● 07.22.16

● Links 22/7/2016: Wine 1.9.15, KaOS 2016.07 ISO

Posted in News Roundup at 6:51 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• In 2008, I started studying physics and got in contact with Linux, since a bunch of people used it for data analysis and simulations. Comprehension came fast and easy with such people around, and I was strongly encouraged to get things done with Linux. I installed Ubuntu on my notebook, and soon got familiar with Bash and the standard tools.

Server

• Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project and leading DevOps proponent, seems to think so. In a recent interview with TechBeacon’s Mike Perrow, Kim notes that of “the nearly 100 speakers at DevOps Enterprise Summits over the last two years, about one in three have been promoted.”

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• For those of you using the xf86-video-ati X.Org driver on a pre-GCN GPU, next time you update to the latest code you’ll need to make sure you manually enable DRI3 or switch to GLAMOR for 2D acceleration as now by default DRI3 is not being enabled unless GLAMOR is the acceleration architecture being used.

• The main addition with Wayland-Protocols 1.5 is that it bundles an unstable version of the graphics tablet protocol, tablet-unstable-v2. Those wanting to learn about this tablet protocol can see this Git commit from two days ago that added the support.

• Next week is SIGGRAPH while taking place now in Anaheim, California is the Web3D Conference. From this conference focused around 3D graphics for the web, the glTF 1.0.1 specification was released and more.

• In addition to the update to the GL Transmission Format (glTF), they also released an open-source glTF validator. Additionally, they confirmed that the glTF MIME type has been approved by IANA.

Benchmarks

• While measuring the battery power rate during the course of many benchmarks, it ended up being comparable to the earlier kernels. You can see those load benchmark results and power data via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

• Today and tomorrow I’ll do a similar idle power comparison on my other notebooks (Haswell era) to see if the results are similar to this Broadwell notebook on Linux 4.7. Have you experienced anything similar with Linux 4.7? Feel free to share your thoughts by commenting on this article in the forums.

Applications

• Today we are depending on more and more online services. Each online service we sign up for, let us set a password and this way we have to remember hundreds of passwords. In this case, it is easy for anyone to forget passwords. In this article I am going to talk about Keeweb, a Linux password manager that can store all your passwords securely either online or offline.

• Version 0.0.5 of RcppCCTZ arrived on CRAN a couple of days ago. It reflects an upstream fixed made a few weeks ago. CRAN tests revealed that g++-6 was tripping over one missing #define; this was added upstream and I subsequently synchronized with upstream. At the same time the set of examples was extended (see below).

• I thought it would come before that, but I’ve finally gotten around releasing version 2.0 of my data analysis program, QSoas !

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Wine 1.9.15 is now complete as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot leading up to Wine 2.0 later this year.

• The Wine development release 1.9.15 is now available.

Games

• The legendary System Shock is being remade thanks to devs Night Dive Studios and a successful Kickstarter campaign. Now it has reached its first stretch goal which will see the game coming to Mac and Linux.

• SWORDY is a rather fun looking local party brawler that has just released on Steam in Early Access. It could see a Linux release too, if Microsoft allow it.

• The Linux stretch goal was $1.1 million and it’s pleasing to see it hit the goal, so we won’t miss out now. I am hoping they don’t let anyone down, as they have shown they can do it already by providing the demo. There should be no reason to see a delay with Linux now.

• Videogames as a storytelling medium have come a long way in their short lifespan. You couldn’t imagine a quirky, off-kilter and thoroughly modern tale like Like Is Strange in the early years of gaming but now it – and games of its ilk, like the Telltale adventures, Oxenfree, Until Dawn and the simply sublime Firewatch – feel more like part of the furniture than anyone could have imagined in a few short years.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• GammaRay 2.5 has been released, the biggest feature release yet of our Qt introspection tool. Besides support for Qt 5.7 and in particular the newly added Qt 3D module a slew of new features awaits you, such as access to QML context property chains and type information, object instance statistics, support for inspecting networking and SSL classes, and runtime switchable logging categories.

• KDAB has announced the release of GammaRay 2.5, what they say is their “biggest feature release yet”, the popular introspection tool for Qt developers.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.21.4 was announced today as the latest development release of this desktop environment leading up to September’s release of GNOME 3.22.

• Core changes in GNOME 3.21.4 include an improved annotation properties dialog UI in Evince, a structured logging API for GLib, support for joysticks with GNOME Bluetooth, support for alarms in GNOME Calendar, support for Snaps in GNOME Software, support for authenticating in plugins with GNOME Software, and various GTK+ toolkit improvements. There are also the previously talked about Mutter improvements with a new screen capture API, support for NVIDIA’s vRAM robustness extension, and significant frame-buffer/display changes for working on multi-DPI desktop support.

• Gamepad support has now been merged into GNOME Games v3.21.4 !!! This means that you can play your favorite retro games using a gamepad!!!Gamepad support has now been merged into GNOME Games v3.21.4 !!! This means that you can play your favorite retro games using a gamepad!!!

• After implementing the new redesigned Shell of GNOME Control Center, it’s now time to move the panels to a bright new future. And the Keyboard panel just walked this step.

• Keyboard configuration is a crucial part of any modern desktop operating system, and GNOME is working to make its even better.

Distributions

New Releases

• KaOS is proud to present the 2016.07 ISO. The policy is, once a first pacman -Syu becomes a major update, it is time for a new ISO so new users are not faced with a difficult first update. With all the needed rebuilds for the move to GCC 5, most systems will see 70-80% of their install replaced by new packages so a new ISO is more than due.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• Remember Mandriva Linux? Once among the most popular Linux-based open source operating systems, it disappeared last year, along with Mandriva, Inc., the company that owned it. Belatedly, here’s a retrospective look at late, great Mandriva Linux.

• I was reminded of Mandriva recently while updating The VAR Guy’s Open Source 50 list. As the list shows, in 2012 The VAR Guy (who is not me, by the way) expressed doubts about Mandriva’s future. He turned out to be right. (When is he not?) In May 2015 Mandriva Inc. ceased operating and its GNU/Linux distribution disappeared.

• But the open source OS’s inglorious and little-reported demise belied the importance it once held within the open source ecosystem. Born in 1998 as a Red Hat-based GNU/Linux distribution originally known as Mandrake, Mandriva stood out from the pack by offering one of the first truly user-friendly open source operating systems.

• Canonical announced an update to their Ubuntu 16.04 Long Term Support Linux system. Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS brings many updates, bug fixes, and security patches as well as Snap app support. In other news, Christopher Tozzi is back again today with a look back at Mandriva Linux and Neil Rickert test drove openSUSE Leap 42.2 Alpha 3 released yesterday. Elsewhere, after all the hubbub over Linux Skype Alpha, Microsoft has announced it will discontinue the application soon.

• [...]

• The Register today reported that Microsoft is going to kill off native Skype for Linux and Mac once and for all. They’re going to stop maintenance of the application all together for a more intrusive cloud-based browser solution. So, all that complaining that Sam Varghese was so upset about was for naught. Skype is on the chopping block anyway – or perhaps because of it. No kill date was announced but expect it anytime I suspect. Linux.com posted an article on an alternative to Skype.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• I saw the announcement yesterday, so I downloaded and installed alpha3. I’ll note that I skipped alpha2, because it was mainly for testing Gnome and I’m don’t much use Gnome (though I do install it).

Red Hat Family

• RHEL has been around for 14 years. A lot has changed in that time. Red Hat’s Gunnar Hellekson (Director, Product Management) tries to explain issues and solutions for coming RHEL releases. From Red Hat Summit 2016. Enjoy!

Finance

Fedora

• It feels like it has been even more than a month since the release of Fedora 24 was announced. I have already installed the new release from scratch on most of my laptops, but I specifically held back my Acer Aspire Z3 all-in-one desktop system so that I could try out the promised upgrade using the Gnome Software utility.

• I have been checking the Software utility periodically, and I finally saw the notice today that an update for Gnome 3.20 was available which would make it possible to upgrade to Fedora 24.

• During my first week of this internship, the first design that I tackled was one of the famed “Fedora Badges” and now about seven weeks, they are one of my favorite things to design. Since my first badge design, I’ve worked on quite a few badges and badge-related designs (and received a few badges along the way *mini happy dance* which was pretty cool too!).

Debian Family

• The majority of NAS devices supported in Debian are based on Debian’s Kirkwood platform. This platform is quite dated now and can only run Debian’s armel port.

