● 07.05.16

● Links 5/7/2016: KDE Plasma 5.7 Released, GSK Demystified

Posted in News Roundup at 8:29 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• “Linux is a failed experiment,” she spit. “It has no business even existing in the tech world and I am fully capable of recovering any important files myself. I do not need your help.”

• On the demand side, mobile and server applications will continue to spur demand for DRAM and help boost average contract prices for the memory in the third quarter, DRAMeXchange noted. Weak PC demand, and Windows 10 licensing scheme, which sets fees according to system specs, will further discourage PC vendors from increasing the memory content per box for their products, DRAMeXchange said.

• Microsoft’s aggressive push to get users to upgrade to Windows 10 has been turned up a notch as the company begins pushing full-screen upgrade pop-up notifications to Windows 7 and 8.1.

• The “Sorry to interrupt” notification will take over the whole screen and force users to select either to upgrade at once or to be reminded later, which will cause the pop up to reappear every three days.

• Two more less prominent options, accessed via smaller links to the left, will allow the user to select to be notified three more times in total or never to be notified again.

• The screen takeover warns users that the free Windows 10 upgrade period will end on 29 July, after which Microsoft will charge a fee to install Windows 10, and forms the latest step in the company’s campaign to get users switching from the six-year-old Windows 7 and two-year-old Windows 8.1.

Server

• The tooling around Linux containers has matured to the point that they are now a viable method of software packaging and deployment. The developer side of the containers equation has gotten a lot of emphasis. However, in order for containers to be a complete solution, they must not only be easy to build, but easy to deploy reliably at scale.

• A company that arguably has more experience than any other company in deploying Linux containers at scale is Google. They have been running conatiners in their own datacenters for over a decade, contributing to the upstream Linux kernel in the areas of cgroups and namespaces. Using an internal system named Borg, Google deploys about 2 billion containers per week.

Kernel Space

• Open source developments, such as the OPEN-Orchestrator (OPEN-O) Project that is developing software for service orchestration over NFV, SDN and legacy network infrastructure, can play a key role in the evolution of telco strategies, says Marc Cohn of the Linux Foundation.

Applications

• BleachBit developer Andrew Ziem has recently announced the availability of a new major release of the popular BleachBit open-source and cross-platform system cleaner utility, version 1.12.

• BleachBit 1.12 comes as a replacement for BleachBit 1.10, which was announced at the beginning of the year, and it looks like it has been in development since April under the BleachBit 1.11.x umbrella. During its three-month development cycle, the software has received a total of three Beta builds that have brought many changes, improvements, and a handful of new features.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• They have 16 days left with £2000/4500 of their needed funds. Hopefully we can help their journey with a few Linux backers.

• Starbound, Terraria and Crea not enough for you? Planet Centauri is yet another sandbox 2D indie RPG with crafting and digging for you to sink your teeth into.

• FORCED SHOWDOWN is essentially an arena shooter with a card-based upgrade system that promises some frantic gameplay, but is it any good? I tried to find out.

• Another day another big sale, I love the summer. This time it’s Humble Store doing their DRM-Freedom sale and I’ve picked a few for you.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today, July 4, 2016, ex-Kubuntu leader Jonathan Riddell announced that the KDE Plasma Wayland image received yet another update, bringing users the latest KDE and GNU/Linux technologies.

• Tuesday, 5 July 2016. Today KDE releases an update to its desktop software, Plasma 5.7.

• When version numbers merge to a singularity we reach the perfection that is KDE neon 5.7. Featuring the newly released Qt 5.7 and the freshly built KDE Plasma 5.7.

• It’s time to check in on the Plasma Wayland image for an update. Built on Neon infrastructure, this comes with the latest from KDE Git master for crack of the day fun. Actually it’s from the end of last week because we paused updates while we add Qt 5.7 but it’s close enough.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME developer Emmanuele Bassi has shared the latest work he’s been doing on GSK — the GTK Scene Kit and the much anticipated improvements it will bring.

• GTK GSK has been talked about for a while with striving for a scene graph and cleaning up other rendering work in the GTK+ tool-kit code-base. GSK has yet to be merged but it’s previously been talked about that it might be ready for GNOME/GTK+ 3.22 this fall.

• Using OpenGL to generate pixel-perfect results is complicated, and in some cases it just goes against the expectations of the GPU itself: reading back data; minuscule fragments and tesselations; tons of state changes — those are all pretty much no-go areas when dealing with a GPU.

Distributions

New Releases

• The development team behind the Tiny Core project has been proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the Tiny Core Linux 7.2 operating system.

• The development cycle of Tiny Core Linux 7.2, which doesn’t bring any major changes, was pretty fast, as the distribution entered the Release Candidate stage a week ago, on June 24. Usually, the Tiny Core developers release two RC builds before the final release, but that’s not the case with Tiny Core Linux 7.2.

• Today, July 5, 2016, Arne Exton has been proud to announce the release of a new version of his Exton|Defender GNU/Linux operating system, bringing some of the hottest technologies available to date.

Screenshots/Screencasts

• The release of Linux Mint 18 was very interesting from many aspects. The most interesting for me was the fact that it is the 1st release of Mint based on LTS version of Ubuntu after skipping several non-LTS versions. If you remember, up to Linux Mint 16, each new version was based on consecutive version of Ubuntu, being it LTS or non-LTS version. But since version 17 only Ubuntu LTS editions are used by the Mint team to build their own operating system. Mint 17 was based on Ubuntu 14.04 and Mint 18 is based on Ubuntu 16.04.

• The full-blown review is still ahead. For now, let’s do a quick whistle-blow tour through the Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon system with some applications you can find out of the box.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• PCLinuxOS developer Texstar has had the great pleasure of announcing the availability of July’s respin ISO image for the PCLinuxOS 64 MATE Edition operating system, version 2016.07.

• PCLinuxOS 64 2016.07 MATE comes exactly one month after the debut of June’s update of the distribution built around the customizable and lightweight MATE desktop environment, and it looks like it’s full of goodies. For example, the distro is now powered by the latest and most advanced kernel, Linux 4.6.3.

Slackware Family

• The Document Foundation released Libreoffice 5.1.4 on June 23, but I was kept busy with preparing my own packaging and scripting stuff for the release of Slackware 14.2. In addition, a new release of Plasma (5.7) is near, for which I promised a Live ISO to be available on July 5.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat’s annual summit held last week was a smörgåsbord of events that illustrate what the company styles as its philosophy of openness. In the rush to publicise this trait, the company forgot that it is aiding the NSA, the biggest spy outfit in the world, to snoop on others.

• Red Hat has chosen Jessica McKellar from Dropbox and Preeti Murthy, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon as the winners of the 2016 annual Women in Open Source Awards.

