● 09.10.15

● Links 11/9/2015: Android Pay, Plasma 5.4.1 in Kubuntu

Posted in News Roundup at 6:57 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Mycroft is a smart device designed to make your home smart, and its makers have just managed to get the project funded on Kickstarter. They still need some help to reach the first stretch goal, which would bring the speech recognition part of their software on regulator desktop distros.

• The Mycroft Kickstarter project has proved to be a success, and it looks like its makers even managed to get passed the first stretch goal and that means only one thing: voice control for the Linux desktop.

• Every ten months or so, a small distribution starts with the goal of making Linux look more like Windows. Among the latest are ChaletOS and Apricity OS, which if nothing else look like thoughtful exercises in design. Yet after so many similar efforts, I have to wonder whether a Windows-like desktop will do a thing to encourage users to try Linux. Maybe the goal should be something different.

• I can see the logic, of course. Windows is the leading desktop, so why argue with popularity?

• For years, Linux software labored to catch up with Windows. But not only did GNOME and KDE passed that goal in terms of features over a decade ago, but modern distros can match OS X in terms of eye-candy as well. Yet, like an ex- colony that still looks to the mother country for its culture, some developers still seem to have a reflexive cringe, an automatic assumption that Linux desktops still lag behind Windows. In reality, it is the Linux desktop which is setting the pace for customization and innovation — which is why Windows 10 borrowed so many features — but apparently not everybody has noticed.

• One of the most important aspects of any Linux distribution is the accessibility for physically disabled people, and some are doing it better than others. Ubuntu is not working to improve this aspect of the OS by adopting some solutions from the community.

• I went shopping for a laptop yesterday, with a fairly high budget and thoughts of a new MacBook, but came home with a $300 Toshiba Chromebook 2 instead. Now obviously a Chomebook gives up something to any Mac in terms of capability but my decision was possible because my laptop isn’t my primary workstation. That being said the new generation of Chromebooks represent a great value and a huge leap in quality over my first-gen Acer C720. With it’s elegant design and amazing display (IPS up to 2400×1350) most casual observers wouldn’t know that you weren’t using a Mac.

Server

• Rancher Labs is a startup founded by a group of former engineers from Citrix Systems. The company has developed Rancher, a complete infrastructure platform for running Docker in production, as well as Rancher OS, a minimalist Linux distro that runs the entire OS as Docker containers. Sheng Liang, CEO and co-founder of Rancher Labs was the lead developer at the original Java Virtual Machine at Sun Microsystems. I spoke with Mr. Liang at LinuxCon NA to learn more about his new venture.

Kernel Space

• A few days ago Bonnie King, a Linux administrator at Fermilab, reached out to thank us for sponsoring her through our diversity scholarship program. She attended this year’s LinuxCon (and the co-located CloudOpen and ContainerCon conferences), and I thought it would be great for people to meet one of the many who have taken advantage of this program in hopes to encourage others to apply as well.

• Hans Verkuil is a senior software engineer of R&D at Cisco Systems Norway. He maintains the part of the media subsystem in the Linux kernel that is focused on video receivers and transmitters, as well as the V4L2 bridge drivers and core V4L2 frameworks. He is currently working on adding HDMI Consumer Electronics Control support to the kernel and on improving colorspace support for the V4L2 subsystem.

• Hans recently sent us a video tour of his office to contribute to our series that takes you inside the workspaces of Linux kernel developers. We’re in awe of many things about this workspace, but I can’t help but be impressed with the level of chaos going on in this space and the whiskey collection at the ready.

Graphics Stack

• With the forthcoming Linux 4.3 kernel is a big rework to the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver. Here are our first tests of NVIDIA GeForce hardware under Linux 4.2 stable and then the Linux 4.3 Git code with this reworked driver.

• After Nouveau didn’t see any improvements for Linux 4.2 due to this ongoing driver rework, the Nouveau changes in Linux 4.3 are significant as outlined in these articles. The Nouveau DRM update improves some of the driver’s design, makes the code “a lot easier” to work with, lower memory usage, GPU VM is faster, and other code clean-ups took place.

• Tom Stellard, the organizer of this year’s X.Org Developers’ Conference, has passed along word that the tentative schedule for next week’s conference is now available.

• Those interested in the XDC2015 talks can now find the tentative schedule via this Wiki page. As has been the case for years, while it’s the X.Org conference, as stewarding oepn-source graphics, there are also talks covering Mesa, Wayland, and other components to the graphics/input stacks for Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc.

Benchmarks

• MD RAID1 of two HDD gives you nearly twice as big perfomance of each individual disc. When you combine SSD and HDD, then the resulting raid will have the same performance as single SSD. The additional HDD will give you redundancy, and will not help you in performance, but on the other hand it will not be bottleneck neither.

Applications

• On September 9, the FFmpeg developers had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the FFmpeg 2.8 open-source and cross-platform software used for recording, converting, and streaming audio and video.

• Convoy is an open-source Docker volume driver that can snapshot, backup and restore Docker volumes.

• It is from the same folks responsible for RancherOS, one of several container-native operating systems solely designed to run containers, and the Rancher platform, an all-in-one infrastructure solution for running Docker containers.

• Enpass 5.0 RC was released recently (64bit only for Linux), bringing one of the most requested features: browser extensions for both Firefox and Chrome on Linux and Windows (and for Safari on Mac), which allows auto-filling your username/password and other sensitive information directly from the web browser.

Proprietary

• Popular peer based torrent provider BitTorrent, has announced a new update for its Sync service that allows synchronization of files on its desktop application. The new version released of Sync brings in additional changes to it’s free as well as pro subscribers. The updated version has been made available on Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

Instructionals/Technical

• In my All About Audio article, I covered the basics of organizing audio in Kdenlive with the intent to round-trip the soundtrack out to a proper audio editor and mixer to produce a mixdown. Since that series of articles was specifically about Kdenlive, I only mentioned XJadeo as the video viewer during an audio mix, so it’s high time to return to the topic now with a little more attention given to the tools outside Kdenlive that help you produce great sound for your motion pictures. That’s exactly what this and next month’s article will address.