• Debian now supports the Seagate Personal Cloud and Seagate NAS devices. They are based on Marvell’s Armada 370, a platform which can run Debian’s armhf port. Unfortunately, even the Armada 370 is a bit dated now, so I would not recommend these devices for new purchases. If you have one already, however, you now have the option to run native Debian.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• It’s three years to the day since Canonical launched the most audacious crowdfunding campaign in history.

Devices/Embedded

• Earlier this year, the Zephyr project was launched to a world justifiably skeptical of self-anointed “secure” technologies, jaded by the sloganeering of all things IoT, and seemingly saturated by the proliferation and fragmentation of no-size-fits-all microcontroller RTOS platforms. Given those circumstances it is only reasonable that I find myself asked what we could possibly be thinking in launching a new “secure IoT RTOS platform.” Or, should I say, why are we launching yet another one.

• Advantech’s Linux-friendly SOM-3567 and SOM-3568 COMS offer Intel Bay Trail and Braswell chips, respectively, and adopt the Qseven 2.1 form factor.

• Advantech’s SOM-3567 and SOM-3568 computer-on-modules are the first we’ve seen to use Qseven 2.1. This is the Qseven computer-on-module standard’s first update since version 2.0 hit in Sep. 2012, and eight years after the debut of Qseven 1.0.

Phones

Android

• Android and iOS fans are known to occasionally disagree when it comes to their choice of mobile OS. Earlier this year, developer Nick Lee finally saw a way to end these years of conflict, designing a solution that allowed an iOS device to dual-boot into Android by means of a custom case. The case, which contained an enclosed circuit board running a modified version of Android Marshmallow, combined with an app that allowed the iPhone to boot the Android OS.

• Here’s what you can expect to see in the upcoming Android Nougat – which seems like it will debut aboard two new HTC Nexus handsets this Autumn.

Free Software/Open Source

• As the workforce becomes more mobile and employers look for ways to improve productivity, collaboration software become increasingly popular. According to a June 2016 study from Markets and Markets, organizations will spend $23.39 billion on cloud-based collaboration software tools this year. By 2021, the analysts expect the market to grow to $42.57 billion, for a compound annual growth rate of 12.7 percent.

• Collaboration software offer small businesses a wide variety of benefits. They can increase teamwork and communication, particularly if people on your team work in different locations. They can also help you share knowledge more widely throughout the organization and lessen the chance that employees will waste time duplicating the same work. They can also streamline your business processes and reduce the need for face-to-face meetings—both of which can decrease costs.

• For a company that’s only been around for a couple of months, Nextcloud isn’t wasting any time making improvements. Frank Karlitschek, Nextcloud’s managing director, just announced the release of the Nextlcloud 10 beta.

• LimeSurvey is released under the GPL, and a number of companies provide commercial hosting and support, so you can use it without having to set it up on a system of your own. LimeSurvey’s installation instructions are clear and easy, and the list of dependencies is not strenuous—MySQL or PostgreSQL, PHP 5.5 or higher, and a web server of your choice. There is a short list of PHP modules that are needed, all of which are easily installable via your package mananger.

• As an industry, we’ve spent decades collectively wringing our hands over Evil Vendor Lock-In. And for equally as long, we’ve happily shoveled hundreds of billions of dollars into these same vendors whose lock-in we allegedly fear: Microsoft, Oracle, and now Amazon. If it weren’t for proprietary licensing, cloud hosting, or other evil machinations, we’d live in a paradise of perfect competition and everyday low prices.

Events

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced the agenda for LinuxCon and ContainerCon Europe, taking place October 4-6 in Berlin, Germany. The event will offer unparalleled open source technical content for technologists of all levels and a celebration of the 25th anniversary of Linux.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• MOZILLA HAS become the latest browser company to turn off the ageing Adobe Flash plug-in.

• The Firefox browser will turn off “not essential” Flash content by default starting in August, but sites that require the plug-in for heritage functionality will be excepted.

• “These and future changes will bring Firefox users enhanced security, improved battery life, faster page load and better browser responsiveness,” said Mozilla in a blog post.

• Listen to a very interesting talk by Dave Herman, Director of Strategy at Mozilla Research, explaining how research and practice can better talk to each other. Among other things, Dave is the author of the popular book “Effective JavaScript: 68 Specific Ways to Harness the Power of JavaScript.”

• His thesis for this talk is: “An open research lab is a research group that engages directly with the market and works via open collaboration to close the feedback loop between ideas and practice.”

SaaS/Back End

• Open source PaaS is similar to other open source projects, there are two approaches.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Public Services/Government

• Malta’s Planning Authority has launched a smart phone application that provide online access to planning applications and can be used to report planning irregularities. The software should make zoning and planning more accessible to citizens and companies, and reduce bureaucracy.

• The European Telecommunications Standards Institute has published a collection of standards for electronic signatures, electronic seals, electronic time-stamps, and for trust services providers. The publication coincides with the entering into force on 1 July of the European Union’s eIDAS regulation on eID and trust services for electronic transactions.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Programming/Development

Leftovers

Science

• Computer science graduates continue to top the UK’s higher education unemployment rankings, according to the latest figures compiled by Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA).

• Ten per cent of computer science graduates failed to find a job six months after graduation in the academic year 2014/2015 – a figure higher than students who had studied Mass Communications and documentation, Physical sciences, or Engineering and technology (all 7.7 per cent).

• But the percentage is improving, albeit slowly. Last year’s statistics by HESA revealed 11.3 per cent of computer science graduates in 2013/2014 were unemployed.

Hardware

• For Japan-based SoftBank’s plan to acquire a 100% stake in UK-based ARM at GBP24.3 billion (US$32.0 billion), SoftBank chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son indicated that the acquisition is motivated by the large business potential for IoT (Internet of Things). However, Son overestimated real benefits from the acquisition and underestimated difficulties in vertical and horizontal integration of industries for IoT application, according to Digitimes Research.

Health/Nutrition

• The International AIDS Society made a statement today at the International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, voicing concerns about India’s recent policy which, according to the group, is threatening access to HIV treatment in India and around the world.

• The International AIDS Conference is taking place from 18-22 July.

• The statement co-signed by a number of civil society groups, said civil society is concerned “about the closing space both for the civil society groups that have been critical in the AIDS response nationally and internationally and for the public health-supporting policies that ensure quality, affordable generic drugs for the world.”

• In September 2012 the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) published the research of a team led by the French biologist Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini, which found liver and kidney toxicity and hormonal disturbances in rats fed Monsanto’s GM maize NK603 and very small doses of the Roundup herbicide it is grown with, over a long-term period. An additional observation was a trend of increased tumours in most treatment groups.

• In November 2013 the study was retracted by the journal’s editor, A. Wallace Hayes, after the appointment of a former Monsanto scientist, Richard E. Goodman, to the editorial board and a non-transparent review process by nameless people that took several months.

• Did Monsanto pressure the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) to retract the study? French journalist Stéphane Foucart addresses this question in an article for Le Monde.

• Seventy-four percent of countries with liberal abortion laws cover abortion costs. Why doesn’t the U.S.?

• New legislation on biodiversity has been adopted by the French National Assembly, opening doors for the sharing and selling of seeds in the public domain to amateur gardeners. For some associations that had been illegally trading public domain seeds, this is seen as a major victory.

• Prior to the newly adopted legislation, only seeds listed in the national catalogue could be commercialised in France. The new law allows non-governmental organisations to transfer, share or sell seeds that are in the public domain to non-commercial users (IPW, Biodiversity/Genetic Resources/Biotech, 7 July 2016).

Security

• There’s no shortage of futurists, industry analysts, entrepreneurs and IT columnists who in the past year have churned out reports, articles and books touting blockchain-based ledgers as the next technology that will run the world.

• Containers are becoming the central piece of the future of IT. Linux has had containers for ages, but they are still maturing as a technology to be used in production or mission-critical enterprise scenarios. With that, security is becoming a central theme around containers. There are many proposed solutions to the problem, including identifying exactly what technology is in place, fixing known bugs, restricting change, and generally implementing sound security policies. This article looks at these issues and how organizations can adapt their approach to security to keep pace with the rapid evolution of containers.

• David Wheeler is a long-time leader in advising and working with the U.S. government on issues related to open source software. His personal webpage is a frequently cited source on open standards, open source software, and computer security. David is leading a new project, the CII Best Practices Badging project, which is part of the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) for strengthening the security of open source software. In this interview he talks about what it means for both government and other users.

