● 10.27.15

● Links 27/10/2015: KDevelop 5.0.0 Beta 1, GParted 0.24

Posted in News Roundup at 5:24 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• An entertained home is a happy home, with the digital dream a real one, most homes have turned into a digital entertainment heaven. My home’s daily routine often revolves around keeping the tiny humans entertained streaming music, video and photos from a home Linux server (plus online services) around the home to a variety of devices. From the traditional TV with a Raspberry Pi media centre to Android tablets and Chromebooks, or through the Pi-powered projector for cinema-style fun.

• As software improves we like to take advantage of new features. For a while we’ve been putting up with the closed-source Plex, but finally Emby has appeared and we’re basing our new home media heaven on this fully open source solution. So from a base Ubuntu server, you’ll be able to dish out transcoded video, music and photos around your home with the option of recorded TV without the hassle of MythTV. It’s a slick solution and one I’m sure you’ll love when you read about it.

• I talked to church heads about this and open about open source alternative software getting their responses that they are not aware that there are available free open source sofware that they can use as an alternative to commercial software.

• A Finnish startup called Solu Machines is closing in on its Kickstarter funding for a smartphone-like mini-PC with a Linux-based, cloud-oriented operating system and a novel UI stack. Funding packages start at $388 for the Solu, which would join a fairly short list of mini-PCs with pre-installed Linux, and an even smaller group of ARM-based Linux mini-PCs. Solu is much more singular than that, however, in that it’s a battery-powered touchscreen device that can also drive a 4K display. It is not only replacing standard PC and phone paradigms with a fully cloud-based platform, but is also reinventing the user interface.

Desktop

• Google engineers have landed a bunch of new code this morning into Coreboot.

• Perhaps most interesting out of today’s Coreboot commits by Google is the addition of a Chell mainboard. Chell is based on the “Glados” Chromebook but with some minor changes. This “Chell” codenamed device will use an Intel Skylake SoC. Details beyond that are scarce at the moment.

• I work in an office which utilities many different devices and operating system, yet I only know of two places we use linux, and that’s not including embedded.

• When I started my current role as a PHP Developer, I was given a laptop and the general accessories, but was given the choice of what OS I wanted to use. From a linux background I wanted linux, but as the other developers used windows I went with windows.

• Xiaomi’s long-rumoured Linux laptop will enter production in the first part of 2016, a new report claims.

• Industry watcher Digitimes’ sources also reveal that China’s Xiaomi plans to launch two notebooks: one sporting a 12.5-inch display and another with a 13.3-inch display.

Server

• rkt v0.10.0 is here and marks another important milestone on our path to creating the most secure and composable container runtime. This release includes an improved user interface and a preview of the rkt service API, making it even easier to experiment with rkt in your microservices architectures.

• Rausch Netzwerktechnik is a distributor of individual and standard server and storage systems for the data center. The company is also developing one of the first solutions around the Kinetic Open Storage Project. We talked to Rausch Netzwerktechnik CEO Sebastian Nölting to learn more about the company and their involvement with open source.

• Traditionally, Devs get frustrated when they want to release, but Ops won’t accept it. Ops thinks there will be problems, but it is difficult to back this feeling with hard data. This fuels resentment and distrust, and management is never pleased. Using error budgets based on already established SLAs means there is nobody to get upset at: SRE does not need to play bad cop, and SWE is free to innovate as much as they want, as long as things don’t break.

Kernel Space

• If you are developing code for embedded hardware then often there is no operating system to get in the way and you are in complete control of the processor. This is simple and its often cheap but it suffers from a number of drawbacks. If you want your device to join the Internet of Things IoT then you generally need sophisticated services like WiFi and Bluetooth not to mention a file system.

Graphics Stack

• For the past few years, all patches flowing into the X.Org Server code-base had to be landed by Keith Packard. Keith was working for Intel on open-source graphics, but now he’s been employed by HP since the beginning of the year and seems to have less day-to-day focus on Linux graphics / X.Org. So now he’s opened it up to having sub-maintainers with commit rights to xorg-server Git.

