● 05.08.16

● Links 8/5/2016: Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5r1, Slackware Live Edition

Posted in News Roundup at 1:23 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The results of a recent survey conducted by the Linux Foundation and Dice.com are out. The survey indicates that the open source professionals are now in high demand and companies are ready to pay fat packages to hire them. This growth in demand is likey to be easily seen in the next six months and developers are advised to brush up their Linux and open source skills.

Desktop

• Without rambling on about the advantages and disadvantages of the many different kinds of Linux distributions, I will summarize this section as “use what works best for you.” You will have people arguing that their version of Linux is the best because it is the most stable (Debian), or the most user friendly (Ubuntu), or has the most up to date packages and customizability (Arch), or because theirs is backed by a large corporation (Redhat/SUSE). Because of how many different variations of Linux there are, each with their own philosophy of what a Linux distribution should be, you will have people who have settled into their distribution of choice, and tend to think their version is the best version. And in some cases, it absolutely is… but for them, not necessarily for everyone. However, you will hopefully be using the version of Linux you pick for a long time, and you will pick your version of Linux based on how completely it meets your needs for a computer.

• We have always felt that Windows is one of the most user-friendly interfaces among the Operation Systems that have been developed and upgraded in this technological era. However, this has become a myth with the release of the Linux Desktops as they have proved to be more user-friendly and safe compared to that of the Windows Desktops.

• A recent Windows 7 update partially bricks computers that have an Asus motherboard fitted, it emerged this week.

• Windows 7 machines that have installed Microsoft’s KB3133977 update may trigger a “secure boot violation” during startup, preventing the PC from loading the operating system, Asus said.

• Though the KB3133977 patch has been out for a while, Microsoft has only this week changed its classification from “optional” to “recommended”, meaning for many users it now automatically installs through Windows Update – and then borks the PC.

Server

• Check out below comparison of the top 7 web hosting companies, based on our experience.

Kernel Space

• Now the conversation isn’t about bacon or no bacon. It’s about how much bacon. Linux is still built on the idea of “do one thing and do it well.” The fact that there’s proprietary software out there is fine. No one says we had to do #AllTheThings perfectly right out the gate. You can’t cook or eat all the bacon at once.

• I can honestly say with a straight face that I’ve never, ever had any real show-stopping issues with PulseAudio. Yeah, I know – you have. And so have many others. I guess this means I’m blessed by the Linux audio gods, as my PulseAudio experience has never been anything other than mundane and functional.

Applications

• Instant messaging has become the standard means of communication in our world today. Whatsapp is leading — reaching over a billion active users as of February 2016, while WeChat, Telegram, and Messenger are following closely behind with millions of users around the world.

• For years, FontForge has been the dominant free-software application for editing and building font files, but it has always been a difficult codebase to work with. At Libre Graphics Meeting 2016 in London, Adrien Tétar presented his work on a promising replacement called TruFont. The new application builds on top of several popular open-source libraries that are widely used by font engineers and even by proprietary font editors. That gives TruFont a head start, and it may mean that the project can count on a more diverse assortment of contributors as time goes by.

• Tétar joined the FontForge team in 2014, he said, with an interest in making fonts for math and science. It was widely acknowledged that FontForge was hard to maintain (at 600,000 lines of C) and had an awkward user interface but, still, no one was working on an open-source replacement. For reference, he pointed the audience to an October 2015 discussion on the difficulty of adding features to FontForge.

• WhatsApp, Messenger, Skype and Telegram – great at helping me stay in touch, useless at helping me stay focused.

• My team and I are pleased to announce the latest release of our Silex library, featuring cool new functionality from all of the core contributors. Silex is a library of reusable components for Apache Spark factored out of our data science work in Red Hat’s Emerging Technology group.

• When I originally wrote my test framework for C, I used SOURCE and BUILD as the preprocessor symbols and environment variables that pointed to the source and build directories of the software being tested. Subsequent discussion and thought convinced me that I should have used some sort of prefix on those variables to distinguish from other uses.

• AltOS is the core of the software for all of the Altus Metrum products. It consists of firmware for our cc1111, STM32L151, STMF042, LPC11U14 and ATtiny85 based electronics and Java-based ground station software.

• A new minor release of BH is now on CRAN. BH provides a large part of the Boost C++ libraries as a set of template headers for use by R, possibly with Rcpp as well as other packages.

Proprietary

• Opera is a web browser developed by Opera Software which is one of the older web browser like Microsoft Internet Explorer and both are released the same year 1995, 20 years ago. It used the own renderer Presto layout engine upto Opera 12.x Linux version were suspended when Opera moved to Blink Layout engine & Xlib as a UI toolkit based on Google Chrome releases and they resumed Linux support with version of opera 26 (Debian based systems only 64-bit), Also they added support for RPM based systems & 32-bit from Opera 35. The first stable version released on 2005. As per Wikipedia page info, as of 4th quarter 2014 Opera holding 350 million users worldwide desktop usage and mobile users reached 291 million in June 2015.

• A pair of talks at Libre Graphics Meeting 2016 addressed ongoing work in a niche market within the broader “design” umbrella: architecture. Yorick van Havre discussed the difficulties of running an architecture business based on free software, and Mark Meagher presented a new free-software application for architects.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Not sure how we missed this, but Feral Interactive have officially confirmed F1 2015 is coming to Linux.

