● 06.15.16

● Links 15/6/2016: Git 2.9, Habitat

Posted in News Roundup at 3:09 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I received a comment at the bottom of one of my articles which expressed bemusement about all of the acronyms and terms used within my reviews.

• I am therefore writing this guide to explain as much of the jargon in my own words as possible.

• I will pin this to the top bar for future reference.

• Even for Linux, you have to consider the platform. In my case, I’m using a 64-bit Intel/AMD PC. But you might be using a 32-bit version or running on ARM (or any other CPU Linux supports). There is even a 32-bit interface for 64-bit Linux (x32), if you are interested in that. The second order of business, then, is to figure out what the CPU architecture looks like.

Desktop

• Trusting Microsoft’s words, he went ahead and tried to upgrade it to Windows 10. Yes, that was a big mistake.

• The tiny netbook, of course, was lost in what we can call the computer equivalent to a coma. Apparently, he attempted to revert the process only to discover that the Windows 10 logo simply wanted to stay as the perpetual image on the screen.

• So, I took the machine with me and ran the Mageia 5 i586 install DVD. Apparently, Windows 10 butchered the MBR. I had to wipe out everything.

Server

• Start small and don’t get overwhelmed. Two principles of DevOps you’ll hear over and over is incremental change and continuous improvement. The DevOps space is so large these days that newcomers can easily get lost. Find a small area where you can make a change, learn from it, and iterate over those learnings to improve.

• Cloud computing has paved the way for programmable infrastructure, which brought extreme automation into software development lifecycle. The ability to provision resources, configuring them on the fly, deploying applications, and monitoring the entire process led to the DevOps culture where developers and the operators are collaborating throughout the application lifecycle. While provisioning and configuration are best left to tools such as Chef, Puppet, and Ansible, one open source software that became the cornerstone of DevOps is Jenkins.

• In the days leading up to DockerCon, it seems like storage is taking its turn at being the hot topic in containers, with CoreOS and EMC recently announcing container-storage projects.

• Today, Portworx is up. The Redwood City, Calif.-based startup released a developer version of its container storage platform last year, and it’s now launching an enterprise version called PX-Enterprise.

• After watching a year’s worth of conference presentations, it is easy to become inured by the hype around products that orchestrate containers. Yet, there still confusion in the broader tech community about what functionality is involved with orchestrating containers. The New Stack ran a survey that was able to target users of container management technology, with 70 percent of respondents using containers to some degree. We found that there is indeed uncertainty about what it means to manage and orchestrate containers. There is also a developing consensus that scheduling, cluster management and service discovery are necessary to orchestrate the use of containers in production.

Kernel Space

• On June 13, Linux kernel developer Willy Tarreau announced the immediate availability for download of the one-hundred-second maintenance release for the Linux 3.10 LTS series.

• The AllSeen Alliance, a cross-industry collaboration advancing the Internet of Things (IoT) through an open source software project, today announced seven new members, rapid growth of the AllJoyn User Group program (AUG), and details for the summer AllJoyn Developer Tour Asia.

• AllSeen Alliance new members represent a diverse group comprising three smart home companies and an academic institution, all committed to advancing an open and interoperable IoT.

• Henrik Austad of Cisco has published very early code for implementing a TSN core driver in the Linux kernel. TSN is short for Time Sensitive Networking and was formerly known as Audio/Video Bridging (AVB).

• TSN is designed for establishing low-latency, jitter-free, guaranteed-bandwidth links over a LAN by reserving a path on the network. In order to support TSN, the NIC and the network itself must be compatible.

Graphics Stack

• Today, June 13, 2016, Nvidia has had the great pleasure of releasing a new long-lived graphics driver for Unix platforms, including GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris operating systems.

• It appears that Intel’s Vulkan open-source Linux driver is finally in good enough shape for being able to handle Valve’s Dota 2 game.

• If you were amazed by the GeForce GTX 1080 performance under Linux but its ~$699 USD price-tag is too much to handle, the GeForce GTX 1070 is now shipping for $399~449 USD. NVIDIA sent over a GeForce GTX 1070 and I’ve been putting it through its paces under Linux with a variety of OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan benchmarks along with CUDA and deep learning benchmarks. Here’s the first look at the GeForce GTX 1070 performance under Ubuntu Linux.

• Yesterday NVIDIA released the 367.27 long-lived driver release to succeed the earlier 367 betas. That driver arrived too late for my initial round of GeForce GTX 1070 / 1080 Linux testing with that GTX 1070 review published this morning.

Applications

• The Git development team is proud to announce the general availability of the 2.9 series of their widely used open-source distributed version control system for all supported platforms.

• The latest feature release Git v2.9.0 is now available at the usual places. It is comprised of 497 non-merge commits since v2.8.0, contributed by 75 people, 28 of which are new faces.

• Git 2.9.0 was announced today by Junio Hamano as the latest stable version of this distributed revision control system.

• Git 2.9 adds git-multimail to its contrib area: git-multimail has been around independently for a while as a way for offering email notifications on Git pushes. Git 2.9 also has some Git merge changes, improvements to Git pull, and various other sub-command changes.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Having a proper WWII shooter on Linux is going to be pretty awesome.

• For those of you using Unreal Engine 4 on Linux, you may be interested to know about the d3d4linux project. The d3d4linux project allows developers to compile HLSL shaders on Linux using the Microsoft DirectX compiler DLL.

• Always nice to see games that promise Linux support get fully funded. Moonlighter is an Action RPG with shopkeeping elements and it has been over-funded.

• Sitting pretty at over $70K againt a target of $40K, it looks pretty set to come for Linux which was included in the initial goal. It still has 18 days left to hit some of their stretch goals, will be interesting to see what else they have planned for it.

• Personally, I think the game is utterly beautiful and I will certainly be picking up a copy when it comes out (if I don’t get a review copy).

• Dungeon Defenders has been out of date on Linux for a long time and the developers need a Linux developer to help get it updated.

• Hardware upgrades, including faster GPUs and CPUs, are poised to improve Linux gaming. The latest gaming titles will come to Linux much faster with Vulkan, a graphics technology that should drive gaming forward on the OS.

• At E3 this week, Dell announced new Linux-based Alienware Steam Machines gaming PCs with Intel’s latest Skylake CPUs and Nvidia GTX 960 GPUs. The catalog of top-line titles — also called AAA titles — for the Linux-based SteamOS will grow by the end of the year, said Chris Sutphen, senior marketing manager at Alienware.

• Dell had high hopes for the Alienware Steam Machine after its delayed release last year, but it did not become as popular as its twin, Alienware Alpha, a Windows-based PC gaming console.

• The viability of Steam Machines, a family of Linux-based PC gaming consoles with SteamOS, has been questioned, but Dell isn’t giving up yet. With better hardware and an expanding list of gaming titles, Dell is hoping that interest in Alienware Steam Machines will grow.

