● 09.01.15

● Links 1/9/2015: Manjaro Linux 0.8.13, Netrunner 14.2 LTS

Posted in News Roundup at 4:20 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The fact that I used Linux and contacted an organization for German and American Linux users was in itself…well, I’ll let you assign any adjectives that you see fit. Now let’s tie in to the only person in Germany I solicited to help me find my baby girl. Let’s place her at the same post office at the exact same moment in time, in the same city of 75 thousand people. Let’s talk about the fact that a woman 30 feet away from the window heard the woman at that window ask for her mail.

Desktop

• The sources believe Xiaomi will likely release a 15-inch notebook as it is the mainstream size in China and will adopt Linux operating system. The notebook is estimated to be priced at CNY2,999 (US$471) and will heap pressure on competitors’ simliar products priced between CNY4,000-6,000.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced it will give away one Chromebook to every person who enrolls in Linux Foundation training courses during September.

• Chromebooks have become increasingly popular these days, with various models burning up the sales charts on Amazon. But what is it about Chromebooks that make them such a formidable competitor to the iPad? In a recent article, CheatSheet listed five reasons why Chromebooks are a better option than Apple’s iPads.

Server

• One increasingly popular approach is container-based computing, designed to support flexible, scalable computing. Linux containers, which are just now beginning to find their way into the HPC environment, allow an application to be packaged with its entire software stack, including portions of the base operating system files, user environment variables and application “entry points.”

• “Photon Machine” is the name for a new, stripped-back version of ESX that’s being cast as a “microvisor”. The Machine is designed to host virtual machines running Photon OS, the stripped-back version of GNU/Linux that VMware announced in April. To manage both, VMware will also release “Photon Controller”, a control plane that will drive the Machine and OS so that it becomes possible to spawn and manage a great many containers.

• VMware vSphere Integrated Containers also leverage the Project Photon OS, which was first announced in April as a Linux operating system distribution for running containers.

• The good news: Linux is on the up and moving like a freight train. 87% or organizations added Linux servers this year. About the same will add more Linux next year. Windows deployment has fallen from 46% to 26%

Kernel Space

• Jiri Slaby, the maintainer of the Linux 3.12 LTS (Long-Term Support) kernel branch, announced the immediate availability for download of the forty-seven maintenance release, a milestone that brings enhancements to various instruction set architectures, as well as many updated drivers.

• While most of you probably haven’t used the LILO bootloader in years in place of GRUB(2), the developer of “LInux LOader” intends to cease development at the end of the year.

• This summer’s intern, Eric Griffith, pointed out today an undated message on the LILO homepage about the bootloader project planning to end development at the end of 2015.

• Aside from Ingo Molnar’s x86 boot changes he sent in to Linus Torvalds for the Linux 4.3 merge window, he also sent in the scheduler changes for this next version of the Linux kernel.

• With Linux 4.3 for those running any sort of SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) workloads, the performance could sway one way or another, but hopefully it’s for the better.

Graphics Stack

• Three days after the release of the Nvidia 352.41 long-lived branch proprietary video driver for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris operating systems, Nvidia announced on the last day of August the immediate availability for download of the short-lived Nvidia 355.11 graphics driver.

• Following this weekend’s Radeon R9 Fury open-source Linux driver tests with the DRM-Next code to be merged into Linux 4.3, the latest Mesa 11.1-devel Git code, and LLVM 3.8 SVN for the AMDGPU compiler back-end, I proceeded to run some bleeding-edge open-source Radeon Gallium3D graphics versus AMD Catalyst Linux benchmarks on Ubuntu.

• Hoping that MIAOW is not a catastrophe

• An open saucy general-purpose graphics processor (GPGPU) has been unveiled at the Hot Chips event.

• The GPGPU is relatively crude and is part of another piece of an emerging open-source hardware platform called MIAOW.

• The outlines of an open source hardware platform continue to come into focus with the introduction of what is claimed by university researchers to be the first general purpose graphics processor design.

• On the Plasma workspaces Display Power Management Signaling (DPMS) is handled by the power management daemon (powerdevil). After a configurable idle time it signals the X-Server through the X11 DPMS Extension. The X-Server handles the timeout, switching to a different DPMS level and restoring to enabled after an input event all by itself.