• VESA has just announced the latest version of their Embedded DisplayPort specification, eDP 1.4b, which marks Embedded DisplayPort 1.4 as now being under a “production-ready” status with this standard being in development for over two years.

• If you are an Intel Haswell ultrabook user and curious whether the Iris Graphics are any faster when switching to one of the newer versions of the Linux kernel, here are some benchmarks.

Applications

• So where does that leave the email client? It’s still a crucial part of everyday business. Yet, when fewer and fewer are depending upon the email client…how do we trust that those precious apps will continue to be developed and/or released?

• This gave me pause to wonder about the state of email clients on Linux. After giving it much thought, I came to realize the situation is, sadly enough, lamentable.

• Double Commander is an cross-platform, open-source file manager, inspired by Total Commander.

• If you were following VLC development status (hey, you should follow the awesome Jean-Baptiste Kempf’s weekly updates!), you might have noticed some recent improvements on how VLC handles subtitle text rendering. In May 2015, the freetype module was improved to use Harfbuzz for text shaping. On the week of August 4, it was mentioned that the internals of VLC subtitle handling were completely rewritten . And in last week’s (October 26) update it mentioned Salah-Eddin added support for font fallback in the freetype module; which would mean that there is no need to set a specific font to display particular script/language.

• 500 user packages is very humbling, a staggering number and a big responsibility. We will out best try to keep Rcpp as performant and reliable as it has been so that the next set of packages can rely on it—just like these 500 do.

• As you may know, PhotoFlow is an open-source, non-destructive photo editing software for adjusting photos from RAW images to high-quality printing.

Proprietary

• The Opera developers have pushed a new stable version out the door, bringing the version number up to 33. Quite a few improvements have been made in this iteration, but the most interesting thing in this release is about the contributions made by the Opera team to the Chromium project.

• Opera is a popular web browser, available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Last year, Opera has adopted Google’s forked WebKit engine, the new versions of the browser being based on Chromium.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Alien: Isolation has officially been released for Linux, and continues our trend of great AAA games. I would recommend playing this from behind a pillow, with emergency pants nearby.

• As a big fan of the XCOM games, I was really excited to see what the original designer could do with his next game. Chaos Reborn is an interesting take on the fantasy turn based strategy genre.

• Alien: Isolation was supposed to be released for Linux in late September with the porting done by Feral Interactive but they ended up delaying the release. Today though Alien: Isolation is now available for Steam on Linux!

• Ashes of the Singularity looks like an awesome RTS game to try, and the developers have confirmed again they want to do Linux, but they are waiting for Vulkan.

• Ashes of the Singularity is a new RTS game from a studio named Oxide Games with Stardock as its publisher. As it stands right now, this is the first game to be developed to take advantage of DirectX 12, but the makers of the game are also involved with the Vulkan API.

• The Long Dark is a survival game I’ve been excited to play for over a year now, as the style is fantastic, and it has some really great reviews.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KaOS has a few known issues, but these mostly affect specific hardware configurations. For example, to use a GUID Partition Table, or GPT, on a BIOS system, make sure you set it up following a guide available on the KaOS website. The installer’s partitioner can only handle GPT correctly for the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface.

• We are excited to announce that in a couple of days Chakra will be switching to Plasma 5 developed by KDE for the default desktop environment. The restructuring of the repositories is almost done, we just need to test it for a while before making it available to everyone.

• Hello all,

• I’m very glad to finally announce the first beta of KDevelop 5.0.0, based on Qt 5, KF 5 and Clang: https://www.kdevelop.org/news/first-beta-release-kdevelop-500-available

• Like I’ve said previously, I’m very thankful of the tons of contributors that made this step possible. From the early testers, over the many new KDevelop contributors who helped a lot in porting our code base to Qt 5 and KF5, to the people that worked on improving kdev-clang and all the other areas. It’s a great feeling to finally release this beast. A year ago, just after we started in this process, I still wasn’t too sure we can pull it all off. Now, look where we are Smile “Just” a few more weeks of polishing and I’m positively sure KDevelop 5.0.0 will be a really good milestone.