• I love the first level of Tiny & Big. It’s a massive sandbox 3D platformer area where you get to use tools to slice through and toss around the terrain in order to explore and find secrets. The game quickly gets more action oriented though, and I unfortunately lost interest long before I finished it. Love, Hate & the other ones also looked interesting to me, and I bought and played a couple of the first areas of it. It’s a puzzler with interesting mechanics, but it didn’t really hook me, and I never wound up playing much of it. That first level of Tiny & Big though had a big impact on me, and I wish I could play a whole game of just that. And it’s the creativity and sense of design that went into that one level that made me eager to try the new game the developers have been cooking up since I first heard about it last year.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today, June 13, 2016, KDE has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and general availability of this month’s KDE Frameworks 5 maintenance update, version 5.23.0.

• Today, June 14, 2016, KDE has released the fifth and last maintenance update of the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment series.

• Today, June 14, 2016, KDE has announced the general availability of the second point release for its KDE Applications 16.04 series of the software suite used for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.

• KDE is a free software community full of diversity and, as such, we foster several meetings and welcome people from all over the world. The 4th Latin-America KDE Summit (LaKademy 2016) took place from 26-29 May at Federal University of State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), Brazil. Since 2014, LaKademy has become a yearly meeting (it happened every two years since 2010) and that has proven to be a quite important step to create a “sprint culture”, narrow the ties with the global community, and better support newcomers. In every new edition, old LaKademy participants are more experienced about how sprints work and, therefore, more skillful in the task of guiding newcomers through their way into the Free Software world.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Historically, GTK has aimed to keep compatible within a major version, where major versions are rather far apart (GTK 1 in 1998, GTK 2 in 2002, GTK 3 in 2011, GTK 4 somewhere in the future). Meanwhile, fixing bugs, improving performance and introducing new features sometimes results in major changes behind the scenes. In an ideal world, these behind-the-scenes changes would never break applications; however, the world isn’t ideal. (The Debian analogy here is that as much as we aspire to having the upgrade from one stable release to the next not break anything at all, I don’t think we’ve ever achieved that in practice – we still ask users to read the release notes, even though ideally that wouldn’t be necessary.)

• The last post explained the new version policy that we hope to use for the future of Gtk. This post aims to explain some of the benefits of that system, and also why we considered, but ultimately rejected some other options.

• The first major takeaway from the new system (and the part that people have been most enthusiastic about) is the fact that this gives many application authors and desktop environments something that they have been asking for for a long time: a versions of Gtk that has the features of Gtk 3, but the stability of Gtk 2. Under the proposed scheme, that version of Gtk 3 will be here in about a year. Gtk version (let’s say) 3.26 will be permanently stable, with all of the nice new features that have been added to Gtk 3 over the last 5+ years.

• Coming out yesterday from the start of GNOME’s latest GTK+ hackfest were details on GTK+ 4.0 and future releases whereby they would change how they enforce API stability and how frequently they do major stable releases of the toolkit.

• The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce the Call for Participation in Libre Application Summit — hosted by GNOME (LAS GNOME). The conference will be held from September 19 – 23 in Portland, Oregon, and brings together developers, entrepreneurs, and FOSS enthusiasts for discussion and debate of the future of Linux apps.

Distributions

Reviews

• When I first started using BunsenLabs Linux I did not enjoy the experience. At first, it felt like installing Debian with a depressing theme and fewer features. The initial installation and configuration steps felt overly long and complicated. The Openbox environment lacked the features of fuller desktop environments while, at the same time, offering unwanted distractions such as Conky and extra virtual desktops. It would be fair to say the first two or three hours with Bunsen were unpleasant for me.

• However, there was definitely a turning point during my trial. Around the start of the second day — once I had a more colourful theme in place, the Conky packages had been banished and I had got into the habit of installing software I wanted from the application menu — there was a point where I began to enjoy Bunsen. The distribution’s hardware and multimedia support were top notch, performance and the interface’s responsiveness were excellent and the applications available all worked properly. Openbox has enough configuration tools to make it flexible without being overwhelming. What really sold me on the distribution though was the way Openbox stayed out of my way, a feature I feel Debian’s default desktop does not offer.

• At the end of my trial, I still had some mixed feelings. As much as Bunsen grew on me, I couldn’t help but feel the experience felt very much like installing Debian and adding the Openbox window manager as a session option. While Bunsen takes care of that step for us, it also adds several extra steps during the initial configuration that made me feel like going with plain Debian and installing Openbox might have been faster and easier.

• In the end, I did grow to like Bunsen with its clean, fast user interface. I like the distribution’s tweaks to Debian such as adding sudo and providing application menu installers. I think the initial welcome script should probably either be automated or ask all its questions up front and then go to work in the background. It took a while for me to get the interface looking the way I wanted it to and less like the inside of a mine shaft, but once I did the distribution provided a good set of default applications and desktop functionality.

New Releases

• Today, June 14, 2016, the developers behind the Debian-based antiX Linux operating system have published a brief announcement to inform the community about the availability of the Release Candidate build of antiX 16.

• The GParted team is pleased to announce a new stable release of GParted Live.

• This release includes GParted 0.26.1, patches for libparted for FAT file system operations, and other improvements.

• GParted developer Curtis Gedak has announced the availability of the first point release for the GParted 0.26 open-source partition editor utility announced back in April 2016.

• Launched on April 26, GParted 0.26.0 introduced some exciting new features and improvements, among which we can mention read-only support for encrypted filesystems with the LUKS method, as well as the implementation of a progress bar for file system copy methods supporting EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, XFS, and NTFS.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Red Hat Family

• The team of developers behind the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based Baruwa Enterprise Edition commercial operating system, popularly known as BaruwaOS, announced the general availability of BaruwaOS 6.8.

• Red Hat is now in the processing of developing a refined approach to how it builds and productizes its OpenStack Platform releases.

• The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (OSP) was first announced back in June 2013 as a fully-supported commercial solution from Red Hat for the cloud. Since then, Red Hat has updated OSP multiple times, with the most recent milestone, OSP 8, released in April of this year.

Finance

Fedora

• The upcoming release of Fedora 24 isn’t shipping with PHP 7.0 but for Fedora 25 later in the year is when they plan to migrate to PHP7 for its speed improvements and more.

Debian Family

• The developers of the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux operating system have announced today, June 15, 2016, that new security fixes are available for Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” and Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 “Erik.”

• Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” is the stable version of the desktop-oriented operating system, based on Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” series, which means that it has most likely received all the security fixes that landed as part of the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 update.