• It is very likely that Sony will come out with a new firmware in order to patch the exploit made by CTurt and in this way; they can go around the latest jailbreak exploit on the PS4. The concept of jailbreaking a Sony PlayStation console is a direct insult to their technological manufacturing and development of firmware.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• So, while the 2016 Google Summer of Code hasn’t officially started yet, and Krita’s master is in feature freeze till the release at the end of the month, it’s a good moment to start preparing.

• If you want to attend Akademy 2016 but are a bit short on money, that is no excuse

• There are new development builds ready, with a bunch of bug fixes since the last beta. Please test thoroughly, we’re getting really close to the second beta!

• Quick update on the next bugfix release for the KBibTeX 0.6 series: KBibTeX 0.6.1-beta1 (0.6.0.90) has just been released. Differences to the alpha version from two weeks ago are two minor bug fixes and updated translations for Galician and Italian (thanks!).

• Some of you in the Debian community might know me from working with the debian-qt-kde team

• All these days, I was spending most of my time fixing bugs on different open source projects. Now I have got the opportunity to work with WikiToLearn, a proud member of KDE community, for a long period of time, implementing a new feature to wiki editor.

• We are pleased to announce our first edition of UbuntuBuzz Thematic Ebook KDE Edition. This is a second ebook publication of us after the UbuntuBuzz Magazine, because we want our readers take more advantages from our articles. We hope this KDE edition helps everyone uses KDE. As usual, you may download our ebook free (gratis) by direct link.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Note that Numix theme requires GTK 3.16 or newer, so the themes generated with Oomox require the same version.

• The Outreachy summer 2016 intern accepted projects/participants were announced at the end of April with the internship period running from the end of May through the end of August. Here are the accepted projects.

Distributions

• GNewSense 4 was released yesterday as the successor to gNewSense 3, which had been around since 2013. GNewSense 4 was also their first release being based off the current Debian stable 7. GNewSense releases have been far and few between, but the developers involved are looking at possibility expediting gNewSense 5 and beyond.

• With gNewSense 4 “Ucclia” out the door, developers have already turned the discussion to gNewSense 5. Developer Sam Geeraerts started a mailing list thread about speeding up the development for this next major release. He’s also started this planning Wiki page with brainstorming ways to improve their build processes to be able to push out new releases in a faster manner.

New Releases

• Parsix GNU/Linux is a live and installation DVD based on Debian. Our goal is to provide a ready to use and easy to install desktop and laptop optimized operating system based on Debian’s stable branch and the latest stable release of GNOME desktop environment. Users can easily install extra software packages from Parsix APT repositories. Our annual release cycle consists of two major and four minor versions. We have our own software repositories and build servers to build and provide all the necessary updates and missing features in Debian stable branch.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• The Lenovo Thinkpad P50 is quite a nifty laptop. However installing Linux required some digging around, so I’m writing this up for others to stumble upon it when looking for answers to similar issues.

Slackware Family

• My gut feeling tells me that I should announce a stable release of my “liveslak” project soon. I have implemented much more than I set out to do from the beginning, and no bugs have surfaced for a while.

• So it was time to stamp a final beta number on the liveslak sources and generate new Slackware Live ISO images. I want you to give them a spin and report any bugs that you find. Otherwise there may well be an 1.0.0 release after the weekend.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Closing out the week Eric Hameleers today announced the final testing release of Slackware Live dubbed 0.9.0. In other news, Clement Lefebvre said today he was reducing the workload over there and axing OEM and NoCodec images, instead shipping no codecs for anyone. gNewSense 4 was recently released based on “a solid Debian” and the Hectic Geek compares and contrasts several flavors of Ubuntu.

Debian Family

• Those running any old VIA C3, AMD K5/K6, or original Intel Pentium CPUs, you’ll be losing your Debian support past the current stable (Jessie) series.

• The Debian i386 architecture builds now require an i686 class processor for Debian testing (affecting Debian Stretch) and future builds. Support for 586 class and 586/686 class processors has been dropped, similar to the 486 CPUs being dropped previously. This i686 CPU requirement means the end of the line for hardware like the AMD K5 and K6, Intel Pentium / Pentium MMX, and VIA C3 Ezra hardware.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Ubuntu Online Summit 2016 for Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) has ended, and we told you already that Unity 8 and Snaps are the future for the popular operating system.

• Ubuntu 16.10, which is codenamed the Yakkety Yak, is currently penciled in to ship on 20nd October, 2016. The release date Ubuntu 16.10 has now been firmed up as are the other development milestones leading up to the mid-October, currently we don’t know what new features and technologies will ship in 16.10.

• LXD works perfectly fine with a directory-based storage backend, but both speed and reliability are greatly improved when ZFS is used instead. 16.04 LTS saw the first officially supported release of ZFS for Ubuntu and having just set up a fresh LXD host on Elastichosts utilising both ZFS and bridged networking, I figured it’d be a good time to document it.

• Sukochev Roman’s (Leolik) patched NotifyOSD PPA adds extra features on top of the Ubuntu NotifyOSD notifications, like closing the notifications on click, option to move the notifications to a different screen corner, configurable colors for both the notification background and text, and much more.

