● 08.22.15

● Links 22/8/2015: Chromebook Gains, GNOME 3.18 Clues

Posted in News Roundup at 1:49 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Headlines pretty much returned to normal today as LinuxCon concluded last night, but a few stories still trickled in. Elsewhere, Christine Hall pondered the future of new Bodhi desktop Moksha and Jack Wallen discussed the LibreOffice 5.0 interface. And finally, adventures in Antergos dominated my day.

Desktop

• As school districts across the country increasingly invest in technology for their students, the volume of personal computers in the classroom is surging.

• It looks like Chromebooks are becoming the popular choice for the education sector, with a new report indicating that sales for Windows-based devices and Apple devices in the school sector are beginning to fall behind.

• If you’ve never installed Linux before and are just about dipping into the realm of free and open source software, go ahead and first read this primer to get acquainted. This done, it’s time to roll up those sleeves and jump right in: we’ll show you here how to install Linux on either a hard disk or straight to a USB drive where you needn’t disturb your current configuration–Linux is flexible that way.

• For the purpose of this hands on, I’ve selected Linux Mint as our distribution of choice. Linux Mint is based on two other popular Linux distributions–Debian and Ubuntu–both of which are mature operating systems in their own right, and well-known for an extensive feature set and solid stability.

• “I’d like to give Linux a try, but I’m not sure how.”

• I’ve heard that statement so many times over the years. During that period, my pat response has changed from something akin to “It’s worth the effort” to “It’s incredibly easy.” Linux is, actually, the single most easy operating system to “try out.” How is that possible? Two words… live booting.

• There hasn’t been a lot of good news on the stats-front this quarter but things are heating up in Finland. The spikes in utilization are back.

Server

• As Red Hat homes in on VMware, investing development resources in container-related efforts will pay off far more than propping up OpenStack

• CoreOS is moving forward with its development of the Rocket (rkt) container technology, thanks to some help from Intel. The latest rkt 0.8 release became generally available on Aug. 19, integrating Intel’s Clear Containers technology, providing hardware-assisted container isolation and security.

• In a video interview with eWEEK, Brandon Philips, CTO of CoreOS, details the latest development in rkt security and why Docker will still be a key part of CoreOS for some time.

• Open source software is set to dominate the enterprise server market, says IBM.

Kernel Space

• While the Linux 4.2 kernel hasn’t been officially released yet, Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in early his pull requests for the various subsystems he maintains for the Linux 4.3 merge window.

• The pull requests sent in by Greg KH on Thursday include the Linux 4.3 merge window updates for the driver core, TTY/serial, USB driver, char/misc, and the staging area. These pull requests don’t offer any really shocking changes but mostly routine work on improvements / additions / bug-fixes. The staging area once again is heavy with various fixes and clean-ups but there’s also a new driver subsystem.

• An ex-Google engineer is developing a new file system for Linux, with the hopes that it can offer a speedier and more advanced way of storing data on servers.

• After a number of years of development, the Bcache File System (Bcachefs) “is more or less feature complete — nothing critical should be missing,” wrote project head Kent Overstreet, in an e-mail to the Linux Kernel Mailing List late Thursday.

• The AllSeen Alliance, a cross-industry collaboration to advance the Internet of Everything through an open source software project, continues to gain momentum. This week, the organization announced six new members have joined the initiative including Fortune 50 company Lowe’s, and technical support services provider, Radialpoint.

• Kent Overstreet, one of the maintainers of the bcache filesystem (also known as bcachefs), had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the project, which aims to be a general purpose POSIX file system.

Graphics Stack

• Besides Rob Clark being busy implementing GLES/GL 3 in Freedreno Gallium3D, over in kernel-space he has a slew of new improvements to land in its MSM DRM driver for Linux 4.3.

Benchmarks

• My benchmarking entertainment this weekend, besides getting to benchmark with a sledgehammer, was testing out Btrfs RAID 0/1/5/6/10 arrays across a set of four USB 3.0 flash drives.

Applications

• David King announced the release of the first Beta build for the upcoming Cheese 3.18 open-source webcam viewer software for the anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment.

• The Dattobd driver was open-sourced earlier this month by Datto Inc. The Datto Block Driver is for taking block-level snapshots and incremental backups.

• The Datto block driver was published earlier this month under the GNU GPLv2 license. This driver is designed just for taking snapshots and incremental backups at the block level. Datto Inc is a data protection/backup company

• Google has begun committing open-source code to the libvpx repository for supporting their next-generation VP10 video format.

• Andi Kleen of Intel announced today the release of Simple-PT, a simple Processor Trace implementation for Linux.

Instructionals/Technical

• The objective of the Great Command-Line Challenge was to create a single command-line program to count the number of emails from each IP address that attempted to access my hosts using SSH.

• Disabling PulseAudio often leads to more problems than it solves. A more effective solution is to tell PulseAudio to ignore a specific device using udev rules. udev is a device manager for Linux, and you can give udev instructions to apply custom configuration for specific devices.

Wine or Emulation

• Wine developers have just announced that a new version of the application has been released and is now available for download. This is the version that shows signs of DirectX 11 support, so it’s going to be an interesting one.

Games

• For the first time in a long time, Linux gamers have a reason to smile. Gaming on the open-source operating system has long meant dabbling in Wine and arcane workarounds, but ever since Valve launched Steam for Linux a year-and-a-half ago the number of native Linux games has positively exploded.

• After a little miscommunication it turns out Celestian Tales: Old North did release as originally planned day-1 on Linux, and I managed to give it a go and write down some thoughts for you.

• In a very unsurprising move, new slides out of SIGGRAPH 2015 from Valve talk about Source 2 and Vulkan. The game featured is of course Dota 2 Reborn. Since it’s Valve’s most popular game, and their first game to use Source 2 it was to be expected.

• The Journey Down is a series of point-and-click adventure games developed by a studio named SkyGoblin. The original plan was to have three chapters for this game, but it looks like SkyGoblin will need your help to make the third chapter a reality.

• The latest installment in the cyberpunk RPG franchise has launched and is a day-1 release for Linux.

• Feral Interactive sure do know their stuff with their porting, so it’s time we took a proper look at Shadow of Mordor on Linux.

• Big Journey to Home, a 2D adventure game developed and published on Steam by The Light Sword Team, has been released on the Linux platform as well.

• Yesterday marked the release of DiRT Showdown for Linux as ported over by Virtual Programming using their eON technology. With being able to use it as an automated, reproducible benchmark, I spent most of the day and into the night working on some initial AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce graphics card benchmarks using this DiRT game that’s finally available to Linux/SteamOS gamers, three years after it was released for Windows. This initial comparison is a 14-way Linux gaming graphics card comparison.

• Vendetta Online is a space MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) developed and published by Guild Software Inc. and its makers are preparing for some important improvements to the economy system.

• The space shooters are making a comeback, but the Linux platform doesn’t seem to be of interest yet. The developers from ROCKFISH Games are now trying to release Everspace, a new single-player space shooter built on the Unreal Engine 4, and a Linux version is planned.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Sway is an open-source tiling window manager that supports Wayland and is fully-compatible with the i3 configuration files.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I already made Marble to recognize the current dpi resolution of the screen and to respond to it’s change(e. g. when printing). Next step will be to supply Marble with icons and bitmaps for different dpi resolutions (ldpi, mdpi, hdpi at least). I look forward to work on this in the next months, and if we achive a bigger progress, I’ll let you know in a next blogpost.