• That said, I also want to express my thanks towards the KDE e.V. which graciously sponsored our recent KDevelop/Kate sprint in Berlin. We rented a flat for the 8 hackers that visited Berlin and had a productive five days directly after the Qt World Summit. Personally, I worked on kdev-clang and polished it a bit more in the preparation of the first beta release. One handy feature I added is the display of size information about classes and member variables, displayed in the image to the right.

• If you want to give back to the KDevelop community, please consider a donation to the KDE e.v., which is used for our yearly developer sprints and the Akademy conference.

• KDE e.V. yesterday released their last quarterly report to end out 2014, which offer a look at their finances for the past year. I’ve also taken the liberty to do a cursory comparison against the GNOME Foundation’s finances for 2014.

• The first beta of KDevelop 5.0 is now available. This huge update comes after more than a year of hard work and its code-base has been ported over to using Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5.

• Besides the big step-up in using Qt5 and KF5, KDevelop has replaced its legacy C++ parser and semantic analysis plug-in with a more powerful one derived from LLVM’s Clang compiler and its extensive code analysis tools.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• For those using GParted as GUI-driven Linux disk partitioning, the GParted 0.24 release is now available with new features.

• It is with pleasure that the GNOME Foundation is announcing that Karlsruhe, Germany, will host GUADEC in the summer of 2016.

• After the GSoC, I’ve done some work related to the open source community in China. We have a organization called kaiyuanshe and they did some work to help promote open source. Last weekend they organized the Apache Roadshow in Beijing and I was one of the volunteers. Also, I gave a speech about my experience in GSoC on the conference. Although it’s not the GNOME community, but I think sometimes we should contribute to the open source world as a whole without caring which one it is. Hope our effort would enlarge the open source force in China.

Distributions

Arch Family

• The Manjaro community has just announced that a second iteration of the GNOME Edition is out, bringing some of the updates that have recently been made to this particular version.

Ballnux/SUSE

• SUSE® has launched beta testing of SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6, giving customers an early look at the latest enterprise-ready technology for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds. Based on the OpenStack release Liberty, SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6 delivers high availability enhancements and non-disruptive upgrades along with Docker and IBM z Systems mainframe support to ease the transition of business-critical applications and data to the cloud. The Liberty-based beta will be demonstrated during this week’s OpenStack Summit in Tokyo and at SUSECon in Amsterdam Nov. 2-6.

• To give its customers an early look of what’s cooking in SUSE’s OpenStack Cloud 6, the company has released a beta preview of its IaaS offering.

• The upgrade comes ahead of an analyst day at the SUSE base in Germany next week, and UBS analyst Michael Briest highlights that more info about the unit’s profitability could also come in December when group financial results are released.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Some time ago, I announced the ‘Getting Started with Fedora’ handbook which we had published in Czech. I also announced the plan to translate it to English, so that it can be translated to other languages. I asked around who could help me with that, especially to figure out the whole system how to get a translated print PDF from a document written in English. A couple of native speakers offered that they would help with proof reading, thank them for that, but first we need to figure out the whole system.

• One of the most exciting projects I’m getting to work with these days is Project Atomic. It touches on the full stack–from OS development to storage, to networking, containers, application development, and pretty much everything in between. Red Hat is working hard on the tools to develop, deploy, and manage containerized applications.