Defence/Aggression

• After a brutal military coup in Turkey against Erdogan’s presidency failed over the weekend, the Turkish president has responded in kind: with his own brutal coup against the Turkish people.

• In the name of defending democracy from the original coup plotters, Erdogan is literally targeting tens of thousands of Turkish citizens. And standing in the firing line are not just his political opponents, but Turkey’s largest ethnic minority, the Kurds.

• The warheads are developed and assembled at the Aldermaston/Burghfield complex which has annual running costs of at least £1bn a year. The missile submarines need protection by nuclear-powered (but not nuclear-armed) attack submarines, and are also given support from surface warships. One of the functions of the fleet of nine new Boeing P-8 Poseidon maritime-patrol aircraft, also just ordered at a cost of a further £3 million, is to provide further protection.

• Secretary of State John Kerry said that he and his European counterparts will be paying close attention to developments in Turkey, after thousands of Turkish officials were punished in the wake of a failed coup attempt.

• “Obviously a lot of people have been arrested and arrested very quickly,” Kerry said Monday, in Brussels. “The level of vigilance and scrutiny is obviously going to be significant in the days ahead. Hopefully we can work in a constructive way that prevents a backsliding.”

• Kerry made the statements from a previously scheduled meeting held by the European Council, an EU executive branch organ. The Washington Post described the gathering as having morphed into “crisis management,” in response to developments in Turkey.

• The Wikileaks website released a cache of nearly 300,000 emails allegedly sent by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), some of which were related to the Kurdistan Region, four days after an attempted military coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.

• One of the leaked emails dating back to March 12, 2016 stated the AKP gave an unspecified member of the Barzani family $200 million in “financial aid” after a temporary halt in oil exports via the Kirkuk-Yumurtalik pipeline – a major financial lifeline for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

• The KRG is not specifically mentioned in the email and the Kurdistan Region is referred to as “areas under the hand of Peshmerga.”

• Like Tony Blair, we were all duped by the intelligence on Saddam Hussein – except for the millions that went on marches, and Nelson Mandela, and France, and the Pope, and the chief weapons inspector, and Robin Cook

• This time, it was very different. Thanks to a series of sham trials targeting secularist officers, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had managed to reconfigure the military hierarchy and place his own people at the top. While the country has been rocked by a series of terrorist attacks and faces a souring economy, there was no inkling of unrest in the military or opposition to Erdogan. On the contrary, Erdogan’s recent reconciliation with Russia and Israel, together with his apparent desire to pull back from an active role in the Syrian civil war, must have been a relief to Turkey’s top brass.

• In an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday, after suggesting that he might not defend another member of the NATO alliance in the event of a Russian attack, Donald Trump was asked if he was paying close attention to what was happening in Turkey, following the failed coup attempt last week.

• Trump replied that he had been impressed by the efforts of the Turkish people, who took to the streets to prevent the military from seizing power — but did so in a way that demonstrated his ignorance about a central facet of what took place last Friday night.

• Reports that Russian President Putin may have tipped off Turkish President Erdogan about last week’s coup attempt – while the U.S. apparently stayed silent – suggest a possible reordering of regional relationships, says John Chuckman.

• Police believe three gunmen opened fire on Friday evening at and near a shopping mall in the German city of Munich, killing several people, authorities said. The shooting at Olympia shopping mall “looks like a terror attack,” a police representative said.

• The local authorities in Nice have refused a request by French anti-terror police to destroy CCTV images of last week’s lorry attack. The Paris prosecutor’s office said the request had been made to avoid the “uncontrolled dissemination” of images.

• But officials in Nice have responded by filing a legal document, arguing the footage could constitute evidence.

• It is the latest evidence of a growing dispute between the local and national authorities in the wake of the attack.

• At laboratories and factories where American nuclear weapons are designed and built, and at the sites still being cleansed of the toxic wastes created by such work, contractor employees outnumber federal workers six to one. That makes them key sentinels when something goes awry, a circumstance that officials say explains why they get legal protections when whistleblowing.

• That’s the theory. It turns out that the Energy Department has actually handed most of the oversight over these protections to the contractors themselves, robbing workers at key nuclear weapons sites of confidence that pointing out security and safety dangers or other mistakes won’t bring retaliation, according to an audit released by the Government Accountability Office on July 14.

• The Energy Department’s decision to embrace contractor self-regulation of its whistleblowing protection system means in many cases that those overseeing it work for the contractors’ top lawyers, who must defend the contractor against employee claims of wrongdoing, or for those officials responsible for deciding about job cuts, the report disclosed.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• The playbook on sowing public skepticism about health and climate issues originated not with Big Tobacco—as long believed—but with Big Oil, a new investigation reveals.

• Documents published Wednesday by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) show that the tobacco and fossil fuel industries used the same public relations firms, the same think tanks, and in many cases, the very same researchers, to foment doubt about public interest issues—starting with climate change. The documents show that the “direct connections” between the industries go back even earlier than previously believed, CIEL says.

• “Again and again we found both the PR firms and the researchers worked first for oil, then for tobacco. It was a pedigree the tobacco companies recognized, and sought out,” said the center’s president, Carroll Muffett.

• A new paper just published by scientists in Geophysical Research Letters presents results of their investigation into the ice sheet covering Greenland. They found that over the four-year period from Jan. 1, 2011 to Dec. 31, 2014 Greenland lost over a trillion tons of ice.

• New documents reveal that the oil and tobacco industries took pages from the same book to engineer their decade long campaigns on denying the existence of climate change and smoking-related cancer. The playbook also appears to have originated not with tobacco, but with the oil industry itself, and the two even appeared to share patents.

• In their research, the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), found that the two industries collaborated from the 1950s onwards, more closely and earlier than previously thought. Both industries had used the same PR firms, research institutes and researchers, many of whom began working for first the oil industry, and then tobacco.

Finance

• Thank you, Leader Pelosi, for standing up for users to block this undemocratic, anti-user deal. Combined with the stated opposition to the TPP of both presidential candidates, and the likelihood that other House Democrats will follow Leader Pelosi’s courageous lead, it is now significantly less likely that the TPP will be introduced during the lame duck session, or if introduced, that it will pass the House.

• Federal agents surprised an HSBC Holdings Plc executive as he prepared to fly out of New York’s Kennedy airport, arresting him for an alleged front-running scheme involving a $3.5 billion currency transaction in 2011.

• Hillary Clinton’s rumored vice presidential pick Sen. Tim Kaine defended his vote for fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on Thursday.

• Kaine, who spoke to The Intercept after an event at a Northern Virginia mosque, praised the agreement as an improvement of the status quo, but maintained that he had not yet decided how to vote on final approval of the agreement. By contrast, Hillary Clinton has qualified her previous encouragement of the agreement, and now says she opposes it.

• Kaine’s measured praise of the agreement could signal one of two things. Either he is out of the running for the vice presidential spot, as his position on this major issue stands in opposition to hers. Or, by picking him, Clinton is signaling that her newly declared opposition to the agreement is not sincere. The latter explanation would confirm the theory offered by U.S. Chamber of Commerce head Tom Donohue, among others, who has said that Clinton is campaigning against the TPP for political reasons but would ultimately implement the deal.

• Many commentators have focused on racism and xenophobia as major factors in the move to leave the EU. Undoubtedly these were important considerations. Many people in England, especially older ones, are uncomfortable with the country becoming more diverse. They fear and resent the people coming in from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere.

• But racism and xenophobia are not new for the United Kingdom. What is new is that these forces are powerful enough to force the country to break with a political union it joined more than four decades ago. Needless to say, there have been other situations where such forces came to dominate politics and they have not ended well.

• The issue in the UK and elsewhere is that there are real grievances which demagogues have been able to exploit. First and foremost is the austerity that had curbed growth in the U.K. and cut back funding for important programs. While austerity has not been as severe in the U.K. as in the euro zone (the U.K. is not in the euro), the conservative government sharply cut government spending in 2010, ostensibly out of concern that deficits and debt were harming the economy.

• This week on CounterSpin: Few ideas are as hard-wired into current corporate media as the notion that so-called “free trade” agreements of the sort we have are, despite concerns, best for everyone. Given that the deals are not primarily about trade, and that what freedom they entail accrues to corporations and not people, you could say the very use of the term “free trade” implies a bias, against clarity if nothing else. This week, CounterSpin will revisit three interviews we’ve done on this issue.