• Lately I have been asked a lot about using Vulkan in KWin: in fact almost every blog post in the last few months has questions about it and that seems to me there is something to write about it.

• KDE developer Martin Gräßlin explained today that he has no plans on making use of Vulkan within KDE’s compositor / window manager.

• Proceeding with the next story about the KDE Incubator with the story of GCompris.

• GCompris is a high quality educational software suite comprising of numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10. It started in 2000 using the GTK+ toolkit and was part of the Gnome project. In order to address users willing to run GCompris on their tablets, a full rewrite has been initiated in 2014 using Qt Quick.

• GCompris had the chance to be accepted by KDE and followed the incubation stage for about a year. It has now been accepted as an official KDE project in its extragear section.

• On X11 the (OpenGL) compositor renders into a single buffer through the overlay window. This is needed to get features like translucency, shadows, wobbled windows or a desktop cube as Xorg itself doesn’t have any support for such features. The disadvantage of this approach is that we basically always have to perform a “copy” of what needs to be rendered. Consider VLC is playing a fullscreen video the compositor needs to take VLC’s video pixmap and render it onto the overlay window. The compositor needs to run, evaluate the scene and then render the one window.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GUADEC is now over, we had a great time in Gothenburg (special thanks to the local organizers!) and got home in time to polish patches and merge branches, to publish the first beta of this cycle, GNOME 3.17.90.

• As part of the forthcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment release, the GNOME developers pushed the second milestone towards the 1.6 branch of the Tracker open-source semantic data storage tool for desktop and mobile devices.

• In preparation for the GNOME 3.18 Beta 1 desktop environment, the GNOME developers have released the first Beta build of the powerful, next-generation GNOME Shell user interface used by default since the release of GNOME 3.

• The GNOME developers are hard at work these days preparing for the first Beta build of the anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due for release on September 23, 2015.

• The GNOME development team has announced that the first Beta update GNOME 3.18 is now out and ready for testing. There is still a long way to go until the stable version is released, but the project is now in software freeze.

• The GNOME 3.18 beta is now available ahead of the planned GNOME 3.18.0 release in late September.

• Polari now indicates the status of each connection next to the connection’s name in the sidebar. If Polari encounters an error, an error icon is displayed. Clicking on the connection in the sidebar, will show a popover with error details and an action which can possibly solve it.

• Yes, Nautilus now is able to display Other Locations view, and finally it caught up with Gtk+ file chooser! It’s already on master, so anyone can test it with jhbuild. Also, Nautilus 3.17.90 already includes it, so Fedora Rawhide users (and any other bleeding edge distro) will be able to test.

Distributions

Reviews

• From the most consumer focused distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint or elementary OS to the more obscure, minimal and enterprise focused ones such as Slackware, Arch Linux or RHEL, I thought I’ve seen them all. Couldn’t have been any further from the truth. Linux eco-system is very diverse. There’s one for everyone. Let’s discuss the weird and wacky world of niche Linux distros that represents the true diversity of open platforms.

• Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela is a highly polished, refined, practical, effortless distro. It’s a genuine joy to use. Everything works as expected, and best of all, out of the box, by default. The new release brings in an avalanche of small, soft but most effective improvements, including system settings, themes, and software management.

• On the bad sides, there are some tiny quirks. Having to leave your bubble of fun and wander around the Internet in search after some new icons or decorations lessens the impact of having a closed and tight ecosystem that can sustain itself. The Realtek bug is also rather annoying and maybe even alarming, and I do not know how to explain the power to brightness applet transformation. But it only happened once.

• Overall though, the impression is very similar to Xubuntu Vivid. Slightly more restrained, because I’ve learned to accept the fact Mint is a top notch player, whereas Xubuntu used to be a black swan underdog and now it’s a majestic phoenix sweeping over the forests of distrolandia, and there’s more of a dramatic effect there. But then, tiny tiny glitches, the family woes, and a whole lot of goodness, elegance, great software, and not a single crash. My 10/10 wizard stick is out again, and it’s trickling faerie dust. 9.99999/10. Not perfect, because perfection means zero flaws. But you should be testing this one, right now. See you around.

New Releases

• Point Linux is an ideal choice for users who do not want to spend a lot of time fussing with configurations and playing around with eye candy and desktop doodads. I have used it to introduce newcomers to computing in general, and to introduce avid Windows users to the Linux OS. Point Linux produced smiles and frustration-free experiences for them — and me.

• We reported a while ago the great team of developers behind the BackTrack Linux successor, Kali Linux, have released Docker images that allow users to run the most popular and powerful penetration testing distro on any platform.

• As you may know, Antergos is an Arch Linux-based, rolling release Linux system.

• Recently, the developers have announced that the Cnchi installer has received important improvements, helping the regular users to install the system.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Ballnux/SUSE

• SUSE, through Meike Chabowski, had the great pleasure of announcing the release and general availability of SUSE Manager, a piece of software that eases things for Linux users, making complex tasks simple, for IBM z Systems.

Red Hat Family

• The developers of the Baruwa Enterprise Edition commercial operating system, which is also known as BaruwaOS, were proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of BaruwaOS 6.7.

• Entrepreneurs looking for $25,000 to help kick-start a business as well as joining the Citrix-Red Hat Innovators Program are running out of time to apply.

• Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Satellite 6.1, Red Hat’s systems management solution for managing Red Hat infrastructure. New additions to the platform bring upgraded security enhancements, enhanced discovery and container management capabilities across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

• Wall street sell-side analysts have given shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) as price target of $83.48. This is the one year target predicted by brokerage firms polled by Thomson Reuters. The same equity research firms are predicting earnings of $0.46 per share next quarter and $1.83 for the current year.

Fedora

• The top story today seems to be the announcement from ex-Googlite Kent Overstreet of a new COW filesystem for Linux. In other news, Major Hayden explained why Ethernet devices have such weird names in Fedora and Manuel Jose covered the strangest Linux distributions. Elsewhere, Christine Hall posted her review of Bodhi 3.1.0 and Dedoimedo loved Mint 17.2. A review of LibreOffice 5 rounds out the day.

• Imagine hypothetically that Red Hat, a (mortal) company, were to fail. The community or another company could continue working on Fedora’s source code and get it (or a downstream distro) certified.

• Cool, right? That’s what I’ve been working on this whole week since Flock. All the bits are now basically in place such that, each night, openQA will run on the Branched and Rawhide nightly composes when they’re done, and when openQA is done, the compose reports will be mailed out.

Debian Family

• I tried to start to write this blog entry like I usually do: Type along what goes through my mind and see where I’m heading. This won’t work out right now for various reasons, mostly because there is so much going on that I don’t have the time to finish that in a reasonable time and I want to publish this today still. So please excuse me for being way more brief than I usually am, and hopefully I’ll find the time to expand some things when asked or come back to that later.

• [...]

