● 06.19.16

● Links 19/6/2016: Randa Over, Fedora 24 Release Soon

Posted in News Roundup at 8:43 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The TRS-80 Model II support in Kermit is missing hardware flow control support however which means that it’s very prone to dropping characters. I started to look into what it might take to add hardware flow control and this sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out how the TRS-80 hardware works, how the Z80 SIO works, learning Z80 assembly, and of course, how the heck you even build CP/M Kermit 4.11 from source.

Desktop

• You can choose something other than MacOS or Windows 10 when it comes to an operating system for your computer. If you’re prepared to be a little more adventurous, Linux has plenty of great features that will save you time and make working a little less dull. The best part is that Live Installations allow you to try out the software before you wipe your entire hard drive.

• Linux comes in various flavors called distros (distributions) and it’s up to you to determine which one you opt for. Ubuntu is by far the most popular desktop distro and is a good place to start for beginners, so we’ve focused on that one here, but once you’ve grasped the basics feel free to explore the pros and cons of some others out there.

• Linux is everywhere and nearly all Linux distros need network connections to offer their services. Network connection failures is one of the major headaches if you are using a Linux based PC or a system. Because if your network fails, all other services will fail and you will be left with a dud system. For this reason, the administrator must have the appropriate tools and commands to analyze and troubleshoot network connectivity.

• Last summer, I wrote an article series called “Kicking Google out of my life.” It was an attempt to remove all Google services entirely from my daily usage for 30 days—a surprisingly daunting challenge for someone who had become deeply dependent on Google. I was mostly successful. I chronicled my experience—detailing how I approached replacing Google services with non-Google variants—and in the end, my life was better for it.

Server

• Clouds have come to dominate the mindset of IT. The promises of business agility, maximized resource utilization, and flexible infrastructure have grabbed the imaginations of CIOs across the world. The opportunity to immediately adjust your infrastructure to the needs of your business is seen as a route to success.

• Docker and other application container platforms are already changing the way enterprises develop and deliver applications. Over the next year, container adoption will really ramp up, according to new report from the Cloud Foundry Foundation, Hope Versus Reality: Containers in 2016.

• Currently, 16 percent of organizations are already using containers in production, noted Abby Kearns, vice president of Industry Strategy at the Cloud Foundry Foundation. But ClearPath Strategies, the research firm that conducted the survey on behalf of the Foundation, asked participants about their plans, she started “seeing an interesting shift in those looking to move into production,” she told Datamation.

• China will soon be enjoying the open source operating system CoreOS Linux thanks to Microsoft Azure as 21Vianet becomes the first ever officially supported cloud provider in the country.

• In a press release posted on their official website, Linux announced that the CoreOS would soon be made available for Chinese computer users together with Microsoft’s cloud operating service, Azure.

Kernel Space

• Deutsche Bank has moved its blockchain project out of the proof of concept stage, according to the bank’s head of disruptive technologies, who also warned that the distributed ledger blockchain technology is still five to ten years from widespread use.

Benchmarks

• Yesterday I published some Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 Linux gaming benchmarks using the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 graphics cards. Those numbers were interesting with the NVIDIA proprietary driver but for benchmarking this weekend are Windows 10 results with Radeon Software compared to Ubuntu 16.04 running the new AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver as well as the latest Git code for a pure open-source driver stack.

Applications

• Email is an old way of communication yet, it still remains the basic and most important method out there of sharing information up to date, but the way we access emails has changed over the years. From web applications, a lot of people now prefer to use email clients than ever before.

• File management is so important on a computer that users always want to have a simple and easy to use file manager or file browser. But sometimes having a feature rich and highly configurable file manager for performing both simple tasks such as searching, copying, moving, creating and deleting files, and complex operations such as remote access of files and SHH connections is very vital.

• There are many web services that allow users to upload pictures to a hosting site. The image host stores the images on its servers, and shows the individual different types of code to allow others to view that image. Popular examples include Flickr, Instagram, Imgur, Photobucket, SmugMug and Snapfish.

• Most of these solutions provide free storage space, with more features available if you are willing to pay for a premium account. However, there are problems with these solutions. Leaving aside privacy and ownership issues, these services typically do not provide good integration with other platforms. There is a simple alternative which gives you more control and flexibility – self-hosted open source gallery software.

• At first blush you might think VirtualBox or any type II hypervisor has no place in the data center, but that assumption would be wrong. Let me see if I can change your mind by laying out reasons why I believe VirtualBox does have a place in the data center.

• Each and every Linux user will have a set of his or her favorites in the list of must have applications. The selection is influenced by their habits, preferences and the distribution criteria which they use. The reason for it is that not all Linux applications support the same applications by default. Here is a list of the top 10 cool multimedia software for Linux desktop.

• I’ve just released virt-manager 1.4.0. Besides the spice GL bits that I previously talked about, nothing too much exciting in this release except a lot of virt-install/virt-xml command line extensions.

• And I responded, “Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users’ declared intentions. Using the concepts of “labels” and “pods”, it groups the container which make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.”

