● 08.17.16

● Links 17/8/2016: GNOME and Debian Anniversaries

Posted in News Roundup at 5:49 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Christine Hall has a point. In the business of supplying PCs to the public, money begets money. If a business is not selling a product for money, there’s not much reason to do so. Still, an OEM can do the maths a different way. They can choose to advertise, distribute and support GNU/Linux on the desktop seeing the product costing very little and being able to make a profit selling it for a little more. Which way will the bottom line benefit more?

• As of October, users of Windows 7, Windows 8, and various server products can farewell a Patch Tuesday of downloading multiple files: Microsoft is implementing the monthly patch rollup it promised in May.

• Regardless, the incident is yet another on the pile adding up to lost faith in Microsoft and Windows 10 downloads.

• Chromebooks are now the most popular school laptops of them all. If your school doesn’t supply them, here are your best choices.

• I know Andrew from his Linux Voice work. It’s interesting to learn how he came to Linux through academia. It just goes to show the importance of powerful software on solid hardware and how it can change your life. Andrew is also a KDE user who feels he hasn’t tapped into the full potential of that desktop. Of course, if anyone did tap into everything KDE could do, they’d get sucked into the Matrix, so I’m glad he hasn’t.

Server

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration today is announcing Platform for Network Data Analytics or PNDA is now a Linux Foundation Project. PNDA provides an open source, scalable platform for next-generation network analytics. The project has also announced the availability of its initial platform release.

• The load balancing news comes as part of AWS’s move to make it easer for its customers to use containers. To do that, it’s in the process of integrating capabilities of its Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform into its ECS — Amazon’s system that allows customers to run containerized applications.

• Helen Koike of Collabora has been one of the developers looking to optimize the performance of virtual NVMe devices, such as used by Google’s Cloud Engine.

Kernel Space

• Today, August 16, 2016, renowned Linux kernel developer and maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman proudly announced the availability of the first point release for the Linux 4.7 kernel series.

• Immediately after announcing the availability of the first point release for the Linux 4.7 kernel series, Greg Kroah-Hartman also informed the community about the launch of Linux kernel 4.6.7.

• The Linux Foundation has added the Platform for Network Data Analytics – aka PNDA – to its stable of officially supported projects.

• PNDA aggregates data from multiple sources on a network, be they-real time performance indicators or static sources like logs, then works with Apache Spark to do the usual Big Data thing of finding useful patterns. The tool’s all about making it easy to gather, consume and crunch diverse data sources, rather than having to do custom integrations.

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.4.18 kernel.

• All users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 4.4.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.4.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA this morning rolled out the first Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD driver beta in their 370 driver series. There’s good stuff in here for Pascal GPU owners.

• First up, the NVIDIA 370.23 beta adds official support for the GeForce GTX TITAN X (the new Pascal model) as well as the 6GB version of the GeForce GTX 1060. The other GTX 1000 Pascal graphics cards have been supported from day-one with the earlier 367 driver series.

• On August 15, 2016, Nvidia rolled out a new Beta version of its graphics driver for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris operating systems, version 370.23, bringing various new features and improvements.

• According to the release notes, the Nvidia 370.23 Beta video driver implemented the ability for users to overclock or underclock their Nvidia GeForce GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). However, it appears that the new feature will only work with certain GPUs from the GeForce GTX 1000 series and later. To see the supported products, please consult the official announcement.

• Independent Nouveau developer Karol Herbst continues to be hard at work on improving the re-clocking state of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack.

• Herbst today submitted his fifth version of a massive patch set to fix engine re-clocking. These re-clocking fixes should benefit GeForce GTX 400/500 “Fermi” hardware up through the latest Maxwell cards, but don’t expect nothing yet for Pascal until NVIDIA releases that signed firmware to provide accelerated hardware support on this open-source driver.

• The alpha release of the upcoming Wayland and Weston 1.12 version is now available.

• Wayland 1.12 is planned for release in September and release manager Bryce Harrington today announced the alpha release as the first step towards this next version. The feature work will also slow down at this stage.

Applications

• The developers of the open-source and cross-platform MPV video player software have announced the release of version 0.19.0, a new maintenance update that adds a few new features, options, and commands, and fixes lots of bugs.

• MPV 0.19.0 is here five weeks after the release of MPV 0.18.1 to improve the build system with and new “–htmldir” option, implement atomics support as a mandatory requirement, as well as to modify the wscript to add proper unversioned SONAME for the Android mobile platform.

• It has been almost three months since last Gammu release and it’s time to push fixes out to users. This time the amount of fixes is quite small, covering Huawei devices and text mode for sending SMS.

• Long running, open source music production software has gotten a new version that introduces Windows support and a new design.

• Ardour is a capable DAW that allows you to record, edit and mix your music. It’s gained appeal around the world with it’s open source platform that allows musicians with proficient enough tech knowledge to tune the DAW to their perfect specifications.

• The GIMP has long been an important app for those who need to create and edit images, and now there’s a way to make it look and work like Photoshop.

• Once I used to be a Windows user but now I use Linux and I use Ubuntu distribution. When I switched to Linux, one of the initial tasks was to know the processes running in the background. In Windows, we have task manager which is GUI. In Linux we have so many task managers that are GUI & CLI both. In this article, I’ll mention one of the easiest CLI Linux system monitoring tool known as ‘Top’.

Proprietary

• Not my usual sort of topic, but since it’s proving popular it’s probably worth highlighting. No Man’s Sky (GOG Link) the brand new survival sim from Hello Games works rather well in Wine on Linux.

• Note: I have not tested it myself, but there’s multiple reports of it now.

• It’s interesting because it shows again how powerful Wine is and also how games using OpenGL rather than DirectX can be good for us even if the game itself isn’t getting a Linux version.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The Humble Indie Bundle 17 — yes, seventeen — is now live, ready to partake of your purchasing pleasure.

• Humble Indie Bundle 17 has released into the wild featuring some interesting games, some first on Linux too.