Applications

• The CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) open-source and cross-platform printing system for GNU/Linux and Mac OS X operating systems reached version 2.1 after being in development for approximately three months.

• Atom is an open-source, multi-platform text editor developed by GitHub, having a simple and intuitive graphical user interface and a bunch of interesting features for writing: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other web programming languages. Among others, it has support for macros, auto-completion a split screen feature and it integrates with the file manager.

• As you may know, Midori is a lightweight web browser with full HTML5 and CSS3 support, used by default on the XFCE4 desktop environment and on Elementary OS systems.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• In a recent interview with PC Gamer, lead producer Brandon Adler of Obsidian said, “I don’t think it was worthwhile developing for Linux. They are a very, very small portion of our active user base – I think around one and a half percent of our users were Linux.”

• Arma 3 is now downloadable and playable on Linux, but be warned it’s early days for the port, and the port may not graduate to official status.

• The idea of gaming on Linux PCs used to be nothing more than a cruel joke—so much so that many Linux enthusiasts dual-booted Windows in order to play PC games. But thanks to the impending release of Valve’s army of Steam Machines, Linux gaming is on the rise, with dozens of big-name PC games going Linux native in recent months. Now for the bad news: The makers of one of 2015’s best games regret their decision to embrace Linux.

• Prison Architect has come a massively long way since the first alpha, and building a prison has never been more fun. This is the last alpha before the full release in October.

• DiRT should now work properly right away with most gamepads, instead of you needing to rotate sticks and press a bunch of buttons to get it working each time. I’m looking forward to them adding this behaviour into older ports too.

• On the last day of August 2015, Epic Games had the great pleasure of announcing the release of Unreal Engine 4.9 game engine for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• It’s my pleasure to announce the Open Beta version of Marble Maps for Android. Marble Maps is a port of the Desktop application Marble Virtual Globe and right now features an OpenStreetMap viewer, search and routing. The app is not yet feature complete; future updates will add turn-by-turn navigation, improve vector rendering and add basic OSM editing capabilities.

• It is time for one more Randa Meetings this year, and over 50 KDE developers are going to participate in it along with me as well. The Randa Meetings is a codesprint sponsored by KDE and organized by Mario Fux, in which KDE developers from all across the globe are invited, and get to sit under the same roof and work together to collaborate on different ideas, coming up with some awesome feature implementations within a time span of about a week. These meetings generally focus on a common topic every year. Last year (2014) it was focused mainly on porting of various KDE applications to the KF5 framework. Similarly, this year we have a common focus as well, and it is aimed at bringing more of KDE to the mobile platform as much as possible. Now, since I am a Marble developer, let me tell you in brief what are my plans for Randa Meetings this year.

• With the move to Plasma 5, updating the Kubuntu website seemed timely. Many people have contributed, including Ovidiu-Florin Bogdan, Aaron Honeycutt, Marcin Sągol and many others.

• We want to show off the beauty of Plasma 5, as well as allow easy access for Kubuntu users to the latest news, downloads, documentation, and other resources.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME Project is currently working on updating packages for the second Beta build towards the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due for release later this month, on September 23.

Distributions

• There are so many operating systems in the world. Apart from the famous ones, like Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Mageia or Linux Mint, there are hundreds of smaller and less well-known.

• If there are many operating systems, there is a good chance that your computer has several of them installed.

Reviews

• This week I want to quickly talk about two projects which have caught my attention. The first is OpenELEC. The OpenELEC (Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center) distribution is an operating system which turns a computer into a media centre. OpenELEC is available in several editions. There are 32-bit and 64-bit x86 builds and a build for people running older NVIDIA video cards. There is a build for WeTek Play Systems, a depreciated build for AppleTV systems, a Freescale build and a couple of builds for Raspberry Pi computers. I decided to continue my Raspberry Pi experiments and downloaded the OpenELEC build for Raspberry Pi 2 computers.

New Releases

• Robert Shingledecker, the creator, maintainer, and lead developer of the Tiny Core project announced earlier today, September 1, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) build of Tiny Core Linux 6.4.

• This is a release candidate. If you decide to help test, then please test carefully. We don’t want anyone to lose data.

• The Manjaro development team announced on the last day of August that the eleventh maintenance update for the stable Manjaro Linux 0.8.13 operating system series is now available to users worldwide.

