● 07.09.16

● Links 9/7/2016: Skype Hype, Wine 1.9.14

Posted in News Roundup at 7:38 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• But it seems those intent on keeping pesky government agencies out of their online business may well be shooting themselves in the virtual foot.

• As documents related to the XKeyscore snooping program reveal, the US’s National Security Agency has started focusing its snooping efforts on Linux Journal readers, Tails Linux, and Tor users.

Desktop

Kernel Space

• Sometime in 2016 Linux will be 25 years old. Exactly when is a matter of opinion.

• We could consider Linux’s 25th birthday to be August 25th. That’s because on that date in 1991, Linus Torvalds made his announcement to the minix community to let them know that he was working on a modest new OS. He had started the work in April. By October 5th, he felt that his new OS was usable and ready for the community at large.

Graphics Stack

• Alex Deucher has submitted the main feature pull request for DRM-Next of the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM driver changes for the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.8.

• Some will be sad though, the AMDGPU material for Linux 4.8 doesn’t contain the huge DAL display abstraction layer code that’s needed for bringing the open-source AMDGPU driver display capabilities more on par with the former closed-source driver stack and also necessary for supporting new features like FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync.

• Sadly, another blow to report on with regard to Intel’s open-source efforts… Just days after reporting on Intel losing its chief Linux/open-source technologist, Dirk Hohndel, there’s another high profile departure in the open-source world.

• While it’s coming late, the huge Mesa 12.0 release is now official! Mesa 12.0 is easily one of the biggest updates to this important open-source user-space OpenGL driver stack in quite some time and will offer much better support and features especially for Intel, Radeon, and NVIDIA open-source Linux desktop users/gamers.

• Today, July 8, 2016, Collabora’s Emil Velikov has had the honor of announcing the release of the final Mesa 12.0.0 3D Graphics Library for all GNU/Linux operating systems.

• While there isn’t yet any 3D/hardware acceleration support, the first milestone of open-source bring-up for the latest-generation NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1000 “Pascal” graphics processors is now available for Nouveau.

• Nouveau DRM maintainer Ben Skeggs has managed to publish initial open-source, reverse-engineered graphics driver support for Pascal (GP100 series) GPUs. Ben Skeggs at Red Hat continues to do this without official documentation from NVIDIA Corp but rather just receiving hardware samples and the hard process of reverse engineering.

Applications

• At some point, you probably have installed or configured a piece of software on a server or desktop PC. Since you read Linux Journal, you’ve probably done a lot of this, as well as developed a range of glue shell scripts, Perl snippets and cron jobs.

• Unless you are more disciplined than I was, every server has a unique, hand-crafted version of those config files and scripts. It might be as simple as a backup monitor script, but each still needs to be managed and installed.

• It’s always funny watching a new open source initiative gain traction — all the more so when the initiative in question isn’t yet firmly ensconced into the warm, inviting bosom of its own full-fledged foundation. This is certainly the case for Kubernetes.

• Today, July 8, 2016, Calibre developer Kovid Goyal has been proud to announce the release of Calibre 2.62 ebook library management software for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X.

• It looks like the Friday weekly releases of Calibre are back, and Calibre 2.62 is here to add a couple of new features, as well as to fix many of the annoyances reported by users since last week’s Calibre 2.61 update or previous releases.

• The most important feature of Calibre 2.62 is support for the newest Kindle Oasis e-reader model that has started shipping today. So if you receive your new Kindle Oasis device this weekend, you’ll be able to connect it to Calibre to upload your books.

• wlc 0.4, a command line utility for Weblate, has been just released. This release doesn’t bring much changes, but still worth announcing.

• The most important change is that development repository has been moved under WeblateOrg organization at GitHub, you can now find it at https://github.com/WeblateOrg/wlc. Another important news is that Debian package is currently waiting in NEW queue and will hopefully soon hit unstable.

Proprietary

• Microsoft’s perception of Linux has changed completely in the last couple of years and with the open-source world growing at a fast pace, Redmond had no other option than to adapt and look into ways to get closer to this continuously expanding community.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine team released today another development release of their software. Version 1.9.14 has many small changes including 20 bugfixes.

• Today, July 8, 2016, the development team behind the popular Wine open-source software used by many Linux users to run Windows apps and games, have announced a new milestone towards Wine 2.0.

• The Wine development release 1.9.14 is now available.

• Wine 1.9.14 was released today as the newest bi-weekly Wine development release for running your favorite Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems.

• As has been the trend recently, there’s been more work going on for Shader Model 5 support in their Direct3D implementation along with more prep work for Direct3D Command Stream. The SM5 support will be needed for Direct3D 11 support and the D3D command stream code will offer nice performance improvements for gamers once all of the code has been readied.

Games

• The trailer and screenshots of Haven Moon show off some of its fantastical landscapes and machinery in crisp detail. What they don’t show is that although rendered in real-time 3D, Roussel has designed the game to be played entirely with the mouse. Your journey across Seleos reveals a “calm and lonely place where you hear the sounds of the sea, the wind and the beautiful music.” You’ll also encounter a variety of puzzles that are fully integrated with the story and promise to be “not too hard nor too easy, just like the length of the adventure is made to be not too long nor too short. Everything is balanced to provide a light relaxing and peaceful experience, to spend a pleasant time in an imaginary world.”

• It’s important for us, as gamers, to know our favorite medium’s past. Doing so informs us of what past developers did well, what they didn’t do well, what kinds of gaming experiences and knowledge manifest today in altered or re-interpreted forms, and which directions games might be heading both technically and conceptually. It’s especially important to learn about gaming’s past in our current era, where information is ephemeral and is especially prone to being misinterpreted due to rapid communications technologies. Institutions like the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (and the planned Videogame History Museum in Frisco, Texas) and websites like The Cutting Room Floor help us achieve that task in various ways. Source code repositories like Github, meanwhile, archive the essential components of specific games in more literal forms.

• Barony, a pretty cool looking 3D first-person roguelike has opened up the engine under the GPL license and is now on github.

• Note: While the engine is now open source, the assets are not. You still need to own a copy to use the now open source engine.

• Black Mesa is officially coming to Linux, and the developer confirmed so in a rather delightful way of shooting down an anti-Linux troll in the Steam forums.

• You may or may not heard of a user who goes by the username “meraco” on Steam. He seems to be popping up all over Linux support posts on the Steam forum to spread anti-Linux sentiments, this time it was different.

• Wizard of Legend is currently on Kickstarter and the great thing is that they built a demo game to show off, it has Linux support and it’s pretty cool.