• Featherpunk Prime is a new indie platformer with a lot of action that has been created by only two people. Its release date is September 1st on Steam and Humble Bundle.

• Lucius Demake, as its name indicates, is a demake of the original Lucius, a survival horror game inspired by the masterpiece horror film The Omen (1976). The premise of the game is to control Lucius, a six year old incarnation of the Antichrist, in his crusade of terror and chaos through his house, murdering all the residents one by one.

• This may be Linux related: Aspyr Media the porting team behind Linux titles like Borderlands 2 are teasing something new to come.

• Tripwire has announced the final release date for Killing Floor 2 on November 18th. They have also said that Linux files will come post launch.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Version 1.18 of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) brings a wealth of new features.

• EFL 1.18 has been working on a new API resulting from the Eo and Eolian work, Elput as a new library for interfacing with libinput, Wayland drag-and-drop improvements, the new Ecore_Drm2 library for improving Wayland and more, a virtual path subsystem was added, JavaScript Eolian bindings, improved portability, and the first release of the EWebkit.

• I came across the Oranchelo icon pack for XFCE4 today, and I have to confess: I’m in love. An hybrid icon set, Oranchelo is based on Super Flat Remix and inspired by Cornie icons, an Android theme pack designed by Patryk Goworowski.

• Ideally, the most frequent operations in a command-line become muscle memory for the user. Documentation is essential, but users shouldn’t have to keep referring to it in order to get their work done.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Last Friday, I gave the first keynote at GUADEC 2016. I was delighted for the invitation from the GNOME Foundation to deliver this talk, which I entitled Confessions of a command line geek: why I don’t use GNOME but everyone else should.

• I’m having the opportunity to once again go to GUADEC. I’ve had many great discussions, There’s so many great people to meet here.

• There are at least two exciting Linux/open-source birthdays to celebrate this week.

• Yesterday marked 19 years since the GNOME desktop environment was founded by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena.

Distributions

• David has come up with three Linux distributions: Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE and Damn Small Linux.

• Ubuntu MATE would definitely be close to reaching my top five and I would recommend Lubuntu for low end computers and older netbooks.

• Damn Small Linux might be a bit daunting for non-technical users and for something of that size it might be worth thinking about a Puppy Linux such as Simplicity.s

• Selecting the best Linux distro for business isn’t easy. With over three hundred active Linux distributions, choosing one for your business can take some serious time.

• Admittedly, you don’t have to try all the Linux distro. A few distros, like deepin and elementary, are obviously aimed at desktop users. Probably, too, you won’t want Ubuntu Studio, with its emphasis on creativity, or DebianEdu, which is obviously intended for the class room. Yet even if you eliminate the distros that are a personal hobby or most of the dozens derived from Debian or Ubuntu, the choices are still overwhelming.

• Instead, you probably need to begin with the question: What business task do you plan to use your choice of distros for?

New Releases

• We are pleased to announce that Mate 1.14 is available in OI now. To facilitate installing, we’ve created pkg:/mate_install meta-package. Unfortunately, when you have both Gnome 2 and Mate installed, both of them try to use the same applications, so you’ll have interesting time removing Gnome 2 applications from Mate and vice versa. We also prepared test Live DVD ISOs/USB images with MATE, which are available at http://dlc-int.openindiana.org/hipster/20160816/ (OI_MATE_experimental.iso/usb). Note that these USB images don’t longer require 1G/2G header file, and can be directly dd’ed to USB stick.

• The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.2, again within three months of the previous release. The team sincerely hopes that this new rapid release cycle will hold for future releases as well. If there is one word to describe progress on the project, it would be steady. The project is reaching a point where rapid releases are viable, where disruption from introduction of major components or restructuring has been greatly reduced from the tumultuous early years and even as recently as the late 0.3.x series. This being the case 0.4.2 presents a fairly incremental update from 0.4.1, primarily because no showstoppers appeared that required the team to wait literally years in order to spin it out. This, ultimately, is a good thing.

• SystemRescueCd developer François Dupoux announced the release and immediate availability for download of the first maintenance update for the SystemRescueCd 4.8.x series.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• openSUSE is a staple of the Linux community. But even long-time open source advocates find themselves wondering what sets the distro apart. Lacking the clear direction of Ubuntu or the free software advocacy of Fedora, openSUSE can seem to lack vision.

• Fortunately, that isn’t the case. There are good reasons openSUSE continues to attract users, and here are some of them. Maybe you will be the next person to fall in love with the Geeko.

• There is no such thing as the best Linux distribution for photographers. With some tweaking, any mainstream distro can be turned into a solid platform for managing and processing photos. After all, digiKam, Darktable, gThumb, and other popular photographic tools can be easily deployed on practically any Linux distribution with a minimum of effort.

• The devil is in the detail, though, and small things might require some adjustments. My recent migration from Ubuntu to openSUSE Tumbleweed is a case in point. Most of the tools I use in my photographic workflow are available in openSUSE’s official software repositories, so deploying them was a rather straightforward affair. But there were a few things that needed some tweaking.

Red Hat Family

• Containers are becoming increasingly popular in the enterprise world, which has come to realize that containers not only solve many problems, but also bring agility, scalability, and other benefits to the IT infrastructure. This idea is now trickling down to the desktop world.

• Canonical gets much of the credit for creating buzz around a container-like approach toward apps with the announcement of Click, which later evolved into Snap. But the fact is there have been many efforts to bring such a solution to the desktop world. Projects like Klik (which evolved into AppImage in 2014), for example, have been around for more than 12 years now. Alexander Larsson, a Red Hat developer, has been playing with the idea of a distro-agnostic, self-contained application packaging and delivery solution since 2007.

• It’s interesting that none of these technologies gained any traction or mindset in their early days. They largely remained unnoticed. Thanks to the success of Docker containers; however, there is a renewed interest in such technologies.