• The Netrunner team is proud to announce the release of Netrunner 14.2 LTS – 32bit and 64bit ISOs.

• Today, September 1, Jerry Bezencon has announced the immediate availability for download of the final version of the Linux Lite 2.6 operating system, a release that brings a great number of new features.

• Linux Lite 2.6 has been released today, using XFCE, Firefox 40.0.3 and LibreOffice 5.0.1 as default. It is based on the Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS Trusty Tahr and received a new Control Center application, permits the users to backup the system via Systemback which is pre-installed, the Ctrl+Alt+Del key combination can now be used to trigger the shutdown, restart and logout dialog and uses GNOME Disk Utility for partition manage, VLC as the default media player, a new dark theme and new wallpapers.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Ballnux/SUSE

• SUSE is one of the Linux trinity — which comprises Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical. SUSE is also one of the leading contributors to many open source projects, including the kernel itself. However, the company went through challenging times as it was acquired by one company after another. It seems that things have stabilized with the Micro Focus acquisition, so I sat down with Michael Miller, SUSE’s Vice President of Global Alliances & Marketing at LinuxCon and talked about topics ranging from acquisition to future plans.

Red Hat Family

• Lenovo, which recently lost one of its top enterprise business leaders and has so far failed to recover all sales previously produced by IBM in x86 servers, is ramping up efforts to win more business. The latest is the addition of Red Hat OpenStack. Lenovo is also offering rebates and other software.

• We are at an incredible intersection in history. The growth of computing, the Internet, and education is creating a wealth of open innovation around the world. While this was born back in the early days of “free software” in universities, it is now a global phenomenon powering major infrastructure, banks, devices, and more.

• Adam Clater, principal cloud architect at Red Hat‘s North America Public Sector organization, has said platform-as-a-service is helping federal information technology professionals shorten the time it takes to deploy applications.

Fedora

• Paul Carroty posted Friday of the news that Lennart Poettering merged an ‘su’ command replacement into systemd and Fedora Rawhide – coming to a Linux system near you next. Elsewhere, Hackaday.com’s Brian Benchoff said new FCC regulations just killed Open Source firmware replacement and Phoronix.com today reported that LILO is being abandoned. Several polls caught my eye today as did the new Linux workstation security checklist.

• While Fedora 24 isn’t set to be released until H1’2016, developers are already working on getting a NetworkManager 1.2 pre-release into the distribution’s archive early.

• NetworkManager 1.2 is a major update that is set to happen later this year. Given the magnitude of the update and NetworkManager being important to the Fedora/GNOME desktop, the developers want to get the fresh code into F24 packages early.

Debian Family

• My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it’s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me.

• Do you happen to know a developer of Firefox or Chrome or some other mainstream browser?

• If so, can you please talk to them about our experiments with Client Certificate authentication in Debian?

• Client Certificate authentication rocks; with just a couple of little tweaks in the interface, it would be pretty close to perfect.

Derivatives

• DebEX KDE is yet another interesting Debian Jessie derivative system, used an optimized version of KDE 4.1.3 and KDE 5 Plasma and KDE 4.14.3 as the default desktop environments.

• Also, it comes with the Nvidia 352.41 GPU driver by default, Chrome pre-installed and replaced VLC with SMPlayer,

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Over the past few weeks, the fate of Ubuntu’s Software Center has received a lot of press. There have been ample ravings about how the Software Center is about to vanish from the face of the Earth. In reality, it’s not going anywhere yet. What is changing, however, will be the ability to submit new applications or updates to existing applications. In this article, I’ll explain what this means and where things will likely go from here.

• Canonical’s Joel Leclerc has proposed a non-windowing display server which could run with Wayland and Weston, in order to provide more flexibility and power to the OS.

Flavours and Variants

• Cinnamon was the first project to receive attention. Its power applet now shows vendor and model information, box pointers look better, and multi-monitor support was further improved: When switching workspaces, the workspace name now appears on all relevant monitors, output names (i.e. plug names) are shown alongside monitor names (in the screenshot below that allows us to distinguish two identical Dell monitors via the name of their display port).

• LXLE 14.04.3 has been released today, being based on Lubuntu Trusty and bringing a bunch of interesting new features, including Xautolock and OpenSnap, among others.

Devices/Embedded

• Axiomtek’s fanless “NA150″ network appliance runs Linux on a Marvell Armada 370 SoC and offers five GbE ports, a 2.5-inch drive bay, and mini-PCIe wireless.