• Fossil Echo is a pretty awesome looking story-driven platformer that has plans for a Linux version, it’s not ready just yet but will be soon.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Last weekend, I was exploring GuixSD, the distribution that introduces a universal package manager developed by The GNU Project. Part of the novelty was the lack of a graphical installer, a luxury that most Linux users expect today, but was once controversial, as well as Linux’s first encounter with user experience.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Plasma 5.8 has its Kickoff meeting yesterday and we Kickered the plans into shape. The big news is it’ll be an LTS release with bugfix releases coming out for 18 months after the .0. This matches Qt 5.6 which is also on an LTS schedule and we’ll still to 5.6 as the minimum Qt version for Plasma 5.8 LTS. Full schedule on wiki.

Distributions

• One of the greatest aspects of Linux is its flexibility—it can be whatever you need it to be. It can be a massive server for big data, a desktop for rendering video or editing audio. A graphic designer’s studio. An every-day, get things done machine.

• Or something in between.

• For every job, you’ll find a distribution. For every need, you’ll find a tool. For every piece of hardware, you’ll find a version of Linux ready to make it work for you. Whether you’re working working with big iron or a low-end, aging desktop or laptop…there’s a Linux for the job.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• openSUSE developer Dominique Leuenberger today, July 8, 2016, informed the openSUSE Tumbleweed community about the latest GNU/Linux technologies and software components that landed in the repositories.

• Today in Linux news Sandra Henry-Stocker looked at how far Linux has come since its humble beginnings 25 years ago. Elsewhere, Lifehacker.com has four alternatives to Windows 10 and Matt Asay wrote that Red Hat is the only profitable Open Source company because they sell piece of mind rather than software. Tumbleweed is poised to accept recently released Plasma 5.7 and Slackware received two security updates this week.

• Summer holiday is here (at least in the northern hemisphere) – and we can see a slightly reduced beat for new snapshots. I can ‘only’ report 3 instead of the usual 4 releases for this week (0701, 0703 and 0705), but the changes were still rather substantial. The slowness seems to be less an issue of package submissions as compared to OBS having trouble getting the stagings completely built. There seem to be a couple PowerPC workers missing.

Red Hat Family

• CentOS Project’s Jason Brooks announced today, July 8, the general availability of a new maintenance update of the CentOS Atomic Host operating system designed to run Docker containers.

• In the modern world of open source, software vendors are becoming increasingly irrelevant. At least, at the infrastructure layer.

• In fact, in a world awash in open source software built and contributed by companies that have no interest in directly monetizing that software, it is the packager of other people’s innovations that thrives. Small wonder, then, that the one “open source company” making serious money is Red Hat, a company whose real innovation is in how it packages and streamlines the innovations of others.

Finance

Fedora

• Today in Linux news Adam Williamson issued a public service announcement concerning Fedora and Skyland systems. Elsewhere, Bruce Byfield said that graphical installers began the influx of the regular Linux user and Ubuntu 15.10 is approaching its end of support. My Linux Rig spoke to System76′s James Blaede and The Hectic Geek said Linux Mint 18 is how a distro should be done.

• One of our main communication channels is IRC. We’ve recently decided to standardize the name of our efforts as ‘Modularity’ where we prior to that sometimes used the term ‘Modularization’ and sometimes ‘Modularity’.

• And it was quite some task because the app is… well… wildly put together. Just see the build instructions provided by upstream. Flatpak manifests are usually fairly simple files, less complex than spec files, but this one ended up being 394 lines long.

• I think such an app is an ideal target for Flatpak. There is no way that an app like this would make it to the official Fedora repositories and its authors don’t even seem to be interested in making it more possible.

• The Southeast Linux Fest (SELF) is an annual Linux conference in the southeast region of the United States. This year, the conference ran from June 10 – 12, 2016. SELF was located in the Sheraton by the airport in Charlotte, NC. As expected, the booth site was the same as the earlier years while at this venue. Booth placement plays a vital role in visibility and accessibility. When presentations finish, attendees come out and the first booth visible is Fedora.

• The HTCondor grid scheduler and resource manager follows the old Linux kernel versioning scheme: for release x.y.z, if y is an even number it’s a “stable” series that get bugfixes, behavior changes and major features go on odd-numbered y. For a long time, the HTCondor packages in Fedora used the development series. However, this leads to a choice between introducing behavior changes when a new development HTCondor release comes out or pinning a Fedora release to a particular HTCondor release which means no bugfixes.

• This post is say thank you to Patrick Uiterwijk, who is part of Fedora Infrastructure sysadmin team (along with nirik, and smooge). He is one of our silent warrior who keeps the Fedora Infrastructure running. Many may not heard about him, unless you came down to any of our admin or development IRC channels, and asked for help. I personally ask him for help in many different areas, starting for basic sysadmin questions, to complex deployment issues, to programming ideas. He is one of the hackers I know who can code in assembly to the web frontend as required. He is our main force behind Fedora Infrastructure Cloud, and spam fighting He is also our new Fedora Infrastructure Security Officer. If any of our new and young contributor thinks that she/he is too young to do things, you may want to look at Patrick’s work. He started contributing back in 2012, and he is right now 24

Debian Family

• Here is the latest look at the performance of Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 vs. Debian Testing on the same system for showing how the performance is looking for Debian 9 “Stretch” ahead of its release next year.

• Originally I was planning to do a Debian GNU/Linux vs. GNU/kFreeBSD comparison too, but the Debian Testing GNU/kFreeBSD installer was yielding problems… So for this article is just a fun look at clean installs of Debian 8.5 versus the current Debian GNU/Linux testing on the same hardware and using each OS release out-of-the-box.

• I was naively thinking that the way autopkgtest would work is that it would set the current working directory of the schroot call and the ensuing subprocess call would thus take place in that directory inside the schroot. That is not how it works. If you want to change directories inside the virtual server, you have to use cd. The same is true of, at least, environment variables, which have their own specific handling in the adt_testbed.Testbed methods but have to be passed as strings, and umask. I’m assuming this is because the direct methods with qemu images or LXC containers don’t work.

• Ian Murdock, the founder of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution of Free/Libre Open Source Software operating system and repository, died by suicide according to a medical examiner’s report.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• If you have ever wanted an application like Apple’s Siri working on open-source software and hardware, you are in luck.

• Mycroft is just that: open-source software that functions exactly the same way as Siri does, but it is housed within its own hardware operating off of a Raspberry Pi 2 and Arduino. The best part, since it’s based on open-source software, is that it runs on Ubuntu’s Snappy Core.