• More on this discussion by Corrinne, I applaud her efforts into making develop girl it a force to reckon with within the community. I myself was a part of “Girl Develop It” in the Seattle/Ann Arbor area and used to attend their casual meetups. I remember when I had just started to learn to code, I was afraid of asking for help. Even if I am stuck, it was hard to find someone willing to understand and provide the right guidance. “Girl Develop It” made that learning process easier for me by providing the right mentorship and guidance throughout my earlier attempts at coding. Not only I was receiving feedback but I had similar people like me trying to understand and develop confidence while learning to code. During her talk at the Summit too, she mentioned about some success stories that had helped many women across the United States. I attended this talk along with women who were a part of the Women Leadership Community-Westford. Further, I would like to thank Garima (Performance Team) for putting all the efforts to arranging this meetup and discussion for us that day.

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

• Stephen Webb of Canonical has written about the company’s latest project, Libertine. Libertine is their new project for allowing legacy X11-focused Debian packages to run on their next-gen converged desktop with Unity 8, Mir, and Snap packages.

• Exactly one week after the release of the major kernel update for the Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” operating system on June 28, the Debian Project, through Salvatore Bonaccorso, has released a new Linux kernel security update.

Derivatives

• A few hours ago, the development team behind Parsix GNU/Linux, a Debian-based computer operating system sporting the modern GNOME 3 desktop environment, has announced that new security fixes are available for the stable Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” distribution, and upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 “Erik” release.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• We’ve been asked several times by some of our readers what’s going on in the Ubuntu Touch world, the operating system that powers the Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices.

• Ubuntu’s Snap package management system which was recently presented as a potential replacement for all the packages across all GNU/Linux systems sparked excitement as well as disapproval amongst Linux enthusiasts towards Canonical and their push of their Snappy format.

• Major Linux distributions are in agreement: it’s time to stop developing new versions for 32-bit processors.

• Simply: it’s a waste of time, both to create the 32-bit port, and to keep 32-bit hardware around to test it on.

• At the end of June, Ubuntu developer Dimitri Ledkov chipped into the debate with this mailing list post, saying bluntly that 32-bit ports are a waste of resources.

Devices/Embedded

• Lumenera, a leading manufacturer and developer of high performance digital cameras and custom imaging solutions, is pleased to announce the launch of Lumenera Linux SDK 2.1, their new software development kit designed for embedded platforms using Linux ARM based processors.

• Combining powerful features with reliable performance, the Lumenera Linux SDK 2.1 software maximizes the high-speed, high-resolution features of Lumenera’s USB 3.0 cameras. Lumenera chose to formally support Ubuntu Linux with their cameras as it is used by many development teams around the world because of its strong presence globally, versatility, reliability, and extensive developer libraries. Ubuntu has regular Long Term Support (LTS) releases that are supported for five years, making it an ideal choice for developers.

Phones

Tizen

• The Samsung Z1 and Z3 have sold quite well since they went on sale last year, reportedly selling over a million handsets, even though they have only been distributed to a limited number of markets so far. Now, According to shipping Information in India, Samsung have started Importing more parts to assemble their next Tizen smartphone, the Samsung Z2. Most likely it will be being put together at Samsung’s Noida assembly plant. Our sources have confirmed that we are possibly looking at an October 2016 release date.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has started publishing nightly in-development builds of its experimental Servo browser engine so anyone can track the project’s progress.

• Executables for macOS and GNU/Linux are available right here to download and test drive even if you’re not a developer. If you are, the open-source engine’s code is here if you want to build it from scratch, fix bugs, or contribute to the effort.

SaaS/Back End

• This year’s first Cloud Foundry Summit took place in Santa Clara at the end of May. Beyhan Veli from SAP and I gave a presentation about the Cloud Foundry OpenStack Validator, a new tool we developed as one of the results of our collaboration with SAP on the BOSH OpenStack Cloud Provider Interface project.

CMS

• Shopware, said to be the largest shop system manufacturer of Germany, released version 5.2 of its ecommerce software. One of the biggest changes is the elimination of encryption software ionCube, thus making its software 100 percent open source.

• Shopware made version 5.2 of its ecommerce software available for download. Aside from the switch to open source, Shopware also added numerous new features, which it says are the result of more than 70,000 members from its community submitting proposals for improvement. CEO Stefan Hamann: “For several years, we have encouraged an open dialogue with the community in order to more directly connect with their wishes for an ecommerce platform.”

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• At last week’s DockerCon 2016 event in Seattle there was a lot of behind-the-scenes chatter about Microsoft wanting to buy Docker for billions of dollars. Microsoft’s bid for Docker was rumored to be as much as $4 billion for the 250-person container technology startup in the last six months, according to multiple sources with contacts close to both companies.

• The popular ride-sharing company adopts an open-source development platform to speed application coding and support more than five million trips per day.

BSD

• The Lumina Desktop Environment has made available their v1.0 beta release of the Qt-written desktop.

• PC-BSD developers and others continue working on Lumina as an alternative, lightweight desktop environment. While originating in the BSD world, Lumina continues to be designed to work on any Unix-like OS and is licensed under a 3-clause BSD license. Should you not be familiar with Lumina from our past articles, visit Lumina-Desktop.org to learn more about the project.

Public Services/Government

• Amendments have been passed by the Bulgarian Parliament requiring all software written for the government to be open source and developed in a public repository, making custom software procured by the government accessible to everyone.

• Article 58 of the Electronic Governance Act states that administrative authorities must include the following requirements: “When the subject of the contract includes the development of computer programs, computer programs must meet the criteria for open-source software; all copyright and related rights on the relevant computer programs, their source code, the design of interfaces, and databases which are subject to the order should arise for the principal in full, without limitations in the use, modification, and distribution; and development should be done in the repository maintained by the agency in accordance with Art 7c pt. 18.”

• The Bulgarian Parliament has passed amendments to its Electronic Governance Act which require all software written for the government to be open source and developed in a public repository.

• From the world of open source, here comes a great news. The Bulgarian government has passed a law that has made the use of open source software in government offices compulsory. We welcome this step and hope that other governments will take similar steps and make more information accessible to the users.

• Less than two years after my presentation titled “Open source for the government”, and almost exactly one year after I became advisor to the deputy prime minister of Bulgaria, with the efforts of my colleagues and the deputy prime minister, the amendments to the Electronic Governance Act were voted in parliament and are now in effect. The amendments require all software written for the government to be open-source and to be developed as such in a public repository.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Engineering Academy program is offered to top students from the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, as well as the School of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering in Singapore Polytechnic. The program aims to impart skills from a multitude of disciplines: electrical, electronics, mechanics, chemistry, design, and business.

• The project statement we were presented with at the beginning of the semester was: “Design a vehicle that can take two samples of water, at one meter and two meters underwater.” This posed a challenge to us as there were many intricacies of the vehicle that we had to think about, and it was a huge undertaking.

• However, we welcomed the challenge with open arms. We knew it would put all of our knowledge to the test and would necessitate the search for even more information on our own. This article will outline the very iterative process of planning and prototyping, and showcase the fruit of our labor.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Sen. Bernie Sanders sent out an email to supporters Friday asking them to take action against a Senate bill that would overturn Vermont’s recent legislation requiring companies to label products containing genetically modified organisms.