• Admittedly, trying to diagnose and fix a problem with X—or anything else—from a command console is not for everyone. There are many of us who just want to use the computer and could care less about how it works. But if you’re like me, interested in how it functions, willing to try something new and learn new things, these tools can be invaluable when the GUI goes south. For many the command line is some mysterious place that only uber-geeks go. These tools put a more familiar, friendlier face on it. With them we can move around in our system, see what it’s doing, and connect to the outside world. Over the years I’ve tried many utilities and these are the ones I’ve settled with, because they’re simple to use and get the job done. Even though I’ve used Linux for nearly 20 years now, I’m not a programmer or command-line guru. But I do like to tinker and I’ve broken my systems more times than I can remember. Being able to find help from the web at the console has been priceless. And honestly, most fixes have been very simple once I found where the problem was. Things like the wrong permissions on an executable, a script calling something that doesn’t exist or had it’s name changed in an update, or a missing package. Only once in all those years have I ever screwed things up so bad that the only recourse was to completely reinstall the system. Besides, there’s a real feeling of accomplishment when we can fix something ourselves.

Wine or Emulation

Games

• Brushfire Games recently announced that our next game Polychromatic would be coming to Windows, Mac, and Linux on Steam later this year. All of our development takes place on OS X and Windows, but supporting Linux is important to us. To assist in our efforts, we are leveraging Vagrant and the Steam Runtime to greatly simplify building our game for Linux.

• Grim Fandango Remastered is a point-and-click adventure developed and published by Double Fine Productions on Steam for Linux and is now available with a 66% discount.

• The Dwarves is a new fantasy RPG from the famous KING Art Games, who also brought us The Book of Unwritten Tales series, The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief, and Battle Worlds: Kronos. The studio is now looking to get enough money on Kickstarter for their new project.

• I took a look at Gryphon Knight Epic a good looking retro-inspired shoot ‘em up from Cyber Rhino Studios.

• The Stanley Parable has finally been released for Linux after a bit of a delay, and it’s one of the most interesting experiences I’ve had in a long time.

• Despite its high production values and unique gameplay, Airscape has been a commercial flop, and has so far only sold 150 copies, according to designer and programmer of Airscape Daniel West in his post-mortem on Gamasutra. That makes me all the more glad I decided to buy a copy on release, since it has been one of my most memorable game experiences this year. And as a dubious bonus, my Linux sale might also have made a bigger dent on the sales statistics per OS than it otherwise would have.

• A game I’ve really wanted to try is ‘The Escapists’ that sees you breaking out of prison, and it looks like it will come to Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Following this week’s Qt 5.6 Alpha release is some more exciting news for this open-source toolkit.

• Code-Q Oy, a Finnish company, is developing a Qt Speech Recognition API for Qt. Work is still in its early stages but they have issued a “request for comments” over this new API.

• A couple of weeks ago, we took our first steps towards the Qt 5.6 release.

• One of the most important achievements was to put our new CI (continuous integration) system into use. This system has been developed from the ground up over the last 8 months as a replacement for the older, Jenkins-based CI system that we have been using so far. The old system was suffering from a lot of problems, leading to very long turn-around times to get individual patches integrated into Qt. The new system is both more stable and significantly faster. It also simplifies adding new repositories to the CI system, and is a lot more flexible in handling multiple branches. This will help both our development work as well as our release process.

• Today, the application switcher is a small bar with thumbnails of the application along with the application icon and the title with ellipsis in the middle. The bar disappears when the user realeases the keys and offers no further functionality. On the other hand, the plasmoid sidebar is sticky until the user closes it or changes the focus to another app. The bar contains of a search function, has functions to add more items (GHNS), and a different kind of preview. And in case of the activities switcher the preview provides additional interactions, such as clone or close, that are shown on hover.

• This week two years ago, we released the first version of KDE Connect. Since then, more than 50.000 people have installed the Android app, more than 60 people have contributed code patches (even high school students), and it has been translated to 26 languages!

• Cutelyst, a Qt web framework just got a new release, this version took a little longer but now I think it has evolved enough for a new version.

• KDE sprint in Randa boosts productivity since VDG members and developers talk directly to each other. In this blog post we present an alternative for the configuration of Baloo file search that meets the guidelines for KCMs.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME project is preparing for the launch of the 3.18 branch, and developers are still making changes, although it might be too late for some of them. A new printer Jobs Dialog has been put together and it already looks great.

• With the forthcoming GNOME 3.18 release, yet another one of the features is proper Google Drive integration.

• With GNOME 3.18 there is Google Drive integration for accessing your files from Google within GNOME applications.

• GNOME’s Debarshi Ray announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the second Beta build of the upcoming GNOME Online Accounts software, a core component of the GNOME 3.18 Beta 2 desktop environment.

• GNOME 3.18 is going to be another milestone in our journey to bring various online services closer to the desktop, but this is one that took us 6 years to reach. You can now access your Google Drive through your favourite GNOME applications and the usual GIO APIs

• The GNOME project has taken some very important steps towards proper integration of Google Drive straight into the operating system, and it looks like we’re going to be able to use it in just a few months.

• GNOME 3.18 is to introduce native support for Google Drive in the GNOME file manager.

Distributions

• You’re using Ubuntu, but you want your desktop experience to be a little more… eye catching. While you could always add a new desktop background, or switch desktops completely, you also have the option of switching to a completely different distro.

• We’ve compiled this list of five utterly stunning Ubuntu alternatives for you to watch demos of, and perhaps download and install on your Linux computer.

• Ultimate Edition 4.6 “Gamers” was released today with lots of updates and lots of software. “It is the ultimate entertainment system.” Elsewhere, Jeff Hoogland today announced some new modules for those using Moksha with Bodhi Linux and Dark Duck recently reviewed tiny Austrumi 3.2.2. “Austrumi is a Linux distribution that is based on Slackware and developed by a small team from the Latgale region of Latvia, a small ex-USSR Baltic state.”

• Today’s Ultimate Edition 4.6 release brings the MATE desktop with a long menu of games. It also ships with emulators such as Wine & PlayonLinux as well as Linux favorite the Steam client. The developer said, “I can play more games in this O/S then any Windows based O/S can.” The desktop is characterized by a dark theme and desktop effects come default. Besides the large number of games, Ultimate also ships with LibreOffice, Firefox and Chromium, several multimedia apps, and XBMC already setup.

Reviews

• I’ve been using this laptop for a few days now, and installing Fedora, Manjaro, Debian, Mint, LMDE, and Ubuntu. Here’s my report on how it all went.

New Releases

• Robert Shingledecker, the creator, maintainer, and lead developer of the Tiny Core project, has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the final build of his Tiny Core Linux 6.4 operating system.

Arch Family

• Immediately after announcing the release of the second RC build of Manjaro Linux KDE 15.09, Philip Müller published details about the Manjaro Linux Xfce 15.09 Release Candidate 2 operating system.

