● 06.12.16

● Links 12/6/2016: Chromebooks EoL, Android N Release Date

Posted in News Roundup at 11:33 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux has become the most popular operating system through forks like Android, Fire OS, Tizen, and Ubuntu, but now low-power wearable and Internet of Things (IoT) devices have bucked the trend.

• Instead of utilizing the open source OS, these devices have found more success with real-time operating systems (RTOS) that function through a mobile OS, either iOS, Android, or in some cases Windows Phone.

Desktop

• The original Chromebooks launched back in 2011 are reaching the end of their support cycle. With Google offering a fairly generous five years (*) of support and updates, users have had a good run, but the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook is the first device to drop off the support list.

• Having been launched in August 2011, Acer AC700 Chromebook will be in a similar position in a couple of months. But it’s not entirely clear what will happen. Google says that after five years, automatic updates are “no longer guaranteed”, but the company has continued to provide updates for its own devices that originate from 2010.

Server

• Full-stack DevOps automation can be done more easily today than ever before, but not every organization should do it.

Kernel Space

• After a virgin start (cold or warm boot) with an empty diskette drive and then loaded with a standard 720K diskette you may run ‘mdir’ (from mtools) and it shows the directory fine.

• I’m not surprised that modifications to the Linux kernel sometimes introduce bugs but I am surprised to find someone who still uses floppies. I

Graphics Stack

• Timothy Arceri of Collabora published his second version of patches on Friday for implementing ARB_enhanced_layouts packing support for Mesa’s Intel i965 driver.

• Finishing up ARB_enhanced_layouts is basically the latest extension needed before the Intel driver will be able to declare OpenGL 4.4 compliance. Similar to a lot of other GL4 work in the Intel driver, this ARB_enhanced_layouts packing support is currently limited to Broadwell (Gen8) graphics hardware and newer.

Benchmarks

• Last week I published the first Linux review of the GeForce GTX 1080 followed by some performance-per-Watt and OpenGL results from the GTX 1080 going as far back as the 9800GTX, among other interesting follow-up tests with OpenGL/Vulkan/OpenCL. Since then one of the most popular requests has been for doing some deep learning benchmarks on the GTX 1080 along with some CUDA benchmarks, for those not relying upon OpenCL for open GPGPU computing. Here are some raw performance numbers as well as performance-per-Watt in the CUDA space.

Applications

• This week, we’re officially launching Vector, a forward-looking open source collaboration app, and the very first production-ready application built on top of the Matrix open standard. In fact Vector Web has been around for a bit, growing and being polished with the help of a passionate community of pioneers and they’ve done a great job of supporting us with useful feedback! And now the mobile apps are out!

• In this article we shall discuss about two powerful Linux utilities that are used for sharing file/folder to network computers that are scp and rsync. scp allows you to simply copy directories or files from/to any remote destination whereas the rsync, besides simply copying files also acts as a synchronising tool that would synchronise the changes between source and destination. The discussion below is about their usage and various parameters that can be used along with to increase speed and security.

• In the final installment of this series we shift our focus away from FLOSS applications for creating bitmap graphics (in Chapter 1 we talked about Krita and in Chapter 2 about GIMP) to Inkscape, a seriously cool application for creating vector graphics, and we do so by talking to Tom Carlos, an artist who uses Inkscape to create eye-catching portraits and landscapes.

• Memory management in terms of monitoring memory usage is one important thing to do on your Linux system, there are many tools available for monitoring your memory usage that you can find on different Linux distributions. But they work in different ways, in this how to guide, we shall take a look at how to install and use one such tool called smem.

• An IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client is a program that a user can install on their computer and it sends and receives messages to and from an IRC server. It simply connects you to a global network of IRC servers and enables one-on-one and group communication.

• There are still many users of IRC out there for one reason or the other, though considered an old fashion way of online communication. But leaving the talk of it being relevant or not to users around the world.

• Most users fear the command line. However, it holds real power and versatility. Commands issued from a shell enable system administrators a quick and easy way to update, configure and repair a system. The benefits of the command line are not only confined to system administration. The ability to transverse the file system quickly, give more information about files and directories, automate tasks, bring together the power of multiple console tools in a single command line, and run shell scripts are just a few examples of how the command line can offer a potent, multifarious toolbox.

Proprietary

• You’ve been waiting for it: the first major update to Substance Painter 2 since its release this past March is here. We’ve been hard at work developing the features that open Substance Painter to new uses (think animation and VFX) including Linux availability, 8K map exports, support for high-dpi (4K) monitors, and UDIM workflow management.

Instructionals/Technical

• Linux Journey was created to document the single journey I took to learn Linux, which is far from over. But, everyone’s journey is a little different. We can further improve the knowledge of the greater Linux community through contribution and collaboration. Thusly, the text content of Linux Journey has been made free to modify and distribute.

Games

• For this installment of the Linux Crowd, I’m checking out a video game. I’ve long been an avid gamer and I couldn’t be happier with the deluge of Linux games that have hit our hungry desktops. To see more and more games get funded on Kickstarter and Indiegogo that support GNU/Linux is truly heartening. Aside from the usual gadget fare over in crowdfunding land, I thought I’d take some time and cover one that crossed my desk (er…screen).

• While this article may sound like an answer to the recent pieces seen on Ars, or PCWorld, regarding how poorly the Steam Machines have done in the past 6 months, this could not be further from the truth, since I had this article as draft since May and only decided to finalize it recently using the most recent data available following the disclosure of Valve and the 500 000 Steam Controllers sold. So, this one will try to answer the question “How are the Steam Machines doing, 7 months later?“.

• Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at HITMAN and Life is Strange for Linux, and new games out for Linux.

• For those wanting to play The Talos Principle this weekend, Croteam has released a significant update to the game.

• Most notable to the update is there are improvements and optimizations to the Vulkan API. Addiitonally, Vulkan is now supported with the 32-bit Windows/Linux builds of the game. Previously, The Talos Principle’s Vulkan renderer would only work with the 64-bit version of the game engine.

• Valve released a stable Steam client update on Friday evening with all of the changes we’ve been seeing from the frequent beta releases.

• First and foremost there is the Steam overlay fix for Vulkan games, which primarily benefits the AMD graphics driver stack. Yesterday I posted some benchmarks showing the performance impact for AMDGPU-PRO of this Vulkan fix.

• Myself, Samsai and Ysblokje from the community had a few games of CS:GO the other night and it was interesting. One this is certain, I am horrific at the game. Watching the replays of my deaths shows me just how slow I am to react upon seeing an enemy.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Kaffeine is a media player application that uses the KDE libraries. As part of my work maintaining the Linux Kernel media subsystem I needed some tools to test whether or not the digital TV core support works properly and to test Linux drivers for new devices. So, I’ve recently been working to improve Kaffeine to offer the necessary features for such tests. As part of this, I recently created a major Kaffeine version (2.0) that uses the latest version of KF5 (KDE Frameworks 5), and to use Qt5 library. I also started helping with upstream Kaffeine maintenance.

• One of the tasks in my Google Summer of Code project was build Umbrello using KF5 in MsWindows and see if had any problems.

• My name’s Sara Tepes, I’m 17 years old, I was born in Romania but grew up in the U.S. and I live super close to Washington D.C. I love roses, rabbits, tea, and historical movies.

• Here’s a handy tip for you – if you see a post that you don’t want to read, use your mouse/touchpad scroll thingy with direction “down”, keep using it until you don’t see the post anymore.

• Planet KDE and similar sites exist to show the people in the communities, what they are working on and what their interests and characters are. It’s not an official news site like KDE Dot News and it’s not even on the kde.org domain which I find disappointing. Posts on topics outwith KDE are encouraged as that gives insight into our friends we work with and builds community.