• How could a law that decimated a woman’s access to abortion for no medical reason have gotten this far?

• Without a doubt, yesterday’s Supreme Court decision dealt a major blow to those who want to prevent a woman from having an abortion. The court struck down two Texas laws that together would have shut down about three-fourths of the clinics in the state of Texas, leaving fewer than 10 clinics for 5.4 million women of reproductive age.

Defence/Aggression

• Senior figures from Labour and the Scottish National party are considering calls for legal action against Tony Blair if the former prime minister faces severe criticisms from the long-awaited inquiry into the war in Iraq.

• A number of MPs led by Alex Salmond are expected to use an ancient law to try to impeach the former prime minister when the Chilcot report comes out on Wednesday.

• The law, last used in 1806 when the Tory minister Lord Melville was charged for misappropriating official funds, is seen in Westminster as an alternative form of punishment that could ensure Blair never holds office again.

• A young boy “shoots” a machine gun from a Vietnam-era helicopter at the New York Air Show in 2015. There are no certain statistics for the number of Vietnamese casualties during the war, but at least 1 million died, and potentially 2 million or more. A 1991 survey found that Americans estimated that about 100,000 Vietnamese had been killed.

• Retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, until recently the supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, plotted in private to overcome President Barack Obama’s reluctance to escalate military tensions with Russia over the war in Ukraine in 2014, according to apparently hacked emails from Breedlove’s Gmail account that were posted on a new website called DC Leaks.

• Obama defied political pressure from hawks in Congress and the military to provide lethal assistance to the Ukrainian government, fearing that doing so would increase the bloodshed and provide Russian President Vladimir Putin with the justification for deeper incursions into the country.

• Breedlove, during briefings to Congress, notably contradicted the Obama administration regarding the situation in Ukraine, leading to news stories about conflict between the general and Obama.

• But the leaked emails provide an even more dramatic picture of the intense back-channel lobbying for the Obama administration to begin a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.

• Did you know that 85 to 90 percent of war’s casualties are non-combatant civilians?

• Despite neocon-instigated chaos and bloodshed across the Mideast (and now into Europe), Hillary Clinton continues to advocate more “regime change” wars with almost no fear from a marginalized anti-war movement, writes Robert Parry.

• When I was young, America still existed. No more. Not even the blather from the 4th of July can hide the obvious fact.

• The young do not know that they have lost their country, because they are born into a time when the country is lost. To them that is normalcy.

• Besides, the young are too busy texting and describing themselves, often intimately, on social media to be aware of the fate that awaits them, lost as they are in their insouciance.

• When I was young, the police were the public’s friends. We could count on them to help us, not abuse us. False arrest was rare. Abuse of citizens even rarer. Today both are routine.

• The official FBI police report acknowledges shootings at 2am, it does not confirm the occurrence of killings of hostages prior to 5am. The killings started when the Police SWAT Teams stormed the Building at 5.13am. (see Timeline Below)

• The Orlando Police Department Timeline summarized in an FBI Tampa Press release not only suggests that no one was killed before 5.13am when the SWAT team broke into the building, it also confirms that the first deadly shots were fired at 5.14am and that the suspect was killed one minute later at 5.15am. This assessment was confirmed by Judge Napolitano in a Fox News report.

• [...]

• The Obama Administration, the FBI, the Media have casually dismissed the possibility of police involvement in the killings despite the statements emanating from police sources. Theater of the absurd: The official story is that the killings were ordered by the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) based in Raqqa, Northern Syria, which happens to be supported and financed by two of America’s staunchest allies, Turkey and Saudi Arabia in close liaison with Washington.

• The CCTV camera footage which is available to law enforcement officials will, most probably, not be made public.

• First, they came for Istanbul. On Tuesday night, three suspected Islamic State militants launched a brazen assault on Turkey’s main airport, exploding their suicide vests after gunning down numerous passengers and airport staff. At least 45 people were killed. The world panicked; Istanbul Ataturk Airport is one of the busiest hubs in Europe and the Middle East, and it is among the most fortified. Are our airports safe, wondered American TV anchors. Could this happen here on the Fourth of July?

• Next, they came for Dhaka. Gunmen whom many have linked to the Islamic State raided a popular cafe in an upscale neighborhood in Bangladesh’s teeming capital. After a 10-hour standoff, authorities stormed the establishment; at least 20 hostages, mostly Italian and Japanese nationals, died at the militants’ hands. U.S. college students also were among the dead. The Islamic State’s reach is growing far from the Middle East, security experts fretted. Foreigners are at risk all over the Muslim world.

• Then, they attacked Baghdad. In the early hours of Sunday morning, as hundreds of Iraqis gathered during the holy month of Ramadan, a car bomb exploded in the crowded Karrada shopping district. The blast killed a staggering number of people — the latest death toll is at least 187 — including many children. The area is predominantly Shiite, making it a choice target for the Sunni extremist group.

• In silence we stop the world for an instant with a symbolic gesture lacking productive solutions. Courageous acts of integrity transform our intentions into new realities for ourselves and the world. When will we speak? When will we pay attention? Uncommon lives do more than stand and wait. When will we take time to really listen, learn and act upon what matters most? Do we know what that means anymore? Some say ours is a throw-away world. Do we see ourselves and others as disposable waste? Is that why we stand motionless and simply look on or look away? Perhaps we know too much about war and too little about peace.

• So, Jefferson perhaps more than any figure in U.S. history gets a pass for what he really was: a self-absorbed aristocrat who had one set of principles for himself and another for everybody else.

• Such persecution continued for 88 days. The mainstream media (virtually the only media at that time) besieged Jewell’s private residence. Television networks spent $1,000 per day subletting an apartment of the tenant next door to Jewell’s so as to observe him. At any given time were an estimated 150 to 200 members of the press, some with high-intensity photo lenses, trained on every move Jewell made. The object of this maelstrom stated, “They had people over there who could read lips. They had a sound dish. They could hear everything that we said. They have a person writing down everything we said.”

• For three months this behavior was all but sanctioned by the FBI who allowed the media to be its willing handmaidens rather than act as a check on its power. That agency too kept both Richard Jewell and his mother under 24-hour surveillance as they allowed the real culprit to escape further and further away from justice. Agents lied to Jewell about seeking his participation in an anti-terror documentary to induce him to a police station where they promptly read him his Miranda rights. He correctly (and wisely) asked for an attorney. In the days which followed the FBI collected hair his samples, confiscated his truck, interrogated everyone he knew and compelled several to undergo polygraph tests.

• The Obama administration released a summary today of the numbers of “non-combatants” it has killed outside actual war zones primarily through targeted killing strikes, as well as a new executive order aimed at creating new transparency and accountability rules for such strikes.

• Unfortunately, both the release and the new order fall far short of the standards for transparency and accountability needed to ensure that the government’s targeted killing program is lawful under domestic and international law.