• I just upgraded my computer to Ubuntu 16.04, from 12.04. So, expect occasional updates on what has happened in the last 4 years since I am a computer dinosaur.

• The feature addition had been long anticipated, with the VideoLAN development team having tagged support for the streaming technology in its roadmap, forum posts and in media interviews.

• File encryption softwares are more of a necessity nowadays than just another luxury application on your Linux PC, given the importance of how safeguarding our most delicate documents have become and the risk of system theft and hack has grown exponentially over the years.

• Those concerned about the proliferation of application-packaging formats will soon have one fewer to worry about. At his blog, Matthias Klumpp announces that he intends to scale back his work on Limba, the cross-distribution application-packaging format he has developed as an extension of the ideas in the earlier Listaller. The decision comes on the heels of discussions with Flatpak developer Alexander Larsson, since the two projects overlap in many respects: “Alex and I had very productive discussions, and except for the modularity issue, we were pretty much on the same page in every other aspect regarding the sandboxing and app-distribution matters.”

Instructionals/Technical

• I am adviser to a high school robotics team and wrote a small Python script to solve a pairing problem. We are starting our spring fund raising drive and I needed to randomly pair one student with one business. On my lunch break I hacked out the following script that solved the problem.

• My First 5 Minutes on a Server, by Bryan Kennedy, is an excellent intro into securing a server against most attacks. We have a few modifications to his approach that we wanted to document as part of our efforts of externalizing our processes and best practices. We also wanted to spend a bit more time explaining a few things that younger engineers may benefit from.

Wine or Emulation

Games

• DOOM set off a firestorm of debate back in 1995, and it came down to: you either liked it, or you didn’t. The game pushed the boundaries at the time, and it solidified itself as the standard of the FPS genre. Now, almost 20 years after that turbulent time, id has rebooted the franchise. Does it still hold sway over gamers in this day and age? Let’s cock that shotgun and find out.

• Fight monsters and explore a medieval world. Aveyond is packed with more than 60 quests, hundreds of places to explore, and over 30 hours of game play. If you like games like Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, and Dragon Warrior, you are going to love Aveyond.

• It’s cross-platform with Windows, Mac and Linux too, so you can play with anyone.

• A developer of Titan Quest commented on their Steam page that they will be looking into Linux and Mac support. Great news, as another positively received RPG would be great for us.

• I am totally in love with Parkitect, so many good memories of playing Theme Park on the Amiga came back when I tried it. You GOG fans can now join in the action too.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• For building Kate from sources, we now have the building instructions on a separate “Build It” page.

• I just created new bundles for Kate & KWrite.

• Qt 5.7.0 is made available today but we @ KDE SIG still want to be more or less conservative and keep 5.6.1 for some time until proper testing and all the new 5.7.0 packages been ready. This packages can become in the future the mainline packages on Fedora.

• I’m on my way back home from the cross-platform sprint in Randa. The four days of hacking, discussing and hiking that I spent there, allowed me to get a much clearer picture of how the cross-platform story for Kube can work, and what effort we will require to get there.

• Snap turns out to be pretty easy to make, and pretty easy to upload to Ubuntu’s app store, and pretty easy to find once it’s there, seeing that there were already more than a thousand downloads after a few days. I don’t care about the security technology, that’s just not relevant for Krita. If you use Krita, you want it to access your files. It takes about five minutes to make a new snap and upload it — pretty good going. I was amazed and pleased that the snap now runs on a number of other distributions, and if Canonical/Ubuntu follows up on that, plugs the holes and fixes the bugs, it’ll be a big plus. Snap also offers all kinds of flexibility, like adding a patched Qt, that I haven’t even tried yet. I also haven’t checked how to add translations yet, but that’s also because the system we use to release translations for Krita needs changing, and I want to do that first.

• My next stop is stars and DSOs. If everything goes well I will finish SkyMapLite by GSoC midterm examinations and proceed to optimization of KStars Lite.

• During Randa we’ve discussed the KDE on Windows road map. There’s been a brisk involvement of the Randa Meetings participants in the platform discussion sessions on Tuesday.

• KDE developers this week at Randa have ben working on improvements for KDE applications on Windows.

• KDE on Windows hasn’t received too much attention recently and they’ve abandoned the concept of having a single KDE installer for Windows, but work on individual programs (and installers) for Windows has continued. Single application installers are their path forward for shipping KDE programs on Windows, among making other improvements

• This is pretty cool: in the week before the Krita release, Michael Hall submitted a snapcraft definition for making a Krita snap. A few iterations later, we have something that works (unless you’re using an NVidia GPU with the proprietary drivers). Adding Krita to the Ubuntu app store was also really easy.

• Again, it’s the time of the year where about 40 KDE developers meet in the middle of the Alps to get a week of fresh air, away from their daily business, to work on improving KDE software. This year’s developer sprint is all about multi-platform distribution of KDE software. We are targeting Android, Windows, MacOSX, and of course all of our beloved Linux platforms.