• I have a confession to make—although the word “cloud” is in my job title, there was a time when I used to think it was all buzzwords, hype, and vapor, with no substance. Eventually, Ansible became my gateway to the cloud. In this article, I’ll provide an introduction to DevOps with Ansible.

• Before Ansible came along, I was a sysadmin, happily deploying bare-metal servers and virtual machines, with each new project requiring its own bespoke infrastructure. Sure, the deployment of the initial operating system was automated with Kickstart, but then came the slew of manual steps to get the servers ready for the application owners. It was a slow process, but I knew when I was done with it, I was handing over a finely tuned system that would run like a champ for years.

• I wrote bash scripts for everything, some of which even had proper error checking. I was confident in what I knew and what I did, and saw no reason to change. I was comfortable. Then I started hearing this word more and more from our various vendors: cloud. What did cloud mean? Ask a dozen people to define it, and you’d get a dozen different answers. Without a concrete notion of what it was, my team of sysadmins and I chalked it up as nonsense.

Finance

Fedora

• I am happy to release the F24-20160808 updated lives isos.

• The Cockpit team is currently uploading the cockpit container to the Fedora repo on the Docker Hub, but Fedora Release Engineering is working on publishing layered images. We now have a super-privileged container (SPC) for the web service (cockpit-ws) with the bridge, shell, and docker components installed by default on the Atomic host.

• I had already planned an earlier Design Team FAD for January 2015, so I wasn’t totally new to the process. There were definitely challenges though.

Debian Family

• Today is Debian’s 23rd anniversary. If you are close to any of the cities celebrating Debian Day 2016, you’re very welcome to join the party!

• If not, there’s still time for you to organize a little celebration or contribution to Debian. For example, you can have a look at the Debian timeline and learn about the history of the project. If you notice that some piece of information is still missing, feel free to add it to the timeline.

• Today was Debian Day as fans all over the World celebrated the Linux project’s birthday. Debian is 23 today, having been officially recognized as beginning August 16, 1993. Elsewhere, Bruce Byfield posted six Linux suggestions for businesses and Bertel King, Jr. listed six reasons to use openSUSE. Laura Abbott shared some tips for getting started with the Kernel project and My Linux Rig interviewed Andrew Conway, astronomer and Slackware user.

• The Debian Project, through Laura Arjona Reina, has had the great pleasure of announcing that today, August 16, 2016, is Debian GNU/Linux operating system’s 23rd anniversary.

• Yes, you’re reading it right. Exactly 23 years ago, the Debian GNU/Linux distribution saw the light of day. The Debian GNU/Linux 0.01 release was the first development build, announced by the late Ian Murdock, Debian Project’s founder and leader for more than 22 years. However, the first official stable release, version 1.0, of Debian GNU/Linux was in 1996, three years later.

• Today it is 23 years ago since Ian Murdock published his intention to develop a new Linux distribution, Debian. It also about 20 years since I became a Debian developer and made my first package upload.

• Peter Manev reports on the release and general availability of the SELKS 3.0 GNU/Linux distribution based on the latest Debian technologies and designed for network security management.

• Being the first time we write here about SELKS, we feel obliged to inform our readers about what this distro. Therefore, SELKS is a specially designed ISO image that’s always synchronized with the Debian GNU/Linux repos and includes various popular software applications for maintaining and hardening the security of your network.

• Many people worked on finishing DEP 5. I think that the blog of Lars does not show enough how collective the effort was.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Today, August 16, 2016, Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, informed Softpedia about a strategic partnership with Advantech to bring the Snappy Ubuntu Core OS to its x86-based IoT gateways.

• Canonical has teamed up with embedded solutions giant Advantech to certify the company’s Internet of Things (IoT) gateways for Ubuntu Core.

• Chances are, you have to look to open source to power some aspect of your business. If that aspect happens to be a server in the backend of your workflow, you’re in luck because there are a number of solid choices. One such choice is Ubuntu.

• Many believe Ubuntu is only a desktop distribution, but they’re wrong. Ubuntu also comes in a very powerful server flavor that is well suited to aid you in the expansion of your company’s data center.

• Canonical is taking some big steps to improve its community developed Terminal app.

• Today, August 16, 2016, Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, informed Softpedia about a strategic partnership with Advantech to bring the Snappy Ubuntu Core OS to its x86-based IoT gateways.

Flavours and Variants

• The Netrunner development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability for download of the first stable release of the Maui, their new GNU/Linux distribution based on the KDE Neon project.

Devices/Embedded

• The new Onion Omega2 is making the headlines as the tiniest computer, but how does it compare with the Raspberry Pi Zero? Here’s a quick comparison between the two, from specs and features to price and size.

• A newcomer in the smallest-ever computer war has arrived in the tiny form factor of the Omega 2 — a computer the makers want to sell for $5 to coders, IoT enthusiasts, the entire third world and men not against the idea of maybe doing a bit of soldering.

• At some point in the future just about everything will want to get on your WiFi and connect to the internet. Comcast will love that, since most cheap plans limit the number of devices you can connect to your account at once.

• Intel’s “Joule” IoT module integrates a 64-bit quad-core Atom SoC, up to 4GB RAM and 16GB eMMC, plus BT/WiFi, 4K video, CSI/DSI, GPIO, USB, and UART I/O.

• At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2016 in San Francisco today, Intel unveiled a tiny Joule computer-on-module that targets makers, innovators, and entrepreneurs developing Internet of Things devices. The module will be available in two versions, based on Atom T5700 and T5500 SoCs, and is supported by the Yocto Project-based Ostro Linux distribution, which similarly targets IoT apps.

• Intel unveiled the Joule IoT module in a keynote talk by Intel CEO Brian Krzanich at the 2016 Intel Developer Forum today in San Francisco. The 48 x 24 x 3.5mm module integrates a 64-bit quad-core Atom SoC, up to 4GB RAM and 16GB eMMC, plus Bluetooth and WiFi wireless, 4K video in/out, MIPI CSI/DSI ports, GPIO, and multiple USB and serial ports. Intel supports the Joule module with an open-source generic carrier board and a Yocto Project-based Ostro Linux distribution.