• Chinese device maker has been offering tiny Windows and Android computers for a few years, but the company first came to my attention back in 2012 when I learned that the Android-powered Mele A1000 TV box was also able to run Linux.

• This year the company started selling some products with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed, and the latest is the PCG03U, a compact computer/TV box with 2GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, an Intel Atom Bay Trail processor, and Ubuntu 14.04 Linux.

• The only good reason to buy the BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition is if you’ve been dying for an Ubuntu tablet and don’t want to install the operating system yourself. For $312, you’re getting an underpowered tablet with an operating system that you can install on a plethora of other devices for free.

• For $155, you can get the Acer Iconia One 10 running Android and install Ubuntu on it yourself (or, of course, use Android). It uses a similar, underpowered processor, but at least you’re getting a deal. Those who are interested in a viable desktop mode might want to consider the Microsoft Surface 3 while it’s still available. The $386 2-in-1 runs full Windows, works as a tablet and is roughly the same size, at 10.8 inches. You could even install Ubuntu if you’re so inclined.

• All things considered, almost anything is better than the BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition. Between its weak CPU and a suite of apps that lack touch optimization, the company fell woefully short of the mark.

• Should Linux distributions continue to issue 32-bit images any longer or phase them out over a year or two? This question was resurrected recently by Ubuntu developer Dimitri John Ledkov, with a cutoff date of October 2018 proposed.

• At that time, Ubuntu would have been around for 14 years and it is increasingly getting more and more bloated. The same goes for many other distributions.

• So, even if anyone wanted to run Ubuntu on an older machine, it would not be a good idea. Computing would have to be done at a rather glacial speed.

• The idea of dropping the 32-bit build was first raised on the Ubuntu mailing lists in February by Bryan Quigley. Several other distributions like Fedora and openSUSE have already dropped their 32-bit images.

• Ubuntu announced its 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) release almost 9 months ago, on October 22, 2015. As a non-LTS release, 15.10 has a 9-month month support cycle and, as such, the support period is now nearing its end and Ubuntu 15.10 will reach end of life on Thursday, July 28th. At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 15.10.

• Ubuntu is world’s most popular free Operating System. It is Linux based and used very widely across the globe. Noticeably, many important government agencies across Europe and Asia use Ubuntu in their offices.

• The fact that Ubuntu gets a free upgrade every year and it comes with familiar apps like Firefox and Thunderbird along with free MS Office alternative called Libre Office makes it a very valuable alternative.

• Additionally, Ubuntu requires very fewer system resources enabling it to run quite well on older systems and are mostly free of viruses and malware.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint is one of the most popular (GNU/Linux) operating systems around, and according to Distrowatch.com‘s popularity ranking factor, for many years now Linux Mint has been on the top 3 most popular distributions (now it’s actually the number one!, surpassing Debian and Ubuntu. By the way, Fedora’s ranking is sinking fast, no surprise there though. Fedora is just a distribution for the coding elite of the GNU/Linux world and not for the average user, there I said it!). And there’s a good and a sensible reason for it (in my opinion anyway).

• It looks like the developers of the lightweight LXLE distribution are working hard on the next major update for the Lubuntu-based computer operating system, and they’ve just released the first Beta in the LXLE 16.04 series.

• Cassidy works for elementary OS AND System76, so he’s what those of us in the business call a double threat. I haven’t spent much time with elementary, so it’s nice to hear about someone using it for so much day-to-day work. It’s also nice to hear how good System76’s hardware is. It’s an important reminder for people looking to have Linux easily installed while also supporting the Linux economy.

Devices/Embedded

• FriendlyARM launched an $8 open-spec, 40 x 40mm “NanoPi Neo” SBC that runs Ubuntu Core on a quad-core Allwinner H3. It’s Ethernet-ready, but headless.

• With the NanoPi Neo, FriendlyARM has released what appears to be the world’s smallest quad-core ARM based single-board computer, and one of the smallest ARM SBCs we’ve seen. This open spec, 40 x 40mm sibling to the $11, 69 × 48mm NanoPi M1 has the same 1.2GHz, quad-core, Cortex-A7 Allwinner H3 SoC with 600MHz Mali 400MP2 GPU, and the higher-end, $10 model has the same 512MB of DDR3 RAM. However, in order to slim down, the Neo sacrifices the HDMI port, the camera and CVBS interfaces, DC jack, and Raspberry Pi compatible expansion connector.

Phones

Android

• Zebra Technologies’ latest enterprise wristband computer, the WT6000 Industrial Wearable Computer, has debuted as the first of the company’s business wearables to run on the Android operating system instead of Microsoft software. Also unveiled were the RS6000 Wearable Ring Scanner and HS3100 Rugged Headset accessories, adding flexibility for a wide range of enterprise users. The WT6000 runs on Android Lollipop 5.1, but the ring scanner and headset don’t include their own operating systems. The Zebra WT6000 Industrial Wearable Computer, which is ruggedized against dust, water and temperature extremes, is built to operate in myriad working environments such as in refrigerated warehouses or factories where hot ovens or smelters are used. Zebra made the move to Android because Microsoft Embedded will reach the end of its development life at the end of the decade and because Android has improved dramatically to fit the needs of enterprise users, according to Zebra. Peruse this eWEEK slide show for more details about the latest Zebra products.

• There are new smartphones hitting the market constantly, but which is the best to pick up when you’re trying to save a buck or two? We’ve seen some great launches this year and we’re only expecting more over the coming months, but for now, let’s go over the best budget Android smartphones you can go pick up today.

• In recent times there hasn’t been much potential for new features in phones. All phones have enough RAM and screen space for all common apps. While the S5 Mini has a small screen it’s not that small, I spent many years with desktop PCs that had a similar resolution. So while the S5 Mini was released a couple of years ago that doesn’t matter much for most common use. I wouldn’t want it for my main phone but for a secondary phone it’s quite good.

• The Nexus 6P is a very nice phone, but apart from USB-C, the fingerprint reader, and the lack of a stylus there’s not much noticeable difference between that and the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 I was using before.

Free Software/Open Source

• Santali, an aboriginal South Asian language, has a brand new freely licensed font and set of cross-platform open source input tools on the way.

• More than 6.2 million people in four South Asian countries (India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan) speak Santali. In India, it is one of the 22 major languages as mentioned in the eighth schedule of the Indian constitution. However, Santali is not the official language in regions where it is largely spoken, nor is it widely taught in schools. A large segment of the native speakers are socially and economically disadvantaged, which doesn’t help either.

