hackers to take control of a hospital drug infusion pump by overwriting the device’s firmware with malicious software.

• …Adobe released updated Flash player plugins which adddress many new vulnerabilities (as usual).

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• TONY Blair has warned Labour members that Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader will “annihilate” the party – prompting claims the former Prime Minister is running scared of the threat of a war crimes trial.

• Reg Keys, whose son Lance Corporal Tom Keys was killed in Iraq in 2003, criticises former prime minister as families threaten legal action over Chilcot

Finance

• The Chinese e-commerce giant announced a $4bn share buyback scheme and posted a 28pc rise in quarterly revenues

• Kimmo Kalliola knows the feeling that thousands of Finns have been dealing with over the last couple of years. He spent more than a decade working on geolocation positioning at Nokia, a highly technical job, but the Finnish tech giant hit hard times. In late 2012, Mr. Kalliola and 10,000 others at the company were laid off.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Yes, Donald Trump, a Fox News political creation, was set to appear on Fox News to discuss his “relationship” with Fox News. But in the end, Fox hosts didn’t even ask Trump about his suddenly newsworthy relationship with Fox. Despite Doocy opening the interview by telling Trump, “glad we’re friends again” — to which Trump responded by assuring him, “we’ve always been friends” — there was no attempt to discuss Trump’s recent feud with Megyn Kelly and the network. Huh? Were they under orders from Fox chief Roger Ailes to ignore the friction?

• Newly-released court filings undermine claims from Scott Walker and his allies that prosecutors were on a “partisan witch hunt” with the ultimate goal of taking down the governor.

• The 2016 presidential race is a bonanza of fossil fuel cash for Republican presidential candidates, even 15 months out from election day.

• Just 17 billionaires and businesses with ties to fossil fuel interests have pumped $67 million into Super PACs to support the ambitions of eight Republicans, according to a new analysis by Greenpeace and the Center for Media and Democracy (which publishes PRWatch.org). The Guardian broke the story.

• The New York Times claimed that Carly Fiorina has emerged as the Republican Party’s “weapon against [the] ‘War on Women’ charge,” ignoring how her policy positions are actually harmful to women.

Privacy

• Facial recognition software, which American military and intelligence agencies used for years in Iraq and Afghanistan to identify potential terrorists, is being eagerly adopted by dozens of police departments around the country to pursue drug dealers, prostitutes and other conventional criminal suspects. But because it is being used with few guidelines and with little oversight or public disclosure, it is raising questions of privacy and concerns about potential misuse.

• If you’re about to start an internship at one of the world’s biggest social networks, it might not be in your interest to publicly embarrass it shortly before you begin. It’s a lesson that Harvard student Aran Khanna learned the hard way after creating an app that took advantage of a privacy flaw within Facebook Messenger. Khanna had found that, whenever you chat to your friends, the system automatically shares your location. As such, he built a browser plugin, called the “Marauder’s Map,” that showed you where your buddies were as they were talking to you.

Civil Rights

• Earlier this year, Texas legislator Jason Villalba attempted to shortchange the First Amendment in the name of “officer safety” by making it illegal to film police officers from within a 25-foot, constantly-moving radius. His proposed law was greeted with criticism (and death threats, according to Villalba) and was consequently discarded because it was a terrible, arbitrary law that had only the briefest of flirtations with reality and logic.

• For one thing, the law would have prompted officers to split their attention between the job at hand (whatever crime they were responding to/investigating) and Villalba’s directive. Of course, officers could easily choose not to enforce this bad law, but far too many officers have been filmed leaving crime scenes just to hassle citizens with cameras. And the instant the officer started closing the gap between him and the photographer, a law would have been violated in letter, if not in spirit. Villalba is a staunch supporter of law enforcement agencies and his proposal was just an attempt to give officers a little less accountability.

DRM

• Get ready folks, ads are coming to Netflix

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Piracy monetization firm Rightscorp has signed an agreement to provide lawfirm Flynn Wirkus Young with the IP-addresses of persistent pirates. The data will be used to target U.S. Internet users who ignore DMCA notices and settlement offers sent by copyright holders. The first cases are already in progress.

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