• For your viewing pleasure today are some fresh benchmarks comparing the out-of-the-box performance of Fedora 20, Fedora 21, Fedora 22, and Fedora 23 RC3 out-of-the-box on an Intel Xeon system with AMD R600g graphics. Here’s a look at the Fedora Linux performance and that of the upstream Linux kernel / Mesa / GCC over the past two years.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Over the past few days have been a number of SteamOS Linux gaming benchmarks, namely published so far are the 22-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA & AMD Graphics Cards On SteamOS For Steam Linux Gaming and 4K AMD/NVIDIA High-End GPU Comparison On SteamOS Linux. When seeing all of those SteamOS results, you may have started wondering: is SteamOS any faster/slower than say Ubuntu Linux? In this article are some benchmarks comparing SteamOS to Ubuntu 15.10.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Ubuntu developers have already started to work on the 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and the first packages are beginning to land. It’s a long way to go until the stable launch in April 2016, but this is how it starts.

• One of the latest updates for Ubuntu Touch has brought a most coveted feature that was still missing, the mouse cursor. This will most likely land with OTA-8, which is scheduled to arrive in about five weeks.

• There are 9 members of the ‘Ubuntu family’ that are recognized as official flavors (i.e., Linux distributions that use the same operating system base but feature different desktop environments).

• Ubuntu, Linux operating system is now built to provide the Linux server to desktops, phones, tablets and TV operating systems. Demand of Ubuntu phones in India is already increase by Linux system fans.

• The new phones released last month, which based on Linux operating system. And now in India Aquaris E4.5 and Aquaris E5 are available to purchase. Costumer can buy it from online website like Snapdeal.

• The Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 software update, slated for a November 18 release date, is only a few weeks away and Cononical’s Lukasz Zemczak promised it would bring with it lots of new features and changes especially when it comes to Unity 8.

Flavours and Variants

• A post on the Fridge today claims “both councils collaborated and resolved any tensions together”. The Ubuntu Community Council bullied me for asking questions that made Canonical feel uncomfortable and this is the only response to that. That bullying someone until they leave a project is the UCC way of resolving tensions leaves me speachless. That nobody else has commented in the Ubuntu project in public (I’ve had people in private tell me they’re wanting to leave Ubuntu and/or Canonical) confirms to me the project has a culture of fear.

Devices/Embedded

• Acrosser’s latest rugged vehicle-PC runs Linux on a 5th Gen Intel Core Broadwell-U processor, offering sufficient power to run multiple, simultaneous apps.

• The Acrosser “AVI-QM97V1FL” vehicle-PC is aimed at systems integration projects like telematics, data recording and fleet and logistics management. A pair of DDR3-1333/1600 SO-DIMM sockets hold up to 16GB of non-ECC RAM. Supported 14nm 5th Gen Intel Core Broadwell-U processor models range from the Core i3 5010U, up through the Core i5 5350U, to the Core i7 5650U at the upper end.

• Raspberry Pi, the family of tiny, inexpensive computers popular for educational and embedded computing, could soon become more Ubuntu-friendly. That’s thanks to new tools that make it easier to port certain versions of Canonical’s operating systems to Raspberry Pi devices.

• The Raspberry Pi microcomputer — which was designed as a cheap educational tool to get kids interested in coding — stole the hearts of many geeks when it first arrived back in 2012, offering a low-cost, bare-bones computer module that could be hacked into all manner of fun DIY gadgets.

Phones

Tizen

• Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a great way for web sites to get their web feed out to users. So to help Samsung Z1 users keep up to date with all the news we have two RSS apps for you.

Android

• Android 6.0 Marshmallow, the latest iteration of Google’s popular mobile operating system, has some cool new features. But it’s the hidden tips and tricks that often let us really get the hang of a new thing and make it our own.

• This roundup of eight Android Marshmallow tips and tricks will let you enjoy your Android update that much more but don’t keep them to yourself – share the love and impress your friends.

