● 06.29.16

● Links 29/6/2016: SteamOS 2.83 Beta, Alpine Linux 3.4.1

Posted in News Roundup at 11:20 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Following a small claims court judgment against them, Microsoft announced they would be making declining their Windows 10 upgrade easier. Why not just switch to Linux as Daniel Robinson highlighted five reasons you should. My Linux Rig spoke to Christine Hall of FOSS Force about her “Linux rig” today and Bryan Lunduke had some thoughts on Canonical’s collaboration myth. Dedoimedo reviewed GeckoLinux 421 and Gary Newell tested Peppermint 7 on his new Lenovo Ideapad.

• Microsoft’s decision to offer Windows 10 as a free upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 made sense on its surface. It was a nice freebie for users happy to upgrade, and an effective way to herd customers on older Windows iterations onto the latest platform to help consolidate support expense. But Microsoft’s upgrade in practice has seen no shortage of criticism from users annoyed by a total lack of control over the update, and Microsoft’s violent tone deafness in response to the complaints.

• For example a Reddit post from an anti-poaching organization made the rounds earlier this year after the 17 GB automatic Windows 10 update resulted in huge per megabyte charges from their satellite broadband ISP. Microsoft’s response to these complaints? Ignore them. As complaints grew, Microsoft finally provided a way to fully disable the forced upgrade, but made sure it involved forcing users to modify the registry, something Microsoft knew full well less technical users wouldn’t be comfortable attempting to hurdle.

• [...]

• Things have been escalating ever since, often to comedic effect. But this week things changed somewhat with the news that Microsoft has struck a $10,000 settlement with a California woman who sued the company after an ill-timed Windows 10 upgrade brought her office computers to a crawl. The woman took Microsoft to court after support failed to help resolve the issue, a spokesman saying Microsoft halted its appeal of the ruling “to avoid the expense of further litigation.”

• On my main desktop, I use Linux Mint 17.1, Rebecca. My main laptop, a 64-bit machine, is running Mint 17.2 Rafaela. The laptop got updated from Rebecca so I could write a review, but the desktop never got upgraded because it’s a 32-bit machine and would require another download, which I haven’t had the time to do. I have another laptop running Bodhi, which might be my favorite distro, but I can be more productive with Mint.

• The wait for the summer’s hottest Linux distro is over and you can finally download the release version of Linux Mint 18 “Sarah”. Often called the best Linux distribution for desktop PCs, Mint 18 comes loaded with new features and Linux 4.4 LTS Kernel.

• Microsoft will change the controversial way it has been force-feeding people Windows 10 upgrades.

• The Redmond spreadsheet maker said that when someone clicks on the red “X” to close its infamous your-Windows-10-upgrade-is-ready pop-up, they will actually hold off the installation rather than accept it.

• That Other Operating System has bitten millions of users: crashing, freezing, slowing down, refusing to boot, endless re-re-reboots, malware, EULA from Hell, etc. Now there’s “10” trying to outdo malware in conversion of the use of your hardware to M$’s purposes, enhancing/preserving monopoly. I was bitten 16 years ago by crashing. My employers were bitten by malware. Many others were tired of the Wintel treadmill and fled to lower cost and more efficient GNU/Linux.

Kernel Space

• IBM has opened a new Bluemix Garage in New York, to offer the city’s developers, entrepreneurs, and fintech firms the use of blockchain on the cloud.

• IBM on Tuesday announced a new Bluemix Garage in New York, located at Galvanize’s newly launched New York campus in SoHo. This enables developers and enterprises to work with IBM Blockchain code in the cloud. As with IBM’s other garages in San Francisco, London, Nice and Toronto, the New York Garage will invite startups and enterprises to collaborate in a creative environment outside of their traditional office setting.

• This is a pretty long blogpost, so for those who want to jump right to the code:

• TriforceAFL: A modified version of AFL that supports fuzzing using QEMU’s full system emulation.

Graphics Stack

• One day ahead of the Radeon RX 480 “Polaris” launch, the necessary firmware updates for the production graphics card support have landed in linux-firmware.git.

• The next generation of AMD GPU’s have launched, and it begins with the AMD RX 480. Benchmarks are now out there along with plenty of info.

• I don’t have the card myself as I have no contacts at AMD, but luckily Phoronix managed to bag a card and he’s done plenty of testing as you can imagine. I will be referencing the green site due to other sites obviously focusing on Windows.

Applications

• In case you missed it — we got PulseAudio 9.0 out the door, with the echo cancellation improvements that I wrote about. Now is probably a good time for me to make good on my promise to expand upon the subject of beamforming.

• Today, June 28, 2016, Oracle has announced the general availability of the VirtualBox 5.0.24 virtualization software for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Today SteamOS has a new beta, which brings a much newer Nvidia driver to the table and a fresher build of the new AMD PRO driver.

• The Nvidia driver is now 367.27 and AMD GPU PRO is now at RC2. The Nvidia driver was especially out of date, so to have both updated is really going to help it.

• Today, June 29, 2016, Valve’s engineers working on the SteamOS gaming operating system based on the stable Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” distribution have released a new Beta update.

• SteamOS Brewmaster update 2.83 is now available for early adopters, it was pushed to the brewmaster_beta, and it comes one month after the release of the previous Beta version, SteamOS 2.80, to enhance both the Nvidia and AMD Radeon graphics drivers.

