● 06.07.16

● Links 7/6/2016: Manjaro Linux 16.06, Firefox 47.0

Posted in News Roundup at 6:08 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The late Muhammad Ali was not only a champion fighter and cultural figure, but also no slouch in the advertising ring.

• Ali sold pizzas, car batteries and even roach spray (“I can whup anything on two legs but even me, the greatest, needs help beating things with six legs…”)

• While many have used Ali’s image or voice in their ads, including Apple (Think Different commercial) and Gatorade, I’m not aware of Ali hawking much in the way of technology. One exception was this 2004 IBM Super Bowl ad during which the company pushes Linux and open source computing, something it had been behind since the late 1990s. The ad features a young boy (depicted as “Linux” in related IBM ads) soaking up vintage video of Ali boasting “I shook up the world!” and then sitting face-to-face with the boxer, who urges the kid to “shake things up” and “shake up the world.”

• Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine. I wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed the day before I would give the talk. The next day I took a plane to the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover that kpresenter refused to load its own data file. I cursed a bit and started making the slides again from memory, to have something to present when I arrived. I tested that the saved files could be loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued. I continued to polish the slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer be loaded into kpresenter. In the end I had to rewrite the slides three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and shorter. After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem – kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand. Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great program to make slides. The point I’m trying to make is that we expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is embarrassing to its developers if it can’t.

Microsoft

• I watched the virt-top output for about 2 minutes and grabbed those numbers above during a representative 2 sec period. The Windows VM never dropped below 25% use. The other VMs each would bounce up as something required it, then would drop back down to nearly nothing when done.

• Microsoft has issued fixes to its last round of Windows Server Management Pack fixes, but is asking you to help it understand if the new fixes fix the messes the last fixes created.

• File this one under “doesn’t exactly inspire confidence”.

• This problem started way back in February 2016 when Microsoft released version 6.0.7303.0 of Windows Server Operating System management pack.

• Remember that irritating Windows 10 upgrade popup that keeps testing your patience while you are busy in some important work? Well, a person has found it too much to handle and expressed his anger in the form of a rant full of swearing.

• ANGRY USERS have launched a petition requesting that the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) investigate the practices employed in persuading people to upgrade to Windows 10, known to us here as Updategate.

• The petition cites a number of problems that we have dealt with on these hallowed pages, as well as an incident that came to light on Friday in which a rural African involved in stopping the poaching trade had 6GB of data downloaded on a per MB metered connection. connection.

• We’re not judging whether it happened, but we remain resolute that Microsoft does not have the right to force download updates onto computers, and make it confusing to uninstall.

• Microsoft has said that it is “transparent” on the matter and that metered connections can be set to avoid the download, but most people feel that the practice has been rolled out without the clarity that such an important issue warrants.

Server

• The Docker developers have announced the availability of Docker 1.11.2, the second maintenance update for the Docker 1.11 stable series of rhe widely used Linux container engine.

• Docker 1.11.2 has been in development for the past one and a half months, during which it received a single Release Candidate (RC) build that included the same changes available now in the final build.

• Among these, we can mention improved networking support by patching an issue that made the “docker inspect”, “docker ps”, and “docker port” commands to report the wrong port, as well as fixing a stale endpoint problem for overlay networks, which occurred due to clumsy reboots.

• In the past five years, demand for DevOps professionals has grown exponentially, with companies looking to build out their tech capabilities and bring new software products to market while simultaneously cutting development time and driving efficiencies in the process. Since the beginning of 2016, there have been more than 2,000 daily job postings looking for DevOps professionals on Dice, representing roughly 3 percent of all job postings on the site and up 53 percent year-over-year.

• RightScale, which delivers some of the most detailed survey results on open source trends, has published the results of its survey report highlighting DevOps trends, as we covered here. A deeper dive into the survey results shows that Docker, Puppet and Chef are shown to be kings of the hill in the tools market, with Docker adoption rising in the enterprise. Docker, Puppet and Chef are shown to be kings of the hill in the tools market, with Docker adoption rising in the enterprise. The company also published its annual State of the Cloud report in February.

Kernel Space

• Things are looking fairly normal, and there are fixes all over, with drivers and architecture code leading the charge as usual, but there’s stuff spread out all over the place, including filesystems, networking, mm, library helpers, etc etc.

• Linus Torvalds has tagged the Linux 4.7-rc2 kernel.

• This is the second weekly test release to the Linux 4.7 kernel, which offers many improvements and new functionality.

• Just a few minutes ago, June 5, 2016, Linus Torvalds announced the general availability of the second Release Candidate build of the upcoming Linux 4.7 kernel.

• Early bird rate is available until our quota of 140 runs out (or we reach 26 August). Please click here to register.

• Linus Torvalds has loosed release candidate 2 of version 4.7 of the Linux kernel on the waiting world.

• “Things are looking fairly normal, and there are fixes all over, with drivers and architecture code leading the charge as usual, but there’s stuff spread out all over the place, including filesystems, networking, mm, library helpers, etc etc,” Torvalds wrote .

• Linus Torvalds makes Linux 4.7-rc2 available for download and public testing

• Linus Torvalds has just announced the general availability of the second Release Candidate build of the forthcoming Linux 4.7 kernel.

• Nearly two weeks ago I warned that You May Want To Think Twice About Trying Linux 4.7 Git Right Now. Fortunately, all is well now and those problems have cleared up.

• Also, silly titles. Atomic has taken of for real, right now there’s 17 drivers supporting atomic modesetting merged into the DRM subsystem. And still a pile of them each release pending for review&merging. But it’s not just new drivers, there’s also been a steady stream of small improvements over the past year, I think it’s time for an update.

Graphics Stack

• Several new benchmarks were added today to the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org and with their GPU-accelerated focus of the new tests, I couldn’t help but run them on the mighty powerful GeForce GTX 1080 and friends.

• The Linux kernel DRM/KMS drivers continue moving ahead with their atomic conversion.

• Daniel Vetter of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center has written an update concerning the state of the DRM drivers atomic support.

• Marek Olšák posted a patch today to significantly boost the performance for games using multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) on both the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers.

Benchmarks

• Now that my initial GeForce GTX 1080 Linux review is out the door, I spent this weekend working on a “fun” comparison out of curiosity to see how the raw OpenGL and OpenCL performance has improved over the generations going back to the once-powerful GeForce 9800GTX plus including the top-end cards of the GeForce 600/700/900 Kepler and Maxwell series too.

• Eight years ago, the GeForce 9800GTX (G92) was a beast with its 65nm GPU and 754 million transistors. The 9800GTX boasted a core clock of 675MHz and 2200MHz for its GDDR3 memory. The 9800GTX was rated for 648 single-precision GFLOPS and had a 140 Watt TDP. Fast forward to today, the GeForce GTX 1080 is fabbed on a 16nm process and has more than 7.2 billion transistors. The base core clock is 1607MHz (and 1733MHz boost) while having GDDR5X for its video memory. The GTX 1080 has a 180 Watt TDP and its single-precision rating is 8228~8873 GFLOPS. Quite impressive seeing how much more advanced Pascal is over hardware from eight years ago and is still being used by some.

Applications

• I’ve not posted many entries in the past year– practically none at all in fact. There’s something entirely different about coding and writing prose that makes it difficult to shift between one and the other. Nor have I been particularly good (or even acceptably bad) about responding to questions and replies, especially those asking where Daala is, or where Daala is going in the era of AOM.

• A few days ago I was running through twitter when I saw Peter Cohen (@flargh) link to a blog post he had written about distraction free writing and the focused simplicity of a 30 year old word processor. Reading the article, I began to reflect upon the word processors I have used over the past 35 years and it inspired me to write a little about a few of those that stand-out in my mind. (I should underscore the fact that this post is not meant to be a look at the overall evolution of the word processor, but a look back at my own experiences over the years.)

• DVDStyler developer Alex Thüring is preparing for the launch of the 3.0 major release of his open-source and cross-platform DVD authoring software, DVDStyler.

• The first Release Candidate build of DVDStyler 3.0 is finally here, available for anyone willing to take the upcoming software release for a test drive, and packing various new features and improvements, such as clipping protection support to the audio normalization feature and a “-alternate_scan” flag to the interlaced encoding component to let users use an alternative scanning method.

• Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of real-time Internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing. IRC was born during summer 1988 when Jarkko Oikarinen wrote the first IRC client and server when he was working in the Department of Information Processing Science at the University of Oulu, Finland. This system enables millions of people around the world to communicate in real time. While IRC has lost some popularity, IRCv3 looks interesting with some advanced client features such as instant notifications, improved security and more.

• IRC is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but it also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfers via Direct Client-to-Client.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• According to Phoronix, gaming on Linux has experienced exponential growth in recent times. Over the course of the last two years, Steam’s catalog on the platform expanded from 500 games up to over 2200. This is a little over a 4.4x increase over two years. If I’m doing my high-school math correctly, and I seriously hope I am, this corresponds to an average increase of just under 2.1x year-over-year.

• The latest and greatest available for Paradox, Hearts of Iron IV is now available as a day-1 release for Linux & SteamOS.

• Shadow of Mordor is a beautiful game on Linux, but quite demanding on the hardware. Here’s how it performs with Linux.

• Shadow of Mordor is quite demanding on Linux systems and while it has a benchmark mode, it’s only exposed through the GUI, but otherwise would be a very nice benchmark. Thus it falls into the problem with many Linux games for benchmarking that I outlined this weekend.

• Always happy to give a shout out to games made entirely on Linux. Recursed was emailed in by the developer, as it’s developed on Linux using open source tools.

• Red Comrades Save the Galaxy: Reloaded is a remaster of a 1998 point & click adventure game that was rebuilt for Unity and it is now available on Linux & SteamOS too.

• Nice to see another classic game get revamped and get a Linux release. Never heard of it myself, but reviews on Steam indicate it’s being well received.

• What a time to be alive and be a Linux gamer! Not too long ago I would have though this would have been impossible.

• Now this is news I am sure some of you will be excited about. Salt and Sanctuary a haunting, stylized 2D action RPG is being ported by Ethan Lee and it’s now in Beta.

• There are more than four times as many Linux games available today as there were two years ago.

• Two years ago today marked when Steam on Linux had 500 titles. Now today, the Steam Store lists 2,208 games as being available for Linux! Well more than four times the amount of Linux games available in just two years.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Qt Company, through Jani Heikkinen, announced the general availability of the Release Candidate (RC) build of the upcoming Qt 5.7 open-source and cross-platform GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit.

• Qt 5.7.0 Release Candidate arrives one and a half months after the Beta version, introducing a huge number of new features and improvements to most of the existing modules, among which we can mention support for a port of the Qt NFC API (Application Programming Interface) to Google’s Android mobile operating system.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• As part of the upcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, GNOME developer Georges Basile Stavracas Neto published today, June 6, 2016, yet another update to the work coming for the GNOME Control Center app of the GNOME Stack.

• After revealing last month the new look of the GNOME Control Center app for the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, Georges Basile Stavracas Neto today informs the community about the latest work done so far.

• The creator of the Arc GTK Theme that most of the GNU/Linux distributions are adopting these days as the default desktop theme, the famous Horst3180, released an icon set to accompany its very popular GTK theme.

• The icon theme is called Arc Icon Theme, or simply Arc, just like the GTK theme, and it was pushed a few hours ago to the developer’s GitHub account for user to get an early taste. Why early taste? Well, because the icon set is far from being complete and many icons are still missing, and it doesn’t provide application icons at this time.

• Last blog of pre-GSoC coding. This is the story which dates back to the application period.

• The month view of the calendar is a pretty important aspect of the calendar. The keyboard arrow keys allowed a user to switch between days in a specific month. But on reaching the end of the month, a user couldn’t go any further.

• It’s been almost two weeks since my last post. In this post, I will be mentioning all the progress done in these two weeks. First of all, the searching part is now moved from the front end part to the actual back end of GNOME Logs which is the sd-journal API. So, now when the user types text into the search bar, the results are actually fetched from the journal itself. Progress on the project can be checked out on my Github repository. I would like to thank my mentor David King a.k.a amigadave for reviewing my commits and guiding me in the right direction.

• Personas are an important part of any design process. Whether you are trying to figure out the user interface or deciding what new functionality to add, personas can help you connect to the users.

• Personas allow you to talk about changes to the interface based on how those changes benefit users. Rather than saying “I want to add X feature because that would be cool” you can say “I want to add X feature because that helps users like the ‘Mark’ and ‘Sophia’ personas.”

• As part of the Outreachy project, we are working with the GNOME Design team (Allan and Jakub). It’s really great to have this connection with GNOME. They also share comments with us about GNOME design, which was very helpful in week 2 when we learned about who uses GNOME.

Distributions

Reviews

• Tiny Core is quite an achievement in developing a small Linux distribution that offers a lot of functionality with very low resource requirements. Just the fact that Tiny Core runs and provides a desktop environment with 20MB of memory is impressive. If a person has need for a small yet powerful operating system, Tiny Core is an obvious choice.

• At the same time, this distribution, being so minimal, leaves us to fend for ourselves a bit. If we want additional software, password protected accounts, extra services or even to have our data survive a reboot, then we need to roll up our sleeves and configure the operating system. There is a strong do-it-yourself element to Tiny Core. In a way, its small size and hands-on approach reminds me of building with Lego blocks. It’s fun and educational if you are into crafting your own operating system, but it does mean a lot more work up front to get what you want.

• For people who like efficient systems and who are interested in exploring Tiny Core, I recommend exploring the project’s wiki, and for the more adventurous, reading Into The Core which talks about the inner workings of Tiny Core and how to build one’s own extensions to the operating system.

New Releases

• SystemRescueCd developer François Dupoux announced the release and immediate availability for download of SystemRescueCd 4.7.3, the third maintenance version in the 4.7 series of the distribution.

• Endless Computers has released its Endless OS Linux for free to everyone. This Linux-based distribution features a modified GNOME desktop and comes in two variants. While Lite version looks like a Linux PC running GNOME desktop, Full version is for the people with limited internet access and comes with 100s of pre-installed apps.

• Alpine Linux has gained in notoriety and popularity in recent months as the new defacto standard Linux distribution on which Docker containers are now building images. The 3.4.0 update is mostly a milestone of new packages, with a few additional capabilities

• Softpedia was informed by 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki about the release and immediate availability for download of the BakAndImgCD 18.0 Live CD distrolette.

• Based on the 4MLinux Backup Scripts 18.0, as well as the 4MLinux Core 18.0 distribution, which is currently in the Beta stages of development under the 4MLinux 18.0 umbrella, BakAndImgCD 18.0 is here as an alternative to popular disk cloning and system backup Live CDs.

Arch Family

• The Xfce edition remains our flagship offering and has received the attention it deserves. Few can claim to offer such a polished, integrated and leading-edge Xfce experience. We ship Xfce 4.12 with this release of Manjaro. We mainly focused on polishing the user experience on the desktop and window manager, and on updating some components to take advantage of newly available technologies such as switching to a new Vertex-Maia theme, we already using known as Maia for our KDE edition.