• The EU on behalf of the member states is current negotiating an EU US trade deal called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Talks around another trade deal between the EU and Canada have concluded – this deal is called The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA)

• Aside from the lack of coverage in the Irish media of the actual substance of these very critical trade talks, there are a number of concerns being expressed by campaign and civil society groups – in particular that a special court system will be incorporated into CETA & TTIP to allow corporations to sue EU member states who wish to introduce strong legislation to protect public health, food safety and environmental legislation for example.

• Nothing seems to rattle Hillary Clinton quite so much as pointed questions about her personal finances. How much she’s made. How she made it. Where it all came from. From her miraculous adventures in the cattle futures market to the Whitewater real estate scam, many of the most venal Clinton scandals down the decades have involved Hillary’s financial entanglements and the serpentine measures she has taken to conceal them from public scrutiny.

• Hillary is both driven to acquire money and emits a faint whiff of guilt about having hoarded so much of it. One might be tempted to ascribe her squeamishness about wealth to her rigid Methodism, but her friends say that Hillary’s covetousness derives from a deep obsession with feeling secure, which makes a kind of sense given Bill’s free-wheeling proclivities. She’s not, after all, a child of the Depression, but a baby boomer. Hillary was raised in comfortable circumstances in the Chicago suburbs and, unlike her husband, has never in her life felt the sting of want.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• An influential reporter at Politico made an apparent “agreement” with the Democratic National Committee to let it review a story about Hillary Clinton’s fundraising machine before it was submitted to his editors, leaked emails published by WikiLeaks on Friday revealed.

• A new trove of internal Democratic National Committee emails, stretching back to April 2016, released by Wikileaks show that the organization’s senior staff chafed at Bernie Sanders’s continued presence in the presidential primary. Staffers were also irritated by criticism that they were biased towards Hillary Clinton.

• In May, chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (DWS) reacted to an MSNBC anchor criticizing her treatment of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic presidential primary by trying to force her to apologize.

• On May 18th, DNC staffer Kate Houghton forwarded to Wasserman-Schultz a Breitbart News story highlighting remarks by MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski in which she called for the chairwoman to step down over perceived bias against Sanders during the presidential primary.

• Wasserman-Schultz reacted angrily, writing that this was the “LAST straw” and instructing communications director Luis Miranda to call MSNBC president Phil Griffin to demand an apology from Brzezinski.

• The Democratic National Committee – a supposedly neutral organisation – apparently hatched a plan to try and undermine Bernie Sanders’ campaign against Hillary Clinton by getting someone to claim he was an atheist.

• The Sanders campaign for months complained that people in the DNC were biased in favour of the establishment candidate, Ms Clinton. The campaign even sued the DNC to allow it access to its voter database.

• Among the nearly 20,000 internal emails from the Democratic National Committee, released Friday by Wikileaks and presumably provided by the hacker “Guccifer 2.0,” is a May 2016 message from DNC CFO Brad Marshall. In it, he suggested that the party should “get someone to ask” Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders about his religious beliefs.

• A report on polling data first published on Saturday by Folha de São Paulo, Brazil’s largest-circulation newspaper, contained errors that were so “huge and fundamentally important to the current political crisis that they require much more than the usual correction,” according to CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot.

• “Bad polling happens quite often, but these are errors in both polling and reporting of a whole different magnitude,” said Weisbrot.

• As noted by The Intercept yesterday, Folha de São Paulo had reported that according to a poll conducted by the firm Datafolha, 50 percent of Brazilians wanted the interim president Michel Temer to serve through 2018; 32 percent wanted the elected president Dilma Rousseff to do this (the end of her current term of office); 4 percent wanted neither of the two; and just 3 percent wanted new elections.

• As Donald Trump shouted for 76 minutes on Thursday night about how horrible everything is in the dystopian fiction he’s confused for America, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan found himself nodding along in agreement.

• So the white supremacist David Duke, who was nearly elected governor of Louisiana in 1991 by channeling white resentment, posted a rave review of the address on Twitter.

• In total, 24 people were arrested in convention-related incidents as of Friday morning, most at a flag burning protest on Wednesday. But while legal observers denounced those arrests, and delays in the processing of arrestees, as “troubling,” the final count was significantly lower than what most expected, with the city having announced ahead of the convention that it was prepared to “handle upwards of 1,000 arrests per day.”

• Republicans have nominated the least popular presidential nominee in recent history — and it showed. Throughout the week, the biggest names on the convention schedule consciously avoided lavishing too much praise on the nominee himself, for fear of their own political futures.

• House Speaker Paul Ryan mentioned Trump just twice in his address. Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, locked in a tough re-election race, mentioned the nominee just once. Ted Cruz, the second-place finisher in the primary, refused to endorse Trump at all, telling attendees instead to “vote your conscience.”

• And these were the Republicans who showed up to speak. Many major party figures didn’t attend at all. Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake told the press he wasn’t attending because he had to mow his lawn. None of the Bushes showed up.

• Ivanka Trump tried to portray her father as a champion of women while introducing him on the last night of the RNC. But not only is there no evidence that the man who has a reputation for demeaning women is actually a champion for them — an examination of his platform and history indicates quite the opposite.

• [...]

• Trump Organization’s salaries are not public, but that claim doesn’t hold up on his campaign. Trump pays his male campaign staffers 35 percent more money than female staffers. That’s partly because he has only two women among his senior-level staff, and just 28 percent of his staff is made up of women. One former staffer filed a complaint earlier this year saying she was paid $2,000 a month — about half what several men with the same title make.

• She also talked about how Trump would help families. “As president, my father will change the labor laws,” she said, suggested he’d make “child care affordable and accessible for all” and provide support for working mothers.

• While affordable child care is a cornerstone of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Trump has not released any plan for child care. The candidate has also shown zero interest in thinking about the issue. When an organizer asked him for his thoughts on child care back in December, he replied, “I love children” but refused to engage further, saying, “It’s a big subject, darling.”

• In a recent interview on The Real News Network, Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer sat down with Paul Jay, senior editor of The Real News Network, to discuss the current election and the future of the American democratic system. The interview begins with Scheer talking about the Republican National Convention and neofascist rhetoric. “You don’t get fascist movements taking over, rising to power, without people being in pain,” Scheer says. “And we have a situation now in the United States that is increasingly resembling a kind of post-Weimar Germany.”

• Jay then brings the conversation around to new movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, which Scheer says save “a reasonable established order” by forcing those in power to respond to the needs of the people. “It’s only when the established order is failing to respond to the real needs of people that you get madness and chaos, and that’s what I think you’re hearing at the Republican convention.”

• Despite their absence from the Republican National Convention, voters prioritize campaign finance reform and action on climate change.

• Donald Trump’s speech tonight accepting the Republican nomination for president will probably go down as one of the most frightening pieces of political rhetoric in U.S. history.

• Even for people who believe the danger of genuine authoritarianism on the U.S. right is often exaggerated, it’s impossible not to hear in Trump’s speech echoes of the words and strategies of the world’s worst leaders.

• Trump had just one message for Americans: Be afraid. You are under terrible threats from forces inside and outside your country, and he’s the only person who can save us.

• Then the headlines shifted and, for the moment, “normalcy” returned. It’s a Trump-sated normalcy that’s anything but, of course, and the most recent heavily reported violence (at least as I write these words) — the murder of three police officers in Baton Rouge — blends into the endlessly simmering turmoil known as the United States of America.

• And the civil war, in fact, started long ago. But until recently, only one side has been armed and organized. That’s why the two latest police killings, by disciplined, heavily armed former military men, loose a terrifying despair. The victims are fighting back — in the worst way possible, but in a way sure to inspire replication.

• When people are armed and outraged, the world so easily collapses into us vs. them. All complexity vanishes. People’s life purpose clarifies into a simplistic certainty: Kill the enemy. Indeed, sacrifice your life to do so, if necessary. I fear this is still the nation’s dominant attitude toward its troubles. We’re eating ourselves alive.

• One way this is happening was described in a recent New York Times story, headlined: “Philando Castile Was Pulled Over 49 Times in 13 Years, Often for Minor Infractions.” Castile, who as the world knows was shot and killed by a police officer during a routine traffic stop on July 6, was a young man caught in a carnivorous system pretty much all his adult life. Every time he started his car, he risked arrest for “driving while black.” The Times quotes a Minneapolis public defender, who described Castile as “typical of low-income drivers who lose their licenses, then become overwhelmed by snowballing fines and fees.” They “just start to feel hopeless.”