• Polishing is important but after a while you need to put a fork in it and decide it’s done and so we’ve announced KDE neon User Edition 5.6, our first edition which we advocate for our target audience.

• I recently learned that the guys at Openmandriva camp are working hard and are going to release a release candidate soon.

• Mageia is doing the same. That means that two of my favorite distros will have a new version to offer.

• What makes me uneasy is KDE 5. I am not a big fan of this desktop environment.

• Oh, and I read yesterday that PCLOS is releasing a new iso… also with KDE 5! My reaction was that of Julius Caesar: “Et tu, PCLOS! Then, fall, Mechatotoro!”

• But the PCLOS devs understand that not everyone is crazy about KDE 5, so they kindly and wisely state that “you can keep your KDE 4 if you want to because nobody is going to force you to use KDE 5.”

• In the last weeks, we worked to improve the timeline preview (pre-rendering) feature, and added a few UI improvements, like a progress bar in the Render button, see screenshot.

• But not all was laziness! Yesterday, all Kickstarter backers got their surveys, and over half have already returned them! Today, the people who backed us through paypal got their surveys, and we got a fair return rate as well!

• This year’s kickstarter fundraising campaign for Krita was more nerve-wracking than the previous two editions. Although we ended up 135% funded, we were almost afraid we wouldn’t make it, around the middle. Maybe only the release of Krita 3.0 turned the campaign around. Here’s my chaotic and off-the-cuff analysis of this campaign.

• MUP, my markup previewer, was starting to show its age, being based on PyQt 4 and Python 2. I spent a bit of time last week to port it to PyQt 5 and Python 3.

• I joined Kolab Systems just over 1.5 years ago, and during that time I have put a lot of my energy and time into working with the amazing team of people here to improve our processes and execution of those processes around sales, communication, community engagement, professional services delivery, and product development. They have certainly kept me busy and moving at warp 9, but the results have certainly been their own reward as we have moved together from strength to strength across the board.

• Over the last few months I have been poking away at a refactoring of the IMAP library that Kolab’s IMAP filter/proxy uses behind the scenes, called eimap. It consolidated quite a bit of duplicated code between the various IMAP commands that are supported, and fixed a few bugs along the way. This refactoring dropped the code count, makes implementing new commands even easier, and has allowed for improvements that affect all commands (usually because they are related to the core IMAP protocol) to be made in one central place. This was rolled as eimap 0.2 the other week and has made its way through the packaging process for Kolab. This is a significant milestone for eimap on the path to being able to be considered “stable”.

• Some weeks ago, I was criticized on KDE Cafe group on Telegram because, when I see that after months of inputs some people still have a very enormous misconception of EU, I insisted on informing them.

• While most of the participants seem to be going to the meeting for the purpose of getting more KDE applications on Windows, MacOS or Android — indeed platforms where our technology can make a difference for developers and where our applications can make a difference for Freedom — I’m going with a slightly different purpose. I’m there for our traditional niche platforms: the BSD’s. But also for packaging in a traditional sense, and for building our software effectively and efficiently.

• I talked about KDE on Flatpak before (called xdg-app then). Lots happened since: new name, fancy new website and a couple of releases shows it’s getting quite stable.

• [...]

• Also we need to compile the applications, start using them and see where’s the limitations, especially regarding the sandboxing. In the end, we also want to bring KDE applications to our GNU/Linux users who cannot reach our stable releases.

• So I have successfully completed the community bonding period and it was 23, May 2016 when Davide, Alessandro and me decided to dig deeper into our Google Summer of Code project WikiToLearn:Ratings.

• In the past week, I worked on the code reviews I got. Hence, I changed the classes’ design all over. The way it works now, is that there is a central dispatcher, the daemon, that handles all the jobs. I chose this design, since it was how originally KIMAP jobs, was supposed to be managed. My mentor and Daniel Vratil helped me in deciding this.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• We’re all used to hearing about features GNOME has retired, moved, or outright dropped from Nautilus (aka ‘Files’), the GNOME file manager.

• Pop a cushion on the floor to break your jaw crashing from the following news: for the release of GNOME 3.22 later this year GNOME has actually added a new feature!

• I’m being a little facetious, of course. But news of this feature will please the power users among you who’ve been a little put off by the application’s recent …streamlining.

Distributions

Screenshots/Screencasts

OpenSUSE/SUSE

Red Hat Family

Finance

Debian Family

• This was a holiday week for me, so my time was rather crammed into a short space.

Derivatives

• Tails is a popular privacy-focused Linux distribution–here are some other Linux distros for different purposes–with an aim to provide anonymous computing experience. This distro was most famously used by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

• If you are acquainted with Tails, you might be knowing that Tails forces all the network activity to go through the TOR network, making your all activities anonymous. Being a Live Linux distro, it can be booted from an SD card, DVD, or USB drive.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Dear readers, we have a new contest ahead of us. The format is very similar to the two previous contests that we had, the one in 2013, which resulted in a lucky winner getting a Nexus phone, as the Ubuntu Phone was not ready yet then, and the one in 2014-2015, where I finally handed out an Ubuntu Phone to an entrepreneuring contestant. This year? The Ubuntu M10 tablet.

• First, this little contest has nothing to do with Canonical. This is my personal endeavor, and it’s all about you and me having a good time. You read my books, that’s right, you write honest reviews, even if they be had, and by that you enter the competition. At the end of it, there will be a random draw, and someone will win a BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet, which I have tested recently, and it seems to be an okay nerdy gadget. Ready for details?

• Some relationships kick off with sparks and fireworks and ambulances and whatnot. Others have a humbler, slower, more restrained start, filled with dread and hope and anxiety. The latter scenario applies for my early hands-on experience with the BQ Aquaris M10 tablet, loaded with Ubuntu.

• I got a hold of a YubiKey NEO, so I was wondering how useful it is and what can I do with it. Here’s my “tutorial” on setting it up using Ubuntu 16.04 and actually using it.

• We announced the Snappy Playpen a few days ago and yesterday was the Kickoff event where we basically invited everyone who was interested, brought in a lot of snapd and snapcraft experts and started snapping software together.

• A new theme suite called “Arc Theme” offers flat themes with transparent elements for Gtk 3/2 and Gnome. It is compatible with Gnome 3.18/3.16 and GTK 3.18/3.16, it works under most of the desktops environments which uses GTK engines to render the theme, such as Unity, Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, and so on. This pack offers three versions ‘Arc’ which is combination of much Light and less dark colors, second is ‘Arc Dark’ which offers full dark color, and 3rd ‘Arc Darker’ also had combination of light & dark theme, you can choose theme whatever meet your requirements. This theme is not compatible with Linux Mint because the latest version of Linux Mint 17 based on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty which uses old GTK version which is not compatible. There is also arc theme available for Firefox. Arc icons looks great with Arc theme and both makes desktop pretty amazing. You can use Unity Tweak Tool, Gnome-tweak-tool.

• Ubuntu’s convergence has made some serious strides in the past few days – having been made available with the OTA 11 software update on the original Ubuntu Touch powered Meizu Pro 5 via Aethercast i.e wirelessly, it is making its rounds boastfully to other smartphones powered by the open source mobile operating system.

• We are getting it as fresh news that the aforementioned Convergence technology will be making its way to the OnePlus One and the Nexus 5 thanks to UBport’s developer Marius Gripsgård for making it known to us via his Google Plus post.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• ReactOS is a relatively new open source operating system that resembles the looks of Windows NT and aims to offer similar levels of functionality and application compatibility. Featuring a wine-based user mode, this system doesn’t use any of the Unix architecture, but is a rewrite of the NT architecture from scratch, with its very own FAT32 implementation, and completely free of legal implications. That said, this is not yet another Linux distro, but a unique Windows-like system that is a part of the free software world. This quick guide aims at users who want an easy to use, open source replacement for their Windows system.