• And I have to repeat myself, this is the place I feel home amongst my extended family, even though I it still is sometimes for me to get to speak up in certain groups. I though believe it’s more an issue of certain individuals taking up a lot of space in discussions without giving (more shy) people in the round the space to also join in. I guess it might be the time that we need a session on dominant talking patterns for next year and how to work against them. I absolutely enjoyed such a session during last year’s FemCamp in Vienna which set the tone for the rest of the conference, and it was simply great.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• On August 20, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report informing Ubuntu Touch users and developer alike about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch devs for Canonical’s mobile operating system in preparation for the OTA-6 software update.

• Canonical has just upgraded the Firefox packages in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems after a regression has been identified. From the looks of it, the default search engine was set to Yahoo.

• Canonical has published details in a security notice about a few of OpenSSH vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

• Particularly if watching any videos from the web browser with an Ubuntu Phone or using WiFi, your phone’s battery can drain quite quickly while the device gets rather warm.

• One of the newest discussions on the Ubuntu Phone mailing list is about overheating. The Ubuntu Phone user that started the thread warned, “my Nexus 4 (most recent stable version) gave me a burn that almost blistered after 15 minutes of YouTube (wifi), and went from 29% battery to 2% in that time.”

• Ubuntu has always been about developers. It has been about enabling the free software platform from where it is collaboratively built to be available at no cost to developers in the world, so they are limited only by their imagination—not by money, not by geography.

• Nekhelesh Ramananthan has posted some interesting information on his blog about the latest work done for the default Clock app of Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.

• The indicator displays both international and domestic live cricket scores in the AppIndicator menu and allows you to set any match as the label (so the live score shows up directly on the panel).

• As you may know, we have previously written that Canonical has created a Film Scope to facilitate the users to watch movie trailers, discover film choices and read movie reviews.

Flavours and Variants

• The Bodhi development folks have been busy bees since lead developer Jeff Hoogland returned to retake his place beneath the Bodhi tree. First, there was the release of version 3.0.0 back in February. Then, a couple of weeks ago came the release of 3.1.0. Although this might be supposed to be a “minor” point grade release, it’s a “big deal” according to the distro’s website. Why? Because it introduces a new desktop called Moksha.

Devices/Embedded

• The emPC-A/RPI follows in a long line of emPC-branded industrial computers dating back to the Xenomai Linux supported emPC-M from 2008 when Germany-based Janztec went by the name Janz Automationssysteme AG. Janztec continues to sell products in the U.S. via Saelig, which is shipping the emPC-A/RPI for $309. The price goes to $364 if you add a microSD card loaded with Raspbian Linux for the computer’s quad-core, 900MHz Raspberry Pi 2 Model B mainboard.

• Lawn watering systems are notorious for sending money down the drain. When Robert Booth was looking to get started on a robotics project, it’s no surprise that a sprinkler system was at the top of his list. Booth will be presenting his “Strawberry Pi” system at Texas Linux Fest this year. We talked to him about it.

• RaspBSD has been released, being the first FreeBSD-based operating system for the Raspberry Pi ARM singleboard computer. For now, it is available only for the models B and B+, but the developers will also include support for the BeagleBone Black and the Banana Pi too.

• A Kickstarter campaign is seeking funds for developing “Mycroft,” an open source, Snappy Core Linux- and Raspberry Pi 2-based alternative to Amazon’s Echo.

• The ambitious Mycroft Kickstarter campaign is now halfway to its $99,000 funding goal for developing what it calls “the world’s first open source, open hardware home A.I. platform.” Like Amazon’s groundbreaking Echo, the Mycroft device will be a speech-recognizing wireless hub that implements a combination of Internet access, media streaming, and home automation functions.

• Mycroft utilizes many open source hardware and software components for its artificial intelligence platform. At the heart of the device is Raspberry Pi 2, the powerful credit-card sized computer.

• Aaeon has launched a rugged, Android- and Linux-ready “ACP-1104″ panel PC with a 10.1-inch WXGA touchscreen, a quad-core Celeron, and dual GbE ports.

• JEHE’s Linux-ready “Giada MG-5200SL” Thin Mini-ITX SBC targets Ultra-HD resolution signage with a dual-core 5th Gen. Core CPU, SATA, mSATA, and mini-PCIe.

Phones

Android

• The photos and short video clips were posted by blogger Evan Blass, aka Evleaks, who got them from an unnamed source. They allegedly show a device to be released later this year as the BlackBerry Venice.

• How big is too big for a tablet? While most of the industry has converged around two sizes (one about 7 inches from corner to corner, the other roughly 10 inches across), Samsung apparently wants to push the boundaries. According to a report from SamMobile, the company is currently working on an Android tablet with an 18.4-inch display. The device is reportedly codenamed “Tahoe,” and although there are no details about when it might be unveiled, SamMobile claims it runs Android 5.1 Lollipop and features a TFT LCD display with a 1920 x 1080 resolution, a 1.6 GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, and rear and front cameras — 8 megapixels and 2.1 megapixels, respectively.

• LeapFrog has revealed its latest child-focused tablet, and its first to run on Android. The 7-inch Epic tablet is said to combine the parental control and kid-safe environment of previous LeapFrog tablets, with a selection of Android games and apps that children love. The Android-powered Epic tablet has also been designed to offer a customized experience which can grow with the child.

• The year is 2015 and we still don’t have a perfect smartphone. I’d argue that there isn’t even a phone that is all that close to being perfect. I’m not saying that all of today’s phones are bad, because most are very, very good and you will probably be satisfied with whatever you choose. But every single one of them includes a big “but.” Hear me out.

• If you never use Google Play Games, Google Play Books, Google+ or Google Newsstand, than good news: none of them will be installed on your next Android phone. The suite of apps used to be mandatory for any manufacturer that wanted to sell a device with essential apps like Google Play and Gmail, but new partner guidelines have taken them off of the required pre-install list. Put simply, this means there will be just a little more free space on the next Android smartphone you buy. And if you do use those apps? They’re still available — you’ll just have to download them from the Google Play store to use them.

• Did you follow along last week’s Android customization post to figure out the details of screen pinning in Android Lollipop? I know, you likely already knew what it was all about. This week we’re diving into YouTube – specifically, using your Android phone to remotely control YouTube. This includes the Chromecast, sure, but also an old, little known and often forgotten feature of the streaming service, YouTube TV.

• The Qt Company, through Eike Ziller, had the great pleasure of announcing earlier today, August 20, the release and immediate availability for download of the final version of Qt Creator 3.5.0.

• As a company, OnePlus’ most distinctive quality has always been its aggressive marketing strategy. Despite only selling about a million phones so far, the company’s slow drip of launch info and any-press-is-good-press mentality keeps it in the news almost as much as companies that sell 100x more units. OnePlus has made a name for itself by aggressively targeting enthusiasts with a “flagship” level device priced at less-than-flagship prices. Its software strategy fully embraces the modding community.

• The OnePlus One, like several of Google’s Nexus phones before it, did a great job of being cheap without feeling cheap. Google has a ton of money to burn with a pricing scheme like that, but things appear different for OnePlus. It seems like reality has kicked in with the company’s second phone, and you can really feel the cost cutting issues with the OnePlus 2.

• Google has announced that its next mobile operating system update will be called Andorid 6.0 Marshmallow.