• Windows 10 is a great operating system from a usability standpoint. Unfortunately, between the privacy issues and Microsoft’s unethical upgrade tactics, more and more folks are turned off to it. Luckily, thanks to Linux, users don’t have to tolerate the company’s shady behavior.

• Manjaro Linux 16.06 “Daniella” was released today as the latest stable version of this popular Linux distribution derived from Arch Linux.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• We are happy to announce the third openSUSE.Asia Summit. The openSUSE.Asia Summit 2016 will take place at Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia on October 1st and 2nd, 2016.

• The summit is a great way for both openSUSE contributors, and, users to meet each other and have fun. The openSUSE community will get together, share their experiences, and, learn free and open source technologies.

• We are happy to announce the availability of the Open Build Service Version 2.7! Three large features around the topic of integrating external resources made it into this release. We worked on automatic tracking of moving repositories of development versions like Fedora Rawhide, distribution updates or rolling Linux releases like Arch. A change to the OBS git integration to enable developers to work on continuous builds. And last but not least an experimental KIWI import that can be used to easily migrate your images from SUSE studio.

• When Red Hat bought Ceph’s parent company Inktank, people were worried Red Hat would keep Ceph’s object store and file system to itself. Then, Red Hat announced it would let others help decide on Ceph’s future. Now, SUSE, a rival Linux power, is taking Red Hat up on this with its Ceph-supporting release of SUSE Enterprise Storage 3.

• On June 6, 2016, openSUSE Project’s Dominique Leuenberger wrote on the openSUSE Tumbleweed’s mailing list a quick review of the major software updates that landed in the week that just passed for the rolling release distribution.

• Those of you who are currently using the openSUSE Tumbleweed OS on your personal computers, are aware of the fact that there were a total of four snapshots released last week, which brought many exciting new GNU/Linux technologies, such as the Linux 4.6 kernel, the KDE Applications 16.04.1 software suite for the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment, and the Perl 5.24.0 packages.

• openSUSE Project, through Henne Vogelsang, announced on June 6, 2016, the general availability of the version 2.7 of the project’s Open Build Service (OBS) software distribution solution.

Red Hat Family

• Open source enterprise software developer Red Hat released Software Collections 2.2 last week, the latest version of its collection of open source Web development tools, dynamic languages, and databases. The new tools are designed to provide software developers with access to the company’s latest stable builds, even though a new version of its flagship enterprise operating system has yet to be released.

• Red Hat, Inc. has announced the general availability of Red Hat Cloud Suite and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8.

• Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, the newest version of Red Hat’s OpenStack offering, adds optimized storage and management capabilities through the native inclusion of Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat CloudForms, respectively.

• I picked up The Open Organization after Verne Harish recommended it in his weekly newsletter. When I started reading, I realized this was going to be one of those books I’d be underlining all over, one I will have to review often to fully understand and implement.

• Following the announcement from Parse on January 28th that they will be shutting down operations in a year’s time, Red Hat has been working on a detailed migration guide to assist existing Parse enterprise customers in migrating their services to the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform (RHMAP).

Finance

Fedora

• Today I decided to upgrade my testing laptop (Lenovo T530) to Fedora 24 Beta from Fedora 23. This is my first experience with the upgrade process in Fedora and I wanted to detail the experience here. The upgrade process took a long(ish) time, but I had a working system when I completed the upgrade. There were a few things that I noticed that were of concern.

• The initialization software systemd has now been integrated into most popular Linux distributions, including the latest versions of Ubuntu. But a change in systemd 230 alters the way Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems have worked for decades, and some Linux users aren’t pleased.

• The development of the highly anticipated Fedora 24 Linux operating system is almost over now, and everyone is looking forward to the June 14 official release.

• Fedora 24 will be shipping with a kernel from the Linux 4.5 series, the latest GNOME 3.20, Xfce 4.12, and KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environments, as well as up-to-date software applications and core components, among which we can mention the LibreOffice 5.1.3 office suite and Mozilla Firefox 46.0.1 web browser.

• However, Fedora Rawhide, the development channel of the GNU/Linux distribution sponsored by the Red Hat giant, already contains packages for the next major release of the operating system, Fedora 25, whose release date has been set for November 8, 2016. Fedora Rawhide with Fedora 25 packages is live since February 23, 2016.

• Inspiring change is difficult. Fighting the status quo typically means being able to communicate so effectively that powerful opponents can’t win merely by outspending you. People need to read your work or hear you speak and leave with enough conviction that they in turn can convince others. You need charisma. You need to be smart. And you need to be able to tailor your message depending on the audience, even down to telling an individual exactly what they need to hear to take your side. Not many people have all these qualities, but those who do are powerful and you want them on your side.

• I’m extremely happy to announce that Randy Barlow has joined the Fedora Engineering team, effective today.

• I spent the last four years working on The Pulp Project, a component of Red Hat® Satellite 6. I worked with some of the finest engineers there and will always remember my time there fondly.

• OSCON is O’Reilly’s annual Open Source Conference celebrating open source software and the people who make it happen. Red Hat developer and Fedora contributor Adam Miller published his event report for OSCON on the Community Blog yesterday.

• On Tuesday I attended OSCON‘s Open Container Day with members of the OpenShift team and the CentOS team. This turned out to be an interesting outing and I got pulled into an interview on TheNewStack with CentOS member Jim Perrin to discuss the Fedora and CentOS respective docker layered image build systems and tooling. This was a great opportunity to explain what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what we hope to provide to the community. This day was roughly half and half tech overview of different container tech and sales pitches from various companies. Which is somewhat understandable, since it’s a sponsored day event. I helped man the OpenShift table before getting pulled into TheNewStack interview.

Debian Family

• GNU/Linux and Android-x86 developer Arne Exton informed us about the availability of a new build of his Debian-based DebEX Live Linux distribution, version 160604.

• According to Mr. Exton, DebEX KDE Live DVD 160604 has been rebased on the software repositories of the Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 “Jessie” operating system, which means that it includes most of the security patches and software updates, through the newest Debian Jessie release if now 8.5.

• The Debian Project announced earlier that an update is available for the Chromium web browser, promising to patch various security vulnerabilities discovered upstream.

• According to Debian Security Advisory DSA-3594-1, the Chromium web browser was updated to version 51.0.2704.79 for Debian Stable, Debian Testing, and Debian Unstable, patching cross-origin bypass issues discovered in both the Blink and WebKit engines, as well as in the bindings to extensions.

• Moreover, it would appear that there was an information leak discovered by Rob Wu in the Chromium web browser since version 51.0.2704.63 that has been fixed as well, along with two use-after-free issues in the autofill feature and extensions, also discovered by Rob Wu.

• Debian 7 ‘Wheezy’ and Debian 8 ‘Jessie’ just received point updates, 7.11 and 8.5 respectively. These releases bring updates for security problems and come with a “few adjustments for serious problems.” The 7.11 release of Wheezy marks the last point release the version will receive as it gets adopted by the volunteer Long Term Support (LTS) team.

• I’ve been running Buildd.Net for quite a long time. Buildd.Net is a project that focusses on the autobuilders, not the packages. It started back then when the m68k port had a small website running on kullervo, a m68k buildd. Kullervo was too loaded to deal with the increased load of that website, so together with Stephen Marenka we moved the page from kullervo to my server under the domain m68k.bluespice.org. Over time I got many requests if that page could do the same for other archs as well, so I started to hack the code to be able to deal with different archs: Buildd.Net was born.

• The current Debian ‘stable’ version, Debian GNU/Linux 8.5.0, was announced on Saturday along with the final update for the ‘old-stable’ version, Debian GNU/Linux 7.11. Both of these are roll-up releases which contain the latest patches and security updates.

• If you have an installed Debian GNU/Linux system you do not need to re-install from these new images, all you need to do is make sure that you have the latest updates (via synaptic or apt-get).

• Debian developer Niels Thykier published the other day a call for artwork proposals for the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system, which is coming in the following months.

• Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” is the next major update of the acclaimed, award-winning, and widely used Linux kernel-based operating system on which numerous GNU/Linux distributions are based, including, but not limited to the popular Ubuntu.

• The upcoming Debian release is currently being developed under the Debian Testing umbrella, which users can install and use as their daily driver. And from the looks of it, the Debian devs are looking for people to contribute new artwork to the OS.

• Trying to catch up with my blog posts about My Free Activities. This blog post will tell you about my free activities from January to May 2016.

• When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out which multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats / MIME types, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types the various players claimed support for. The range was from 55 to 130 MIME types. I suspect most media formats are supported by all players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in their desktop files. There are probably also some bogus MIME types listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.

Derivatives

• The developers behind the Q4OS Linux kernel-based operating system, an open-source distro built on top of the Debian GNU/Linux OS, have informed Softpedia today, June 6, 2016, about the availability of Q4OS 1.4.11.

• Q4OS 1.4.11 is the eleventh update to the current stable series (Orion) of the Debian-based distribution, bringing more enhancements and fixing the nasty issues reported by users since the previous maintenance build, version 1.4.10, announced two weeks ago, on May 22, 2016.

• The Tails Project released Tails 2.4, a major version of the anonymous Live CD based on Debian GNU/Linux, which was used by ex-CIA employee Edward Snowden to stay hidden online and protect his privacy.

• When compared with the previous release, we can notice that Tails 2.4 includes some big changes, among which we can mention the upgrade to Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 “Jessie” and the inclusion of the recently released Tor Browser 6.0 anonymous browser, which is based on the open-source Mozilla Firefox 45.2 web browser.

• After long months of testing and waiting for the DVD production, we have released TeX Live 2016 today!

Canonical/Ubuntu

• UBports developer Marius Gripsgård has announced earlier this morning, June 6, 2016, that he is currently working on bringing Canonical’s new Aethercast (Wireless Display) for the Nexus 5 and OnePlus One Ubuntu Phone devices.

• Back in February, BQ and Ubuntu announced that they’d joined forces to create the Aquaris M10 Tablet, the first 10.1-inch device to run Ubuntu OS. With the ability to quickly transform from a handheld touch tablet to a full-on desktop computer, the M10 has something different to offer users; and let’s be clear on this, the M10 is a tablet for developers and fellow geeks, not the average consumer. If you want something to watch movies, play games and browse the web on, you’ll be much better serviced elsewhere.

• So, how is the first Ubuntu tablet experience? Here’s our Aquaris M10 review.

• Dejan Petrovic, the creator of the Ubuntu-based ChaletOS computer operating system, is currently uploading the new ISO images for the soon-to-be-officially-announced ChaletOS 16.04.1.

• We took the liberty of informing our readers that ChaletOS 16.04.1 is now available for download, despite the fact that Dejan Petrovic didn’t have the time to write any release notes for the minor update, nor publish the new Live ISO images on the distribution’s website for users to download it.

Devices/Embedded

• The “Monarco HAT” industrial interface for the Raspberry Pi offers analog, digital, RS-485, and 1-wire I/O, plus a power supply, watchdog, and RTC.

• Czech-based REX Controls has passed the halfway mark on its Indiegogo funding journey for a 99-Euro ($126) Monarco HAT industrial interface add-on for the Raspberry Pi, with 20 days days left. Shipments are due in September.

• The Raspberry Pi camera module is a great accessory for the Pi—it’s great quality, and can capture still photos and record video in full HD (1080p). The original 5-megapixel camera module was released in 2013, and a new 8-megapixel version was released in April this year. Both versions are compatible with all Raspberry Pi models. There are also two variations—a regular visible light camera, and an infra-red camera—both available for US$ 25.

• The camera module is high spec and much better quality than a basic USB webcam. Its feature-packed firmware fully utilizes the power of the VideoCore GPU in the Raspberry Pi SoC, allowing recording 1080p video at 30fps, 720p at 60fps, and VGA resolution (640×480) at 90fps—perfect for slow-motion playback.

Phones

Tizen

• Russia’s continued effort to support a non American mobile OS has benefited the likes of Tizen OS and Jolla’s Sailfish OS for a while now. In the past we have reported on Russia’s interest in Tizen which led to the launch of the device in the country initially for the enterprises and government personnel and later on for the general consumers.

Android

• Secondly, there’s only one non-Chinese company in the top five: Samsung, with the Galaxy S7 Edge. The top four are all Chinese companies (with the fourth place Xiaomi Mi 5 using a Snapdragon 820 with 4 GB of RAM), showing just how serious Chinese hardware has become in terms of unadulterated performance. Here’s the full list for your consideration:

• Samsung has hit the nail on the head with the Galaxy S7 Edge. The phone has a stunning 5.5in (14cm) quad HD screen with curved edges and a minuscule bezel, which makes this large-screened phone quite narrow and much easier to handle than other phablets. The Galaxy S7 Edge is snappy, has a two-day battery life, wireless charging and is waterproof. It also has expandable storage, a cracking camera and a great fingerprint scanner. The Samsung is pricey, but it’s arguably the best smartphone available at the moment, and if you shop around you can get it for much less than the asking price.

• Verdict: The best big-screened smartphone available at the moment.

• Last month saw the announcement that the Nokia name would be returning to the world of smartphones. The historic company will be licensing the brand name to a new Finnish company (HMD Global Oy) which will partner with Nokia Technologies and a new Foxconn subsidiary (FIH Mobile Ltd) to “collaborate on a global business partnership to sell Nokia-branded mobile phones, smartphones, and tablets.”

• The ZTE Axon 7 and the Asus Zenfone 3 were launched in late May this year and both smartphones pack in impressive features. Here is quick specs comparison of the two.

• A batch of images and details emerged via Chinese sources for two handsets codenamed the “Hamburg” and “Rome”, however, it has since come to our attention that there’s been some nefarious stuff going on. According to a report from CrackBerry the Chinese source that leaked these renders acquired them (and re-watermarked them as their own) from Dylan Habkirk, a contributor on the CrackBerry forums who has insider knowledge of BlackBerry. Habkirk rendered these images based on his own information, in the case of the Hamburg some “internal device sketches” he has seen, and in the case of the Rome his own hands-on time with a prototype. This means of course that these renders have not come from inside BlackBerry, and that the designs are not final, so while it does debunk the original leak to an extent, the revelations still don’t rule out that they exist and are in development in some way or another, even if only a sketch and even if they never see the light of day. Interestingly, accoding to Habkirk’s comments on the incident (which we’d urge you to read in full), the Rome is actually the previously rumoured and leaked BlackBerry Vienna, it appears it’s just in a later stage of development.

• One thing is pretty clear. Android has become the most ubiquitous computing platform on the face of the planet. That by default also means most people just buy Android smartphones. India is a great example of this trend as the average purchasing power doesn’t allow people to buy iPhones.

• India is generally an Android-first market compared to other markets. It is because Android smartphones are vastly cheaper – even the flagship models which compete with the iPhone.

Free Software/Open Source

• We are never going back to proprietary networks. Today’s world is all about open—from APIs to partnerships to end-to-end orchestrated services. It’s about time.