• Dafuq? What is this? Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus is supposed to be an LTS. A pillar of stability! It’s buggier than Werewolf. And it sure comes with a dozen new issues and/or regressions that Trust did not have. Horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible. Why? WHYYYYYY? Why oh why?

• Why can’t I have my peace and quiet and sanity? Why do you have to dash my hopes? Why do you have to ruin my day? Why can’t I use this new LTS with a big and happy smile on my face? Why did you have to rush this release? Why release the tablet without the newest LTS on it? Why all of it?

• I am really displeased. But I also believe I must keep on testing Xerus, so that you know where you stand, and hopefully, with enough pressure, we will see some positive results. Much like openSUSE, I presume the issues will be ironed out a few months after the initial offering. Which reminds me, I need to test Leap again. On the Xenial side of things, there’s a lot of room for improvement. Network support first and foremost, Bluetooth, battery life, memory consumption, codecs, package management. All of it really.

• At the moment, Ubuntu 16.04 is not ready for mass consumption. It pains me, really deeply pains me, because I know there will be a ripple effect on Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Mint, and for months ahead, we will struggle with silly problems and regressions, and hardware support will just suck. For now, Xerus gets 3/10. Let’s hope things improve, for everyone’s sake. More than just pride and silly release names are at stake. The whole of Linux, even if you don’t believe that. See ya.

• LimeSDR is an open source SDR with a crowdfunding campaign. By itself, that’s not anything special. There are plenty of SDR devices available. What makes LimeSDR interesting is that it is using Snappy Ubuntu Core as a sort of app store. Developers can make code available, and end-users can easily download and install that code.

Flavours and Variants

• After reviewing Ubuntu 15.10 a few months ago, I came up with an Ubuntu (15.10) flavor comparison as well. So after reviewing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and especially since this is a LTS (Long Term Support) release, I decided to come up with yet another Ubuntu 16.04 LTS flavors comparison that involves Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu GNOME because they come with the 3 main desktop environments of GNU/Linux: Unity, KDE Plasma and GNOME.

• But just like the previous one of its kind, this too will be based on the performance aspect and the stability of the each operating system, and I won’t talk about the new features of the desktop or the applications. But as a general introduction, all three flavors use the Kernel 4.4 & Xorg 1.18.3. Ubuntu’s Unity desktop features the version 7.4.0, Kubuntu features the KDE Plasma 5.5.5 (and KDE Applications 15.12), and Ubuntu GNOME features GNOME 3.18 release.

• Lubuntu 16.04 LTS was officially released as part of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Official Flavors. This release ships with the latest build of LXDE Desktop Environment and powered by long-term suported of Linux kernel Series 4.4.

• April saw the releases of Cinnamon 3.0 and MATE 1.14 which will be featured in the upcoming Linux Mint 18.

• The announcement posted by Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre on May 6, 2016, was a pretty big one, revealing a lot of information about the upcoming Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” operating system.

• Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS as part of Ubuntu 16.04 Offical Flavors has been released and announced by Ubuntu MATE Developer. This release include mate desktop 1.12 as default desktop environment and powered by long-term support Linux Kernel series 4.4.

Devices/Embedded

• May 6, 2016, Innopolis, Tatarstan, Russia. New company “Открытая мобильная платформа” (Open Mobile Platform) is about to begin the development of domestic Russian operating system for mobile devices.

• The new mobile operating system is suggested to be based on components of Sailfish OS. The company is already hiring employees.

• Many years ago I started OpenBSC and Osmocom in order to bring Free Software into an area where it barely existed before: Cellular Infrastructure. For the first few years, it was “just for fun”, without any professional users. A FOSS project by enthusiasts. Then we got some commercial / professional users, and with them funding, paying for e.g. Holger and my freelance work. Still, implementing all protocol stacks, interfaces and functional elements of GSM and GPRS from the radio network to the core network is something that large corporations typically spend hundreds of man-years on. So funding for Osmocom GSM implementations was always short, and we always tried to make the best out of it.

• On Wednesday February 17th, the GENIVI Alliance released a QEMU image of the GENIVI Demo Platform ivi9 Beta version, together with everything needed (instructions, source code, recepies, etc.) to build GDP-ivi9 with Yocto. A few weeks later, on March 8th, the first release candidate was published.

Phones

Android

• If there’s one common refrain we often hear from Android fans, it’s that the experience you get with the stock version of Android is always better than whatever version of Android has been modified by manufacturers such as Samsung, LG and HTC. But is this always true? Recently Pocketnow decided to do an in-depth comparison of the Nexus 6P and the Galaxy S7 edge and it discovered that while there are advantages to using stock Android, they don’t always outweigh the advantages of new features added by OEMs.

• I wanted a phone that works pretty much out of the box without having to worry about hardware compatibility and installation hassles since I never used Replicant before. The only shop and product I found to meet these criteria was the second-hand Samsung S2 by Tehnoetic. The Romanian shop was positively mentioned by the FSF so I decided to test my trust.

Free Software/Open Source

• Over the years people have accused Free and Open Source Culture (FOSC) as being a “religion”. Other people have used FOSC as a political tool, assigning the advocacy of FOSC to one political party; usually the “left”, “liberal” or (as some people call them) “progressive” party.

• FOSC is none of these. It is an economic model just like “Communism”, “Socialism” (yes, those are two different things) or “Capitalism”.