• Owncloud GmbH released an official statement last week, detailing their thoughts and feelings on Frank Karlitschek’s new service, NextCloud, and announced the closing of ownCloud Inc. They cite the Launch of Karlitschek’s new product and the “poached” devs as causes for the shuttering of the Massachusetts incorporated organization, just 12 hours after the NextCloud announcement. The report also details the formation of the “ownCloud Foundation,” an effort to strengthen the community despite the corporation’s closure.

Events

• This year we celebrated the fourth LaKademy conference and for my luck it happened in the city I live in, Rio de Janeiro The reason for that is because I have not had much time for contributing to KDE as I used to have. The fact that the event happened in Rio saved me a lot o time and sure I wouldn’t miss it for nothing hehe.

• The time to summarize the foss-north event has come. I’d like to start by thanking everyone – speakers, sponsors and visitors – you all made it a great event!

• After the event I sent out a questionnaire which made for some interesting reading. About 30% of the visitors have replied to the questions, so I feel that the input is fairly representative.

• The Seattle GNU/Linux Conference (we like to call it SeaGL) has opened its call for participation for the 2016 event.

• SeaGL welcomes speakers of all backgrounds and levels of experience—even if you’ve never spoken at a technical conference. If you’re excited about GNU/Linux technologies or free and open source software, we want to hear your ideas.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Chrome 52 Beta may have just been released, but I’m already looking forward to Chrome 53 for very significant performance improvements!

• Google engineers have been using the Motion Mark web benchmark for making some improvements to the Chrome GPU pipeline. They’ve made around a 47% improvement in the speed of Chrome for these common benchmarks while for some particular tests they are multiple times faster.

Mozilla

• We all know Mozilla by its great work in the software development. Some of the great applications we use daily are actually built by Mozilla. It includes Firefox, the most common web browser and email client Thunderbird. Mozilla has taken a step further to act as best of the security testing tools to strengthen open source security through fund called “Secure Open Source” a.k.a SOS.

• Mozilla Firefox is a great browser. Not everyone may agree with me on this but that is fine and expected. Firefox is the browser that gives users the most control over their browsing experience. It has the strongest add-on ecosystem of the three, and is backed by an organization that for the most part seems to be on the user’s side of things when it comes to rights and such.

Databases

• PostgreSQL’s annual developer conference, PGCon, took place in May, which made it a good place to get a look at the new PostgreSQL features coming in version 9.6. The first 9.6 beta was released just the week before and several contributors demonstrated key changes at the conference in Ottawa. For many users, this was the first time to see the finished versions of features that had been under development for months or years.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks a Infrastructure and System Administrator to start work as soon as possible. The role is scheduled for 40 hours a week. The work time is flexible and work happens from the applicant’s home office, which can be located anywhere in the world.

• Our infrastructure is based on 4 large hypervisors with about 50 virtual machines running on them. In addition there are several bare-metal machines, additional backup servers, externally hosted virtual machines and services, split across three data centers and connected via dynamic routing.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Development is ongoing, so it’s possible RoslynPad will come with all of the paid LINQPad goodies, minus the price tag. If you’re a die-hard LINQPad user, give it a go and see if it’s the substitute for you.

BSD

• The pkgsrc team has prepared the 50th release of their package management system, with the 2016Q1 version. It’s infrequent event, as the 100th release will be held after 50 quarters.

• The NetBSD team has prepared series of interviews with the authors. The next one is with Jonathan Perkin, a developer in the Joyent team.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Make 4.2.1, a bug-fix release for GNU Make 4.2, has been released and is available in the usual locations.

• The people behind the satellite, GomSpace, has a complete parser for the ADS-B data beacons and [destevez] has it rolled into a GNU Radio module. There’s a good representation of captured data on a map in [destevez’s] blog post. If you want something less interactive, you can see a static map of all collected data. If you want to try your hand at picking up GOMX-3, you can hear it transmitting in the video below.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Support grows for RISC-V open-source instruction set architecture.

• A few weeks ago Yubico published an interesting piece on their security architecture illustrating conflicts between Open Source and Secure Hardware. While we agree on the most important points raised in this article (basically that Secure Elements are a critical part of a security architecture to provide protection against physical attacks and device interdiction), we’d like to offer our perspective on how we’re trying to improve the status quo.

• If you didn’t have a cloud chamber, you can build your own thanks to the open source plans from [M. Bindhammer]. The chamber uses alcohol, a high voltage supply, and a line laser. It isn’t quite the dry ice chamber you might have seen in the Sears Christmas catalog. A petri dish provides a clear observation port.

Programming/Development

• Python’s (in)famous global interpreter lock (GIL), which effectively serializes multi-threaded access to the interpreter (thus hampering concurrency using threads), has long been seen as something that Python could do without. But there are both technical and political hurdles to clear before the GIL can be removed. Larry Hastings presented his thoughts and progress on doing a “gilectomy” to the CPython interpreter at the 2016 Python Language Summit.

• The opening session at the 2016 Python Language Summit concerned the ssl module in the standard library. Cory Benfield and Christian Heimes described some of the problems that the module suffers from and discussed some plans for making things better.

• Do you know how top programmers write mission-critical code at NASA? To make such code clearer, safer, and easier to understand, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has laid 10 rules for developing software.

Leftovers

• Gumball, a game released in 1983 for the Apple II and other early PCs, was never all that popular. For 33 years, it held a secret that was discovered this week by anonymous crackers who not only hacked their way through incredibly advanced copyright protection, but also became the first people to discover an Easter Egg hidden by the game’s creator, Robert A. Cook. Best of all? Cook congratulated them Friday for their work.

Health/Nutrition

• The bill would update the Toxic Substances Control Act amid complaints that its 40-year-old provisions hobble the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from effectively regulating chemicals, including those ranging from asbestos and flame retardants to everyday household products.

• U.S. lawmakers have just passed legislation to finally update how toxic chemicals are regulated, but, according to watchdog groups, the changes to “the worst environmental law on the books” still leave consumers at risk.

• The House voted to update the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) last month, and the Senate passed the measure Tuesday in a voice vote.

• New and higher radioactivity limits for drinking water tainted in the case of a nuclear emergency were put forward by the Environmental Protection Agency this week, a move that environmental organizations are calling “egregious.”

• “The upshot really is that the [nuclear] industry really wants to be able to release more radioactivity and not be responsible for it,” Diane D’Arrigo, a project director at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, told ThinkProgress. “This is really a big loss.”

• On Monday, the EPA proposed new guidelines for radiological emergencies — like a nuclear meltdown or a dirty bomb, a weapon that combines conventional explosives such as dynamite with radioactive material. During a radiological emergency, radioactive material could be released into the rivers, lakes, and streams used by public water suppliers. EPA is proposing non-regulatory guidance that authorities can use “to protect residents from experiencing the harmful effects from radiation in drinking water following an emergency.” Guidelines influence radioactive limits that trigger safety measures like local water use restrictions or deploying alternative water supplies. The EPA calls these guidelines the Protective Action Guide, or PAG.

• Most chemicals used in everything from cleaners to candy bars have never been reviewed by either the EPA or the FDA. This measure won’t change that.

• Last month, a strain of bacteria resistant to “last-resort” antibiotics appeared in the United States for the first time. Luckily, doctors were able to kill the bacterium, but public health officials warned that one day a “superbug” resistant to all our antibiotics could emerge.

• The Air Force announced on Friday that it has lost thousands of records belonging to the service’s inspector general due to a database crash.

• “We estimate we’ve lost information for 100,000 cases dating back to 2004,” Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek told The Hill in an email.