• The NA150 is latest addition to Axiomtek’s family of compact desktop and rack-mountable network appliances, but it appears to be the first to stray from the well-trodden x86 path. Unlike the company’s similar circa-2011 NA330 and NA320R systems, which were powered by Intel Atoms, the NA150 is built around Marvell’s ARMv7-based Armada 370 system-on-chip.

Phones

Android

• This morning Google revealed their new logo and design language evolution, complete with Android implementation. We’re having a look with what Google describes as “designers from all across the company, including Creative Lab and the Material Design team” at what it took to design this logo and this new look. We’ll see first how the new look will appear in a web browser on your desktop or notebook computer. We’ll also see how it’ll appear on Android – colors, animations, and everything in-between.

• Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Smart Protect will allow phone makers and mobile security software vendors to enhance their existing security products, the company said. For operators, it should mean less fraud and network congestion associated with malware traffic. For consumers, it should mean improved protection of personal data with minimal impact on device performance or battery life.

• Samsung’s flip Android comes with two 3.9-inch Super AMOLED panels with 768 by 1280 pixels of resolution, both of them protected by layers of Corning’s Gorilla Glass 4, which is the same ultra-resistant glass that you’re going to find on high-end Samsung handsets such as the Galaxy Note5 or the Galaxy S6. The handset draws its processing power from the hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 chipset, a SoC that’s paired with 2 GB of RAM.

• If you want one Linux-based OS to run on all of your devices, Android-x86 could become a viable alternative. The major advantage to running Android on all of your devices would be keeping all of your settings, apps and Google services on an equal footing. That is not happening yet, however.

• Chih-Wei Huang, project maintainer for the Android-x86 Project, last month announced the release of Android-x86-r3 — the third stable release of the Android-x86 project.

• It certainly is more refined, but it is a work that needs more progress.

• After weeks of teasing out little details on Twitter, Nextbit has finally spilled the beans on what they’ve been working: Robin, a “cloud-first” Android smartphone.

• So what does “cloud-first” mean? At least initially (the company suggests that the cloud integration will only get deeper in time), it means smart, automated offloading of your photos, videos, and apps to free up the local storage space on your device.

• Robin has 32GB of storage built in. As you fill this, it’ll automatically back up your photos and apps to a private 100GB box on their cloud server.

• Both models of the Galaxy Tab S2 are impressive. Of the two, I’m partial to the 8-inch Tab because its size is perfect for what I like to do with a tablet, like reading comics and watching movies.

• The question now is, should you buy a Tab S2 instead of the iPad?

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source code. GitHub and other cloud repositories enable developers to share and consume code for almost any purpose imaginable. This reflects today’s practical, non-ideological open source culture: Why code it yourself if someone else is offering it free under the most liberal license imaginable?

Events/Communities

• In her Texas Linux Fest keynote, Joan Touzet talked to us about how to improve our open source communities. Joan’s talk was a series of stories about communities who have faced a crisis and then rose above it.

SaaS/Big Data

• When XBT Holding S.A. decided to simplify how its subsidiaries provided global hosting, network solutions, and web development they turned to the open source cloud infrastructure platform OpenStack. By consolidating the offerings under a single service provider, Servers.com, customers can more easily browse, mix, compare and choose the most suitable services.

• There is another OpenStack-focused startup on the scene, and you have to appreciate its creative name: ZeroStack. The cloud computing company has come out of stealth mode to introduce a private cloud solution that it claims is easier to configure, consume and manage than any other technology on the market.

• Only a few days ago, Apache, which is the steward for and incubates more than 350 Open Source projects, announced that Apache Lens, an open source Big Data and analytics tool, has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP). Now, the ASF has announced that Apache Ignite is to become a top-level project. It’s an open source effort to build an in-memory data fabric that was driven by GridGain Systems and WANdisco.

Databases

• Science is swimming in data. And, the already daunting task of managing and analyzing this information will only become more difficult as scientific instruments — especially those capable of delivering more than a petabyte (that’s a quadrillion bytes) of information per day — come online.

• Tackling these extreme data challenges will require a system that is easy enough for any scientist to use, that can effectively harness the power of ever-more-powerful supercomputers, and that is unified and extendable. This is where the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s (NERSC’s) implementation of SciDB comes in.