• To understand the impact that open source technology has made on the enterprise, one need only look to the numbers. With over 35 million GitHub repositories, 1,961,460 lines of code on Hadoop and over a thousand Apache Spark contributors, the open source ecosystem is home to some of the world’s most innovative and impressive tech collaborations. With some of the biggest names in tech leading the charge — Apple’s Swift programming language, IBM’s machine learning technology SystemML and Facebook’s Relay JavaScript framework were all made public in the past year — open source technology is set to change the way we process, stream and analyze data.

• In this slideshow, IBM VP of Big Data and Analytics on z, Dinesh Nirmal, and IBM VP of Offerings, Big Data and Analytics, Ritika Gunnar, outline several tips to help enterprises make the most of their open source strategy.

• A full snapshot of more than 2.8 million open source project hosted on GitHub is now available in Google’s BigQuery, Google and GitHub announced. This will make it possible to query almost 2 billion source files hosted on GitHub using SQL.

• If you’ve been here for the past few years, it would have been hard for you to miss the digital stampede from ticket-based processes to continuous delivery. But somehow, this transition has skipped over load-testing processes. This is probably because performance problems are hard to fix, as they are removed from the code.

• During his time recruiting young programmers on college campuses, one of the questions Chris Aniszczyk would hear a lot is, “How do I get involved in open source?”

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google has launched a new encryption algorithm in its Chrome web browser to fend off attacks launched by powerful quantum computers. Called the New Hope algorithm, this “post-quantum cryptography” is being tested in Chrome Canary builds to develop a stronger security algorithm within two years. The new encryption adds just 2KB of extra data that is sent in each direction when a new HTTPS connection is made.

SaaS/Back End

• Less than a year ago, Wikibon published a series of research focused on Structured and Unstructured platforms, with a focus on how these platforms were designed to help developers build cloud-native applications. The evolution of PaaS and Container platforms has significantly evolved over the past 9-12 months. While some platforms are still highly Structured, the growing trend has been for the previously Unstructured platforms to become more “composable” or even Structured. Wikibon defines “composable” as a packaged offering that leverages a set of modular open source projects, but is more tightly integrated as a set of services that accelerate developer productivity and application deployments. Composable platforms are becoming more “opinionated” in their architectural choices, but they still allow architects, developers and operators some amount of architectural flexibility that may not be present in Structured platforms.

• Recently, the OpenStack Foundation conducted a survey to dig deeper into who was actually involved with its community. The results were quite shocking, showing that only 11 percent of the entire OpenStack population identify as women. Team leaders across the industry took notice, with many asking how they could improve diversity not only within their communities but their hiring practices.

CMS

• WordPress upgraded to version 4.5.3 last month with a security release for all versions of the content management system. But it quickly discovered a number of vulnerabilities.

• A total of 17 bugs were found in the last three releases from this year, many of which allowed attackers to take over websites running on WordPress. And according to the latest estimates from BuiltWith, 48 percent of the top million websites globally run on WordPress. But popularity has a price: It is also one of the most hacked platforms.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Why does this raise questions? Mainly because VMware doesn’t have a reputation for having much to do with open source, although it was an early player spurring the development of OpenStack Neutron (then called Quantum), a cloud networking controller and a networking-as-a-service project for OpenStack. Since Dell still appears to be in the process of purchasing VMware, this might be in preparation for some plans Dell has afoot.

• Hohndel’s hiring would certainly seem to indicate that something is in the works. Not only is he considered very good at what he does, he’s a huge open source advocate who often speaks at open source conferences — so he brings some FOSS community cred to the table. Stay tuned. I have a feeling that at VMware it’s going to be “something open source this way comes.”

• After being noticed by TechCrunch last week, Nike published three open-source projects on the version control system, GitHub – a space that companies such as Walmart, Target, Best Buy and rival Adidas have used in the past. Nike’s release consisted of a JSON parsing framework, a distributed tracing solution for Java and a logging library written in Swift.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Java Training Wheels has become the newest GNU package.

Public Services/Government

• The city of Ciudad Real is to switch to using free and open source software. A resolution by the city’s Ganemos party to use open source for all of the city’s 400 PC workstations, got a majority of the votes in a meeting on 23 May. The city will begin with an inventory of the potential hurdles, according to press reports.

• Adullact, the French organisation for public administrations using free software, has unveiled a new website, Comptoir du Libre.org, which aims to raise the interest of public administrations’ IT decision makers.

• iVIS provides an open ICT platform for a fully digital school administration. The software is developed and made available as open source, so anyone is free to use the code, adjust it, and build their own modules, applications and mobile apps on top of it.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Distributor Mouser has the Hexiwear wearable platform products from MikroElektronika. Completely open source and developed in partnership with NXP, the Hexiwear device incorporates a low-power NXP Kinetis K64 microcontroller, Bluetooth low energy (BLE) and wireless connectivity, and six onboard sensors into a compact wearable form factor for developers who need a complete Internet of Things (IoT) toolkit.

• RC servo motors are used in a wide variety of robotic and radio control applications, and are basically a maker’s best friend. They are cheap, easy to get ahold of and relatively reliable for resisting and correcting for external disturbances that interfere with the operation of the device they are powering. However, they are often limited in their ability to produce accurate motion, unlike more robust industrial servos that are capable of highly precise and advanced motion control. Unfortunately that accuracy and precision comes at a cost, often close to $1000 each, that makes them relatively prohibitive for the average maker.

Leftovers

• Kevin Turner’s departure as Microsoft’s chief salesman after 11 years marks the final passing of the Redmond old guard.

• Chief operating officer Turner – KT, as he was known – was a chief of the old-school corporate kind; sales, marketing and Microsoft’s stores all reported into Turner.

Health/Nutrition

• Liverpool and France defender Mamadou Sakho has had a doping case against him dismissed by Uefa.

• The 26-year-old served a provisional 30-day suspension after testing positive for a ‘fat burner’ in March.

• Sakho admitted taking the substance, but Uefa had to investigate whether it was actually prohibited.

• Its control, ethics and disciplinary body dismissed the case after a hearing including experts from World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratories.

• “I am happy that this is finally over,” Sakho said. “It’s been a difficult time for me but I knew I had done nothing wrong.

Security

• A while back my friend Mårten Mickos joined HackerOne as CEO. Around that time we had lunch and he shared with me more about the company. Mårten has an impressive track record, and I could see why he was so passionate about his new gig.

Defence/Aggression

• The Iraq war was a fiasco waged on the basis of scandalous lies. My son Tom, aged 20, died serving his country in this war. If I didn’t already know it before today, I know it now: Tom died in vain. He and his comrades died brutal deaths in a conflict that did not have to take place. Even now, I watch the reports from Iraq: 250 people blown up last weekend on the streets of Baghdad in this war without end. Is this what our soldiers fought for?

