● 07.14.16

● Links 14/7/2016: New Open SDN Platform, GNOME Board of Directors, Tor Board of Directors

Posted in News Roundup at 1:52 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• In fact, considering that Flatpak, Fedora and Red Hat’s candidate for a universal package manager, was rushed out a few days after Snappy was announced, it appears that the issue is not necessity so much as a corporate rivalry that is being played out in the Linux community — the last place that it belongs.

• Still, accepting the claims about universal package managers at face value, which one would benefit Linux the most? Some choice must surely be made, or the main result of trying to implement a universal package manager, as many point out, would be to replace the longtime rivalry between Debian and RPM packages with yet another conflict between competing standards, which would remove one of the main rationalizations for raising the issue.

• The Linux Voice asked readers today, “How did you discover Linux?” Many of the comments are from those who started in the mid 1990′s or earlier. ComputerWorld featured an interview with Jim Hall who’s been spearheading the project to keep FreeDOS alive and TechRadar recommended the best distributions for small business. Elsewhere, the next Slackware will use UTF-8 by default and Dedoimedo said, “Linux is slowly killing itself.”

• Do you use decentralized, open source software? The US government considers you an extremist.

• According to leaked documents related to the XKeyscore spying program, the National Security Agency (NSA) flags as an “extremist” anyone who uses Tor or Tails Linux, or who subscribes to Linux Journal.

Desktop

• The Year of Linux is the year that you look at your distribution, compare to the year before, and you have that sense of stability, the knowledge that no matter what you do, you can rely on your operating system. Which is definitely not the case today. If anything, the issues are worsening and multiplying. You don’t need a degree in math to see the problem.

• I find the lack of consistency to be the public enemy no. 1 in the open-source world. In the long run, it will be the one deciding factor that will determine the success of Linux. Sure, applications, but if the operating system is not transparent, people will not choose it. They will seek simpler, possibly less glamorous, but ultimately more stable solutions, because no one wants to install a patch and dread what will happen after a reboot. It’s very PTSD. And we know Linux can do better than that. We’ve seen it. Not that long ago. That’s all.

• For our next podcast, we want to hear how you got into GNU/Linux. Where did your journey begin? Maybe you saw it on the coverdisc of a magazine somewhere, or a friend recommended that you try it. Perhaps your company switched to Linux which encouraged you to install it at home, or you simply became so enraged with Windows that you had to find something else.

• My trusty old Sony Vaio laptop has been saddled up with Ubuntu MATE for a little over a month now. For the most part, it’s running just as smoothly as it ever did on Windows XP — and definitely better than it ran with the lovingly installed bloatware that came included with it shiny and new from the factory.

• Upon the suggestion of FOSS Force reader Jeff, I invested in a recent upgrade of RAM that fulfills its maximum potential of a single gigabyte. Compared to its performance in the past, it’s definitely noticeable. But compared to my main work computer with a humble (by modern standards) 4 GB RAM, it can feel a little sluggish if I try to do do something unreasonable — like having two programs open at once.

Server

• Xen Project technology supports more than 10 million users and is a staple in some of the largest clouds in production today, including Amazon Web Service, Tencent, and Alibaba’s Aliyun. Recently, the project announced the arrival of Xen Project Hypervisor 4.7. This new release focuses on improving code quality, security hardening and features, and support for the latest hardware. It is also the first release of the project’s fixed-term June – December release cycles. The fixed-term release cycles provide more predictability making it easier for consumers of Xen to plan ahead.

Kernel Space

• Linux kernel developer Sasha Levin has announced the release of the twenty-eighth maintenance update for the Linux 4.1 long-term supported kernel series, version 4.1.28.

• Linux kernel 4.1.28 LTS has been in development for the past three weeks since the June 23 debut of the previous maintenance release, Linux 4.1.27 LTS. During all this time, it has received a huge number of improvements, updated drivers, and core kernel changes. According to the appended shortlog, the update changes a total of 334 files, with 3,165 insertions and 2,032 deletions.

• AT&T says it’s just about ready to release its virtualisation automation software, amounting to more than eight million lines of code: its Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy platform – ECOMP – will soon land at the Linux Foundation.

• The company says the platform is the basis for its target to virtualise 75 per cent of its network by 2020, something chief strategy officer John Donovan says is necessary to respond to huge and unpredictable traffic growth.

• Being half-way now through the year and Linux 4.7 coming later this month, I figured it would be fun to run some statistics on the Linux kernel Git repository to see how this year is stacking up compared to past years.

• When running GitStats on the mainline kernel tree as of yesterday, there were 21,718,865 lines of code reported across 603,345 commits by 15,430 different authors.

• Thunderbolt networking support is still being worked on for the mainline Linux kernel.

• The set of patches for implementing Thunderbolt networking for Linux is up to its third revision. These patches are for enabling networking of computer-to-computer over a Thunderbolt cable for non-Apple hardware. This adds the Thunderbolt networking support for hardware with a firmware-based controller, namely the Intel Connection Manager (ICM). These Linux kernel patches continue to be worked on by Intel with Amir Levy sending them out.

Graphics Stack

• Thanks to work by AMD developers, there is support for accelerated H.264 video encoding with the VA-API implementation in Gallium3D.

• Particularly for benefiting the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, there is H.264 VA-API acceleration in Gallium3D. The 11 patches for this support with the Gallium3D Video Acceleration API were published today by AMD’s Boyuan Zhang.

• Today’s release of NVIDIA VR Funhouse extends our role in the gaming ecosystem to that of a game creator.

• Our first game, NVIDIA VR Funhouse is built on Epic’s Unreal Engine 4, and is the brainchild of NVIDIA’s LightSpeed Studios. It was created with a dual-purpose.

• First, we wanted it to be fun. To be enjoyed by people of all ages, whether or not they’ve tried VR, whether or not they’re an early adopter.

• Second, it was created to show how immersive VR can be when physics simulation is fully integrated into an experience.

• Daniel Vetter of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center has submitted the final round of feature updates for the i915 DRM driver for DRM-Next to in turn target the Linux 4.8 kernel.

• The Intel DRM code already had some pull requests of material in DRM-Next for Linux 4.8. The previous pulls included work on DisplayPort++ dongles, more GuC stuff, panel-related work and one end-user feature that’s new is the GVT-g para-virtualization support for Broadwell and newer.

• Last week we reported on Kristian Høgsberg, the founder of Wayland and a long-time Linux graphics developer, leaving his position at Intel. We now know he headed off to Google.

• Through his LinkedIn profile he has confirmed that he’s now working for Google in the Portland area as a software engineer.

Applications

• I just released version 1.3.0 of Cubemap, my high-performance video reflector. For a change, both new features are from (indirect) user requests; someone wanted support for raw TS inputs and it was easy enough to add.