Ballnux/SUSE

• When asked to peer into his crystal ball and tell us what he thought was the next wave of innovation, Mr. Miller did not hesitate. “With software defined distributed storage, we are on the cusp of a new revolution,” he stated. IoT and other technologies are bringing “more data and larger data sets kept for longer periods of time. This massive explosion of data really requires a storage revolution. This is our opportunity to bring the power of open source innovation to bear on storage.” Stay tuned for more.

Red Hat Family

• A startup accelerator with some big tech backup just selected 12 startups.

• Dubbed the Raleigh Innovators Program, the three-month accelerator is backed by a coalition that includes Citrix, Red Hat, Cherokee, HQ Raleigh and the city of Raleigh.

• Intersec (www.intersec.com), leading editor of real-time streaming analytics software, and Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, have demonstrated their ability to deliver significantly faster results and go beyond state-of-the-art distributed Big Data solutions. Benchmarks conducted by Intersec and Red Hat against Hadoop and Spark have been successfully carried out in a NFV environment based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform with two use cases, Customer Base Management and Geomarketing. In both cases, Intersec’s overall performance was measurably faster than Hadoop and Spark thanks to its cutting-edge software architecture. Complete benchmark results are available at www.intersec.com.

• Analysts on the Street are predicting that Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) will report earnings of $0.29 per share for the current fiscal quarter. This figure is representative of the total sell-side analysts polled by Zack’s Research covering the equity. Most recently Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) reported earnings per share of $0.31 for the fiscal period ended on 2015-05-31.

Fedora

• Good News everyone,

• after another 3 weeks, new versions of DNF and DNF-PLUGINS-CORE have been released. DNF 1.1.1 brings mark command feature while DNF-PLUGINS-CORE adds 4 new filters from “dnf list” command and extending functionality of `–arch` and `–tree` switches. Additionaly around 15 bugs have been fixed.

• For more detailed information about the releases see DNF and DNF plugins release notes.

• Recently Jiri Eischmann posted a great blog post about ABRT improving Fedora Workstation – [cz] and [en]. I’m glad the work the ABRT team is a valuable source of data for many projects these days and thanks to their input, the UI of ABRT Server is getting new features for better filtering, queries etc.

Debian Family

• The SteamOS version based on the newer Debian 8 has been upgraded once more, and it looks like developers are preparing the groundwork for some important changes that will land very soon.

• Open-source software is especially trustworthy compared to closed-source software because you can see the source code of the program you’re running.

• Or can you?

• You probably aren’t compiling all your software from source—you’re getting packages provided by your Linux distribution. But how do you know those binary packages were actually compiled from that source code and weren’t tampered with?

• DebConf 15 happened last month in Heidelberg where there was many interesting sessions, not just for Debian GNU/Linux but also Debian GNU/Hurd.

• Provided at this annual Debian conference was a status update on Debian GNU Hurd, the version of Debian using the Hurd micro-kernel rather than the Linux kernel while retaining much of the same Debian user-land. Debian GNU Hurd has been chugging along for the past few years, just like the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD variant.

Derivatives

• SparkyLinux is a GNU/Linux distribution created on the “testing” branch of Debian. It features customized lightweight desktops (like E19, LXDE and Openbox), multimedia plugins, selected sets of apps and own custom tools to ease different tasks.

• Debian maintainers for MATE have announced that all the packages for the latest 1.10 branch of the desktop environment have been uploaded into the repositories for Debian unstable.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A Spice vulnerability has been found and repaired in Ubuntu 15.04 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and a new patch has been made available in the official repositories.

• On September 9, Canonical published a new Ubuntu Security Notice document informing users about a new kernel update for its Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) operating system, urging them to upgrade as soon as possible.

• The Cube-Controls team, through Maarten Ectors, has the great pleasure of informing users about a new device called Pi-Cubes, which is an app-enabled HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) control system powered by Snappy Ubuntu Core.

• One of the most important aspects of any Linux distribution is the accessibility for physically disabled people, and some are doing it better than others. Ubuntu is not working to improve this aspect of the OS by adopting some solutions from the community.

• Canonical’s Bill Filler posted a very interesting message on the Ubuntu Touch mailing list, informing Ubuntu app developers and Ubuntu Phone users alike about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch team for the operating system’s core apps.

• Falldown, a fast-paced and addictive game that we previewed last month, hit the streets a few hours ago, on September 9, with version 0.0.7 available to users worldwide on the Ubuntu Store for phones.

• Wondering what Ubuntu—Canonical’s open source, Linux-based operating system—can do for your phone that Android and iOS can’t? If the answer is yes, the company is hoping you’ll take a look at a video showcasing Scopes, one of Ubuntu’s key features for user devices.

• Didier Roche, the creator and lead developer of Ubuntu Make, an open-source command-line tool that lets Ubuntu users install all sorts of useful projects that cannot be found in the default software repositories, has announced the release of Ubuntu Make 15.09.2.

• Besides working on the legacy X11 support atop Mir, Canonical developers working on this display server have just implemented evdev device detection for Mir.

• Via this commit yesterday to the Mir Bazaar repository, there’s now evdev device detection. “Add evdev device detection. Adds utilities to detect the capabilities of an input device.”

Flavours and Variants

• The elementary OS team recently released version 0.3.1 of their operating system, and I took it for a ride. As it turns out, there are a lot of problems out of the box, and it’s becoming increasingly annoying to even consider keeping it for a longer time than I need to.

• Kubuntu developers have announced that they’ve integrated the latest KDE Plasma 5.4.1 release into the latest Kubuntu 15.10 (Willy Werewolf).

Devices/Embedded

• Toradex is prepping two Linux-ready Colibri branded COMs, based on Freescale’s single- and dual-core Cortex-A7 i.MX7 SoCs, for release early next year.

• Last week we were intrigued by a vague pre-announcement from Toradex about its plan to develop one of the first computer-on-modules built around the i.MX7 system-on-chip, which Freescale announced in June. The Swiss embedded board maker said it would be among the few hardware partners showcasing the Cortex-A7-based i.MX7 when the SoC launches in early 2016.

• The Eragon 410 computer-on-module does for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410 system-on-chip what the recently introduced eInfochips Eragon600 did for the Snapdragon 600: help it gently on its way to enable embedded applications. eInfochips recommends the device for robotics, infotainment, automation and control, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including wearable devices.

Phones

• For Jolla Phone users part of their early access user group, the Sailfish OS 2.0 user interface is now available.

• Sailfish OS 2.0 will bring simplifications to the mobile platform’s user interface while still beautifying it and providing new functionality. Sailfish OS 2.0 will also be the first release to support smartphones and tablets, with the first Jolla Tablets finally shipping soon.