• Open source IoT platforms are starting to emerge as an attractive options for organizations embarking in the IoT journey. In an extremely nascent and crowded market like enterprise IoT, organizations are trying to rely more and more on open platforms and control their own destiny. Although we are still in the first generation of open source IoT technologies we can already see how this model can become dominant in the enterprise.

• Application Lifecycle Management – ALM – was, in many ways, the early 2000s version of DevOps.

• In that pre-cloud world, it was the idea of taking software from build through test and retirement from inside your integrated development environment.

• A Russian developer here has created an open source computer vision platform, in collaboration with Facebook and Google, that acts as a teaching machine and enables them “see”.

• VisionLabs, a solutions developer in the field of computer vision, data analysis and robotics, and a Skolkovo IT Cluster resident have developed this as a global open-source computer vision project with the support of Facebook and Google, an official said.

• ownCloud Inc., an open-source Dropbox replacement, shut down its U.S. operations. Meanwhile, its founder forked the code to start a new company.

• Open-source cloud file storage, sharing and synchronization vendor ownCloud Inc. is shutting down in the United States amid internal turmoil. At the same time, Frank Karlitschek, founder of the ownCloud project, is forking the code to create a new company called Nextcloud.

• OwnCloud was founded by Frank Karlitschek in 2010, a KDE developer who created many other open source projects. Concerned about the rise of proprietary cloud, Karlitschek’s vision for ownCloud was to give users complete control over their cloud storage and sync software.

• After the successful launch of the project, Karlitschek started looking to build a business model around it. In 2012, he co-founded ownCloud Inc. with Markus Rex. They raised over $10 million in venture capital and the company was growing tremendously well.

• Open source has become the “default” way to build software. But that does not mean open source has overcome all challenges. New ones are arising as the cloud and embedded computing (including in the Internet of Things) expand.

• The software world has come very far since Richard Stallman launched the free software movement by founding GNU in 1984. It drives billion-dollar businesses like Red Hat. It powers a majority of smartphones in the form of Android (which is only kind of open source, but still). It delivers scalable, low-cost ways to build clouds through platforms like OpenStack and ownCloud.

• RUSSIA: A Russian developer here has created an open source computer vision platform, in collaboration with Facebook and Google that acts as a teaching machine and enables them to “see”.

• A Russian developer in Skolkovo has created an open source computer vision platform, in collaboration with Facebook and Google, that acts as a teaching machine and enables them “see”.

• As of three weeks ago, we open sourced Runway (MIT license), and there’s a live version running at https://runway.systems. The project is still in early stages of development, but we wanted to start growing the community now. We invite others to browse the existing models, build and share their own models, and help contribute to Runway’s development. We’re looking for help in a variety of areas, including compilers and programming languages, model checking optimizations, front-end, UX, and documentation. But most of all, we’re really excited to see what models you build and share with the world!

SDN

• SDN will not emerge in a vacuum, however, and with the entire data center turning into a software construct, today’s network manager will find that tomorrow’s enterprise will require skills in storage, server and virtual infrastructure as well. And all the while, new technologies like containers will be coming online that must be integrated into an increasingly dynamic data environment. As linux.com’s Amber Ankerholz points out, Docker utilizes SDN and VXLAN technologies reasonably well, but numerous development projects like Calico and Weaveworks are underway to enable crucial management, integration and orchestration functions. All of this will simply add to the burden of learning the ins and outs of maintaining connectivity across abstract and increasingly distributed infrastructure.

• AT&T’s (NYSE: T) creation of the Domain 2.0 program, which is driven by the implementation of software-defined networks (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV), is causing the telecom equipment industry to rethink how they deliver products and services.

• Earlier this year, Facebook led the charge to launch a new open source group – the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) – whose mission is to improve global Internet connections. TIP will employ the same methods Facebook has used to re-design data centers via its Open Compute Project (OCP). Some of TIP’s goals are lofty: such as rethinking network architectures and bringing the Internet to underserved regions of the globe.

• In a world where network processors are viewed as a commodity, the assumption is that most innovation will be driven by software. But support is building for the P4 language to boost NFV, as chip specialists point to hardware improvements that will be key for more demanding applications in a virtualized environment.

• “Too many people think innovation is all about software,” says Cliff Grossner, an industry analyst with Infonetics. “The pendulum is now swinging back to hardware.”

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The final expected binaries of Firefox 47.0 are now available ahead of the expected official debut tomorrow.

• Firefox 47.0 now supports embedded YouTube videos with HTML5 vieo even if Flash is not installed, the Firefox User Extension Library was removed, ChaCha20/Poly1305 ciphers were added, various HTML5 WebCrypto additions, and other improvements. Firefox 47.0 also now supports Google’s Widevine CDM, but unfortunately that’s just for Windows and OS X right now.

SaaS/Back End

• On the data analytics front, profound change is in the air, and open source tools are leading many of the changes. Sure, you are probably familiar with some of the open source stars in this space, such as Hadoop and Apache Spark, but there is now a strong need for new tools that can holistically round out the data analytics ecosystem. Notably, many of these tools are customized to process streaming data.

Databases

• Dave Stokes is a MySQL Community Manager at Oracle and leads the North Texas MySQL User Group. He’ll be speaking at SouthEast LinuxFest in Charlotte, NC this year (June 10-12, 2016) about Working From Home: Tips For Keeping Your Sanity, Productivity, and a Manatee.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Xdg App project has been renamed to Flatpak to get an easy-to-remember name and reflect that after almost two years of development it’s finally ready for broader adoption.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• As such, cloud applications require monitoring tools so that we can look at their workflow metrics, external dependencies, stress levels, idle periods, bottlenecks and resource allocation ineffeciencies.

BSD

• The DragonFlyBSD kernel now has an initial NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) driver for supporting these modern, super-fast storage solutions.

• A few days back Matthew Dillon added the initial NVMe driver code and since then he’s begun to work it into basic shape.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU and an outfit called “Inria” have released Alpha code – version 0.0.0 to be precise – of an anonymous-but-taxable electronic payments system they say is “a currency for the mainstream economy, and not the black market.”

• “Taler”, as the effort is dubbed, looks to be an attempt to build on the concepts behind Bitcoin. So while Taler lets you use encrypted “coins” as a means of exchange, it is explicitly not a new currency. Instead, it “… uses an electronic exchange holding financial reserves in existing currencies.”

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Earlier this year, we reported that 2016 Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena announced that his practice, ELEMENTAL, released four of their social housing designs available to the public for open source use. A recent article published by Urbanisms in beta discusses what exactly “open source use” means to the architecture world, and how we may see these designs applied to projects in the future.

Open Data

• Better use and reuse of data, and a reduction in the administrative burden are two eGovernment priorities, according to a statement concluding last week’s ‘Digital Open Government: next step to maturity’ conference.

• The United Kingdom is continuing to improve its central eGovernment service platform, GOV.UK. “The major focus of our improvement effort this year is to make it possible for organisations across government to join their content together as coherent services for users”, writes Neil Williams, head of GOV.UK.

• The UK’s Government Digital Service is rebuilding the way services publish and share content on GOV.UK, providing a publishing API. GDS is standardising publishing methods, to harmonise the look of content that is being made available. The agency is also merging several databases into one, to prevent data duplication and data mismatches, and is improving the caching technology for the platform.

• Countries working on their new OGP Action Plans should incorporate more steps to increase budget and fiscal transparency. They should also create more opportunities for public participation in the design and implementation of fiscal policies in the whole budget cycle, as well as in the delivery of public services and the construction of public investment projects. So says Murray Petrie, Lead Technical Advisor to the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT), in a recent blog post.

Programming/Development

• Not everyone has been happy with the state of Qt 5.6.0, that was released after months of delay and Qt 5.7 is just around the corner. Fortunately, Qt 5.6.1 should be out this week with some important bug fixes.

• SyntaxDB calls itself a programming syntax database that wishes to eliminate the need to use Google to search syntax during coding. It allows you to search your syntax queries and shows you helpful results along with further documentation. Currently, SyntaxDB supports nine popular programming languages.

• Redmine’s charting capabilites make it easy to visualize bug counts, story counts, and other metrics on our community issue tracker at pulp.plan.io. Below is a video showing off the charting capabilities and some simple interpretation about what these charts mean. Here is a link to the charting area so you can check it out for yourself.

Standards/Consortia

• The European Commission will investigate if there are duplicate or conflicting service standards in the EU. The EC also wants to get standardisation organisations and stakeholders to agree on priorities for these standards, it announced in its 2017 annual work programme. Examples of service standards include terminology on hotels and other tourism accommodation.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Many more babies die in the United States than you might think. In 2014, more than 23,000 infants died in their first year of life, or about six for every 1,000 born. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 25 other industrialized nations do better than the United States at keeping babies alive.

• This fact is hard for some to comprehend. Some try to argue that the disparity isn’t real. They assert that the United States counts very premature births as infants because we have better technology and work harder to save young lives. Therefore, our increased rate of infant death isn’t due to deficiencies, but differences in classification. These differences are not as common, nor as great, as many people think. Even when you exclude very premature births from analyses, the United States ranks pretty poorly.

• A majority of Americans support women’s right to abortion, a fact that’s been true for about two decades now. Support for that right actually increased after attacks on Planned Parenthood last year. And development experts have for decades, maybe centuries, identified women’s right to control family size and birth timing as critical to communities’ economic and social development. That’s just by way of indicating how far removed from the reality of abortion is the US media conversation about it—at least as represented by cable news.

• Three ambulances have been destroyed in a fire outside a hospital in Surrey.

• The blaze started in a parked ambulance outside the east entrance of East Surrey Hospital in Redhill, before spreading to the two other vehicles.

• Huge plumes of black smoke could be seen rising into the air at the height of the fire.

• Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust said there were no patients involved and everyone was safe.

• The hospital is closed to emergencies, and patients are being diverted through the South East Coast Ambulance Service.

• All hospital services in the city of Manchester should be run by a new single city-wide Trust, an influential report has proposed. The review, penned by former trust chief executive Sir Jonathan Michael and commissioned by the chair of Manchester city council, recommends that the creation of a new NHS Trust to take over the running of services currently provided at Central Manchester University Hospitals Foundation Trust, University Hospitals of South Manchester FT and North Manchester General Hospital.

• Today in Brussels representatives from the European Union (E.U.) failed to pass a temporary reauthorization of glyphosate – a toxic chemical in the common pesticide RoundUp determined by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be a “probable carcinogen”. The committee was asked to grant re-authorization for between one and two years, to allow for completion of a safety assessment currently in progress at the European Chemicals Agency, but rejected the proposal. If the European Commission does not re-authorize the chemical’s use by June 30th, it will be considered illegal to use throughout the E.U. and all products containing glyphosate would be pulled from the market after a six-month grace period. Several countries including the Netherlands and France have already acted to restrict public access to glyphosate within their own borders on the basis that it poses a severe risk to human and environmental health.

Security

• In a surprising incident, Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest accounts were compromised this Sunday. A Saudi Arabia-based hacking group managed to hack his account using credentials found in the recent LinkedIn breach. Interestingly, the hackers tweeted that his LinkedIn password was “dadada”.

• The entire Internet depends on OpenSSL to secure sensitive transactions, but until the Linux Foundation launched the Core Infrastructure Initiative to support crucial infrastructure projects, it was supported by a small underfunded team with only one paid developer. This is not good for an essential bit of infrastructure, and OpenSSL was hit by some high-profile bugs, such as Heartbleed. Now that OpenSSL has stable support, there should be fewer such incidents — and not a moment too soon, because we have no alternatives.

• Added GnuTLS-SA-2016-1 security advisory.

• Think it’s bad when companies take their time fixing security vulnerabilities? Imagine what happens when they avoid fixing those holes in the name of a little cash. KeePass 2 developer Dominik Reichl has declined to patch a flaw in the password manager’s update check as the “indirect costs” of the upgrade (which would encrypt web traffic) are too high — namely, it’d lose ad revenue. Yes, the implication is that profit is more important than protecting users.

• The impact is potentially quite severe, too. An attacker could hijack the update process and deliver malware that would compromise your PC.

• Drive-by attacks that install the once-feared TeslaCrypt crypto ransomware are now able to bypass EMET, a Microsoft-provided tool designed to block entire classes of Windows-based exploits.

• The EMET-evading attacks are included in Angler, a toolkit for sale online that provides ready-to-use exploits that can be stitched into compromised websites. Short for Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, EMET has come to be regarded as one of the most effective ways of hardening Windows-based computers from attacks that exploit security vulnerabilities in both the operating system or installed applications. According to a blog post published Monday by researchers from security firm FireEye, the new Angler attacks are significant because they’re the first exploits found in the wild that successfully pierce the mitigations.

• “The level of sophistication in exploit kits has increased significantly throughout the years,” FireEye researchers wrote. “Where obfuscation and new zero days were once the only additions in the development cycle, evasive code has now been observed being embedded into the framework and shellcode.”

• I recently finished reading the book Ghost Fleet, it’s not a bad read if you’re into what cyberwar could look like. It’s not great though, I won’t suggest it as the book of the summer. The biggest thing I keep thinking about is I’ve yet to really see any sort of book that takes place in the future, with a focus on technology, that isn’t a dystopian warning. Ghost Fleet is no different.

Defence/Aggression

• “[T]he way in which the military law enforcement system functions precludes it … from achieving justice for the victims,” noted a report from B’Tselem, the human rights group which has ceased cooperating with Israeli military investigations into crimes committed by Israeli soldiers.

• Make no mistake. Putin’s strategic intervention in Syria last September was a bold, vital step. He deserves credit and praise for taking it.

• Things changed dramatically on the ground. Reinvigorated government forces retook large swaths of earlier lost territory, freeing them from the scourge of US-sponsored terrorism.

• In the wake of President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima last week, renewed debates over the use of atomic weapons against Japan in August 1945 have highlighted a disturbing trend: a rise in public support for US attacks on civilians across the globe. Never having withstood a prolonged bombing campaign on their soil, many people in the United States are quick to support and justify the use of bombs — including nuclear ones — on others.

• Iraqi Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi said Thursday that his troops were in position to move into the city of Fallujah from the south, after advances made during the past two days, but that he would “slow down” the assault for fear of civilians trapped in the city. The Iraqi military and its Shiite militia auxiliaries have met with fierce resistance by Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) fighters holding the city, which fell to them in January 2014.

• In light of President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima on May 27, Peter and Mickey spend the hour with historian Peter Kuznick, who has written extensively about President Truman’s decision to drop the bomb.

• A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post questioning the Obama Administration’s logic in killing the leader of the Afghan Taliban in a drone strike in Pakistan. It turns out that the Defense Department also employed some very suspect reasoning surrounding the drone strike.

• [...]

• It seems that a suitable reference on which to rely for DoD’s thinking on combatants is to go back to William Haynes’ memo dated December 12, 2002 and titled “Lawful Combatants”. This memo comes from Haynes as General Counsel to DoD and is addressed to a Roundtable assembled by the Council on Foreign Relations. It appears that this exercise was geared toward providing legal cover for the Bush Administration’s “new” reading of international law and especially its attempts to shield prisoners from the Geneva Conventions.