• As is tradition, Google will release new Nexus devices with the latest OS preloaded, first. These are expected to arrive in the forms of new Nexus 5 and Nexus 6 replacements, currently expected from LG and Huawei respectively.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Jolla has opened pre-orders on Jolla Tablets starting at $300. The 7.9-inch 2048 x 1536 tablet runs the Linux-based Sailfish OS 2.0 on a quad-core Atom.

• The Jolla Tablet has been a long time coming for Indiegogo backers, but the participants will finally receive their tablets in September, says Finland-based Jolla. Now anyone can order the tablets, with shipments due to start in late October. Quantities are said to be limited.

Free Software/Open Source

• The open source community has been at the forefront of this new trend, creating software and hardware designs that enable nearly anyone to experiment with IoT devices and applications. And the number of open source projects dedicated to IoT has been growing rapidly. Last year, we put together a list of 35 open source IoT projects, and this year, we’ve extended it to 51 tools.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Today we are announcing some major upcoming changes to Firefox add-ons. Our add-on ecosystem has evolved through incremental, organic growth over the years, but there are some modernizations to Firefox that require some foundational changes to support:

• Taking advantage of new technologies like Electrolysis and Servo Protecting users from spyware and adware Shortening the time it takes to review add-ons

• Back in July, Mozilla disclosed plans to modernize its Firefox browser. Today, the organization made those plans more concrete, with a tentative timeline for introducing long-desired improvements such as the creation of a process per tab—and with it, a timeline for the end of support for traditional Firefox add-ons.

SaaS/Big Data

• There are a lot of open source projects out there, and keeping track of them all is next to impossible. Here are five important ones in the Big Data space that you may not know about.

• MapR Technologies gives enterprises another alternative channel for its Hadoop distribution with placement in the AWS Marketplace.

• Among the offerings is Discovery Peak, analytics software that is underpinning a cloud platform created to facilitate collaborative cancer research.

LibreOffice

• Jack Wallen believes the latest release from LibreOffice might be the best yet… even with an aging UI. Do you think this flagship office suite is ready for the masses?

• It’s free! It’s open! But does LibreOffice deliver on its promise of a powerful office suite for normal users?

• Prominent GNOME and Fedora developer Christian Schaller has published an open letter to the Apache Software Foundation and Apache OpenOffice teams asking them to redirect OpenOffice.org to the LibreOffice web-site.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• In case there were any doubt, it’s becoming clearer every day that it’s no joke: That old, staid telecom giant known as AT&T (NYSE: T) is actually turning its engineering ship around in a big, big way, and it’s not your grandfather’s or grandmother’s network anymore.

• “Clouds” don’t just free IT from having to buy, provision and manage hardware, they can be used as an “elastic” infrastructure, where apps can request resources as needed. Apps that can do this are, unsurprisingly, called “cloud-native apps.”

• Facebook has open-sourced its library for automatically generating Hack code. Hack is a more scalable version of PHP, developed at Facebook.

• Dropbox acquired Hackpad in April 2014. About a year later the team behind Hackpad informed users that the code would become available under an open-source license “in the next few weeks.” When that didn’t happen right away, some people got frustrated and took to GitHub to vent.

BSD

• The latest version of the desktop-focused PC-BSD operating system is now available.

• PC-BSD 10.2 is, of course, based off the brand new FreeBSD 10.2 that was released last week.

• While not a GNU/Linux distribution, PC-BSD is an important piece of software for the open-source ecosystem, a BSD operating system tweaked and optimized for desktop computers, based on FreeBSD.

• Two important events of the OpenBSD 5.8 release cycle happened today:

• On the Orders page, pre-orders for the new release have been enabled On the Lyrics page, the OpenBSD 5.8 release song has been published, with links to OGG and MP3 formats available.

Project Releases

• For users of Kodi 15 “Isengard”, it’s now time to upgrade to the 15.1 maintenance release.

Public Services/Government

• Recently, the Sunlight Foundation, the Congressional Data Coalition and the OpenGovFoundation announced that constituents of the U.S. House of Representatives can now choose open source software over proprietary software to better suit their technology requirements and projects.

Openness/Sharing

• Intel hopes to take an employee’s painful personal healthcare journey, combine this knowledge with its advanced scale computing and partnerships with medical leaders, and transform treatment for the 1 million Americans who get cancer each year by leveraging big data to make personalized medicine a reality.

• Intel Corp. and Oregon Health & Science University’s Collaborative Cancer Cloud cleared a major hurdle and will scale to two other major cancer centers in the first quarter of 2016.

Open Hardware

• Adarsh Simon is an aspiring product designer with a keen eye for detail, and he also enjoys hacking electronics. Now his interests have led him to research additive manufacturing techniques, and that research has resulted in the BOLT MINI, an all-metal, open source 3D printer.

• Focal Camera have begun bringing their open source modular camera prototyping system to the consumer, allowing any budding designers to try their hand at creating their very own SLRS, stereo and panoramic cameras with a system that while a little daunting, allows users to get to grips with the technology behind their photographs and create a functioning device that is entirely of their own device.

Programming

• Code hosting website, GitHub, has published a graph which shows just how popular different programming languages are on the site since its launch in 2008. The results revealed some interesting trends and how different languages have picked up momentum in recent years.

• Since 2009, Google has been overseeing the community-led development of Go – a programming language aimed at helping web developers build apps at Google’s scale and Google’s speed.

• GitHub is the web’s number-one place for developers all over the world to swap and share code.

• IncrediBuild uses a ‘Docker-like’ proprietary distributed container technology to enable fast processing of development tasks in parallel, allowing developers to turn their computer into a virtual supercomputer by harnessing idle cores from remote machines across the network and in the cloud, increasing performance, speeding build time, and improving developer productivity.

Leftovers

• On Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver took on the fraudulent behind-the-scenes (and occasionally, not so behind-the-scenes) practices of America’s mega-televangelist ministries — specifically, those that have exploited people’s faith for monetary gain with the promise that “donations will result in wealth coming back to you.” It’s called “The Prosperity Gospel,” and is built on the idea that every donation a congregant gives its pastor is a “seed” that will one day be harvested. “Wealth is a sign of God’s favor,” after all.

Hardware

• Everyone likes buying stuff with a bunch of built-in restrictions, right? The things we “own” often remain the property of the manufacturers, at least in part. That’s the trade-off we never asked for — one pushed on us by everyone from movie studios to makers of high-end cat litter boxes and coffee brewers. DRM prevents backup copies. Proprietary packets brick functions until manufacturer-approved refills are in place.

Security

• Amid this week’s LinuxCon in Seattle, SecurityWeek reported that the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), which funds open source projects, will give the badge to those that meet a set of standard criteria. This includes an established bug reporting process, an automated test suite, vulnerability response processes and patching processes. A self-assessment will determine whether the project owners merit the badge.

• HTTPS protects both website owners and users from interference by network operators. It provides three protections: data authentication, integrity, and confidentiality. HTTPS makes sure that the website you loaded was sent by the real owner of that website, that nothing was injected or censored on the website, and that no one else is able to read the contents of the data being transmitted. We are seeing more and more evidence of manipulation of websites to inject things that the website owners and users didn’t intend. Additionally, browsers are starting to deprecate HTTP as non-secure, so in the coming years non-HTTPS websites will start throwing warnings by both Chrome and Firefox.