• …I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the most anticipated smartphones based on the Linux operating system instead.

Tizen

• Hey developers, get a pre-release of the Tizen tools which can be used in Ubuntu 15.04 OS, available to download now. There will be an official Tizen tool release which will include tools for Ubuntu 15.04 as soon as verification procedure for tools release is finished.

Android

• Today Google will begin rolling out its long-awaited Android Pay app—the second version of an NFC-based payment app that the company has launched.

• Google’s new payments platform Android Pay, a rival to both Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, is starting to roll out, the company is announcing today. The system allows consumers to make purchases at point-of-sale using NFC technology, as well as pay for in-app purchases on Android devices.

• At launch, the payments technology will work at millions of locations around the U.S., including big-name brands like Best Buy, McDonald’s, Macy’s, Walgreens, Subway, Whole Foods, Toys R Us, and more.

• Neither Amazon nor Google will talk about the issue—and they didn’t answer my requests for comment—but evidence suggests a classic case of two rival companies who can’t get along, and are punishing users caught in the middle.

• Of course, we said all that to say this: when it comes to tech, it’s not ever about who does something first, it’s about who ends up doing it best. As Android OEMs battle for their tiny piece of the pie with new bleeding edge tech, Apple has grown a reputation for carefully calculating their next move so that they can continue offering small improvements and keep customers coming back for more. They’ve done this every year and the iPhone 6s is no exception. With 4K displays on the horizon and 4GB of RAM soon to become the norm, maybe Android OEMs should start taking note ease up on superfluous tech specs.

• I’ve never used a device with Cyanogen OS so was very surprised to see that the ZUK Z1 offers a nearly pure Google experience. Cyanogen preview 12.1 is currently installed on this evaluation device with a full release scheduled for the end of September. I’m withholding my final rating until after I get the chance to test out the final release software.

• I understand that the Chinese release of the ZUK Z1 includes the ZUI, based on Android 5.1.1. Cyanogen 12.1 is also based on Android 5.1.1.

• Mobile apps are the key driver behind the explosion in learn-to-code schools, with startups like Udacity, Udemy, Coursera, and others promising to give you the right toolkit and know-how to to make a career switch.

• Google has latched on to this trend in an effort to bolster the ranks of Android developers. A recent partnership with Udacity birthed the Android Developer Nanodegree.

Free Software/Open Source

• QuickQuote, which was open-sourced last week, requires users to upload their video footage and then provides an automated transcription using natural language processing.

• After the transcription is generated, the user can click anywhere in the text to see and hear the corresponding video and audio, highlighting their desired quote with their mouse.

• TL;DR — When putting source code into the open, reserve some time & energy to build a community around it, otherwise: zombie.

• But Gmail is far from the only name in the game when it comes to web-based email clients. In fact, there are a number of open source alternatives available for those who want more freedom, and occasionally, a completely different approach to managing their email without relying on a desktop client.

• Let’s take a look at just a few of the free, open source webmail clients out there available for you to choose from.

• The current move towards open data generating massive amounts of data, needs real-time processing needing intelligent solutions to process it. Having more tools which are open source can fuel further open data research impacting not only computing, but social sciences, where economists and governments can make use of big data as well.

• Concurrent, a provider of high-performance Linux and storage products, announced a new open-source content delivery network (CDN) platform. Concurrent’s new CDN platform combines open-source technologies with the company’s enterprise support services to deliver streaming video and other content to consumers on connected devices. Concurrent is leveraging community-driven open-source technologies including Apache Traffic Server for caching and streaming, Traffic Control for request routing, Ceph for storage and its own packaged feature enhancements to create a CDN platform that is well-suited for commercial applications.

• Put yourself in their shoes – that’s the most important thing to remember as the boss of a free software project.

• Whether you’re handling a code patch from an argumentative contributor or trying to attract users via a release announcement, it’s vital to think carefully about how other people will see it.

• Now the first code release as part of the Node.js Foundation is out with v 4.0.0.

• “This release represents countless hours of hard work encapsulated in both the Node.js project and the io.js project that are now combined in a single codebase,” the Node.js foundation wrote in a blog post. “The Node.js project is now operated by a team of 44 collaborators, 15 of which form its Technical Steering Committee (TSC). Further, over 100 new individuals have been added to the list of people contributing code to core since v0.12.7.”

• The Node.js Foundation has released version 4.0.0 of the Node.js, the first version that reunites the JavaScript-based server-side web application framework with its io.js fork.

• “This release represents countless hours of hard work encapsulated in both the Node.js project and the io.js project that are now combined in a single codebase,” the Foundation said in a technical blog post announcing the release.

• Systers is the world’s largest email community of women in tech.

• First a little history, from Anita Borg.org: Systers was founded by in 1987 as an email mailing list for women in “systems.” At last official count, the community has over 5,500 members from at least 60 countries. Women technologists of all ages and at any stage of their studies or careers are welcome to contact the current Systers-keeper, Rose Robinson.

• In this interview Rose Robinson talks with me about Systers’ participation in the Open Source Day Codeathon taking place at the Grace Hopper Conference (GHC) in Houston, Texas this year—where attendence will hit record numbers. (You can still register!) Systers is one of a group of participating organizations during the codeathon.

SaaS/Big Data

• Cloudera proclaimed some time ago that it saw Apache Spark as the future of Big Data. It predicted, and committed to help bring about, a world where most Hadoop ecosystem components would run on the memory-centric Spark processing engine and would rid themselves of their dependency on MapReduce.

• The firm this week today announced the opening of its new international headquarters in the City of London.

• The move comes at the same time as a new Hadoop Community Hub for Central London.

• Designed to make it possible to replicate data between Hadoop clusters using a wide area network (WAN), WANdisco Fusion Enterprise Edition makes sure that all the all Hadoop servers and clusters are fully readable and writeable, and that they are always in sync and recover automatically from each other after planned or unplanned downtime. There are no read-only backup servers and clusters that would be used when the primary active cluster goes offline.

• OpenShift and Cloud Foundry are two popular options for open source PaaS. Here’s how to tell which one is right for your development needs.

Databases

• Part of why people are choosing PostgreSQL and EnterpriseDB is because users get to see the way the company works.

• “Not only can people see how we develop the code but they can see how we deal with bug fixes and things like that, but they can also see how we work. Everything we do is out in the open so you’re not hiding behind the PR department.”

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation has released the first Release Candidate for LibreOffice 5.0.2, the second maintenance release for the incredibly successful 5.x branch of the office suite.