• The original Raspberry Pi sparked the creativity of many developers and students, but it was woefully underpowered. Through several iterations, however, it slowly became more powerful. While the most recent version — the Raspberry Pi 3 — has a much more capable processor, some developers will still want even more horsepower.

• Today, Intel announces a maker board that puts the Raspberry Pi 3 to shame. The Joule system-on-module mini-computer features RealSense camera support and runs Ubuntu Linux Core. Best of all, its specs are very impressive for what it is.

• Intel has a bunch of new and updated hardware kits for engineers to toy with and use to build prototypes – from a DIY drone kit to a bunch of beefy Internet of Things packages.

• The most interesting is the Aero drone-building kit, available now to order. You use this single-board computer as the control electronics in a quadcopter: it does everything from the decision-making logic and processing of incoming remote control signals to driving the IO lines to the drone’s propellers.

Phones

Tizen

• Google’s code depository and GitHub have recently become a hot talking point after a chunk of code has been spotted bearing the name Fuchsia. Google has been generous to mention what the term means on the websites- Pink+Purple==Fuchsia. The development has raised a quite a lot of eyebrows as nobody apart from Google as of now knows exactly why the company are even working on a completely new Operating System from scratch. Another interesting fact is that the OS isn’t based on a Linux Kernel but is based on Magenta which is supposedly based on LittleKernel project developed by MIT.

Android

• There is no shortage of messaging apps jam-packed with features to help you stay in touch with friends. Alphabet Inc.’s Google has a new app, called Duo, that is going in the other direction and focusing on just one thing: video chat. Is it enough to get you to switch?

• It’s getting rarer for phone launches to generate excitement these days — especially in the Android world, where all models use the same underlying Google software. Every year, phones get routine refreshes such as faster processors, better cameras and longer battery life.

• Simplenote on its website states that they have a saying “We don’t make softwre for free, we make it for freedom.” In this spirit, they announced that all of the official Simplenote client apps are now Open Source Software under the GPLv2 license.

• Which mobile operating system is best for business? We compare iPhone vs. Android in eight different categories, including hardware, apps, storage, customization, security, backup, management and personal assistant.

• Here’s what’s really confusing. All three phones have stunning 2560 x 1440-pixel resolution, AMOLED screens that absolutely blow any iPhone display out of the water. (According to the display experts at DisplayMate, the Note 7’s screen is the best smartphone screen ever.) All three also have the same super-speedy quad-core processors, water-resistant designs and superb 12-megapixel cameras.

Free Software/Open Source

• French airplane manufacturer Airbus has officially joined the Hyperledger Project, the Linux Foundation-led blockchain initiative.

• The Toulouse-based manufacturer, which last year beat Boeing to sell more than 1,000 aircraft, is expected to “actively contribute” to the initiative, which also counts companies such as IBM, Intel and JPMorgan among its membership.

• Business blockchain consortium Hyperledger is now building an open-source tool that will let anyone explore the distributed ledger projects being created by its members.

• Originally conceived by an intern at the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the proposal to create a blockchain explorer gained steam last month when it was informally proposed to members. It was then that other prominent contributors to the Linux-led group discovered they all had similar efforts underway.

• But instead of launching competing open-source services, an effort began to merge the blockchain explorers being developed by DTCC, IBM and Intel. The joint project has been dubbed the “Hyperledger Explorer”.

• Similar to block explorers already being offered for other public blockchains, the tool would make it easier to learn about Hyperledger from the inside, while still protecting the privacy valued by many of the non-profit organization’s members.

• According to an Apple Insider report published on August 9, a disturbing trend has emerged on Apple’s App Store as a series of malicious copycats of well-known Bitcoin wallet apps became available to download. Some of the fake wallets looked quite similar to the real thing but were specifically tweaked to steal bitcoins from unsuspecting users. As a result some $20,000 reportedly ended up in the pockets of scam artists before Apple was able to filter and remove the apps from its store.

• When an HMI project requires more functionality than that offered by self-contained touchscreen units, the next step is to use an industrial PC-based system. The PC can be a traditional keyboard and mouse if the environment allows, or an integrated computer/touchscreen with varying degrees of environmental protection.

• [...]

• The three biggest advantages when using open source are the price (free or close to it), the programmer’s ability to modify and extend the code in any way required and having the final project being a smaller, more efficient product. The programming skill needed to create an application is somewhat higher than what is required using off-the-shelf development packages.

• Healthy open source communities usually include a wide range of people with different ideologies, goals, values, and points of view—from anarchists to CEOs of major corporations. The normal approach for making decisions that affect the entire community should be an attempt to reach consensus through discussion; however, what if you’re attempting to make a decision that is critically important, but there are irreconcilable differences in the community?

• The Xen Project community had such a decision to make in the wake of the XSA-7 security issue about the project’s security policy. We knew beforehand that there was unlikely to be consensus, so we thought carefully about how we could approach the discussion.

• Our main goals were to find a “center of gravity” of the community preference, and to make sure that the people who didn’t get what they wanted felt like their voice was heard and taken into consideration. In this article, I’ll briefly summarize my conclusions from that experience.

• I learned more about business, software, and, most importantly, people, in the first two years of Lucidworks than I did in the previous 10-15 years of school and work combined. Being a founder was (and is) a thrilling ride and one that expands your brain in ways you never knew it could expand. It’s also an addictive ride, as your brain starts to crave the novelty of newness that comes from context switching between a dozen different things, seemingly all at once, as well as the satisfaction that comes from being “the one who gets it done.” Not that you ever really are that person, but more on that in a moment.

Events

• Open source technology is understandably controversial, not least because it has massively eroded the software licensing revenues of established IT players.

• At a panel hosted by Rackspace, entitled ‘Open source is eating the world: Building on open source for enterprise’, participants disagreed over what was driving the production of open source, but not over the scale of disruption it had brought to the industry.