• Going by the AnTuTu benchmark test results for the third quarter of 2015, the brand new flagship smartphone “Meizu Pro 5” powered by Samsung’s Exynos 7420 has beaten other counterparts to take the top rank. This device features 1080p screen resolution, unlike the other top 5 handsets that come with 1440p QHD resolution. The brilliant Meizu Pro 5 reportedly scored a whopping 76,852 points in AnTuTu testing.

• You can use FullContact as your phone’s main address book too. It allows you to call or email right from the app, and see the person you’re about to call’s recent social posts. That might help you understand why they’re not answering calls if they’re at a conference, or you can use it as an icebreaker to reprimand them if they’ve recently told a particularly bad joke (a favourite tactic of mine).

• Of all the big companies that were selling mobile phones before the iPhone, every one has now either moved to making Android phones or left the market. BlackBerry was the last remaining holdout, but now it too has an Android handset in the offing, and if that goes sour, it too could be departing the hardware business altogether.

• Motorola and Verizon on Tuesday unveiled their newest additions to the Droid lineup: The Android-powered Droid Turbo 2 and the Droid Maxx 2. Motorola claims the Droid Turbo 2 is shatterproof, meaning you can drop it face down on the ground without cracking its screen.

• I finally broke down and bought an iPhone 6s last week after years of using nothing but Android. I found a lot to like about the device and am very happy with my decision to go with Apple’s latest smartphone so far. That said, nothing is perfect and so far there are three things about the iPhone 6s that have left me feeling disappointed. Let’s go through them below.

• Apple’s neat 3D Touch tricks rely on a touchscreen that has integrated pressure sensors to determine between a ‘peek’ and a ‘pop’. But give a cunning Android hacker a waterproof phone and a barometer, and you can get a similar sort of effect.

Free Software/Open Source

• San Francisco wants voting to be open source. That’s the goal of a new initiative by the city government aimed at studying the development of a balloting system based on open source software, which would be the first of its kind in the United States.

• The Librarian of Congress has granted security researchers and others the right to inspect and modify the software in their cars and other vehicles, despite protests from vehicle manufacturers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed the request for software access as part of the complex, triennial rulemaking process that determines exemptions from Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

• Because Section 1201 prohibits unlocking “access controls” on the software, car companies have been able to threaten legal action against anyone who needs to get around those restrictions, no matter how legitimate the reason. While the copyright office removed this legal cloud from much car software research, it also delayed implementation of the exemption for one year.

Events

• South Korea’s top tech firm Samsung Electronics Co. kicked off a conference on Tuesday to promote an open source ecosystem, with local programmers and technology experts sharing ideas and experiences.

• Samsung Open Source Conference, which first started in 2014, falls in line with the tech giant’s efforts to forge deeper ties with local developers to pave the way for the creation of new services and devices.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The Mozilla Foundation has announced it is launching an award programme, to support open source and free software groups.

• The initial allocation for the awards will be US$1 million, initially to groups which Mozilla depends on, and later to other groups which help to make the community better.

SaaS/Big Data

Business

Semi-Open Source//Openwashing

• The mission for day two will be to confirm the possibility that IBM will open source its analytic engine, Watson, while maintaining other components as proprietary. Another area of interest is the rest of the open-source strategy.

• Ritika Gunnar, VP of information integration and governance for IBM’s $30 billion analytics business, said that her focus within the division isn’t nearly as complicated as her lengthy job title makes it out to be. Managing an organization’s data effectively boils down to merging the disparate metrics into a usable form and ensuring the combined whole is handled properly from there onward.

BSD

• It is my great pleasure to announce the release of version 0.8.7 of the Lumina Desktop Environment! This version includes a massive number of changes from the previous version. Here are some of the highlights.

• The PC-BSD developers working on their Lumina Desktop Environment have released Lumina 0.8.7 on Monday.