• MKVToolNix developer Moritz Bunkus proudly announced the other day the release of the MKVToolNix 9.3.0 “Second Sight” maintenance update of the popular open-source MKV (Matroska) manipulation utility, promising to implement many of the user-requested features, as well as to fix numerous reported bugs.

• MKVToolNix 9.3 brought a new chapter generation feature with two placeholders, better support when opening a saved configuration via the merge tool, along with the ability to specify how much a TS or MPEG-PS file will be probed for tracks by using the new “–probe-range-percentage” option.

Proprietary

• Ruarí Ødegaard informs Softpedia today, July 14, 2016, about the availability of yet another snapshot towards the Vivaldi 1.3 cross-platform web browser, bringing more improvements to Linux support.

• According to Mr. Ødegaard, Vivaldi Snapshot 1.3.537.5 has been released only a few days after the previous snapshot, version 1.3.534.3, mostly to improve the broken HTML5 proprietary media support on Linux kernel-based operating systems, which was made more robust on the Ubuntu Linux distribution but now works on Slackware and openSUSE, SLES, and derivatives.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The announcement goes on to say that while custom maps are playable on Linux, it is unlikely that Linux users will ever be able to make their own maps, due to a limitation in the GameMaker: Studio engine.

• You can grab DEADBOLT on Steam now, but the DRM free version on the Humble Store is for now only available for Windows.

• The developers of Turmoil, a simulation game about digging for oil are looking for testers using SteamOS.

• We mentioned a while ago it would come to Linux and it’s good to see them now moving to do it! They already have enough testers for Mac and Linux, but now they specifically need people using SteamOS.

• Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire, a tactical turn-based RPG in which a 20-year-old princess must save her people from a genocidal empire, launches on Linux on August 31, 2016.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The photos are organized in albums which can be sorted chronologically, by folder layout or by custom collections.You can tag your images which can be spread out across multiple folders, and digiKam provides fast and intuitive ways to browse these tagged images. You can also add comments to your images.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• This year we had 253 registered voters, 142 of which sent in valid ballots. Elections ran during the months of May and June, and the new Board was officially announced on June 18, 2016.

• The Board of Directors is a team of volunteers who are elected for a one-year term by GNOME Foundation members. The Board is an important part of the GNOME Foundation and ensures the health of the organization by working on operational and legal items that help keep the Foundation in order. It also helps to manage the relationship with the Advisory Board and promotes the overall well-being of the GNOME Project. This year’s Board has experience that spans the GNOME project including expertise in design, development, usability, and communications.

Distributions

New Releases

• Today, July 13, 2016, Untangle Inc. security software and appliance company proudly announced the release of the Untangle Next Generation (NG) Firewall 12.1 operating system.

• Roberto J. Dohnert from Black Lab Software (PC/OpenSystems LLC) has informed Softpedia today, July 14, about the immediate availability of the first Service Pack (SP) for the netOS Server 7 operating system, as well as the GA of netOS Core Server.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• We told you last week that users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling release operating system received fewer yet very important milestones of essential core components and open-source applications, and now it’s time to take a look at what’s coming to openSUSE Leap 42.2 this fall.

• While openSUSE Tumbleweed users are currently enjoying cutting-edge software releases like the LibreOffice 5.2 RC1 office suite, Mesa 3D Graphics Library 12.0.0, Linux kernel 4.6.3, the PulseAudio 9.0 sound system, python3-setuptools 24.0.2, and the latest systemd init system update, openSUSE Leap users will have a surprise later this year when the 42.2 major version is announced.

• The last update provided on Tumbleweed was almost a month ago and a lot has happened since then.

• Besides the release of a an Alpha 2 for openSUSE Leap 42.2 and the five-day openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg, Tumbleweed snapshots have been rolling along with 10 snapshots since the last update, which highlighted the addition of GNU Compiler Collection 6 as the default compiler for Tumbleweed.

• The latest snapshot, 20160710, brought a major release for python3-setuptools to version 24.0.2. Systemd also added some subpackages and python3-numpy squashed some bugs.

Slackware Family

• Besides taking security updates, Patrick already started minor changes in Slackware-Current which probably have big impact for users. The first one is enabling UTF-8 support by default in /etc/profile.d/lang.{csh,sh} script which are loaded by default and also in lilo dialog. It will not prompt you about UTF-8 anymore since it will use it by default and the kernel is already UTF-8 compliance. We will have less installation dialog in the next Slackware release

• The second change is mesa upgrade to 12.0.1. This is requested in LQ, but surprisingly Patrick approved it. Normally, current will not be active for some time besides security updates.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• It was always a dream to have a fully functional Fedora mirror in the local network which I can use. I tried many times before, mostly with copying rpms from office, carrying them around in hard drive, etc. But never managed to setup a working mirror which will just work (even though setting it up was not that difficult). My house currently has 3 different network (from 3 different providers) and at any point of time 1 of them stays down

• Over the past few months, many of us in the Bangalore open source community have focused our efforts of writing test cases for Fedora, organizing a few sessions where one can learn about testing, and how we can do things together. All this while, it has been fun: I’ve met new people, learned things, and realized that sharing even small pieces of knowledge and experiences makes it easier for newcomers to feel welcome.

• Every year again, could be said if the budget.next not would enforce the Ambasadors to meet in summer instead of the end of the calendar year to come together and working on the budget plan for the next year. So after Singapore in December the APAC ambassadors came in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia again together. For me is the way to KL just one hour longer as to Singapore, but there is one hour time difference, so I arrived again very late.

• The first day was mostly for discussions how to cut the budget of this year so that it fits to the huge budget cut. Having 11.5k US$ budget for the whole year and paying the regional FAD out of it, means for the APAC region after the FAD and paying the media the budget is gone. The next bigger agreement was how to continue with FUDCon in APAC, if it is a good idea to switch to FUDCon APAC with an bi-annually cycle.

• Today, july 12, was the first day of the seventeenth edition of FISL – International Forum Free Software, this event was my entrance door to Fedora in 2008 and in 2016 this is my seventh participation here in Porto Alegre, capital of state Rio Grande do Sul.

• I’ve been a software developer working on applications and services for Linux-based systems since around the turn of the millennium. For the last eight years, I’ve been working for Red Hat in various software development roles. During that time, I’ve contributed to a number of open source projects; in particular: Fedora Server, the System Security Services Daemon, and OpenShift Origin.

• For some time now, Fedora has discussed the idea of the Fedora Outreach Steering Committee (FOSCo), a body to coordinate all our outreach efforts. Now it’s time to make it happen!

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• We reported two weeks ago on the upcoming availability of a major GTK+ 3.20 / GNOME Stack 3.20 update for the now-in-development Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system.

• At that moment in time, Ubuntu developer Iain Lane told us that he managed to port the Ambiance theme to the latest GTK+ 3.20 technologies, and that he also updated some of the GNOME components Ubuntu is using, such as the Nautilus file manager, and Baobab disk usage analyzer tool, along with the GTK+ port of Mozilla Firefox 47.0 for Ubuntu 16.10.