• Maru OS lets phones run both Android and Debian Linux, and now, months after being in private beta mode, all Nexus 5 users can put the operating system on their device. Their phone will run like a Linux desktop when it’s connected to an external display, mouse, and keyboard. It’s very similar to the Continuum feature Microsoft introduced in Windows 10 for phones last year. That desktop state will still be preserved after the phone is disconnected from its keyboard and monitor.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Aside from the amazing wireless convergence (and it truly is game-changing), the most important aspect of an update is simple…did the update improve the experience? After all, every developer wants their platform to always be improving. So, what’s the end result with OTA-11? To the casual user, it might seem like the latest Ubuntu Touch image really didn’t do much. However, the truth is much more telling than that. With the release of OTA-11, Ubuntu Touch now runs much smoother; apps are faster to open, animations are cleaner, and there’s much less wait involved with regular usage. That doesn’t mean Ubuntu Touch has been perfected. It’s still not on par with the speed and efficiency of either Android or iOS, but it has made amazing leaps forward with OTA-11 and is closing the gap faster than anyone would have deemed possible.

• Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu, the Debian-based Linux distribution that many of us know as ‘probably’ (arguably, not necessarily if you’re a purist) the best Linux operating system for a personal PC.

• Today, June 14, 2016, Canonical informed us that they’ve been working for some time with developers from various major GNU/Linux distributions to make the Snap package format universal for all OSes.

• As many of you who are using Ubuntu might know already, Snap is a secure, easy to install, and confined package format that lets developers distribute the latest versions of their software applications as soon as they’re out. For Ubuntu, it is an alternative packaging format for Debian’s .deb binary packages.

• Docker’s container-style approach to distributing and running apps on any platform has been a big boost to helping patch up some of the fragmentation in the world of Linux. Now, a new package format hopes to have the same effect for smaller apps that need to speak to each other, or simply get updated. Snaps — a packaging format Canonical introduced earlier this year to help install apps in Ubuntu — is now available for multiple Linux distributions to work across desktops, servers, clouds and devices.

• Ubuntu’s “snappy” new way of packaging applications is no longer exclusive to Ubuntu. Canonical today is announcing that snapd, the tool that allows snap packages to be installed on Ubuntu, has been ported to other Linux distributions including Debian, Arch, Fedora, and Gentoo, among others.

• Today, June 14, 2016, Softpedia was informed by Logic Supply about the general availability of CL100, the tiny, fanless, and ventless industrial PC that promises to offer more than meets than eye.

• The quick booting time and swift usage of the operating system, however, fades away pretty quickly compared to the others. It can be quickly brought back to its previous speed with these simple and quick fixes.

Flavours and Variants

• elementary co-founder Cassidy James Blaede announced earlier, June 13, 2016, the immediate availability for download of the first Beta build of the upcoming elementary OS 0.4 “Loki” operating system.

• There are a lot of Linux-based desktop operating systems nowadays. Understandably, it can be hard to pick one. Many Linux users end up being distro-jumpers, constantly trying many, yet never settling.

• One popular Linux distro is vying for your attention, hopefully making you feel at home — no jumping needed. Called elementary OS, it uses an Ubuntu base for stability and software compatibility. The developers put a high value on the user experience — the interface is both gorgeous and intuitive. Today, the much anticipated 0.4 version — code-named ‘Loki’ — sees Beta release.

• Elementary OS is an Ubuntu variant that features the custom developed Pantheon desktop environment. The latest release that is coming down the pipeline will be Elementary OS 0.4. This week, however, the first beta of the upcoming release, nicknamed “Loki” was made available to the public and we thought we’d dive in to see what all of the fuss was about.

Devices/Embedded

• Adlink’s MVP-6000 is a “value” embedded PC with 6th Gen Intel Core “Skylake” CPUs, three GbE ports, six USB ports, four video ports, and PCI/PCIe expansion.

• Commell’s 3.5-inch “LE-37F” SBC supports Intel Braswell processors, and offers a pair each of SATA, GbE, and mini-PCIe connections plus four USB 3.0 ports.

• The Sequitur Labs port of Linaro’s OP-TEE environment to the Raspberry Pi 3 aims to encourage prototyping of ARM TrustZone hardware security on IoT devices.

• Linaro’s three-year old OP-TEE open source port of the TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) for ARM TrustZone security is now available on the lowest-cost platform yet: the Raspberry Pi 3. Sequitur Labs has worked with the ARM-backed not-for-profit development firm Linaro and its Linaro Security Working Group (SWG) to provide the technology to Pi 3 developers so they can learn about ARM TrustZone and begin developing trusted applications for it.

• Qualcomm announced a pre-integrated suite of automotive hardware components including LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, tuners, CAN, and VSX technology.

• In conjunction with last week’s TU-Automotive Detroit conference, Qualcomm unveiled a Connected Car Reference Platform that offers a pre-integrated lineup of the chipmaker’s wireless and telematics solutions. The reference platform even includes DSRC for enabling V2X (vehicle to vehicle or vehicle to infrastructure) technology.

Phones

Tizen

• The largest Android smartphone manufacturer Samsung is considering a shift from Google’s Android mobile operating system. According to a report, the South Korean tech giant is planning to expand its homegrown Tizen OS to all of its devices in future.

Android

• The ads are enticing: The promise of “Free TV” and the chance to “Say goodbye to cable bills forever.”

• So it’s no surprise Canada’s cable giants are targeting upstart dealers selling loaded Android TV boxes. The devices enable users to access pirated content with ease for a one-time fee.

• Bell Media, Rogers Communications and Quebec’s Videotron have taken legal action in Federal Court against five Canadian vendors.

• The OnePlus 3 is practically perfect, save for expandable storage, waterproofing, fast wireless charging and a QuadHD display. To be honest, I could live without any of these.

• OnePlus has really outdone itself and its competitors this year. I dare you to find a better Android phone for $400.

Free Software/Open Source

• Microsoft’s recent decision to offer FreeBSD images in the Azure cloud is a reminder that GNU/Linux is not the only game in town when it comes to alternative operating systems.

• Here’s a look at lesser-known operating systems. Some are serious, production-quality systems. Others are whimsical or half-baked platforms. All present alternative options for people who want to experiment with something other than Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.

• We have been living through another cold war. Not geo-political — digital. Open-source software versus commercial software has long been on the brink of going nuclear, fought in the shadows with enormous stakes and conflicting ideologies. But suddenly… perestroika! The wall quietly fell. It did not end in absolute victory, or a stalemate; convergence is a more apt term.

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is inviting open source developers to write and contribute code to The Machine project, an effort to juice up its ambitious plan to reinvent computing. During my reporting on that news I had the opportunity to talk with a real veteran of the Open Source Wars. (Not officially a thing, I know, but it should be.)

• Well ahead of the early July promise, today Nextcloud makes available Nextcloud 9. With this release we also announce to release all enterprise functionality as open source. Building on top of the open source ownCloud core and adding functionality and fixes, this release provides a solid base for users to migrate to. All enterprise functionality users and customers need will be made available over the coming weeks, fully developed in the open and under the AGPL license.

• When Frank Karlitschek, co-founder and former CTO of ownCloud, forked ownCloud into Nextcloud , I expected it to do well. I didn’t expect it to have its first major release less than two weeks after the company opened its doors. Well, the first Nextcloud release is out now.

• Less than two weeks after ownCloud was forked into Nextcloud, the project today did their version 9 release.