• “The database crashed and there is no data,” Stefanek said. “At this time we don’t have any evidence of malicious intent.”

• The database, called the Automated Case Tracking System (ACTS), holds all records related to IG complaints, investigations, appeals andFreedom of Information Act requests.

• ​Data related to USAF Inspector General investigations have been lost, the Air Force said Friday. The service discovered Monday the data stored in the IG’s Automated Case Tracking System database were corrupted, spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said in a statement. The service is investigating the cause and attempting to recover the lost data. The database stores records related to IG complaints, investigations, and appeals along with FOIA requests. It is also used to track congressional inquiries. Senior official data are held separately. Stefanek noted the immediate impact of the loss is being assessed, but the service is “experiencing significant delays in the processing of inspector general and congressional constituency inquiries.”

Security

• We are proud to announce the return of EFF’s Badge Hack Pageant at the 24th annual DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas. EFF invites all DEF CON attendees to stretch their creative skills by reinventing past conference badges as practical, artful, and over-the-top objects of their choosing. The numerous 2015 pageant entries included a crocheted badge cozy, a quadcopter, counterfeit badges, a human baby, a breathalyzer, a dazzling array of LED shows, and more than one hand-made record player that would make MacGyver weep. We encourage you to join us and contribute something whether you are a crafter, a beginner, or a hardware hacking wizard. It’s a great summer project so get started now and enjoy a great show!

• This has been the week of Twitter hacks, from Mark Zuckerberg to a trove of millions of passwords dumped online to, most recently, Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson.

• “Memory protection keys” are an Intel processor feature that is making its first appearance in Skylake server CPUs. They are a user-controllable, coarse-grained protection mechanism, allowing a program to deny certain types of access to ranges of memory. LWN last looked at kernel support for memory protection keys (or “pkeys”) at the end of 2015. The system-call interface is now deemed to be in its final form, and there is a push to stage it for merging during the 4.8 development cycle. So the time seems right for a look at how this feature will be used on Linux systems.

Defence/Aggression

• Gold’s conference was about the French peace initiative concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

• I have a lurking suspicion – it is still lurking around – that this is not really a French initiative, but a camouflaged American one.

• It arouses the fury of the Israeli government, and no American president can do that if he wants – himself or his party – to be reelected.

• Amid a reassertion of U.S.-backed neoliberal policies in Latin America, Venezuela’s socialist government totters at a tipping point, beset by a severe economic crisis, but Lisa Sullivan sees a ground-up struggle of Venezuelans to survive.

• Military veterans are one of the most conned groups in America. Their exploitation resumed in full force with the 9/11 attacks against America. Those attacks allowed the George W. Bush administration to ramp up patriotic fever, justify launching a “global war on terrorism,” and continue the American empire’s capitalistic attempts to control other countries’ rulers and resources – which imperialism actually had provided the motivation for the 9/11 attacks. Bush himself conscripted the role of “President” into that of “Commander-in-Chief,” and with it the militarization of America was in full swing. Politicians, mainstream media, Hollywood, professional and college sporting programs, businesses, community institutions, and even religious groups accommodated, celebrated and worshipped the military uniform – with the American flag visible on the lapels of politicians and sportscasters. Shortly after the illegal, falsely-based invasion of defenseless Iraq in 2003, even a small hospital in New Hampshire displayed American flags and patriotic signs, such as “Support the Troops.” The patriotic con, which is undermining America’s morality and security, is now deeply ingrained in the status quo and readily seen in the 2016 presidential campaign.

• The South Korean Navy filed a civil lawsuit against 116 individual anti-base protesters and five groups including the Gangjeong Village Association demanding $3 million in compensation for alleged construction delays caused by protests over the past eight years.

• The global spiral downwards towards less peace continues, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) finds.

• The findings are laid out in the think tank’s latest Global Peace Index (GPI), now in its 10th edition, released Wednesday. It ranks 163 states and territories based on 23 indicators covering domestic and international conflict, societal safety and security, and a country’s militarization.

• Book-ending the 2016 index (pdf) are Iceland, ranking as the most peaceful country, and Syria, which ranks dead last. The United States comes in at 103, just behind Uganda and Guinea, while the UK comes in much further ahead at 47.

• Whatever your take on the presidential race, Tuesday’s primary results make it all but certain that, come January, President Obama will hand over the keys to the White House — and the nuclear codes — to Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

• Both presumptive nominees have expressed deep concern about the nuclear threat. With more than 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world, rising tensions among nuclear-armed countries, extravagant investment in a new generation of these weapons, and the evolving specter of nuclear terrorism — the risks of a catastrophe are reaching unprecedented heights. It’s little wonder the Doomsday Clock hovers at three minutes to midnight.

• Everybody knew that the awful day would come when the Queen of Chaos, the Empress of Ineptitude, would become the Democratic Party’s “presumptive” nominee.

• It did last Tuesday. Wall Streeters, Cold Warriors, “humanitarian” interveners, Zionist settler supporters, and other assorted miscreants can now rejoice!

• Add to that list those who think that, at last, little girls can grow up thinking that the “glass ceiling” is gone – as if it wasn’t already by 1984, when Walter Mondale selected Geraldine Ferraro to run as his Vice President.

• Come on, they aren’t tanks, they’re armored rescue vehicles. And the, uh, grenade launchers would only be used to launch teargas canisters. When necessary. And the M-16s? Standard police issue.

• Hillary Clinton spent years vowing to defend the rights of children worldwide, but under her leadership the State Department played a central role in allowing rebel forces in southern Sudan to use child soldiers in defiance of a 2008 law forbidding it, reports Nick Turse at The Intercept.

• The law is called the Child Soldiers Prevention Act, or CSPA, and after South Sudan’s independence, in 2011 the White House issued annual waivers that kept taxpayer dollars flowing its way despite its use of child soldiers.

• As the world is faced with numerous crises requiring cooperation between the US and Russia – Syria, Ukraine, and international terrorism to name just three – Washington just can’t help its Russophobic ways.

• Most recently, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul expressed his extreme displeasure (dare I say revulsion) at the idea that the Canadian Government, and specifically its Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion, could possibly make the independent decision to not follow the diktats of Washington in adopting a Canadian version of the Magnitsky Act, a piece of proposed legislation which would have severe repercussions for the Russia-Canada relationship. McFaul, a staunch anti-Putin crusader whose time as ambassador was marred by countless failures and embarrassing public blunders, went so far as to cast doubt on the commitment to human rights of Mr. Dion and the Canadian Government.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Emails recently released by the State Department give more information on how a securities trader and big-money Clinton donor was appointed by her office to the International Security Advisory Board (ISAB), a group that advises the Secretary of State on nuclear weapons and other security issues.

• According to the State Department’s own website, members are “national security experts with scientific, military, diplomatic, and political backgrounds.” The current members show a lot of generals, ambassadors and academics.

• So it seemed odd to ABC News that Clinton felt that Rajiv K. Fernando, above, qualified for the group, since his background is in high-frequency stock trading and Internet “ventures.” He has donated heavily both to the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton’s two presidential campaigns, and the Obama campaigns.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Climate activists on Wednesday delivered more than 90,000 petitions to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) demanding that the party’s 2016 platform include a nationwide ban on fracking.

• As the DNC convened in Washington, D.C. for its open forum on shaping the platform, activists with Food & Water Watch, 350.org, Honor the Earth, and other groups handed over the appeals and said officials must acknowledge the harm that fracking has caused the environment.

• The luminous glow of light pollution prevents nearly 80 percent of people in North America from seeing the Milky Way in the night sky.

• That’s according to a new atlas of artificial night sky brightness that found our home galaxy is now hidden from more than one-third of humanity.

• Norway announced a zero deforestation policy in its procurement of goods, two years after making a pledge with Germany and Britain to ‘promote national commitments that encourage deforestation free supply chains.’