• The oft-delayed probe into the 2014 shoot-down of MH-17 over eastern Ukraine has been tainted by its dependence on Ukraine’s intelligence service for much of its evidence, as a new interim report makes clear, reports Robert Parry.

• Although it is customary to say nice things about a person who has died, Muhammad Ali has been rightly commended for not only his superb boxing career but also his principled opposition to the then-popular Vietnam War. Unlike later chairborne hawks, such as Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney, Ali did not try to evade the draft or get numerous college deferments to avoid service. He declared that because of his religion, he would not fight against people who had done nothing to him and bluntly said, “just take me to jail.”

• Therefore, it is difficult to argue that Ali avoided the war for selfish reasons, because the costs of noncompliance with the draft were substantial. If the Supreme Court had not nullified his conviction 8-0, he would have served five years in prison. Although he ultimately avoided losing his liberty, he had to give up his heavy weight boxing title and experienced financial hardship as a result.

• At the time, Ali’s was not a popular stand, but he turned out to be right about many things, just as the then unpopular civil rights heroes Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were. The war – in a faraway, insignificant country – turned out to be a non-strategic quagmire in the competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Of course, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) privately predicted that at the time, but escalated the conflict anyway, so as not to be seen as a wimp politically with an eye toward winning the 1968 election. The war killed 58,000 Americans, a few million Vietnamese, and drained equipment and resources from the U.S. military, which it hollowed out for more important missions.

• In 1967, Ali famously connected the civil rights struggle to the injustices of the war in Vietnam: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end… I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.” May he rest in peace and power.

• The on-camera execution of a wounded Palestinian suspect by an Israeli soldier in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron in March — which led to an indictment of the soldier for manslaughter and exposed a rift between Israel’s military leaders and many civilians — was preceded by another extrajudicial killing not captured on video by witnesses, an Israeli rights group reported on Monday.

• Amnesty International has published detailed information rebutting claims by the British government that no UK-manufactured cluster munitions were used by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition during the Yemen conflict which began in March 2015.

• The organization recently found evidence indicating that a British-manufactured “BL-755” cluster bomb was used by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition in an attack in al-Khadhra village in Yemen’s Hajjah governorate, approximately six miles from the Saudi Arabia border.

• On September 10, 2014, President Obama gave a speech advocating for the same kind of approach to counterterrorism against ISIL his Administration had been using with Yemen (and Somalia).

• The West’s scary new catch phrase for anything the diabolical Russians do is “hybrid war,” accusing Moscow of spreading propaganda and funding NGOs, pretty much what the West has been doing for decades, as Gilbert Doctorow explains.

• A State Department spokesperson repeatedly refused to comment on the momentous political crisis in Brazil during his daily press briefing on Friday — in almost ludicrous contrast to his long and loquacious criticisms of neighboring Venezuela.

• When questioned on the stark contrast, increasingly exasperated department spokesperson Mark Toner replied, “I just – again, I don’t have anything to comment on the ongoing political dimensions of the crisis there. I don’t.”

• In news you probably haven’t heard about today, Syria’s largest city — Aleppo — was hit by around 50 airstrikes from Russian and Syrian aircraft.

• “A civil defense worker said at least 32 people were killed in the rebel-held parts of the city during the air strikes, with 18 bodies pulled from flattened buildings in the Qatrji neighborhood, the worst hit,” Reuters reported Sunday.

• The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a human rights monitoring group, told Reuters that “dozens of barrel bombs – oil drums or cylinders packed with explosives and shrapnel- were dropped by helicopter on densely populated districts.”

• Thousands are expected to gather in Louisville Friday for the funeral of Muhammad Ali, one of the world’s most iconic figures of the 20th century. He was considered by many to be the greatest boxer of all time, but he will also be remembered for his activism against racism and war. In 1966, Ali announced his refusal to fight in Vietnam. After his conscientious objector status request was denied in April 1967, he refused induction. Ali’s title was taken away from him, and he was sentenced to a five-year prison term. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, and in 1971 his conviction was finally reversed.

• Drawing Russian rebuke, NATO members and partners on Monday launched what is being called the largest war game in decades—a 10-day exercise involving 31,000 troops and thousands of vehicles from 24 countries, none more committed than the United States.

• The exercise, dubbed “Anakonda-16,” is taking place in Poland ahead of next month’s NATO summit in Warsaw that will likely approve more troops to be stationed in eastern Europe. The United States is providing around 14,000 troops for the exercise, more than any other participating nation.

• Four persons have so far lost their lives while at least one house, a church and a shop have been burnt in a riot sparked by alleged posting of a blasphemous statement about Prophet Muhammad on the social media in Pandogari town, Niger State last Sunday, according to Nigerian military authorities.

• In a statement released on Tuesday morning, the military announced imposition of curfew on the town to curb the raging violence in which it said has also led to looting of 25 shops.

• Foreign ideologies have failed to solve mankind’s problems, but Islam can lead the way forward, PAS president Datuk Seri Abdul Hadi Awang said at the opening of his party’s 62nd annual general meeting here today.

• He said Malaysians continue to put their faith in the democratic ideology inherited from the colonial British rulers, claiming there to be evidence pointing to its failure.

• The wife of a prominent anti-terror police officer was stabbed and shot to death Sunday in an apparently targeted killing in the coastal Bangladeshi city of Chittagong, a local police commissioner said.

• Mahmuda Khanam Mitu, wife of decorated police superintendent Babul Akter, was attacked by three assailants at a busy intersection about 90 meters from her home at about 7 a.m. local time, Chittagong Police Commissioner Iqbal Bahar said.

• A Christian was knifed to death after Sunday prayers near a church in northwest Bangladesh in an attack claimed by Islamic State.

• Police said unidentified attackers murdered the 65-year-old in the village of Bonpara, home to one of the oldest Christian communities in Muslim-majority Bangladesh. “Sunil Gomes was hacked to death at his grocery store just near a church at Bonpara village,” said Shafiqul Islam, deputy police chief of Natore district.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Even as Hillary Clinton closes in on the Democratic nomination, facts continue to emerge indicating that her sloppy email practices may have endangered secrets, including the identities of covert operatives, writes Peter Van Buren.

• You can look at the source documents yourself. This is not opinion, conjecture, or rumor. Hillary Clinton transmitted the names of American intelligence officials via her unclassified email.

• From a series of Clinton emails, numerous names were redacted in the State Department releases with the classification code “B3 CIA PERS/ORG,” a highly specialized classification that means the information, if released, would violate the Central Intelligence Act of 1949 by exposing the names of CIA officials.

• As you probably recall, several months ago, after going to court to try to force Apple to write some software to allow the FBI to hack into Syed Farook’s work iPhone, the DOJ and FBI abruptly called off the case, claiming that it had been able to get an exploit that let it into the phone. A few weeks later, FBI Director James Comey suggested that the government paid over $1.2 million to get that exploit from some “hackers.” Some later news reports indicated that the FBI quietly tried to talk down those numbers, and suggested that perhaps Comey was just bad at math (rather than name a number, he said that the FBI had paid “more than I will make in the remainder of this job, which is seven years and four months….”).

• Either way, I sent a FOIA request into the FBI that day asking for either the invoice or any other documentation showing how much the FBI had paid to get into Farook’s work iPhone. The FBI has now rejected my FOIA request, arguing that since this is an “ongoing investigation,” responding to such a request might somehow “interfere” with the case.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Australia’s natural wonder is in mortal danger. Bleaching caused by climate change has killed almost a quarter of its coral this year and many scientists believe it could be too late for the rest. Using exclusive photographs and new data, a Guardian special report investigates how the reef has been devastated – and what can be done to save it

• Firefighters are battling a series of brush fires throughout Southern California this weekend.

• The brush fire that broke out in Temecula has doubled in size to 70 acres, according to Cal Fire Riverside county. The fire is 20% contained. Earlier in the day, the brush fire had was burning 30 acres south of the Temecula Parkway and forced the southbound I-15 freeway to close. Two southbound lanes reopened an hour later. No homes were immediately threatened in the area.

• Another brush fire recently broke out in Jurupa Valley, a city roughly 50 miles north of Temecula.

• Of that, EPA regulations delivered the majority of benefits ($132.5 to $652 billion) but only about half the costs ($31 to $37.5 billion).

• Of course, lots of those benefits were things like reduced health care costs because the air got cleaner — and those benefits don’t show up in our primary measure of economic growth, GDP. Indeed, reducing sickness and death actually lowers GDP.

• On the morning of February 18, 2015, the ExxonMobil oil refinery in Torrance, California exploded, causing chemical ash to rain on the surrounding community for hours. Eight workers had to be decontaminated and four were sent to hospitals with minor injuries.

• California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) ordered ExxonMobil to shut down the unit until it could demonstrate safe operation.

• In August, Cal/OSHA issued 19 citations for workplace safety and health violations at the Torrance refinery. The company was fined $566,600 in penalties in connection with the blast.

• The Arctic could become virtually ice-free by 2017 for the first time in 100,000 years, a leading scientist has told the Independent.

• Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University, cited new statistics from the National Snow and Ice Data Center which showed that as of June, Arctic sea ice had slimmed down to about 11 million square kilometers—lower than the last 30 years’ average of 12.7 million square kilometers—and it continues to melt.

• At that rate, Wadhams said, “Arctic ice may well disappear, that is, have an area of less than one million square kilometers for September of this year.”

• “Even if the ice doesn’t completely disappear, it is very likely that this will be a record low year. I’m convinced it will be less than 3.4 million square kilometers [the current record low],” he continued. “I think there’s a reasonable chance it could get down to a million this year and if it doesn’t do it this year, it will do it next year.”

• As states and corporations increasingly head to court over climate change, a lawyer lays out an ethical roadmap to give the environment a louder legal voice

• In the year since five fiery oil train disasters in the US and Canada brought national attention to the threat from trains hauling explosive crude oil, the rail industry has embarked on a high profile public relations exercise to reassure the public that deadly disasters can be averted by emergency responders. In fact, the reality of oil train accidents — and the unanimous opinion of fire officials and federal rail safety experts — proves that there is no fighting an oil train derailment and fire. The scene of a crude oil derailment and fire is an uncontrollable fire. All firefighters can do is evacuate the area and wait for the fire to burn itself out.

• “We’re playing Russian roulette. I think the industry is perfectly willing to put a gun to our heads and risk our lives for the sake of making money. It is abundantly clear this enterprise is unsafe, unsustainable and they don’t know how to manage it.”

• The scientific community is profoundly uncomfortable with the storm of political controversy that climate research is attracting. What’s going on?

• Warning against dangers to “workers, communities, and our environment,” more than 450 environmental advocacy groups called on Congress to reject the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

• The world’s largest miners have squandered the benefits of the long resources boom, writing off the equivalent of 32 per cent of the capital expenditure spent since 2010, according to accounting firm PwC.

• An analysis of the world’s 40 largest mining companies by market capitalisation revealed a collective $US199 billion of impairments were booked between 2010 and 2015, representing a staggering 31.9 per cent of the $US623 billion in capital expenditure deployed over the period.

• PwC said the findings highlighted a “lack of capital discipline”.

• While PwC’s weighted commodity price index declined 25 per cent year-on-year in 2015, the combined market capitalisation of the top 40 miners plummeted 37 per cent to $US494 billion, just a third of the collective value five years ago.

• D.C.’s $6.4 billion city government pension fund has divested from fossil fuels.

• In September, the District of Columbia pledged to curb its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. Consistent with that aim, D.C’s Retirement Board has scrubbed its $6.4 billion pension fund of investments in the 200 largest publicly traded coal, oil and gas companies.

• The largest pension fund in Washington, D.C. has divested its $6.4 billion from 200 of “the world’s most polluting fossil fuel companies.”

• “In doing so, Washington, D.C. has taken a critical step toward addressing climate change, joining the more than 500 cities, philanthropic organizations, faith groups, universities, and other organizations that have divested funds worth a collective $3.4 trillion,” wrote grassroots advocacy group DC Divest, which celebrated the hard-won victory that came after three years of campaigning.

• Food waste is a huge international problem that costs the global economy billions of dollars each year and creates tons of methane gas, which helps fuel climate change. Nearly one-third of all food produced is wasted each year. If the emissions associated with all that wasted, rotting food were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, behind the United States and China.

• At least 18 people have lost their lives in central Europe as severe floods engulf the continent from France to Ukraine. In Paris the River Seine reached 6.1 metres (20 feet) above normal, and tens of thousands of people have fled their homes.

• If the downpours and swollen rivers came as a surprise, they shouldn’t have done. Not only are there historical precedents for disastrous floods. There have been graphic recent warnings too, spelling out the growing likelihood that the warming climate will make bouts of flooding and other extreme weather more frequent.

• Last March a study reported in the journal Nature said climate change was already driving an increase in extremes of rainfall and snowfall across most of the globe, even in arid regions. The study said the trend would continue as the world warmed.

Finance

• Hilary Clinton has come under fire for giving a speech about inequality in a Giorgio Armani jacket reportedly worth $12,495.

• It has emerged the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee wore the tweed jacket during her victory speech in April in which she explored topics of income inequality, job creation and retirement schemes.

• Clinton, who is known for her pantsuit collection, has hired a team of image experts which includes Michelle Obama’s former assistant Kristina Schake and opted for higher end European fashion labels in recent months.

• “She’s had to have spent in the six figures on this wardrobe overhaul,” Los Angeles-based political image consultant Patsy Cisneros told The New York Post yesterday.

• General Electric Co. is the laboratory of American management. So when the manufacturing giant says it’s rethinking a bedrock tradition of corporate life — the annual raise — you can bet that C-suites everywhere will be watching closely.

• GE executives are reviewing whether annual updates to compensation are the best response to the achievements and needs of employees. The company may also scrap the longstanding and much-imitated system of rating staff on a five-point scale. Decisions on both issues may come within the next several months, spokeswoman Valerie Van den Keybus said by phone.

• A whistleblower lawsuit filed against Oracle over its accounting practices underscores the pressures established computer companies face to show that they are growing in the fast-moving business known as the cloud.

• The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco by former Oracle senior finance manager Svetlana Blackburn, also revives longstanding questions about proper accounting when software and computer services are bought on a subscription basis rather than as a single package, analysts said.

• Indeed, neo-colonial South Africa has been good to South Africa whites. Whites, who comprise 10% of South Africa’s population, control 80% of one of the wealthiest real estate on the planet. Undeniably, land is the basis of all present and intergenerational wealth, not jobs. South Africa contains a cornucopia of mineral riches. It is the world’s largest producer of gold, diamonds, vanadium, chrome, manganese, platinum and vermiculite. No one voluntarily relinquishes this kind of wealth and the struggle for control of these magnificent resources is yet to be waged. The murders of valiant freedom fighters and the election of Mandela provided a temporary reprieve for white settlers and monopoly capitalism but a new generation of Black activists have determined that the fight for power, land and the future of Black folks in South Africa can no longer be held in abeyance.