Devices/Embedded

• Running a small business isn’t easy, and especially so for retailers, restaurant owners, and others who have a brick-and-mortar storefront. Managing purchases and cash flow, keeping inventory stocked, making sure your employees are happy, and above all else serving your customers needs requires dedication, a solid business plan, and a bit of luck to be successful.

• In his recent ELC talk, ARM kernel developer Mark Rutland traced the evolution of caches over the last decade or so, and explained how to manage them.

• “If you’re a bit tired, this is a presentation on cache maintenance, so there will be plenty of opportunity to sleep,” began Rutland. Despite this warning, Rutland’s presentation, titled Embedded Linux Conference presentation titled Stale Data, or How We (Mis-)manage Modern Caches, was actually kind of an eye opener — at least as far as cache management presentations go.

Phones

Android

• Nokia used to be the world’s biggest phone maker. When you thought of mobile phones you thought of Nokia. The brand was synonymous with mobile technology, just as Apple iand Samsung are right now.

Free Software/Open Source

• How can you showcase the fact that your open source project follows best practices and is secure? The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Badge Program is a free program that is good to know about on this front. Its Best Practices Badge is a symbol of open source secure development maturity. Projects having a CII badge showcase the project’s commitment to security, and The Linux Foundation is the steward of this program.

• Note that The Linux Foundation also has a collection of very useful free resources pertaining to open source compliance topics. For example, Publishing Source Code for FOSS Compliance: Lightweight Process and Checklists and Generic FOSS Policy can align your project’s development with best practices and policies.

• I recently saw the following questions on a survey about organizational management, and decided to answer them from my open organization point of view. I’d love to hear how others in the open source world would answer these questions, so leave some comments and tell us what you think!

• The Internet of Things (IoT) is finally ramping up in a big way, and many of the biggest tech companies are announcing partnerships. The latest two players to cozy up to each other are IBM and AT&T. They are in partnership to meld AT&T’s connectivity with IBM’s Watson and Bluemix analytics platforms. Via APIs and development environments, including a number of open source tools, the tech titans want to make life easier for developers focused on IoT.

• Jim Hall’s day job is chief information officer for Ramsey County in the US state of Minnesota. But outside of work, the CIO is also a contributor to a number of free software/open source projects, including FreeDOS: The project to create an open source, drop-in replacement for MS-DOS.

• FreeDOS (it was originally dubbed ‘PD-DOS’ for ‘Public Domain DOS’, but the name was changed to reflect that it’s actually released under the GNU General Public License) dates back to June 1994, meaning it is just over 22 years old — a formidable lifespan compared to many open source projects.

• NZ Open Source Society president Dave Lane is a frequent and articulate promoter of his cause. He can also be a scathing critic of proprietary software.

• In keeping with the Open Source philosophy, his presentation from this year’s ITX conference is online.

• You can read the slides, or hit the S key to see the slides and his speaker notes.

• Lane’s presentation has a Creative Commons licence. You can copy, adapt and share the work to your heart’s content so long as you credit the author.

• It’s well worth a read if you need a crash course in Open Source. It also works as a refresher.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla says it will next month ship the first official Firefox build that sports code written in its more-secure-than-C Rust programming language.

• The Firefox 48 build – due out August 2 – will include components developed using Rust, Moz’s C/C++-like systems language that focuses on safety, speed and concurrency.

CMS

• Providing web services for the government of one of the most populous U.S. states (Georgia) is no small task, but it’s made a bit easier thanks to Drupal, open source software, and the work of Kendra Skeene and the GeorgiaGov Interactive team.

• In her lightning talk at Great Wide Open 2016, Skeene explains the role Drupal and open source software play in the Georgia’s efforts to save taxpayer time and money.

• If you’re running a WordPress website and you have the hugely popular All in One SEO Pack plug-in installed, it’s a good idea to update it as soon as possible. The latest version released Friday fixes a flaw that could be used to hijack the site’s admin account.

• The vulnerability is in the plug-in’s Bot Blocker functionality and can be exploited remotely by sending HTTP requests with specifically crafted headers to the website.

• The Bot Blocker feature is designed to detect and block spam bots based on their user agent and referer header values, according to security researcher David Vaartjes, who found and reported the issue.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Funding

• ownCloud, a Nürnberg, Germany-based provider an open source software for enterprise file access, secured millions in financing.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• We provide “patchsets” to stable releases. Patchsets allow applying bug fixes and updates on production systems. Always try to keep your production system up-to-date with the latest patches.

• Patches and Patchsets maximize uptime for production systems, and keep your system updated, without the need to do a whole installation.

• We have just released the second development version of GIMP in the 2.9.x series. After half a year in the works, GIMP 2.9.4 delivers a massive update: revamped look and feel, major improvements in color management, as well as production-ready MyPaint Brush tool, symmetric painting, and split preview for GEGL-based filters. Additionally, dozens of bugs have been fixed, and numerous small improvements have been applied.

• GIMP 2.9.4 is quite reliable for production work, but there are still loose ends to tie, which is why releasing stable v2.10 will take a while. Please refer to the Roadmap for the list of major pending changes.

• Just about every image you encounter in the world has been manipulated or processed in some way. Headline images, fine art photography, and advertisements all rely to some extent on image editing software. Many of these manipulations are so subtle that they’re nearly imperceptible: Slight cropping, adjusting contrast, and color correction are all standard procedures. Others are more drastic, like altering shapes and removing (or inserting) certain elements.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• This story might more properly belong on RobotHugger, but with its open source DIY approach to small-scale food production, FarmBot is worth a look.

• The old-school gardener in me is battling my high-tech early adopter side over whether or not this robotic farming device is a step toward greater food sovereignty or toward a dystopian future where robot overlords rule backyard farms. Sure, it’s easy enough to learn to garden the old fashioned way, on your hands and knees with your hands in the soil, but considering that one of the excuses for not growing some our own food is lack of time and lack of skills and knowledge, perhaps this automated and optimized small-scale farming approach could be a feasible solution for the techie foodies who would like homegrown food without having to have a green thumb.

• Joe Church from Tropical Labs wanted low cost, accurate servo motors for a project but was unable to find the right parts for his need. The team began to develop motors and recording their progress on hackaday.io. The motor project eventually turned into Mechaduino, and Tropical Labs is running a highly successful Kickstarter campaign to fund the first run of production motors.

• Customisation periods end with ICs becoming complex and expensive and, at that point, standardisation comes in and returns ICs to affordability.

• Or that’s the theory.

• Over the years there have been many ways to bring the cost of custom silicon down – MPW, ASIC, P-SOC, FPGAs and, latterly, ARM’s offer of free access to Cortex-M0 processor IP through DesignStart which aims to deliver test chips for $16,000.