• With terrorist massacres hitting the news every few days, and financial markets reeling over the uncertain future of Europe, it’s no wonder pundits like Roger Cohen of the New York Times are warning that “the forces of disintegration are on the march” and “the foundations of the postwar world … are trembling.”

• But the news media have given only glancing coverage to one of the most positive developments of our time: the end to 52 years of armed conflict between the government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

• Responding to civilian casualty figures released by the White House today, international human rights organization Reprieve has expressed dismay at how little the Obama Administration appears to know about those it has killed in its covert use of lethal drones outside of war zones.

• The new White House data relates only to Obama’s first seven years in office – during which it says 473 covert and clandestine airstrikes and drone attacks were carried out in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya.

• The public’s right to information about the drone campaign, and about counterterrorism policy more generally, should not depend on the grace of executive branch officials. Transparency should be required by law.

• The Situation Room, a commander-in-chief with rapidly graying hair, a cluster of grim-faced men and women debating the ethics and the legality of a killing. This is how the Obama administration has for years sought to portray its notorious global drone killing program: cautious, calculated and as conscientious as possible.

• The Obama administration just released numbers suggesting this depiction is closer to reality than fiction. It announced that drone strikes in countries excluding Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have resulted in between at least 64 and 116 noncombatant deaths during his administration. The president also issued an executive order effectively directing his successor to do as he is doing, and publish this data going forward.

• In a long-anticipated gesture at transparency, the Obama administration on Friday released an internal assessment of the number of civilians killed by drone strikes in nations where the U.S. is not officially at war.

• According to the data, U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya killed between 64 and 116 civilians during the two terms of the Obama administration — a fraction of even the most conservative estimates on drone-related killings catalogued by reporters and researchers over the same period. The government tally also reported 2,372 to 2,581 combatants killed in U.S. airstrikes from January 20, 2009, to December 31, 2015.

• An American journalist and documentary filmmaker reporting from Syrian rebel-controlled territory near Aleppo says he was nearly killed in what he suspects was a drone strike last Sunday. Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American citizen originally from New York, was sitting in a car with his driver outside the village of Khan Touman, he reports, when a missile struck nearby the vehicle.

• “We heard some drones traveling overhead about half an hour before, which is not uncommon, but there were none of the screams that you normally hear before an airstrike,” Abdul Kareem told The Intercept. “We were sitting in the car, and then all of a sudden, everything went black. It felt like the earth had split open and we’d fallen into it. In reality, the explosion had sent the car into the air.”

• A video Abdul Kareem posted after the bombing on his YouTube channel showed the damage to the vehicle, as well as his camera equipment. He says this is the fourth airstrike that has nearly hit him in the past month. Given the frequency of the near-misses, Abdul Kareem believes he is being targeted. “Locals had told me that I was being targeted by someone, but I hadn’t believed it before,” he says. “I just chalked it up to being in a war zone — bad things happen — but now it seems clear that someone is targeting me.”

• Abdul Kareem is one of the last Western journalists covering the conflict in Syria from rebel-controlled territory. Earlier this year, he helped produce a series of exclusive CNN reports from Syria with journalist Clarissa Ward. His reporting has also been featured on the British outlets Channel 4 and Sky News.

• Because many people in the United States don’t value history very much, they tend to allow politicians to be selective in their remembering of historical events – usually to manipulate public nationalism (which now passes for patriotism) for their own dubious policy goals. For example, if Americans had focused more on the fact that historically, the Vietnamese had been fighting fiercely over the centuries to throw out foreign invaders – such as the Japanese, the Chinese, and recently the French – perhaps they would have demanded that their politicians think twice, even three times, about invading that country. And if Americans had known that the historically fractious Iraq, an artificial country that had been created by the greedy colonial powers after World War I to exploit the country’s oil reserves, they might have wisely rejected George W. Bush’s attempt at military social work in one of the most unlikely places in the Middle East for democracy to flourish.

• Other occupations — Belgium in the Congo, Japan in China, France in Algeria, Russia in Afghanistan, etc. — provide ample, if imperiously unheeded warnings, because they all failed. Wasn’t British colonial rule overthrown by insurgent militias using unconventional methods against superior forces here? Milt Bearden, a 30-year CIA veteran, wrote for the New York Times, “[I]n the history of the 20th century, no nation that launched a war against another sovereign nation ever won. And every nationalist-based insurgency against a foreign occupation ultimately succeeded.” Not some, not most: every one.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• All cars built before 2005 are to be charged an additional £10 per day to enter central London, Mayor Sadiq Khan announced today.

• The levy, which will be in addition to the existing congestion charge and will apply to all vehicles with pre-Euro 4 emission standards, is one of a package of measures aimed at cleaning up London’s poor quality air.

• City Hall says the new fee, which it dubs the ’T-charge’, would “be the toughest crackdown” on polluting vehicles by any major city around the world when it comes into effect next year.

• The “South,” both as a global region and within industrialized countries, is where the people most vulnerable to climate catastrophe are located. It is here that we find the highest concentration of fossil fuel sacrifice zones, home to low-wealth citizens who enjoy little to no access to political power in their respective nations. And it’s here that we find some of the more efficacious models of climate resistance and resilience that you’ve never, or barely, heard about.

Brexit and Finance

• The EU in essence is a cartel intended to suppress competition among the states of Europe — which is not to say it has had no liberalizing objectives or effects, such as freedom to move and work without visas, and disincentives for corporate subsidies. (I said this is complicated.) Competition, however, is too important to be suppressed because it reveals critical information we are unlikely to acquire otherwise. Since vital knowledge is disbursed among large numbers of people, competition is, as Nobel laureate economist F. A. Hayek put it, a unique “discovery procedure.” It’s not just a matter of freedom; it’s a matter of progress, and of life and death for those in the developing world.

• Trade campaigners in the UK have accused the European Commission of attempting to hasten attempts to push through a controversial trade deal between Canada and the EU ahead of the UK leaving the EU. The accusations come before a meeting tomorrow of the EU Commissioners in Brussels where it’s expected the implementation of the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) will be agreed upon.

• The leader of Ukip – a political party whose primary platform had been to push the UK towards leaving the EU – seems to have stepped down.

• Charlotte Church has said she is “shocked” by “horrifying” abuse she has received after tweeting about Nigel Farage in the wake of his resignation as Ukip leader.

• After the Brexit campaigner stepped down saying he “wants his life back”, the singer was one of many well-known people who vented their anger.

• David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage have been described as “rats fleeing a sinking ship” following their resignations in the immediate aftermath of Britain’s historic European Union referendum.

• Guy Verhofstadt, the former Prime Minister of Belgium who now heads up the alliance of Liberal and Democrats for Europe, made the comparison the day after Mr Farage resigned as the leader of the UK Independence Party, saying “he couldn’t possibly achieve more”.

• Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European commission, has accused Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson of being unpatriotic quitters, after the pair stood back from leadership positions after the UK’s historic vote to leave the European Union.

• “The Brexit heroes of yesterday are now the sad heroes of today,” Juncker told MEPs at the European parliament in Strasbourg.