• The story goes on: “The episode, to many, is a heartbreaking illustration of the disproportionate risks black motorists face with the police. . . . The killings have helped fuel a growing national debate over racial bias in law enforcement.”

• A growing national “debate”? Oh, the politeness! How much racism should we allow the police to show before we censure them? It’s like talking about the “debate” we used to have over the moral legitimacy of lynching.

• In a remarkable show of disunity at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Sen. Ted Cruz was booed and heckled by many delegates on Wednesday night as it became clear that he had no intention of endorsing Donald Trump for the presidency.

• Cruz, who called Trump “a pathological liar” and “utterly amoral” when he dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination in May, refused to follow the lead of two of the other defeated candidates, Gov. Scott Walker and Sen. Marco Rubio, who did endorse the billionaire in their speeches.

• Watching Cruz give what seemed like a campaign speech for himself, Trump’s children sat in silence. Then there were cheers and a ripple of applause from the delegates as Cruz looked into the camera and said, “to those listening, please don’t stay home in November.”

• Donald Trump may well be the loneliest man in America. And I’m only 45%-60% kidding. This belief springs from his use of one single word—a word that every native speaker of the English language other than Trump knows does not, in fact, exist: the word “bigly.”

• Consider this: Donald Trump is so rich, so insulated–and so truly bereft of friends—that he’s managed to walk around on this planet for more than 70 years without ever realizing that “bigly” is not an actual word.

• The president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday signaled that the big-business community is still undecided between newly minted Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton. Chamber President Tom Donohue’s statements to Fox Business News on Wednesday morning represented an astonishing break from the organization’s nearly invariable support for Republican candidates.

• “Trump talks about some important things in energy and taxes and financial areas,” Donohue said. “Hillary perhaps has more experience and businessmen like that — businessmen and women like that — but I don’t think that’ll be decided until you hear the speeches here and next week and you see the first debate, and I think people will start to move more clearly to where they’re going to vote.”

• “If we can’t change consciousness, if we can’t get people to identify with the issues in a way that make them appear very real to their lives, then all of a sudden anger gets distorted and rerouted into something worse – it becomes racism, it becomes a movement mobilized by the need for saviors, it becomes a movement that embodies the worst possible political alternative.”

• Roger Ailes, the longtime Fox News chairman who helped found the network and build it into a cable ratings behemoth, has been forced out of the company following allegations that he sexually harassed numerous subordinates, including former host Gretchen Carlson and star anchor Megyn Kelly.

• A day after Republican National Convention speakers discussed how to “make America safe again,” a group of young Clevelanders held their own “make America safe again” event at a downtown park.

• As police officers on horseback and bikes fended off a small rally down the block and helicopters buzzed overhead, the group of mostly black and Latino college students huddled around a picnic table Tuesday and talked about how irrelevant and offensive the Republican event is to many residents of its host city.

• At the beginning of his big RNC-closing speech, Trump called for “a straightforward assessment of the state of our nation,” and said he would “present the facts plainly and honestly.” He didn’t follow through on that promise.

• Trump’s speech was much more scripted than his typically ad-libbed rally performances, which are riddled with falsehoods. But his formal acceptance of the nomination was also full of deception. Here’s a rundown of some of the misleading claims made by the man whose campaign statements were named the “lie of the year” by Politifact.

• Donald Trump wants you to think that America is a scary, scary place. In his speech accepting the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, Trump claims that “decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this Administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement.” He unleashes a blizzard of cherry-picked statistics all directed at one purpose — convincing you that crime has run amok and that he is the only thing that can save you.

• Don’t believe him. The reality is that crime isn’t just on a downward trend, but it has been for a very long time.

• “Many women feel they can’t afford their lives, their husbands can’t afford to be paying for the family bills,” Manafort said. “Hillary Clinton is guilty of being part of the establishment that created that problem. They will hear the message. As they hear the message, that’s how we will appeal to them.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Regulators revoke licenses of 13 TV stations, 12 radio stations

• The Turkish broadcast regulator RTÜK released a list of 13 television stations and 12 radio stations whose broadcast licenses it had revoked, the news website Bianet reported today.

• The Istanbul police operation searched through nine computers and arrested 10 engineers with alleged connections to the anonymous Fuat Avni account.

• Turkey’s most well-known whistleblowing Twitter account is still running after the man alleged to be behind the account was arrested Wednesday and later revealed to be a mere contributor.

• Earlier this week there was a fascinating piece in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer, interviewing Tony Schwartz, who is credited as the co-author to Donald Trump’s first and most famous book, The Art of the Deal (Schwartz is interchangeably referred to as the ghostwriter or co-author — his name appears on the book as the much smaller type-faced co-author, which is unlike most ghostwriters — but Schwartz claims he really wrote the book after just following Trump around for a bit and getting some ideas from him). The interview with Schwartz is great storytelling and focuses on his belief that Trump would be a disastrous President (and the fact that The Art of the Deal was exaggerated reality).

• Despite the fact that the Republican National Convention happened this week, where Trump was officially nominated as the Republican Party candidate for President, Trump apparently found the time to have his lawyer dash off a ridiculously stupid cease and desist letter. It’s the kind of cease and desist letter that we tend to see from complete cranks, rather than serious businessmen, let alone the official nominee for President from a major political party. Everything about the letter is flat out ridiculous (and at points, contradictory). Throughout it, Trump’s Chief Legal Officer, Jason Greenblatt, keeps saying that Schwartz’s statements are defamatory, but fails to name a single one. As has been pointed out many times, if you’re screaming “defamation” but fail to point to a factual statement that is defamatory, you’re just making noise.

• The letter also claims that Schwartz is attempting to “rewrite history” and even starts out suggesting that Schwartz’s claim of writing the book is an exaggeration, because the contract was merely to “provide certain services.” But, rather than actually follow through on that line of argument, Greenblatt then more or less admits it, while arguing something totally different: that the book was successful because of Trump’s association with it, not because of Schwartz. But Schwartz never argued otherwise, and that’s completely besides the point.

• Thai authorities have ordered an anti-junta television channel to stop broadcasting as the kingdom’s military rulers tighten the screw on dissent ahead of a controversial referendum vote.

• The junta has banned campaigning ahead of an August 7 plebiscite on a new draft of a charter in what will be the first public vote of any kind since the military seized power two years ago.

• The junta says its new charter will end the political upheaval that has rocked the kingdom for a decade.

• Rose, the editor responsible for publishing controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005, was invited last year to give the August 2016 lecture, which UCT describes as a “flagship lecture to promote academic freedom and freedom of speech” and which is organised by the university’s academic freedom committee.

• Digital rights groups have warned the German government against giving huge internet platforms like Google and Facebook greater responsibility for removing extremist propaganda following the knife and ax attack on a train in Bavaria this week, which left five people injured.

• Authorities believe the attacker – a 17-year-old asylum seeker – radicalized himself in a short period of time by consuming jihadi propaganda online. On Thursday, Interior Minister Thomas De Maiziere called for web platforms to delete more illegal content, to stop others from being tempted by extremist groups.

• But Markus Beckedahl, Editor-in-Chief of the digital rights blog Netzpolitik, has warned against increasingly handing removal decisions to tech companies, saying it would lead the country down a dangerous path towards censorship.

• When Hafiz Saeed, a Pakistani Islamist wanted in the United States and India, led a kilometre-and-a-half long caravan of supporters on an anti-India protest march across Pakistan to the capital this week, the story was not aired by local TV channels.

• Also absent from the airwaves earlier this year were images of the nearly 100,000 hardliners who packed the funeral of executed assassin Mumtaz Qadri, hailing him a hero for killing a governor who advocated reforming Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws.

• Bill Gurden’s answers are not spring-loaded. Instead, he pauses, and then arranges his thoughts contemplatively before responding, as though carefully placing fine crystal on a hutch shelf one delicate piece at a time.

• That meditative approach represents, in many ways, his blueprint. It was evident in the way he taught, instructed and molded the student journalists as adviser of The Stinger, the Pemberton Township High School newspaper, for five years. He guided each student, nurtured each story with painstaking care. He showed the students that solid reporting is achieved riding on the backs of snails, not rabbits. Slow and steady wins the truth.