• Finnish startup Ruuvi Innovations has successfully crowdfunded the first fully open-sourced Bluetooth Smart (Bluetooth 5 ready) sensor beacon. The device, RuuviTag, is claimed to be the only sensor beacon with a one kilometer open-air range and offers unlimited possibilities for makers, developers, Internet of Things (IoT) companies and educational institutions.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• When a wire piece headlined “Supreme Court Strikes Down Texas Abortion Law, Dooms Women to Substandard Care” is bylined Operation Rescue, readers are tipped off as to how genuinely to take the piece’s stated concern that by reversing a Fifth Circuit ruling that upheld restrictions Texas placed on abortion providers, the Supreme Court “relegated women to second-class citizens when it comes to abortion by allowing abortionists to evade meeting basic safety standards that are proven to save lives.”

Security

• The Heartbleed bug revealed that some important open source projects were so understaffed that they were unable to properly implement best security practices. The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative , formed to help open source projects have the ability to adopt these practices, uses a lot of carrot and very little stick.

• Viceland is known for its extensive security-focused coverage and videos. In the latest CYBERWAR series, it’s showing us different kinds of cyber threats present in the world around us. From the same series, recently, we covered the story of an ex-NSA spy that showed us how to hack a car.

• In another spooky addition to the series, we got to see how easily the famous iPhone hacker George Hotz hacked a computer.

• George Hotz, also known as geohot, is the American hacker known for unlocking the iPhone. He developed bootrom exploit and limera1n jailbreak tool for Apple’s iOS operating system. Recently, he even built his own self-driving car in his garage.

• Cyber criminals always develop malware filled with unbelievable features but hardly ever you will find something that targets different operating systems simultaneously. Now, researchers have discovered a malware based on Java infecting companies in Denmark but it’s only a matter of time before it will probably hit other countries.

• Are automated “computer hackers” better than human hackers? DARPA is answering this question in positive and looking to prove its point with the help of its Cyber Grand Challenge. The contest finale will feature seven powerful computer fighting against each other. The winner of the contest will challenge human hackers at the annual DEF CON hacking conference.

Defence/Aggression

• At the present time, an increase in U.S. military spending seems as superfluous as a third leg. The United States, armed with the latest in advanced weaponry, has more military might than any other nation in world history. Moreover, it has begun a $1 trillion program to refurbish its entire nuclear weapons complex.

• This is not an article on South Sudan, which is just as well because the conflicts there are almost fractal in their complexity. The mini-war last weekend between the forces of President Salva Kiir and Vice-President Riek Machar, which killed more than 270 people and saw tanks, artillery and helicopter gunships used in the capital, Juba, is part of a pattern that embraces the whole country.

• [...]

• The real reason for its poverty, however, is war: the country that is now South Sudan has been at war for 42 of the past 60 years. British colonialists included it in what we now call Sudan for administrative convenience, but the dominant population in the much bigger northern part was Muslim and Arabic-speaking, while the south was mostly Christian and culturally, ethnically and linguistically African.

• As the U.S. military relies more and more on remote-controlled drones to kill people half a world away, one of the key links in the chain of death is in southwest Germany, the Ramstein Air Base, reports Norman Solomon for The Nation.

• By inserting Israel-first promises in the Republican platform, GOP regulars challenge Donald Trump’s America-first policies and open a possible bidding war with Hillary Clinton over pandering to Israel, as Chuck Spinney explains.

• The worst disservice Sanders has done to his supporters, other than to lead them on a wild goose chase for real change, is to virtually ignore his rival’s vaunted “experience.” He need not have mentioned Hillary Clinton’s Senate record, since there was nothing there; her stint as law-maker was merely intended to position her for a run for the presidency, according to the family plan. But there was a lot in her record as Secretary of State.

• As she recounts in her memoir, she wanted a heftier “surge” in Afghanistan than Obama was prepared to order. Anyone paying attention knows that the entire military mission in that broken country has been a dismal failure producing blow-back on a mind-boggling scale, even as the Taliban has become stronger, and controls more territory, than at any time since its toppling in 2001-2002.

• Hillary wanted to impose regime change on Syria in 2011, by stepping up assistance to armed groups whom (again) anyone paying attention knows are in cahoots with al-Nusra (which is to say, al-Qaeda). In an email dated Nov. 30, 2015, she states her reason: “The best way to help Israel…is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.”

• A lawsuit filed earlier this year charging President Barack Obama with waging an illegal war against the Islamic State (or ISIS) was met on Tuesday with a motion from the Obama administration asking the court to dismiss it.

• In its motion to dismiss (pdf), the administration argues that congressional funding for the war amounts to congressional approval for it.

• The lawsuit (pdf) was filed in U.S. district court by Capt. Nathan Michael Smith, an intelligence official stationed in Kuwait, in May. Smith has been assigned to work for “Operation Inherent Resolve,” the administration’s name for the nebulous conflict against the terrorist group ISIS.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Republican congressman Mike Pompeo of Kansas, who represents Wichita, seems to be doing the bidding of the Koch Brothers once again: He has introduced legislation to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from issuing or enforcing a rule to improve the safety of America’s most dangerous chemical plants. Wichita is the home of Koch Industries, which has been the most aggressive opponent of efforts to make these plants safer.

• The Obama EPA’s proposed rule, issued in March, is — in the opinion of former George W. Bush EPA head Christine Todd Whitman, experienced retired generals, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, community and labor leaders and many others — far too weak to adequately protect the public from the serious dangers represented by hazardous chemical facilities, which Senator Barack Obama once called “stationary weapons of mass destruction spread all across the country.” But at least the rule takes some steps toward requiring chemical plant operators to address the problem. And that’s apparently too much for Pompeo to tolerate.

• Shell is targeting journalists, policy-makers and millennials with a new strategy to position the oil major as a leading light on the path to a ‘net-zero emissions’ future, according to a leaked document seen by Energydesk.

• The document – a project brief for PR companies – outlines Shell’s aims for the communications project, which include:

• “Help ‘open doors’ in building relationships with key stakeholders in support of business objectives” “Build Shell’s reputation as an innovative, competitive and forward-thinking energy company of the future” “Brand perception and advocacy”

• The communications campaign, which the briefing suggests should include a range of interactive online media and events, centres around a scenario outlined in a recent report entitled A Better Life with a Healthy Planet: Pathways to Net-Zero Emissions.

• Another major public opinion analysis confirms that Americans are growing substantially more “Alarmed” and “Concerned” about global warming, while at the same time becoming less “Doubtful” and “Dismissive.”

• The GOP is amping up its campaign against those seeking to hold Big Oil accountable for climate deception, with House Science, Space, and Technology Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) announcing Wednesday that his panel has issued subpoenas to the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general and climate groups demanding information on their ExxonKnew investigations.

• Call it a tit for tat over subpoenas, one that escalates an ongoing spat over what the biggest U.S. oil company knew and when it knew it.