• Resin-based SLA printers need a different slicing algorithm from “normal” melted-plastic printers. Following their latest hackathon, [Matt Keeter] and [Martin Galese] from Formlabs have polished off an open source slicer, and this one runs in your browser. It’s Javascript, so you can go test it out on their webpage.

• Figuring out whether or not the voxel is inside or outside the model at every layer is harder for SLA printers, which have to take explicit account of the interior “empty” space inside the model. [Matt] and [Martin]’s software calculates this on the fly as the software is slicing. To do this, [Matt] devised a clever algorithm that leverages existing hardware to quickly accumulate the inside-or-out state of voxels during the slicing.

• Capital One is one of the nation’s largest banks. It started as a credit card company, really as a startup in the late 1980s. Its founder, Richard Fairbank, is still its CEO today. Fairbank’s idea was to build a better financial services company by using information and data to make better decisions and build better products and services for customers—making Capital One an early “big data” company. The company launched around the notion of an information-based strategy, which in that era was a pretty novel concept.

• News this morning from storage vendor Scality that the company is announcing the general availability of its S3 Server Software. The offering is an open source version of Scality’s S3 API and allows developers to code to Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage API on a local machine.

• Packaged as a Docker container (what else!) the idea is that developers can local build applications that thereafter can be deployed on premises, on AWS or some combination of the above.

• 21 Inc. has made its software free, ‘turning any computer into a bitcoin computer’, the company announced on Medium. Once a computer has installed the software, the user can get bitcoin using any device nearly anywhere without a bank account or credit cards.

Events

• There’s an upcoming GNU/Linux conference for those living in the Seattle area, and it promises to be a starting point for anyone interested in switching to a free and open source operating system for their personal computers.

• Open Source Bridge is an annual conference focused on building open source community and citizenship through four days of technical talks, hacking sessions, and collaboration opportunities. Prior to this year’s event, I caught up with one of the speakers, Lindsey Bieda, who will give a talk called Hardware, Hula Hoops, and Flow.

• The conference overall drew nearly 2,000 open-source enthusiasts, setting yet another record for the event! All the openSUSE sessions were well attended, and that gave our team some excellent feedback for future sessions. We were pleasantly suprised to find that “Q&A with openSUSE board members (plus another guy)” was a standing-room-only event, with the audience providing plenty of thoughtful questions for us to answer. “Make the Leap from Dev to Production with openSUSE Leap“, co-presented by Richard Brown and James Mason, provided a thoughtful developer-oriented talk to another full room. Richard also showed some cross-distribution love for openSUSE tooling, co-presenting “openQA – Avoiding Disasters of Biblical Proportions” with Fedora’s Adam Williamson.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• In a post earlier this month, I mentioned the importance of building a network of people who can help us identify and recruit potential Board level contributors and senior advisors. We are also currently working to expand both the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation Boards.

SaaS/Back End

• As the OpenStack cloud computing arena grows, a whole ecosystem of tools is growing along with it. Tesora, familiar to many as the leading contributor to the OpenStack Trove open source project, has focused very heavily on Database-as-a-Service tools for OpenStack deployments.

• Now, Tesora has announced a promising partnership with OpenStack heavy-hitter Miranti

• Ken Rugg, CEO of Tesora, discusses the latest innovations in the OpenStack Trove project and what’s coming in the Newton release cycle.

• The OpenStack Mitaka release debuted back in April of this year and with it came a series of updated open source projects, including the Trove database-as-a-service effort.

Habitat

Cost

• The change from using a dedicated build server to running builds in a virtual machine probably will not change much for Slax users, but the post does highlight a common thread I have been seeing in recent years. Many open source projects are regularly in need of funding. Back in 2009, the OpenBSD project reported it was in “dire need” of infrastructure upgrades and needed funds. This call for donations was echoed by the OpenBSD team again around the end of 2013 which resulted in a lot of public attention and, ultimately, more money flowing into the project. More recently, the HardenedBSD project has asked for help maintaining the infrastructure of the security-oriented project. Last year the NTPD project, a critical piece of software for most Internet-connected computers, was almost abandoned due to a lack of funding. The previous year, OpenSSL’s Heartbleed bug highlighted how little support the critical security software had been receiving from its many users.

Healthcare

• Even if the Department of Veterans Affairs were to switch from its Vista system, the basis of Medsphere’s OpenVista EHR, Medsphere would continue to thrive, Irv Lichtenwald said.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• Patches are landing in LLVM Clang to improve the compiler’s support for musl libc as an alternative to glibc on Linux-based systems.

• LLVM has added Musl to the triple and work in Clang to enable the compiler to support targets such as x86_64-pc-linux-musl for building binaries against this alternative libc implementation. The later patch explains, “This make it easy for clang to work on some musl-based systems like Alpine Linux and certain flavors of Gentoo.”

Public Services/Government

• Repositories for software and services developed by and for public administrations have multiple advantages, emphasises Elena Muñoz Salinero, head of Spain’s technology transfer centre (Centro de Transferencia de Technologica, CTT). Repositories make it easier to find suitable solutions, reduce costs, and let users share best practices.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• We already know that open source gives us better and more secure software. But with the advent of 3D printing, the open source model shows even more meaningful promise in areas like open source bionics.

• Recently while reading a tweet from the Blowing Things Up Lab, I learned about Emily Daub, a maker and college student who designed a running shirt that helps runners be more visible to motorists—my daughter is a runner so this sounds like a great idea to me.

• The shirt is photosensitive which cause the light intensity of the fabric to change in ambient light. According to Emily Daub, “If you run at night, this is for you. This lights up as it gets darker outside on two independent photocells and no microcontroller!” In this interview, I ask Emily more about this fantastic invention.

• Fun fact: Blowing Things Up (BTU) lab is located at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where Emily is a student of Alicia Gibb’s, the executive director of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), who I wrote about last year and contributed to our 2015 Open Source Yearbook.

Open Data

• New Open Government National Action Plan includes Crown Commercial Service in lead role and further developments of GOV.UK

• The Crown Commercial Service (CCS) is to implement a standard for open data in contracting later this year as a first step towards its wider use in government.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Gaming hardware and peripheral maker Razer Inc has announced the new HDK2, a VR device that is part of its Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) initiative, whose goal is “to create a universal open source VR ecosystem for technologies across different brands and companies.”

• The new headset is still considered a developer kit that is not ready for mass production, but at $400, it offers a number of high end features that put it on par with its much more expensive competition, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. HDK2 offers a 2160 x 1200 dual display resolution, which is 1080 X 1200 for each eye. It also offers a frame rate or 90 frames per second, as well as a front-facing infrared camera and a number of other features.

Programming/Development

• An 11-year-old asks her grandfather how computer games are made and he tells her they’re created by programmers “using complex mathematical code.” The next thing he knows, she’s learning Python on her own, and getting her chums involved too.