• I’m happy to announce that we will release Choqok 1.6 next month! (mid July)

• After a nice, mostly uneventful trip to Randa, which involved picking up David on the way to the airport and then a long train trip on the very pleasant Swiss trains, we are now settled into the computer room and ready to get on with this year’s meeting.

• Since it’s rainy in Randa today, I’m going to write a little about all the bits-and-pieces of FreeBSD packaging that I worked on. The *NIX-packaging BoF has given me lots of ideas, for extracting metadata and for automating bits of packaging, but nothing has crystallized around that yet.

• One of the nice things about the Randa meetings is — for me at least — is the return to an almost student-like work scheme. Sleep, eat, code, repeat. The hacking room downstairs (there’s two more upstairs) has 16 people in it, working on all corners of KDE. People move around to form pairs as needed. The Davids are in high demand. Alexander jumps at all kinds of problems, from Python to I18n. Tomaz is doing neat things with Subsurface and explaining things to others. Just sitting here means catching up with KDE technologies and hearing tips.

• Anyway. It’s sorted out now, and Zanshin can be had through the unofficial ports repository. There’s no ETA for landing it (and the rest of KDE Frameworks 5) in official ports and packages, though.

• It has been sometime since I mentioned how Davide, Alessandro and me met our algorithm while working for Google Summer of Code project WikiToLearn:Ratings.

• This is why in WikiToLearn we are trying to involve many people such as students, teachers and researchers.

• Partially, this week was spent on me recuperating from my exam-week and the Krita Kickstarter. After that, delving into the jungle that is Pigment, which is Krita’s colour management library, for abstracting the caching and handling of colour managed colours. It’s a bit of a jungle of templates and class inheritance. This part is where living at my mentor for a week was helpful, as communicating some of the problems I bumped into(mostly confusing class names and how to avoid having to rewrite the caching graph), would’ve been too difficult to do over IRC.

• This is not related to KDE itself, but I’d like to hear some opinion from keyboard layout users, especially from those who use more than one keyboard layout.

• Right now I’m designing a new feature for fcitx (for people who doesn’t know it, it’s an input method framework under Linux), currently called “input method group”. The goal of this feature is to solve the conflict between keyboard layout and input method (mostly conceptually) . It can also solve some other problem, but the original goal is about keyboard layout.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• My first contribution for GNOME project is a usability test for Nautilus, Firefox and Gedit also the environment itself. I started this test by explaining what is usability testing and why is it important and then walked trough the methods I used for conducting the test as well as the end results and some recommendations .

• The preliminary results for this year’s elections were not challenged. This means, in the next term, our Board of Directors will be composed of the following Foundation members:

• Allan Day Cosimo Cecchi Shaun McCance Nuritzi Sanchez Alexandre Franke Jim Hall Meg Ford

Distributions

• Linux and open source is the future and there is no doubt about that, and to see this come to a reality, a strong foundation has to be lied, by starting from the lowest level possible and that is exposing kids to Linux and teaching them how to use Linux operating systems.

Reviews

• Duke Nukem, Half-Life 3, ReactOS. What do they all have in common? An extremely long development time. In this article, we will focus on the last, a project that started in 1996 as an attempt to provide a free, Windows-compatible operating system to the masses.

• Fast forward 20 years, ReactOS is a living, breathing entity, having recently reached a semi-mature 0.4.1 release. Lots of stuff has been happening under the hood, enough to warrant some real-life testing. Anyhow, here be Dedoimedo’s first stab at this interesting little system.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Red Hat Family

• TechRights.org’s Dr. Roy Schestowitz blogged today that Red Hat was “bashing the media” for covering Canonical’s Snap packaging. In related news, Matthias Klumpp has suspended development of Limba, a cross-platform package management system similar to Flatpak, in deference to Snap and Flatpak. On Snap, Christine Hall touched on a thought that needs to be reported as well. On the other side of town, Dominique Leuenberger shared a bit of Tumbleweed news and Mike Saunders posted on the progress of the Document Liberation Project.

Finance

Fedora

• I just finished organizing my first event for Fedora – Fedora 24 Release Party in Novi Sad!

• At the second round of Fedora 24 Final Go/No-Go Meeting, Fedora 24 Final RC1.2 has just been declared as GOLD. GA of this release is planned on Tuesday 2016-June-21. Here the official post on Community Blog, Meeting details and full log. So, finally, Fedora 24 is really coming!

• I wanted to get two more Fedora grunge rock style wallpapers out before the launch of Fedora 24. I did a different background texture and added the 24 to both of these. I hope you enjoy.

• At the second round of Fedora 24 Final Go/No-Go Meeting, has just been Fedora 24 Final RC1.2 declared as GOLD.

Debian Family

• The last few months have been a bit of a crazy period of ups and downs, with a tempest of events beneath the apparent and deceivingly calm surface waters of being unemployed (still at it).