• As a side note of huge interest… during general discussions it emerged that (according to one statistic) the split between female and male developers is roughly 80% to 20% in favour of males, obviously. But, significantly, that split drops down to 90% to 10% — why that should be is unknown, but it may be a good pointer for where responsibilities lie.

• On Wednesday in the Upskill U course “Using Open Source for Data Centers and Cloud Services,” Roz Roseboro, senior analyst at Heavy Reading, will address why and how operators are implementing open source for cloud platforms and services. This course will examine relevant open source projects for telcos, how open source differs from traditional standards bodies and what concerns operators have about open source, like security. (Register for Using Open Source for Data Centers and Cloud Services.)

• Yesterday I gave a talk about Outreachy to Girls Coding Kosova. Since there is isn’t anyone else from Kosovo who participated in Outreachy previously and they were not really informed about it, I thought I’d share my amazing experience and give some details about the program. I decided to focus more on the application process since that was the “tricky” part when I applied and seemed to be the same for them as well, since they had a lot of questions regarding the application part. I pretended to be applying for the second time and went through the application process step by step. Starting from choosing an organization, choosing a project, contacting mentors and coordinators via e-mail or IRC, making a small contribution etc.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Last year, Mozilla launched the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS) – an award program specifically focused on supporting open source and free software. As The VAR Guy notes: “The Mozilla Foundation has long injected money into the open source ecosystem through partnerships with other projects and grants. But it formalized that mission last year by launching MOSS, which originally focused on supporting open source projects that directly complement or help form the basis for Mozilla’s own products.”

• Now, Mozilla has reported that it awarded a hefty $585,000 to nine open source projects in Q2 of this year alone. Here is more on a couple of the most interesting projects and what they are focusing on.

• PyPy. PyPy is a fast, compliant alternative implementation of the Python language (2.7.10 and 3.3.5). Its developers tout its performance advantages over Python.

• In the upcoming release of Firefox 49, Mozilla will include support for Google’s Content Decryption Module (CDM), Widevine. With this support, Firefox users on Linux will finally be able to watch Netflix content; previously Linux users had to watch Netflix using Google’s Chrome browser.

• Mozilla Firefox users on Windows and Mac already had the ability to watch Netflix content as Widevine was switched on earlier for those users. Firefox 49 brings the Linux version up to parity.

SaaS/Back End

• The OpenStack community has grown at breakneck pace since the open-source cloud orchestration technology burst on the scene in 2010, a product of NASA and Rackspace Hosting.

• As envisioned by its developers, OpenStack provided a welcome alternative to proprietary IaaS solutions and an opportunity for independent service providers to build robust public and hybrid clouds with distributed computing resources that had the functionality and power to compete with the big boys, including industry-dominating Amazon Web Services.

• How fast is the OpenStack global cloud management market growing? Research and Markets analysts are out with a new report that forecasts the global OpenStack cloud management market to grow at a CAGR of 30.49% during the period 2016-2020.

• According to the report: “Cloud brokerage services that provide management and maintenance services to enterprises will be a key trend for market growth. However, this report and others forecast that technical issues and difficulties surrounding OpenStack deployments will be on the increase. In this post, you’ll find resources that can help you avoid the pitfalls present in doing an OpenStack deployment.

• “OpenStack talent is a rarified discipline,” Josh McKenty, who helped develop the platform, has told CRN, adding, “to be good with OpenStack, you need to be a systems engineer, a great programmer but also really comfortable working with hardware.”

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• I recently discovered this on YouTube from a few years ago (2013) and had to share.

• I’m posting this not because it’s Super Mario Bros, and not because it’s stop-motion animation. It’s because it was done in OpenOffice. An abuse of a spreadsheet, to be sure, but pretty impressive effort with some cool results.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• MidnightBSD developer Lucas Holt proudly announced the release of the MidnightBSD 0.8 operating system. Based on the latest BSD and FreeBSD technologies, this update brings you the latest software updates and under-the-hood improvements.

• MidnightBSD 0.8 is here eleven months after the release of MidnightBSD 0.7, and five months after the MidnightBSD 0.7.6 maintenance update. It’s a major milestone that switches the system compilers from GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 4.2 to LLVM/Clang 3.3, uses the libdispatch library in the package manager, and fixes bugs for the mports framework.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Public Services/Government

• Yesterday Kathryn Ryan interviewed Eric Hysen, the head of U.S. Digital Service at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) about his organisation’s efforts to streamline and improve government IT projects. Hysen, formerly a Silicon Valley tech guru at Google discusses how DHS is partnering top private sector tech expertise with innovators inside government to transform critical government services. This approach is part of a fundamental shift in thinking in the US that seeks to tackle Government services delivery problems through more open source and human centred design approaches. The interview is available here:

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• The Slovakian Public Procurement Office (PPO) has published its Public Procurement Bulletin in an open XML format, making all announcements of public procurement, including editorial corrections, available for download and (automated) processing.

• Over the last five years, more than 1200 datasets have been published on the open data portal of Greater Helsinki, comprising the Finnish cities of Helsinki, Vantaa, Espoo and Kauniainen. According to the City of Helsinki, just opening up the data has resulted in 1-2 percent savings. “Making lots of our city purchase data public has opened up a new view for citizens into city administration, and it increases people’s trust toward the city and its officials,” said Tanja Lahti, the project manager for the Helsinki Region Infoshare (HRI) service.

• Publishing government data online can improve accountability and transparency not only of national governments, but also of parliaments and the judiciary. Consequently, open data will play an important role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were adopted in 2015 by the United Nations with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development [1, 2]. “With growing access to social media, an increasing number of countries now proactively use networking opportunities to engage with people and evolve towards participatory decision-making. This is done through open data, online consultations, and multiple ICT-related channels.”

Programming/Development

• I was searching for a language to write the phone GUI with… python3+gtk3 is way too slow; 9 seconds for trivial application is a bit too much (on N900). python2+gtk2 is a lot better at 2 seconds. Lua should be even faster.