• In the early 1970s, at Silicon Valley’s Xerox PARC, Alan Kay envisioned computer software as something akin to a biological system, a vast collection of small cells that could communicate via simple messages. Each cell would perform its own discrete task. But in communicating with the rest, it would form a more complex whole. “This is an almost foolproof way of operating,” Kay once told me. Computer programmers could build something large by focusing on something small. That’s a simpler task, and in the end, the thing you build is stronger and more efficient.

Leftovers

• Political commentator Robert Peston sums up reaction: ‘Rupert Murdoch does not typically back the loser – and this is his call’

• [...]

• Both the latter two papers – owned respectively by Mr Murdoch and billionaire brothers Sir David and Frederick Barclay – have arguably shown support for the Leave campaigns as led by right-wingers Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, John Whittingdale and others.

• Amazon faces a $350,000 fine from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration after shipping a corrosive chemical by air, in violation of federal law. It’s the 25th time the company has been found to violate hazardous chemical shipping regulations in two and a half years.

• News wire Thomson Reuters is to scale down its Chinese-language news site, according to an internal email obtained by HKFP on Tuesday.

• “We are reorganizing our Beijing editorial consumer operation to deploy more translation and editing resources to our professional news products from Reuters.cn,” the email from Digital Executive Editor Dan Colarusso said.

Security

• Security is likely to rise to the top for many enterprises, and these concerns could have an impact on which kinds of applications enterprises end up trusting. All the data rolling in points to the fact that application security concerns are significantly rising at enterprises, not falling.

• Releases of new ransomware grew 24 per cent quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2016 as relatively low-skilled criminals continued to harness exploit kits for slinging file-encrypting malware at their marks.

• The latest quarterly study by Intel Security also revealed that Mac OS malware grew quickly in Q1, primarily due to an increase in VSearch adware. Mobile malware also increased 17 per cent quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2016.

• Two new reports out by The Hill and Vice are both showing that the NSA used programmable Word Macro shortcuts, which are considered a potential security risk by Microsoft.

• Local media report deputy Communications Minister Aleksei Sokolov is discussing a possible bug bounty with the Russian tech sector.

• The implications of such a bounty are being considered including staffing requirements for bug triage and validation, and the need to find a way to force developers to develop and apply patches for affected software.

Defence/Aggression

• A man who claimed allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) group stabbed a senior French police officer to death on Monday night before he was killed in a dramatic police operation, officials have said.

• The slaughter of 49 people in a night club in Orlando in the US state of Florida is another expression of the growing problem of mass violence in American society that cannot solely be attributed to Islamic extremism, NSA whistleblower Mark Klein told Sputnik.

• The ugly scenes came just hours after Uefa bosses warned Russia would be kicked out of the tournament if the violence continued.

• England fans came under attack following the 1-1 draw at the Stade Velodrome, with images showing Russian thugs chasing supporters inside the stadium.

• Uefa said Russia have been given a suspended disqualification from the tournament and a 150,000 euro (£120,000) fine after the crowd disorder.

• Going back in time, the U.S. government inadvertently created al Qaeda by encouraging, funding, and arming radical Islamist fighters against the Soviet Union in faraway Afghanistan during the 1980s. After the 9/11 attacks by that group, the U.S. government, by conducting an unrelated invasion of Iraq, then unintentionally created an even more brutal group called al Qaeda in Iraq, which pledged allegiance to the main al Qaeda group in Pakistan, and eventually morphed into the even more vicious ISIS. ISIS then took over large parts of Iraq and Syria, but began to attack Western targets only after a U.S.-led coalition began bombing the group in those countries.

• Shortly before noon on Sunday (6/12/16), during NPR’s national coverage of the horrific shooting in Orlando, NPR “counter-terrorism correspondent” Dina Temple-Raston made a critical false claim that deserves an on-air correction.

• The floundering inquiry into who shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014 has relied heavily on a Ukrainian intelligence agency that recently stopped U.N. investigators from probing its alleged role in torture, reports Robert Parry.

• Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump reacted to the Orlando shooting with evidence that they can agree on at least one thing: bombing people. Both candidates called for an escalation of the U.S.-led bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

• “We have generals that feel we can win this thing so fast and so strong, but we have to be furious for a short period of time, and we’re not doing it!” Trump complained on Fox & Friends Monday morning.

• The Orlando mass murderer, Omar Mateen, worked for G4S, one of the largest private security employers in the world. G4S has some 625,000 employees spanning five continents in more than 120 countries. As a private security company it provides services for both governments as well as corporations. Some of its well-known contractors are with the British Government, the United States, Israel, Australia and many more. G4S providers a range of services in the areas of corrections, policing, and security of important facilities. In the corporate sector it has worked with such well-known companies such as Chrysler, Amtrak, Apple, and the Bank of America.

• Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange warns more information will be published about Hillary Clinton, enough to indict her if the US government is courageous enough to do so, in what he predicts will be “a very big year” for the whistleblowing website.

• Expressing concerns in an ITV interview about the Democratic presidential candidate, who he claims is monitoring him, Assange described Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump as an “unpredictable phenomenon”, but predictably, given their divergent political views, didn’t say if he preferred the billionaire to be president.

• He was not asked if he supported Green Party candidate Jill Stein, even though she said she would immediately pardon Wikileaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning if elected.

• As the U.S. and NATO mount provocative military maneuvers on Russia’s border, the West is oblivious to how these threatening gestures ratchet up prospects of thermonuclear war that could extinguish civilization, says Gilbert Doctorow.

• A new report in the Wall Street Journal reveals emails in which then-Secretary of State Clinton approved CIA drone assassinations in Pakistan from her unsecured Blackberry.

• Some vaguely worded messages from U.S. diplomats in Pakistan and Washington used a less-secure communications system

• The Force Awakens didn’t deal with the fact that the US has become (if it wasn’t already, in 1977) The Empire; the movie shied away from contemplating that fact.

• A search is on to find a 2-year-old boy who was attacked by an alligator and dragged away at a Disney hotel near Orlando, authorities said.

• The incident happened while the family relaxed at a sandy area near the Seven Seas Lagoon on the property.

• The child was “wading just in the water along the lake’s edge at the time that the alligator attacked,” Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings said.

• The boy’s father saw the animal – reportedly between 4-7ft long – take his son, and entered the water to wrestle him from its jaws.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Congress has passed reforms to the Freedom of Information Act, which EFF hopes signals the beginning of a larger overhaul of the transparency law that will mark its 50th birthday in July.

Finance

• Techdirt has been writing about investor-state-dispute settlement (ISDS), aka corporate sovereignty, for more than three years now. During that time, we’ve published well over a hundred articles on the topic. Increasing numbers of people have become aware of the threat that ISDS represents to democracy because of the privileged access it grants companies to a parallel legal system. Now, it seems, it’s beginning to enter the political mainstream around the world.

• [...]

• In other words, this is yet another “ratchet” clause that ensures changes only ever move in one direction — to the benefit of companies, and against the interests of the public. It’s yet another reason never to include corporate sovereignty chapters in these so-called trade deals.