• The Linux Gamer does some really awesome videos and his editing is really quite brilliant at times. Take a look at his thoughts on Pac-Man 256.

• When I’m super rich he’s high on my “must employ” list.

• While it’s sad to see it as a stretch-goal, I have big faith in Nightdive Studios due to their previous good support of Linux. System Shock is being remade and it’s probably going to be funded quite well.

• System Shock is a complete remake of the genre defining classic from 1994 built by a team of industry veterans. Remember Citadel.

• A new video for Civilization VI shows off the English, but they don’t seem to want to talk about the Linux version at the moment.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME developers are always hard at work patching bugs in the popular desktop environment used by default in many GNU/Linux operating systems, and today they’ve updated the GNOME Shell and Mutter components.

• I loved attending the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference (GUADEC). I want to go back, but it’s hard to get away for such a long trip.

• I’ve coded the research phase in blue, and the usability testing phase in red.

• As you can see, we moved pretty quickly through the research phase, learning about “What is usability,” different ways to test usability, personas, scenarios, and scenario tasks. And Ciarrai, Diana, and Renata have done very well here.

• We’ve taken the last week to settle into a project focus, and figure out who wants to do what. And today, we are officially starting the usability testing phase!

Distributions

• Today, June 28, 2016, Natanael Copa, the creator of the Alpine Linux distribution, was proud to announce the immediate availability of the first point release of Alpine Linux 3.4 series.

• That technical issue aside, The MakuluLinux line is one of my favorites. Unlike typical distros, Makulu strays from some of the mainstream primary applications.

• It also has a set of the most commonly used software preinstalled regardless of the desktop flavor selected. For example, it uses the WPS office suite.

• If you fancy the Cinnamon desktop, you will feel right at home with MakuluLinux. If you cut your computing teeth on Microsoft Windows, you will be particularly enamored with the LinDoz Edition.

Reviews

• For an application first demonstrated a year ago, GigJam still feels tantalizingly unfinished, with a limited number of services you can connect to, frustrating bugs when connecting to Microsoft’s own services, no way to work offline and an interface you’re unlikely to figure out without reading the documentation (and even then may find frustrating).

• It’s also a fascinating glimpse into what the Microsoft Graph can unlock. The ability to filter your CRM leads information based on your meetings, or your email based on your unfulfilled orders, or your tasks based on the emails about what you’re supposed to be doing — and share that view with your colleagues — could make you hugely productive. The ability to see the PowerPoint and the Word document you’re going to use in a meeting, along with the emails everyone has had from the people you’re meeting with so you know what they care about, could be a great way to prepare for the meeting. And you can do all that without sharing more information than you want (probably). It’s a fantastic idea, but Microsoft really needs to improve the execution.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Gentoo Family

• Today, June 28, 2016, the developers of the Gentoo-based Sabayon Linux computer operating system have had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of new respin ISO images for the month of July 2016.

• Right on the schedule, Sabayon 16.07 Live ISO images are now available for download, switching the OS to the latest Linux 4.6.3 kernel from the deprecated Linux 4.5 branch that shipped with the May ISO respins of the GNU/Linux distribution, Sabayon 16.05.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• I heard a lot of good praise about this little distro. My inbox is flooded with requests to take it for a spin, so I decided, hey, so many people are asking. Let us. The thing is, openSUSE derivatives are far and few in between, but the potential and the appeal are definitely there. Something like CentOS on steroids, the way Stella did once, the same noble way Fuduntu tried to emancipate Fedora. Take a somewhat somber distro and pimpify it into submission.

• GeckoLinux is based on openSUSE Leap, and I chose the Plasma Static edition. There’s also a Rolling version, based on Tumbleweed, but that one never worked for me. The test box for this review is Lenovo G50. But wait! Dedoimedo, did you not recently write in your second rejection report that GeckoLinux had failed to boot? Indeed I did. But the combo of yet another firmware update on the laptop and a fresh new download fixed it, allowing for a DVD boot. Somewhat like the painful but successful Fedora exercise back in the day. Tough start, but let’s see what gives.

• It is Hack Week at SUSE, and I am working on La Mapería (the map store), a little program to generate beautiful printed maps from OpenStreetMap data.

Red Hat Family

• Two Triangle tech titans are teaming up to create cloud solutions for the changing telco space: Lenovo and Red Hat.

• It’s not their first collaboration, says Brian Connors, vice president of next generation IT and business development in Lenovo’s Research Triangle Park-based Data Center Group.

• Red Hat even invested in Lenovo’s RTP executive briefing center, where its technology is currently “displayed prominently as customers come in.”

• Broadening the strength and depth of the open source community has always been a goal that has been supported by vendors and businesses alike, but a call to arms for a greater participation was the message that Red Hat wanted to get across at its annual summit.

• The Red Hat Summit in San Francisco was an opportunity for CEO Jim Whitehurst to talk about the ideology of open source during his keynote presentation, and a message of changing hierarchies underpinned much of what he said.

• Red Hat still faces a major challenge convincing organisations to pay for its services, especially in markets such as China where there is widespread use of free, open source alternatives, says CEO Jim Whitehurst.

• On the first day of the Red Hat Summit, Linux vendor Red Hat makes some incremental container announcements and belittles its competitors.

Finance

Fedora

• Welcome to the “Container technologies in Fedora” series! This is the first article in a series of articles that will explain how you can use the various container technologies available in Fedora. This first article will deal with systemd-nspawn.