• The “Last Week Tonight” host discovered just how easy it is to get into the debt collection business and then go after payment, something that often results in the persecution of innocent people. Oliver then made television history Sunday night. Watch to the very end of the hilariously informative clip to see Oliver outdoing Oprah Winfrey with an unforgettable act.

• The international campaign for taxes on financial speculation is on the brink of a major European milestone that could further boost momentum in the United States.

• There can no longer be a defense of the removal of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff from office. The political maneuvering by the opposition PSDB has been uncloaked and revealed for what it clearly was all along: a quiet coup dressed in the disguise of democracy.

• The recent release of a recording of a phone call has done for Brazil what Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs Victoria Nuland’s phone call to American ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt did for Ukraine: it has provided incontrovertible proof that the removal of the elected President was a coup.

• The published transcript of the call between Romero Jucá, who was a senator at the time of the call and is currently the planning minister in the new Michael Temer government, and former oil executive, Sergio Machado, lays bare “a national pact” to remove Dilma and install Temer as President. Jucá reveals that, not only opposition politicians, but also the military and the Supreme Court are conspirators in the coup. Regarding the military’s role, Jucá says, “I am talking to the generals, the military commanders. They are fine with this, they said they will guarantee it.” And, as for the Supreme Court, Glenn Greenwald reports that Jucá admits that he “spoke with and secured the involvement of numerous justices on Brazil’s Supreme Court.” Jucá further boasted that “there are only a small number” of Supreme Court justices that he had not spoken to.

• The US does not want to deal or negotiate with a sovereign reformist nationalist government. What it wants is a compliant US proxy state.

• Unconditional basic income, a policy option that seems radical by American standards, is gaining new traction across Europe, Canada, and even a few places in the United States. Also known as “universal basic income,” the policy mandates a guaranteed stipend to every resident of a community, with no strings attached. It is promoted as a way to address rising inequality, protect against economic uncertainty, and replace increasingly austere and inadequate means-tested benefit programs. A basic income is gaining credence among economists and policymakers as a necessity in a global economy that’s failing millions of people.

• The international policies of the US government are organized around the needs of businessmen, according to Thorstein Veblen, in the same way the legal system was organized to protect their interests and not those of the common people.

• In this perspective, the interaction with transnational movements and various initiatives “for democracy in Europe” (DiEM25, among others) is necessarily required. An example come from the recent meeting of Local Authorities against TTIP, held on April 21 and 22 in Barcelona, and that concluded with a strong claim to the European Commission signed by hundreds of mayors.

• Two recent high-profile statements attempt to drum up support for the unpopular Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) based on faulty analyses of provisions that greatly concern public health: tobacco control, and access to medicines.

• The TPP requires the 12 member states to uphold basic International Labour Organization (ILO) standards. But there is a simple problem: no one knows what to do about non-compliance. Recent reports from The Atlantic Monthly and the House Ways and Means Committee cast doubt on the ability of the United States to hold some of the TPP partner countries to their labor rights commitments.

• TPP MIRED AS CONGRESS RETURNS: It could be a long, sleepy summer for the Trans-Pacific Partnership one year after Congress nearly ripped itself apart to give President Barack Obama “fast track” authority to finish the landmark Asia-Pacific deal. The administration is trying to sell Congress and the American public on the economic and geostrategic benefits of TPP. But both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan are keeping their distance, while Donald Trump is promising to walk away from the 12-nation pact.

• While Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has publicly reversed her position on the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), it remains unknown how much she helped advance, or even craft, the international trade deal while serving as U.S. Secretary of State—and the Obama administration appears interested in keeping it that way.

• On Monday, International Business Times (IBT) senior editor David Sirota reported that the State Department is refusing to release correspondence between Clinton’s State Department office and the United States Trade Representative related to the TPP until after the 2016 presidential election.

• Over the years, William R. Ponsoldt had earned tens of millions of dollars building a string of successful companies. He had renovated apartment buildings in the New York City area. Bred Arabian horses. Run a yacht club in the Bahamas, a rock quarry in Michigan, an auto-parts company in Canada, even a multibillion-dollar hedge fund.

• Now, as he neared retirement, Mr. Ponsoldt, of Jensen Beach, Fla., had a special request for Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm well placed in the world of offshore finance: How could he confidentially shift his money into overseas bank accounts and use them to buy real estate and move funds to his children?

• “He is the manager of one of the richest hedge funds in the world,” a lawyer at Mossack Fonseca wrote when the firm was introduced to Mr. Ponsoldt in 2004. “Primary objective is to maintain the utmost confidentiality and ideally to open bank accounts without disclosing his name as a private person.”

• The law firm at the center of the Panama Papers scandal, Mossack Fonseca, helped many of its American clients evade U.S. tax and transparency laws, according to an investigation by the New York Times published Monday.

• Documents including “confidential emails, copies of passports, ledgers of bank transactions and even the various code names used to refer to clients” show that Mossack Fonseca went beyond simply creating shell companies for some of the 2,400 Americans implicated in the leak, the Times reports—instead, the firm “offered a how-to guide of sorts on skirting or evading United States tax and financial disclosure laws.”

• In your first speech as Speaker you called for combining many safety net programs into a single block grant. But I know you realize that poverty would be twice as high without the safety net, with nearly 30 percent of Americans living below the poverty line. What would our nation look like with 30 percent poverty? We can thank the safety net for the fact that we don’t know the answer to that question.

• Gramercy Funds Management has filed a $1.6 billion claim against Peru for its refusal to redeem land bonds from the 1970s agrarian reform.

• The Connecticut-based hedge fund has requested arbitration before a special tribunal created in the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement which took effect in 2009.

• “For several years, Gramercy has attempted to engage in negotiations with the Peruvian government to find a solution for the land bond debt,” the hedge fund said in a statement according to the Wall Street Journal. “The government has consistently declined to enter into serious discussions on this matter, leading Gramercy to file the arbitration.”

• FAIR has written before about “Trumpwashing”: the use of Trump’s extremism as a way of propping up establishment Democrats’ own history of extreme neoliberal economic policy and military adventurism. Just as Trump’s hypothetical wars are used to distract from the actual wars Hillary Clinton has pushed for, Trump’s theoretical recession is used to gloss over how much damage the Bill Clinton administration’s economic policies of deregulating Wall Street did.

• The rub in Summers’ warnings—and the subsequent coverage of them—is how ideological they are. Summers insists that two of the biggest dangers posed by Trump are his pulling out of “free trade” agreements and “scaling back NATO.” There’s much dispute over what caused the 2008 recession, but one thing is clear: Anti–“free trade” policies and scaling back NATO didn’t play a role. While it’s certainly possible Trump’s wackier economic policies (like defaulting on debts, for example) could bring the cataclysm Summers warns about, the smuggling in of pro-TPP and pro-NATO expansion language belies a disinterested motive.

• The use of the Trump spectacle, as FAIR has noted before, as a proxy war against either unrelated or tangentially related ideas, causes or countries is one of its more pernicious features. This tactic is made even more cynical when it’s done by one of the architects of the 2008 recession, nominally in an effort to warn us about a future one.

• The Dutch city of Utrecht is developing a pilot project for a universal basic income that will launch in January 2017. The Finnish government is designing a trial to see whether giving low-income people a guaranteed basic income destroys their motivation to do any work at all, as critics allege. The idea is not going away because most “real” jobs are on the way out.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• There are several good reasons why presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton might want to choose Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) as her running mate. Warren is a forceful critic of Republican candidate Donald Trump. As the architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Warren helps insulate Clinton from charges that she is too close to Wall Street. And Warren is popular with many liberal Democrats that Clinton may want to build bridges towards in the wake of a bruising primary against Sen. Bernie Sanders.

• Early on, media executives in charge of much of America’s broadcasting industry were worried that Donald Trump, who eschewed traditional political advertising, might dampen prospects for a high-spending campaign season.

• That fear is gone.

• The Intercept reviewed the past six months of investor earnings calls and presentations of major media companies. In the first few months of this year, some executives expressed concern that Trump might continue to rely on his extraordinary free media exposure and spend less money than traditional Republican candidates. But over the last two months, the concern has dissipated and transformed into excitement that this year is on track to be the most expensive election in history.

• In reviewing the transcripts, we observed no discussions during any of the calls about the media’s role in creating the Trump phenomenon, or the media’s duty to present voters with the information necessary to make informed decisions.

• Beaten-down Americans are ignored by our neoliberal system of economics and government. A social democracy would help to restrain runaway capitalism by focusing on the needs of all citizens rather than just the money-makers. But unless our next president is Bernie Sanders, struggling Americans will continue to be ignored, as they have been since the Reagan years.

• Last week, the Washington Post reported a striking piece of news: One of the five individuals Bernie Sanders nominated to play a role in writing the Democratic Party’s platform was vetoed by the Democratic National Committee.

• Striking, but far from surprising — particularly when, as the Post observes, we learn that the individual the DNC rejected was RoseAnn DeMoro, the executive director of National Nurses United, “the largest union and professional association of registered nurses in U.S. history.”

• The NNU was the first major union to endorse Bernie Sanders and, according to DeMoro, Sanders picked her “to advocate for Medicare for All.”

• Hillary Clinton’s fiery performance last Thursday night, intended to assert her credentials as a former secretary of state (with all the positive “experience” that’s supposed to entail), framed by no fewer than seventeen U.S. flags, was a strident reassertion of U.S. “exceptionalism” without apologies or even reflections on the recent past and her bloody role in it.

• Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson believes his campaign will get a boost whenever Bernie Sanders ends his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

• Johnson, who many believe could be the strongest third-party candidate in decades, told The Hill in an exclusive interview on Monday that Libertarians are poised for a breakout year driven by dissatisfaction with the major-party nominees.

• Johnson believes that once Sanders drops out, he’ll benefit from having one less insurgent candidate in the field as voters look for an alternative to the Republican and Democratic candidates.

• The United States is not a democratic country, former presidential candidate and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said Monday while discussing the “very poor choices” and “no real contrast” for voters to choose from between the likes of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

• “This country, we do not really have democracy. I mean, even if we were really, really super happy with the Libertarian candidate, you think they’d get into the debates? No, the debates are run by the Republicans and Democrats,” Paul said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” when asked about the viability of the Gary Johnson-Bill Weld Libertarian ticket.

• Hillary Clinton’s private emails jeopardized the safety of undercover CIA officers, suggesting criminal charges, but the Obama administration might make an exception for the Democratic frontrunner, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

• Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee for president, appears to have committed a very serious violation of some of the country’s most important laws governing the use and misuse of classified information: She revealed the names of undercover CIA officers by using her unclassified and unprotected personal email server. That may be a violation both of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Intelligence Identities Act of 1982 (IIPA). That Clinton used an unclassified system for classified information is not conjecture. That’s the same email server that Romanian hacker Guccifer said was so easy to hack that it was “like an open orchid on the internet.”

• That Clinton had such highly classified information on an unclassified system is a fact. The question now is: What is the Obama administration going to do about it? And the answer is, probably, nothing.

• As the California Democratic Primary rapidly approaches, I’m reminded of a small but important event that took place earlier this spring in San Francisco. Gutsy activists protested in April outside a campaign fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, co-hosted by movie megastar and area resident, George Clooney. The party was full of glitz, privilege, glamour, and of course money. Lots of it. The minimum price for entry to the hotel location was $33,400, with a seat inside the house party going for $353,400.

• A group of 200 protesters, uninvited and unwelcome at an event unaffordable to them, used the media spotlight outside to call out Hillary Clinton’s corporate record and corporate backing. George Clooney even felt compelled to respond to reporters, acknowledging the “obscene” amounts of money influencing the U.S. political system.

• Of course, lots of Clinton fundraisers like this one have happened all over the country, both before and since, while even larger sums of money are amassed quietly with corporate Super PACs. But what was different about this “Golden City” event was the success of activists in breaking through the media blackout with a vivid snapshot into the world inhabited by the Democratic Party establishment, and the fundamental class character of the party itself.

• While no one can predict the future, victories in California, New Mexico and the Big Sky states on June 7, combined with a strong showing in New Jersey, would leave Sanders (or at least his movement) in a position analogous to Ronald Reagan’s in 1976: a close runner-up, poised to lead the country in a new direction. It certainly won’t be easy; unlike Reagan, Sanders would face unified opposition from the establishment. Still, victories in these final contests would cement the impression not only that Sanders’ program represents the future of progressive politics, but also that he won the battle of ideas in this election cycle.

• Graduates of 2016, don’t be fooled by this glorious day. As you leave campus for the last time, many of you already deeply in debt and with a lifetime of payments to look forward to, you head into a world that’s anything but sunny. In fact, through those gates that have done little enough to protect you is the sort of fog bank that results in traffic pile-ups on any highway.

• And if you imagine that I’m here to sweep that fog away and tell you what truly lies behind it, think again. My only consolation is that, if I can’t adequately explain our American world to you or your path through it, I doubt any other speaker could either.

• Of course, it’s not exactly a fog-lifter to say that, like it or not, you’re about to graduate onto Planet Donald — and I don’t mean, for all but a few of you, a future round of golf at Mar-a-Lago. Our increasingly unnerved and disturbed world is his circus right now (whether he wins the coming election or not), just as in the Philippines, it’s the circus of new president Rodrigo Duterte; in Hungary, of right-wing populist Viktor Orbán; in Austria, of Norbert Hofer, the extremist anti-immigrant presidential candidate who just lost a squeaker by .6% of the vote; in Israel, of new defense minister Avigdor Lieberman; in Russia, of the autocratic Vladimir Putin; in France, of Marine le Pen, leader of the right-wing National Front party, who has sometimes led in polls for the next presidential election; and so on. And if you don’t think that’s a less than pretty political picture of our changing planet, then don’t wait for the rest of this speech, just hustle out those gates. You’ve got a treat ahead of you.

• As Hillary Clinton seeks to finally extinguish Bernie Sanders’s campaign, the Vermont senator continues to speak out against the Establishment’s neglect of social justice and against the racism coming from Donald Trump, reports Marjorie Cohn.

• No matter what happens in the remaining seven Democratic presidential primaries, progressives—many of them Bernie Sanders supporters—will gather in Chicago later this month to discuss how to build and fortify the political revolution that’s been sparked during the 2016 campaign season.

• Lurking in the background of this secret deal was a Canadian financial tycoon named Frank Guistra, who owned 60,000 shares of stock in Diamond Fields. Over the years, Clinton and Guistra would become close friends, with Clinton travelling the world in Giustra’s private jet, negotiating mining deals from Kazakhstan to Moscow. As detailed in Peter Schweitzer’s very informative Clinton Cash, Giustra returned the love, donating more than $30 million to the Clinton Foundation.

• Hillary made out as well. On the night of the first Clinton inaugural ball, the new first lady proudly flashed a 3.5 carat diamond ring, a present from the old Diamond Fields team, mined from the Crater of Diamonds. As for old John Huddleston, the man once hailed as the Diamond King of Arkansas? He died indigent and was buried in a pauper’s grave two miles from his glittering crater.

• The moral of this tale: though others may well go under, you can count on the Clintons to always profit from their plunder.