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Meizu PRO 5 might be almost a year old now, but it is still a gorgeous and exquisite flagship device. The only real question is, could Meizu have possibly made it better by ditching the tried and true Android and by taking a shot on Ubuntu – a rarity on the smartphone scene to say the least. But, we won’t dive into that quite yet.

• LibreOffice Windows x64 MSI: 238 MB

• LibreOffice OS X Bundle: 201 MB

• LibreOffice Flatpack: 156 MBs

• LibreOffice x64 Deb package: 229 MBs

• LibreOffice x64 RPM package: 229 MBs

• LibreOffice AppImage: 246 MB

• LibreOffice snap: 1.1 GB

• I have just updated the LibreOffice snap package. The size of the package available for download created some confusion.

• Over the last several months there has been noticeable and growing pain associated with the evolving integration tests around snapd, and given the project goal of being a cross-distribution platform, we are very keen on solving this problem appropriately so that stability is guaranteed everywhere.

• If you’ve been following the latest Ubuntu news around the traps, you’ve probably heard about Canonical’s “Snappy” system. We actually did an article on Snappy back in late 2014 when the project had just started to surface. As of the latest Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release, the core program ‘snapd’ is included out of the box, allowing you to install ‘Snaps’ right away.

• Today is Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day, but this year I am going to expand my appreciation beyond the boundaries of the Ubuntu Community to include anyone in open source that has impacted my journey in open source.

Flavours and Variants

• First off, this post is all my personal thoughts and opinions; while I am involved with elementary OS, this doesn’t necessarily represent the thoughts of anyone else or of elementary itself.

• This release brings tons of fixes and new features for both users and developers. Over 20 blueprints were implemented and over 800 issues closed. Time to break it all down and reveal what the future holds for the next version of elementary OS!

• elementary OS 0.4 “Loki” beta was released today, and it includes over 800 closed issues and 20 implemented blueprints.

• Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” Review : Improved Features With Better Experience : The Beta version of Linux Mint 18 code name “Sarah” was released few days back. The final release is expected to come out by end of this month.

• You may be aware that Linux Mint has forked several GNOME applications, either directly from GNOME (Totem -> Xplayer, Evince -> Xreader, Eye of GNOME -> Xviewer), or indirectly via MATE (gedit -> pluma -> XEd).

• GNOME is like the Debian of the Linux desktops. But is it a good thing? In the current state of the code, I don’t think so and I’ll explain why, with a solution: creating more shared libraries.

Devices/Embedded

• Artificial Intelligence is everywhere. Self-driving cars, world’s sexiest robot or Go champion, all are the miracles of artificial intelligence. How about an AI-powered device leading all the connected gadgets in your home? Sounds appealing, right? Voice activated personal assistants are in vogue thanks to Apple’s Siri and Google Now. Amazon Echo is one of the first smart-home assistants that brings voice control into the picture. However, a new startup is putting a similar value on voice control. Mycroft, the world’s first open-source, open-hardware home AI platform.

• A fairly straightforward idea by Imagination Technologies could rescue American geeks’ ability to run Openwrt on their routers.

• The freedom to tinker with Wi-Fi routers has been a hot topic ever since the Federal Communications Commission issued an edict that devices be locked down to protect America’s spectrum.

• Aaeon has added wider temperature range options to a number of its embedded SBCs and COMs. Most of these boards originally came out before LinuxGizmos (now HackerBoards) was launched in early 2013. One fairly recent board we missed, but we think is still worthy of coverage is the PICO-BT01 Pico-ITX SBC detailed farther below. As usual, Aaeon does not list OS support, but we are confident all these boards can run Linux or Windows.

Phones

Android

• Maru offers desktop experience on your smartphone which is available for Nexus 5 Phone now. Based upon Android 5.0 Lollipop, Maru makes it possible for you to talk on the phone while you can be connected to standalone display to work. All you will need is a Bluetooth enabled keyboard and mouse. The latest public release is version 0.2.3, which seems rock-solid stable, though the developer warns that

• Conventional tablets may be going out of style, but that hasn’t stopped Asus and Verizon from hooking up to launch a new slate for those who want an Android device bigger than a smartphone to use on the go with the carrier’s 4G network.

• Some 93 percent of Android devices today are using one of the latest three versions of the mobile operating system, giving weight to the idea that Android may not be as fragmented as some critics believe.

Free Software/Open Source

• Doubts about the accuracy of the Senate vote count remain until the Australian Electoral Commission agrees to publicly release the computer code it uses.

• That’s the view of the Australian Greens and academics who have studied vote-counting software errors.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Vimperator is a plugin for Firefox that completely overhauls the GUI to behave like Vim making your mouse unneeded for most web sites. If this was not available I would be attempting to create something much like it.

• We all portray different characteristics of ourselves in different situations. The way I speak with my son is much different than the way I communicate with my coworkers. The things I tell my friends are different than what I tell my parents. I’m much more guarded when withdrawing money from the bank than I am when shopping at the grocery store. I have the ability to use multiple identities in multiple contexts. But when I use the web, I can’t do that very well. There is no easy way to segregate my identities such that my browsing behavior while shopping for toddler clothes doesn’t cross over to my browsing behavior while working. The Containers feature I’m about to describe attempts to solve this problem: empowering Firefox to help segregate my online identities in the same way I can segregate my real life identities.