• The new embargo target allows vendors to test the automatic update functionality using a secret vendor-specific URL set in /etc/fwupd.conf without releasing it to the general public until the hardware has been announced.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The specter of war in American foreign policy discourse has thus produced a rather troubling framework: Advocates of diplomacy with Iran cite war as the inevitable alternative, while critics of diplomacy cite war as its inevitable outcome. No matter which side you choose, it seems, you are choosing war.

• Jeremy Corbyn will apologise on behalf of Labour for the Iraq War if he wins the leadership next month.

• The left-wing frontrunner said Labour must finally say sorry for the “deception” which took Britain to war in 2003.

• So many North Korean officials have reportedly been put to death this year that it’s hard to keep track of them. In most cases, we lack even names.

• No casualties were immediately reported from the exchange of fire that took place across one of the world’s most heavily armed borders on Thursday. But tensions remained high on Friday, as Mr. Kim ordered his front-line units to be prepared to attack South Korean loudspeakers along the border unless they stopped blaring propaganda broadcasts by Saturday evening.

• People have taken to Twitter to mock the bearded MP and Labour leadership favourite, after he vowed to apologise for the Iraq war

• While the “pro-Israel community” is not further defined–it’s a broad category, given that 70 percent of Americans describe themselves as having a favorable view of Israel (Gallup, 2/8-11/15)–the implication is that the Jewish constituents of these congressmembers are overwhelmingly opposed to the Iran deal. But such a generalization about Jewish American opinion is contradicted by polls.

• One survey, by the LA Jewish Journal (7/23/15), found 49 percent of US Jews favoring the agreement, with 31 percent opposed. Another poll, conducted for J Street (7/28/15), a progressive pro-Israel organization that supports the deal, found a similar margin, with 60 percent of Jewish Americans pro and 40 percent con.

• Israeli leaders planned to attack military targets in Iran in recent years, but they were held back due to the opinions of other government leaders and military leaders, according to an audio recording leaked to an Israeli television broadcaster.

• Ehud Barak, the former defense minister, said that a plan to launch an attack against Iran was sabotaged by the hesitancy of fellow cabinet ministers Yuval Steinitz and the man who would replace him at the Kirya Defense Ministry compound, Moshe Ya’alon.

• The bombshell revelations were made in a tape recording obtained by Channel 2. The clip was aired on its flagship Friday news magazine.

• Barak said that the attack plans against Iran were drawn up and approved by him and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sometime between 2009 and 2010.

• In new book, former defense minister says he, Netanyahu and Lieberman sought to strike Tehran’s nuclear facilities between 2010-2012, but that attempts were blocked by former IDF chief Ashkenazi and ministers Ya’alon, Steinitz.

• Likud MK Yoav Kish on Saturday lambasted former defense minister Ehud Barak for making recordings in which he details Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unsuccessful attempts to win approval for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Transparency Reporting

• October 23 1945, John Edgar Hoover: “RUMORS HITLER MAY BE IN ARGENTINA […] transmitted primarily for your info

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Report recognises that electricity market reform was necessary, but urges strong commitment to regain investor confidence

• The last two weeks have seen record increases in gas prices thanks to an unexpected major outage at BP’s Whiting, Indiana refinery, but in a new development, sources are now saying that BP has made temporary repairs to its refinery while parts for a permanent fix are fabricated.

• Unlike other predators, humans kill adults and predators, skewing populations.

Finance

• With each city Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders visits, the number of supporters he draws to his rallies keeps growing. Since June 1, Sanders has spoken to 100,000 people across seven events.

• In Phoenix, Arizona, on July 18, he drew 11,000 people, setting a new record for 2016 presidential candidates. His record continued in Seattle with 15,000 supporters, and then in Portland with 28,000 supporters. In Los Angeles on August 10, Sanders drew about 27,500 supporters, according to the Sanders campaign.

• Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders recently convened a panel of economists in Washington to discuss the debt crisis in Greece and throughout the world. In his opening statement, Sanders talked about the debt crisis in Greece as well as in Puerto Rico. “It is time for creditors to sit down with the governments of Greece and Puerto Rico and work out a debt repayment plan that is fair to both sides,” Sanders said. “The people of Greece and the children of Puerto Rico deserve nothing less.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The two big surprises of the 2016 presidential race so far are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Two dark horse candidates opposed by party insiders, each began a substantial surge in campaign polls around the beginning of July. In Real Clear Politics‘ average of polls, Sanders has gone from 12.7 percent to 25.0 percent since July 1, while Trump has gone from 6 percent to 22 percent.

• Yet corporate media show a fascination with just one of these characters. Is it the self-described socialist senator from Vermont, who has focused his campaign on combating the US’s rising inequality? Or is it the billionaire real-estate developer who blames America’s economic troubles on foreigners and calls for massive deportations?

• Mensch was unbowed by the criticism and continued to post examples of abuse she said had come from Corbyn supporters. She did not respond to a request for comment.

• Users of the micro-blogging site were quick to point out the mistake, mocking the former MP for her monstrous faux-pas.

• While anti-Semitism is rife on social media, and Mensch and others has raised concerns regarding Corbyn’s alleged links to high-profile anti-Semites, the gaffe itself was widely appreciated.

Censorship

• After promising a strong response to piracy for several years, Indonesia has finally taken action against The Pirate Bay. Along with fellow torrent index IsoHunt.to, the site is among almost two dozen others now ordered by the Ministry of Communications to be blocked at the ISP level.

• Google has been ordered by the Information Commissioner’s office to remove nine links to current news stories about older reports which themselves were removed from search results under the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling.

• The search engine had previously removed links relating to a 10 year-old criminal offence by an individual after requests made under the right to be forgotten ruling. Removal of those links from Google’s search results for the claimant’s name spurred new news posts detailing the removals, which were then indexed by Google’s search engine.

• Google refused to remove links to these later news posts, which included details of the original criminal offence, despite them forming part of search results for the claimant’s name, arguing that they are an essential part of a recent news story and in the public interest.

• The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has ordered Google to remove links from its search results that point to news stories reporting on earlier removals of links from its search results. The nine further results that must be removed point to Web pages with details about the links relating to a criminal offence that were removed by Google following a request from the individual concerned. The Web pages involved in the latest ICO order repeated details of the original criminal offence, which were then included in the results displayed when searching for the complainant’s name on Google.

• A planned ‘Draw Mohamed’ exhibition has been cancelled in London after counter-terrorism police warned that people could be killed if it went ahead.

• Organiser Anne Marie Waters, Sharia Watch director and former UKIP candidate, revealed that security services had reason to believe the event might be attacked, with a “very real possibility that people could be hurt or killed – before, during and after”.

• Organisers asked more than 200 galleries to host the exhibition but their requests were almost universally refused, with even the gallery that eventually agreed later pulling out.

• Since its launch two years ago, the City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has requested domain name registrars to suspend 317 pirate sites. A lot of requests were denied, but police say they don’t know how many. The numbers were made available in response to a Freedom of Information request by TF, which also reveals more interesting details.