• “Those who have contributed to the situation in the UK have resigned – Johnson, Farage and others. They are as it were retro-nationalists, they are not patriots,” he said.

• Waltz criticised Mr Farage for not failing to see through and stand up for what he had been vigorously campaigning for throughout his political career.

• The United Kingdom is unlikely to try to lure international investment by becoming a tax haven after it leaves the European Union, according to an internal memo prepared by the body responsible for the drafting international tax rules.

• The head of tax at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which advises developed nations on policy, said the UK could use its freedom from EU rules to slash corporate tax but the political price would be high.

• The idea the country may cut tax on multinational companies’ profits, which could also help them avoid tax on profits made elsewhere in the EU, has been raised by some accountants and policy experts since the country voted to leave the bloc.

• “The negative impact of the Brexit on UK competitiveness may push the UK to be even more aggressive in its tax offer,” the OECD’s head of tax, Pascal Saint-Amans said in the memo, details of which were seen by Reuters.

• UK business confidence has fallen sharply in the aftermath of the vote to leave the EU, research suggests.

• The share of businesses that reported feeling pessimistic about the UK economy doubled in the week after the Brexit vote.

• The figure jumped from 25% the week before the referendum to 49%, according to YouGov and the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

• Falling confidence can lead companies to pull back on investment and hiring.

• Scott Corfe, director at the CEBR, said that the figures indicated a “significant shock reaction” among UK businesses following the vote last month.

• One of the most startling aspects of the Brexit debate is the rapidity with which the Conservatives have set it behind them. Within hours of the result David Cameron was on the steps of 10 Downing Street, describing this slim majority as “a very clear result” and proposing irrevocable steps to set it in motion. Within days his chancellor, who had threatened a punishment budget only weeks earlier, was falling into line.

• The referendum was manifestly won on the basis of misinformation, and puts the UK in an extremely dangerous situation, and there are several plausible scenarios for avoiding it. Yet among the candidates to succeed Cameron, even former remainers are now voting leave. “Brexit means Brexit,” Theresa May stated on joining the race on Thursday. “There must be no attempts to remain inside the EU, no attempts to rejoin it through the back door, and no second referendum.” All the bloodshed in the Tory leadership contest masks an underlying consensus: they are all determined to block every exit from Brexit.

• Here is a question: would a decision by the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union require an Act of Parliament?

• On this question, one week or so after the referendum vote for Leave, it may be fairly said that “views differ”. Some constitutional lawyers say one thing, others say the other.

• Trade unions must take immediate action to reassure NHS and social care staff from the EU that they are welcome and needed in the UK – and to protect the rights of all workers.

• Environmentalists oppose it. So do labor unions, medical professionals, and major religious groups, as well as every leading presidential candidate.

• So why hasn’t the Democratic Party gone on record opposing the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)?

• That’s what Bernie Sanders wants to know.

• Amid a haze of grief after her son’s murder last year, Marcia DeOliveira-Longinetti faced an endless list of tasks — helping the police access Kevin’s phone and email, canceling his subscriptions, credit cards and bank accounts, and arranging his burial in New Jersey.

• And then there were his college loans.

• When DeOliveira-Longinetti called about his federal loans, an administrator offered condolences and assured her the remaining balance would be written off.

• The myths on which Benefits Street was based – namely the myth of so-called “workless communities” – are demonstrably false; however the furore it has generated demonstrates that the politics of class and representation still matter.

• Many, even on the Conservative backbenches, now question its utility. Growth in the UK stalled throughout the period, falling markedly below competitors in the global markets. The UK was positioned as the foremost adherent of this bastardised Keynesian policy which saw its own Government cannibalise its own functions in a maudlin effort to lose weight. Over the past six years spending fell 10% – similar crashes have been seen previously only in times of war or famine.

• “You never let a serious crisis go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel infamously said when he was President Obama’s White House chief of staff. So it is with the legislation that President Obama signs into law Thursday that offers Puerto Rico a process for managing its crushing debt.

• This bill is being heralded as a rare moment of bipartisan cooperation to solve a serious crisis, in this case the default by Puerto Rico on more than $1 billion of general obligation bonds on July 1. The island’s government has already missed payment deadlines on other bonds.

• Many workers at the Trump Taj Mahal, including those with years on the job, have seen only $.80 in total raises over the last twelve years. The cost of living in Atlantic City has risen over 25 percent in the same time period. Housekeepers, servers and other casino workers at the Taj Mahal earn an average of less than $12/ hour.

• Comfort zones are available for us to shatter them, both physically and mentally.

• Robert Reich’s latest book, Saving Capitalism For the Many, Not the Few, graphically details how current U.S. capitalism operates in stark contrast to the post-World War II period of the 50s, 60s and 70s. For Reich, the earlier period represented almost an ideal state: “the rules of the game were basically fair.” The rules defined a system in which “widely shared prosperity generates more inclusive political institutions, which in turn organize the market in ways that further broaden the gains from growth and expand opportunity.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• For high-rolling special interests looking to make an impression at the presidential conventions next month, one option is to pay a lot of money to a media outlet. Lobbyists for the oil industry, for instance, are picking up the tab for leading Beltway publications to host energy policy discussions at the convention, including the Atlantic and Politico.

• And for the right price, some political media outlets are even offering special interviews with editorial staffers and promotional coverage at the convention.

• Broken Windows was always about constant police contact with vulnerable groups of people. A buffet of interactions, the theory was in some ways just a crude, physical form of surveillance. The fact that it never worked was secondary to what did work: creating a politically accepted justification for crackdowns on those populations. After all, the theory implied that the squeegee man, the subway dancers, the “loosie” sellers and the homeless were responsible for the murder rate. Broken Windows was not a failure but a hugely successful communications strategy that promoted the idea that the poor were dangerous and that the cops should be unshackled to deal with them.

• It’s time to bury that idea and reverse that strategy by listening to the stories of those who’ve been dealing with the fallout of decades of a law and order onslaught.

• The priority now of the political “elite” is to ensure voters never again get the chance to make a choice the political class do not want. Jeremy Corbyn is the thing the political class want least.

• Do you remember when 184 Labour MPs refused to vote against the Tory benefit cuts that ruined lives and caused suicides? They did so on the grounds that their focus groups showed the public wanted benefit cuts, and so it would be wrong to oppose the Tory Welfare Reform and Work Bill.

• Patrick Davis has denied allegations that he inappropriately steered hundreds of thousands of dollars raised by a conservative PAC to organizations linked to himself and his friends. Now he’ll lead Trump’s campaign in a key swing state.

• Politics has become a branch of PR. It is just about selling. The party, candidate or policy you are selling must be portrayed as the absolute epitome of excellence, with no flaws whatsoever. Political discourse has therefore become juvenile. It is about expensively dressed, well groomed salesmen with perfect teeth. Thought is positively frowned upon.