• In Firefox 48, which reaches the release channel on August 1, 2016, mullti-process support (code name “Electrolysis”, or “e10s”) will begin rolling out to Firefox users without any add-ons installed.

• Any website can access a selection of Firefox resource files to find out more about the web browser that is used to connect to the site.

• TLDR: I’m toying with writing a C standard library in Rust by porting musl-libc over function-by-function.

• Mozilla recently announced a new feature that is being tested in the Firefox browser called “Contextual Identities”. The idea behind this feature is that users will be able to separate different types of browsing into different identities, allowing them to protect their data with more control. The images below were all taken from the announcement page and should provide a good example of how this feature works.

SaaS/Back End

• The world of OpenStack moves quickly. Each day brings new features, new bug fixes, and new ways of thinking. The OpenStack-Ansible community strives to understand these changes and make them easier for operators to implement.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Some rendering speed improvements have been worked on recently for the LibreOffice open-source office suite and are now present in LO Git.

• If you haven’t heard of the Document Liberation Project (DLP) before, we made a short video explaining what it does and why it’s important. In summary: it supports development of software libraries to read documents from many (usually proprietary) applications. If you’ve ever opened a file generated by Apple Pages, WordPerfect or Microsoft Works in LibreOffice, you’ve benefitted from the hard work of the DLP team. And DLP libraries are used in many other prominent FOSS tools such as Inkscape and Scribus as well.

Funding

• 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.

BSD

• There’s more work going on in the CUDA/OpenMP space for the LLVM Clang compiler.

• Landing this week in Clang SVN/Git is generic offload toolchains for the concept of an offloading tool chain plus related work. The initial patch explains, “This patch is the first of a series of three that attempts to make the current support of CUDA more generic and easier to extend to other programming models, namely OpenMP.”

Licensing/Legal

• Brett Smith has been using free software since 1998. He worked in several roles at the Free Software Foundation (FSF) from 2002-2004, and then worked in its GPL Compliance Lab from 2006-2012. dtrx stands for “Do the Right Extraction:” it extracts all kinds of archive files in a consistent way, so you always get the same results no matter how the author built the archive.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• The idea is to undermine the monopolies of companies like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and the like with a genuinely cooperative, horizontal and P2P model directly controlled by the users themselves, and cut out the corporate middleman altogether. Advocates for this model have coined the term “Platform Cooperativism” for it (if you search the #PlatformCooperativism hashtag on Twitter, you’ll find links to a lot of great articles on it).

Programming/Development

• Ned Deily, who is the release manager for the upcoming Python 3.6 release and will “probably be the 3.7 release manager”, led a session at the 2016 Python Language Summit to review and discuss the release cycle for the language. There have been some changes for 3.6 compared to the 3.5 cycle and there may be opportunities to make some additional changes for 3.7 and beyond.

• A mini-theme at this year’s Python Language Summit was tools that are using the PEP 484 type hints. In the final session on that theme, Andrey Vlasovskikh, the community lead for the PyCharm IDE, described that tool’s support for type hints.

• Google’s pytype tool, which uses the PEP 484 type hints for static analysis, was the subject of a presentation by one of its developers, Matthias Kramm, at the 2016 Python Language Summit. In it, he compared several different tools and their reaction to various kinds of type errors in the code. He also described pytype’s static type-inference capabilities.

• At last year’s Python Language Summit, Guido van Rossum gave an introduction to “type hints”, which are an optional feature to allow static checkers to spot type errors in Python programs. At this year’s summit, he discussed mypy, which is one of several static type checkers for Python. It is being used by Dropbox, Van Rossum’s employer, on its large Python codebase—with good results.

• Brett Cannon gave an update on the migration of Python’s repositories to GitHub and the associated workflow changes at the 2016 Python Language Summit. The goal is modernize the development process; right now that process is “old school”, which is “good or bad depending on who you ask”. After looking at the options, GitHub seemed to be the best choice for housing the repositories; PEP 512 lays out the options and rationale for those interested. LWN looked at some of the discussion surrounding the move back in December 2014.

• If we make a list of the most important programming languages, we’ll come across two categories. There are many vintage programming languages that just won’t die and continue to be used in their respective field. Along with them, there are some newer programming languages that have managed to make their mark upon the tech world.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• It’s hard to find an herbicide like glyphosate. It’s cheap, highly effective, and is generally regarded as one of the safest and most environmentally benign herbicides ever discovered. But a report last year that glyphosate could cause cancer has thrown its future into jeopardy. Now the European Union faces a 30 June deadline to reapprove its use, or glyphosate will not be allowed for sale. Here’s a quick explanation of the issues.