• Gurden’s students won journalism awards; he won their respect. Under his tutelage, The Stinger became a model student newspaper, spawning journalism majors at colleges and universities throughout the country.

• Senior SABC journalists who were among those dismissed by the public broadcaster on Thursday vowed to fight for freedom of expression and a better working environment at the public broadcaster.

• [...]

• She said the SABC’s ban on showing footage of violent protests could be followed by another controversial decision by management at any time, and believed that only the Constitutional Court could undo what was happening at the public broadcaster.

• As the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) prepares to face legal action for the dismissal of journalists opposing its editorial changes, some of the fired employees say they are still happy about their decision to take an ethical and moral stance against the broadcaster.

• Today, four of the seven dismissed workers approached the Labour Court calling for their reinstatement at the broadcaster.

• Other former SABC employees whose cases are not yet being heard in court were present to show their support.

• South Africa Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), the country’s public service broadcaster, is facing accusations of pro-government bias after it fired eight journalists who criticised the organisation’s decision to avoid covering protests.

• SABC drew widespread criticism in June after it adopted a so-called “Protest Policy” and refused to broadcast footage showing “destruction of property”. Violent protests have afflicted South Africa in recent months, with riots in Limpopo province seeing more than 20 schools burned down in May, and protests turning deadly in Tshwane in June.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Before heading out to capture Pokémon, you might want to consider the data the game has access to and the history of the company that created the game

• When Edward Snowden leaked highly classified secrets about government spying in 2013, the undertaking took meticulous coordination.

• Snowden, a former NSA contractor, chatted with Guardian reporters Glenn Greenwald and documentary maker Laura Poitras over encrypted email exchanges. Their first meeting hinged on code words and a secret signal involving a Rubik’s cube.

• But when the first article revealing hush-hush surveillance programs went live that June while he was in a Hong Kong hotel room, that’s as far as Snowden had thought things through, he said over a live internet feed from Russia, where he’s been living in exile since the leaks.

• Since it’s hard to see the Chinese government really caring too much about the problems that ad-blocking software causes for online publishers, there is presumably another motivation behind this particular move. One possibility is that the Chinese authorities use the tracking capabilities of online ads for surveillance purposes, and the increasing use of ad blockers in China is making that harder. That clearly runs against the current policy of keeping an eye on everything that online users do in China, which is perhaps why the authorities want ad blockers banned in the country, despite the inconvenience and risks for users of doing so.

• It remains to be seen how successful the Chinese government will be in stamping out such popular software, or whether this will be another regulation that is largely ignored.

• Last week’s one-sided “hearing” on encryption — hosted by an irritated John McCain, who kept interrupting things to complain that Apple hadn’t showed up to field false accusations and his general disdain — presented three sides of the same coin. Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance again argued that the only way through this supposed impasse was legislation forcing companies to decrypt communications for the government. The other two offering testimony were former Homeland Security Advisor Ken Wainstein and former NSA Deputy Director Chris Inglis.

• Not much was said in defense of protections for cellphone users. Much was made of the supposed wrongness of law enforcement not being able to access content and communications presumed to be full of culpatory evidence.

• But one of the more surprising assertions was delivered by a former government official. Wainstein’s testimony [PDF] — like Vance’s — suggested the government and phone makers start “working together.” “Working together” is nothing more than a euphemism for “make heavy concessions to the government and prepare to deliver the impossible,” as Patrick Tucker of Defense One points out. Wainstein says phone manufacturers must do more than theorize that weakened encryption would harm them or their companies. They must hand over “hard data” on things that haven’t happened yet.

• Welcome to Bordertown, USA. Population: 200 million. Expect occasional temporary population increases from travelers arriving from other countries. Your rights as a US citizen are indeterminate within 100 miles of US borders. They may be respected. They may be ignored. But courts have decided that the “right” to do national security stuff — as useless as most its efforts are — trumps the rights of US citizens.

• Wall Street Journal reporter Maria Abi-Habib – a US-born citizen traveling into the States with her valid passport — discovered this at the Los Angeles International Airport. Her Facebook post describes her interaction with DHS agents who suddenly decided they needed to detain her and seize her electronics.

• France is not happy about the amount of data collection and lack of security in Windows 10 and has given the firm three months to sort it out.

• Yesterday France’s National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) slapped a formal order on Microsoft to comply with data protection laws after it found Windows 10 was collecting “excessive data” about users. The company has been given three months to meet the demands or it will face fines.

• Microsoft has now responded, saying it is happy to work with the CNIL to work towards an acceptable solution. Interestingly, while not denying the allegations set against it, the company does nothing to defend the amount of data collected by Windows 10, and also fails to address the privacy concerns it raises.

• Microsoft does address concerns about the transfer of data between Europe and the US, saying that while the Safe Harbor agreement is no longer valid, the company still complied with it up until the adoption of Privacy Shield.

• The Cloud has gained quite a bit of popularity within the past decade such that many companies can roll out their own or one hosted by a cloud provider with relative ease. However with this new world come new threats and it is important that organizations adequately model their networks, data and possible threats to ensure sensitive data is kept secure. Kenn White was kind enough to create this threat scenarios mind map and I thought it was worth sharing as it does a great job of showing scenarios that different security technologies help protect against.

• There’s a growing fear that the exploding internet of things — from baby cams to pacemakers — could be a goldmine for spies and criminal hackers, allowing them access to all kinds of personal photos, videos, audio recordings, and other data. It’s a concern bolstered by remarks from top national security officials.

• After a $1.2 billion deal fell through, Opera has sold most of itself to a Chinese consortium for $600 million. The buyers, led by search and security firm Qihoo 360, are purchasing Opera’s browser business, its privacy and performance apps, its tech licensing and, most importantly, its name. The Norwegian company will keep its consumer division, including Opera Apps & Games and Opera TV. The consumer arm has 560 workers, but the company hasn’t said what will happen to its other 1,109 employees.

• You may have installed the Maxthon browser on your mobile devices. If so, here’s why you should remove it. Immediately.

• [...]

• What exactly has been discovered that could be so damaging to this underdog browser? Fidelis Cybersecurity reported that Poland-based Exatel uncovered the Maxthon browser regularly sends a file, via HTTP, named ueipdata.zip, to a server in Beijing, China. The ueipdata.zip contains a file called dat.txt which stores information about the following:

• Operating system CPU Ad blocker status Homepage URL Browser history Installed applications (and their version number)

• Once again. The State of Emergency in France has been extended until January. In reaction to violence shaking the country and with the presidential election of 2017 only a few months away, political leaders are indulging an ignominious orgy of security-driven policy. Not satisfied with merely prolonging the state of emergency, lawmakers have also amended the 2015 Intelligence Act passed last year to legalize domestic mass surveillance.

• It is hard to believe that only 48 hours have passed since the bill was sent to the French National Assembly. With incredible speed, in the middle of summer, the Committee on Legal Affairs of the French Senate has given carte blanche to rapporteur Michel Mercier (UDI – centre-right wing and former Minister of Justice) to erase so-called “rigidities” in the Surveillance Law adopted last year.

• The provision, much criticised during the parliamentary debates at that time, provides for real-time scanning the connection data of individuals suspected of terrorist activities.

• Filmmaker Oliver Stone tore into the Pokemon Go smartphone phenomenon on Thursday, describing it as “a new level of invasion” that could lead to totalitarianism.

• During a panel for his new movie Snowden on the first day of San Diego Comic-Con 2016, the director said the app was part of a larger culture of “surveillance capitalism.”

• The program will mirror a similar approach adopted by the US Army that will provide soldiers with the ability to transmit strike coordinates, access visual maps, and potentially engage weapon systems using a heavily-modified consumer-level smartphone.

• On Thursday, a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter claimed that the Department of Homeland Security demanded access to her mobile phones when she was crossing the border at the Los Angeles airport.

• In early 2012, Marie Colvin, an acclaimed international journalist from New York, entered the besieged city of Homs, Syria, while reporting for London’s Sunday Times. She wrote of a difficult journey involving “a smugglers’ route, which I promised not to reveal, climbing over walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches.” Despite the covert approach, Syrian forces still managed to get to Colvin; under orders to “kill any journalist that set foot on Syrian soil,” they bombed the makeshift media center she was working in, killing her and one other journalist and injuring two others.