• It’s amazing the kind of trouble that Carl Malamud ends up in thanks to people not understanding copyright law. The latest is that he was alerted to the fact that YouTube had taken down a video that he had uploaded, due to a copyright claim from WGBH, a public television station in Boston. The video had nothing to do with WGBH at all. It’s called “Energy — The American Experience” and was created by the US Dept. of Energy in 1974 and is quite clearly in the public domain as a government creation (and in case you’re doubting it, the federal government itself lists the video as “cleared for TV.”

• ‘A powerful declaration of the primacy of freedom of expression, not always the most fashionable view at a liberal arts festival.’ It’s lines like this that prove we live in strange times. This caught my eye in a review of character comic Sarah Franken’s new Fringe show Who Keeps Making All These People?, a searing satire of the Islamic State, political correctness and the gutlessness of modern Western culture. I wonder if the reviewer recognised the irony.

• If the strangeness of opening a burlesque club in China had not occurred to Amelia Kallman and Norman Gosney as a Buddhist cleansing ceremony took place in their future venue, it certainly did when they found themselves submitting Frank Sinatra lyrics to be vetted by the local cultural department.

• As Tianjin residents struggle to find answers, China has imposed heavy restrictions on independent media trying to cover the deadly explosions that rocked the port city. DW spoke to China expert Isabel Hilton.

• It has now been more than a week since the explosions in Tianjin occurred. Discussions on online social networks such as Weibo (China’s version of Twitter) show Chinese netizens are angry. The incident has been Weibo’s top trending topic for a week, with combined posts gaining more than 3 billion views.

• The Film and Publication Board (FPB) will not publish public comment on its Draft Online Regulation Policy, which has been heavily criticised as Internet censorship legislation.

• This after the Right2Know Campaign called for records of the FPB’s public hearings and written submissions to do with the controversial draft policy to be made public.

• “We believe the record of public comment will confirm that the majority of South Africans want a free Internet,” says R2K in a statement.

• As predicted, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had absolutely no intention of abiding by the results of the June 7, 2015 when, for the first time in more than 12 years, his Justice and Development lost its majority in parliament. Joining a coalition means compromising with opposition parties rather than continuing his own tyranny of the plurality.

• Hence, Erdoğan has called snap-elections for November 1. Erdoğan is no gambler, however, and he will not trust his fate to the voters determining their party pick on an even playing field.

• A black curtain has been preventing the public from receiving news since certain media outlets’ websites have had all access to their sites from within Turkey blocked since July 25, just as the cease-fire between Turkey and the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) ended and the country enters a war against radical terrorist group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

• Demanding an end to “censorship by the bullet” in Mexico, more than 500 international writers and intellectuals called on President Enrique Peña Nieto to do more to prevent the murder of journalists in a country they say has “no safe haven for the profession”.

• It’s hard to know which is worse: the deadly conditions that threaten critical journalists in Mexico or the government’s feeble response to recent deadly attacks. The intolerable situation has produced a letter from 500 global writers and thinkers to Mexico’s president urging him to address his country’s terrible record on protecting news professionals. Among the signers: novelists Salman Rushdie, Junot Diaz, Margaret Atwood and news figures Christiane Amanpour and Tom Brokaw.

• American Web users’ access to Internet content may soon be limited, thanks to a recent decision by French regulators. France’s National Commission on Informatics and Liberties (known by its French acronym CNIL) ordered Google to apply the European Union’s bizarre “right-to-be-forgotten” rules on a global basis in a June ruling. The search engine announced at the end of July that it would refuse to comply. If it is nevertheless forced to do so, the result could be unprecedented censorship of Internet content, as well as a dangerous expansion of foreign Web restrictions on Americans.

• Since his election in May 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has trumpeted India’s open society and vibrant democracy when he speaks to foreign heads of state and business leaders. But, at home, his government is seeking to restrict freedom of expression, including recent attempts to limit access to the Internet and the freedom of Indian television networks to report the news.

• Videos made in the UK by artists signed to major labels will be classified before release, in measures meant to protect children from unsuitable online content

• Does Mark Latham’s parting of ways with the Australian Financial Review amount to censorship? Has political correctness gone mad? Are commentators not allowed to be provocative? Should we not tolerate a wide array of views – popular or not? Do ‘frightbat’ feminists on Twitter have too much power?

• Second, parents should insist on workable procedures for students to report instances of bigotry (and also for allegations that faculty members are failing in their duty to evaluate student work based on its quality, rather than a divergent political view).

• Third, they should ask the regents to ensure that each campus has a plan so that when a significant instance of bigotry occurs, there are clear and immediate communications from the chancellor, campus police and campus administrators.

• Fourth, parents should ask the regents to stress a core principle without which the university cannot function: that attempts to outlaw or chill speech are more dangerous than hateful speech itself. Unless the speech is illegal, such as threats against a person or a group coupled with a clear call for immediate unlawful action, it must be answered with other speech that argues why what was advocated or articulated was not only wrong, but also bigoted. This, not censorship or “trigger warnings,” will tell the students that people of goodwill are speaking out with and for them.

• Bloggers need to exercise ethical self-censorship, one of the organizers of NeForum for Bloggers 2015, LiveJournal head marketing officer Ivan Kalyuzhny told reporters.

• The “right to be forgotten” has always been a double whammy of a disaster: an awful policy based on terrible ideas. Under the right, implemented in 2014 by the European Court of Justice, private citizens can petition search engines to hide results that pertain to their pasts. As a policy, the right to be forgotten is bad because companies like Google have legitimate free speech interests in presenting their results as they see fit. As an idea, it’s bad because it bars search engines from publishing truthful information about matters of public concern—a troubling precedent which, taken to its logical end, could lead to serious censorship.

• On Thursday, a UK court ordered Google to remove links to some stories about the right to be forgotten.

• When ISPs and social media platforms are held legally responsible for all content passing through them, we all lose out.

• The Ecuadorean authorities have imposed “preventive censorship” on all media coverage of Cotopaxi, a volcano 50 km south of the capital that became active again on 14 August after 73 years of inactivity. The government’s communiqués are now the only permitted source of information on the subject.

• The new language of campus censorship cuts out the middleman and claims that merely hearing wrong, unpleasant or offensive ideas is so dangerous to the mental health of the listener that people need to be protected from the experience.

• Look at a move back in 2014 with proposed legislation that would give more powers to a government regulatory body to say what they want taken offline – all in the name of ‘protecting children.’

• The National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) backs the protest of journalists working in central Somalia due to increasing pressure, intimidations and censorship by armed religious group.

• The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago, is one of the most studied events in modern history. And yet significant aspects of that bombing are still not well known.

• I recently published a social history of US censorship in the aftermath of the bombings, which this piece is based on. The material was drawn from a dozen different manuscript collections in archives around the US.

• I found that military and civilian officials in the US sought to contain information about the effects of radiation from the blasts, which helps explain the persistent gaps in the public’s understanding of radiation from the bombings.

• The recent show-cause notice by the government to three television channels on Yakub Memon’s hanging, and its temporary ban on 857 porn sites, have rekindled apprehensions about overt and covert censorship, and of the kind of coercive constraints on free and fearless expression that is a fundamental right guaranteed to every Indian.