• People also tend to forget that economic models are usually never “pure”. One of my favorite sayings is that “unbridled capitalism is almost as bad as unbridled communism”, and that typically a good mix of economic models is better than “purity”.

Events

• Last Thursday, the 5th of May, we had our first Linux Desktop Meetup in Brno. It was an exciting start, with informal talks from fellow members of our community. In this first edition, we had talks focused on IDE and development environments.

• Our rooms at the hotel are nearly completely booked out. We have already had to add rooms twice. So if you haven’t already, book immediately! If it says no availability, please contact us immediately and we’ll work to get more rooms added. Even if we cannot, we can get you a discounted rate at a nearby hotel that will shuttle you to the event hotel for free.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• I have used Thunderbird off and on since about 2003. I started using it on Windows and then installed it onto my Linux PCs later on. The point is: Thunderbird is near and dear to my heart.

• Unfortunately over the past few years Thunderbird’s importance with Mozilla has faltered. Not because of anything negative, rather because Mozilla is trying to refocus their efforts with Firefox. Most recently, the news that Mozilla is finally letting Thunderbird go took a lot of folks by complete surprise. What was once loved by legions of users has now been placed onto the market for others to adopt it.

SaaS/Back End

• As I mentioned earlier, I’ll be talking about feature engineering and outlier detection for infrastructure log data at Apache: Big Data next week. Consider this post a virtual handout for that talk. (I’ll also be presenting another talk on scalable log data analysis later this summer. That talk is also inspired by my recent work with logs but will focus on different parts of the problem, so stay tuned if you’re interested in the domain!)As I mentioned earlier, I’ll be talking about feature engineering and outlier detection for infrastructure log data at Apache: Big Data next week. Consider this post a virtual handout for that talk. (I’ll also be presenting another talk on scalable log data analysis later this summer. That talk is also inspired by my recent work with logs but will focus on different parts of the problem, so stay tuned if you’re interested in the domain!)

• As early as 2012, writers, industry critics, and big data companies such as Cloudera predicted Hadoop’s demise as the de facto standard for big data analytics. Hadoop’s future as a viable real-time big data analytics platform seemed questioned at the height of its hype and adoption.

• And indeed, many businesses that manage large data sets have looked elsewhere to find something better to use. In the view of some, Hadoop’s complexity and management requirements make it a technology that cannot survive long-term in business.

Databases

• PostgreSQL 9.6 isn’t being released until later this year, but with it moving along, the release notes are starting to be assembled for this next major update to this open-source SQL server implementation.

• This week added to PostgreSQL Git was the start of the 9.6 release notes. Among the prominent items to mention are the parallel query support, synchronous replication now supports multiple standby servers, full-text search for phrases, support for remote joins/sorts/updates, “substantial” performance improvements (especially for many-core servers), no more repetitive scans of old data by auto vacuum, and much more.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The 3D/OpenGL support in LibreOffice just got a bit better with now supporting multi-threaded rendering.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Given the recent stable release of GCC 6 (GCC v6.1.0), here are some fresh compiler benchmarks on an Intel Debian x86_64 system when comparing the GCC 4.9.3, GCC 5.3.0, and GCC 6.1.0 compiler releases.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• “Local Geographic Information System and Big Data”, “Transparent Local budget” and “Local Open Data in smart city” were three topics at the centre of the DataBoom hackathon that took place on the 15th and 16th of April in Budapest, Hungary. The event, which was organised by the K-Monitor, the Magyary Zoltán Association on e-Government Science and the Kitchen Budapest, is considered as the first Open Data, reusing, hacking competition organised in Hungary, the website states.

Programming/Development

• On May 7 there will be the first International Drone Day in campinas, and I’m working with qgroundcontrol for a while, it’s a very nice drone control station build entirely on C++/Qt/QML and it runs on everything you may think of (not bricks, however),and I’ll be using it to showcase on the International Drone Day in campinas. There’s a facebook event for those that may like to go, and live in São Paulo state.

Standards/Consortia

• There are however some hiccups with vendor lock-in, in cloud computing or elsewhere. It just hasn’t disappeared. The lock-in still exists through proprietary or otherwise unimplementable file formats; through undocumented protocols and weak or non existent reversibility clauses. Vendor lock-in has not gone away, it has become more subtle by moving up the ladder. If your entire business processes are hosted and run by a cloud service provider there may be some good reasons for you to have made that choice; but the day the need for another provider or another platform is felt the real test will be to know if it is possible to back up your data and processes and rebuild them elsewhere and in a different way. That’s an area where open standards could really help and will play an increasing role. Another area where open standards are still contentious is multimedia: remember what happened to Mozilla in 2015 when they chose to embed proprietary, DRM-riddled codecs because of industry pressure.

Leftovers

Science

• General Motors Co. and Lyft Inc. within a year will begin testing a fleet of self-driving Chevrolet Bolt electric taxis on public roads, a move central to the companies’ joint efforts to challenge Silicon Valley giants in the battle to reshape the auto industry.

Hardware

Health/Nutrition

• The problem offers new insight into why so many people have become addicted to OxyContin, one of the most abused pharmaceuticals in U.S. history.

Security

• If you use Windows AppLocker to restrict others from using some applications and locking down your Windows PC, here’s something to worry about. Casey Smith, a security researcher, has found a way to bypass the AppLocker whitelist and run arbitrary scripts. IT admins are advised to run this command on their systems and see if some loopholes exist in their network.