• I really enjoyed the experience when I first tried OpenBSD. Someone suggested it to me because I said I was concerned about security. The installation was painless and what was being advertised in the documentation is what was there. I really have grown to appreciate accurate documentation. It’s a very good indicator of a projects overall health. If their guides are wrong, you can imaging how terrible the rest is. My first install was around 1999 when I was in college. At the time I was studying engineering, but my roommate was a computer science major so I had a ton of exposure to other stuff.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The upcoming release of GNU Guix will feature an implementation of Linux containers named, following Scheme conventions, call-with-container. Containers are a lightweight virtualization technique used to isolate processes sharing the same host machine. A container has its own separate global kernel resources such as mount points, networking interfaces, users, hostname, and processes.

• Containers are a hot topic, and there are many implementations available, but Guix containers are built differently. Compared to other container implementations such as Docker, the most notable difference is that disk images and layered file systems are not used. Instead, the necessary software packages are inserted into containers via simple bind mounts. A pleasant consequence of this structure is that software is deduplicated system-wide. A package used in any number of containers is only on disk in a single place. Additionally, some containers may be created by unprivileged users, allowing any Guix user to create isolated sandboxes for their applications to play in.

Openness/Sharing

• A marine technology group has begun a crowd funding campaign for an on board data sharing device that will allow users to connect to mobile devices and the cloud.

Programming

• Guido van Rossum, best known as the Python programming language author, was born 31 January 1956 in Netherlands. In Python community, Van Rossum is known as a BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life), which means that he continues to oversee Python development process, and always making decisions where necessary. He worked at Google from 2005 till 7 2012, where he spent half of his time developing Python programming language. In 2013, Guido started working for Dropbox.

Standards/Consortia

• Portugal has launched a public consultation to gather feedback on the revision of the country’s digital interoperability regulation. This is the first revision of the 2012 regulation, itself one of the outcomes of a 2011 law on the adoption of open standards in government IT systems.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Earlier this month, Sony announced that it was dropping the price of its PlayStation 4 game console by $50 to $349.99. The move put the PlayStation 4’s price in line with Microsoft’s Xbox One. The decision made clear what the price cut was desired to do: get gamers who have not yet moved to the company’s latest console to take the plunge this holiday season.

Security

• The last of the Zone 9 Bloggers are finally free from jail, after nearly 18 months of detention for simply speaking out online. All the bloggers were acquitted of terrorism charges by the Ethiopian courts; one blogger, Befeqadu Hailu was found guilty of a single charge of “inciting violence” as a result of a confession made during his detention. He was released on bail last Wednesday. Given the time he has already served, he is unlikely to return to jail.

• The credibility of the TrueCrypt encryption application is in tatters following the discovery of two serious flaws in the code.

• Its anonymous developers abandoned the open source TrueCrypt project in May 2014, and since then no updates to the code have been released. At the time the developers advised users to switch to an alternative encryption program such as Microsoft’s BitLocker. Although TrueCrypt is still available for download, the developers suggest it should only be used to migrate data off TrueCrypt encrypted drives.

• W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), the regulatory body that oversees the creation of Web standards, has announced plans to set up a special group tasked with the responsibility of putting together a standardized API that will simplify the payment and check-out process, but also improve its overall security.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Hmm. The “unrivaled leader” leads her closest rival, Bernie Sanders, by 7 percentage points in an average of recent polls in the first caucus state, Iowa. In the first primary state, New Hampshire, she trails Sanders by 2 points; it’s been two months since she had a clear lead over him there. (In an accompanying graphic, the Times ranks Clinton as No. 1 in New Hampshire polls—based on a different polling average that has her ahead by 0.2 percentage points.)

• The Wall Street Journal editorial board used sharply revised government estimates on the number of Americans expected to purchase health insurance through federal marketplaces to claim that Obamacare is failing and hype so-called Republican “alternatives” to the landmark health care reform legislation. The Journal’s fearmongering about the long-term viability of Obamacare failed to acknowledge that while enrollment via federal marketplaces is less than expected, millions of Americans are still gaining access to affordable health insurance coverage.