• Computer scientists have developed a novel method for providing concrete proof to internet users that their information did not cross through certain undesired geographic areas.

• The new system, called “Alibi Routing”, offers advantages over existing systems as it is immediately deployable and does not require knowledge of the internet’s routing hardware or policies.

• Recent events such as censorship of internet traffic, suspicious “boomerang routing” where data leaves a region only to come back again, and monitoring of users’ data have alerted the researchers.

• Censorship, lying by omission and lying by commission will doom the planet.

• Chiming in with the outraged individual who wrote to the Fringe, Gideon Falter, chairman of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, said in a statement that Chabloz’s presence should be ‘of grave concern’ to Fringe organisers and urged Scottish premier Nicola Sturgeon to step up and enforce her pledged ‘zero-tolerance’ policy on anti-Semitism. Related categories Free speech

• But as dodgy, detestable and potentially anti-Semitic as Chabloz may be, the ease with which people are trying to run her out of the festival, and, potentially, out of the country, is a complete disgrace. In a free society, we must all be free to speak, discuss and salute however we like.

• Currently a controversy is brewing over at Github, which can be described as “the facebook of programmers”. That’s one heck of an elevator pitch, and made Github the darling of VC-funders and happy users alike. It’s a web-based Git repository hosting service, where you can upload your projects and if anyone takes a liking to your repo they can fork it and work on it too.

• Git in this context is a free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full version-tracking capabilities. A fork is a copy of a repository. Forking a repository allows you to freely experiment with changes without affecting the original project, and the original project doesn’t affect yours. Just making that clear so that Adria Richards doesn’t come around in case I make any forking-jokes.

Privacy

• Jeb Bush, one of the leading Republican presidential candidates, told a national security forum that Washington, DC needs a stronger link to Silicon Valley.

• “There’s a place to find common ground between personal civil liberties and NSA doing its job,” Bush said Tuesday, according to the Associated Press. “I think the balance has actually gone the wrong way.”

• Further Reading Watchdog report offers harshest critique of NSA metadata program to date

• Group fights gov’t claim that “essentially all telephone records are relevant.” The former Florida governor’s statement puts him not only at odds with rival Republican candidates like Rand Paul, but also against a number of government committees and federal judges.

• “If you create encryption, it makes it harder for the American government to do its job—while protecting civil liberties—to make sure that evildoers aren’t in our midst,” Bush said in South Carolina at an event sponsored by Americans for Peace, Prosperity, and Security, according to The Intercept.

• Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said Tuesday that encryption makes it harder for law enforcement to track down “evildoers” — and called for a “much better, more cooperative relationship” with Apple, Google, and other tech companies that are building uncrackable private communication apps into their new products.

• People are the worst. An unknown number of assholes are threatening to expose Ashley Madison users, presumably ruining their marriages. The hacking victims must pay the extortionists “exactly 1.0000001 Bitcoins” or the spouse gets notified.

• In the last 48 hours we went under the ‘psychological’ threshold of 1000 Exit Relays in the consensus. Right now, Thu Aug 20 23:57:02 UTC 2015, we have:

• 6234 Running relays 954 Exit relays

• How much of your public cloud do you need to log? According to enterprise managers, everything. And why not? They have access to virtually unlimited processing and storage resources, so they turn on all logs.

• Logging comes in different flavors. You can log the use of storage systems, such as Amazon Web Services’ S3, log the use of databases, log the use of server instances, log the network, log security, and log governance.

• New terms and conditions popping up on Spotify users screens give the music-streaming company sweeping new rights.

• Updated privacy policy also reveals who Spotify is sharing personal data with, including advertisers, generating social media backlash

• …youth board member Matthew Brown explores mass surveillance in the UK.

• Specifically, a quantum computer using something called Shor’s algorithm can efficiently factor numbers, breaking RSA. A variant can break Diffie-Hellman and other discrete log–based cryptosystems, including those that use elliptic curves. This could potentially render all modern public-key algorithms insecure. Before you panic, note that the largest number to date that has been factored by a quantum computer is 143. (That computation also accidentally “factored much larger numbers such as 3599, 11663, and 56153, without the awareness of the authors of that work,” which shows how weird this all is.) So while a practical quantum computer is still science fiction, it’s not stupid science fiction.

• New disclosures about the National Security Agency’s partnership with AT&T could reignite constitutional challenges to the spy agency’s efforts to wiretap the Internet.

• Sonic CEO Dane Jasper responds to revelations of NSA and AT&T’s coziness

• Yesterday, U.N. spokeswoman Vannina Maestracci said that the world diplomatic organization would discuss the spying issue with AT&T “over the coming months.” Also, the U.N. said that in the next few months, it will start accepting bids for new communications contracts.

• The combined spying capabilities of the U.S. government and some private companies threaten civil liberties, according to a formal employee of AT&T.

• On Saturday, The New York Times published a story confirming that U.S. telecom giant AT&T had helped the country’s National Security Agency (NSA) spy on vast swaths of Internet traffic.

• “This threatens civil liberties, as individuals have little power against such combinations. It’s intimidating,” former AT&T technician and whistleblower Mark Klein told Russian news agency Sputnik.

• The convergence of power against the ordinary citizen, here via the interpenetration of government and the telecommunications industry, a collapsing of the public and private spheres of authority (it doesn’t matter which of the two seizes the initiative, for what amounts to the privatization of repression under the aegis of the State), eviscerates/invalidates the existence of a democratic social order. The American Imperium wears no clothes, a condition at least a century in the making. The present, however, is perhaps worse than ever, from the standpoint of freedom of thought and expression, as witness, in passing, the clear rightward shift of the political spectrum in which both major parties field candidates stopping just this side of outright fascism.

• The United Nations has said it expects member states to respect its right to privacy and is assessing how to respond to a report that telecommunications company AT&T Inc helped the US National Security Agency spy on the world body’s communications.

• The company gave technical assistance to the NSA in carrying out a secret court order allowing wiretapping of all internet communications at the headquarters of the United Nations, an AT&T customer, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

• The former mayor of Salt Lake City is suing former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and the National Security Agency for spying on the city during the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.

• “This is the first time anyone knows of that a surveillance cone has been placed over a specific geographical area in the United States,” Anderson told The Register. “What was so alarming was that they were reading the contents of the text messages and emails.”

• The government seems to have lost interest in finding anyone to hang for Snowden’s all-access tour of the NSA’s internal servers — access that greatly aided in his absconding with a number of documents revealing the surprising extent of the agency’s surveillance programs. It certainly still wants to hang Snowden — literally, if some legislators get their way.

• It has, however, decided to nail one handy scapegoat to the wall. This would be the contractor who allowed Snowden to get in the door in the first place. The Register’s Shaun Nichols reports that the DOJ is fining US Investigative Services (USIS) $30 million for generally being completely terrible at the one thing it’s supposed to be doing: vetting applicants for sensitive government jobs.

• Snowden-inspired crypto-email service Lavaboom has apparently gone titsup, according to several net sources.

• Rumours that the German encrypted mail service was no more surfaced through an ex contractor Piotr on the blog of rival ProtonMail, before getting picked up and discussed on Reddit.