• House Science, Space and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) said Wednesday his committee was issuing subpoenas to the New York and Massachusetts state attorneys general, who have issued their own subpoenas as part of probes into whether ExxonMobil misled the public and investors about what it knew about the dangers of climate change decades ago.

Finance

• Of the three appointments, the one which should worry Remainers is that of David Davis. It is a serious appointment. He was an outstanding Chair of the main Commons watchdog committee, the Public Accounts Committee, and a competent Europe minister. He is not a politician to underestimate.

• That said: there is the irony that, because of his genuine civil liberties concerns, he is currently suing the UK government at the European Court of Justice so as to enforce EU law. Not the most appropriate thing a Brexit minister should be doing, one may say.

• But what difference will the appointment make?

• Or should we ask whether the Pope is Catholic? Why else would President Barack Obama be so determined that November/December’s lame duck Congress, with Republican majorities in both House and Senate, vote on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)? And, why did Hillary Clinton and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s majority representatives on the Democratic platform committee block any opposition to a vote by the lame duck Congress? What else explains either phenomenon? Support for the TPP has always been majority Republican, despite considerable Democratic support in the Senate and Obama’s own unflagging dedication. If lame duck Republican majorities pass the TPP, Obama can claim his vicious, anti-worker trade legacy, and Hillary can take office without taking the heat. So much for Obama’s 2014 plea to get Cousin Pookie off the couch to vote for the Democrats.

• Horrible things often happen between presidential elections in November and the inauguration of new presidents in January. In 2000, in the final months of his presidency, Bill Clinton worked with Republicans to pass the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, the Wall Street deregulation bill that tanked the economy and allowed the banks to drive millions of Americans out of their homes. On his last day in office in 2001, Clinton pardoned fugitive commodities dealer and Glencore International founder Mark Rich, who had been on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list for years for charges that included buying $200 million worth of oil from Iran while it was holding 53 American hostages in 1979 and selling it to Israel. In 2008, as Obama prepared to take office, Israel pounded Gaza with Operation Cast Lead between December 27th and January 18th. The bombardment ended just two days before Obama’s inauguration. Then, on Inauguration Day, when all eyes were on the U.S.A.’s first African American President, U.S. allies Rwanda and Uganda invaded the Democratic Republic of the Congo again with U.S. blessing.

• So, why not ram through the TPP when everyone’s trying to get home for the holidays? Much as Republicans hate handing Obama any kind of victory, and much as Mitch McConnell, R-KY, Richard Burr, R-NC, and Thomas Till, R-NC, dislike exemptions that would allow TPP-participating nations to issue health warnings without compensating tobacco farmers, they might see this as their last chance too.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Unless you’re one of those freaks with attentive parents and a good education, Wikipedia has probably taught you more than school and family combined. It’s society’s go-to source for knowledge, from settling disputes at the bar to cranking out term papers hours before they’re due. But as Chris, a veteran Wikipedia administrator explained to us, this is a problem. That’s because …

• Western propaganda portrays Russia as the aggressor and NATO as the victim, but the reality looks almost opposite from the ground level, Rick Sterling found on a recent fact-finding trip.

• So much for Mr. Sanders’ ‘progressive’ platform.

• Difficult as it is to say anything positive about the Republican Party, at least its voters thought ‘outside of the box’ this year. There was no decent candidate running, so rather than choosing some tired career politician, they selected a billionaire racist, homophobic, Islamophopic misogynist. The Democrats played by their rigged rulebook, and are about to nominate the quintessential Washington insider.

• Is there a lesser evil between these two? Hardly! Each, in his or her own way, will cause untold suffering at home and abroad; do nothing to assist those who are struggling; enrich their friends and associates, and leave a trail of blood and carnage in their wake.

• Even more bizarre is the Times editorial’s reliance on Paraguay’s foreign minister, Eladio Loizaga, a diplomat left over from the decades-long dictatorship of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner. The foreign minister is accused by Latin Americans (E’a, 8/12/13) of involvement in the hit squad operations of the World Anti-Communist League and Operation Condor.

• Loizaga, whom the Times apparently interviewed and treats favorably in its editorial (“We can’t condone any action that silences dissident voices,” the editorial quotes him), was an important Latin American member of WACL, an extreme right-wing organization incorporating fascist and Nazi elements and involved in murders around the globe.

• Note “to pitch himself”. For PR professional Smith, political stance is nothing to do with personal belief, it is to do with brand positioning. On Channel 4 News last night, an incredulous Michael Crick pointed out that the “soft left” Smith had previously given interviews supporting PFI and privatisation in the health service. He also strongly supported Blair’s city academies.

• When Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008, expectations were high.

• What occupied the minds of the president-elect’s advisers, however, was not how to live up to those expectations, but how to temper them.

• On 14 July, the world was still digesting the fact that former London mayor and pro-Brexit conservative Boris Johnson had been assigned the role of Foreign Secretary in Prime Minister Theresa May’s new cabinet.

• That means, for better or worse, Johnson is suddenly the minister responsible for the activities of MI6 and GCHQ while also having to represent the UK in its numerous dealings abroad. The reaction, as expected, was mixed.

• The intelligence agency, based in Cheltenham, is the responsibility of the Foreign Secretary, the job Mr Johnson was unexpectedly given yesterday by new Prime Minister Theresa May.

Censorship/Free Speech

• And that is probably the real reason for this latest move: big companies tend to be far more willing to toe the government line than smaller independents, since they have far more to lose. So, as with other apparently arbitrary moves, the latest unexpected clampdown by the Chinese government looks to be yet another example of its shrewd and subtle control of the online world.

• Supporters of Bahraini human rights activist Nabeel Rajab say he will remain behind bars for now after a judge postponed a court hearing over comments he posted online.

• Bahrainis are calling their government’s intensified repression of all opposition “the Egyptian strategy”, believing that it is modelled on the ruthless campaign by the Egyptian security forces to crush even the smallest signs of dissent.

• Index strongly protests the continued judicial harassment of Nabeel Rajab, a respected Bahraini human rights defender, and calls for his immediate and unconditional release.

• Rajab was arrested on 13 June 2016 and later charged with “spreading false news and rumors about the internal situation in a bid to discredit Bahrain.” This charge was in response to statements he gave during past television interviews in early 2015 and 2016.

• On Tuesday, 12 July 2016, Rajab’s trial was set to begin but the Court adjourned the hearing and postponed the case until 2 August 2016, ordering the continued detention of the human rights defender.

• Well known anti-Muslim troll Pamela Geller has teamed up with a group called the American Freedom Law Center to file one of the dumbest lawsuits we’ve ever seen. There’s so much wrong here it’s difficult to know where to start. Here’s the lawsuit itself, which is filed against US Attorney General Loretta Lynch, even though Geller’s own story about the lawsuit falsely claims she’s suing Facebook. She’s not. She’s suing the US government because Facebook relies on Section 230 of the CDA in taking down some of her pages, and she claims, ridiculously, that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act violates the First Amendment. The lawsuit is wrong on so many levels it’s not even funny. Let’s start with this, though — Geller has long positioned herself as an extreme supporter of the First Amendment. And yet, she’s now suing the government over CDA 230, a law which has probably done more than any other to guarantee that the First Amendment works on the internet.