CMS

• I just pushed a new release of PiwigoPress (main page, WordPress plugin dir) to the WordPress servers. This release incorporates new features for the sidebar widget, and better interoperability with some Piwigo galleries.

Education

• Students spend the 16-week long course learning practical skills using real tools. To support their systems, students learn about using support tickets and documentation by using RT and MediaWiki. To deploy and maintain their systems, they learn about configuration management using Puppet, system monitoring using Nagios, and backup and recovery using Bacula. But the broad concepts are more important than the specific software packages I just mentioned. The point is to learn, for example, configuration management, not to be trained to use Puppet. The software used by Clark is used because it works for him, but the software is flexible and changeable.

Openwashing (Fake FOSS)

• Amazon, Netflix, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Cisco have announced the formation of the Alliance for Open Media.

• The group aims to build “The open and royalty-free format for next generation ultra high definition media.”

• SAP SE has become the latest big technology company to throw its weight behind open-source data-sifting software called Spark as it tackles information streaming from industries such as retail, telecommunications and transport.

Funding

• ownCloud Inc. have announced a partnership with HackerOne to help with the newly created Security Bug Bounty Program in an effort to find vulnerabilities and fix them before they become an issue for users.

BSD

• The OpenBSD Foundation has been funding work on a project to provide OpenBSD with its own, native hypervisor.

• The hypervisor’s VMM is so far able to launch a kernel and ask for a root file-system, but beyond that, it’s been laying most of the hypervisor foundation up to this point.

• Earlier today, Mike Larkin (mlarkin@) published a teaser for something he’s been working on for a while.

• The author of stunnel has (once, twice) asserted that stunnel may not be used with LibreSSL, only with OpenSSL. This is perhaps a strange thing for free software to do, and it creates the potential for some very weird consequences.

• First, some background. The OpenSSL license and the GPL are both free software licenses, but they are different flavors of freedom, meaning you can’t mix them. It would be like mixing savory and sweet. Can’t do it. Alright, so maybe technically you can do it, but you’re not supposed to. The flavor, er, freedom police will come get you. One workaround is for the GPL software to say, oh, but maybe wait, here’s an exception. (Does this make the software more or less free?) Here’s a longer explanation with sample exception.

• X11 clients on the Beagle Bone Black .. that’s X11 over the network, with the X Server elsewhere. No display as yet. The FreeBSD wiki notes that there’s no (mini) HDMI driver yet. So I built some X11 programs, xauth(1) and xmessage(1), and installed them on the Bone. Since I bought a blue case for the Bone, and it is the smallest computer in the house (discounting phones .. let’s call it the smallest hackable computer in the house) the kids decided to call it smurf. Here’s a screenshot of poudriere’s text console as it builds packages.

Openness/Sharing

• …open data and an open programming interface…

• If you’re not familiar with the string of open projects that the Blender Institute has kicked out over the years, you might not be familiar with the term “open movie.” Simply put, not only is Cosmos Laundromat produced using free and open source tools like Blender, GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape, but the film itself, and all of its assets—models, textures, character rigs, animations, all of it—are available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. Want to see what a production character rig looks like? Or know how that giant color tornado was created? How about actually using a character (or just a prop) in your own project? Maybe you even want to redo the entire film to your own tastes. It’s an open movie! You can!

Programming

• I don’t like automation — I love it. I whisper sweet nothings, come ’round with flowers, and buy milkshakes for automation. I’ve even stood outside the window with a boombox for automation. I will go out of my way to automate tasks that, while they are not terribly tedious, I don’t want to have to remember exactly how to do them somewhere down the road, when months have gone by since the last time I had to relearn them.

Leftovers

Security

• Over the last 10 years, OpenSSL has published advisories on over 100 vulnerabilities. Many more were likely silently fixed in the early days, but in the past year our goal has been to establish a clear public record.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• It is an astonishing fact that, despite near universal recognition now that the war in Iraq was a disaster, no major British social institution is headed by a single one of the majority of the population wo were opposed to the war.

• Every Cabinet Minister actively supported the war. Of the fifteen Tory MPs who rebelled and voted against the war, not one is a minister. Civil servants officially have no politics but privately their opinions are known. There is not one single Permanent Under Secretary of a UK government department who was known to be against the war and most were enthusiasts. Simon Fraser, PUS at the FCO, was an active Blairite enthusiast for the war. Though no Blairite, the Head of MI6 Alex Younger was also an enthusiast.