• The NYT has an article describing how a bunch of apparently moronic Hillary aides believe they will govern when she becomes President. I say moronic not just because — in a week when Hillary’s spouse scored an enormous own goal by chatting up Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmack in Phoenix — numerous Hillary aides said Hillary might keep Lynch as AG.

• A quick Google news search for “Theresa May and “Abu Qatada” reveals over 2,000 mainstream media articles in the last three days combining both. This is hardly surprising, as in her speech announcing her candidacy for Tory leader (and thus PM) May dwelt on her deportation of Abu Qatada as evidence she was qualified for the job. The May supporting Tory MP who was put up for Sky to interview immediately afterwards managed to say “Abu Qatada” three times in a two minute interview.

• Abu Qatada should indeed be a powerful symbol – but not the symbol he has become, a hate figure. He should rather be a symbol of the hate-filled and intolerant place Britain has become, and the dreadful injustice meted out to individuals both by the state and the media.

• There is little in Trump’s rambling off-the-cuff speeches and media interviews, or in his reactionary stream-of-conscious tweets, that demonstrate his understanding of patriotism. Trump is a snake oil salesman, and he is arguably in the midst of his greatest pitch to date. Smart consumers should do their research to find out the truth about the “product” they are being sold by Mr. Trump.

• Note Ms Hinshliff’s use of inverted commas there, indicating that “media conspiracy” was the actual phrase used. Except it wasn’t. Wadsworth never used the phrase, or indeed either of the words “media” and “conspiracy” separately. What he actually said is widely available, as is video footage of him saying it. I published it yesterday, along with what I hope was a very rational consideration of what the incident did and did not signify .

• a) I did not accept the argument that the BBC was biased in the referendum campaign towards Brexit. Indeed especially in the last few days, I thought it was biased towards Remain. b) However the BBC had been guilty of helping promote Brexit by giving Farage massive and disproportionate publicity for many years, from when UKIP was a negligible electoral force. They were always willing to give right wings views publicity but not left wing views. c) The right wing print media were indeed a major problem distorting democracy. However the solution to this should be to break up media ownership, not impose government control of content. d) Project Fear had not succeeded in the Scottish referendum. It had seen a 35 point unionist lead cut to a 10 point lead, making it one of the most disastrous campaigns in history. The question of why Project Fear “succeeded” in Scotland but not the EU referendum was therefore a false one. e) Media coverage focused on the despised political class rather than the facts.

• Who are you going to believe: us, or your lying eyes? That’s the good word from Democratic Party powers that be and their transcribers in the corporate media, in response to the “allegations” by Bernie Sanders supporters that the nomination was stolen by Hillary Clinton.

• Via a new Gallup poll, more evidence comes Friday that the nation’s electorate really doesn’t like this year’s leading presidential candidates.

• Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has the dubious distinction of being the most unfavorably viewed of any candidate over the past seven decades—displacing 1964 Republican candidate Barry Goldwater from the bottom spot.

• The poll offers no smug moment for Clinton: her scores put her among the bottom four presidential candidates, with scores barely better than those of Goldwater.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Helen Suzman Foundation has launched an urgent court bid to stop the SABC from implementing its decision to censor reporting of protests.

• The application is against the SABC, its board, chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng and communications minister Faith Muthambi, the foundation said in a statement on Monday.

• It would be heard in the high court in Pretoria. The provisional court date is 29 July, but it could be moved forward pending the availability of lawyers.

• “It is impermissible for the SABC to distort or refuse to cover important news, as a result of political partisanship or otherwise.

• In the summer 2016 issue of Index on Censorship magazine, Spiegel Online’s managing editor Matthias Streitz and Privacy International technologist Richard Tynan go head to head to debate the rise of ad-blockers.

• Many publishers have voiced concern that this software – which allows users to block online adverts from their screens – is damaging their revenue streams.

• “If you consume our content, you must allow us some means of monetisation,” said Streitz. While Tynan argued that online adverts pose a security risk and ad-blockers allow users to “retain control over who the communicate with, and [minimise] the amount of data companies collect on users’ online patterns”.

• The Helen Suzman Foundation has launched an urgent application asking the High Court in Pretoria to suspend the implementation of the policy until the court has decided whether it is lawful, or pending the finalisation of an inquiry by the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) into the matter.

• The SABC is likely to know on 7 July whether its contentious decision to ban coverage of violent protests is valid.

• On the Chakrabarti report itself, it seems to me a model of good sense. It is interesting to note that her recommendations on what areas (including holocaust denial and the Nazis) and what language to ban from discourse, end up very closely mirroring the same rules we have adopted over the years on this blog, effectively to bar anti-Semitism.

• The recent clash between Brikkuni vocalist Mario Vella and OPM aide and blogger Glenn Bedingfield has once again exposed the limitations of freedom of speech.

• Vella is widely known to be outspoken and vitriolic in his public commentary. On this occasion, however, many felt that his comment about Michelle Muscat (which was both obscene and highly personal) had ‘crossed the line’.

• Israeli Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan said Facebook was responsible for a spate of Palestinian attacks on the country’s citizens.

• “Facebook today sabotages, it should be known, sabotages the work of the Israeli police, because when the Israeli police approach them, and it is regarding a resident of Judea and Samaria, Facebook does not cooperate” with the West Bank, Erdan said in a television interview Saturday, Reuters reported.

• Applying censorship to illustrate censorship itself is what Akshita’s art intends to achieve.

• Terrorism is scary. That’s the entire point of terrorism, of course. The relatively meager bodycounts of acts of terror — compared with, say, most minor individual battles in either of the World Wars — are actually attempting to create some kind of political or social change amongst the victims. And guess what? It totally works! After all, western nations, the bastions of freedom and puppy dogs that we are, have reacted to what is ultimately a minor threat by reporting toddlers to the authorities, freezing the bank accounts of people with dogs whose names are a couple of letters off of the scary terror-enemy, and refusing online services to people with scary (read: Islamic) sounding names. Freedom, you see, isn’t free, and we have to pay for it with freedom.

• And the real lesson that should be learned from pretty much the entire early part of this century is that once you start the fear-ball rolling when it comes to terrorism, it gets really hard to prevent it from trampling a great deal of innocent people in some of the dumbest ways possible.

• South Africa is embroiled in a national debate over media censorship. This, after the SABC made the editorial decision to stop airing video of violent protests. The SABC has maintained the move was to protect journalists from becoming victims while covering such events.

• What does South Africa have in common with China‚ Russia and North Korea? “Poor human rights track records” and they are the “biggest practitioners of censorship”‚ the Democratic Alliance’s Phumzile van Damme suggested on Tuesday.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The annual wiretap report is out. The headline number is that wiretaps have gone up, and judges still don’t deny any wiretap applications.

• In a dangerously flawed decision unsealed today, a federal district court in Virginia ruled that a criminal defendant has no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in his personal computer, located inside his home. According to the court, the federal government does not need a warrant to hack into an individual’s computer.