• Other headlines went on to suggest that you need to change your password right now if you’re using the likes of Hotmail or Gmail, among others. The strong implication across the stories I’ve read is that these mail providers have been hacked and now there’s a mega-list of stolen accounts floating around the webs.

• At this stage, we’re most of the way towards fully deprecating SSH protocol 1 – this outlines our plans to complete this task.

• We are happy to announce the release candidate of Firejail version 0.9.40-rc1 (download). Firejail is a generic Linux namespaces security sandbox, capable of running graphic interface programs as well as server programs. This release includes a number of major features, such as X11 sandboxing support, file transfers between sandboxes and the host system, run-time configuration support, Ubuntu 14.04 AppArmor support, and firecfg, a desktop configuration utility. A number of smaller features, documentation and bugfixes are also included:

• If I was not such an incurably lazy person I would create XReallyEvilTeddy to demonstrate this. I am, so I have not. But it would be naïve to believe such applications do not exist. And it would therefore be naïve to believe that Mir and Wayland really do have better security.

Defence/Aggression

• The diplomatic crisis on these infamous 28 pages regarding the terrorist attacks keeps growing.

• Auschwitz survivor Leon Schwarzbaum, who had lost 35 members of his family in that camp gave evidence in the trial against Hanning. He said that he remained haunted by his experiences in the camp and described Hanning as “cruel and sadistic”. Schwarzbaum said, “The older I get, the more time I have to think about what happened. I am nearly 95 years old and I still often have nightmares about this.”

• But the most remarkable part of Schwarzbaum’s testimony is when he declared before entering the court, “I’ll look into his eyes and see if he is honest, because the truth is what is most important. I don’t want revenge; I don’t want him tormented in prison. He is just an old man like me.”

• A recent PBS report about the war in Yemen exposed the secret connection between the U.S.-Saudi alliance and Al Qaeda, a reality that also underscores the jihadist violence in Syria, writes Dan Lazare.

• YOGYAKARTA: Indonesia, Malaysia and Philippines agreed on Thursday to run coordinated patrols to boost maritime security following the kidnappings at sea of Indonesians by suspected Abu Sayyaf militants.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Building new nuclear power stations is becoming hugely more expensive by the day, but decommissioning old ones might prove to be even more costly.

• Renowned scientist and animal conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall is speaking out against the government’s efforts to drop the grizzly bear from the Endangered Species List, a move which would allow the vulnerable and revered animal to become but a trophy “mounted on a wall.”

• Experts have offered stark warnings that proposed power plants in India, China, Vietnam and Indonesia would blow Paris climate deal if they move ahead

Finance

• Sure, they went belly-up and crashed our economy with their frauds, rigged casino games and raw greed. And yes, the Bush and Obama regimes rushed to bail them out with trillions of dollars in our public funds, while ignoring the plight of workaday people who lost jobs, homes, businesses, wealth, and hope. But come on, byu7uckos, have you not noticed that the feds are now socking the bankers with huuuuuge penalties for their wrongdoings?

• The President of the United States (POTUS) is desperate. Exhibit A: His Op-Ed defending the Asian face – the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – of a wide-ranging, twin-headed NATO-on-trade “pivoting”.

• The European face is of course the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

• POTUS frames TPP – as well as TTIP – in terms of a benign expansion of US exports, and private (US) firms having “a fair shot at competing against state-owned enterprises.” “Fair”? Not really. Let’s see how the mechanism works, focusing on TPP’s European twin.

• Corporate control on both sides of the Atlantic will be solidified should the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership be passed. Any doubt about that was removed when Greenpeace Netherlands released 13 chapters of the TTIP text, although the secrecy of the text and that only corporate representatives have regular access to negotiators had already made intentions clear.

• Bernie Sanders has put inequality at the center of the 2016 presidential elections. However much the corporate media attempt to turn the election into a personality contest between Clinton and Trump, inequality will not go away as the defining domestic election issue. Whoever are the two major party presidential candidates, they will have to address the deepening problem of inequality.

• The Occupy insurgency of 2011 put inequality onto the American political agenda, redefining class struggle in terms everyone could understand – the 1% versus the rest of us. Sadly, only one major political campaign has followed — the push for a $15 minimum wage – and it has been fought by grassroots campaigns at the local and state levels by labor unions, NGOs, community groups and ordinary workers.

• The concept of inequality, of the 1% vs the 99%, is a powerful metaphor that makes clear the structure of wealth and power defining American life today. Sadly, while framing the problem confronting the nation, the concept of inequality doesn’t delineate the forms of economic, political and moral tyranny impacting the lives of an increasing number of Americans. To illuminate the deepening crisis the U.S. is undergoing as capitalism restructures its useful to reframe the notion of inequality in terms of poverty.

• Conservative lawmakers are well known for wanting to cut funding to public education. But just remember, every time they take a swing at public school budgets, they hit poor kids.

• The newest blow aimed at public schools will hit low-income students in the stomach, literally.

• A bill introduced by a Republican in Congress called The Improving Child Nutrition And Education Act does the exact opposite of what it claims to do.

• In this case, “improving” children’s nutrition means cutting the availability of federally subsidized lunches to hungry children in public schools.