• The long anticipated Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War released Wednesday contains stinging indictments of Britain’s role in the U.S.-led invasion, detailing failures starting with the exaggerated threat posed by Saddam Hussein through the disastrous lack of post-invasion planning. An element conspicuously missing from the report, however, are allegations of systemic abuse by British soldiers — accusations that are currently being considered by a domestic investigative body as well as the International Criminal Court (ICC).

• The claims center on alleged violations committed against Iraqis while held in detention by British soldiers between 2003 and 2008. Based on the receipt of a dossier outlining numerous incidents, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda in 2014 reopened a preliminary examination into abuse allegations. The same examination, a step below an official investigation that could yield court cases at the Hague, had initially been closed in 2006 for lack of evidence.

• Presented to the court by the British firm Public Interest Lawyers and the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human rights, the January communication was followed up by a second batch of cases in September of 2015, submitted by PIL. By November of last year, the ICC reported that it had received 1,268 allegations of ill treatment and unlawful killings committed by British forces. Of 259 alleged killings, 47 were said to have occurred when Iraqis were in UK custody.

• Following the damning Chilcot report, much will be said about the decision to go to war in Iraq. But one thing will be missing: the information I leaked in the runup to the war. It won’t get an airing because I was never questioned or asked to participate in the Chilcot inquiry.

• Back in early 2003, Tony Blair was keen to secure UN backing for a resolution that would authorise the use of force against Iraq. I was a linguist and analyst at GCHQ when, on 31 Jan 2003, I, along with dozens of others in GCHQ, received an email from a senior official at the National Security Agency. It said the agency was “mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN security council (UNSC) members”, and that it wanted “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises”.

• In other words, the US planned to use intercepted communications of the security council delegates. The focus of the “surge” was principally directed at the six swing nations then on the UNSC: Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan. The Chilcot report has eliminated any doubt that the goal of the war was regime change by military means. But that is what many people already suspected in 2003.

• The enormous toll of Saturday’s bombing in Baghdad has stunned even the war-weary residents of the Iraqi capital.

• At the end of a bloody week of attacks in Lebanon, Turkey and Bangladesh, a car bomb ripped through a crowded shopping center in Baghdad, igniting an inferno that raged all weekend.

• After days of sifting through the ashes, Iraq’s health ministry announced Tuesday that 250 people were confirmed killed. It was the deadliest car bomb attack since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

• At first, Sajad Jiyad, an Iraqi analyst living in Baghdad, felt numb after the attack and had “an intense feeling of déjà vu,” he wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. “Relatives, friends or someone I know have been killed or injured in every year since 2003,” Jiyad says.

• On Sunday, Jiyad learned that his friend, Ahmed Dia, was among the burned bodies pulled out of the mall, and his grief over the attack became searingly personal. “He was going to achieve so much, he should not be dead,” Jiyad writes.

• Some Iraqi activists have expressed an intense frustration and dismay that the names and stories of victims like Dia are little known outside of Iraq.

• The suicide bombings in Baghdad by Islamic State, timed for maximum violence, are only the latest reminders that the United States should not downplay the group.

• Since the wave of Islamic State suicide bombings in May – killing 522 people inside Baghdad, and 148 people inside Syria – American officials have downplayed the suicide bombing strategy as defensive. Brett McGurk, the Special Presidential Envoy in the fight against Islamic State, said the group “returned to suicide bombing” as the area under its control shrinks. The American strategy of focusing primarily on the “big picture” recapture of territory seems to push the suicide bombings to the side. “It’s their last card,” stated a compliant Iraqi spokesperson in response to the attacks.

• President Obama has signaled a willingness to join Russia in going after Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front in Syria, but neocons and other hawks are fighting the policy shift, reports Gareth Porter.

• At the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Conference, President Putin excoriated Western Journalists for endlessly repeating Washington’s lies that are driving the world to nuclear war. He asked Washington’s bought-and-paid-for-whores, the scum who comprise the Western news media: “How do you not understand that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction toward nuclear war?”

• Yes, indeed, how is it possible for the Western media to be totally blind? The answer to this question is that Americans live in the system of lies that comprise The Matrix, and media are paid to support the system of lies. The determining questions are: Can Americans escape their captivity in time to save life on earth? Do Americans have what it takes, or are Americans already a proven failed people who cower in ignorance under the threat of implausible “foreign threats”?

• As the West’s elites growl about “Russian aggression” – as they once did about Iraq’s WMD – NATO leaders meet in Poland to plan a costly and dangerous new Cold War, while shunning the few voices of dissent, John V. Walsh warns.

• Formed in the early years of the Cold War, 1949, with the United States, Canada, Portugal, Italy, UK, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, by 1952 this post-WWII alliance included Greece and Turkey, and had rejected the Soviet Union’s request to join. In 1956, when West Germany was admitted to NATO membership, the USSR formed the Warsaw Pact in response and the Cold War was then on, full-blown. Missiles and nuclear weapons from each side pointed menacingly at each other, with the United States parking nuclear weapons in five NATO countries (Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Turkey), where they remain to this day. NATO doctrine provides that nuclear weapons will be used if necessary, at will, on behalf of all its members.

• Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made no secret his heart is set on taking Canadian soldiers to Africa, with perhaps a sideshow in Colombia.

• It is part of a grand strategy to burnish his reputation as a gentle agent of change, with the ultimate goal of winning Canada a temporary seat on the UN Security Council.

• That may not sound like much of an achievement — permanent members Washington, Beijing, Moscow, London and Paris all wield vetoes and shape global discourse on the council. But the seat in New York would be the crowning glory of Trudeau’s first term in office and proof Canada is back on the world stage — although the truth is Canada has not punched above its weight since a few years after the Second World War.

• The Navy has concluded there is no evidence that famed Navy SEAL Chris Kyle received two of the valor awards he had claimed in his best-selling memoir, including a second Silver Star.

• In an unusual move, the service has re-issued the DD-214 discharge paperwork to support the medals that the late Chief Special Warfare Operator (SEAL) Chris Kyle received during his 10-year Navy career, finding no records for two of six Bronze Stars with combat ‘V’ and the second Silver Star, two of which he had claimed in “American Sniper.” However, the renowned SEAL sniper had earned the Silver Star and four Bronze Stars, the review confirmed.

• I am going to share with you four devastating emails sent and received by Hillary Clinton on the subject of Libya. You can find these posted at Wikileaks. It is clear in reading these exchanges that, in the glow of the fall of Qaddafi, Hillary embraced the call to spike the football and clearly was planning to use Libya as evidence of her leadership and skill that qualified her to become President.