• Seemingly insurmountable differences in food standards are threatening to sink trade negotiations between the United States and the European Union. EurActiv Spain reports.

• Since 2013, the United States and the EU have been working to construct what would be the biggest trade deal in the world. But negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) have got bogged down on a number of issues.

• According to Brian Kilgallen, part of the European Commission’s negotiating team, one of the major hurdles that remains to be overcome in the TTIP negotiations is the chapter dedicated to phytosanitary mesures (plant and animal health).

Security

• A security researcher has outlined a dangerous loophole that affects the Intel CPUs that have Intel Management Engine and vPro enabled. While there’s no known exploit at the moment that uses this flaw, it can act as a powerful rootkit mechanism.

• A teen from Washington hacked the websites of US Department of Defence. But, instead of going to prison, he was thanked by the Pentagon for the work he did. This is because he was a participant of a bug bounty program titled Hack The Pentagon.

• Recent Intel x86 processors implement a secret, powerful control mechanism that runs on a separate chip that no one is allowed to audit or examine. When these are eventually compromised, they’ll expose all affected systems to nearly unkillable, undetectable rootkit attacks. I’ve made it my mission to open up this system and make free, open replacements, before it’s too late.

• Certificate authority Let’s Encrypt accidentally disclosed the email addresses of several thousand of its users this weekend.

• Josh Aas, Executive Director for the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), the nonprofit group that helped launch the CA, apologized for the error on Saturday. In what Let’s Encrypt dubbed a preliminary report posted shortly after it happened, Aas blamed the faux pas on a bug in the automated email system the group uses.

• Software Freedom Conservancy congratulates its phpMyAdmin project on succesfuly completing completing a thorough security audit, as part of Mozilla’s Secure Open Source Fund. No serious issues were found in the phyMyAdmin codebase.

• StartCom, a leading global Certificate Authority (CA) and provider of trusted identity and authentication services, announces a new service – StartEncrypt today, an automatic SSL certificate issuance and installation software for your web server.

• he 8-year-old worm continues to infect in some corners of the Internet, highlighting the difficulty in eradicating more virulent programs. On Oct. 23, 2008, Microsoft revealed a critical flaw that could allow an attacker to remotely compromise and infect Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 systems.

• It took only a week for the Internet’s seedier element to create the first malware based on the vulnerability. While initial attacks targeted specific companies and infected fewer than a dozen systems a day, the situation was much worse a month later when an unknown malware developer released a self-propagating worm.

Defence/Aggression

• We may have achieved peak military-industrial complex: the U.S. is in part supplying both sides of the Iraq-Islamic State conflict and through that, creating the need for a new class of weapons to be sold as a counter measure. As arms manufacturers across our great land say, it doesn’t get any better than this.

• Islamic State militants have not only acquired a grand majority of the military Humvees gifted to and then abandoned by the Iraqi Army, they are now re-purposing them into car bombs to use against the Iraqi Army (Hint: don’t leave the keys in the car next time.*)

• Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi confirmed that 2,300 are in ISIS hands, more than two-thirds of all Humvees provided to Iraq by the U.S.

• Now this is one way to stop terrorism, particularly the funding of ISIS. Did the United States clamp down on Saudi Arabia funneling millions to ISIS and other Sunni terror groups? Use American military power to stop the illegal weapons trade to ISIS? Bomb the hell out of the oil wells and transit systems ISIS uses to raise hard currency?

• Hell no. The government of the United States used its full resources to steal $42 from some drunk dude who wrote “ISIS Beer Funds!!!” in the memo field on Venmo when he tried to pay back his buddy for a night out.

• Telling a friend you’re paying him back for “ISIS beer funds!!!” is not a particularly good joke. I knew this as I was typing it at 2am on a Sunday, but what I did not know is that it’s an even worse joke on Venmo because the federal government will detain your $42.

• Failing to call Islamic terror by its name breeds more violence

• Before Omar Mateen walked into Pulse nightclub and shot 49 of its patrons and staff to death, he was a nobody. In the hours that followed, though, he was catapulted to global infamy. When rumors of his ideological inclination first went public, observers stopped talking about him as if he was an “ordinary” mass shooter and effectively put the full force of ISIS behind him. He stopped being a mere man with a gun and was transformed, via the media and politicians, into a full-fledged ISIS operative, a human manifestation of the group’s international menace.

• A group of Radiohead fans has been attacked by a mob of men carrying sticks and bottles as they held a listening party of the band’s music in Istanbul.

• The incident, which was largely captured on video, occurred on Friday night at the Velvet Indieground record store – a popular destination for Turkish and foreign music fans in the Istanbul district of Cihangir. There was at least one injury, with a picture of a person with a bloodied shirt, purportedly from the attack, posted on Twitter.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Exxon Mobil Corp. is seeking an injunction against the Massachusetts attorney general, alleging that a wide-ranging investigation into the oil company is politically motivated and violates its constitutional rights.

Finance

• For the state’s first hundred-plus years, certain unspoken rules governed California politics. In a state where agriculture produced more wealth than any industry, the first rule was that growers held enormous power.