• The Dead Zone that grows annually in the Gulf of Mexico could stretch to over an area the size of Connecticut, according to new predictions. In all, this area of the Gulf where little life can exist will cover near 5,900 square miles.

• The hypoxic zones are created because of the runoff of agricultural waste into waterways. Phosphorus and nitrogen from fertilizers and waste from livestock can rob regions of water bodies of their oxygen. As a result, plants and animals in the area are unable to take in the vital element, and die of suffocation.

• Although the size of the dead zone may sound large, the predicted area is about average for the summer season, researchers contend.

• During the early stages of resistance against the Keystone XL pipeline in Nebraska, an unlikely alliance of farmers, ranchers, environmentalists and Native Americans held a spiritual gathering at the farm of Art Tanderup. While gathered in a tepee during a cold night, Mekasi Horinek of the Ponca Nation had a vision: they should plant the newly revitalized Ponca Nation sacred corn along the proposed route of the pipeline.

• The planting of this seed not only offered a life-affirming resistance to the pipeline, but it also represented a return of the corn to this land after a 137-year absence. Mekasi’s great-grandfather had walked across this very farm at the age of eight when white settlers drove the tribe from Nebraska and forced them to relocate to Oklahoma on a 600-mile trail of tears. Allowed to take with them only what they could carry, the natives to this land had to leave behind their newly planted crop of corn and thus lose a precious link to their heritage.

• Years before Big Oil began sowing doubt about the science of climate change and fighting efforts to cut dangerous emissions, the fossil fuel industry sought to muddle the research around smog, according to an investigation published this week by InsideClimate News.

• The revelations—from one of the first news outlets to expose ExxonMobil’s climate deception—are based on hundreds of industry speeches, articles, reports, and oral histories that span the last 70 years, many of them gathered by the Boston-based Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) and dozens unearthed by InsideClimate News (ICN) in the Library of Congress and other archives.

Finance

• In Egypt, both the ruling elites and the urban middle class cling to the military regime, in the hope that they will be protected from a seemingly inevitable tide of social unrest.

• Heralding a new victory for the Fight for $15 movement, lawmakers in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday unanimously approved a measure to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020, which Mayor Muriel Bowser has promised to sign.

• Beyond 2020, the minimum wage will rise with inflation. “When I see how much it costs to live in Washington, D.C.—and that cost is only going up—we know that it takes more money for every household to be able to afford to live,” Bowser said during a news conference following the vote.

• I think we are about to have the most serious constitutional crisis since the Abdication of King Edward VIII. I suppose we had better try to enjoy it.

• If – as I think we will – we vote to leave the EU on June 23, a democratically elected Parliament, which wants to stay, will confront a force as great as itself – a national vote, equally democratic, which wants to quit. Are we about to find out what actually happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?

• I am genuinely unsure how this will work out. I hope it will only destroy our two dead political parties, stiffened corpses that have long propped each other up with the aid of BBC endorsement and ill-gotten money.

• The Trans-Pacific Partnership, the huge new 12-country trade deal, raises the question: How low would we go to get the next NAFTA-style deal?

• The basic idea of a trade deal is that we will lower our tariffs, you will lower your tariffs, and trade goes up. That would be a trade deal.

• TPP is much more than that. The tariff schedules in TPP are not controversial. Really, TPP will not pass or fail based on the tariff schedule.

• Rather, the rules in TPP are very controversial because the rules define power relationships, and those power relationships determine who will take the gains from globalization.

• In Racine, Wisconsin, it is clear that a community was abandoned.

• On either side of Memorial Drive, one after another, are relics of better days: massive brick factories now closed, sprawling warehouses deserted, empty lots, boarded-up buildings. Rusted water towers and aged smokestacks rise from industrial rooftops, like sentries standing guard long after they served their duty. Racine Steel Casings, Case Tractors, Sealed Air, Jacobsen Textron, Golden Books, Young Radiator—once-great employers, all gone, but not forgotten by locals.

• One in two Americans will experience poverty or near poverty during their working years. But you wouldn’t know that from watching the news.

• Nightly news broadcasts on the three major television networks barely mentioned the 47 million Americans living in poverty in the first quarter of 2016. According to a new report from Media Matters for America, NBC Nightly News ran just two segments on the topic in the first three months of this year. What’s worse, ABC and CBS failed to cover the issue entirely.

• The EU provides a means to exercise more control of international capitalism.

• Donald Trump is at home in the underworld. Tom Robbins writes that the de facto GOP nominee “has encountered a steady stream of mob-tainted offers that he apparently couldn’t refuse” in his decades in business. He “worked with mob-controlled companies and unions” while building his empire, the Washington Post reports.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Playing the game well or honorably is irrelevant.

• This was no ordinary primary race, not a contest between warring factions within the party establishment, á la Obama-Clinton in ’08 or even Gore-Bradley in ’00. This was a barely quelled revolt that ought to have sent shock waves up and down the party, especially since the Vote of No Confidence overwhelmingly came from the next generation of voters. Yet editorialists mostly drew the opposite conclusion.

• Many Bernie Sanders backers feel that the mainstream media did its best to marginalize the Vermont senator’s campaign and clear the way for Hillary Clinton’s coronation – and they’re not all wrong, says Neal Gabler.

• State and local threats to voting rights have exploded in the three years since the U.S. Supreme Court attacked a critical constitutional protection for minority voters, despite overwhelming evidence of discrimination, a new report by the NAACP reveals.

• Democracy Diminished (pdf), released by the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF), looks at disenfranchisement around the country since the Supreme Court effectively blocked Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act—which requires certain jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination against voters to submit proposed voting changes to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) or a federal court in Washington, D.C. for pre-clearance—in its 2013 ruling on Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder.

• I write as a feminist, a well-seasoned historian of American women, and a die-hard supporter of Bernie Sanders. Long-time colleagues disparage my loyalty to the Sanders campaign and chastise me, along with him, for not celebrating Hillary Clinton’s landmark achievement as the first woman to become the presumptive nominee of a major political party. I’m betraying my feminist principles, they suggest. Moreover, I’m denying the historical significance of Clinton’s victory, they pointedly add. Against this tide, I’m holding fast to my principles on both accounts. Both feminism and the historical moment weigh heavily in my decision.

• After an hour-long meeting with President Barack Obama on Thursday afternoon, Bernie Sanders spoke briefly to reporters outside the White House pledging that his campaign will continue the “political revolution” and encouraged his supporters not to give up on the key issues that have raised their political passions.

• Just minutes later, the Hillary Clinton campaign released a video of Obama offering his official endorsement of the former secretary of state.

• Those speculating that Sanders might concede after rival Hillary Clinton won the California primary on Tuesday, clearing the path for her to take the Democratic nomination, were proven wrong. Even as Sanders warned of the “disaster” of a Donald Trump presidency and vowed to work tirelessly to defeat the Republicans’ presumptive nominee, Sanders promised to fight for the ideals of his own campaign through to the end—including the Democratic National Committee (DNC) convention in July.

• Fifty years ago, California was a reasonably Republican state—with a Republican named Reagan on his way to being elected governor, two Republican senators representing the state in Washington, and the pieces in place to back the GOP nominees in the next six presidential elections. Republicans did not always win California, but they had the upper hand. From 1952 to 1988, only one Democratic presidential candidate won the state—and that was Lyndon Johnson, in the Democratic landslide year of 1964.

• What does the post-mainstream era hold for journalism? Can censorship exist in an era of total access to information? Where does freedom of expression begin and where does it end?