• Now this panic alert, designed to get us in line behind Hillary, is raised by the man who ended The New Republic as we knew it (which then went on to end and then end again), promoting racist and imperialist dogma during his reign at the magazine in the 1990s, and then, with his finger in the wind (which to him and that other arch-hypocrite Hitchens meant being like George Orwell), turned into one of the biggest shills for the war on terror, the Iraq war, the whole works, all the while denouncing the fifth column within our ranks. This so-called journalist, who has no record of liberal consistency, who keeps shifting to whoever holds moral power at any given moment, is scaring us about the mortal threat that is Trump.

• President Obama has taken action to increase pay transparency among federal contractors. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces laws prohibiting employment discrimination, recently issued a regulation requiring large companies to disclose aggregate salary information in their annual informational filing. And states have been taking action as well, with California and New York enacting legislation to support pay transparency efforts.

• During his last 1 ½ years at Goldman Sachs, Mr. Sparks was involved in creating something called a “synthetic collateralized debt obligation.” Unlike the securities Goldman Sachs sold to unsuspecting investors, the debt obligations Mr. Sparks helped create did not include actual bonds but, instead, instruments whose value was based on the the performance of sets of junk bonds. Those instruments were sold to unsuspecting investors by Goldman Sachs knowing they were worthless. (For those who would like more detail than is provided by the foregoing, that practice is described in some detail in a report on Mr. Sparks’ testimony before Congress) What both activities had in common, however, was that both were part and parcel of the financial collapse that took place in 2007-2008. As a result, in hundreds of thousands of cases, buyers defaulted on their mortgages and lost their homes. And that brings us to the present.

• Research on inequality usually looks at fairly static social structures like schools, transport, healthcare, or jobs. But sometimes glaring inequality can be quite fleeting, as researchers Katherine DeCelles and Michael Norton argue in a recent PNAS article. Their example? Coming face to face with just how awful airplane economy class is in comparison to first class.

• DeCelles and Norton wanted to study whether exposure to this kind of inequality could prompt people to behave badly. They looked at records of “air rage” incidents, where “abusive or unruly” passengers threaten staff or fellow travelers. “Popular explanations for air rage include crowded planes, frustrating delays, and shrinking seats,” they write—but they suspected these explanations are missing something.

• If a society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members, the United States just received an incredibly unflattering judgment.

• A new study published by the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund, or UNICEF, ranked the wealthiest countries of the world by the well-being of their most disadvantaged children. Out of 41 countries, the U.S. ranked No. 18 overall.

• For context, the U.S. ranks No. 1 in total wealth.

• The study took a comprehensive approach, comparing the gap between children at the very bottom to those in the middle across a range of criteria – including household income, educational achievement and self-reported health and life satisfaction. The central question was this: How far do countries let those at the very bottom fall?

• In the United States, the answer seems to be distressingly far.

• A perfect technological storm: the awesome threat you won’t hear about in America’s presidential campaign.

• For a huge number of Americans the key emotion driving the tortured primary campaigns has, arguably, been fear.

• It’s fear of terrorism, fear of immigrants; but above all, it’s a fear—panic for some—of Americans whose standard of living has declined or stagnated, and who apprehend an even bleaker future for their children.

• But the candidates—and most of the media—are ignoring the real cause of that angst.

• We are, in fact swept up in a vast technological tsunami. It’s a tsunami bearing challenges as great as anything our species has ever known.

• It has already swept away millions of jobs and will wipe out tens of millions more. It will totally transform the economic landscape, and—like climate change—could conceivably threaten our very existence.

• But, if you tune in to the cacophony that currently passes for political debate in the U.S. –and much of Europe—you hear precious little about that massive, relentless threat.

• Instead, there are tirades against immigrants, against supposedly disastrous international trade deals and ruthless businessmen who close domestic factories to exploit labor in sweatshops abroad; against a political and economic system crafted to make the top .1 % even more obscenely rich.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• President Obama on Friday urged the news media to closely scrutinize Donald Trump’s record and past comments, and avoid coverage that highlights “the spectacle and the circus” of the campaign trail.

• Obama previewed his role as an anti-Trump spokesman and pressed the media to follow suit.

• “He has a long record that needs to be examined. And I think it’s important to take seriously the statements he’s made in the past,” the president told reporters at the White House. “I just want to emphasize that we are in serious times and this is a serious job.”

• And yet the BBC ran a claim all day that the “projected” national vote share was Labour 31%, Conservative 30%.

• This simply cannot be true. Labour won the London mayoral election by over 200,000 votes. They were 130,000 ahead in Wales. Taking all the elections except the English local council seat elections, Labour were 360,000 votes and approximately 6% ahead of the Tories. To balance this plus the majorities of the 1,291 Labour English councillors elected, each of just 828 Conservative English councillors elected would have to have an average majority of approximately 1,000. Random sampling shows this is absolutely not the case.

• My own calculations, based on knowing all the other results and extrapolations from samples of the English local council results, is that the national vote count was Labour 34% Conservative 29%. It might not be precisely correct, but is not far out.

• But I can say for certain is that the BBC 31/30 figure is a despicable and quite deliberate lie. The BBC has become a caricature of a state propaganda machine.