Business

Openwashing

• The ePADD open-source email archiving and processing platform developed by Stanford University Libraries was awarded a $685,000 National Leadership Grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) on August 31. The software “supports archival processes around the appraisal, ingest, processing, discovery, and delivery of email archives,” according to the project site. “Email archives present a singular window into contemporary history; however, they are often inaccessible to researchers due to screening, processing, and access challenges, as well as the sheer volume of material.”

• Signalling and train control supplier Thales Deutschland has agreed to use the ERTMSFormalSpecs open-source modelling tool to test braking curves in the development of its onboard unit for the ETCS Baseline 3 specifications.

BSD

• We are pleased to announce the availability GhostBSD 10.1 BETA2 MATE & XFCE which is available on SourceForge for the amd64 and i386 architectures.

• Before going further I will like to say a special thanks Ovidiu who recently join back the project and Andrea who join the project, they have help to make GhostBSD better, add up new feature and fixed issue.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU Project today call upon the free software community to submit nominations for the 18th annual Free Software Awards. The Free Software Awards include the Award for the Advancement of Free Software and the Award for Projects of Social Benefit. The awards are presented each year at the LibrePlanet free software conference, and at the same time nominations for the next year’s awards open.

• I’m expecting the addition of a second DWARF interpreter to GDB to be contentious, but they’ll optimized for different things and doing different things. For example, Infinity could work better with some type tracking (and will likely need it to make function calls secure) but it’s different from what GDB’s existing interpreter needs and it’s difficult to see how to combine the two without ending up with something that’s not very good at either. Not to mention that getting it to a point it can be moved to common code would likely slow it down a ton.

Public Services/Government

• In a further blow to Microsoft’s grip on government desktop computing in the UK, the UK government has published 18 guides offering detailed information about the Open Document Format (ODF) standard and how to move organisations to ODF-compliant solutions.

• ODF 1.2 was selected last year as the standard for editable office documents to be used across UK government departments, along with HTML5 and PDF, which became the official defaults for static documents that would be viewed, but not edited after they were published. The fact that native Word formats were not included as an alternative option was a major defeat for Microsoft, which had lobbied hard—and until 2014, lobbied successfully—to prevent this high-profile victory for ODF’s open standard.

• For years now, open source tools and applications have been gaining traction in parts of Europe, and Munich has been involved in a multi-year effort to transform its technology infrastructure by throwing out Microsoft applications and using open tools instead. Munich’s move to open source has been followed here on OStatic, and it has not been without hiccups. There were problems, for example with people finding Linux too complex.

Openness/Sharing

• Science can be expensive. But making customized scientific equipment doesn’t have to be. Researchers at Michigan Technological University have compiled economic data on the effectiveness of open source hardware in the laboratory—and the process looks promising.

• The World Bank Group (WBG) has recognised transparency, citizen participation and collaboration as strategic priorities in its work on governance. The Bank now wants to bring its own experience to client governments, aiming for them to become more open and more citizen-centric.

• The newest artist participating in the Mural Arts’ Open Source project has revealed her work.

• Artist Michelle Angela Ortiz revealed a 17 foot portrait in the courtyard of City Hall has part of the Open Source project.

Open Data

• Japanese researchers have conducted research to prove that Wikipedia’s publicly-available page view data could potentially provide a better insight into web trends than the more limited statistics available from Google.

• This summer, Spain renewed its law on the re-use of public sector information. The amended law, originally dating from 2007, now implements the European ‘Directive 2003/98/EC on the Re-use of Public Sector Information’ (i.e. the PSI Directive).

Open Access/Content

• Dr. Paul Flowers, who authors a free, open source textbook called “Chemistry,” says his book could change textbook publishing models.

• Flowers has joined a revolution in academia that would change the way textbooks are published and delivered to students, drastically changing — or eliminating — expensive textbooks, which can cost more than $200.

Open Hardware

• We’ve been looking forward to the impending launch of the Eleven 3D printer from ISG3D, a startup from Canada. Now, they’ve scheduled the release date for the end of this month, beginning with a Kickstarter campaign.

• If you find the Disney version of the Star Wars BB-8 Robot little small for your liking, makers, developers and of course Star Wars fans that would like to create something a little larger, are sure to be interested in this full-sized open source BB-8 Robot project.

Leftovers

• When Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, presents an updated iPhone and other gadgets at an event on Wednesday, several hundred of the company’s invited guests will be seated in a giant auditorium in San Francisco to watch.

• More than 5,000 miles away in Britain, members of the London Mac User Group — comprising about 90 people, many of whom are longtime Apple enthusiasts — will also be watching Mr. Cook’s event closely, but via a live stream at a pub called the Sun Tavern. Along with bar snacks and pints, a bingo game and a raffle will be part of the fun. The top prize: an Apple accessory.

• So the new iPhone S models are out. Am so underwhelmed with 12mp camera as the big tech upgrade. The old joke still holds, to see what will be in next iPhone, look at a 5 year old Nokia flagship (yes the Nokia N8 had 12mp back in 2010). And rose gold color? Ooh, color me unimpressed. The time when colors were big news in mobile phones was about 15 years ago – incidentially also a Nokia invention. But yeah. So faster guts, big whoopte do.

• There was no dual SIM or waterproofing or anything radical that could help now. There was no update to the ‘nano’ model ie the entry-level model iPhone 5C. And these two 6S and 6S Plus iPhones will of course be appealing to Apple users who have been begging for more colors and better cameras but for the rest of us, no, this is not going to help reverse Apple’s diminishing annual market share trend. But that gap in price/performance grows ever larger with each iPhone model and soon many consumers will simply arrive to the conclusion that the emperor doesn’t have clothes (or the few it has, are way too expensive compared to rivals). iPhone market share will continue down. The iPhone owners (aka iSheep as I mockingly often call them and that is a crass oversimplification many do actually love Apple products for being the best gadgets in any category for usability and that is a virtue of course. Others love iToys for their bling factor, nothing wrong with that either if you go by style over substance).

Science

• In a modern, multicore chip, every core — or processor — has its own small memory cache, where it stores frequently used data. But the chip also has a larger, shared cache, which all the cores can access.

• If one core tries to update data in the shared cache, other cores working on the same data need to know. So the shared cache keeps a directory of which cores have copies of which data.

• That directory takes up a significant chunk of memory: In a 64-core chip, it might be 12 percent of the shared cache. And that percentage will only increase with the core count. Envisioned chips with 128, 256, or even 1,000 cores will need a more efficient way of maintaining cache coherence.

Health/Nutrition

• An alternative medicine conference has ended in chaos in Germany after dozens of delegates took a LSD-like drug and started suffering from hallucinations.