• The attack on our diplomats and CIA officers in Benghazi on 11 September 2012 however, destroyed that dream. The dream became a nightmare and Hillary has scrambled to pretend that she was not the mover and shaker that destabilized Libya and made it a safehaven for ISIS aka radical Islamists.

• Following the tragic deaths of five police officers in Dallas, Texas, during a rally for Alton Sterling and Philando Castile on Thursday night, the Dallas Police Department deployed a small robot designed to investigate and safely discharge explosives.

• Officers attached a bomb to the robot ad hoc style — detonating it and killing the sniper while keeping the investigators out of harm’s way.

• According to companies who manufacture bomb disposal robots interviewed by The Intercept — none were aware of their bots ever being turned into lethal weapons, though one company acknowledged the robots can be adapted to hold weapons.

• Video filmed in the aftermath of Philando Castile’s fatal shooting has revealed that his car’s two tail-lights appear to have been working – despite police saying he was stopped because one was busted.

• Gregory Ford, 42, took multiple videos of Castile’s Oldsmobile Aurora after he arrived on the scene in Falcon Heights, Minnesota within the hour of the fatal shooting taking place.

• He had been taking a ride on his motorcycle after finishing work and happened to drive up Larpenteur Avenue.

• He told Daily Mail Online: ‘I got there after they had taken him [Castile] away about 9.50pm. There were roughly five other people there with me.’ Castile, 32, later died of multiple

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• FBI director Comey said today that Hillary Clinton running emails containing government information on an unsecured, private server was not as bad as former CIA director Petraeus sharing classified documents with his lover.

• But the highest-level NSA whistleblower in history, William Binney – the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”) – explains why Comey’s statement is nonsense.

• By way of background, recall that – when the American press reported that U.S. intelligence services tracked Bin Laden through his satellite phone – he stopping using that type of phone … so we could no longer easily track him.

• A recent decision by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals may not directly reference the Hillary Clinton email fiasco, but the conclusion reached set off irony detectors all over as it arrived the same day FBI director James Comey announced that Clinton’s private email server may have been a stupid idea, but not a criminally stupid one.

• There were indications that Clinton’s use of a private email address was an attempt to route around FOIA requests. As her server was being set up, communications from both her staff and the State Department’s noted that an account in her name existed already, but would be subject to FOIA requests.

• This has been a problem elsewhere. Several government officials have conducted an inordinate amount of government business using private email accounts or personal devices in hopes of skirting public records requests. The DC Circuit Court’s case deals with a little-known government agency, but an all-too-familiar dodge by public officials.

Finance

• I believe the permanent injunction sought is so as to restrain the UK government from taking (or purporting to take) such a decision under the royal prerogative and/or making the notification under Article 50(2).

• The interim injunction sought is to have an order in place stopping the UK government taking (or purporting to take) a decision under the royal prerogative and/or making the notification under Article 50(2) until the High Court has dealt with the case.

• EFF has joined with partners including MoveOn, CREDO, Daily Kos, and Demand Progress to call on Democratic Party Leader Nancy Pelosi to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) from going to a vote during the “lame duck” session of Congress following the November election.

• As we explained in a press conference yesterday, the TPP is simply bad for tech users and innovators: it exports the most onerous parts of U.S. copyright law and prevents the U.S. from improving them in the future, while failing to include the balancing provisions that work for users and innovators, such as fair use. Outside of these copyright provisions, it does nothing to safeguard the free and open Internet, by including phony provisions on net neutrality and encryption, trade secrets provisions that carry no exceptions for journalism or whistleblowing, and a simplistic ban on data localization that enabled the USTR to buy off big tech.

• It was a fallacy that withdrawing from the EU would save us from the corporate power grab symbolised by TTIP. This week we’ve discovered that not only might another massive EU trade deal be imposed on us before we Brexit, but our whole trade strategy could be handed over to big finance, egged on by true believers in the free market within the Tory party.

• We can and must build a radically different trade agenda that serves ordinary working people in the UK and the wider world.

• Three out of four Americans think government corruption is widespread. Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for president in part by claiming he couldn’t be bought. Bernie Sanders almost grabbed the Democratic nomination away from one of the most famous and powerful people on earth by decrying the influence of big money.

• Yet by overturning the bribery conviction of Bob McDonnell, the former governor of Virginia, the Supreme Court this week just extended its incredible run of decisions driven by the concern that America has too many restrictions on money in politics.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The deadly shooting of 32-year-old Philando Castile by a cop during a routine traffic stop in Minnesota on Wednesday just got murkier.

• Multiple sources have told The Register that police removed video footage of Castile’s death from Facebook, potentially tampering with evidence.

• Castile, his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds, and her four-year-old daughter were pulled over by police in the Falcon Heights suburb of Minneapolis for a broken tail light. Using her cellphone and Facebook Live, Reynolds web-streamed footage of her dying boyfriend after he was shot by a police officer as he reached for his ID in his wallet. The video was mysteriously removed from her Facebook profile as it went viral across the internet.

• On Thursday, Facebook said a “technical glitch” caused the recording to be pulled from its social network. However, Reynolds claimed officers seized her phone and took over her Facebook account to delete the evidence.

• A bitter dispute recently erupted in Bollywood over the very hard-handed—and some claim all too often unreasonable—censorship measures implemented by India’s Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). On June 8, the producers of Udta Punjab (2016), a crime drama revolving around drug abuse among teenagers in the northern Indian state of Punjab, filed a petition with the Mumbai High Court against CBFC for demanding 13 cuts to the film before it could be released on June 17. According to local media, the censorship board wanted all references to Punjab removed, including in the title. CBFC chairman Pahlaj Nihalani was quoted in Indian newspapers as saying that although the film’s story and characters were fictitious, “the whole movie is [set in] Punjab and [the producers] have taken [place] names from Punjab. They need to make the cuts and take the [release] certificate.” Prior to going to court, one of the movie’s producers, Anurag Kashyap, on June 6 had tweeted that the CBFC’s stance was “akin to living in North Korea.”

• A picket is underway outside Independent Communications Authority of South Africa’s (Icasa) offices in Sandton as the body is expected to make a ruling on the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) ban on broadcasting violent images at protests.

• SADC Lawyers Association says SABC must not follow in the footsteps of other broadcasters in failing democracies that have been used to prop up unpopular ruling elites.

• In a statement issued by SADCLA president Gilerto Caldeira Correia, the association stated that SABC must resist censorship.