Censorship

• Earlier this year, the Newseum Institute asked 1,000 Americans to name their rights under the First Amendment. A clear majority listed freedom of speech first — before freedom of religion, assembly, and other core civil liberties.

• And that makes sense. Protecting free speech is essential to the health of any functioning democracy.

• Free speech matters to the hundreds of millions of Internet users who exercise this right every time they connect with others online. But if you ask some of the lawyers working for the companies that sell you Internet access, they’ll insist that it’s more important to protect the free speech rights of phone and cable giants like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon.

• Politwoops, the site that saved and republished tweets first published and later deleted by politicians, may get back its access to the Twitter API. After disabling Politwoops’ developer accounts this summer, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last week hinted that the company might restore access to the Twitter streams.

• The post-Charlie Hebdo “free speech” march in Paris was a fraud for multiple reasons, as I wrote at the time. It was led by dozens of world leaders, many of whom imprison or even kill people for expressing prohibited views. It was cheered by many Westerners who feign upset only when free speech abridgments are perpetrated by Muslims, but not — as is far more common — by their own governments against Muslims.

Privacy

• Microsoft has joined forces with Taser to combine the Azure cloud platform with law enforcement management tools.

• [..]

• In order to ensure Taser maintains a monopoly on police body cameras, the corporation acquired contracts with police departments all across the nation for the purchase of body cameras through dubious ties to certain chiefs of police.

Civil Rights

• The British constitution is appallingly undemocratic. The fact that an undemocratic chamber has fended off a proposal from an undemocratic executive which gained the votes of only 34% of the voting electors, is not a blow struck for democracy. It is however a temporary victory for human decency in mitigating an attack on the poor.

• This week’s program addresses the Black Lives Matter movement, and other efforts to challenge police brutality. Devonte Jackson, organizer with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) speaks about uniting Black communities against abuses by police and other agencies of government. Attorney Izaak Schwaiger summarizes a pending civil rights lawsuit on behalf of inmates at the Sonoma County, CA jail, who were subjected to a systematic beating by guards. Philosophy Professor Glen Martin of Radford University shares his ideas on how to build a world without police violence. And there’s a live call-in from police-brutality protestors in New York.

• Saudi Arabia’s airstrikes in Yemen, conducted with U.S. assistance, are alleged to have killed at least 1,500 civilians, dividing members of the Obama administration over whether the U.S. risks being accused of abetting war crimes in a bombing campaign that could ultimately strengthen Islamist militants.

• Sources inside the administration say they are struggling to keep in check the opposing sides in Yemen, one of the clearest examples of the intensifying Saudi-Iran proxy war in the Middle East. But even as reports of civilian suffering and terrorist gains pile up, U.S. officials believe that reducing American support for the Saudis could make the situation even worse.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• FATHER OF the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee has issued a stark warning to the European Union ahead of a crucial vote on net neutrality due to take place tomorrow.

• After the historic win for net neutrality supporters in the US earlier this year, tomorrow will see MEPs looking at plans for internet fast lanes in the UK and mainland Europe.

• Berners-Lee said in a blog post on the World Wide Web Foundation website: “When I designed the World Wide Web, I built it as an open platform to foster collaboration and innovation. The web evolved into a powerful and ubiquitous platform because I was able to build it on an open network that treated all packets of information equally. This principle of net neutrality has kept the internet a free and open space since its inception.”

• The European Parliament is scheduled to vote on net neutrality rules on Tuesday, and at first glance the proposed regulations appear very similar to ones already in place in the United States.

• Both the European proposal and the US rules prevent Internet service providers from blocking or throttling traffic, and they impose a ban on “paid prioritization.”

• Today, members of the European Parliament voted on a proposal (PDF) for rules affecting how Internet traffic is managed, following the European Commission’s release of a draft agreement for regulation back in June. And Europe’s lawmakers have decided Europe doesn’t need a truly open, free Internet.