• These were just three of the important questions addressed at the “New Era of Journalism” conference held in Moscow this week, an event which brought together leading journalists from 32 countries and also featured a video link up with Wikileaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

• Opening the proceedings, Dmitry Kiselev, Director General of the Rossiya Segodnya news organization, said that since 2001 the US had interfered with and destroyed a number of countries around the world with wars and interventions based on lies. These lies, such as the blatantly false claim that Iraq had WMDs which could be launched within 45 minutes, were promoted by US State Department/NATO-friendly news channels and other media as proven facts which they clearly were not.

• Actually, the US policy predates the terrorist attacks on New York, as citizens of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, who were bombed by NATO for 78 days and nights in 1999, would testify. The most drastic form of censorship was imposed in that conflict too, when Serbian state television (RTS), was bombed and 16 employees killed. But it was the “humanitarian crusaders” of a US-led military alliance doing the killing, so there were no ‘Ja sam Jelica’ or ‘Ja sam Branislav’ marches of solidarity in western capitals. It seems it’s ok to kill media workers if it’s “our side” that does it. Then the victims are “unpeople”.

• The Democratic elite may be lining up behind Hillary Clinton, but for those who have been galvanized by Bernie Sanders’ populist campaign, the call for a political revolution burns brightly still.

• Even as she endorsed Clinton on Thursday night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) lauded Sanders’ integrity and primary achievements—and recognized the grassroots army inspired by his candidacy.

• “I take my cue on every part of this from Bernie himself,” Warren told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “I also think that what Bernie Sanders did was just powerfully important. He ran a campaign from the heart, and he ran a campaign where he took those issues and he really thrust them into the spotlight. He brought millions of people into the political process, millions into the Democratic Party, and for me, that’s what it’s all about.”

• I sit next to a thirtyish man named Shawn and a sixtyish woman named Tanya. Tanya supports Teachout because “she understands that the structure of the system is the problem.” Shawn clutches Teachout’s 2014 book, Corruption in America, which castigates the modern Supreme Court’s campaign finance rulings.

• It’s easy to spot Donald Trump’s crude bigotry but harder to detect Hillary Clinton’s more subtle variety since it pertains mostly to Palestinians and people pressuring Israel to respect Palestinian rights, explains Lawrence Davidson.

• The promotion of the TPP is a recurring staple at Vox, which frequently publishes articles that happened to dovetail with the interests of their major investor, Comcast—a corporation that spends large sums trying to convince members of Congress to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership…

• House Speaker Paul Ryan spent the past week announcing policy plans designed to fill the void left by the party’s presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, who has virtually no detailed policy proposals save for outrageous propositions like building a giant wall on the U.S.-Mexico border at no cost to the U.S. taxpayer.

• There is no doubt that history was made Tuesday night after Hillary Clinton swept California, all but sealing her fate as the first woman to become a major party nominee for president.

• Even before polls closed in the Golden State, the former secretary of state celebrated the moment at a Brooklyn rally, telling her supporters, “Thanks to you we’ve reached a milestone: the first time in our nation’s history that a woman will be a major party’s nominee.”

• “Yes, there are still ceilings to break for women, men, for all of us, but don’t let anyone tell you that great things can’t happen in America,” she said after premiering a stirring video that highlighted some of the women who fought for equality and liberation.

• Though it might not always seem like it, the news media is composed of human beings. Humans aren’t, can’t be, and possibly shouldn’t be, objective. Still, there’s a reasonable expectation among consumers of political news that journalists of all political stripes strive to be as objective as possible.

• At their minimum, media outlets ought to be straightforward about their biases.

• They certainly shouldn’t have, or appear to have, their thumbs on the scales.

• Unfortunately, all too often, it appears that the political system is rigged – and that the major media companies play an important role in gaming the system. That’s what has happened throughout this year’s Democratic primaries, in which the vast majority of corporate media outlets appear to have been in the bag for Hillary Clinton, the establishment candidate, against self-described “democratic socialist” insurgent Bernie Sanders.

• Richmond California is a refinery town in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is also where there is a diverse working class community with a strong Richmond Progressive Alliance which previously elected a Green Party Mayor. Bernie Sanders visited the city and actively supported the populist movement in February 2014 making it likely that Bernie Sanders would receive strong support in Richmond.

• Regardless of what you decide to do now, you have ignited a movement that will fight onward. We will fight to put more progressives into the House and Senate. We will fight at the state level. We will organize for the 2020 presidential election.

• There’s no debate at this point that Hillary Clinton has won the popular vote and the delegate count to win the Democratic primary. But even Clinton supporters should agree that our supposedly “democratic” system for picking nominees for president is terribly broken and should be dramatically overhauled.

• It’s not just Bernie Sanders’ campaign that should (and has) argued that the voting system in this country is “rigged”. Virtually every major campaign in both parties griped about how the other was winning at some point during this campaign, and along the way almost all of them were right.

• First, there are the delegates themselves – the “representatives” that voters “choose” to express their interests at the party conventions (but sometimes don’t have to comply). Each state has its own rules for how delegates are allocated, and they are almost always ridiculously complicated. In both parties, delegate counts regularly do not match up to the percentage of votes candidates received in the primaries. For example, as Fusion’s Felix Salmon demonstrated in March, Trump had dramatically more delegates than his percentage of the Republican vote at that point, and Sanders had dramatically fewer delegates than his percentage on the Democratic side.

• The Associated Press’ early crowning of Hillary Clinton as the “presumptive” Democratic presidential nominee thrust a news organization into the middle of the political process with a story that suddenly, and without enough explanation, emerged from the mysterious methods of today’s journalism.

• The story was not just a scoop. It fed the hostility and cynicism of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ fervent supporters. Now it will complicate Clinton’s efforts to build a united campaign against Donald Trump following her big and conclusive primary victories Tuesday night. And it possibly influenced voters before the primaries in California, New Jersey and New Mexico. Why vote if you already know the score?

• Clinton reached the 2,383 mark Tuesday with the help of the superdelegates. You might say that makes the AP story yesterday’s news. But it’s not. The story raised major questions about today’s journalism and its impact on the political process.

• On June 5th, the Nevada Green Party and the Jill Stein for President 2016 campaign filed petitions to qualify for the Nevada ballot in November. Stein thanked all those who helped collect signatures, including Bernie Sanders’ supporters who were alienated by Nevada’s controversial nominating convention.

• The Nevada Green Party was required to file 5,431 signatures. They filed 8,300 which will now be verified by county clerks and then sent to the Nevada Secretary of State. Nevada Greens and the Stein campaign believe that number ensures qualification even after some number of signatures have been invalidated by clerks comparing them to the voter rolls.

• Sen. Bernie Sanders plans to get together Sunday night in his hometown of Burlington, Vt., with a couple of dozen of his closest supporters, an aide announced Friday.

• Sanders is spending the weekend in his Vermont home-base but is booked to appear on several Washington-based TV news shows on Sunday morning.

• Earlier this week, even before Hillary Clinton’s primary victory in California assured her the Democratic presidential nomination, the Associated Press had already declared her the presumptive nominee. Bernie Sanders and his supporters were sore, and they had a right to be.

• Although the AP defended its decision, saying that Clinton’s crossing the delegate threshold was news and they had an obligation to report it when they did (the day before the clinching primaries) the timing and the circumstances were suspicious. It appears that AP had been hounding superdelegates to reveal their preferences, and blasting that headline just before those primaries threatened either to depress Sanders’ vote or Hillary’s or both because the contest was now for all intents and purposes over.

• Sanders has never been much of a media fan. Last October, Mother Jones reported that way back in 1979, he wrote in Vermont’s Vanguard Press, an alternative newspaper, that “with considerable forethought [TV capitalists] are attempting to create a nation of morons who will faithfully go out and buy this or that product, vote for this or that candidate and faithfully work for their employers for as low a wage as possible.” He said TV was America’s “drug.” On another occasion, he took a 60 Minutes crew to the AP office in Burlington and, in a bit of turnabout, began interrogating their reporters. So perhaps the AP’s announcement this week was a bit of long-simmering retribution.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Lancome, the face-cream company owned by French cosmetics giant L’Oreal, shut main stores in Hong Kong on Wednesday as protesters gathered accusing it of bowing to China by cancelling a concert featuring a pro-democracy singer.