Leftovers

Hardware

Health/Nutrition

• A last-ditch effort to prevent yellow fever spreading through Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and potentially developing into a global epidemic is to be launched using vaccines containing a fifth of the normal dose because the global stockpile is so low.

• Yellow fever is frequently lethal, killing half of those who develop severe symptoms. It is transmitted by the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is also responsible for the spread of Zika virus. There is a vaccine which protects people for life, but few adults had been immunised in Angola when yellow fever broke out there in December last year, and in the DRC, to where it has spread.

• If it takes hold in Kinshasa, a densely packed city of more than 10 million people, it is feared that infected mosquitoes could travel beyond the central African region, which has been experiencing so severe an outbreak that vaccine stocks are almost exhausted.

Security

• Security issues that companies need to pay attention to include container technology, data loss prevention, regulatory compliance and skills development

• Someone has generated a host of dodgy PGP keys, and by abusing the inherent weakness in the short identifying code attached to each, has made the keys appear to belong to a series of high profile individuals in the security community.

• This means that someone trying to communicate with these people, which include developers of the Tor anonymity software, may accidentally use the wrong key, leaving messages potentially open to snooping. Or, at best, recipients will simply not be able to decrypt some of the messages they receive. Many of the keys appear to relate to a 2014 research project, but their reemergence highlights a lingering security concern with PGP, which stands for “pretty good privacy”.

• Back from the future! While working on this release I noticed something is wrong with the dates in the changelog and in the last two blog posts. They were one month ahead. It’s always good to know that one has more time to do stuff that previously thought.

• Security pro Mark Lachniet has stamped himself as a p0wnball wizard by cracking a commercial pinball machine.

• Lachniet, who goes by the handle “Bede”, was able to crack a pinball titled The Hobbit.

• Detailed here, the hack saw Bede find his way inside the Jersey Jack production. Inside he found a Celeron-powered PC running Ubuntu 15.10.

Defence/Aggression

• For hours throughout the assault, the U.N. peacekeeping force stationed less than a mile away refused to respond to desperate calls for help. Neither did embassies, including the U.S. Embassy.

• The Associated Press interviewed by phone eight survivors, both male and female, including three who said they were raped. The other five said they were beaten; one was shot. Most insisted on anonymity for their safety or to protect their organizations still operating in South Sudan.

• The accounts highlight, in raw detail, the failure of the U.N. peacekeeping force to uphold its core mandate of protecting civilians, notably those just a few minutes’ drive away. The Associated Press previously reported that U.N. peacekeepers in Juba did not stop the rapes of local women by soldiers outside the U.N.’s main camp last month.

• The attack on the Terrain hotel complex shows the hostility toward foreigners and aid workers by troops under the command of South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir, who has been fighting supporters of rebel leader Riek Machar since civil war erupted in December 2013. Both sides have been accused of abuses. The U.N. recently passed a U.S.-sponsored resolution to send more peacekeeping troops to protect civilians.

• Army spokesman Lul Ruai did not deny the attack at the Terrain but said it was premature to conclude the army was responsible. “Everyone is armed, and everyone has access to uniforms and we have people from other organized forces, but it was definitely done by people of South Sudan and by armed people of Juba,” he said.

• A report on the incident compiled by the Terrain’s owner at Ruai’s request, seen by the AP, alleges the rapes of at least five women, torture, mock executions, beatings and looting. An unknown number of South Sudanese women were also assaulted.

• The attack came just as people in Juba were thinking the worst was over.

• Three days earlier, gunfire had erupted outside the presidential compound between armed supporters of the two sides in South Sudan’s civil war, at the time pushed together under an uneasy peace deal. The violence quickly spread across the city.

• Throughout the weekend, bullets whizzed through the Terrain compound, a sprawling complex with a pool, squash court and a bar patronized by expats and South Sudanese elites. It is also in the shadow of the U.N.’s largest camp in Juba.

• By Monday, the government had nearly defeated the forces under Machar, who fled the city. As both sides prepared to call for a cease-fire, some residents of the Terrain started to relax.

• “Monday was relatively chill,” one survivor said.

• What was thought to be celebratory gunfire was heard. And then the soldiers arrived. A Terrain staffer from Uganda said he saw between 80 and 100 men pour into the compound after breaking open the gate with gunshots and tire irons. The Terrain’s security guards were armed only with shotguns and were vastly outnumbered. The soldiers then went to door to door, taking money, phones, laptops and car keys.

• “They were very excited, very drunk, under the influence of something, almost a mad state, walking around shooting off rounds inside the rooms,” one American said.

• In 2014, ProPublica published an investigation of USA Discounters, a subprime lender that, contrary to its name, specialized in enticing military service members into overpaying for furniture, electronics and appliances. When they fell behind on the high-interest loans, the company often took them to court in Virginia — a few miles from the company’s headquarters, but often nowhere near where the service members were based. With court judgments in hand, the company gained the power to seize money from soldiers’ paychecks or bank accounts.

• The interventionist temptation, muted since the Iraq imbroglio, is now returning. Sec. Clinton’s team are already talking about taking steps to remove Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad from office as soon as they get into the White House. An excellent and principled NYT columnist called the non-intervention in Syria President Obama’s worst mistake.

• In Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the Democratic Party seems to have found the perfect counter to Donald Trump. Since Trump proposed banning Muslims from the US, his campaign has sought to exploit the fear that Muslims are dangerous and disloyal. But who could think that of the patriotic, constitution-waving Khans, whose son died fighting for the US?

• Trump suggested that Ghazala Khan did not speak for Islamic reasons. But this backfired and the episode appears to have hurt him in the polls. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has been able to establish herself as the candidate of tolerance and liberal progress.

• But take a closer look and things are not that straightforward. It is easy to lose sight of why the Khans lost their son in the first place. Humayun Khan died fighting in the illegal war in Iraq, which was launched on the basis of Islamophobic lies, and supported by Hillary Clinton, as senator for New York.