• The sound of vuvuzelas rang through the crisp winter air on Thursday as scores of people picketed while waiting for a decision to be made over alleged censorship at the SABC.

• The group had hoped that a verdict would be reached by the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) rendering the public broadcaster’s decision to ban the airing of visuals of violent protests invalid.

• The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) is still deliberating on the SABC’s decision not to broadcast the destruction of public property during protests.

• Icasa’s complaints and compliance committee held a hearing into the decision two weeks ago. It’s discussing the recommendations behind closed doors.

• The complaint about the SABC’s protest ban was brought before the communication regulator by Media Monitoring Africa, the AIR support Public Broadcasting Coalition and the Freedom of Expression Institute.

• Once again, the issue of internet freedom is making headlines in India. After the country snubbed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s plan for free basic connections over concerns it was at odds with the net’s open nature, India’s Supreme Court on Tuesday drew its own red lines, chastising a host of tech giants for failing to block advertisements for fetal sex testing and sex-selective abortions, both of which are illegal.

• Since the early days of the internet, there has been a constant movement of people, from mailing boards to Facebook and Reddit. Eternal September keeps chasing out the best who are then followed by the rest with the process now repeating.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The House Homeland Security Committee has decided to weigh in on the encryption debate with the release of a report [PDF] entitled “Going Dark, Going Forward.” Despite the use of Comey’s pet term for the increasing deployment of encryption by service providers and device makers, the committee points out backdoors are a terrible way to address the problem.

• [...]

• It’s about as even-handed as one can expect from a committee that still believes there’s an “honest conversation” to be had about a subject FBI Director James Comey refuses to discuss honestly. It notes that most countries people consider to be free (mainly Western European) have shot down encryption backdoors, even in the wake of terrorist attacks. The countries where governments have demanded backdoors are no one’s idea of civil liberties paradises — like China and Iran. Presented this way, there’s a strong suggestion that the US government shouldn’t come down on the side of countries whose human rights records are, at best, highly questionable. That should help keep the conversation more “honest,” at least.

• A few weeks ago, we wrote about the push by the Russian Duma to pass a massive new surveillance bill that would mandate backdoors to encryption as well as massive data retention requirements for service providers, including saying that they need to store recordings of phone calls. As you may have heard, earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the bill into law. And apparently to prove that he’s serious about all of this, Putin has also signed an executive order telling the FSB (the modern version of the KGB) to make sure it gets encryption keys to unlock everything within the next two weeks.

• Governments across the European Union have finally given the green light to a new deal on how consumer data must be transferred with the United States, ending months of delay caused by concern over US surveillance.

• Privacy Shield, the new commercial data transfer pact, was provisionally agreed by the EU and the US in February and will come into effect on Tuesday.

• The EU’s top court had struck down the previous data transfer agreement, Safe Harbour, on concerns about intrusive US surveillance – leaving companies, including Google, Facebook and MasterCard, in legal limbo.

• Details of secret warrants used for mass surveillance in the UK and abroad have been revealed for the first time in an official new report.

• The Interception of Communications Commissioner’s Office (IOCCO) has published an unprecedented review of mass surveillance carried out via Section 94 of the Telecommunications Act 1984.

• The continued use of this relatively old piece of legislation to carry out large-scale spying was first avowed last year, when home secretary Theresa May told MPs that “successive governments have approved the security and intelligence agencies’ access to such communications data from communication service providers” using Section 94 of the Act.

• Unlimited power to require telecoms companies to do, or not do, anything, without any limit of time was granted to home secretaries under the law. The warrants are so secret that recipients are not allowed to mention their existence in any way, and they may even be forbidden from keeping copies.

• The IOCCO’s report reveals that 15 Section 94 “directions” for mass surveillance were given between 2001 and 2012, and that all of these remain in force. All of them are for traffic data—that is, metadata—and all require “regular feeds of bulk communications data to be disclosed.” Data is held for a year, and then automatically destroyed on a daily basis. Requests for the warrants came from GCHQ and MI5, but not MI6, and were made on the grounds of “national security.”

• Nearly 250 million video surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the world, and chances are you’ve been seen by several of them today. Most people barely notice their presence anymore — on the streets, inside stores, and even within our homes. We accept the fact that we are constantly being recorded because we expect this to have virtually no impact on our lives. But this balance may soon be upended by advancements in facial recognition technology.

Civil Rights/Policing

• There are cameras everywhere. But when cops start shooting, it’s usually bullets and never footage. The first recordings that ever make their way to the public are those shot by bystanders. Anything else captured during a shooting remains under strict control of law enforcement… even when the recordings don’t belong to law enforcement.

• The ACLU is suing the state of Alabama in an effort to stop two unconstitutional abortion restrictions from taking effect.

• The Supreme Court’s decision last week in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt was a monumental victory for women.

• For years, extremist politicians around the country have done everything in their power to block a woman from obtaining an abortion, passing law after law designed to close down clinics or to shame, humiliate, and put barriers in the way of a woman trying to access reproductive healthcare services — more than 300 abortion restrictions since 2010 alone.

• EFF staffers will spread the online freedom message at 2600 Magazine’s biennial Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference from July 22 to July 24. The Eleventh HOPE will take place at the historic Hotel Pennsylvania in New York and host numerous presentations on such diverse topics as automobile software hacking, pervasive surveillance, the blockchain, and fostering community.

• Graphic video illustrating gruesome police killings of African-American men in Louisiana and Minnesota has set off promises of a federal investigation, at least in the former case, but many are skeptical that it will lead to any prosecutions.

• Police involved in even these high-profile cases of abuse have rarely faced successful indictments, let alone prosecutions.

• However, at the federal level, a simple change to the law would make it more likely that abusive cops face punishment for their behavior.

• Currently, police abuse is subject largely to one federal statute enacted in 1866: Title 18 U.S. Code, Section 242, which punishes anyone who “willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

• The race to be the next leader of Britain’s ruling Conservative Party, and hence prime minister of the United Kingdom, was whittled down to two candidates on Thursday: Theresa May, the home secretary, and Andrea Leadsom, deputy energy minister.

• As the two lawmakers with the most support from their colleagues, they will now spend the next two months trying to win the votes of the party’s members, a tiny portion of the British electorate thought to number less than 150,000. (In comparison, more than 33.5 million people voted in last month’s referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union.)

• While May has been a high-profile member of the government for the past six years, Leadsom is a relative newcomer, who was first elected to Parliament in 2010 after a career in banking.

• However, some clues about the kind of campaign Leadsom might run appear to have been accidentally made public on Thursday by a supporter who was spotted on the London underground studying what looked like notes laying out her strategy.