• Last week, however, during a hearing in US District Court in Washington, DC, a government attorney revealed for the first time that it found three emails Snowden said he sent to the NSA’s Oversight and Compliance office, one of the offices that would have handled his complaints.

• However, those emails did not raise any questions or concerns about NSA surveillance, according to Justice Department attorney Steve Bressler.

• “They concerned him doing his job of providing tech support to them, not raising concerns about NSA programs,” Bressler told US District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.

• The court hearing was held in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the NSA that VICE News filed a year ago in which we sought all of the emails Snowden said he sent to agency officials that “raised concerns” about NSA surveillance.

• Because intelligence officials often claim that these programs are directed only at foreigners abroad (as though mass surveillance of the rest of the world is justified), many Americans believe that they aren’t vulnerable to the NSA’s dragnet spying. But the reality is far different.

• In an interview with Nexgov about the report, ODNI’s director of science and technology David Honey spoke openly about working with techcompanies like Uber—to better emulate the way they track and predict customer (and driver) actions. “If we can leverage those kinds of tools,” Honey told Nexgov, “maybe we gotta adapt them a little bit, but that certainly beats having to go and pay for those things from scratch.”

• One portion of the report, a flow chart titled “Enhanced Processing and Management of Data From Disparate Sources,” lists every logistical and analytical problem intelligence agencies hope the private sector can help them with. They range from the completely understandable (“geospatial analytics,” “data structures for optimized searching”) to the somewhat ludicrous (“photonic computing,” “immersive virtual world user experience”).

• Translated, this means that bureaucrats decided they wanted to snoop into phone calls and went ahead and did so without getting a warrant from a court.

• After the US security agency NSA identified a massive hacking attack from Chinese sources, other G8 countries have followed their lead. Australia is tightening its telecommunications policies, and it is shutting out Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.

Civil Rights

• Ted Nugent called a black man a “mongrelboy” during an exchange on Facebook in just the latest example of the National Rifle Association board member’s use of the social media platform as a launch pad for racial attacks.

• It’s not just Donald Trump and Scott Walker that have declared children born on American soil should no longer be considered citizens: the American Legislative Exchange Council, or “ALEC,” made the same claim in 2008.

• A coalition of environmental and human rights organisations from the UK, Romania and Canada have called on prime minister David Cameron to intervene in an international case which is pitting a Canadian mining company against the government of Romania. The group argues that under new trade agreements like TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) such cases will radically expand, targeting the British and other European governments.

• The presumed illegality of filming police is a law enforcement mental disorder. Far too many officers believe they have the right to perform their public service unobserved. Officers continue to take cameras from bystanders who happen to catch them behaving badly. Abby Phillip at the Washington Post details another apparent act of police misconduct that resulted in more misconduct as officers attempted to shut the recording down.

• Just after 4 p.m. Thursday, a woman stood a few feet away from several Miami Police Department patrol cars with her cellphone camera recording. After a few seconds, an officer entered the frame, escorting a handcuffed young black man to the back of a police car.

• Suddenly, the officer put his head inside the car door and appeared to punch the suspect.

• “Oh!” a woman exclaimed on the recording, reacting to what was unfolding before her. The woman, who the Associated Press identified as Shenitria Blocker, moved closer, and the officer climbed into the back seat of the car. Moments later, the camera shook and the video ended.

• The National Rifle Association’s magazine America’s 1st Freedom attacks Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley on its first cover focused on the 2016 presidential race. The issue’s feature article outlandishly accuses the former Maryland governor of offering “hope and change to convicted killers and criminals,” but the organization’s overheated rhetoric is based on unfounded attacks on O’Malley’s record.

• It will soon be the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a devastating event that killed at least 1,800 people across the Gulf Coast region and displaced as many as half a million, followed by rebuilding efforts that were bungling and divisive.

• Sky has reported that UK police are using body worn cameras from the company Evidence.com, which automatically uploads the footage online. This company is a subsidiary of TASER, makers of the well known electric shock devices. Their piece says that questions have been raised about the safety and security of the footage, with shadow Labour minister for policing, Jack Dromey, asking for reassurances from the Home Secretary.

• The noisy garbage trucks that lumber down San Jose streets every week could soon pick up more than just trash — they might also scan your license plate and all your neighbors’ tags, too, in a proposed city-wide sweep for stolen vehicles that has civil libertarians crying foul.

• What remains – I guess I would be a horrible performer at Amazon, and I am proud of it.

• The page does not mention that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 terrorist attack architect, lied to CIA officers about a Montana recruitment plot while being water-boarded.

• The revelations of U.S. spying on Japan have been an unpleasant surprise for the Japanese public.

• In 1967, amid civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, U.S. Army Gen. William P. Yarborough, Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, initiated unprecedented extensive domestic surveillance involving Army Intelligence and the CIA as well as the NSA.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Google joined hands with Facebook to try and prevent the Internet and Mobile Association of India, which represents some of the largest Internet companies in India, from taking a stand that counters Zero Rating. According to emails exchanged between IAMAI’s Government Relations committee members, of which MediaNama has copies, Vineeta Dixit, a member of Google’s Public Policy and and Government Relations team, strongly pushed for the removal of any mention of Zero Rating from the IAMAI’s submission, as a response to the Department of Telecom’s report on Net Neutrality. Please note that Google hasn’t responded to our queries, despite multiple reminders.

• Last week, I came across two separate speeches that were given recently about the future of the internet — both with very different takes and points, but both that really struck a chord with me. And the two seem to fit together nicely, so I’m combining both of them into one post. The first speech is Jennifer Granick’s recent keynote at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. You can see the video here or read a modified version of the speech entitled, “The End of the Internet Dream.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Three years ago now, EFF’s client Kyle Goodwin, a sports videographer, asked the court to allow him to retrieve the files he stored in an account on the cloud storage site Megaupload. When the government seized Megaupload’s assets and servers in January 2012, Mr. Goodwin lost access to video files containing months of his professional work. Today, EFF filed a brief on behalf of Mr. Goodwin asking, once again, for the return of the files.

• We originally asked the court for help back in 2012. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia took briefing, and even held a hearing. Unfortunately, since that time not much has happened. The U.S. government has continued pursuing a criminal case and a civil forfeiture case against Megaupload and its owners, but the data stored by millions of Megaupload customers, including material like Mr. Goodwin’s sports videos that had nothing to do with the alleged copyright infringement that Megaupload is accused of, languished in a warehouse on hundreds of servers owned by Carpathia Hosting, Megaupload’s former contractor.

• A Minnesota court has ordered Paul Hansmeier, one of two lawyers considered the creators of the Prenda Law copyright-trolling scheme, to pay sanctions in a case where he and his colleague John Steele were accused of trying to collude with a defendant.

• An order published Monday by a Minnesota appeals court describes how Hansmeier tried to dodge a $64,000 judicial sanction in the Guava LLC v. Spencer Merkel case by moving money out of his Alpha Law Firm then dissolving it. A district court previously found that Hansmeier’s actions and inconsistent explanations warranted a piercing of the “corporate veil,” and that court ruled that Hansmeier should be held personally responsible for the debt. Now, an appeals court has agreed (PDF) with that conclusion.

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