• Labor is promising to review three of the major free trade agreements signed by the Abbott and Turnbull governments in the hope of removing a controversial clause that allows foreign corporations to sue the Australian government.

• The department store chain announced it is beginning negotiations with unions over plans to cut 380 non-sales jobs from its payroll. Although profits grew this year, acting CEO Lauri Veijalainen said the group’s sales performance has not met expectations.

• A lead analyst at Forrester shares her views on blockchain technology, the risks it poses to enterprise customers and how they can eventually reap the rewards of the distributed ledger technology.

• As more and more companies invest in the much-hyped blockchain technology, outside observers could be forgiven for thinking that the technology has arrived. The potential for the distributed ledger to transform key business processes has been spoken about but, like any cutting edge technology, blockchain comes with risks for businesses.

• The aims of the corporate state are, given the looming collapse of the ecosystem, as deadly, maybe more so, as the acts of mass genocide carried out by the Nazis and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

• The reach and effectiveness of corporate propaganda dwarfs even the huge effort undertaken by Adolf Hitler and Stalin. The layers of deception are sophisticated and effective. News is state propaganda. Elaborate spectacles and forms of entertainment, all of which ignore reality or pretend the fiction of liberty and progress is real, distract the masses.

• Education is indoctrination. Ersatz intellectuals, along with technocrats and specialists, who are obedient to neoliberal and imperial state doctrine, use their academic credentials and erudition to deceive the public.

• I’ve seen plenty of nonfiction books that add some amount of content in the process from the original hard cover release to the eventual paperback release. But apparently Hillary Clinton went the other direction and conveniently excised all of the stuff about her support of the TPP. It’s no secret that, while facing a considerable challenge from Bernie Sanders in the primary contest, Clinton’s views of the TPP flip flopped from supporting it to being against it. She did try to explain away the flip flop by saying that it was about the details, but still, if you’re going to actually change your position, you should own it. Instead, it looks like Clinton and her campaign are simply trying to rewrite history. The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) first noticed a series of big changes in the paperback edition of Clinton’s book, including excising the support of the TPP — such as two full pages about a conference in El Salvador where she spoke in favor of the agreement.

• Cracks are finally emerging in the grossly imbalanced, plurilateral talks on a Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) being pursued by 23 countries, after the European Union and several other members voiced concern about the overall quality of the latest revised offers and the exclusion of Mode 4, maritime transport, and sub-federal categories among other sectors, several trade envoys told the SUNS.

• The EU and Mexico launch negotiations for a ‘modernised’ Free Trade Agreement. A key feature is the investment protection chapter which grants major multinational companies in Mexico and the EU the exclusive right to challenge democratic decisions taken by States, even when they were taken in the public interest. The report outlines six reasons of major concern.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A January 2016 poll of likely Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa found that 43 percent described themselves as “socialist.” Fully 56 percent of registered Democrats, including 52 percent of Clinton supporters, view socialism favorably according to a recent NY Times/CBS News poll.

• There was a fair bit of coverage on Monday of the news that the Donald Trump campaign had removed the press credentials from the Washington Post because the campaign was upset with the Washington Post’s coverage of the campaign. While it got a lot of attention, it was quickly pointed out that Trump has revoked or barred at least six other news outlets from receiving press passes, including Politico, the Huffington Post, the National Review, Buzzfeed and the Daily Beast. This issue is being discussed in lots of media circles. But what interested me much more was buried deeper in the full two paragraph statement that the Trump campaign later released. It included a weird and basically confused attack on Jeff Bezos, that again raises some serious questions about how Trump may use the Presidency to “settle scores.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• At this point, I’ve written a bunch of stories about Peter Thiel and his (largely successful) plans to bring down Gawker with lawsuits. I’ve made it clear why I think this is a bad thing — and I’ve learned that many Techdirt readers disagree with me on that (though I appear to have won a few people over to my point of view after a bunch of discussions on this). Part of the issue, I believe, is that there are a few separate things at stake here, all of which get conflated and lumped together when it’s important to look at them separately. There are questions about privacy violations, about the role and protections of the press, about the validity of financing lawsuits and about the way in which the judicial system works. I may try to unpack all of these in a separate post, but I did want to focus on one aspect that I find troubling that often gets dropped from the debate: and it’s that this was not about financing one lawsuit against Gawker, but about finding any way to bring the company down.

• Leaving aside, for now, the question of the Hogan lawsuit, it’s becoming abundantly clear that Thiel’s plan was to find any way possible to destroy Gawker through lawsuits. That link goes to a much more detailed report at Forbes (yes: warning that it hates people who use ad blockers), describing how Thiel’s efforts here more or less financed an entire law firm to focus on hunting down anything to attack Gawker over. The article reports that someone working for Thiel approached the lawyer Charles Harder while he was working for another law firm. Soon after, Harder left to launch his own firm — and his first client was Hogan and the first case against Gawker.

• [...]

• And we’ve seen how this can impact others as well. Less than a year ago we wrote about a billionaire that not only filed a bogus defamation lawsuit against Mother Jones, but also had offered to fund others suing the site — even after the defamation claim was thrown out. Merely defending that lawsuit cost Mother Jones and its insurance company over $2 million. Leaving aside the reasonableness or not of the Hogan verdict (we’ll get to that later), the idea that this entire law firm was propped up to support basically any and all legal actions against Gawker — not for purposes of getting justice, but clearly with the sole intent of taking down the company — should raise many concerns.

• The thing is, these are the kinds of charges that you throw in to a case when you’re just really annoyed at what someone or some company did to you, and you don’t have any actual laws you can show they broke. I do think there could be an argument for some sort of anti-SLAPP law that allows companies to go after those financing questionable lawsuits for legal fees of such lawsuits, but expanding that to racketeering just seems extreme (and, also, very unlikely to succeed — as Ken White has pointed out repeatedly, judges hate civil racketeering claims, as they recognize that they’re frequently bogus).

• So I’m all for looking for reasonable ways to prevent billionaires from overloading small publications with bogus legal fees, but I don’t think making questionable arguments around tortious interference and racketeering are a reasonable approach.

• As Parliament debates Bill 113, the removal of the crime of vilification of religion has become the object of heated debate. Several interventions have been made in the House, most notably by Claudette Buttigieg and Jason Azzopardi from Opposition benches and by Godfrey Farrugia from the government’s side.

• Two German TV stations have complained about UEFA censorship after the governing body failed to supply footage of clashes between Russia and England supporters at the end of Saturday’s Euro 2016 match.

• A large group of Russian fans in a stand behind England’s goal advanced on the neighbouring Three Lions section following the 1-1 draw, throwing objects and breaking through a line of stewards, who were outnumbered and offered little resistance.

• The Orlando nightclub shooting that took the lives of 50 people, has seen a furious outbreak on the popular online forum Reddit, with numerous users accusing the moderators of the forum of censoring the news coverage of the incident. Over 15,000 users have already unsubscribed from the subreddit, which has around 9 million subscribers.