• The sustained clamour to have the “delinquent” SABC board removed will be brought to the ANC’s doorstep as civil-society organisations are expected to protest outside the party’s Luthuli House headquarters in central Joburg on Friday.

Privacy/Surveillance

• For the first time, a federal judge has thrown out evidence obtained by police without a warrant using the controversial “Stingray” device that mimics cell phone towers to trick nearby devices into connecting with them, revealing private information.

• U.S. District Judge William Pauley said the defendant’s rights were violated when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) used a Stingray to figure out his home address during a drug investigation.

• On a recent summer evening, something strange happened in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. As usual, joggers zipped along the edge of Long Meadow and dog owners did their postprandial duty. But this time they were joined by a dozen people shuffling about haphazardly, zombie eyes fixed on their glowing phone screens. This ad hoc crowd was busy catching Pokémon, the virtual creatures at the heart of the latest, out-of-nowhere smartphone craze.

• Another week, another CFAA (Computer Fraud & Abuse Act) ruling out of the 9th Circuit Appeals Court. This time it’s the infamous Facebook v. Power.com case that’s been going on since 2008. When we first came across the case, in early 2009, we insisted that it made no sense. Power.com was trying to set itself up as a sort of “meta” social network, or perhaps a social network management system, where users could have a dashboard for all their different social networks. Facebook didn’t like this and sued over a long list of things, including copyright and trademark infringement, unlawful competition, violation of anti-spam laws… and the CFAA. Most of the claims went nowhere, but the CFAA and anti-spam ones lived on (because Power.com had systems for sending emails to users). The copyright claims were troubling, but the CFAA claims were the ones that concerned us the most.

• Of course, it’s taken many, many years for the case to make its way through the courts, and Power.com ceased even existing about five years ago. And the latest ruling is not just a nail in the coffin, but a potentially problematic CFAA ruling. While the court tosses out the CAN SPAM arguments, it does say that Power’s actions were a CFAA violation. It’s not as bad as it could have been, because the court doesn’t say that merely violating Facebook’s terms of service violates the CFAA, but instead narrows it slightly. It says that because Facebook sent a cease and desist letter to Power, from that point on it was on notice that it was not authorized to access Facebook’s servers. It was the move to continue getting Facebook user data that sealed the CFAA claim.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says Silicon Valley companies Google and Facebook now compile more information than the US’ National Security Agency.

• Speaking via a videoconference at the embassy of Ecuador in London, where he was granted asylum in 2012, Assange said the new global economic template was what he called Surveillance Capitalism.

• The Australian spoke during a Freedom of Expression seminar organised in Santiago by the Chilean College of Journalists that was celebrating its 60th anniversary.

• The cyberactivist said although the information was channelled through the two companies, the NSA still monitored the content and finally ended up “knowing everything”.

• Security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski has been picking apart the FBI’s oral testimony on the NIT it deployed in the Matish/Playpen case. The judge presiding over that case denied Matish’s suppression request for a number of reasons — including the fact that Matish’s residence in Virginia meant that Rule 41 jurisdiction rules weren’t violated by the FBI’s NIT warrant. Judge Morgan Jr. then went off script and suggested the FBI didn’t even need to obtain a warrant to deploy a hacking tool that exposed end user computer info because computers get hacked all the time.

• He equated this to police peering through broken blinds and seeing something illegal inside a house, while failing to recognize that his analogy meant the FBI could let themselves inside the house first to break the blinds, then peer in from the outside and claim “plain sight.”

• The oral arguments [PDF] — using FBI Special Agent Daniel Alfin’s testimony — were submitted in yet another case tied to the seizure of a child porn website, this one also taking place in Virginia and where the presiding judge has similarly denied the defendant’s motion to suppress. The DOJ has added the transcript of the agent’s oral testimony in the Matish prosecution as an exhibit to this case, presumably to help thwart the defendant’s motion to compel the FBI to turn over the NIT’s source code.

• Many assertions are made by Agent Alfin in support of the FBI’s claim that its hacking tool — which strips away any anonymity-protecting efforts put into place by the end user and sends this information to a remote computer — is not malware. And many of them verge on laughable. Or would be laughable, if Alfin wasn’t in the position of collecting and submitting forensic evidence.

• A few years ago, I got to travel to Moscow to present some of our research at an event. Having heard more than a few stories about internet access issues in Russia, before going I made sure that I had three separate VPNs lined up in case any of them were blocked. I ended up using Private Internet Access — which was already quite well-known and reliable. That’s my regular VPN, but I had been worried that maybe it wouldn’t work in Moscow. I was wrong. It worked flawlessly. But apparently that’s no longer the case. Just after Russia’s new surveillance bill passed, complete with mandates for encryption backdoors and data retention (along with a demand that all encryption be openly accessible for the government within two weeks), apparently Russian officials seized Private Internet Access’s servers in Russia, causing the company to send an email to all its subscribers, announcing what happened, what it was doing to fix things… and also that it was no longer doing business in Russia.

• Today, the board of directors of the Tor Project is announcing a bold decision in keeping with its commitment to the best possible health of the organization.

• Says Tor’s Executive Director Shari Steele, “I think this was an incredibly brave and selfless thing for the board to do. They’re making a clear statement that they want the organization to become its best self.”

• The Tor Project today announced that it has elected an entirely new board of directors, as the nonprofit privacy organization continues seeing the fallout from accusations of sexual misconduct by prominent former employee Jacob Appelbaum.

• The Tor Project, a nonprofit digital privacy group, on Wednesday replaced its board with a new slate of directors as part of a larger shake-up after allegations of sexual misconduct by a prominent employee.

• New team includes Cindy Cohn, Biella Coleman, Matt Blaze, and Bruce Schneier.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Baton Rouge police showed excessive force when they arrived at this weekend’s Black Lives Matter demonstration in riot gear and bearing machine guns, the lawsuit (pdf) alleges. The officers also violated protesters’ First Amendment rights when they used “physical and verbal abuse and wrongful arrests to disperse protestors who were gathered peacefully to speak out against the police killing of Alton Sterling,” the ACLU wrote.

• The ACLU of Louisiana has filed an emergency order to make Baton Rouge police respect protester’s First Amendment rights.

• Since our very founding, the American people have taken to the streets and sidewalks to make their voices heard. Unfortunately, this week it’s the residents of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who have good reason to partake in this historical tradition. On July 5, 2016, a Black Baton Rouge resident named Alton Sterling — a man who had committed no crime — was tackled, Tasered, incapacitated, and fatally shot at point blank range by two white Baton Rouge police officers.