• Some examples: If I criticize the Israeli government for abusing Palestinians and stealing their country, the Israel Lobby accuses me of being an anti-semite who wants to repeat the holocaust. In the same batch of emails, anti-semites denounce me for being too easy on Israel and covering up for the Jewish conspiracy against mankind.

• Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales warned the French government was seeking to extend the EU Privacy Law to crackdown on internet freedom on a global level.

• Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has said an attempt by France to give an online privacy ruling global force is opening up a “disastrous can of worms” and could spur global censorship.

• The Udta Punjab controversy shows some of the worst manifestations of governance in the country. First, it highlights the failure of the Punjab government led by the Akali Dal and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to check the drug menace.

Privacy/Surveillance

• A bipartisan group of House members are preparing to introduce measures widely supported by their colleagues that would reign in NSA domestic surveillance and protect encryption. But a change in procedure adopted by the House leadership may deny the House a chance to even consider their proposal.

• Based on their successful amendments to the House Defense Appropriations bill two years ago, Representatives Thomas Massie (R-KY), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), and Ted Poe (R-TX) aim to reintroduce measures backed by civil liberties organizations and activists as amendments to the Defense Appropriations bill currently moving through the House.

• By prohibiting backdoor searches and preventing the NSA and CIA from undermining encryption devices and standards, their proposals would represent a significant step forward in the ongoing battle to secure privacy and security in the face of ongoing unconstitutional surveillance documented in 2013 by Edward Snowden.

• Top secret documents revealing that Scots police forces had access to a GCHQ spy programme collecting information on people’s communications, movements and use of social media, are published today by The Ferret.

• The newly released classified documents came from US whistle-blower Edward Snowden and reveal that a previously unknown surveillance unit called the Scottish Recording Centre (SRC) was given access to a classified GCHQ project called MILKWHITE.

• The SRC was a police project that allowed Scottish forces to access metadata for information about people’s phone calls and emails.

• MILKWHITE was also storing data on people’s usage of smartphone apps such as WhatsApp and Viber and instant messenger services such as Jabber.

• GCHQ’s definition of metadata is broad and includes location data that can be used to track people’s movements, login passwords and website browsing histories.

• If you don’t use Facebook’s Moments app, the social network is looking to incentive you a bit to check it out—though, perhaps incentivize is the wrong word. The company is essentially threatening that your synchronized pictures are going to the digital recycling bin unless you download the Moments app, which isn’t leaving some users very thrilled.

• The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has been using mass surveillance devices known as IMSI catchers, in public, for a decade. In that time, the police have indiscriminately surveilled potentially thousands of Canadians without their knowledge, and stored that information for later use.

• Motherboard and VICE News obtained more than 3,000 pages of court documents that were produced as part of a case centering around a 2010 RCMP drug bust that unveiled a Montreal mafia slaying, codenamed Project Clemenza. Thanks to these documents, Canadians are finally getting a peek into the RCMP’s use of mobile device identifiers—the police’s term for IMSI catchers. On Friday, some of the men who pleaded guilty in the case that sprang from Clemenza are being sentenced in a Quebec court.

• One of the more surprising aspects regarding the locked iPhone 5c involved in the San Bernardino terrorist attack of 2015 was that the FBI was unable to unlock the device by themselves. What’s more, we would later find out that even the NSA — who the FBI asked for assistance — lacked the requisite tools to unlock the device, a somewhat startling fact given all we know about the NSA’s activities and expertise.

• Speaking at a conference on military technology this past Friday, NSA deputy director Richard Ledgett addressed the topic and explained why the NSA was unable to access Syed Farook’s iPhone 5c. And as it turns out, it’s not necessarily that the task was beyond the NSA’s capabilities. Rather, the iPhone 5c wasn’t a sufficiently popular device that would have warranted the NSA’s attention in the first place. In other words, the iPhone 5c was never on the NSA’s radar because the people it had an interest in tracking and spying on were using other devices.

• Still, it’s both wild and disconcerting to think that something as critical as a pacemaker could be monitored by a hacker. The NSA doesn’t plan to stop at that, either. Perhaps less surprising is Ledgett’s broader suggestion that the NSA is interested in using information from any internet-connected device.

• It’s no surprise that the U.S. National Security Agency and presumably other spy agencies around the world are investigating how they might take advantage of the new generation of Internet-connected devices in homes and offices for spying purposes.

• What is surprising is how willing Richard Ledgett, the NSA’s deputy director, was to talk about it in remarks at a conference in Washington on Friday. “As my job is to penetrate other people’s networks, complexity is my friend,” he said of the growing mass of common household and office items that are increasingly likely to be logged in to a nearby Wi-Fi network. “The first time you update the software, you introduce vulnerabilities — or variables, rather. It’s a good place to be in a penetration point of view.”

• SECRET REPORTS leaked by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden have revealed how UK mass surveillance of phone and internet activity was accessed by Scottish police forces.

• The documents confirm that a little-known policing body called the Scottish Recording Centre (SRC) was given access to information logs that includes millions of communications data including phone activity, internet histories, and social media behaviour on Facebook.

• Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., warned colleagues Thursday to think hard before expanding FBI surveillance powers, sharing a cautionary tale about his own experiences with former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Hakim was home alone with his two dogs, relaxing one night in March, when his cellphone rang. The man on the other end of the line asked a simple question: “Do you know that we can assassinate you at any time?”

• In seconds, the line went dead.

• B in Brexit stands for Boris and his overweening ambition. But R is for Racism, the method through which Vote Leave aims to achieve the political upset of the century.

• U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon publicly acknowledged Thursday that he removed the Saudi-led coalition currently bombing Yemen from a blacklist of child killers — 72 hours after it was published — due to a financial threat to defund United Nations programs.

• The secretary-general didn’t name the source of the threat, but news reports have indicated it came directly from the Saudi government.

• Doubling down on border enforcement is as ineffective as it is inhumane.

• Levar McDonald, also known as the as web comedian and rapper The Levar Show, was arrested in the Brooklyn Bridge Park in an escalating series of events that ended with him on the ground under a pile of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers.

• Bystander video footage of part of the encounter shows a police officer standing close to McDonald and demanding to see McDonald’s ID, to which McDonald repeatedly responds, level-voiced, “don’t put your hands on me,” and says, “I’m not doing nothing wrong.” McDonald tells an agitated crowd that he left the park when an officer told him to.

• Between 2006 and Gray’s death in 2015, 67 people were killed in encounters with Baltimore police, according to the Baltimore Sun. Only two of the police officers involved in those killings were charged with a crime. Following Gray’s death, the Department of Justice opened an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department, focusing on its use of force, including deadly force, and its pattern of discriminatory policing. The police commissioner was fired, the city’s officials engaged in a public exercise of soul searching, and police reform became the talk of the town.

• The first time I visited the UK, the young immigrations officer at LHR was very inquisitive about this old friend I was going to meet while I was in London for a conference: Who was he? Where did he live? What was our relationship? My awkward answers and copious fear sweating must have been unsatisfactory, for she waved me over to the Corral of Shame to join other suspicious characters while she had a chat with a man I can only assume was her supervisor.

• The Kelantan Mufti today urged non-Muslims to dress conservatively throughout the fasting month of Ramadan as provocative attire could be haram for surrounding Muslims.