• Front-line journalists risk their lives to report from conflict regions. Casting a spotlight on atrocities, their updates can alter the tides of war and outcomes of elections. As a result, front-line journalists are high-value targets, and their enemies will spare no expense to silence them. In the past decade, hundreds of journalists have been captured, tortured and killed. These journalists have been reporting in conflict zones, such as Iraq and Syria, or in regions of political instability, such as the Philippines, Mexico, and Somalia.

• When Edward Snowden met with reporters in a Hong Kong hotel room to spill the NSA’s secrets, he famously asked them put their phones in the fridge to block any radio signals that might be used to silently activate the devices’ microphones or cameras. So it’s fitting that three years later, he’s returned to that smartphone radio surveillance problem. Now Snowden’s attempting to build a solution that’s far more compact than a hotel mini-bar.

• Bunnie Huang is having quite a day — and it’s a day the US government perhaps isn’t too happy about. Huang has worked on a number of interesting projects over the years from hacking the Xbox over a dozen years ago to highlighting innovation happening without patents in China. This morning we wrote about him suing the US government over Section 1201 of the DMCA. And now he’s teamed up with Ed Snowden (you’ve heard of him) to design a device to warn you if your phone’s radios are broadcasting without your consent. Basically, they’re noting that your standard software based controls (i.e., turning on “airplane mode”) can be circumvented by, say, spies or hackers.

• Edward Snowden thinks about phone security a lot more than the average person. And with good reason, as the world-famous whistleblower revealed methods of government data collection on phone calls, and even from his exile in Russia, still remains a major advocate for digital privacy.

• Tesla’s Elon Musk is not afraid to think big and then go for it. He famously published the Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan ten years ago, and has pretty much stuck to that plan.

• The European court of justice ruling that bulk data collection is only lawful if it is used to tackle serious crime (Report, 20 July) makes it clearer than ever that the monstrous (in size and aims) investigatory powers bill currently passing through the House of Lords is simply not fit for purpose.

• The proposed legislation sanctions the mass collection of citizens’ telephone and email data – something that is both ineffective and, as we now know, unlawful – and fails to put in place sufficient safeguards against the misuse of the powers granted to the intelligence services.

• The US last year ended the bulk collection of data from telephone calls when a report found that its counter-terrorism benefits were few or none. Firsthand evidence suggests that mass surveillance makes the security services’ jobs harder, not easier; you don’t look for a needle in a haystack more efficiently by making the haystack bigger.

• Exiled NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and legendary hardware hacker Andrew bunnie” Huang have published a paper detailing their new “introspection engine” for the Iphone, an external hardware case that clips over the phone and probes its internal components with a miniature oscilloscope that reads all the radio traffic in and out of the device to see whether malicious software is secretly keeping the radio on after you put it in airplane mode.

• The other day, I Con the Record released an updated index of the procedures intelligence components use to comply with Executive Order 12333’s rules on sharing information about US persons. As is typical of I Con the Record, it didn’t admit that this new “transparency” really just incorporates information demanded under FOIA. In this case, the index released three newly available documents liberated by ACLU in their 12333 FOIA. I Con the Record also misrepresented how long the renewed effort to make sure agencies have such procedures in place has gone on; as I’ve noted, PCLOB has been pursuing this issue since 2013.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Diplomatic staff with immunity, working in embassies in the UK, have been accused of child sex offences and human trafficking, the Foreign Office says.

• A total of 11 “serious and significant” offences were allegedly committed by such people in the past year.

• Diplomatic missions and international organisations ran up nearly £500,000 in unpaid parking fines in London last year, it was also revealed.

• Diplomats and some embassy staff are entitled to diplomatic immunity.

• This means they can be exempt from being tried for crimes.

• The allegations, contained a written ministerial statement by new Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, include someone at the Mexican embassy allegedly causing a child aged 13 to 15 to watch or look at an image of sexual activity.

• Ex-Bureau of Statistics worker Matthew Artis says he was unfairly moved around different sections of the ABS, treated as a liability and once told he was a “fish out of water” by one of his bosses.

• Mr Artis is suing his former employer in the Federal Circuit Court where he is alleging he was the victim of serious and blatant disability discrimination by the Commonwealth.

• Increasing awareness of the shady dealings of the monarchy – and the institutions that protect it – are leading to a growing republican movement in the UK.

• How a man who served 33 years on a 15-to-life sentence is pushing New York’s intransigent parole board to release violent offenders who have aged out of crime, the fastest growing segment of the prison population.

• The background is this: James Brandon Hill exited a taxi cab without paying, leaving his phone behind. The cab driver reported this to the police and an officer dialed 911 to obtain the owner’s info. The court doesn’t touch the issue of abandonment — which would likely have made the search legal. But its decision that the method used to obtain this info isn’t a search seems to be a bit off.

• While the information received may have had no expectation of privacy, an officer accessing a cell phone without a warrant is questionable under the Supreme Court’s Riley decision. As noted above, the warrantless search still likely would have survived a motion to suppress as the phone was abandoned in the cab. In fact, Hill does not challenge the seizure of the phone — only the search.

• The tragic shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile occured because soldiers and police officers alike view themselves on the frontline and dangerous edge of preventing terrorist and criminal attacks.

• Theresa May was warned by the French president, François Hollande, at their first meeting in Paris that the UK cannot expect access to the single market if it wants to put immigration controls on EU citizens.

• At a joint press conference in the Élysée Palace, Hollande made it clear that the new British prime minister was facing a choice about whether to accept free movement of people in return for free trade.

• A former leader of a Chinese village who was democratically elected five years ago after taking a stand against corruption has been arrested for taking bribes, said Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

• Lin Zuluan, one of the Wukan village protest leaders in 2011 whose calls for an uprising attracted global attention, had called for fresh protests in June against new land grabs and graft in the fishing village in Guangdong province.

• His arrest is the latest move on the core group of Wukan village protest leaders from 2011.

• Mongolia is known for the nomadic lifestyle of many of its citizens, its mines of global importance and for being an unlikely – if troubled – democracy landlocked by Russia and China. On 29 June, amid deep economic problems Mongolians showed their discontent by voting opposition Mongolian People’s Party into the State Grand Khural (parliament) in a landslide victory.

• The party took 85% of the seats in the parliament, defeating main rival the Democratic Party, which led a coalition from 2012-2016; about half of the elected candidates are first timers in the Khural. Voter turnout was above 72%, indicative of the electorate’s overwhelming discontent, and its apetite for change. The election period raised questions that stretch beyond the immediate economic crisis, making many reflect on the state of democracy, trust and public ethics.

• “We are extremely disturbed by the police shooting of Charles Kinsey, an unarmed caretaker helping a patient with autism outside a group home facility in North Miami. Thankfully, Mr. Kinsey is alive and not more gravely injured – but had the officer’s weapon been pointed just a few degrees differently, this senseless incident could have been a much greater tragedy.

• “This is the latest in what seems like an endless litany of police shootings of individuals who should not have been shot. Philando Castile in Minnesota, Alton Sterling in Louisiana, Vernell Bing in Jacksonville: there are too many to name them all here. Of the 598 people killed by U.S. police this year, 88 were unarmed. Mr. Kinsey or his patient could very easily have become number 89.

• “We have to stem the tide of violence, both nationwide and here in Florida. It starts with holding people accountable for their actions. There must be a thorough and independent investigation into this shooting that covers both whether officers violated internal use of deadly force policies and whether criminal charges should be brought.

• Charles Kinsey, a black man and caregiver at a group home, was shot by police on Monday in North Miami, Florida.

• It’s a dark day for the student leaders of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests in 2014 that came to be known as the “Umbrella Movement.”

• On Thursday, a court convicted Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow for unlawful assembly, for their role in starting the protests.

• Soon after the horrific video of Minneapolis-St Paul resident Philando Castile being killed by a cop during a routine traffic stop was broadcast live over Facebook, evidence of just how “routine” the stop actually was also became public.

• Castile, it turned out, had been pulled over at least 52 times in 13 years for a variety of minor infractions – a broken seat belt, an unlit license plate, tinted windows, a missing muffler – or what his mother called “driving while black”.

• Critics often tell immigrants to “get in line” to legally stay in the United States — but the only line in place spans years, as there are now more than half a million cases backlogged in the federal immigration court system.

• Based on new Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) findings by the Associated Press, the total number of immigration cases still pending has reached 500,051 — a number driven by Central American mothers and children who began arriving at the southern U.S. border beginning in late 2013.