• The anger at Mr. Sterling’s death is immense. It is real. It is justified. And it deserves a voice.

• So in our grand American tradition, residents sought to make their voices heard, to speak truth to power about police use of force, to object to the death of Black men in police custody, and to say that Black lives matter. To do this, they spilled out onto the city’s streets and sidewalks — the very places which the Supreme Court has described as having “immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public” as the place to exercise our constitutional liberties.

• But it doesn’t appear that the law enforcement agencies in Baton Rouge care much for our Constitution, or for the liberties of its own citizens. Instead officers have shown naked hostility to the constitutional rights of the citizens they have a duty to serve. That’s why today the ACLU of Louisiana is going to court on behalf of community organizations like Black Youth Power 100 New Orleans, New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, and Louisiana Chapter of the National Lawyers’ Guild to seek an emergency order to ensure that the police in Baton Rouge obey the Constitution. It’s not the first time an ACLU affiliate has stepped up to challenge the cops reacting to protests over police accountability — and while I hope it’s the last, it won’t be.

• Hillary Clinton traveled to 19 foreign locations during her first three months in office, inlcuding China, South Korea, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, and a meeting in Switzerland with her Russian counterpart. During that period of time her email system was unencrypted. She transmitted data over wireless networks in those countries, networks almost certainly already monitored 24/7 by intelligence and security officials. To say her email was not collected is to say the Russian, Chinese, Israeli and other intelligence services are complete amateurs.

• What was your reaction when you heard FBI Director James Comey announce to the world that the Bureau would not be recommending that charges be filed against Hillary Clinton over her handling of emails while she was Secretary of State? Did you do a humorous spit take with your coffee like some modern day Danny Thomas? Were you frozen in place like Americans were on November 22, 1963? Did your jaw hit the floor with your tongue rolling out like a flabbergasted cartoon character?

• Chances are you weren’t the least bit surprised that no charges were recommended. But what does that tell you about our political system?

• That millions of Americans weren’t remotely caught off guard by the exculpation of Hillary Clinton is less a commentary about American attitudes than it is a clear indication of the all-pervasive criminality that is at the heart of America’s political ruling class. And the fact that such criminality is seen as par for the course demonstrates once again that the rule of law is more a rhetorical veneer than a juridical reality.

• But consider further what the developments of recent days tell us both about the US and, perhaps even more importantly, the perception of the US internationally. For while Washington consistently wields as weapons political abstractions such as transparency, corruption, and freedom, it is unwilling to apply to itself those same cornerstones of America’s collective self-conception. Hypocrisy is perhaps not strong enough a word.

• The race between the two presidential frontrunners remains too close to call in the final stretch leading to the two major party conventions, as new polling shows that Donald Trump has overtaken Hillary Clinton in key battleground states while her national lead has shrunk to just three points.

• A McClatchy-Marist survey released Wednesday found that in a head-to-head match-up, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is currently ahead 42 to 39, which McClatchy notes, marks the first time that support for Clinton has dropped beneath 50 percentage points.

• The State Department restarted their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails following the DoJ’s unanimous recommendation that Attorney General Loretta Lynch not pursue criminal charges for Hillary’s negligence in handling classified documents. FBI insiders now believe a deal was struck when Bill Clinton met Loretta Lynch on a Phoenix airport tarmac in June. Agents have also said they were forced to sign a document that went above and beyond the typical NDA signed when performing investigations

• When news broke of the infamous tarmac Lynch-Clinton meeting we said: “Well then, if Lynch says it was a completely random encounter with Hillary Clinton’s husband on a tarmac (admit it, that happens often to most people), and nothing was discussed that pertains to official business, then that certainly must be the truth.”

• When FBI Director James Comey publicly revealed his recommendation to the Department of Justice last week that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton not be prosecuted for espionage, he unleashed a firestorm of criticism from those who believe that Clinton was judged by different standards from those used to judge others when deciding whether to bring a case to a grand jury.

• Why the social-media honeymoon may be over for some activists.

• Iowa health officials recently discovered it wasn’t against state law for a nursing home worker to share a photo on Snapchat of a resident covered in feces. They are trying to change that.

• What good are police body cameras, or police car dash cams, if the footage they record is off limits to the public? That question might best be posed to North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, who yesterday signed into law a bill making that footage inaccessible to the general public, including everyday citizens who were recorded in the footage and might need it to prove police misbehavior. Despite widespread outcry, including protests and submission of a petition signed by more than 3,000 people, House Bill 972 received little opposition in the Senate, where it passed by a vote of 48 to 2 before the governor gave final approval.

• Two years ago this week, Eric Garner died in Staten Island after officers wrestled him to the ground, pinned him down and applied a fatal chokehold. The man who filmed the police killing of Eric Garner, Ramsey Orta, is now heading to jail for four years on unrelated charges—making him the only person at the scene of Garner’s killing who will serve jail time. Last week Orta took a plea deal on weapons and drug charges. He says he has been repeatedly arrested and harassed by cops since he filmed the fatal police chokehold nearly two years ago. We speak to Eric Garner’s daughter, Erica Garner, and Matt Taibbi, award-winning journalist with Rolling Stone magazine. He’s working on a book on Eric Garner’s case.

• CIA Director John Brennan said Wednesday that the next president could remove the restrictions President Obama has put on the use of drones overseas – and that CIA might comply with an order to commit torture.

• In April, Brennan told NBC News that the CIA would refuse an order to resume its torture program. But on Wednesday, speaking at a Brookings Institute event, he said he was just speaking on his own behalf.

• “If a president were to order, order the agency to carry out waterboarding or something else, it’ll be up to the director of CIA and others within CIA to decide whether or not that, that direction and order is something that they can carry out in good conscience,” he said.

• He added that he was personally opposed: “As long as I’m director of CIA, irrespective of what the president says, I’m not going to be the director of CIA who gives that order. They’ll have to find another director.”

• Brennan did not acknowledge that Congress last year turned Obama’s anti-torture executive order into law, explicitly banning waterboarding and other forms of torture — and restricting the CIA in particular to interrogation methods listed in the Army Field Manual.

• Last month, pictures of a young girl wearing a headscarf made with a newspaper pattern spread through the Iranian social media. The girl is in fact the niece of Iran’s jailed Green Movement leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, but that was not the reason why the picture went viral. The newspaper pattern on the scarf was the front page of the newspaper that printed the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s pledge in 1978 as its main headline: “Regarding the wearing of the veil, there will be no compulsion”.

• The court’s ruling cited a recent ProPublica investigation into COMPAS, the popular software tool used to score defendants in Wisconsin and in other jurisdictions across country. Our analysis found that the software is frequently wrong, and that it is biased against black defendants who did not commit future crimes – falsely labeling them as future criminals at twice the rate as white defendants. (The software is owned by a for-profit company, Northpointe, which disputes our findings.)