• Broadcaster NDR described the 29 men and women “staggering around, rolling in a meadow, talking gibberish and suffering severe cramps”.

• The group of “Heilpraktikers” was discovered at the hotel where they held their conference in the town of Handeloh, south of Hamburg, on Friday.

• In a first for the country, California’s Environmental Protection Agency (Cal/EPA) has issued plans to list glyphosate—the toxic active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide—as known to cause cancer.

• According to a “notice of intent” issued last week by the Cal/EPA’s California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), the effort falls under California’s Proposition 65, in which the state is required to publish a list of chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm.

• Impending multi-billion health insurance mergers involving four major providers have drawn the ire of patient advocacy groups that say such deals violate antitrust laws and threaten to fatten insurance companies’ coffers at patients’ expense.

• The European Union has initiated plans to ban genetically modified crops. Currently, each country and sometimes each state can decide to approve GMO crop cultivation, creating a “patchwork” approach that is causing confusion and inconsistencies.

• GMO crops are allowed throughout North, Central, and South America, as well as Asia. In March, the EU approved a law allowing the European Commission to approve genetically modified crops individually for import, but also allows countries to opt-out of the importation even if deemed safe.

Security

• Severe vulnerabilities within the WhatsApp mobile application which tricked users into executing malicious, arbitrary code has been patched.

• Alex Rice spent five-and-half years working as head of product security at Facebook before he helped found HackerOne, provider of a platform that enables organizations to run bug bounty programs. At HackerOne, Rice has teamed with his former employer as well as Microsoft to help sponsor and operate the Internet Bug Bounty.

• Rice explained that the Internet Bug Bounty covers approximately a dozen open source projects that are critical to the functioning of the Internet, including PHP, perl, Python, Ruby, OpenSSH and others. Such projects typically don’t have the resources to run their own bug bounty programs, Rice said.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Nuclear experts are lauding the Iran nuclear deal for ensuring a major turnaround in Iran’s production of plutonium, a key concession ignored by critics of the deal.

• In other words, if the deal with Iran fails, then the US must go to war with Iran, because war is the only means to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. So the entire spectrum of debate allowed by the Post accepts an Iranian quest for an atomic bomb as an article of faith–and the “left” edge of the debate endorses the legitimacy of preemptive war (FAIR.org, 8/20/15).

• Media outlets reported on congressional Republicans’ plan to delay implementation of the landmark nuclear agreement with Iran by alleging President Obama inappropriately failed to provide details of the “side deals” between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to Congress. But those outlets failed to note that the IAEA deal with Iran is confidential, which is “standard operating procedure” for agreements of this type.

• US president Barack Obama doesn’t need to worry: for all intents and purposes, his signature foreign policy accomplishment—a nuclear deal with Iran—will be safe from a congressional override vote.

• The 159-page “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” that the president and his administration negotiated with Iran and the P5+1 (UN Security Council members plus Germany) was an endeavor that required an immense amount of political will and diplomatic acumen. US secretary of state John Kerry, secretary of energy Ernest Moniz, and undersecretary of state Wendy Sherman pulled it off after nearly two years of intensive talks with Iran’s delegation, led by one of the best negotiators in the world—Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

• Leading Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton this morning delivered a foreign policy speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington. By itself, the choice of the venue was revealing.

• Brookings served as Ground Zero for centrist think tank advocacy of the Iraq War, which Clinton (along with potential rival Joe Biden) notoriously and vehemently advocated. Brookings’ two leading “scholar”-stars – Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon – spent all of 2002 and 2003 insisting that invading Iraq was wise and just, and spent the years after that assuring Americans that the “victorious” war and subsequent occupation was going really well (in April 2003, O’Hanlon debated with himself over whether the strategy that led to the “victory” in his beloved war should be deemed “brilliant” or just extremely “clever,” while in June, 2003, Pollack assured New York Times readers that Saddam’s WMD would be found).

• This may be the most important article I ever post, because it reveals perfectly how the Establishment works and how the Red Tories and Blue Tories contrive to give a false impression of democracy. It is information I can only give you because of my experience as an insider.

• It is a definitive proof of the validity of the Chomskian propaganda model. It needs a fair bit of detail to do this, but please try and read through it because it really is very, very important. After you have finished, if you agree with me about the significance, please repost, (you are free to copy), retweet, add to news aggregators (Reddit etc) and do anything you can to get other people to pay attention.

• The government based its decision to execute by drone two British men in Syria on “Legal Opinion” from the Attorney-General for England and Wales, Jeremy Wright, a politician, MP and Cabinet Minister. But Wright’s legal knowledge comes from an undistinguished first degree from Exeter and a short career as a criminal defence barrister in Birmingham. His knowledge of public international law is virtually nil.

• [...]

• The only known occasion when this did not happen was the Iraq War. Then the FCO Legal Advisers – unanimously – advised the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, that to invade Iraq was illegal. Jack Straw asked the Attorney General to dismiss the FCO chief Legal Adviser, Sir Michael Wood (Goldsmith refused). Blair sent Goldsmith to Washington where the Opinion was written for him to sign by George Bush’s lawyers. [I know this sounds incredible, but it is absolutely true]. Sir Michael Wood’s deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, resigned in protest.

• In consequence Blair and Straw decided that, again for the first time ever, the FCO’s chief legal adviser had to be appointed not from within the FCO legal advisers, who had all declared the war on Iraq to be illegal, but from outside. They had to find a distinguished public international lawyer who was prepared to argue that the war on Iraq was legal. That was a very small field. Blair and Straw thus turned to Benjamin Netanyahu’s favourite lawyer, Daniel Bethlehem.

• [...]

• Jeremy Wright pretends to give a Legal Opinion, actually from FCO legal advisers based on the “Bethlehem Doctrine”. The Labour Party pretends, very unconvincingly, to be an opposition. The Guardian, apparently the leading “opposition” intellectual paper, publishes articles by its staff neo-con propagandists Joshua Rozenberg (married to Melanie Phillips) and Rafael Behr strongly supporting the government’s new powers of extrajudicial execution. In summer 2012 Joshua Rozenberg presented a programme on BBC Radio 4 entitled “Secret courts, drones and international law” which consisted mostly of a fawning interview with … Daniel Bethlehem. The BBC and Sky News give us wall to wall justification of the killings.

• Authors Mark Pilisuk and Jennifer Rountree discuss their new book, “The Hidden Structure of Violence: Who Benefits From Global Violence and War.” They contend that organized violence is not an inescapable part of human existence, but is organized and carried out by the dominant social order to enhance its own power.