• I suspect those people would be grateful for any help they can get to go into the future. But according to Nate Silver at 538 they aren’t Trump voters. His voters are white but they are not members of the working class, at least not if you define class as relating to how much money someone has. Silver wrote a piece called “The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support” about a month ago in which he examined all the exit poll data and discovered that Trump voters are actually better off than most Americans.

• Donald Trump is the ill spoken, boorish, graceless version of every American president in modern history. He differs from them only in his unconcealed appeals to white nationalism. But Democrats aren’t much better. They pretend to work on behalf of human, civil and economic rights but those claims are lies. They are meant to hide their partnerships with corporate America, very wealthy individuals and the worldwide imperialist project.

• Addressing concerns that the media may preemptively announce his rival Hillary Clinton as the “presumptive Democratic Party nominee” even before she has won the requisite numbers of pledge delegates, Bernie Sanders over the weekend indicated that such reporting would be both wrong and irresponsible and held to his commitment to take his campaign all the way to the national convention when so-called superdelegates will finally—and for the first time, in fact—be able to cast their vote for who they believe will make the best nominee.

• Six states are holding Democratic primaries this Tuesday, including California, New Mexico, New Jersey, Montana, South Dakota, and North Dakota.

• Amid some speculation, bolstered by overt comments by people like MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, that cable outlets or other news agencies would call the election in favor of Clinton before all the results of next Tuesday’s results are in, Sander reiterated his argument that even though he has a steep hill to climb, the race is much closer than often reported.

• This morning I heard from an old friend here in California who said “I’m for Bernie, but he doesn’t really have a chance anymore. So isn’t my vote for him in the California primary just prolonging the agony, and indirectly helping Trump?”

• I told him:

• 1. True, the electoral numbers are daunting, and Bernie faces an uphill task, but a win Tuesday will help enormously. One out of 8 Americans lives in California.

• 2. Regardless of the electoral math, Bernie’s candidacy has never been mainly about Bernie. It’s been about a movement to reclaim our democracy and economy from the moneyed interests. And a win for Bernie in the California primary (and in other Tuesday primaries in Montana, New Jersey, North Dakota South Dakota, and New Mexico) will send an even clearer signal to Washington, the Democratic Party, and the establishment as a whole, that a large and growing share of Americans is determined to wrest back control.

• 3. The goals Bernie has enunciated in his campaign are essential to our future: getting big money out of politics and reversing widening inequality; moving toward a single-payer healthcare system and free tuition at public universities (both financed by higher taxes on the richest Americans and on Wall Street); a $15 minimum wage; decriminalization of marijuana and an end to mass incarceration; a new voting rights act; immigration reform; and a carbon tax. All will require continued mobilization at all levels of government. A win Tuesday will help continue and build on that mobilization.

• Appearing on Meet the Press Sunday morning, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) thrice refused to label Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s statement that a federal judge cannot decide a case impartially because the judge is Mexican American a “racist statement.”

• In early April this space was devoted to a discussion of the assorted political adversities that were being inflicted on those seeking to govern the state of Alabama, going from the Governor of the state, to the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, and finally to the Alabama Speaker of the House. It has, however, been more than two months since those events were described and it is time for an update, if for no other reason than to reassure my readers that Donald Trump is not the only clown in town. The following events occurred within days of each other during the merry month of May.

• “There’s more at stake today than in any story ever told,” said the actor who starred in the 1997 film “Good Will Hunting,” set at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as he took the stage at the school’s graduation ceremony Friday. He even mentioned a certain Massachusetts senator, saying, “I don’t know if justice is coming for you in this life or the next. But if justice does come for you in this life … her name is Elizabeth Warren.”

• In the last days before the California primary, where Democratic primary polls showed her neck-and-neck with Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton delivered a campaign speech in San Diego. Though her campaign billed it as a “major foreign policy address,” it looked more like a last-ditch attempt to position herself as the Democratic nominee ahead of a potentially embarrassing loss or close finish with Sanders in the nation’s most populous state.

• On July 25, opening day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Cheri Honkala, leader of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, who was denied a permit to march by city authorities, will rally with thousands of protesters outside City Hall. Defying the police, they will march up Broad Street to the convention.

• We will recapture our democracy in the streets of cities such as Philadelphia, not in convention halls such as the aptly named Wells Fargo Center, where the Democratic Party elites intend to celebrate the results of the rigged primary elections and the continuity of corporate power.

• Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, other activists and I will march with Honkala. It is not as if we have a choice. No one invited us into the center or to the lavish corporate-sponsored receptions. No one anointed us to be Clinton superdelegates—a privilege that went to corporate lobbyists, rich people and party hacks. No one in the Democratic establishment gives a damn what we think.

• The convention is not our party. It is their party. It costs a lot of money to attend. Donate $ 100,000 and you become an “empire” donor, with perks such as “VIP credentials for all convention proceedings,” along with tickets to lavish corporate and Party receptions, photo ops with politicians at the convention podium, four rooms at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel and a suite at a Yankees game, where a “special guest” will be present. Short of $100,000? You can become a “gold” donor for $50,000, a “silver” donor for $25,000 or a “bronze” donor for $10,000.

• A former Texas official said a fraud investigation into Trump University was silenced in 2010, under “highly unusual” circumstances. Former Deputy Chief of Consumer Protection John Owens told CBS he had a strong case against Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s company for scamming students at his unaccredited real estate school. Shortly after the company folded in 2010, Owens’ says he was ordered to drop the case.

• Donald Trump has entered a new phase of autocratic weirdness. His attack on Federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding in the lawsuit against Trump University, was a trifecta. It combined outright racism with an assault on the independent judiciary and a clear warning that Trump would use the presidency to settle personal business scores.

• His rants at reporters display contempt for the role of a free press. He would govern like a spiteful tyrant, with all the awesome powers of a president of the United States — settling scores, punishing enemies, making impetuous, ignorant decisions.

• Donald Trump doesn’t subscribe to the Atwater School of Subtle Racism.

• Trump last week declared the Latino judge presiding over the Trump University case unfit strictly because of his ethnic heritage.

• And though Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign dismissed the news on Monday evening — and Hillary Clinton herself said at a campaign rally in California that she wanted to let voters have their say on Tuesday — the AP now says it will be calling Clinton the “presumptive nominee” until the convention in July.

• Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) supporters took to social media on Monday to protest the Associated Press declaring, one day before the highly-anticipated California primary, that Hillary Clinton had become the Democratic Party’s nominee.

• The Bernie Sanders campaign and progressives across the nation expressed mixtures of frustration and contempt Monday night after major news outlets—following declarations by the Associated Press and NBC News—ignored the explicit instructions about how primary delegates should be tallied and declared that Hillary Clinton has won the nomination of the Democratic Party.

• The bias of the major media never ceases to amaze me.

• Apparently someone in the media (AP, and now the Huffington Post among others) was in a hurry to declare Hillary Clinton the winner of the primary before she actually wins. Before millions of people in California and five other states vote. Before the convention, weeks before it, in fact. The hell with specific rules stating not to include superdelegates in the count. It doesn’t matter! The convention? It doesn’t matter! The votes of millions of people on June 7? They don’t matter either!

• Democracy? Screw it,

• in America, Democracy doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter!

• The media has declared, today in America, that the Democratic process does not matter!

• IT DOESN’T MATTER!

• However, superdelegates (or unpledged delegates) can change their minds and switch their loyalties until the Democratic National Convention, so it’s not completely accurate to call Clinton the presumptive nominee. That point wasn’t lost on the Sanders campaign, which quickly put out a press release saying the Associated Press had jumped the gun…

• We’ve just crossed a historic Rubicon in the most anticlimactic way possible. On Monday night, the Associated Press announced that, due to some new superdelegate commitments, Hillary Clinton has clinched the Democratic nomination. This news pleased no one. Bernie Sanders supporters saw the announcement, on the eve of an important primary day, as evidence that the system is rigged on Clinton’s behalf. The Clinton team worried that the announcement would suppress turnout Tuesday and step on a victory that should have been made manifest at the polls.

• Not including superdelegates, Sanders is just 291 delegates behind Clinton and campaigners for his “political revolution” have been going all out in California, which will allocate 475 delegates.

• Of course this is an inadequate way of posing the question. God is always present for believers, even if the political workings of the divine can be hard to discern. And religious people continue to occupy points all along the spectrum. Just ask Hillary Clinton about her Methodism.

• But especially among Republicans, religious issues have taken a back seat in the party’s discourse and religious leaders are playing a diminished role in the 2016 campaign.

• With just hours before the start of the presidential primaries in Puerto Rico, members of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ team accused the leadership of the local Democratic Party of fraud, saying they hindered the certification process of their voting center officials.

• The Hispanic vote director for the campaign of the Vermont senator, Betsy Franceschini, denounced a series of irregularities her work team faced Friday while thousands of inmates at the island’s correctional facilities were voting.

• The presidential primary in Puerto Rico is today, but concerns about election fraud have been growing for days already. Bernie Sanders campaign officials and supporters are worried that a series of problems, ranging from drastically reduced polling stations to poll workers who can’t get certified, might be signs of voter suppression or election fraud. Some of these problems wouldn’t just hurt Sanders supporters, but could reduce everyone’s access to voting during the primary. What exactly is happening? And is it some form of fraud or voter suppression, or just a series of poor management decisions?

• Polling locations for the Democratic primary in Puerto Rico were reduced from 1,510 to 432 days before the contest that Clinton won.

• In an interview on CNN this weekend, Sen. Bernie Sanders said: “You asked me about the Clinton Foundation. Do I have a problem when a sitting secretary of state and a foundation run by her husband collects many millions of dollars from foreign governments, governments which are dictatorships? You don’t have a lot of civil liberties, democratic rights in Saudi Arabia. You don’t have a lot of respect there for divergent, opposition points of view, for gay rights, for women’s rights. Yeah — do I have a problem with that? Yeah, I do.”

• The weirdest presidential election year in the history of modern US politics came down to one of the weirdest five-day news runs I’ve ever seen. Secretary Hillary Clinton gave a rousing speech on Thursday in stalwart defense of empire while cutting Donald Trump off at the knees. Trump, in response, spent the next several days spraying copious amounts of folly into the air as if he were the fountains at the Bellagio Hotel in Vegas.

• Usually the chair of the Democratic National Committee appoints the group after consulting with the party’s presidential nominee, and Barack Obama had sweeping say in 2008. However, this year, the party allowed candidates to make appointments in proportion to their share of the popular vote in the primaries. Hillary Clinton made six picks, and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz selected the remaining four. The Washington Post interpreted the change in the selection process as an attempt to unite an increasingly divided party.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The word “troll” no longer means just “troll” any more, as it seems that when some people come across another whose opinion they can’t counter, they will simply label them “troll” so as not to highlight the short-comings of their own position.

• After New York governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order directing the state to monitor and sanction activists in the Boycott, Sanctions and Divest Movement (BDS) against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, critics complained that the order is McCarthyism. They objected that social and economic boycotts have been used in instances such as South Africa’s racial segregation or Apartheid. Interference in such a social and political movement in protest of injustice, they aver, is contrary to the first amendment. (Cuomo’s executive order will certainly be struck down by the courts). The order is creepy, since it suggests that Cuomo will have New York state bureaucrats combing through citizens’ Facebook and Twitter accounts to see if they support BDS, and then find ways of punishing them (no contracts from the state, no state jobs, no internships).

• Shame on Governor Cuomo for using an anti-democratic executive order to push through a McCarthyite attack on a movement for justice. Boycotts have long been a tactic of social justice movements to bring about urgently needed change for a more just and equal society, and the movement for Palestinian rights should not be singled out.

• Through an executive order, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) is going after a peaceful boycott movement fighting Israeli occupation — and many critics are worried his effort will seriously threaten free speech.

• One of the greatest free speech threats in the west is the growing, multi-nation campaign literally to outlaw advocacy of boycotting Israel. People get arrested in Paris – the site of the 2015 “free speech” (for Muslim critics) rally – for wearing pro-boycott t-shirts. Pro-boycott students on U.S. campuses – where the 1980s boycott of apartheid South Africa flourished – are routinely sanctioned for violating anti-discrimination policies. Canadian officials have threatened to criminally prosecute boycott advocates. British government bodies have legally barred certain types of boycott advocacy. Israel itself has outright criminalized advocacy of such boycotts. Notably, all of this has been undertaken with barely a peep from those who styled themselves free speech crusaders when it came time to defend anti-Muslim cartoons.

• New York Governor Andrew Cuomo stirred the immediate ire of human rights campaigners around the world on Sunday by signing an executive order calling for the creation of a “blacklist” that would track groups and individuals who support Palestinian rights through the international Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement known as BDS.

• It took a little less than a week, but the EFF, with the invaluable assistance of Venkat Balasubramani of FOCAL PLLC, have persuaded a Washington state judge to strike down the temporary restraining order against MuckRock he hastily granted back on May 27th.

• Landis+Gyr, a multinational corporation owned by Toshiba, recently secured a contract to upgrade Seattle’s “dumb” meters to smart meters. Privacy activist Phil Mocek requested information on the city’s smart meter plan through MuckRock and was handed two Landis+Gyr documents in unredacted form by the city.

• These documents worth suing over spent a month uploaded to MuckRock before Landis+Gyr took notice. Once it had secured the city contract, L+G then demanded — via a request for a temporary restraining order — that MuckRock take the documents down, turn over info on site users who may have seen/downloaded them, and somehow help L+G shove its smart meter genie back into the bottle.

• Yee claimed they were using his videos on religion because they “don’t want to take me down for mocking politicians because foreigners wouldn’t like it”.

• During the video Rubin questioned the laws around freedom of speech in relation to America or in Europe.

• “There is a constitution in Singapore which allows freedom of speech, it’s article 14 but in that constitution itself in clause two it says ‘we have freedom of speech but there are restrictions to freedom of speech, even if it breaks the public harmony or is provocative or whatever’ and that completely fucking defeats the purpose of freedom of speech,” he explained.

• Moderators of the popular Donald Trump supporting Reddit community known as /r/The_Donald are reporting that Reddit admins have requested that they delete any threads relating to censorship in the site’s main politics community, /r/Politics.

• The decision to drop textbooks that question the severity of climate change from schools in Portland, Oregon, has drawn heavy criticism from the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), which is warning that it will “undermine public education”.

• You may have heard recently that after switching many domains, a few weeks back ThePirateBay returned to its original thepiratebay.org domain. It’s basically an ongoing game of wac-a-mole, where the entertainment industry freaks out and scares registrars into taking back whatever domain and TPB just moves on. It’s unclear what good this does for anyone, but it keeps happening. And with the return to .org, it appears the entertainment industry has basically lots its mind. First, it had one of its lobbying front groups, the Copyright Alliance write a hellishly misleading post attacking Public Interest Registry (PIR), the organization that currently runs the .org top level domain.

• Watch our panelists struggle to evade the censor, cast your own vote on where to draw the line, and expect plenty of no-go subjects to come out from the shadows.