• An Iowa jury found three political operatives with deep ties to Ron and Rand Paul guilty on Thursday of a scheme to pay an Iowa state senator for his endorsement of Ron Paul in the 2012 campaign.

• All three men were key Ron Paul lieutenants in that campaign, and two, Jesse Benton and John Tate, went on to run a pro-Rand Paul super-PAC during his 2016 candidacy. After the younger Paul dropped out of the race, Benton began working last month with a pro-Donald Trump super-PAC. Along with Benton and Tate, operative Dimitri Kesari was also convicted.

• Donald Trump may not have the keys to the nuclear arsenal quite yet, but his all-but-guaranteed nomination, sealed with a landslide victory in the Indiana Republican primary on Tuesday, means the intelligence community must soon start briefing the presumptive GOP nominee and giving him access to classified security information.

• Politics makes for strange bedfellows they say, but often political differences that appear deep and fundamental are not so much that way, especially given a threat to the bipartisan political establishment. Take the strange case of Mr. Donald Trump. Today the same pundits of all stripes who predicted he could never win even one primary, then that he could never win the nomination, now are saying “have no fear, he could never be President of the United States.” Who you gonna believe, them or your own lying eyes?

• Bernie Sanders will go to Philadelphia with more pledged delegates than any insurgent in modern history. Here’s what he could do with them.

• No one knows why Rudy Eugene, a 31-year-old car wash employee, suddenly launched himself at Ronald Poppo, a 65-year-old homeless man he encountered on Miami’s McArthur Causeway, chewing off most of his victim’s face in an 18-minute assault that ended only after a police officer shot him dead. But one thing is certain: “Bath salts” did not make him do it.

• Sanders’ fairly narrow victory in another purple state, Indiana, continued the pattern that was established in Nevada and Iowa. Clinton’s lead in delegates is based on a combination of closed primary states and southern red and purple states. Unfortunately neither of these results have much relevance to the winning map for the electoral college. Clinton’s identity politics appeals to the Democratic party faithful who dominate the closed primaries held at public expense for the Party’s 29% of the electorate. Those who see all politics as identity politics remain loyal to a corrupt party which provides in exchange the surface image of empty symbols. You can buy a faux “Woman Card” from Clinton. But you will not get from her a restored democracy in which 99% of women’s votes, or of anyone else’s votes, can achieve policy reforms.

• It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade….Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”a

• Christians who claimed months ago that Donald Trump was foretold in Biblical prophecy must be feeling prescient today. Worrying in 2015 that Trump would be a major party nominee was treated as being about as likely as the 5000-1 odds that bookies gave Leicester City at the beginning of the 2015-16 season. But this week, as both unlikely predictions came to pass, it seems prudent to take a look at just what it is that those eschatologists claim to see.

• Sanders has won nearly ten million votes in the primaries so far including his latest strong come-from-behind win in Indiana, and that is only a fraction of his national base of support, given that many states have closed primaries where independents — his strongest backers — have been barred from voting.

• The Vermont Senator said he will ‘mobilize’ his delegates if party platform does not reflect the bold progressive vision demanded by Democratic grassroots

Censorship/Free Speech

• Two individuals were involved in the escalation of this row to new and explosive heights. Naz Shah, in 2014, before she became Labour MP for Bradford, tweeted that Israel should be transported to the United States as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Shah issued a dignified apology, explaining that feelings were running high during the Israeli assault on Gaza. Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London and close ally of Jeremy Corbyn, rushed to Shah’s defence but compounded the crisis with his bizarre claim that Hitler supported Zionism in 1932 “before he went mad and killed six million Jews”. Jeremy Corbyn was pilloried in much of the press for not dealing quickly enough with the antisemitism that was said to be endemic in the left of the party. One result of this furore has been to shift the focus of debate from any criticism of Israel to condemnation of the critics of Israel and to bypass discussion of Palestine altogether.

• American academics will soon realize that their jobs are in jeopardy, if they don’t know it already. Not only their jobs, but their right to think, say, and write what they wish – and to engage in the pursuit of truth, wherever it may lead them.

• The censor board, the guidelines it operates under and the law that created it were all sanctified by the highest court in the land

• A draft European Commission Communication on Platforms has been leaked. The proposals with regard to the regulation of “illegal” “or harmful” content are hugely disturbing. In summary, the European Commission seems willing to completely give up on the notion of law. Instead, regulation of free speech is pushed into the hands of Google, Facebook and others.

• Chrome, Firefox and Safari are actively blocking direct access to The Pirate Bay. According to the browsers, Thepiratebay.se is a “deceptive site” or “web forgery,” that may steal user information. The TPB crew has been alerted to the issue, and hope it will be resolved soon.

• Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari are blocking access to The Pirate Bay torrent portal showing the classical “Deceptive site ahead” error usually seen on dangerous sites that may attempt to collect user credentials with fake login pages, show deceptive ads, or push unwanted downloads.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Prior to assuming command of the 691st ISRG, James held the position of Director of Cyberspace Policy, Resources and Capabilities for the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Washington D.C. position. An Air Force academy graduate, James has served in all three levels of leadership roles to include commanding ISR and Cyberspace units.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Some walls are made of concrete and razor wire. Others are made of soldiers, violence, bureaucracy and misinformation. While Grupo Mexico has built a long wall to stop migrants from getting on or off its long distance train, “The Beast,” the Mexican government’s Southern Border Plan is also making it much harder for Central American migrants desperately fleeing violence and poverty to travel through the country.