• Fedora 24 was released last week, so of course I had to upgrade my machines. As has become the norm, there weren’t any serious issues, but I hit a few annoyances this time around. The first was due to packages in the RPMFusion repos not being signed. This isn’t Fedora’s fault, as RPMFusion is a completely separate project. And it was temporary: by the time I upgraded my laptop on Sunday night, the packages had all been signed.

• I’ve been working on a shirt design for this year’s Fedora Flock in Krakow, Poland and figured that I’d share what I’ve put together! I’m also including some of my earlier attempts at the design as well to show my thought process as well. Ps. for those who may not be familiar with landmarks and iconic images of Krakow (and yes, I too am one of you too… much research was needed!) here’s a list of some of the imagery that I tied to incorporate in the designs.

• Honestly, nothing from the features in the announcement of the Fedora 24 release didn’t manage to excite me intro upgrading my desktop from an old, out-of-support Fedora. It’s main task is to edit digital photography and for some years a Linux solution is decent at it.

• FESCO have approved, for Fedora 25 the upgrade from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.0.

• We have upgraded our beloved evil super villain IRC bot on freenode from an old version of supybot-gribble to a new shiny version of limnoria ( https://github.com/ProgVal/Limnoria ). This doesn’t change much in the interface, but it does mean we are using something that is maintained and gets updates and is a good deal more secure. If you notice problems please do let us know with a Fedora Infrastructure ticket.

• 2 days ago, I woke up to a mail from Google saying that I passed the mid term evaluations of GSoC and could continue working towards my final evaluation. “What a wonderful way to kick start a day, I thought”.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• In only two days from the moment of writing this article, we will be able to get a very early taste of the upcoming Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system, as the first Alpha build should be released, as planned, on June 30, 2016.

• Canonical implies it is collaborating with nearly every major Linux distro for its Snappy project. It is not. And what could have been a marketing win for it is now a loss.

• MongoDB is a NoSQL database that avoids the traditional structure of relational databases in favor of document-oriented JSON-like objects. What this translates to is the integration between application and data is faster and easier. If that’s not enough, consider this: MongoDB is one the databases preferred by big data and large enterprise companies, including Adobe, Craigslist, eBay, FIFA, Foursquare, and LinkedIn.

• Users of the Ubuntu Phone will have to get used to the fact that popular Android apps like WhatsApp are unlikely to be made available for the platform, at least not in in the short term.

• Facebook owns WhatsApp and the communications app now has more than a billion users.

• Ubuntu developers are once again pondering the possibility of dropping support for i386 (32-bit x86) as installation media for their Linux distribution.

• The matter of dropping Ubuntu i386 ISOs has been brought up many times the past few years, but ultimately it’s kept getting pushed back for users still running Ubuntu Linux on old hardware and other reasons. Dropping Ubuntu for i386 keeps getting brought up namely for the installer media rather than the i386 package archive itself.

• Are you running i386 (32-bit) Ubuntu? We need your help to decide how much longer to build i386 images of Ubuntu Desktop, Server, and all the flavors.

• There is a real cost to support i386 and the benefits have fallen as more software goes 64-bit only.

Devices/Embedded

• Boardcon announced a pair of 70 x 58mm COMs that run Android on Samsung’s quad-core, Cortex-A9 S5P4418 and octa-core, Cortex-A53 S5P6818 SoCs.

• The MINI4418 and MINI6818 computer-on-modules are “compatible” with each other, as well as with Boardcon’s earlier MINI3288, which is based on the quad-core, Cortex-A17 Rockchip RK3288. The new COMs instead tap two Samsung SoCs: the quad-core, Cortex-A9 S5P4418 for the MINI4418, and the octa-core, Cortex-A53 S5P6818 for the MINI6818. The MINI6818 supports applications such as “sensitive home automation, security, and industrial applications,” whereas the MINI4418 supports “MID, multimedia advertising, intelligent control terminals, and smart instrumentation,” says Boardcon.

• Axiomtek’s “MANO0500” Mini-ITX board supports 6th Gen Intel Core, Pentium, and Celeron CPUs, and offers three SATA, two GbE, and mini-PCIe with SIM.

• Mini-ITX boards are typically among the first form-factors to support new Intel Core chips along with COM Express modules. We’re not sure why Axiomtek, one of the more prolific of embedded vendors, waited so long to launch its first 6th Generation Intel Core (“Skylake”) based Mini-ITX board, but it’s a welcome edition. Back in April, the company announced a Skylake-based PICO500 SBC using the smaller Pico-ITX form factor.

• Lately I have had the need to do real time video capture from HDMI devices as of late for a project, and while looking around the internet found that all of the capture cards that are aimed at gamers (windows / OSX support only) or full blown production capture (Very expensive, more inputs than I need). The other downside is that all of these options either have no Linux drivers at all, or if they do, they have a Linux driver that is behind an NDA, and those cards are in the $800+ range.

Phones

Tizen

• WatchMaster features a collection of 200+ high quality and unique watch face designs that up to now have been available for Android wear devices, but have now finally been released for the Tizen based Gear S2.

• The company has many capable designers, such as Liongate, Pluto, Excalibur and Monostone that create a wide variety of watchfaces that include: Analog to illustration, moonphase, ambient and animation design. If your looking some aesthetically pleasing watches to enhance your individuality then they are definitely worth a look.