• In the second half of the program, Tara Dorabji joins in to explain how violence and social control are wielded in two of the world’s occupied lands, Palestine and Kashmir, and the role women play in preserving life and culture in those areas, despite the occupiers’ brutality.

Transparency Reporting

• Julian Assange, the man who has made it his life’s mission to expose government secrets, suggested Wednesday that Clinton’s e-mail scandal wouldn’t be much of a scandal if the U.S. government wasn’t so classify-happy.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• In a just world the United States would pay back the $4 trillion dollars it owes, according to new research, for trashing the climate.

• Global warming wasn’t created equal. Rich, industrialized nations have contributed the lion’s share of the carbon pollution to our currently-unfolding catastrophe—the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the hotter it gets, of course—while smaller, poorer, and more agrarian countries are little to blame. The subsequent warming from our carbon-stuffed skies will, naturally, impact everyone, often hitting the poorer countries harder. So, since the rich fueled the crisis that’s about to soak the poor, they might help chip in to soften the blow.

• That, in super-basic terms, is the concept of climate debt, which guides current emissions negotiations and efforts to distribute funds for adaptation to nations most affected by climate change. If you acknowledge, as the UN does, that there’s a carbon budget—an amount of greenhouse gas pollution the world can collectively churn out before we land in dangerous warming territory, currently figured at a 2˚C threshold—then it follows that nations that have overstepped theirs should pay back those who haven’t.

• National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent shared a Facebook post on September 9 showing off several cars and wrote (sic throughout): “Look closely & you shall see a huge leaking pipeline connected directly to a Saudi Prince’s ass sucking massive quantities of rawcrude as I throttle relentlessly over the rotting corpses of mikeymoore & algore & all the pathetic greenies.” “Greenie” is a term for an environmentalist or conservationist.

Finance

• In other words, the ratchet clause ensures that there is only one direction of travel — towards greater deregulation, and greater loss of control by sovereign nations.

• TISA is unusual for being honest about introducing a ratchet. But there’s another, more subtle, kind of ratchet that acts on all major treaties. It means that once a country has joined the negotiations, it becomes increasingly hard to back out, whatever the growing reservations of its public once they find out what is being done in their name. Indeed, that one-way street is one of the most powerful features of trade agreements: corporations only need to get some coveted but controversial measure inserted in a treaty’s text, and it will automatically cascade down to all the signatories, however much they — or their people — may dislike it. It’s how things like anti-circumvention laws for DRM were brought in: once it was included in the WIPO Copyright Treaty, all signatories had to pass legislation implementing it, because they had “no choice”, the treaty “forced” them to do it — a convenient excuse for passing unpopular laws.

• New York Times columnist David Brooks discussed the rise of Jeremy Corbyn on the left in the Labor Party in the United Kingdom and Bernie Sanders on the left in the United States, along with Donald Trump and Ben Carson on the right. He argues that none of these people could conceivably win a national election. He therefore concludes that their support must stem from a psychological problem, which he identifies as “expressive individualism.”

• Janine Jackson: In 1996, Bill Clinton signed something called “The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act,” calling it an effort to “end welfare as we know it” and to “promote fundamental values of work, responsibility and family.” Ten years later, Clinton took a victory lap with a New York Times column headed “How We Ended Welfare, Together,” shouting out “the Democrats and Republicans who had the courage to work together to take bold action,” which Clinton claimed led to a “new beginning” for millions of Americans.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Ever since it was launched from the temple-like headquarters of the National Geographic Society in Washington in 1888, National Geographic magazine has illuminated the world’s hidden places and revealed its natural wonders.

• Fox has had an 18-year partnership with the society, in which the two have jointly owned and operated National Geographic cable network channels that are distributed worldwide. But the latest deal expands the relationship. Fox and the society will create a new corporate entity, called National Geographic Partners, that will own and operate nearly all other National Geographic media operations, including the cable networks, the famous yellow-border magazine, the video studio, books, maps, children’s media, catalog, licensing and e-commerce businesses.

• Fox News hosts have used the controversy surrounding Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis to repeatedly hawk the new book from a man considered one of America’s most extreme and prominent anti-gay hate-group leaders.

• Tony Perkins is the president of the Family Research Council (FRC), an organization that has been labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center for spreading damaging lies about gay people, including the myth that they are more likely to engage in pedophilia.

• For instance, since June 1, the New York Times has published approximately 180 articles or columns that included the word “Trump” five or more times, according to Nexis. But just a handful of those have made any mention of Trump’s previous birth certificate folly. The same goes for USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, for example: Nearly 180 detailed Trump articles and columns published since June between them, but just a few that have addressed the birther nonsense.

• It appears Ezra Klein’s new media startup Vox is taking on many of the habits of old media—like blurring the lines between business and editorial by running a thinly disguised commercial for Comcast, the cable giant that not only seeded Vox‘s initial run, but recently invested $200 million more in its parent, Vox Media, Inc.

• If Scott Walker is elected president, he will enact American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) policies on the first day of his presidency.

• Walker was an ALEC member as a state legislator, and according to outlets like The Guardian, Walker could be “The First ALEC President.”

Censorship

• Saudi Arabia has banned the August issue of National Geographic’s Arabic edition, whose cover featured Pope Francis standing inside the Sistine Chapel.

• In a statement published on National Geographic’s Arabic Language Twitter account, the magazine said the edition was banned for “cultural reasons.”

• “Dear readers in Saudi Arabia, we apologize that you did not receive August’s magazine,” the editor-in-chief, Alsaad Omar al-Menhaly wrote, Foreign Policy magazine reported. “According to the distribution company, the magazine was refused entry for cultural reasons.”

• WordPress.com is taking a strong stance against rightsholders who abuse its takedown process. The company maintains a “hall of shame” which recently expanded with the addition of Subaru. The car manufacturer tried to take down a blog which was created in response to one of Subaru’s own contests.

• One of the more unusual things to come from the Ashley Madison hack was the discovery that AM’s founding CTO, Raja Bhatia, had apparently hacked another company, Nerve, after that company expressed an interest in setting up a competing adult dating service.

• That story was first reported by Brian Krebs, and it seems that Bhatia, no longer at Ashley Madison, isn’t very happy with it. His lawyer has threatened Krebs with a libel suit.

• Silent readings of Ted Dawe’s Into the River are being planned across New Zealand tomorrow in protest at the much-praised young adult novel’s nationwide ban.