• Immigration courts have been inundated with cases after the Obama administration prioritized and expedited court hearings for Central Americans in a process critically called a “rocket docket,” which gives lawyers and immigrants little time to gather evidence to support their claims for humanitarian relief.

• Yet another politician can be added to the list of people who think police officers just don’t have enough protections as is. Following in the footsteps of legislators in New Jersey and Minnesota — along with Rep. Ken Buck (CO) — Texas governor Greg Abbott has decided it’s time to treat attacking officers as a “hate crime.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• In fact, a bunch of the internet was pretty upset. “It’s not fair!”, they cried. “You’re comparing apples and oranges!”, they raged.

• Broadband ISP CenturyLink this week confirmed it’s following on Comcast’s heels and starting to impose usage caps and overage fees on the company’s already pricey DSL services. As we’ve long noted, there’s no reasonable defense for what’s effectively a glorified rate hike on uncompetitive markets, but watching ISP PR departments try to justify these hikes has traditionally been a great source of entertainment (at least until you get the bill).

DRM

• My name is Matthew Green. I am a professor of computer science and a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. I focus on computer security and applied cryptography.

• Today I filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government, to strike down Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law violates my First Amendment right to gather information and speak about an urgent matter of public concern: computer security. I am asking a federal judge to strike down key parts of this law so they cannot be enforced against me or anyone else.

• Today I filed a lawsuit against the US government, challenging Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Section 1201 means that you can be sued or prosecuted for accessing, speaking about, and tinkering with digital media and technologies that you have paid for. This violates our First Amendment rights, and I am asking the court to order the federal government to stop enforcing Section 1201.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the US government over ‘unconstitutional’ use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

• Computer security professor Matthew Green and famed hardware hacker Bunnie Huang have teamed up with the EFF to sue the US government, challenging the constitutionality of Section 1201 of the DMCA, also known as the “anti-circumvention” clause. As we’ve discussed for many years, 1201 makes it against the law to “manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof” that is designed to “circumvent” DRM or other “technological protection measures.” There are all sorts of problems with this part of the law, including the fact that it doesn’t matter why you have that tool or why you’re circumventing the DRM. For example, it would still be considered infringement if you cracked DRM on a public domain work. That’s… insane.

• The only “safety valve” on this is the ridiculous triennial review process, whereby people can beg and plead with the Librarian of Congress to “exempt” certain scenarios from being covered by 1201. The process is something of a joke, and even if you get an exemption one time, it automatically expires after three years, and the Library of Congress might not renew it.

• Sure, you’re a hardcore superuser, but that doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy the finer things in life — like shiny squircles and getting every new app first. But, what’s an OS-indiscriminate person like yourself going to do when it comes time to purchase music? That’s where the recover_itunes tool shines, and if you’re a Linux user with an iPhone, it might just be your new best friend.

• iPhones and other Apple products work great when you’ve purchased music from iTunes, but can be a headache when your music comes from other sources. On the other hand, music purchased from iTunes is notoriously difficult to listen to on anything other than an Apple product. One major reason for the difficulty with the latter is in the way that iTunes handles metadata.

• Since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) became law in 1998, it has been a federal crime to copy a DVD or do anything else that subverts digital copy-protection schemes.

• Soon, government lawyers will have to show up in court to defend those rules. Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit (PDF) claiming the parts of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that deal with copy protection and digital locks are unconstitutional.

• Under the DMCA, any hacking or breaking of digital locks, often referred to as digital rights management or DRM, is a criminal act. That means modding a game console, hacking a car’s software, and copying a DVD are all acts that violate the law, no matter what the purpose. Those rules are encapsulated in Section 1201 of the DMCA, which was lobbied for by the entertainment industry and some large tech companies.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has found that prices of older HIV drugs continue to decline, but newer drugs largely remain expensive.

• The results were released on 21 July in Untangling the Web, the 18th edition of MSF’s report on HIV drug pricing and access, at the International AIDS Conference in Durban.

• A commitment signed this week to facilitate investment in Africa’s pharmaceutical industry is expected to boost the sector’s production and make available essential medicines for millions of needy people.

• UNAIDS and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the African Union (AU), and the Kenyan and South African governments signed the pledge on 21 July, on the sidelines of the fourteen session of UNCTAD (UNCTAD-14), which is convening in Nairobi from July 17-22.

Trademarks

• With all the trademark actions we’ve seen taken these past few years that have revolved around the craft beer and distilling industries, it seems like some of the other folks in the mass media are finally picking up on what I’ve been saying for at least three years: the trademark apocalypse is coming for the liquor industries. It’s sort of a strange study in how an industry can evolve, starting as something artisan built on friendly competition and morphing into exactly the kind of legal-heavy, protectionist profit-beast that seems like the very antithesis of the craft brewing concept. And it should also be instructive as to how trademark law, something of the darling of intellectual properties in its intent if not application, can quickly become a major speed bump for what is an otherwise quickly growing market.

• It seems the USOC is just getting started with its bullying bullshit this Olympic season. Fresh off the heels of threatening Oiselle, a corporate sponsor of an Olympic athlete (but not a sponsor of the Olympics themselves), over trademark concerns because the company posted a congratulatory tweet for its sponsored athlete that included the Olympic bib she was wearing, the USOC is now sending out a helpful little reminder to other companies that have sponsored athletes but not the games. And by helpful, I mean that it’s helpful in seeing just how blatantly the USOC will outright lie in order to continue its bullying ways.

Copyrights

• So just as the US government itself is accused of being engaged in massive copyright infringement itself, the Justice Department proudly announces that it has charged the owner of Kickass Torrents with criminal copyright infringement claims. The site has also been seized and the owner, Artem Vaulin, has been arrested in Poland. As with the original Kim Dotcom/Megaupload indictment, the full criminal complaint against Vaulin is worth reading.

• As with the case against Dotcom/Megaupload, the DOJ seems to ignore the fact that there is no such thing as secondary liability in criminal infringement. That’s a big concern. Even though Kickass Torrents does not host the actual infringing files at all, the complaint argues that Vaulin is still legally responsible for others doing so. But that’s not actually how criminal copyright infringement works. The complaint barely even shows how Vaulin could be liable for the infringement conducted via Kickass Torrents.

• But, of course, that doesn’t matter because the guy at Homeland Security Investigations (formerly: ICE: Immigrations & Customs Enforcement) just spoke to the MPAA and the MPAA said that Kickass Torrents had no permission to link to their content. Yes, link.

• Last week we noted how copyright has once again become a straw man, this time as part of an attempt to kill the FCC’s plan to bring competition to the cable box. Under the FCC’s plan, cable providers would have to provide their programming to third-party hardware vendors — using any copy protection of their choice — without forcing consumers to pay for a CableCARD. The plan has little to actually do with copyright, but cable providers have tried to scuttle the effort by trying to claim more cable box competition will magically result in a piracy apocalypse (stop me if you’ve heard this sort of thing before somewhere).

• The cable industry’s attack on the FCC’s plan has been threefold: hire sock puppets to make violently misleading claims in newspapers and websites nationwide; push industry-loyal politicians (who have no real clue what the plan does) to derail the plan publicly as the worst sort of villainy, and present a counter proposal packed with caveats that makes it all but useless. This counter proposal involves the cable industry delivering its programming via apps (much like it already does), but forces consumers to continue renting a cable box if they want to record programs via DVR.

• Given the cable industry’s plan is little more than a press release, that’s only the caveat we know of. But anybody thinking the cable industry’s going to just give up $21 billion in set top rental fees and their walled garden control over the user experience is utterly adorable.

• Shortly after the U.S. Government seized the domains of KickassTorrents, IsoHunt is here with a working mirror of the world’s largest torrent website. The mirror can be accessed by visiting a URL similar to KAT’s domains i.e. kickasstorrents.website. The new website also displays a manifesto, demanding KAT founder’s freedom.

• The founder of the world’s largest torrent hosting website KickassTorrents is now behind the bars. The cause of his arrest are the legal purchases he made on Apple’s iTunes Store which helped the homeland security department to track him down.

• Donald Trump’s campaign has acknowledged that Melania Trump’s speech on Monday at the Republican National Convention used identical phrasing as a speech from Michelle Obama in 2008.

• The admission came in a written statement (viewable below in its entirety) on Wednesday from Meredith McIver, the writer who worked with Melania on the speech. McIver identified herself as an “in-house staff writer for the Trump Organization” and a friend of the Trump family.

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