• In the immediate aftermath of the deadly attack on police officers at a protest march in Dallas that left at least five officers dead, social networks were flooded with witness accounts of what happened, in video clips and livestreams, photographs and text updates. The Intercept is assembling pieces of that mosaic here, starting with the accounts below, and will add more as we see them. Input from readers is welcome.

• [...]

• Before he died, according to the police chief: “The suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter. He said he was upset about the recent police shootings. The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”

• The gunman also told officers that he had left improvised explosive devices for them to find. Brown said. “The suspect stated that he was not affiliated with any groups,” the police chief added, “and he stated that he did this alone.”

• Tens of thousands of people every year are sent to jail based on the results of a $2 roadside drug test. Widespread evidence shows that these tests routinely produce false positives. Why are police departments and prosecutors still using them?

• The Houston cases shed light on a disturbing possibility: that wrongful convictions are most often not isolated acts of misconduct by the authorities but systemic breakdowns — among judges and prosecutors, defense lawyers and crime labs.

• We write about lots of nutty court cases around here, and semi-frequently, parties engaged in those lawsuits aren’t always happy about our coverage. Not too long ago, we received a series of emails and phone calls and more from an individual who was involved in some lawsuits that we covered. Without providing too many details at all, the individual in question made a pretty straightforward case that he or she absolutely regretted filing the lawsuits, and provided some additional information about why it had happened, while also noting that the Google searches on this person’s name were now linking to the few news stories that covered the lawsuit, including the court documents that we had posted. It was explained that these search results were making life difficult for this person who was trying to get his or her life back on track and believed that Google searches on the name were making it harder to find a job.

• The story was compelling, and we were asked to remove our post as well as the links to the documents, something that we won’t do. However, there was one intriguing bit to the communication, telling us that the court in question had “sealed the case” and asking us to respect that decision. That seemed odd to us. We’ve certainly seen filings sealed. And even some instances where almost all of the details in a docket were done under seal, but the case would still exist. Usually, though, those were cases involving at least a semi-plausible claim of national security. This was a case where someone just regretted filing questionable lawsuits (for a good reason). Even more amazing, after searching through PACER, it appeared that the judge in question did not just seal documents in the case, but made the entire case disappear. This happened for at least three cases. They do not exist in the court’s electronic records system at all. It is as if the cases never happened at all.

• A suburban police officer likely wouldn’t have shot dead a black motorist if he had been white, Minnesota’s governor has said, joining the national debate in the US over how law enforcement treats black people.

• Andrea Leadsom has suggested that she would be a better prime minister than her Conservative leadership contest rival Theresa May because she has children and May does not.

• In comments that were strongly denounced by some fellow Tories, Leadsom told the Times in an interview that being a mother was an advantage in the election because it showed that she had a “a very real stake” in the future of the country.

• Leadsom, an energy minister who has only emerged within the last week as a serious contender to replace David Cameron, said that she did not want to capitalise on May’s childlessness because to do so would be “really horrible”.

• A controversial Swiss law prohibiting Islamic dress has been used to fine a Muslim convert and a businessman, who protested the ban.

• The rule, which came into effect in Ticino on Friday, was voted in by referendum and outlaws face-covering headgear.

• Nora Illi and Rachid Nekkaz, who are prominent campaigners for the rights of Muslims, walked in the streets of Locarno in full Islamic dress soon after the rule was introduced.

• Lawyers for Chelsea Manning, the US soldier who covertly provided secret diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, are no longer in the dark about their client’s condition after several days of demanding information from military authorities on reports that Manning had been hospitalized.

• Manning, who is six years into a 35-year military prison sentence for revealing state secrets, alarmed her attorneys and outside contacts earlier this week when all contact stopped for at least 36 hours. The total loss of contact came on the heels of unconfirmed media reports that Manning had experienced a health crisis, and lawyers for the soldier railed against the defense department for keeping them in the dark while details of Manning’s medical status apparently leaked.

• Anyone who’s ever gone to the movies is accustomed to watching characters’ instant reaction to tragedy: Tears. Hysteria. Rage.

• Diamond Reynolds wasn’t in a movie.

• In her Facebook Live posting, viewed by more than 5 million people, she is relatively calm, polite and clearheaded as she speaks into her cellphone seconds after her boyfriend, Philando Castile, had been shot and killed by a Falcon Heights police officer during a traffic stop.

• The lack of immediate emotion — the tears would come 10 minutes later while her 4-year-old daughter comforted her — set off a fiery debate on the media’s role in interpreting such an intimate, and unexpected, testimonial.

• Earlier this year, computer science professor and cryptography expert Matt Blaze happened across a Pennsylvania state-owned vehicle attempting to d/b/a a Google Street View… um, SUV. Taking that info, local reporter Dustin Slaughter dug deeper into the origins of that fake Google Street View vehicle.

• Journalist Terri Buhl — who gained a bit of Techdirt infamy by claiming her public tweets couldn’t be republished (which led to wild claims of copyright infringement and defamation) — is still dealing with some legal woes of her own, stemming from the posting of someone else’s actually private information to Facebook.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• We’ve been talking a lot about how the FCC is pushing a new plan that would force cable providers to provide their programming to third-party hardware vendors. The idea is to put an end to the $21 billion in annual rental fees consumers have to pay for often outdated cable boxes and create some competition in the cable box space, resulting in better, cheaper hardware for everyone. Given it’s a hugely profitable monopoly and third-party boxes would be more likely to direct users to competing services, the cable industry has shelled out big bucks for misleading editorials and high test Congressional whining.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• On 5 July 2016, the General Court of the CJEU issued a ruling which suggests that the repute of the McDONALD’S trade mark will usually make it possible to prevent others from registering food or beverage trade marks which combine the prefix ‘Mac’ or ‘Mc’ with the name of a food or beverage.

• The England and Wales Court of Appeal has confirmed that senior courts have jurisdiction to grant an injunction requiring ISPs in the UK to block websites selling counterfeit goods, in a case involving Cartier. The Court also held that ISPs can bear the costs of implementing such orders

Copyrights

• Among other things, this French law gives approved collecting societies the right to authorise the reproduction and the representation in digital form of out-of-print books, while allowing the authors of those books, or their successors in title, to oppose or put an end to that practice subject to certain conditions.

• This week a new Digital Economy Bill [PDF] has been tabled before the United Kingdom Parliament, tackling a diverse range of topics related to electronic communications infrastructure and services. Two of these give us serious concern, the first being a new regime restricting access to online pornography, and the other an expansion of criminal liability for copyright infringement.

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