• It was a bright, sunny day, though nowhere near as hot as Honduras. Migrants knocked on the door of the refuge in Tlaxcala, central Mexico, exhausted. Eyes dark and half closed, and their feet shredded after having walked for 15 days, they handed their one small bag each over to the volunteers, changed into donated clothing, and threw out their old clothes. The two barrels near the entrance were full to the brim with such clothing.

• Can the FBI recruit your child’s college sport shooting coach to be on the look out for vague signs that your teenage son—an avid shooter, a great coder, and not a fan of certain federal government policies—is becoming a “violent extremist”? Apparently, yes.

• Despite being held in solitary confinement for years, men known as Kinetik, Dhati, and Brother M, primary leaders of the Free Alabama Movement, have been instrumental in organizing a statewide prison work stoppage in Alabama that began on Sunday, May 1. Currently, the prison labor strike has begun at Alabama’s Holman, Staton, and Elmore Correctional Facilities. St. Clair’s stoppage will begin on May 9, with Donaldson and other correctional facilities to follow soon after. The current plan is for the work stoppage to last 30 days, although the Movement’s leaders said the length of the strike is contingent on the cooperation of legislators in regard to reforming the prison labor system and the conditions of the prisons. The Free Alabama Movement is an activist network of incarcerated men, spanning numerous state prisons across Alabama.

• Hersh synthesized the information from the dissenting Seals, combined it with the account of events in the email from Pakistani nuclear security, and presented the result to the SOC consultants to help sort things out. After getting their views, he was sufficiently prepared to take what was by then an internally consistent alternative narrative to the unnamed “retired senior intelligence officer.” He, too, confirmed the new outline of events and contributed his own details. All that was missing was a candid assessment of events from the Pakistani high command. He interviewed Gen. Asad Durrani, a former chief of ISI and one of the most powerful men in the country, who was eager to cooperate.

• On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse.

• Or so dozens of unsuspecting passengers thought.

• The curly-haired man tried to keep to himself, intently if inscrutably scribbling on a notepad he’d brought aboard. His seatmate, a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag, looked him over. He was wearing navy Diesel jeans and a red Lacoste sweater – a look he would later describe as “simple elegance” – but something about him didn’t seem right to her.

• [...]

• He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or another foreign language, or even some special secret terrorist code. They were math.

• Maybe one day they can do one about living under constant government surveillance, or being denied healthcare. What are a world we are making for our children to deal with.

• The Jesuit writer and activist’s death is a reminder of the necessity and power of protest in America.

• Estimated number of people directly affected by the order: 200,000

• An Egyptian court on Saturday recommended the death sentence against six people, including two Al Jazeera employees, for allegedly passing documents related to national security to Qatar and the Doha-based TV network during the rule of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.

• It’s inhumane, dystopian and actually increases in-prison violence — but god, it makes money.

• Sadiq Khan, the son of Pakistani immigrants who won a landslide victory in this week’s London mayoral election, was sworn in on Saturday in a multifaith service at Southwark Cathedral, becoming the British capital’s first Muslim mayor.

• Airbnb is facing a storm of criticism after several consumers complained of racial discrimination from some of the home-sharing service app’s hosts.

• A few years ago, while clearing dried broccoli stalks from the tired soil of our land at Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York, I received a cold call from Boston. On the other end was a Black woman, unknown to me, who wanted to share her story of trying to make it as a farmer.

• Frustrated by what they describe as a “rigged” electoral system in the face of Bernie Sanders’ overwhelming majority win, Democrats in Maine on Saturday voted to adopt a rule change that will essentially eliminate the power of superdelegates to pick a candidate of their choosing.

• Though Sanders won 64 percent of the Maine vote, he has only received one of the state’s five superdelegates. Three have endorsed Hillary Clinton, who only secured 35 percent of the popular vote, while one remains undeclared.

• Silver was found to have engaged in a two-track corruption scheme that netted him an estimated $4 million in bribes and kickbacks disguised as legal fees.

• An amendment to eliminate the influence of superdelegates just passed overwhelmingly at the Maine Democratic Party’s statewide convention.

• Rep. Diane Russell (D-Portland), who introduced the amendment, told US Uncut that the measure was passed by a single voice vote, followed by chants of “Ber-nie! Ber-nie!”

• “I never expected this kind of response from the amendment,” Russell said in a phone interview. “I’m suddenly seen as the hero of the convention.”

• This week, Techdirt’s Tim Cushing published a story about the Hancock County, IN Sheriff’s Department officers who stole $240,000 under color of asset forfeiture.

• Digger, a Techdirt commenter, remarked, “The only ‘bonus’ these criminals [the Sheriff's Department officers] are likely to see could be a bullet to their apparently empty skulls.”

• This prompted the Department of Homeland Security to contact Techdirt and ask whom they should send a subpoena to in order to get at the identity of Digger. Masnick is worried that the subpoena, when and if it arrives, could come with a gag order…

DRM

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The boss of a prominent ISP in Sweden has criticized moves by the government which could criminalize hundreds of thousands of Internet users. Bahnhof CEO Jon Karlung says the country is stuck in the past when it calls for harsher punishments for file-sharing and should instead concentrate on developing better legal options.

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