• Featuring Guardian and Index on Censorship cartoonist Martin Rowson, Citizen Khan comedian Adil Ray, theatre-maker Nadia Latif, director of Homegrown, and journalist Ian Dunt of politics.co.uk and Erotic Review.

• The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has come under fire for its decision to ban television images of violent protests.

• Maggs on Media hosted a debate with the SABC’s Chief Operating Officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng, Glenda Daniels, senior lecturer at Wits University’s media studies and media lawyer and partner at Webber Wentzel, Dario Milo.

• Motsoeneng, maintained that the public broadcaster’s decision was not self-censorship.

• On February 29th through March 1st at UC Davis, we faced our most aggressive, persistent, and unreasonable protest yet.

• As many of you know, our preferred way of doing outreach is to set up a simple poll table that asks questions like, “Should Abortion Remain Legal?” and provide options for people to sign Yes, No, or It Depends. While we do keep track of the results of these polls to pay attention to trends, they aren’t scientific and we don’t ask the question in order to track people’s answers. We just want to dialogue with people and give our volunteers an opportunity to use what they learned at our training seminar.

• What a week. Just a few days after we wrote about a dangerous ruling in a federal appeals court in California concerning a way to get around Section 230 of the CDA, now we have another problematic CDA 230 ruling from California in the form of a ruling from San Mateo Superior Court judge, Donald Ayoob, that has the potential to do a lot of damage to Section 230 as well as anti-SLAPP efforts in California. Paul Levy has a very detailed post about the case, but we’ll try and do a summary here.

• The case involves Jason Cross, a “country rap” musician who performs under the name Mikel Knight, who has apparently made a name for himself through a highly aggressive “street team” operation that basically travels around in vans pushing people to buy Knight’s CDs — and there are plenty of accusations of sketchy behavior around how those street teams operate, and how Cross treats the people who work for him. Apparently, Cross was not happy with a Facebook group entitled “Families Against Mike Knight and the MDRST” (MDRST standing for Maverick Dirt Road Street Team, which is what Cross calls the street team). He then used a court in Tennessee to try to get Facebook to identify who was behind the group, and then demanded that the page be taken down. That effort is still ongoing, but has been temporarily postponed, while he then filed a separate lawsuit in California against Facebook and whoever is behind that group, a variety of things, including breach of contract, negligent misrepresentation, negligent interference with prospective economic relations, unfair business practices and various publicity rights violations. Oddly, as Levy points out in his post, despite listing John Does as defendants, the complaint doesn’t describe anything anyone did other than Facebook. However, as part of the discovery process, Cross did (of course!) ask Facebook to identify the people behind the group criticizing him.

• Many of us have unflattering photographs that we would rather forget but most exist in family archives that are easily hidden away. However, if you’re a multi-millionaire rock star potentially trying to erase an unfortunate moment, there are always DMCA takedown notices to fall back upon.

• Gawker Media LLC isn’t just contending with a legal challenge from a wealthy wrestler backed by an extremely wealthy venture capitalist. There’s also the matter of the man who says he invented e-mail—a claim a Gawker website attacked under the following headline: “Corruption, Lies, and Death Threats: The Crazy Story of the Man Who Pretended to Invent E-mail.”

• Shiva Ayyadurai, the longtime tech entrepreneur who says he invented e-mail, filed a defamation suit against Gawker on May 11. His lawyer, Charles Harder, also represents Hulk Hogan in a lawsuit that resulted in a $140 million verdict against Gawker. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of Paypal and current Facebook Inc. board member, is bankrolling the Hogan suit, which was prompted by the publication of a sex tape. Thiel’s involvement was kept secret until recently.

• Buzzfeed is at it again today. First it decided to pick sides in a presidential election, and now it has noticed that other countries, often Muslim, don’t have the same sensibilities as Americans. And this is a big problem for social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.

• Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulos noted, “The proliferation of internet-connected mobile phones, in theory, is bringing the world together — with people continents apart talking and sharing, fueled by the sweet nectar of social apps. But in some cases, those connections turn into collisions. Within just the last three weeks, three big American social media platforms — Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter — have all butted up against the laws and cultural norms of local populations outside the United States.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• Congress has no business approving government programs that neither it nor the public understands. Yet policymakers have repeatedly authorized surveillance activities without doing their homework. Over the eight years since enacting reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), Congress has failed to gain a functional understanding of NSA Internet surveillance, and has never even considered its impacts on democracy.

• Until Congress legislates meaningful limits to curtail widespread, longstanding, and continuing violations of constitutional rights, the digital rights movement stands united in calling for FISA Section 702 to expire next year as scheduled. Authorizing an extension of the law before securing answers to several critical questions, and enacting real limits to prevent documented and predictable abuses, would be a gross abdication of Congressional responsibility.

• Several groups have banded together to call for an end to warrantless mass surveillance.

• Fight for the Future and a coalition of groups are using the third anniversary of Edward Snowden’s revelations of the extent of the NSA’s surveillance practices to drum up support for the end of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. The program, the group said on its website, “has allowed for mass surveillance programs…that have been used by the U.S. government to warrantlessly collect and search the internet communications of people all over the world.”

• Facebook is forcing users of its mobile site to install its separate Messenger app if they want use chat, just as it has already done for users of its Android and iOS app.

• The Facebook app for Android and iOS began encouraging people to install Facebook Messenger in August 2014. Some users switched to using the Facebook mobile site on their phone browser instead, which still had Facebook’s built-in chat – but now that mobile site work-around has been marked for death, too. Facebook is prompting users to install its Messenger app, while warning it will be their only option soon. The change should also affect web wrappers such as Metal, which is currently blocking the warning message.

• “The Snowden leaks caused a sea change in the policy landscape related to surveillance,” writes watchdog, from the recent passage of the USA Freedom Act to the coming showdown in Congress over Section 702.

• Privacy International questions whether the government is bending surveillance rules too far

• Previously secret documents revealed by Privacy International have exposed what it claims to be a worrying relationship between MI5 and GCHQ, suggesting the two organisations could be putting UK residents’ privacy at risk.

• The document, penned by Interception of Communications Commissioner Sir Swinton Thomas in 2004, reveals plans to develop ‘the database’, a collection of data about citizens of the country that could be used to investigate into people thought to be involved in illegal activities.

• It was sent to lawyers of MI5 and GCHQ, asking their opinion on whether it could be used in security operations.

• “The documents revealed today demonstrate the Government’s troubling history of bending the rules to expand its surveillance powers while minimising safeguards,” Caroline Wilson Palow, general counsel at Privacy International, said.

• “The particular correspondence that we reveal today, between lawyers for MI5 and GCHQ and the former Interception of Communications Commissioner, is also an illuminating example of how oversight can go wrong when it lacks sufficient transparency and resources.”

• Two years before Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president, he took to Fox & Friends to discuss Edward Snowden’s then-recent revelation of the unconstitutional mass surveillance of innocent Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA).

• Three years ago today, The Guardian published the first story based on the huge archive of documents that that Edward Snowden stole from the National Security Agency while working as an NSA contractor. Then-Attorney General Holder’s Justice Department quickly charged Snowden with felonies for theft of government property and mishandling classified information. Last week, however, Holder praised Snowden. “I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made,” Holder said.

• Three years after news first broke of the government’s mass telephone data collection program based on NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, there’s proof that going public might have been his only option.

• According to a Vice News investigation published Saturday, NSA officials ignored Snowden’s multiple attempts to report his concerns about the NSA’s surveillance programs.

• Jason Leopold has secured another comprehensive set of Snowden-related documents from the NSA, dealing with the agency’s search for evidence backing up his claim that he tried to take his complaints to intelligence community officials before heading to Hong Kong with a drive full of secret documents.

• The long, detailed post — written with the help of Marcy Wheeler and Ky Henderson — covers the 800+ pages of internal emails released to Vice in response to a FOIA request. The headline suggests there’s a smoking gun, but a few thousand words later, the conclusion seems to be, “There’s possibly a smoking gun… and the NSA, due to malice or just incompetence, is going to be of no help in locating it.”

• What is undoubtedly true is that there was more to Snowden’s concerns than the single email released to shore up the NSA’s side of the story. There is evidence Snowden contacted other officials about his concerns, but the agency decided to present the single email as though that were the extent of Snowden’s complaints.

• The infamous former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is speaking out again, now claiming that the United States is carrying out mass surveillance and data storage operations in Japan.

• The claims came this weekend during a video conference in Tokyo, where Snowden spoke to a collected group of journalists and lawyers from his home in Moscow, Russia. Snowden was granted temporary asylum in Russia in 2013 after his whistleblowing efforts on American data collection programs yielding an international controversy.

• Since the earliest days of the Snowden revelations, apologists for the NSA’s criminal spying program have said that Snowden should have gone “through channels” to report his concerns, rather than giving evidence to journalists and going public.

• Snowden has vigorously disputed this narrative, insisting that he repeatedly contacted his superiors about the spying he was being asked to abet. The NSA denied that they had any record of this, and Snowden supplied specifics.

• Newly declassified NSA documents provide official confirmation that Edward Snowden was a CIA asset, and show the extent to which the government went to discredit him after he told lawmakers in Europe that he tried to blow the whistle on a secret federal program that snooped on private citizens.

• The documents, obtained by Vice News, do not conclusively confirm claims by Snowden, then a private contractor working for the NSA, that he tried to alert supervisors of what he believed to be illegal spying before going public. They do show that following a flurry of claims by Snowden in early 2014 that his supposed concerns the agency was violating the constitutional rights of citizens were ignored, Obama administration officials sought to discredit him with his own words.

• A case dealing with a warrant issued in 2003, a subsequent warrant issued in 2006, and a whole lot of judicial work in between finally concludes — with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals coming down on the side of the government’s apparent “right” to seize everything, hold it for an indefinite period of time, and pore through unrelated documents in hopes of finding evidence of additional criminal activity.

• The government, in the form of the US Army, first went after Stavros Ganias for billing improprieties and theft of copper wire. Over the next three years, this morphed into an IRS investigation for tax fraud, using the same hard drives the Army seized three years before the IRS showed any interest. The IRS obtained its own warrant and began looking for evidence related to its suspicions.

• Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson says he would abolish the National Security Agency (NSA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and other federal agencies if elected.

• In an interview with The Hill on Monday, Johnson said he would sign an executive order as president eliminating the NSA, which sparked controversy with its domestic surveillance programs.

• Johnson promised to turn “the NSA satellites away from you and I as citizens of the United States.”

• Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson says he wants to abolish the National Security Agency.

• Johnson, a former Republican who was governor of New Mexico, says he wants to turn “the NSA satellites away from you and I as citizens of the United States.”

• Without noting the parts of the article that show that, nine months into the Snowden leaks and multiple hearings on the subject, Keith Alexander still didn’t know how contractors might raise complaints, and that the NSA editing of its Q&A on Snowden show real questions about the publicity and viability of reporting even to the IG, especially for legal violations, Cordero complains that he did not do so. Then she asserts that had Snowden gone to NSA’s IG (ignoring the record of what happened to Thomas Drake when he did the same), the programs would not have changed.

• And yet, having taken a different approach, some of them have changed. Some of the programs — notably Section 215, but also tech companies’ relationship with the government, when exposed to democratic and non-FISA court review, and FISA court process itself — did get changed. I think all but the tech company changes have largely been cosmetic, Cordero has tended to think reforms would go too far. But the record shows that Snowden’s leaks, along with whatever else damage critics want to claim they caused, also led to a democratic decision to shift the US approach on surveillance somewhat. Cordero accuses Snowden of doing what he did because of ego — again, that’s her prerogative; I’m not going to persuade people who’ve already decided to think differently of Snowden — but she also argues that had Snowden followed the already problematic methods to officially report concerns, he would have had less effect raising concerns than he had in fact. Some of what he exposed may have been legally (when argued in secret) sustainable before Snowden, but they turned out not to be democratically sustainable.

• Three years ago today, the world got powerful confirmation that the NSA was spying on the digital lives of hundreds of millions of innocent people. It started with a secret order written by the FISA court authorizing the mass surveillance of Verizon Business telephone records—an order that members of Congress quickly confirmed was similar to orders that had been issued every 3 months for years. Over the next year, we saw a steady drumbeat of damning evidence, creating a detailed, horrifying picture of an intelligence agency unrestrained by Congress and shielded from public oversight by a broken classification system.

• Several documents have been obtained by Vice News through the Freedom of Information Act which reveal that whistleblower Edward Snowden tried to take up his concerns against the government’s spying programs with the National Security Agency before ultimately deciding to hand over top-secret documents to journalists. These documents contradict earlier claims by federal agencies that Snowden never went through the proper channels to have his concerns addressed.

• The NSA maintains that Edward Snowden never came to them with concerns about the constitutionality of some of their electronic spying programs. It only released an email from Snowden to the public which had a question about legal authority but as the NSA put it, the email “did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse.”

• For the longest time, US officials denied that Edward Snowden made serious attempts to raise concerns about NSA surveillance activities before he took off with classified data. There was only evidence of one not-so-worrisome email, they said. However, it’s now clear that this isn’t the whole story. Documents obtained by Vice News (and published by the NSA) show that Snowden likely did more to raise concerns with the NSA than officials claimed. While there’s no smoking gun, two out of three previously unmentioned Snowden interactions with the Oversight and Compliance Office involved disputes over an open-book test on foreign intelligence gathering. The findings suggest that Snowden might have disagreed with the test’s interpretation of the law, which would be in sync with the previously released email.

• This could be one of the creepiest things you would have come across in recent times. You’ll be surprised to know that Google gives you the option to listen (and delete) everything you have ever said to Google while using its voice search feature.

• Google’s educational packages include things like the google calendar, Google docs, Google classroom, gmail, and most recently it has added the Chromebook. Chromebooks are low-cost and easy-to-use notebooks that come with support and built-in access to Google Apps. They are offered to schools participating in Google for Education for $149. Google reports that it sold more than 1 million Chromebooks in just the second quarter of 2014. In November of 2014, the New York City School Department of Education adopted Chromebook as part of its approved and supported tools in its 1800 schools.

• [...]

• Finally, as was alluded to above, it is critical to note that Google’s aim is to expand its market share. By getting Google products in the hands of users before they can read, Google is building a giant base of people who will likely be life-long users of its products. By spoon feeding young people on easy-to-use applications, they will become addicted to Google. They may not even become aware that there are alternatives, since all of their classmates, friends, and teachers use Google. And since they grew up on Google, they will likely find other applications daunting. Educators themselves lack awareness of the non-corporate software and internet service options that are available, since their institutions are usually captured by the likes of Google and Microsoft. Few colleges and universities in the United States, for instance, support Linux operating systems. The process of corporate capture is not unlike the efforts of junk food companies to use promotional school contracts to gain captive audiences for their products.

• The main downside (which Signal faces as well) is that you have to contend with the complexities of sending SMS messages on top of the work needed to write a well-functioning XMPP client. As I mentioned in my Signal blog, there are no shortage of MMS bugs against Signal. Nobody wants that head-ache.