• Tax dollars built giant water projects that turned the Central and Imperial Valleys into some of the nation’s most productive farmland. Land ownership was concentrated in huge corporate plantation-like farms. Growers used political power to assure a steady flow of workers from one country after another—Japan, China, the Philippines, Yemen, India, and of course Mexico—to provide the labor that made the land productive.

• This evening the Securities and Exchange Commission approved an application by a startup called IEX to become a full-fledged stock exchange. By approving IEX, the SEC was giving its stamp of approval to one of the most high-profile challenges to the current Wall Street regime. Co-founded by a Canadian trader named Brad Katsuyama, IEX is designed to be a market free from high-frequency traders who use their speed to skim profits off the orders from ordinary citizens.

• The company, and Katsuyama in particular, rose to prominence as the stars of Michael Lewis’ best-selling book, Flash Boys. Lewis argued that modern markets were rigged, allowing high-frequency traders to pay for fast access and use that speed to front-run other traders. As a trader, Katsuyama dealt with the problem first hand. He would place a bid for a stock at a price he saw listed, and then find there were no shares available at that price. “They could detect my order at BATS, race me to the next exchange, and cancel their sell orders while buying whatever is left, then turn around and try and sell stock back to me at a higher price,” said Katsuyama.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Most coverage of Donald Trump’s rallies are about people disrupting it. But one American journalist went there and quietly observed what was going on.

• He came back shaken and scared.

• Jared Yates Sexton is a writer and political correspondent from the state of Georgia.

• Yesterday, Donald Trump held a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. Sexton went there to cover the event, and wrote a series of tweets.

• The Trump Plaza Casino and Hotel is now closed, its windows clouded over by sea salt. Only a faint outline of the gold letters spelling out T-R-U-M-P remains visible on the exterior of what was once this city’s premier casino.

• Not far away, the long-failing Trump Marina Hotel Casino was sold at a major loss five years ago and is now known as the Golden Nugget.

• At the nearly deserted eastern end of the boardwalk, the Trump Taj Mahal, now under new ownership, is all that remains of the casino empire Donald J. Trump assembled here more than a quarter-century ago. Years of neglect show: The carpets are frayed and dust-coated chandeliers dangle above the few customers there to play the penny slot machines.

• On the presidential campaign trail, Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, often boasts of his success in Atlantic City, of how he outwitted the Wall Street firms that financed his casinos and rode the value of his name to riches. A central argument of his candidacy is that he would bring the same business prowess to the Oval Office, doing for America what he did for his companies.

• Charles Koch and the Koch machine continue to press for changes to federal laws to make it harder to prosecute corporate crimes, as part of criminal justice “reforms,” but the Koch-connected network is already at the trough for public funds intended to help prisoners with “reentry” into society.

• As Congress considers major criminal justice reforms to address the devastating impact of gross sentencing disparities that have devastated minority communities, the Koch machine is seeking changes to the law that would benefit Koch Industries and other corporations by limiting their criminal liability, as the Center for Media and Democracy documented in 2015.

• But that’s not the only part of the agenda of the billionaire Koch brothers’ network that is in play.

• Few policymakers understand the role the Koch-funded “think tanks” like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and its “Right on Crime” operation have played and are playing in the privatization of the criminal justice system, including in the area of “re-entry,” a term of art for how people who have served their sentence re-enter society.

• Earlier this week, a lone hacker—self-dubbed Guccifer 2.0—breached DNC servers and reportedly obtained opposition research on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump. The DNC confirmed the hack and hasn’t denied the authenticity of the documents released. The Party has, however, continued to propagate that the hack was deployed by the Russian government—perhaps because the information that was released is far more revealing than just opposition research.

• Internal memos, dated May 2015—long before the first state voted in the Democratic primary—referred to Hillary Clinton as though she was already the Democratic presidential nominee. The documents leaked by Guccifer 2.0 not only illuminate the DNC’s efforts to ensure Clinton’s coronation but also reveal the strategies used to shield her from criticism on ethics, transparency and campaign finance reform—all vulnerabilities for the corrupt Establishment darling.

• Despite being under criminal investigation by the FBI and DOJ, Clinton has still managed to secure the Democratic presidential nomination. And, despite revelations from the State Department Inspector General—who reported Clinton did break federal rules, effectively debunking the defense she has echoed for over a year—Democrats still, shockingly, continued to vote for her in the remaining primary states.

• Just one of the issues Clinton panders to voters is campaign finance reform, even though she has reaped more benefits from our broken system than any other presidential candidate in American history. Clinton has received millions in dubious donations through Super-PACs by exploiting campaign finance law loopholes. Thanks to an exempt Internet clause in existing campaign finance law, the Hillary Victory Fund (a joint fundraising committee with the DNC) and Correct the Record have legally and directly coordinate with Clinton’s campaign.