Android

• Google recently announced the release of its Science Journal app, a tool intended to “inspire future makers and scientists.” All you need to get started is an Android phone—it will make use of the sensors on your phone and offers a digital science notebook to record your findings. The app is free and slated to be released open source later this summer. Google has already released microcontroller firmware for Arduino-based sensors on GitHub.

• It’s like the early 2000s again. With Apple finally launching the first ever iPhone, there is talk about Google doing something similar. Of course, that happened and it didn’t, with the Nexus line the closest thing to a “Google phone”. Fast-forward nearly a decade, Google is rumored to once again try its hand at actually becoming a smartphone maker too. Like Apple. It doesn’t make business sense, of course. But what if it were true? What if Google din put out a “gPhone”? It definitely can, like the Pixel C Android tablet. But if it did, this non-Nexus Google-made Android smartphone would be an atrocity for consumers. Here are the reasons why.

• When Chromebooks launched in the summer of 2011, they seemed destined to fail, much like the underpowered, internet-dependent netbooks that came before them. But in the five years since, Chromebooks have defied expectations, becoming the most used device in US classrooms and even outselling Macs for the first time this year. Still, people complain about their inability to run useful software, but that’s all about to change.

Free Software/Open Source

• This whole list has been inspired by many years of open source hacking and free software contributions. Everyone’s experiences and feelings might be different, or malpractice may have been seen under different forms. Let me know if there are any other points that you encountered that blocked you from contributing to open source projects!

Events

• During the last week I have participated at the ISC 2016 Conference at Frankfurt, Germany. It has been the most well known HPC event in the world wide for the last five years. From my point of view, it was more than a successful event and it exceed all my expectations.

• I had planned to do some work on NBD while here at debcamp.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

SaaS/Back End

Openness/Digitisation

• The French government is encouraging citizens to get involved in the debate on sharing and using of healthcare data. A public survey and two workshops were organised, in May and June. The results are to be used for a conference on 4 July.

• The first workshop, in May, drew 17 participants, reports SGMAP (Secrétariat Général pour la Modernisation de l’Action publique), the government modernisation unit. It was followed by an online session and a second workshop in June.

• Over the past weeks, SGMAP also hosted an online consultation, asking for ideas on what to do with healthcare data, and how to regulate its use.

• The Republic of Malta wants to increase the use of eGovernment services by simplifying online processes and by creating a one-stop-shop eGovernment portal. The government will also increase training of public administration’s staff members.

Open Data

Open Access/Content

• The UK research community’s response to the recent referendum – in which a majority of 52% voted for the UK to leave the European Union (or “Brexit”) – has been one of horror and disbelief.

• This is no surprise, not least because Brexit would have a serious impact on research funding in the UK. Nature reports that UK universities currently get around 16% of their research funding from the EU, and that the UK currently hosts more EU-funded holders of ERC grants than any other member state. Elsewhere, Digital Science has estimated that the UK could lose £1 billion in science funding if the UK government does not make up the shortfall in EU-linked research funds.

• Using online, open-source materials instead of expensive printed books eases the burden on students. By The Washington Post. Share. facebook · tweet · email. print Comment.

• The following editorial appeared in The Washington Post: Every year, college students shell out thousands of dollars for tuition. Then they face an additional cost: textbooks.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Wevolver, an online platform for sharing and collaborating on open hardware projects, has featured some really cool 3D printable projects in the past, such as this open-source motorcycle with 3D printed parts. Recently, the webplatform has released a number of new 3D printed robotics projects that are sure to get makers’ gears going.

• If you need an example of Gillette’s razor blade business plan, don’t look at razors; a five pack of the latest multi-blade, aloe-coated wonder shaver is still only about $20. Look a glucose meters. Glucose meters all do the same thing – test blood glucose levels – but are imminently proprietary, FDA regulated, and subsidized by health insurance. It’s a perfect storm of vendor lock-in that would make King Gillette blush.

Programming/Development

• When working on FMN’s new architecture I been wanted to profile a little bit the application, to see where it spends most of its time.

• I knew about the classic cProfile builtin in python but it didn’t quite fit my needs since I wanted to profile a very specific part of my code, preferrably without refactoring it in such a way that I could use cProfile.

• Based on the principles of tangible programming, Google has devised a new learning tool called ‘Project Bloks’. With the help of three components, Bloks creates a ‘physical’ program that teaches the coding basics to the young learners.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• The latest episode in the glyphosate saga just took place, with the EU’s Health and Food Safety Commissioner, V. Andriukaitis, announcing that the European Commission would extend the current market authorisation of glyphosate by 18 months. [this article is an updated version of the same piece on June 24.]

• The cached version includes a banner image touting the pledge to ‘give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week’ – which has already been walked back by Leave supporters

• Costs of private doctors’ services have risen much faster than inflation, the newspaper Savon Sanomat reports on Tuesday. However reimbursements by the Social Insurance Institution (Kela) have not risen at the same pace. For instance prices at paediatric receptions rose by more than 23 percent within five years. Nearly one in three Finns visits a private doctor at least once a year.

• Whereas general inflation was around nine percent in the years 2010-15, some doctors’ fees rose by three times that much during the same period.

• The biggest spike, 28 percent, was in psychiatrists’ fees. Other significant price rises were in visits to paediatricians (23.5 percent) as well as to gynaecologists and general practitioners (both 22 percent).

• Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette’s wide-ranging probe into the Flint water crisis could cost as much as $4.9 million, more than triple the amount allocated by the state in a contract in March, according to a posting on the state Administrative Board website.

• Earlier this year, Schuette received approval from the board to expand the contract to up to $1.5 million, from the original $249,000, with Flood Law, a Royal Oak legal firm. Todd Flood is the lawyer Schuette tapped to head his investigation into whether any state laws were violated in the lead contamination of Flint drinking water, which has led to state and federal emergency declarations and instructions to Flint residents not to drink tap water without using a lead filter.

Security

• The Transportation Security Administration’s PreCheck program is risk-based screening that allows passengers assessed as low risk to be directed to expedited, or PreCheck, screening. We begin by modelling the overall system of aviation security by considering all layers of security designed to deter or disrupt a terrorist plot to down an airliner with a passenger-borne bomb. Our analysis suggests that these measures reduce the risk of such an attack by at least 98%. Assuming that the accuracy of Secure Flight may be less than 100% when identifying low and high risk passengers, we then assess the effect of enhanced and expedited (or regular and PreCheck) screening on deterrence and disruption rates. We also evaluate programs that randomly redirect passengers from the PreCheck to the regular lines (random exclusion) and ones that redirect some passengers from regular to PreCheck lines (managed inclusion). We find that, if 50% of passengers are cleared for PreCheck, the additional risk reduction (benefit) due to PreCheck is 0.021% for attacks by lone wolves, and 0.056% for ones by terrorist organisations. If 75% of passengers rather than 50% go through PreCheck, these numbers are 0.017% and 0.044%, still providing a benefit in risk reduction. Under most realistic combinations of parameter values PreCheck actually increases risk reduction, perhaps up to 1%, while under the worst assumptions, it lowers risk reduction only by some 0.1%. Extensive sensitivity analyses suggests that, overall, PreCheck is most likely to have an increase in overall benefit.

• Information security is challenging, and can be breathtakingly expensive in money and staff energy. Smaller organizations may not have the money or staffing expertise to do the job right, even when the need is the greatest. At OSCON 2016, Kelsey Gilmore-Innis of Sexual Health Innovations (SHI) gave a really interesting talk on how her small nonprofit has done some creative thinking about security, and how that influences the deployment and operation of their application.

• Security researchers have revealed a unique new DDoS attack launched against a small business, which was powered entirely by thousands of compromised CCTV units.

• Sucuri founder Daniel Cid explained in a blog post that 25,513 IP addresses were spotted, with a plurality in Taiwan (24%), the US (12%) and Indonesia (9%) – although they spread out over 105 countries in total.

Defence/Aggression

• Jeremy Corbyn represents the “politics of protest” and is standing by while people are “bombed, beaten and starved into submission” in Syria, Tony Blair has said, in his most vehement attack on the Labour leader yet.

• A triple suicide bombing and gun attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport has killed at least 36 people, including foreigners, with Turkey’s prime minister saying early signs pointed to an assault by the Islamic State group.

• The attackers began spraying bullets at the international terminal entrance before blowing themselves up at around 10.00 pm local time on Tuesday, Turkish authorities said.

• It is the deadliest of four attacks to rock Turkey’s biggest city this year, with two others blamed on Isil and another claimed by a militant Kurdish group.

• Though there was no immediate claim of responsibility for Tuesday’s carnage, “the evidence points to Daesh,” Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told journalists at the scene, using another name for the jihadists.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• When you think “peatland,” you probably picture water, or mosquitoes, or creepily preserved human artifacts. What most of us don’t consider are catastrophic wildfires—but that’s precisely what scientists are now worried about when it comes to one of the most carbon-rich ecosystems on Earth.

• Mike Waddington is a forest ecologist at McMaster University in Ontario. He’s been studying the peatlands that pepper the Canadian boreal forest for going on thirty years, and he’s begun to notice an alarming trend. When peatlands that have been drained by humans for forestry or mining catch on fire, they burn like crazy, eating through meters of carbon-rich soil over the course of months.

• “I always tell people to think about the fire swamp from Princess Bride,” Waddington told Gizmodo. “Peat fires are very difficult to put out because they just keep smoldering down into the soil.”

Finance

• A Scottish MEP has received a lengthy standing ovation from hundreds of members of the European Parliament after asking members “not to let Scotland down”.

• Alyn Smith, from the Scottish National Party (SNP), addressed a special session on the Brexit in Brussels moments after Nigel Farage hailed Britain’s “independence day”.

• I think it is time for parliamentary democracy to re-establish itself, and this legislation will be just the thing to bring sense back to British politics.

• Trump criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement as a U.S. job killer, saying he would be willing to scrap the pact if Canada and Mexico were unwilling to budge. He also tried to link Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to the deal on the eve of a meeting in Ottawa of the “three amigos,” the leaders of the three NAFTA signatories: the United States, Mexico and Canada.

• I imagine Canadian trade with Mexico will do really well if USA agrees to stop trading with both of us, although we may have to trade by sea.

• The Democratic party’s elites must not think that trade and jobs will be big issues in the coming election. Apparently, they’ve never listened to a Donald Trump speech, and didn’t notice that working-class people in the United Kingdom just voted to “brexit” from the European Union (EU) over these issues.

• The Democratic platform writing committee has voted not to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), with the pro-TPP majority saying that doing so would undercut President Obama’s efforts to pass the agreement.