• Datuk Mohamad Shukri Mohamad explained that while non-Muslims have the freedom to dress however they liked, they should be “considerate” and dress appropriately to prevent Muslims from forfeiting their fast.

• “They (non-Muslims) should respect Muslims and dress appropriately.

• “It is not wrong for them to dress how they like but they must be considerate because when Muslims, particularly men, bump into them at public places, it is considered haram,” he was quoted as saying to local daily New Straits Times.

• Kairana (Uttar Pradesh): At a time when the Central government is mulling to award citizenship to Hindu migrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh, there are reports that the community is being to forced to migrate from a city in Uttar Pradesh.

• The feds are fighting to look at millions of private files without a warrant, including those of two transgender men who are taking testosterone.

• Marlon Jones was arrested for taking legal painkillers, prescribed to him by a doctor, after a double knee replacement.

• Jones, an assistant fire chief of Utah’s Unified Fire Authority, was snared in a dragnet pulled through the state’s program to monitor prescription drugs after someone stole morphine from an ambulance in 2012. To find the missing morphine, cops used their unrestricted access to the state’s Prescription Drug Monitor Program database to look at the private medical records of nearly 500 emergency services personnel—without a warrant.

• Activists against female genital mutilation have urged Sky News to drop a segment which they say will show a girl as she undergoes the cutting in Somalia, saying it is tantamount to filming child abuse.

• Leyla Hussein, who co-founded anti-FGM campaign Daughters of Eve, said she was asked to appear on Sky News for an interview after a filmed segment about the prevalence of FGM in Somalia and Puntland, an autonomous state in Somalia’s north-east.

• Along with VCNV companions, I’m part of a 150 mile walk from Chicago to Thomson, IL, a small town in Northwest IL where the U.S. Bureau of Prisons is setting up an Administrative Maximum prison, also known as a Supermax. Prison laborers from U.S. minimum security prisons now labor to turn what once was an Illinois state prison into a federal supermax detention facility with 1900 cells that will confine prisoners for 23 hours of every day.

• U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon admitted Thursday Saudi Arabia had been removed from a blacklist for maiming and killing children as a result of unnamed sources’ threats to defund United Nations programs. In plain language, an unknown entity used extortion to force the U.N. to reverse an important move toward ensuring the safety of children.

• According to an as-yet unsubstantiated report from Foreign Policy, that threat came directly from the Saudi government — though immediately after the report blacklisting the Saudi-led coalition went public, the kingdom vociferously denounced its placement, and was removed within 72 hours — perhaps lending an air of credibility to the allegation.

• Rebekah wrote: ‘That has to be up there with the worst experience EVER at an away game!

• ‘Teargassed for no reason, caged and treated like animals! Shocking!

• ‘I witnessed this with my own eyes! I can’t comment on things I didn’t see but what I got caught up in was horrific and uncalled for!

• ‘And this happened before the game even kicked off!’

• Rebekah Vardy, the wife of England footballer Jamie Vardy, has revealed how she was caught up in a tear gas attack during the violence around Saturday’s Euro 2016 match between England and Russia.

• French, English and Russian football fans caused violent scenes in Marseilles, which carried on into Sunday morning.

• In court documents filed yesterday, North Carolina and the University of North Carolina system argued that the state’s law banning transgender people from public restrooms matching their gender identity should remain in effect while a legal challenge proceeds in federal court. The law, House Bill 2, also removes legal protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and others.

• Muhammad Ali was then out on bail for dodging the draft. He had been stripped of his heavyweight title, banishing him from the ring, and he needed money for his legal fees. The Champ was touring college campuses across America, lecturing mostly white students about his Muslim faith and the sins of racism at home and war abroad.

• Last summer, the Las Vegas Review-Journal published an editorial proclaiming that the paper’s editorial page “has long supporting the decriminalizing, regulating and taxing the sale of currently illegal drugs,” including marijuana. It was on record as supporting an effort to legalize marijuana in the state that will go before voters this November, and as recently as late last year called for all presidential candidates to champion “removing marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act.”

• Ireland’s restrictive ban on abortions subjected a woman to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and should be ended, a groundbreaking decision from a United Nations committee states.

• The findings from the Geneva-based Human Rights Committee are based on the case of Amanda Mellet, who was denied access to an abortion in 2011. In November 2013, the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a complaint on her behalf.

• A member of the Navajo Nation filed a lawsuit this week against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) for inadequately protecting him from sexual and physical abuse he allegedly experienced during his participation in a Mormon foster program for Native American children. He is the fourth Navajo in recent months to sue the Mormon church for its neglectful oversight during the program—and more victims may still come forward.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• “The current Web is not private or censorship-free.” That matter-of-fact bug report provides the reason for the first ever Decentralized Web Summit, taking place this week at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. EFF is participating in the festivities, and whether you’re following along in person, on the live stream, or online, we hope these highlights can bring a bit more of the conversation to you.

• The day started with a kickoff by Wendy Hanamura, Director of Partnerships at the Internet Archive, welcoming all of the “great builders of the next decentralized web.” She then handed the stage to Mitchell Baker, Executive Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation.

• The afternoon session of the Decentralized Web Summit started with a rousing call to action by EFF’s own Cory Doctorow, who started by talking about…Oreos. More specifically: if you want to lose weight, you start by throwing away your bag of Oreos, so that when it’s been a long day and you’re exhausted and you’re craving a snack, they’re not there to tempt you. This is what’s called a “Ulysses Pact,” something you do when you’re strong and at your best, so that you can avoid giving in to temptation and compromise when you’re at your worst.

• When I wrote my previous article on Cloudflare, and how it craps all over my daily internet browsing and possibly millions of others, most of the responses I got was skepticism with a healthy dose of justification. Either, it’s my fault for being born and living in a country which is not on the favorable IP blocks for Cloudflare (read Developed Nations). Or it’s the Website owner’s fault for not turning firewall rules to essentially off. Who in their right might would turn firewall essentially off? Firewall is a good thing, right?

• The fight over the Internet has happened before, almost step by step, with the fight over the printing press 550 years ago. As the Catholic Church lost its power to interpret reality, it attacked any usage of the new copying technology, up to and including the death penalty. What it is, is a fight over the power to tell the narrative – the ability to tell others what reality looks like, and powerful institutions of today are fighting for their survival as they’re losing this ability and becoming irrelevant and obsolete.

• VPNs, Tor, encryption, surveillance – it’s all part of a much bigger picture about a fight over the Power of Narrative.

• I sometimes ask people to imagine how they would act if they could write all the world’s news for a week, and all of it would be unquestionably accepted as true. This is the Power of Narrative, the ability to sort true from false for other people. If they could change people’s perception of themselves in any way imaginable and never have it questioned, what would they write?

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Last month Megaupload’s former hosting company Cogent raised alarm bells about failing hard drives, which contain crucial evidence. Responding to this threat the MPAA and RIAA asked the court’s permission to copy the data, but this has now been denied. Instead, Judge O’Grady went with Megaupload’s proposal to simply repair the drives while keeping them stored at Cogent.

• Lots of people are talking about the fact that President Obama went on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Thursday night to “slow jam the news” and play up a bunch of his accomplishments while stumping for the TPP agreement.

• People who don’t like what’s said about them on the Internet can’t bypass important protections for online speech by demanding the copyright to objectionable comments, EFF argues in a new amicus brief filed together with Public Citizen and Harvard’s Cyberlaw Clinic. The underlying case, now before the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, implicates key principles for online free speech and the rights of those who use online speech platforms.

• A European Commission proposal to give new copyright-like veto powers to publishers could prevent quotation and linking from news articles without permission and payment. The Copyright for Creativity coalition (of which EFF is a member) has put together an easy survey and answering guide to guide you through the process of submitting your views before the consultation for this “link tax” proposal winds up on 15 June.

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