• This decision is the latest in, and perhaps the culmination of, a series of troubling decisions in prosecutions stemming from the FBI’s investigation of Playpen—a Tor hidden services site hosting child pornography. The FBI seized the server hosting the site in 2014, but continued to operate the site and serve malware to thousands of visitors that logged into the site. The malware located certain identifying information (e.g., MAC address, operating system, the computer’s “Host name”; etc) on the attacked computer and sent that information back to the FBI. There are hundreds of prosecutions, pending across the country, stemming from this investigation.

• And because of a little-known law, it can be illegal to test for discrimination online.

• It can be pretty convenient when Facebook processes the gargantuan amount of personal data it has on you to show you ads for the precise lemon curd recipe you never knew you were craving.

• But what are the harms associated with this kind of targeting? It’s hard to answer that question — because an overbroad law actually prohibits the kind of studies best positioned to figure it out.

• The implications go far beyond dessert — studies have shown that people are being treated differently online based on their race, actual or perceived. Websites have been found to use demographic data to raise or lower prices, show different advertisements, or steer people to different content.

• There are dozens of messaging apps for iPhone and Android, but one in particular continues to stand out in the crowd. Signal is easy to use, works on both iOS and Android, and encrypts communications so that only the sender and recipient can decipher them.

• We wrote about a case last week that was deeply disturbing: a federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia held that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a personal computer located inside their home. In this court’s view, the FBI is free to hack into networked devices (aka, pretty much everything) without a warrant.

• Fortunately, this is only the opinion of a single district court judge, so it’s not controlling precedent throughout the country. But the decision makes one thing clear: we need to stop the changes to Rule 41, amendments that will make it easier for the government to get a warrant to remotely search computers.

• First, the changes to Rule 41 are going to result in a lot more government hacking. And, as the decision in the Eastern District of Virginia illustrates, that dramatic increase in government hacking is going to occur in a legal environment where judges are struggling to understand the technology and the implications their decisions will have for people’s security and privacy. If law enforcement is going to be allowed to stockpile and exploit vulnerabilities to investigate domestic crimes, there need to be stringent safeguards on the circumstances when they can do this. And it’s up to Congress, not the courts, to create those rules. If Congress allows the changes to Rule 41 to go through, they’re effectively saying: “Courts, you figure it out.” As the recent court decision shows, that is a perilous path.

• Second, the changes to Rule 41 will encourage forum shopping. As we wrote before, under the changes, law enforcement will be able to apply for warrants before judges or in districts with the most flexible view on the Fourth Amendment and its requirements. And, if last week’s decision is any indication, the FBI has a very friendly venue conveniently located near its headquarters—the Eastern District of Virginia. If the FBI is looking to obtain an expansive warrant under the new Rule 41 to search a computer whose location is hidden by “technological means,” it won’t have to travel far.

• While you’re strolling the Seattle streets this summer, take a moment to look up. Thanks to the FBI, there’s a new bird in town atop the maples and the power lines: surveillance cameras housed in birdhouse-like “concealments” attached to the city’s utility poles.

• The new species was first spotted in the wild last July, and a state public-records request by KIRO 7 yielded limited information from Seattle City Light in November. But most Seattleites likely weren’t aware of their presence in the city until recently, when the U.S. Department of Justice sued the city and Seattle City Light to prevent the release of additional information about the cameras, including their locations. A federal judge promptly blocked the release of the location information, at least for now.

• Whether that decision is correct as a legal matter is complicated. The government claims, “Every FBI pole camera is associated with a particular subject or particular investigation,” and that revealing a camera’s location would have a “devastating impact” on ongoing police work.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A disabled teenage cancer patient was injured during a violent arrest by security agents at Memphis international airport, her family has alleged in a lawsuit filed against the Transport Security Administration.

• Hannah Cohen, 18, at the time of her arrest on 30 June 2015, and her mother had been on their way home to Chattanooga from St Jude’s hospital in Memphis, where Hannah underwent her final treatment for a brain tumor.

• Hannah and her mother, Shirley, told the Guardian that the pair had made the trip hundreds of times, and knew the airport security routine well. Shirley would usually go through the scanner first and wait for Hannah on the other side, since Hannah’s tumor, and numerous surgeries and treatments since she was two years old, had left her easily confused and frightened in unfamiliar situations.

• According to the complaint, the warning alarm was triggered when Hannah passed through the body scanners. Hannah attributed the alarm to her shirt’s design.

• Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court took away a little more of your right to be free from unlawful police searches. In a 5-3 decision in Utah v. Strieff, the Court held that if the police illegally stop and search you, they can use against you any evidence they find, as long as they determine—after they’ve stopped you—that you’re one of the 7.8 million Americans with an outstanding arrest warrant.

• Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a fiery and spot-on dissent that forcefully demonstrates the troubling links between racial discrimination, police stops of pedestrians and motorists, arrest warrant databases, and out-of-control police surveillance technologies.

• “You’re on the no-fly list,” the woman at the kiosk told me. It was a Wednesday, six years ago, at Midway Airport in Chicago. I was traveling to Spokane, Washington, for my job as a dog trainer.

• I had absolutely no idea how I could have ended up on the No Fly List. I waited for Ashton Kutcher to come out and tell me I was being Punk’d. No luck.

• At least 30 federal agents swarmed me. They didn’t handcuff or manhandle me, but the sheer number of them was intimidating. I was in a state of shock, looking at them confusedly. Their expressions turned puzzled, too, when they noticed my Marine Corps shirt.”You’re on the no-fly list,” the woman at the kiosk told me. It was a Wednesday, six years ago, at Midway Airport in Chicago. I was traveling to Spokane, Washington, for my job as a dog trainer.

• I had absolutely no idea how I could have ended up on the No Fly List. I waited for Ashton Kutcher to come out and tell me I was being Punk’d. No luck.

• At least 30 federal agents swarmed me. They didn’t handcuff or manhandle me, but the sheer number of them was intimidating. I was in a state of shock, looking at them confusedly. Their expressions turned puzzled, too, when they noticed my Marine Corps shirt.

• Vatican prosecutors have demanded prison sentences for a senior clergyman, a communications consultant and a journalist accused of involvement in “Vatileaks” – the leak of sensitive Holy See documents.

• The prosecution called for three years and nine months’ prison for communications consultant Francesca Chaouqui, who had been involved in a review of Vatican finances and is accused of both “inspiring” and of ultimate responsibility for the leaks.

• This evening the committee of the European Parliament on Civil Liberties (LIBE) will vote on the draft directive on combating terrorism. La Quadrature du Net already warned about the dangerous provisions of this text and urges once more MEPs to oppose this text.

• Holly Harris may wear cowboy boots to work, but the Kentucky mom and Executive Director for the US Justice Action Network (USJAN) is far from your average southerner.

• This past Saturday, June 25th, Harris talked about her work to a group of journalists and bloggers who traveled to Washington D.C. from different corners of the country to hear from leaders of the criminal justice reform movement. Harris was the first speaker at FreedomWorks’ #JusticeForAll event, and as the leader of USJAN, she set the tone for what turned out to be a fascinating conference.