• Of course empathy is important and we should encourage it. But the president falls short; empathy alone will never end the regular and widespread killing of black people in disproportionate numbers. It’s a racist system, not a few individual racist police that devalues black lives and leaves us dead so easily.

• The war abroad and the war at home are both fueled by a fear of encroaching chaos — and it’s hard to miss the racist subtext.

• The treatment of all things “cyber” by the government is incredibly inconsistent. Give someone a password so they can deface a website for 40 minutes and it’s two years in jail. Doxx, SWAT, and cyberstalk multiple people and the best the court can do is two years minus time served. The end result is one year in prison for Mir Islam, who doxxed multiple celebrities and politicians, as well as called in fake threats that resulted in the swatting of at least nineteen people, including security researcher Brian Krebs, who uncovered Islam’s doxxing tactics.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• As we’ve noted for some time, Comcast continues to expand the company’s usage cap “trial” into more and more markets. As a clever, lumbering monopoly, Comcast executives believe if they move slowly enough — consumers won’t realize they’re the frog in the boiling pot metaphor. But as we’ve noted time and time again, Comcast usage caps are utterly indefensible price hikes on uncompetitive markets, with the potential for anti-competitive abuse (since Comcast’s exempting its own services from the cap).

• This is all dressed up as a “trial” where consumer feedback matters to prop up the flimsy narrative that Comcast is just conducting “creative price experimentation.”

• Last week, Comcast quietly notified customers that the company’s caps are expanding once again, this time into Chicago and other parts of Illinois, as well as portions of Indiana and Michigan. Comcast recently raised its cap from 300 GB to one terabyte in response to signals from the FCC that the agency might finally wake up to the problems usage caps create. And while that’s certainly an improvement, it doesn’t change the fact that usage caps on fixed-line networks are little more than an assault on captive, uncompetitive markets.

DRM

• The World Wide Web Consortium has published a “Candidate Recommendation” for Encrypted Media Extensions, a pathway to DRM for streaming video.

• A large community of security researchers and public interest groups have been alarmed by the security implications of baking DRM into the HTML5 standard. That’s because DRM — unlike all the other technology that the W3C has ever standardized — enjoys unique legal protection under a tangle of international laws, like the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Canada’s Bill C-11, and EU laws that implement Article 6 of the EUCD.

• Under these laws, companies can threaten legal action against researchers who circumvent DRM, even if they does so for lawful purposes, like disclosing security vulnerabilities. Last summer, a who’s-who America’s most esteemed security researchers filed comments with the US Copyright Office warning the agency that they routinely discovered vulnerabilities in systems from medical implants to voting machines to cars, but were advised not to disclose those discoveries because of the risk of legal reprisals under Section 1201 of the DMCA.

• Browsers are among the most common technologies in the world, with literally billions of daily users. Any impediment to reporting vulnerabilities in these technologies has grave implications. Worse: HTML5 is designed to provide the kind of rich interaction that we see in apps, in order to challenge apps’ dominance as control systems for networked devices. That means browsers are now intended to serve as front-ends for pacemakers and cars and home security systems. Now more than ever, we can’t afford any structural impediments to identification and disclosure of browser defects.

• There is a way to reconcile the demands of browser vendors and movie studios with the security of the web: last year, we proposed an extension to the existing W3C policy on patents, which says that members are forbidden from enforcing their patent rights to shut down implementations of W3C standards. Under our proposal, this policy would also apply to legal threats under laws like the DMCA. Members would agree upon a mutually acceptable, binding covenant that forbade them from using the DMCA and its global analogs to attack security researchers who revealed defects in browsers and new entrants into the browser market.

Intellectual Monopolies

• In The Medicines Co. v. Hospira an en banc Federal Circuit confirmed the validity of MedCo’s Angiomax product-by-process patent claims over an on-sale challenge. More than one-year before filing the patent application, MedCo had hired a third-party supplier to provide three batches of the drug using an embodiment of the claimed processes. The question was whether this ‘supply contract’ constituted a commercial offer for sale sufficient to trigger the on-sale bar of Section 102(b) (pre-AIA). In the appeal, the Federal Circuit held that the supply contract was “for performing services” rather than a triggering sale. “[A] contract manufacturer’s sale to the inventor of manufacturing services where neither the title to the embodiments nor the right to market the same passes to the supplier does not constitute an invalidating sale.”

• The first is that, for the first time, there is a “gap” (if you will) between zealous advocacy under Rule 11 (and other similar statutes) and the fee shifting statute. So, as a lawyer, I may be ethically required to do something that could result in my client paying the other side’s fees.

Copyrights

• YouTube and the music industry are frenemies of the first order, a mutually dependent couple that can’t stop bickering in public. The major record labels are currently renegotiating their contracts with the world’s largest online video platform, and so the war of words has been heating up of late. Today, Google added a fresh data point to the back and forth, announcing in a new report on piracy that its Content ID system has paid out $2 billion to copyright holders, double what it announced back in 2014.

• Content ID is actually at the heart of the music industry’s current beef with YouTube. The system asks copyright holders to upload a file, say a music video, and then tries to automatically detect any copies of that work which are uploaded by other users. The copyright owner can ask the system to automatically report, block, or monetize videos when it detects a copy, and YouTube has argued that the music labels almost always choose the last of those options.

• The longtime leader of Baltimore’s public library system was confirmed by the Senate on Wednesday to head the Library of Congress despite concerns from some conservative lawmakers about her past position on a law intended to limit children’s access to pornography at schools and libraries.

• Carla D. Hayden, the CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library since 1993, will become the first woman and the first African-American to oversee the nation’s largest library. Hayden was nominated by President Barack Obama in February and was confirmed by the Senate on a 74-18 vote.

• Here’s some good news. After decades of ridiculously bad management, it appears that the Library of Congress has a real leader. Dr. Carla Hayden has been approved by the Senate as our new Librarian of Congress by a wide margin, 74 to 18. And that’s despite a last minute push by the ridiculous Heritage Foundation to argue that the Librarian of Congress should not be a librarian (and one with tremendous administrative experience). Heritage Foundation’s alerts can often sway Republican Senators, so the fact that only 18 still voted against her is quite something. Hayden was also able to get past ridiculous claims that she was pro-obscenity or pro-piracy based on people who just didn’t like the idea of an actually qualified person in the position.

• She’s an exceptionally qualified librarian with administrative and leadership experience. And while I’m sure I won’t agree with everything she does, it seems like a massive improvement on the previous librarian, James Billington, who famously resisted any kind of modernization efforts, and who the Government Accountability Office had to call out multiple times for his leadership failings. Billington was so bad that when he resigned, the Washington Post was able to get people to go on the record celebrating.

• The company behind the world famous file-sharing client BitTorrent is all set for the birth of their news network titled as BitTorrent News. Streamed on BitTorrent Live, the network will commence its operations at the Republican Party Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 18.

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