• Hillary Clinton gave a big speech in Raleigh on her plans for the economy on June 22. It was full of Bernie Sanders-like rhetoric about “outrageous behavior” by business and Wall Street.

• But it also included a dog whistle that only huge multinational corporations would hear, telling them that she plans to deliver on one of their greatest dreams and slash their longterm taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars.

• U.S. bank JP Morgan said on Wednesday it now expects Scotland to vote for independence and introduce its own currency before Britain leaves the European Union in 2019.

• “Our base case is that Scotland will vote for independence and institute a new currency at that point (2019),” JP Morgan economist Malcolm Barr said in a note to clients on Wednesday.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Angela Eagle’s local Labour party has come out in support of Jeremy Corbyn, HuffPost UK can reveal.

• The chair and secretary of Wallasey constituency Labour party have written to express their backing for the leader.

• Kathy Miller and Kathy Runswick said that their local party had decided at their annual meeting on Friday to urge their MP to oppose the ‘motion of no confidence’ in Corbyn.

• MPs voted by 81% today to back the motion and Eagle, the former Business Secretary, is expected to announce she will stand in a leadership contest.

• Over the weekend, the Democratic National Committee began drafting the party’s official policy platform, which will be rolled out next month at the organization’s national convention in Philadelphia. Though it’s virtually impossible that Sen. Bernie Sanders would become the Democratic nominee, he’ll still have a big influence on the party’s agenda going forward.

• That’s the message of a chart that takes up a good chunk of some of the most valuable journalistic real estate in the world, the top half of the front page of the New York Times (6/28/16). Looking at the chart, you can see that just about every justice has moved to the left over time: Of the Democratic appointees, Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Bryer are all well to the left of where they were when they were appointed; only Elena Kagan is more or less where she started out.

• This picture has been all over twitter, promoted by every high level Blairite you can think of, from JK Rowling down. Yet all may not be what it seems.

• Who governs Britain? Farage? Boris? Gove? Cameron? May? Sturgeon? Corbyn? Corbyn’s critics? Never have so many actors mattered and so few had any actual power.

• In the wake of Brexit, the old party divisions no longer apply. Britain is now a ten-party system, with the major parties cleaved in two between leavers and remainers.

• Using data from YouGov, who have reweighted their final EU referendum poll to reflect Thursday’s 52:48 vote for Brexit, we can discover the proportion of each party’s supporters who voted for leave or remain.

• And if we take the vote shares for each party at last year’s general election (the latest polls suggest similar shares), we can see where power really lies.

• A major Democratic donor personally lobbied then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s office for a seat on a sensitive government intelligence board, telling one of her closest aides that if appointed he would make Clinton “look good.”

• Rajiv Fernando acknowledged that he may not have the experience to sit on a board that would allow him the highest levels of top-secret access, but he assured deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin in newly released 2009 emails that he was talking to two professors who were “getting me up to speed on the academics behind the field.”

• Fernando, who contributed to Clinton, her family’s foundation and Barack Obama, described himself as one of “Hillary’s people” and mentioned that he recently had sent an ailing Clinton flowers to wish her a speedy recovery.

Censorship/Free Speech

• We’ve mentioned and linked to the wonderful SCOTUSblog many times in the past, and have even mentioned its annual running of the trolls, in which the site’s Twitter account responds sarcastically to people who think that it is the Supreme Court’s twitter account, rather than a blog of some journalists and lawyers covering the court. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that the Supreme Court doesn’t have its own Twitter feed, combined with Twitter’s eagerness to suggest alternate accounts when people are assuming SCOTUS must have a Twitter feed. But, really, a big part of the problem is people tweeting inane things at SCOTUSblog without realizing it’s not SCOTUS.

• Today we had our annual running of the trolls — wherein we respond to people who direct mostly hateful and sometimes cute things to our @SCOTUSblog account, thinking it is the official Twitter account of the Supreme Court. We’ve done this for several Terms without incident. But this Term, Twitter — probably through some automated system — decided that our account had been hacked. So it kicked us out of our account — thinking we were the hackers — and then blocked all the tweets, so they have disappeared. We’re trying to get our account back — so far without success. But for posterity, and for those who thought we had deleted the tweets ourselves, here are some screen shots captured from our Twitter followers (many others are blocked by Twitter so even retweets don’t show them):

• Have you heard of Vice Media? Rupert Murdoch has – in 2013 he called the internet and print publishing upstart a “wild interesting effort to interest millennials” and a “global success.” Not long after, he bought a five per cent stake in what is known as the “hipsters bible”, and his son, James, now sits on its board. The company, which runs dozens of websites and magazines, is said to be at least as valuable as the New York Times.

• Last week it was announced that Vice is moving into the Middle East with a major new partnership with Moby Group, an Afghan media company which has also been a long-term collaborator. Together, the companies hope to bring the Vice brand to much of the Arab world, including all the Gulf Cooperation Council states, Jordan, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt and Algeria as well as to Afghanistan.

• The Khajuraho temples are a group of Hindu and Jain holy shrines built between 950 and 1050 in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Although 85 were originally built, only 22 remain today.

• The holy structures are known for housing an extensive array of erotic images — from Kamasutra-style entangled sex positions to sculptures of curvaceous, nude women celebrating their sensual forms. The temples even included some wonderfully nasty depictions of orgies and bestiality.