• Additinally, we would still lose one Signal feature: with Signal, when a user joins, everyone automatically sends them encrypted messages. With this proposed app, each user would have to manually add the XMPP address and have no way of knowing when one of their friends gets an XMPP address.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Politics has gotten very ugly. Arguments that used to be limited to fringe groups and the dark corners of the internet are now embraced by presidential candidates.

• So what are things like behind closed doors? Even worse.

• A column in the Financial Times published Tuesday gave us a peek. Mary Childs, a financial correspondent for FT, reported on what she observed at a private hedge fund conference in May.

• While innocently attempting to access an article on the Haaretz website the other day, I was accosted by a sequence of intrusive advertisements inviting me to “Fight BDS”—the popular boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement that aims to force an end to Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights.

• Pico Rivera is a dusty working-class Latino suburb of Los Angeles. After the school district, Wal-Mart is the city’s largest employer and the source of 10 percent of its tax revenue. More than 500 families in the town depend on income from the store.

• The town is also the epicenter of activism by Wal-Mart workers in the United States.

• Times op-ed writer Thomas Edsall (6/1/16) sets out to examine the role resentment plays in fueling the movement behind Donald Trump—but does so in such an uncritical way that he seems to adopt Trump voters’ resentments as his own.

• These voters, he says, “are evidently enraged by the imposition of norms of political correctness that they see as enforced by ‘Stalinist orthodoxy,’” and “perceive the network of state, local and federal anti-discrimination laws and directives as censorious and coercive.” Trump, according to Edsall, “has capitalized on the visceral belief of many white voters that government-enforced diversity and other related regulations are designed ‘to bring Americans to submission.‘”

• Today we are experiencing a global activist wave, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the 1960s. Here in this country, the Black Lives Matter movement has become a powerful force for change. Sen. Bernie Sanders has energized millions of Americans across demographic lines, especially millennials of all races and backgrounds. Labor efforts like the drive for a $15 minimum wage, and movements for the rights of LGBT people and other oppressed communities, are gaining force and winning victories.

• Boxer Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, on 17 January 1942, is dead at 74.

• Ali was on the US team for the Rome Olympics in 1960, and became the Olympic light-heavyweight champion. He and the team were lionized when he came back. But then in Kentucky he was refused a table at a restaurant.

• In 1964 he defeated Sonny Liston. He became famous for his footwork in the ring, for his boasts and his taunting of his opponents, naming the round in which he would defeat them.

• The Snowden revelations were not the first time it was revealed that powerful organisations carried out large scale, disturbing operations in secret, however.

• Here are just a few examples of things that, even when we hear them now, sound incredibly far-fetched – but they were sadly all too real.

• Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump spent most of the last week under fire for claiming that Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the judge overseeing a case alleging that a Trump company was an elaborate scam, cannot fairly decide this case because Curiel is “of Mexican heritage.” The judge is an American citizen born in Indiana to immigrants from Mexico.

• Appearing on Face the Nation Sunday morning, Trump added another category of individuals who may not be trustworthy on the bench — Muslims. In response to a question from host John Dickerson about whether an Islamic judge wouldn’t be able to treat Trump fairly, the Republican presidential candidate replied “it’s possible, yes.”

• The government has responded with a filing [PDF] claiming it has done nothing wrong. It acknowledges the FBI and the US Attorney’s office received copies of the files from the duplication service, but claims it never asked the company to perform this “service.” That’s at odds with other information gleaned by the defense, as well as an admission by a federal prosecutor.

• Robert Eatinger, whose name was redacted 1,600 times in the Senate Torture report, and who went on to file a crime report against Senate staffers for using materials provided to them by CIA, is complaining about lack of trust in this summary of Edward Snowden’s role in surveillance debates.

• Yesterday, the State Department declassified and released Organization and Management of Foreign Policy: 1977-80, volume 28, a Carter-era document that includes startling statements by CIA General Counsel Anthony Lapham on the role of the WWI-era Espionage Act in prosecuting leaks of classified material to the press.

• A 1977 memorandum from CIA General Counsel Anthony Lapham stated that when it comes to prosecuting leaks of classified information to the press, “It is extremely doubtful that the provisions [of the Espionage Act] were intended to have application in such situations, and as a matter of historical fact, leaving aside the unsuccessful Ellsberg prosecution and possibly one or two other cases, they never have been so applied.”

• Our current Justice Department is more than happy to prosecute, pushed along by a president who shows little sympathy for those who expose this country’s abuses, errors, and shortcomings. The government has bagged one significant trophy — Chelsea Manning — along with a handful of other whistleblowers, and shows zero interest in holding back should Ed Snowden ever return to the US.

• But with all the prosecutions, the stripping of protections for whistleblowers, the campaigns to eradicate “insider threats,” the US government still can’t stop the leaks. It has punished whistleblower after whistleblower, but Snowden continues to frustrate it, and he’s been joined by other leakers yet to be identified.

• Part of the problem, as Lapham saw it four decades ago, is the government’s desire to treat every leak as threatening to national security — a desire that has only grown in size and intensity over the past 15 years.

• Over the years, their hands began to curl. Their fingers formed into hooks from decades spent using them to rip the innards from turkeys in a remote processing plant in rural Iowa. They feared their overseers: disobedience could spell the denial of basic privileges, like access to the radio or television; worse, they might be forced to endure hours spent standing in a corner, staring at a wall, alone and scared. One of the men fled, only to be discovered months later, his remains decaying in the newly thawed Iowa snow.

• These are some of the stories of the 32 intellectually disabled men in “The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland,” a new book by New York Times reporter Dan Barry. Barry began writing about the experience of the men for the Times in 2014. Referred to as the “boys” by their abusive employers, the men were ostensibly brought to Iowa to be cared for by professionals and schooled in a basic trade. Their reality became something far different. They were held against their will in a decrepit schoolhouse and forced to work in bleak, arduous conditions at a turkey processing plant for a paltry $65 dollars a month. It took 35 years before state authorities rescued the men in 2009. Barry joined our podcast to describe how he was alerted to the story and how he achieved a few of his breakthroughs.

• We spend our time fighting against EU policies. But now, we’re campaigning to stay in.

• Lately one Australian family’s immigration case and prospect of forced removal from the UK made front-page news across Scottish national newspapers, was discussed in the House of Commons, picked up by The Guardian, The Independent, the Daily Mail, and BBC News — resulting in a job offer that might help keep the family here, and a crowdfunder page that has raised more than £4000.

• In the same week, around 100 people were torn from their long-standing communities in the UK and forcibly removed to a country from which they fled, or hadn’t lived in for up to 20 years. Of these people, their family, their friends, their distress, the fate that awaits them, there is no public awareness, nor any media reporting. With the exception of Shine A Light at openDemocracy, no journalists or media outlets picked up the multiple press releases widely issued by The Unity Centre in the lead up to the flight.

• In the early hours of Wednesday 25 May — at 1am — a delayed private charter plane left Stansted airport, bound for Nigeria and Ghana. The UK government does not publicly reveal the location of departure (even to detainees who are set to be on the plane). The flight itself does not appear on airport flight schedules or online as a planned flight. However, we can reveal that the contracted airline is Titan Airways.

• A Senate Judiciary Committee report concludes Federal Bureau of Investigation employees, including those in the intelligence community, “enjoy no legal protection for making reports of wrongdoing to supervisors or others in their chain of command.” It supports the passage of legislation to institute and expand whistleblower protections for FBI employees.

• In 2014, the Justice Department refused to adopt key reforms that would benefit FBI whistleblowers. The department rejected “judicial review, the incorporation of administrative law judges, time limits for decisions on cases, hearings upon request, and a requirement that federal government employees be produced to provide testimony if it would be relevant to the resolution of a case.”

• The proposed Federal Bureau of Investigation Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2016 seeks to correct a system the Justice Department will not change, by offering FBI employees opportunities for judicial review outside the Justice Department. It expands the list of individuals an FBI employee may make “protected disclosures” to when blowing the whistle.

• Ali paid a terrible price for his apostasy, subjected to withering columns by sportswriters, commentators, politicians, and even black leaders of the day. People lined up to attack both him and his beliefs, and ticket sales for his fights plummeted. And this was before his stance on the war in Vietnam, when after being reclassified he told a reporter that “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”

• However, in his review of Chomsky’s book Roth failed to apply the principle of universality to U.S. national security policy, HRW’s third priority program, including U.S. policy toward the Israel-Palestine conflict. This was one problematic aspect of Roth’s review, in addition to his apparent lack of familiarity with the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles. These problem areas were exacerbated by Roth’s petty criticisms of Chomsky’s book (see below), and his apparent ignorance of Chomsky’s lifelong work that is grounded to a very significant extent in the principle of universality and the rules of the UN Charter that Roth, in turn, did some damage to in his review for the New York Review.

• In 1993, Yousry received a job offer to work as an Arabic translator for the defense team of Omar Abdel Rahman, also known as the “Blind Sheikh.” Abdel Rahman, the spiritual leader of the Egyptian militant group Gamaa Islamiya, had been arrested earlier that year on accusations of plotting terrorist attacks against public landmarks in New York City.

• “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong — no Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”

• With those pointed words, Muhammad Ali explained his opposition to the US war in Vietnam and justified his refusal to submit himself to the draft. He declared himself a conscientious objector. After declining three times to step forward for induction into the US Armed Forces in April of 1967 in Houston, Texas, the reigning world heavyweight boxing champion was arrested, stripped of his title and state boxing licenses, and thrown into a three-year legal battle ending with his exoneration (on technical grounds) by the US Supreme Court.

• A white former police officer who shot and killed an unarmed, naked, mentally ill black veteran just outside Atlanta pleaded not guilty Monday to murder and other charges against him.

• Robert Olsen shot Anthony Hill on March 9, 2015, while responding to a call about a naked man behaving erratically outside a suburban Atlanta apartment complex. He was indicted in January on numerous charges, including felony murder and has since resigned from the force.

• Olsen appeared in DeKalb County Superior Court on Monday and waived formal arraignment. His attorney Don Samuel told the judge his client pleads not guilty.

• Samuel and Olsen left the courtroom immediately after entering the not guilty plea and declined to make any further comment.

• Black Lives Matter (BLM) began in 2014 as a hashtag after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case and evolved into a social movement. Since its inception, it has grown to 28 chapters in over 17 states in the USA, and one international chapter in Toronto. There’s no denying that the movement wants to disrupt the status quo, and that makes some people angry. They have shut airports and stopped Black Friday sales with their protests against police brutality.

• A Muslim man was assaulted and beaten after leaving his mosque in Queens, New York last Wednesday in an incident advocates are urging police to investigate as a possible hate crime.

• Mohammed Rasheed Khan, 59, left prayers at the Center for Islamic Studies in Jamaica, Queens, around 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday night. According to CAIR-NY Executive Director Afaf Nasher, he got on his bike to make the short trip home, and before he’d even traveled half a block, he was assaulted by three men who repeatedly punched him in the head and face. He’s now suffering from at least five broken bones in his face, including his nose and eye socket, along with a concussion and fractured ribs. He’s due to have surgery today.

• It was March 8, 1971, the night of Ali’s first fight with Joe Frazier, and the noise from that epic battle provided cover for the break-in of an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. The burglary, by eight activists who stole every file in the office, revealed the illegal spying operations that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had organized against a broad swathe of Americans, including Martin Luther King, Jr. The revelations led to congressional investigations and major reforms of all intelligence agencies.

• Stephen Ruth, who remains free on bail, was arrested in April shortly after he told a CBS affiliate that he was the culprit and that he dismantled the cameras “in order to save lives.” He said the county shortened the yellow light duration from 5 seconds to 3 seconds in a bid to make more money.

• He’s accused of 17 felonies and faces a maximum seven-year prison sentence if convicted on all the charges. He pleaded not guilty Friday in a local court and wants to go to trial for snipping the wires on as many as 16 red light cameras on intersections on Route 25 between Coram and Centereach.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The good news for Comcast? The latest edition of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) indicates that the nation’s largest cable company actually has a slightly better customer satisfaction rating than last year. The bad news? Comcast remains among the worst-rated companies of any industry in America thanks to limited competition. According to the firm’s full ratings for cable providers, Comcast saw an eight point rise in customer satisfaction, thanks in part to crazy ideas like actually showing up on time for appointments and a website that actually works.

• The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) has today published for public consultation draft guidelines on the implementation by regulators of new net neutrality rules and is seeking the views of stakeholders over the next six weeks, with the consultation closing on 18 July.

• Europe’s telecoms watchdog has set out its first ideas on how to implement regulation for so-called net neutrality, even though that term isn’t once used by the body overseeing implementation of the law.

• The guidelines from the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) do not create any new rules, but will clarify how the legislation—adopted by the European Parliament last October—will be enforced. However before setting those guidelines in stone on August 31, BEREC is holding a public consultation that will run until mid-July.

• Ofcom’s international policy manager Ben Wallis, who also co-chairs BEREC’s network neutrality expert working group, said that the end of August was a “very hard deadline which we have no intention of missing.”

• Rovi, the company that’s buying TiVo, isn’t very interested in staying in the hardware business.

• The combined company will be looking to partner with set-top box makers instead of continuing to sell set-top boxes directly to consumers, Rovi Chief Financial Officer Peter Halt said at an investors conference last week. (See transcript and this Light Reading article.)

• Halt noted that TiVo’s direct relationship with consumers has “been a source of great innovation for them and stuff like that.” But he then said that “being in the hardware business isn’t something that necessarily excites us.” It sounds like TV watchers could still get boxes powered by TiVo software and services, but the hardware would be made by another company.

DRM

• What is EFF worried about?

• The W3C effort to standardize Encrypted Media Extensions (EME, part of the Media Extensions Working Group) marks a new era in W3C standardization. For the first time, implementations of a W3C standard will be covered by “anti-circumvention” laws such as the Section 1201 of the US DMCA; European laws that implement Article 6 of the EUCD; and Canada’s Bill C-11.

• These laws have been used by companies and rightsholders to threaten security and privacy researchers who came forward to report defects in their products. These laws may also create legal risks for entities who independently implement EME-compatible systems.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• A YouTube user who creates video essays has been hit with a punishing lawsuit after selecting Stanley Kubrick as a subject matter and uploading his work to YouTube. UK-based Lewis Bond from Channel Criswell is being targeted by the music publishers behind the 1971 classic ‘A Clockwork Orange’ who want huge damages for willful infringement.

• A Ninth Circuit ruling that a 0.23 second sample in Madonna’s Vogue did not infringe copyright creates a split with the Sixth Circuit’s Bridgeport ruling that could be sent to the Supreme Court

• The IPKat was delighted to receive the following guest post from Katfriend Ben Williams. Complete with Star Wars quotes, Ben looks at recent discussions in DRM and the impact of piracy. Have we really moved on in the last 15 years?

• Is the Ninth Circuit ripe for intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court? The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has decided that the de minimis doctrine applies to the infringement of sound recordings. The Ninth Circuit has rejected the 2005 Bridgeport Music Inc. v. Dimension Films decision that essentially any sampling of a sound recording results in infringement.

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