• Less than a month after the Facebook summit between founder Mark Zuckerberg and leading conservatives, the tense relationship between Silicon Valley and conservatives has taken a turn for the worse.

• There are reports of mass censorship on /r/News, the chief Reddit community for breaking news stories, in the wake of last evening’s deadly terrorist attack. Moderators of the subreddit even deleted a post offering blood donation advice to Orlando residents.

• New York Times editor Jon Weisman announced he was leaving Twitter last week, thanks “to the racists, the anti-Semites, the Bernie Bros who attacked women reporters yesterday.” Enough was enough.

• Here’s what happened: In response to a rash of hatred on the site, Weisman’s colleague Ari Isaacman Bevacqua (also a Times editor) reported accounts that used anti-Semitic slurs and threats to Twitter support. Twitter replied that it “could not determine a clear violation of the Twitter Rules,” Weisman told me. It didn’t make sense to him.

• Weisman isn’t alone. A Human Rights Watch director, a New York Times reporter, and a journalist who wrote about a video game have all reported a similar phenomenon. Still more confirmed the process independently to Motherboard. They each got what they perceived to be a threat on Twitter, reported the tweet to Twitter support, and received a reply that the conduct does not violate Twitter’s rules.

• Moscow’s Department of Culture has banned a play by independent theatre company Teatr.doc that was due to take place in the Moscow Hermitage Garden.

• Censorship is a complicated thing. That time where publication was an easily controlled act and the state actively did the controlling is over. Contemporary totalitarian states do their best, but even in China unwanted information has begun to leak into the farthest corners of that nation. Today in the United States the last areas where unambiguous censorship occurs touches upon what can be deemed national security and some matters that involve sex. In Europe also some things touching on sex, national security and here and there some areas of political and even religious speech are censored. It can and is argued that the areas that remain are censored for the common good.

• I wasn’t annoyed at all. Suddenly one day the BBC said it was racist, because they didn’t know history. You’ve got to know what the world was like at one time. That’s the problem. I went to the university of

Privacy/Surveillance

• One of the challenges Apple has faced in making its services truly personal and proactive is its focus on privacy. While Google unashamedly collects masses of data about its users, even going to far as to scan emails for boarding passes and restaurant reservations in order to provide automated reminders, Apple has been extremely conservative in the amount of data it collects.

• A company founded by three ex-National Security Agency analysts says it can predict where hackers may strike next – up to a year before it even happens.

• Privacy organizations and various technology professionals have been warning us for years about the destructive influence of the internet on our privacy. Trivial things like search results are liable to be used against us, they repeatedly warn us. But who believes them?

• Well, a new site that has spread widely, thanks to r/InternetIsBeautiful surfers on Reddit, guarantees to ruin you search history in a way that is sure to put you on the blacklist of the next date that picks through your browser’s history (and it’s just as well. Who wants a date like that?) It also promises problems with Google, the NSA, the FBI, the Illuminati and perhaps some agencies fighting aliens.

• The script for what to do following a tragedy like the one in Orlando over the weekend is now quite clear: politicians want to appear “serious” about the issue, and thus they say stuff to appease people, even if what they say makes no sense. There was a lot of senseless rhetoric going around, of course, and we’ll leave the usual debates about issues we don’t cover on Techdirt to lots of other sites. But an issue we do cover is surveillance and bogus ideas like “watch lists” where a mere accusation leads to basic rights being taken away. And, unfortunately, it appears that both major Presidential candidates are advocating for greater surveillance and denial of civil liberties as a response to someone shooting up a nightclub and killing dozens of people.

• “Intelligence agencies such as GCHQ need to enter the public debate about privacy. I think we have a good story to tell.” – Robert Hannigan, Director of GCHQ

• The Investigatory Powers Bill, which was passed by the House of Commons last week, will effectively give the police and other authorities the same powers of surveillance that are currently enjoyed by GCHQ.

• That’s according to Raegan MacDonald, senior policy manager EU principal at Mozilla.

• HE SNOOPERS’ CHARTER will give UK police the same powers of surveillance over web use and telephone communications that are currently available to GCHQ, according to Mozilla.

• Raegan MacDonald, senior policy manager and EU principal at Mozilla, made the claim during a Mozilla Privacy Lab event in London yesterday.

• Rather than clarifying surveillance powers, the real effect of the Snoopers’ Charter, or Investigatory Powers Bill, is to legitimise current practice and bring in ideas from other areas, such as a police database.

• “It’s about legally justifying the previously secret practices of GCHQ and allowing those powers to go to all levels of law enforcement,” she said.

• Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger warned this morning editors will “betray future generations of journalists” if they don’t “push back hard” against the so-called snooper’s charter.

• Just as we’re learning of law enforcement’s bold new plan to take travelers’ prepaid debit cards down to a $0 balance without ever leaving the highway, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals comes along [PDF] to remind us that swiping (not as in “taking”) a credit card to determine its legitimacy is not a search under the Fourth Amendment. (via Ars Technica)

• The court notes a couple of obvious things about the search that isn’t. First, it can’t be a physical search because swiping the card does nothing more than (if it’s legit) return the same information that’s printed on the front of the card.

• Recently released National Security Agency (NSA) emails show that the top digital spying group uses Word macros, widely considered a security risk.

• Word macros, programmable shortcuts in Microsoft Word, have been used in recent years to distribute ransomware, to launch attacks on credit card systems and even to black out the power grid of the Ukraine.

• Emails released by a Freedom of Information Act request by Vice show that as recently as 2012, the NSA was using Word macros.

• Attacks using Word Macros have gone in and out of vogue since the 1990s. In March, Microsoft released a feature for Word to block certain high-risk macros. It came at the end of a massive upswing in macro malware between 2014 and 2015. Intel estimated year-over-year growth of such attacks at 350 percent.

• While attacks on Word macros were not as common in 2012 as they are today, dangerous vulnerabilities were still being announced around that time.

• Vice uncovered the use of macros after requesting emails sent by Edward Snowden, the former government employee who leaked classified NSA information. In one, Snowden provides tech support for a proprietary macro embedded in NSA Hawaii documents that was incompatible with Washington, D.C., offices.

Civil Rights/Policing

• There’s no universal law enforcement “best practices” for searches and seizures, but simply respecting the Fourth Amendment would seem to be a good base guideline. However, that baseline is rarely used. Far too often, searches and seizures seem to be officers seeing what they can get away with — and expecting the legal system to assist in applying “good faith” to unconstitutional searches after the fact.

• Ethan Moore landed at the Dillingham, Alaska airport, where he was met by two police officers. According to the officers, informants claimed Moore was transporting marijuana. They seized his luggage and took it to the local police station while they sought a search warrant.

• TURKEY is threatening to release “millions” more migrants from refugee camps if Britain does not grant more than one million Turks visa-free travel, leaked documents have sensationally claimed.