• In 2011, Clinton was a leading figure pushing for military action in Libya. She initially presented the bombing campaign as a way to create a no-fly zone to protect civilians. Within three weeks, the real aim became apparent: regime change.

• Germain Katanga, a warlord convicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for murder and other crimes, thought he was getting released from prison in January. But he was wrong. He had been found guilty by the ICC on charges linked to a 2003 attack on the village of Bogoro, in the eastern province of Ituri of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – and had served the end of his 12-year sentence in a Kinshasa jail, at his own request.

• The enemy could not have chosen a worse time to turn up. On the eve of a major international sporting event, Brazil was simultaneously living through profound economic and political crises. With the country at its weakest moment and fears spreading rapidly, the bombshell dropped: A secret service report leaked to the press revealed that a group of Brazilian citizens, in collusion with foreign agents, planned to arm themselves in order to commit acts of violence and thus further destabilize the country.

• That was 30 years ago, in the first year of the post-dictatorship era. The event was the 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico. In Brazil, President José Sarney’s government was a disaster, and the cumulative inflation would reach 65 percent that year. The dangerous enemy rehearsing the moves to plunge the country into chaos? According to the secret service, which at the time was known as the National Information Service (Serviço Nacional de Informações, or SNI), the threat was the return of guerrilla warfare, funded by foreign agents, principally from Germany, but also involving the left-leaning opposition Workers’ Party and the trade union federation Unified Workers’ Central. Of course, the threat was just a delusion. It was fabricated by the SNI to warrant the criminalization of social movements and help stop the construction of a left-wing political project, but not only that. The creation of a dangerous enemy right at the beginning of the democratic transition justified the existence of an entity that had become the symbol of the dictatorship.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Two big issues dogged Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary: the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP) and fracking. She had a long history of supporting both.

• Under fire from Bernie Sanders, she came out against the TPP and took a more critical position on fracking. But critics wondered if this was a sincere conversion or simply campaign rhetoric.

• Now, in two of the most significant personnel moves she will ever make, she has signaled a lack of sincerity.

• She chose as her vice presidential running mate Tim Kaine, who voted to authorize fast-track powers for the TPP and praised the agreement just two days before he was chosen.

• And now she has named former Colorado Democratic Senator and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to be the chair of her presidential transition team — the group tasked with helping set up the new administration should she win in November. That includes identifying, selecting, and vetting candidates for over 4,000 presidential appointments.

• Clinton has also faced questions from environmentalists about her record on pipeline construction, hydraulic fracking and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Salazar’s appointment will not allay those concerns: Since leaving government, he has made headlines promoting the Keystone XL pipeline, promoting the TPP and defending fracking.

• In November, Salazar authored a joint oped with former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt saying “The TPP is a strong trade deal that will level the playing field for workers to help middle-class families get ahead. It is also the greenest trade deal ever.” Politico reports that Salazar is now opposing a ballot measure designed to restrict fracking in his home state of Colorado. He has previously asserted that “there’s not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone.”

• The world’s biggest offshore windfarm off the Yorkshire coast is to be expanded to an area five times the size of Hull after being approved by ministers.

• The multibillion-pound Hornsea Project Two would see 300 turbines – each taller than the Gherkin – span more than 480 sq km in the North Sea.

• Fifty-five miles off the coast of Grimsby, the project by Denmark’s Dong Energy is expected to deliver 1,800MW of low-CO2 electricity to 1.8m UK homes.

• ‘Decoupling of global emissions and economic growth confirmed’ ran the headline on the International Energy Agency (IEA) website in March 2016. “Coming just a few months after the landmark COP21 agreement in Paris, this is yet another boost to the global fight against climate change”, noted IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. It’s a popular idea that the decoupling of economic growth and carbon emission represents ‘green growth’ or ‘sustainable growth’, and that this is a powerful tool in the fight against dangerous levels of climate change. The idea was further pushed in a 2014 report co-authored by prominent economist Lord Stern, and backed by the United Nations, the OECD, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Finance

• Wouldn’t it be great if you could refuse to pay your taxes until you decided your tax rate was “fair”?

• That is, of course, not the way it works. Unless you’re Apple.

• Apple is currently holding $181 billion overseas, largely thanks to arbitrarily deciding that its most valuable intellectual property seems to live exclusively in low tax countries. For instance, at one time Apple’s subsidiaries in Ireland — a country with 4.6 million people — “earned” over one-third of all Apple’s worldwide revenue.

• And due to a very business-friendly quirk in U.S. tax law, Apple doesn’t have to pay any U.S. taxes on its overseas profits until it “brings them back” to America.

• Cisco Systems is reportedly planning to lay off about 14,000 employees, representing nearly 20% of the US technology company’s global workforce.

• San Jose, California-based Cisco was expected to announce the cuts within the next few weeks as part of a transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric business, technology news site CRN reported, citing sources close to the company.

• Cisco, which had more than 70,000 employees as of 30 April, declined to comment.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on Monday ramped up her attacks on Hillary Clinton for using a private email system while serving as the nation’s top diplomat and maintaining a fuzzy boundary between her official and private duties.

• In an interview with CNN, Stein appeared to reiterate her call for the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton for mishandling government secrets, and also joined in the attacks on her relationship with the Clinton Foundation.

• “I think there should have been a full investigation,” Stein said. “I think the American people are owed an explanation for what happened, and why top secret information was put at risk, why the identity of secret agents were potentially put at risk.”

• “There is much more that is coming to public attention about Hillary Clinton’s behavior, including the recent revelations about favors bestowed on the Clinton Foundation’s donors who got special deals, who got state partnerships,” she added, in a reference to recently released emails suggesting blurred lines between Clinton’s position as secretary of State and her vast personal and philanthropic connections.

• “If she wasn’t aware that she was violating State Department rules, it raises real issues about her competency.”