• A simmering row at public broadcaster SABC could soon boil over into renewed protests. Just weeks before crucial polls, journalists, civil society, and trade unions accuse SABC of political meddling and censorship.

• There are no issues within the SABC according to its Chief Operating Officer, Hlaudi Motsoeneng – despite the public broadcaster having decided to censor public protest visuals on television.

• For the past few weeks, the SABC’s decision not to show footage of violent service delivery protests has raised some concern. The media believe that the broadcaster is engaging in censorship, but Motsoeneng has denied it. According to him, censorship is English, and he added that he doesn’t know what it is.

• Controversial SABC boss Hlaudi Motsoeneng has effectively told frightened employees to make peace with being dutiful lapdogs or walk out.

• Motsoeneng, the chief operating officer, allegedly made these remarks during a staff meeting at the SABC headquarters in Auckland Park, Joburg, on Tuesday.

• The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) strongly condemns the suspension of three South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) journalists – economics editor, Thandeka Gqubule, Radio Sonder Grense executive producer Foeta Krige and senior journalist Suna Venter – for the “offence” of questioning the ban on visual coverage of protests, in particular a protest against censorship at the public broadcaster itself.

• The recent editorial shakeup that has been taking place at the SABC is a very serious issue, with the media freedom of the public institution being threatened. Journalists have been censored by the banning of showing violent protest and the threat of suspension and dismissal hanging over their heads. However through all this, there have been a number of brave journalists from the SABC who have spoken out against Hlaudi Motsoeneng and the recent editorial decisions being made at the public broadcaster.

• South Africa’s public broadcaster is battling to quell a journalist revolt over censorship of programmes that portrayed the government in a negative light and its ban on screening footage of protesters destroying property because it didn’t want to encourage violence.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Facebook privacy hoax status update is back to fool you. Before going into the details, let me tell you one thing — DON’T fall for this hoax and copy-paste some privacy message on your wall. You are in full control of your Facebook content and you can take a privacy checkup anytime to confirm it.

• SOCIAL ADVERTISING PORTAL Facebook has made a dramatic U-turn. Despite confirming to The INQUIRER on Tuesday that the site tracks your location to recommend new friends, the firm has since changed its mind and said that it’s not.

• News broke this week, courtesy of news site Fusion, that Facebook has been taking it on itself to recommend hooking up with people in the same area. People did this organically in the old days by meeting or speaking.

• The report said that the privacy-unaware company has already exposed a couple of concerned parents and identified them following a hook-up at an anonymous help session.

• One part of this comment is easy: Facebook is not using locations you mark for yourself (so if I said I was in Grand Rapids, they wouldn’t use that to find new Grand Rapids friends for me). But it’s not really clear what they mean by “device location.” Determined by what? GPS? Cell tower? IP location? Wifi hotspot colocation?

• Which got me thinking about the way that federal law enforcement (in both the criminal and FISA context, apparently) are obtaining location data from social media as a way to tie physical location to social media activity.

• Norway can issue no guarantee that Edward Snowden will not be extradited to the US, should he visit the country. This a Norwegian court decided Monday. The court argues that such guarantees can not be given when it comes to someone who is not presently inside the country.

• The digital revolution arrives in remote Indian villages such as Akbarpur by communication methods old and new: a WhatsApp message buzzes through to the village chief; he notifies his fellows via megaphone.

• The world’s biggest biometric ID programme is coming to town.

• The next day, two men arrive at the village in Palwal district, Haryana state, with devices the residents have never seen: an iris scanner, a fingerprint machine, a camera and laptop. They are here to register the people of Akbarpur.

• Is your messaging app using encryption? And, actually, do you even care about that?

• Even though people have more choices than ever when using mobile messaging apps billed as secure and private, and surveillance and encryption have been steadily in the news for the last few years, some consumers don’t seem to really grasp what an encrypted app actually is, and they might not really care that much, according to a new study.

• [...]

• The researchers conducted the study trying to figure out how much users, both security experts and regular people, cared about security and privacy when choosing and using messaging apps.

• As it turns out, when choosing apps, the main motivation is whether other people, mainly “friends,” use it, not whether it’s secure or private, according to the study.

• [...]

• Another participant said he or she stopped using an (unnamed) app after news of a privacy incident, switching to a more secure alternative. But eventually, he or she had to go back to the original messenger because it’s “too dominant” among his friends.

Civil Rights/Policing

• As the article explains, that’s not going down too well with other WTO members, including Brazil, the European Union, Japan, and South Korea, who are traditionally allies of the US in trade matters. So what exactly has Chang done to incur the wrath of the US?

• As my colleague Glenn Greenwald argues, it is too simple to suggest that last week’s rejection of the European Union by more than half of the British electorate, like Donald Trump’s victory in the Republic primary, can be explained by dismissing the voters as racists.

• In both countries, and across the Western world, xenophobic bigots who pin the blame on foreigners, and promise to restore prosperity by walling us off into ethnic-nationalist enclaves, have grown in prominence only after decades of failure by the traditional parties of left and right to find solutions for the suffering caused by the globalization.

• At the same time, however, it seems clear that the rhetoric of the referendum campaign in Britain, like Trump’s demonization of Mexican and Muslim immigrants, has emboldened the white supremacist fringe in ways too dangerous to ignore.