Censorship/Free Speech

• BeIN Sports chose not to show the images on its popular post-match program L’Euro Show. The station’s head sent out an email to all staff telling them not to show the images, according to Le Parisien. The email leaked. Images came out. And suddenly the debate became not just about one player’s action, but about censorship and the free press.

• Google is being overloaded with DMCA takedown requests. The company has seen the number of takedown notices from rightsholders quadruple over the past two years. In 2016 alone, Google is projected to process over a billion reported pirate links, most of which will be scrubbed from its search index.

• A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that service providers such as video-sharing sites like Vimeo are protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for pre-1972 musical recordings uploaded by their users.

• The record labels had sued the YouTube-like site and successfully convinced a district court judge that, because pre-1972 recordings fell under state laws and not federal copyright law, the DMCA didn’t apply. The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision and also overturned the lower court that ruled the DMCA didn’t grant so-called safe-harbor passage to service providers whose employees saw infringements on their platforms uploaded by their users.

• Three National Guard companies in Spokane – along with National Guard units around the country – were mobilized and readied for war.

• Not for the war in Europe, which had been raging for two years. Instead, they were readied for service on the Mexican border, where tensions had been rising for years.

• Recently, Mexican bandits had been raiding American border towns.

• The local National Guard reservists were destined for American Lake (today’s Joint Base Lewis-McChord), where they would join other units. Then they would be dispatched along the border to prevent any further incursions.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Apple plans to use differential privacy (DP) in iOS 10 to maximise the accuracy of queries from data while minimising the likelihood of identifying who it is from.

• I was one of LinkedIn’s first members, joining on June 27, 2003, when it was still in beta. Over the years, it has gotten me a lot of work and helped me write countless stories. But now that Microsoft is buying the company, I’m really wondering whether I should leave.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Nearly five months after convicted Silk Road druglord Ross Ulbricht filed his opening brief in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, the government finally responded with its own brief late Friday evening. The government included over 200 pages of exhibits from the trial.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The FCC won a major victory over net neutrality this week, and the surprise wasn’t so much that it prevailed but that its legal win was so sweeping.

• There had been some expectation, on Wall Street, on Capitol Hill and in the legal community, that the D.C. Circuit would chip away at some of the FCC’s rules of the road for the internet. The FCC actions that looked to be under threat included extending the regulations to mobile carriers, and a “general conduct” rule which, in the words of FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, was meant to stop “new and novel threats to the internet.”

• The wall outlet that connects your Internet router to Comcast or Verizon is no different from the one that supples power to the living room lamp. That’s one way to look at this week’s federal court decision that wisely validated the position of the Federal Communications Commission itself: The Internet should be treated more like a utility than like an online superhighway where travelers who pay a toll get to go faster than others.

• The ruling by a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reinforced the premise of so-called net neutrality — the idea that everyone should have equal access to the Internet, whether they’re sending and receiving basic HTML images or streaming full-length HD movies. Yes, it’s a numbingly dense principle, but one that should matter to anyone who spends time online.

• You may have heard something this week about a US court and net neutrality and something about the internet. Maybe it didn’t make much sense. And that’s a good thing! If we all spent our time trying to decipher the web, we’d never get around to actually using it, or creating awesome new things with it.

• That said, some debates are so important to the healthy function of the internet that they’re worth learning about in depth, and in the process grasping their implications for free speech, online commerce, educational opportunity and all the reasons that make the internet worth using in the first place.

• One of those debates reached a key turning point on Tuesday in the US when a federal appeals court said that the internet was basically like a giant telephone network and that the companies that provide it, such as Comcast and Verizon, must offer essentially the same protections to internet users that the government has required of phone companies for decades.

• It’s probably bad if all our media and communications are going through services that are controlled by profit-driven corporations.

DRM

• Lots of my self-pub writer friends urge me to sign on with Kindle Unlimited. They tell me I’ll make more money by making my books only available on Amazon.

• They’re probably correct… in the short term.

• But if you have only one customer, and only one sales channel, that sales channel can destroy yo without warning. And today, Amazon’s scam-fighting techniques are crushing authors guilty of only one thing: trusting Amazon as their sole customer.

• For a year or so, I’ve been working with the EFF to get the World Wide Web Consortium to take steps to protect security researchers and new market-entrants who run up against the DRM standard they’re incorporating into HTML5, the next version of the key web standard.

• At issue is the DMCA and its global equivalents, which impose daunting penalties on those who break DRM, even for legal reasons — whether that’s investigating privacy and security risks or making a competitive new product that does completely legal things. Once DRM is part of a full implementation of HTML5, there’s a real risk to security researchers who discover defects in browsers and want to warn users about them, and for new companies hoping to compete by offering features and products that the incumbents don’t choose to implement.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The lawyers who successfully got “Happy Birthday” put into the public domain and then sued two months ago over “We Shall Overcome” have a new target: Woody Guthrie’s “This Land.”

• Randall Newman and his colleagues have filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against The Richmond Organization (TRO) and Ludlow Music, the two entities that also claim to own the copyright for “We Shall Overcome.”

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