• When Americans go to the polls in November to elect the next president, more than 5.8 million of them will be unable to vote due to a past felony conviction.

• Many of them, like our client Kelli Griffin, were convicted of a non-violent drug offense and have since recovered from drug dependence, served their sentence, and returned to their communities. But because Kelli lives in Iowa — one of three states, along with Florida and Kentucky, that disenfranchise people for life after a felony conviction — she remains a second-class citizen denied full participation in the democratic process.

• Among the many controversial statements made by Mr. Donald Trump, his recent one on the use of waterboarding tops them all. Speaking at a rally in Ohio, when asked if the U.S. should use waterboarding to extract confessions from prisoners, Trump said, “I like it a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough.” It was an irresponsible statement by a man who knows no moderation on serious issues.

• Waterboarding is a form of torture in which water is poured over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of a person, causing the individual to experience the sensation of drowning. It causes not only extreme pain, but also damages the lungs and the brain due to oxygen deprivation. In addition, it may cause lasting psychological damage and death. It is among the cruelest forms of torture.

• The prosecution denied its misconduct for decades. Then the Supreme Court gave Terry Williams a chance for a new trial.

• The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office intentionally withheld critical evidence in 1986 when it prosecuted 18-year-old Terry Williams and won a death sentence. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the Pennsylvania courts, putting the prosecution’s wrongdoing on display.

• At Terry’s trial, the prosecution told the jury a story: at age 18, Terry had killed 56-year-old Amos Norwood for “no other reason” than to rob him. The prosecutors described Norwood as a kind man who volunteered at church. But they knew much more about Norwood than they let on. When they withheld that information from the defense and from the jury, they violated the law.

• Terry had grown up in a terror-filled household, the victim of beatings by his mother and stepfather. He was six when an 11-year-old neighbor, someone he considered to be like a big brother, first lured him with promises of food — something that he often didn’t have at home — and then sexually assaulted him. Terry was repeatedly sexually abused and exploited by adults, including one of his middle school teachers.

• Rhode Island legislators recently decided not to advance a bill that would have made that state’s bad “anti-hacking” law even worse. This is good news. But the struggle continues against other vague and overbroad computer crime laws.

• As EFF previously explained, this Rhode Island bill was a threat to many different kinds of innocent, common, and beneficial uses of computers. It would have further empowered prosecutors to bring charges against computer users who violate a corporate terms-of-service agreement to access confidential information, as well as whistle blowers and independent computer security researchers. It would have imposed a minimum of five years of incarceration for a first offense, even where there was no intent to obtain financial gain. It allowed for the stacking of charges, enabling prosecutors to seek even lengthier prison terms. And there was no showing that existing laws are insufficient to protect confidential computer data.

• The concept of “freedom” is at the very least ambiguous, and, at the most, destructive to those being deceived by false patriotism. The people who benefit from the uncontrolled pursuit of money push the concept of individual freedom on the rest of us, making us feel unpatriotic if we disagree. “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself,” once blathered Milton Friedman, whose economic theories made America the most unequal developed nation.

• It wasn’t until many years later, while reading an issue of the armed forces newspaper Stars and Stripes in Vietnam that I began thinking and feeling differently about the flag and what it represents. There was a story about an arrest and jailing for flag burning somewhere in the United States. I had recently experienced the horror of seeing numerous bodies of young women and children that were burned alive in a small Delta village devastated by napalm. Since the pilots had “successfully” hit their targets, they were feeling good and had received glowing reports that would bode well in their military record for promotions. I wondered why it was okay to burn innocent human beings 9,000 miles from my home town, but not okay to burn a piece of cloth that was symbolic of the US policies intentionally burning villagers to death with napalm. Something was terribly wrong with the Cold War rhetoric of fighting communism that made me question what our nation stood for. There was a grand lie, an American myth that was being fraudulently preserved under the cloak of our flag.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Today at the OECD Ministerial Meeting on the Digital Economy in Mexico, the Global Commission on Internet Governance released its final report, One Internet. Despite its important-sounding name, the Commission is not an official body, but a think tank convened in 2014 by the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and Chatham House, composed of a diverse panel of 29 invited experts from industry, government, academia, and civil society (including EFF Pioneer Award recipient Anriette Esterhuysen).

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Nevertheless, it turns out that trademark strategy may sometimes be better viewed as the use of generic (or nearly so) terms without any apparent interest in whether or not they meet the requirements for registration. Case in point is the announcement last week by PepsiCo, as reported here, regarding changes to its soft drink line-up and the names assigned to these products. At the heart of these moves by Pepsi is the presence or absence of the artificial sweetener, aspartame. While used for a long time, aspartame has been challenged on various health grounds, so much so that in 2015 Pepsi removed it from the formulation for its Diet Pepsi soft drink product, in favor of sucralose. Pepsi thereby hoped to capture customers who are wary for health reasons of products containing aspartame. The problem is that the removal of aspartame from the Diet Pepsi soft drink did not blunt the continuing decline in sales. The solution—bring back the diet version with the aspartame ingredient.

Copyrights

• You spoke, and the California Legislature listened. We’re happy to report that A.B. 2880 was amended in the State Senate to remove the dangerous sections that EFF and over 25 other organizations opposed. Your messages to the Legislature were vital to this effort.

• The prior version of A.B. 2880 that was passed by the State Assembly would have given state government agencies vast new power to assert copyrights and trademarks over government-created work. It also would have added a broad new exemption to the California Public Records Act, the state’s version of FOIA.

• The so-called ‘copyright-trolling’ piracy lawsuits in Finland have claimed their first victim in court. Despite operating an open Wi-Fi network, a man has been ordered to pay more than 32,000 euros in damages and costs for sharing ten episodes of the TV show “Black Sails” and a movie.

• A groundbreaking international agreement to address the “book famine” for blind and print-disabled people is now set to go into force after passing another key milestone today. The agreement requires countries to allow the reproduction and distribution of accessible ebooks by limiting the scope of copyright restrictions.

• The Marrakesh agreement takes aim at the global shortage of ebooks available in suitable formats for the print disabled, which in some regions is as low as 1% of published books. At the time of its completion, only 57 of the 184 member countries of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) had copyright exceptions for this purpose, and inconsistencies between them made sharing books between countries nearly impossible.

• As the debate over the future of the DMCA safe harbors heats up, the US Copyright Office is proposing a plan that could undermine those safe harbors much sooner.

• One of the myriad conditions of DMCA safe harbor protection from copyright liability (protection on which thousands of intermediaries rely to survive) is to register an agent to receive DMCA takedown notices. Last month the Copyright Office announced that it would finally be implementing a new, much cheaper and streamlined electronic registration process.

• EFF has observed an alarming trend: when certain parties face challenges in attempting to monetize their contributions to copyrighted works, lawmakers often attempt to address it by handing out new copyright-like veto powers. We’ve dubbed this trend “copyright creep”, and it’s running rampant all over the world.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.