• Following a complaint from Christian group Family First about the award-winning title’s “detailed descriptions of sex acts, coarse language and scenes of drug-taking”, New Zealand’s Board of Film and Literature Review has placed an interim restriction order on Into the River, meaning that “no one in New Zealand can distribute, or exhibit, the book”. Individuals who breach the order face a fine of $3,000 and companies who breach it will be fined $10,000. The board will revise the order and consider a permanent age restriction for the novel in October.

Privacy

• Prior to two weeks ago, when this reporter alerted authorities that they had exposed critical data, anyone online was able to freely access a City of Boston automated license plate reader (ALPR) system and to download dozens of sensitive files, including hundreds of thousands of motor vehicle records dating back to 2012. If someone saw your shiny car and wanted to rob your equally nice house, for example, they could use your parking permit number to obtain your address. All they had to do was find the server’s URL.

• Facebook has been hit with a class-action complaint over its biometrics slurpage, with millions of possible plaintiffs who may claim damages if the advertising giant is found to have acted unlawfully.

• The complaint (PDF) states that “Facebook has created, collected and stored over a billion ‘face templates’ (or ‘face prints’)”, which, ostensibly, are as uniquely identifiable as fingerprints. These have been gathered “from over a billion individuals, millions of whom reside in the State of Illinois”.

• The working group at Internet Corporation for Assignment of Names and Number (ICANN) that has been tasked with designing a new domain registration database can’t seem to wrap its head around why privacy matters when it comes to domain registration services. ICANN’s Expert Working Group on gTLD Registration Directory Services (EWG) issued a Preliminary Issue Report on Next-Generation gTLD Registration Directory Services to Replace WHOIS in July, and EFF has submitted comments.

• Europeans whose data has been mishandled by US authorities will soon have the right to take legal action in the US courts.

• EU citizens’ right to seek legal redress in the US comes as part of a new EU-US data protection agreement covering instances where EU citizens’ personal data is involved in US criminal and terrorism investigations. The deal brings rights of EU citizens in line with those of US citizens, who can sue in European courts for similar privacy breaches.

• Since January 2015, La Quadrature du Net, FDN and the FDN Federation have begun a series of legal actions before the French Council of State and the French Constitutional Council against the laws and the implementing decrees that these associations consider fatal to civil liberties. In order to help people to follow over time the different stages of these procedures, this page explains in a few lines each of these appeals and their progresses.

Civil Rights

• Dubbed ‘zero schoolgirl’, Mariam Malak is drawing national attention after appeals to investigate forgery allegations were repeatedly dodged by authorities

• A camera operator for a Hungarian nationalist television channel closely linked to the country’s far-right Jobbik party has been filmed kicking two refugee children and tripping up a man at the border hotspot of Rőszke on Tuesday.

• Petra László of N1TV was filming a group of refugees running away from police officers, when a man carrying a child in his arms ran in front of her. László stuck her leg out in front of the man, causing him to fall on the child he was carrying. He turned back and remonstrated with László, who continued filming.

• In Luis Bunuel’s eponymous 1961 film, the young postulant Viridiana leaves her convent to claim her uncle’s rural estate, and creates a refuge for local beggars. They ransack her house in a bachannalia staged to lampoon the Last Supper, and a couple of them rape her. The classic film should be mandatory viewing for European officials caught up in refugee euphoria. This is going to end very, very badly.

• A few years back, Jenny Vekris says she was prescribed the sleeping pill Ambien for insomnia. It took her a while to figure out that the drug was affecting her in dangerous ways. “I’d wake up to car damage, bruises, fast-food wrappers, and who knows what else, because I was sleeping and driving,” she says. Twice, she woke up in jail. One of those times, she was charged with a DWI.

• When she got home, she turned to a place she knew she’d be understood: Yelp.

• “So, one morning, I wake up next to a girl in the big house. It took a minute to realize where I was, and I started asking the girl questions,” Vekris wrote in a review of the Austin city jail, which is more formally known as Travis County Jail. “My Cellie told me I was in jail, and then she started crying. I asked why, and she said she had to poop. That’s cool, whatever, do it. So she sits on the silver toilet, pooping and crying, and apologizing to me.” Twenty-six people marked the review “useful” and 22 thought it was “cool.”

• We don’t have to keep buying new gadgets. In fact, we should insist on the right to keep old ones running.

• Who hasn’t experienced a situation like this? Halfway through a classic Jack Lemmon DVD, my colleague Shira’s 40-inch TV conked out. Nothing showed up on the screen when she pressed the power button. The TV just hiccupped, going, “Clip-clop. Clip-clop.”

• Alan Pean is a 26-year-old biology student with no criminal record or history of violence. But on August 27th, he was shot in the chest by an off-duty Houston police officer working as a security guard at the St. Joseph Medical Center. The police are claiming that Alan became combative and that they followed standard operating procedure. It’s Alan, they say, who is as fault, and they have charged with two counts of aggravated assault against a public servant. He was arraigned today.

• An Iranian artist currently serving more than 12 years in prison for criticising the government now faces further charges of “indecency” for allegedly shaking her male lawyer’s hand.

• Amnesty International reports that Atena Farghadani, 29, who was jailed after she depicted Iranian government officials as monkeys and goats in a satirical cartoon, may face a longer sentence amid claims over the handshake.

• I write on behalf of Human Rights Watch concerning recent reports of an administration plan to close the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay that would include transferring a number of detainees there to the United States.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The comment period for the Federal Communications Commission’s notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) on software-defined radios was supposed to end on Sept. 8. But the FCC has extended the comment period because the topic is complex, and the parties involved need time to work.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• So, we were just discussing Getty Images’ latest foray into ridiculous copyright trolling (something the company has a long history with), by demanding money for a meme image used on a blog. Today, we have another example of Getty Images copyright trolling that is even worse. It’s so bad, that Getty Images doesn’t even have a legitimate copyright claim here at all, let alone abusing a legitimate copyright to shakedown someone. The target? The famed hacker publication 2600, which a Getty subsidiary, Trunk Archive, claimed was infringing on one of its images.

• Audio recordings are a huge part of the world’s cultural history—and some are in danger of degrading so much that they’ll be lost forever. Now researchers report that infrared spectroscopy offers a quick, noninvasive way to separate magnetic tapes that can still be played from those that can’t. This could help archivists know which tapes need special handling, and soon, before they get any worse. (Anal. Chem. 2015, DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.5b01810).

• The Cultural Heritage Index estimates that there are 46 million magnetic tapes (VHS, cassette, and others) in museums and archives in the U.S. alone—and about 40% of them are of unknown quality. Many of these tapes are reaching the end of their playable lifetime, and given the limited number of studio-quality tape players available for the digitizing process, not all the tapes will be digitized before the world loses them.

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