• But that “huge role” often disappears when the the leading papers are discussing the carnage that results from the air attacks that the US is supporting and supplying. Thus when the Times‘ Rick Gladstone (8/22/15) reported that “Saudi-led airstrikes on a residential district in Yemen’s southwestern city of Taiz had killed more than 65 civilians, including 17 people from one family,” according to Doctors Without Borders, and that the death toll in the war included “hundreds of civilians killed in airstrikes,” Washington’s role in facilitating those deaths went unmentioned.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• This Monday through Wednesday, President Obama will be in Alaska, visiting melting glaciers and remote towns and meeting with other Arctic leaders. On Sunday, the president made a major statement by officially renaming Mt. McKinley — the U.S.’s highest peak — Denali, its traditional native name.

• The trip’s purpose is to highlight climate change — and for Alaska in particular, the change has been dramatic.

Finance

• These Wall Street veterans all know who Blythe Masters is. She’s the wunderkind who made managing director at JPMorgan Chase at age 28, the financial engineer who helped develop the credit-default swap and bring to life a market that peaked at $58 trillion, in notional terms, in 2007. She’s the banker later vilified by pundits, unfairly some say, after those instruments compounded the damage wrought by the subprime mortgage crash in 2008. Now, one year after quitting JPMorgan amid another controversy, Blythe Masters is back. She isn’t pitching a newly minted derivative or trading stratagem to this room. She’s promoting something wilder: It’s called the blockchain, and it’s the digital ledger software code that powers bitcoin.

• eBay will soon be banning PayPal rivals, ProPay and Skrill, from offering payment services to sellers on its platform.

• Major reduction in funding could see number of police officers in England and Wales fall to 40-year low

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Colion Noir, a commentator and web series host for the National Rifle Association (NRA), warned the parents of slain journalists Alison Parker and Adam Ward against becoming “so emotional” in response to the fatal shooting of their children that they channel their “grief-inspired advocacy” to the wrong effect.

• CNN repeatedly asked former Vice President Dick Cheney for his criticism of Hillary Clinton’s email practices during her time as secretary of state, but the network failed to acknowledge the fact that Colin Powell, who was secretary of state during the Bush-Cheney administration, similarly used a private email account to conduct State business.

Censorship

• Jyllands-Posten editor Flemming Rose, who was behind the controversial 2005 publication of Prophet Muhammad cartoons, is being honoured by a Norwegian free speech group.

Privacy

• As someone who has been reporting on license plate readers (LPR) for some time now, it actually surprised me when I heard that Roanoke, Virginia, shooter Vester Lee Flanagan had been first located through the use of the scanning device. While the devices have been in use in Virginia for years, their effectiveness and efficiency there—and nationwide—is questionable.

• According to local media accounts, when Virginia State Police Trooper Pamela Neff received the suspect’s plate number over her radio last week, she punched it into her LPR system and got an alert that the car had passed by not three minutes earlier. Within 10 minutes, Neff and other officers converged on Flanagan’s location, finding that he had shot himself, ending the manhunt.

Civil Rights

• Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff co-hosts for the Project Censored show provide an update on human rights abuses in Mexico funded by US; they speak with researcher/journalist Laura Carlsen in Mexico City.

• A “featured blogger” for Mississippi’s Clarion-Ledger touted the Center for Medical Progress’ (CMP) widely debunked sting videos targeting Planned Parenthood to compare doctors who perform abortions to terror group ISIS.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• For years we have been graced by cheap consumer electronics that are able to be upgraded through unofficial means. Your Nintendo DS is able to run unsigned code, your old XBox was a capable server for its time, your Android smartphone can be made better with CyanogenMod, and your wireless router could be expanded far beyond what it was originally designed to do thanks to the efforts of open source firmware creators. Now, this may change. In a proposed rule from the US Federal Communications Commission, devices with radios may be required to prevent modifications to firmware.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Russian search giant Yandex has ordered U.S-based Github to take down a tool that allows downloading of MP3s from its music streaming service. Yandex, which has 60% of the local search market and has deals with Universal, Sony and Warner to offer a Spotify-like platform, says that the music downloader is illegal.

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