• As the British historian Victoria Stiles observed, the referendum result, which has been followed by a 57 percent spike in reported hate crimes, seems to have encouraged the kind of public displays of racism in Britain that make physical assaults more likely.

• Not content with merely spying on our emails and phone calls, the NSA wants to spy on thermostats, refrigerators, and pacemakers.

• A Montreal-based university professor being held in an Iranian jail is being investigated for ‘dabbling in feminism and security matters,’ according to her family.

• Homa Hoodfar’s niece, Amanda Ghahremani, said the Tehran public prosecutor made a statement to Iranian media on the case on Friday.

• Ghahremani said the family doesn’t know whether Hoodfar has been charged with a crime.

• She said the prosecutor’s statement was the first indication of why the 65-year-old professor has been held in Iran’s notorious Evin prison since her arrest on June 6.

• “We’re very concerned that we have no news from her, that the family hasn’t been able to see her, that the lawyer hasn’t been able to see her, and we don’t know her mental state, her health, or the conditions of her detention,” Ghahremani told The Canadian Press.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• After years of negotiating Europe has agreed on a set of Net Neutrality rules. While the legislation is a step forward for some countries, experts and activists warn that it may leave the door open for BitTorrent and VPN throttling. With the “EU Slowdown” campaign that launches today, they encourage the public to have their voice heard to improve the current rules.

• The US appeals court decision upholding the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules wasn’t quite the final word on the matter, as ISPs immediately vowed to appeal the ruling, with AT&T saying it “expect[s] this issue to be decided by the Supreme Court.”

• But while ISPs will give it their best shot, there are reasons to think that the Supreme Court won’t take up the case. The appeal probably won’t even make it to a rehearing by the full appeals court, a potential intermediate step before a Supreme Court case, legal expert Andrew Jay Schwartzman wrote last week in a Benton Foundation article titled, “Network Neutrality: Now What?” Schwartzman is a Georgetown Law lecturer, an attorney who specializes in media and telecommunications policy, and a longtime consumer advocate who previously led the Media Access Project.

DRM

• The news of explosive SVOD growth in Australia over the past year has not been good for the global market leader Netflix which finds that two well-resourced local competitors are nipping at its heels, while it appears to have cut off its nose to spite its face by blocking access to its big differentiator.

• As reported in iTWire this week, SVOD subscriptions would have grown by almost 900,000 during the 12 months to the end of June 2016.

• However, the main beneficiaries of that growth have been local players Stan (jointly owned by Nine Entertainment and Fairfax Media) and Presto (jointly owned by Foxtel and Seven West Media).

Intellectual Monopolies

• Marie-Paule Kieny, World Health Organization Assistant Director-General, Health Systems and Innovation, writes: Amid public outcry, political battles and media articles, no one seems to understand how, exactly, medicines prices are set. For years, pharmaceutical research companies have cited the large investment of time and resources that go into bringing a drug to market. More recently, they argue that their medicines are actually saving money by preventing expensive medical interventions like surgery and hospitalization.

• But whatever the argument used, the price setting mechanisms for commodities that are inextricably linked to people’s health and survival must be made more transparent so that we can, as a global community, devise effective solutions.

• Guillaume Long, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Human Mobility of Ecuador, who was fresh from a three-day visit to the UN in Geneva with several meetings, including with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said during a press briefing that he paid a visit to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on 19 June in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, on the 4th anniversary of his taking refuge in the embassy.

• Four years ago, Long said, Julian Assange walked into the embassy and asked for asylum. After two months of studying his request, Ecuador decided to grant Assange asylum on human rights grounds, Long said, in particular because there were fears of significant political persecution of Assange, he said.

• In particular, Ecuador was unable to obtain a guarantee that Assange would not be extradited to a third country, he said. Ecuador is not seeking to interfere with the Swedish judicial system but have been told by the United Kingdom government that it can neither confirm nor deny that Assange would be extradited.

• [...]

• On a separate issue, access to health and access to medicines are pillars of Ecuadoran policy, Long said today, answering a question from Intellectual Property Watch on the leading role that Ecuador has said it wanted to have in the management of intellectual property policy. In particular, Ecuador has issued a number of compulsory licences, allowing the production of generic versions of expensive brand name drugs.

• When criteria for compulsory licences are met, Ecuador will carry on issuing compulsory licences when the country has to do so. “We are in the confines of the WTO [World Trade Organization] and other bodies,” he said, as he underlined the country’s “progressive approach to IP.”

• “Intellectual property is the new free trade agenda, the new neo-liberal pillar,” he said. In most trade agreements, “intellectual property is massive.”

• “We are in a knowledge economy and a science and technology age, and a patenting age,” he added.

• Unfortunately, since the 1980s, he said, patenting has become much more recurrent and more lenient. There is a greater privatisation of knowledge which affects countries that are low producers of knowledge and do not have an innovation economy, he said.

• The more knowledge circulates, the more it becomes a public good, and the more innovation you can have, he explained. Although intellectual property is legitimate, the right balance should be struck, he said.

Copyrights

• Fight Copyright Trolls has tracked down two more court decisions that reach an obvious conclusion: an IP address is not a person. In both cases, the normal trolling tactics were used: legal threats against alleged infringers, based on nothing more than IP addresses. In the first case, New Jersey Judge Kevin McNulty disagreed with Malibu Media’s request for default judgment, pointing out that the limited info it was working with could not rule out a successful defense being raised by the accused infringer.

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