• The European Parliament has passed the flawed compromise text on net neutrality without including any of the amendments that would have closed serious loopholes. The vote, with 500 in favour, and 163 against, took place in a plenary session a few hours after a rather lacklustre debate this morning, which was attended by only 50 MEPs out of the European Parliament’s total of 751, indicating little interest in this key topic among most European politicians. The Greens MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht called the final result a “dirty deal.”

• “Today’s vote on the Telecoms Single Market package in the European Parliament constitutes a broken promise both on the end of roaming surcharges and the establishment of net neutrality”, says Julia Reda, Member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party and shadow rapporteur for the Greens/EFA group in the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee.

• “The European Parliament’s first reading position in April 2014 proposed far-reaching provisions for the introduction of net neutrality in Europe. In the end, not even the words ‘net neutrality’ survived the closed-door negotiations with the Commission and the Council. The text leaves open critical loopholes. Today, the Parliament decided not to adopt opposition amendments that could have fixed these shortcomings.

• After months of negotiations (read: ISP lawyer and lobbyist rewrites), the European Union has voted to approve new net neutrality rules (pdf) that for many nation states may be worse than having no net neutrality protections at all. As we’ve noted, the rules ignore zero rating, carve out massive loopholes for “specialized services,” “class-based discrimination,” and even include provisions allowing ISP throttling and discrimination provided it’s addressing phantom congestion that hasn’t even happened yet. In short, these rules effectively protect ISPs looking to creatively violate net neutrality, not European consumers.

• European Parliament members completely ignored last-minute suggested amendments that would have closed these loopholes. They also completely ignored opposition to the rules by the likes of BitTorrent, EyeEm, Foursquare, Kickstarter, WordPress, Netflix, Reddit, Transferwise, Vimeo, the EFF and Tim Berners-Lee (who penned a lengthy blog post outlining his opposition to the rules). Similarly, only 50 MEPs out of the European Parliament’s total of 751 could be bothered to even attend a superficial “debate” preceding the approval vote.

• The EU has rejected legal amendments that would firmly protect the concept of net neutrality in Europe. The European Parliament voted in favor of new regulations which proponents say establish an internet “without discrimination,” but advocates for net neutrality say the laws contain a number of loopholes which could lead to the creation of a tiered internet service. The legislation also includes an end to roaming charges in Europe, although some critics say those laws are also less robust than they appear.

• Today, the European Parliament voted the Telecommunication Single Market regulation text by 500 votes against 163, hereby ending the negotiations on this matter. Despite numerous citizen’s calls, despite repeated international calls to support the amendments, including Tim Berners-Lee’s, this ambiguous text leaves important loopholes and cannot ensure Net Neutrality1. Worst, it allows commercial discrimination. It is a profound disillusion for all those who, throughout the years, battled to ensure Net Neutrality in Europe.

• The European Parliament has voted to adopt the Telecoms Single Market (TSM) regulation. The regulation was supposed to guarantee net neutrality in Europe.

• Unfortunately, MEPs have created large loopholes and left ambiguity in much of the legislation. Net neutrality is the principle whereby Internet access providers treat internet traffic equally. Because of the vagueness of the new regulations, telecoms regulators in EU Member States will now have to decide whether telecoms companies in their country will be able to prioritise different categories of data.

• The internet is a global network. That means if one part of the world decides to start pulling the wrong levers, we could be dealing with the consequences. And the European parliament just pulled a very big lever by voting down amendments to net neutrality rules that include dangerous loopholes.

• European Parliament has voted for a package of EU internet traffic regulations, rejecting all amendments on net neutrality. The move was slammed by activists and companies alike, who say it will allow some to have faster internet access than others.

DRM

• Siri, the digital assistant found on Apple’s iOS devices, has become a familiar presence for many, and a prompt (sometimes even mischievous) answer to questions you ask it has always been forthcoming. But it seems Siri is now holding back some answers, only providing certain information to those users who pay for Apple Music.

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