• At this morning’s press conference announcing the departure of Oakland Police Chief Sean Whent, Mayor Libby Schaaf and City Administrator Sabrina Landreth told a room full of reporters that Whent was resigning for “personal reasons.” The mayor said it had nothing to do with a scandal involving rookie police officers who sexually exploited a minor, or the suspicious death of a police officer’s wife and his subsequent suicide.

• The Home Office is refusing to reveal how many detainees have been sexually assaulted or raped inside Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire in case the information becoming public knowledge harms the “commercial interests” of private companies that are involved in running it, The Independent can reveal.

• At 6:30am on Tuesday, May 24, someone began banging on the front door of Justin Shafer’s home in North Richland Hills, Texas. When Shafer and his wife answered the door, they found a dozen FBI agents with guns drawn. Shafer, 36, still in his boxer shorts, was allegedly handcuffed, according to a Daily Dot report. The agents seized all of Shafer’s computers and digital devices, and pushed him into a car.

• The most prominent advocacy group for orthodox radical Islam in the United States threatened Friday to have a Breitbart reporter arrested if he did not leave its soon-to-start public press conference about the bloody Pulse massacre of at least 50 gay Americans by an American Muslim.

• Update: On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services said it had not waived HIPAA in Orlando after all because it was not necessary—the mayor’s original remarks were the result of some miscommunication. WIRED’s original story, about why a HIPAA waiver would not have been necessary, is below.

• But the Cupertino giant does not always come down on the side of those who use its products as is evident from its attempts to block bids by US states to make repair of Apple devices cheaper.

• According to a published report, Apple is fighting “right to repair” amendments being considered by the US states of Minnesota, Nebraska, Massachusetts and New York.

• Given the difficulty in gaining access to the innards of most current Apple devices, these amendments would make it mandatory for Apple to provide unofficial repair shops with the necessary information needed to fix broken devices.

• It is such cases that give the United Nations a bad name. And if heads and decay say something about the rest of the body, Ban Ki-Moon says all too much in his role as UN Secretary General. Always inconspicuous, barely visible in the global media, his presence scarcely warrants a footnote. This has been a point of much relief for various powers who have tended to see the UN as a parking space for ceremony and manipulation rather than concrete policy.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• As we’ve noted a few times, there’s really only two ways the telecom sector can successfully destroy U.S. net neutrality rules. Broadband providers could prevail on part or all of their multi-headed lawsuit against the FCC, a decision on which is expected any day now. Or the rules could be dismantled by the next President, who could repopulate the FCC with the usual assortment of revolving-door sector sycophants, reverting the agency back to its more consistent, historical role as a dumbly nodding enabler of broadband sector dysfunction.

• Every other attempt to kill the rules is just politicians barking loudly for their campaign contribution dinners — though that’s not to say the barking doesn’t get very loud from time to time.

• The latest example is the House Appropriations Committee’s 29-17 vote to approve an FCC appropriations bill (pdf), part of a larger Financial Services Bill determining the 2017 budgets for multiple agencies. The bill was passed last week with amendment language intended to hobble the FCC’s net neutrality rules — and its quest to bring competition to the cable set top box. More specifically, the bill prohibits the FCC from enforcing its net neutrality rules until the ongoing court case is settled. But it also would relegate the FCC’s attempt to bring competition to the cable box to committee purgatory.

• After months of anticipation on all sides, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has upheld the FCC’s Open Internet Order, a notably huge win for net neutrality advocates. The full court ruling (pdf) supports the FCC’s arguments across the board, including the FCC’s decision to classify internet providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. That’s not only big for net neutrality, but it solidifies the FCC’s authority as it looks to move forward on other pro-consumer initiatives such as the exploration of some relatively basic new privacy protections for broadband users.

• Historically the DC Appeals court has been a mixed bag for the FCC, but in this instance the court declared the FCC’s neutrality protections rest on solid legal ground from beginning to end, dismantling arguments by the likes of US Telecom, AT&T, and advocacy groups like TechFreedom from stem to stern. That includes industry attempts to prevent the rules from being applied to wireless networks (a split decision whereby fixed-line services were covered by wireless was not was something that had worried many telecom sector consumer advocates).

• As part of the conditions attached to Charter’s $79 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, the FCC imposed a requirement that Charter expand broadband service to another two million locations, one million of which must already be served by an ISP delivering speeds of 25 Mbps or greater. Unfortunately these kinds of conditions historically don’t mean much; merger broadband expansion promises are almost always volunteered by the ISPs themselves, who already planned the expansion regardless of their merger plans.

• The web we have works incredibly well. Its feature set has enabled users to write billions of web pages. The technology is standardised and there are many mature implementations.

• HTML is still a medium where some things are easy and some things are not. We should not lose sight of how HTML will affect how we communicate. Instead, we should pillage the ideas of the past to make the best use of our content today.

• Is it time to rebuild the Web? That’s what Tim Berners-Lee and other Internet pioneers are now saying in response to concerns about censorship, electronic spying and excessive centralization on the Web.

• Last week, Berners-Lee, the guy who played a leading role in creating the Web in 1989, held a conference with other computer scientists in San Francisco at the Decentralized Web Summit. Attendees also included the likes of Mitchell Baker, head of Mozilla, and Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• There are a surprising number of really dumb trademark disputes involving professional sports, what with athletes jumping at the chance to trademark their nicknames and phrases, and that really dumb 12th Man thing. But even this cynical writer was taken aback at the news that Dr. Pepper had stepped in to block the Denver Broncos from trademarking the term “Orange Crush”, the nickname for the team’s defensive squad spanning nearly half a century.

• The Denver Broncos might have had the Orange Crush defense, but the team shouldn’t be allowed to trademark the term, at least according to Dr Pepper Snapple Group, which owns the Crush soda brand, whose most popular flavor is orange.

Copyrights

• We’ve written plenty of times about ridiculous European plans to create a so-called “snippet tax” which is more officially referred to as “ancillary rights” (and is really just about creating a tax on Google). The basic concept is that some old school newspapers are so lazy and have so failed to adapt to the internet — and so want to blame Google for their own failures — that they want to tax any aggregator (e.g., Google) that links to their works with a snippet, that doesn’t pay for the privilege of sending those publishers traffic. As you may remember, Germany has been pushing for such a thing for many, many years, and Austria has been exploring it as well. But perhaps the most attention grabbing move was the one in Spain, which not only included a snippet tax, but made it mandatory. That is, even if you wanted Google News to link to you for free, you couldn’t get that. In response, Google took the nuclear option and shut down Google News in Spain. A study showed that this law has actually done much to harm Spanish publishers, but the EU pushes on, ridiculously.

• Dutch film producer Klaas de Jong has filed a police report against four local ISPs, holding them accountable for tens of millions of euros in piracy related losses. The producer says that the ISPs are responsible for the actions of pirating subscribers, since they fail to block torrent sites and other download portals.

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