• Stein has previously criticized the Justice Department’s decision not to indict Clinton or her senior aides for the email set-up, a move that she said gave the Democratic presidential nominee “a pass.”

• A group tied to billionaire Charles Koch has unleashed an aggressive campaign to kill a ballot measure in South Dakota that would require Koch-affiliated groups and others like them to reveal their donors’ identities — part of a sustained effort by his powerful network to keep government agencies and the public from learning more about its financial backers.

• Americans for Prosperity, the largest activist group in the policy and political empire founded by industrialist Koch and his brother, David, launched a coalition this year to fight Initiated Measure 22, which calls for public disclosure of donors who fund advocacy efforts, the creation of a state ethics commission and public financing of political campaigns. It also limits lobbyists’ gifts to elected officials and lowers the amount of campaign contributions to candidates, parties and political action committees.

• Run by Party Elites and Lobbyists, Sponsored by Corporations

• In 1988, the CPD wrested the stewardship of general election presidential debates away from the fiercely independent League of Women Voters (LWV), which had run the events from 1976 to 1984.

• The CPD is nominally a nonpartisan organization, but its co-chairmen, Frank Fahrenkopf, Jr., and Michael McCurry, are senior Republican and Democratic Party figures, both of whom leveraged their time in politics to later work for corporate interests.

• Fahrenkopf chaired the Republican National Committee for six years before joining the Washington, D.C., law and lobbying firm Hogan & Hartson. From 1998 to 2013, he was the president of the American Gaming Association, a lobbying group for for-profit gambling interests.

• McCurry is a former Clinton White House press secretary who today works for the D.C.-based corporate and political communications firm Public Strategies Washington. Although his current client list is not public, he was employed on the “Hands Off Internet” campaign in 2006, working for telecommunications companies to kill net neutrality.

• The commission’s board of directors is composed of an entire strata of America’s elites including Howard G. Buffett, the son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, Newton N. Minow, a former chairman of Citigroup and Time Warner — and Jim Lehrer.

• The debates themselves are consistently sponsored by private corporations. This year’s sponsors have yet to be announced, but in the past, they have included AT&T, Anheuser-Busch, Southwest Airlines, J.P. Morgan, Ford Motor Company, and the Washington, D.C., international law firm Crowell & Moring.

• The CPD has not included a third-party candidate in a presidential debate since Ross Perot ran in 1992. Since 2000, its rules state that only candidates who consistently poll over 15 percent in national polls should be included.

• Donald Trump says he is running for presidency against the crooked media. What should be the media response?

Censorship/Free Speech

• Wang Yanjun, who was ousted as deputy editor of Yanhuang Chunqiu, with the latest issue of the journal on Tuesday, which still shows his name and that of other editors removed by its new managers.

• As a former Soviet republic, Azerbaijan has never had a strong record on press freedom. Since independence, the country’s journalists have been mistreated, while independent and opposition newspapers faced constant libel charges and other harassment from local law enforcement or criminal elements.

• Journalists and outlets that support government policies are left alone to fill their pages with praise, while those who take a more critical approach are punished. Official court documents detail how journalists have been sent to prison on trumped-up charges of hooliganism, extortion, trafficking, and instigating mass protests and violence.

• In practice, however, targeted journalists reported on official corruption, criticised extravagant government spending or documented illegal evictions. While the country’s leaders and key decision makers pay lip service to media freedom, the government continues to hunt down journalists, activists and human rights defenders.

• It’s been really unfortunate to see various internet companies that absolutely should know better, look to abuse the CFAA to attack people using tools to scrape public information off of their websites. In the past few years, we’ve seen Facebook and Craigslist do this (with Facebook recently winning in court).

• Now LinkedIn is doing the same thing, suing a bunch of anonymous users for scraping public information from LinkedIn. This is not the first time the company has done this. A few years ago, the company (using the exact same lawyers) filed a very similar lawsuit, eventually figuring out that the scraping was done by a wannabe competitor, HiringSolved, which pretty quickly settled the lawsuit, agreeing to pay $40,000 and erase all the data it collected.

• We’ve already made it quite clear where we stand on Peter Thiel financing a number of lawsuits against Gawker Media as some sort of retaliation for some articles he didn’t like. Lots of people who really hate Gawker don’t seem to care how problematic Thiel’s actions are, but you should be concerned, even if you dislike Gawker — in part, because many of the lawsuits Thiel appears to be backing are clearly bogus and just designed to bankrupt the company, which happened a couple months ago.

• This week is the auction to see who ends up with Gawker, and Thiel is taking a weird victory lap with a silly and misleading oped in the NY Times where he argues that this was really all about making a stand for privacy and has nothing to do with shitting on the First Amendment. There’s a lot in the article that’s bullshit, and it deserves a thorough debunking, so here we go.

• First off, positioning himself as a champion of privacy seems laughable. After all, this is the guy who put the first money into both Palantir and Facebook. Palantir, of course, is the datamining operation used by governments and law enforcement around the globe to snoop through various databases and try to find magical connections. Palantir is rumored to be in trouble lately, in part because its technology isn’t that good, and it may have built a multi-billion dollar business on convincing clueless government officials that by sniffing through a variety of databases, it could magically find important “connections.” But

• Over the past few days, researchers have pored over dumped data allegedly belonging to a group associated with the NSA. The data, which contains a number of working exploits, was distributed via Dropbox, MEGA, and other file sharing platforms.

• The files were also linked to from a page on Github, but the company removed it fairly swiftly—despite having hosted plenty of hacked material in the past. It turns out that removal was not due to government pressure, but because the hacker or hackers behind the supposed breach were asking for cash to release more data.

• “Per our Terms of Service (section A8), we do not allow the auction or sale of stolen property on GitHub. As such, we have removed the repository in question,” Kate Guarente, from Github’s communications team, told Motherboard in a statement.

• In June 2016, hacker Guccifer 2.0 released a trove of internal Democratic National Committee documents, which pointed to DNC staff violating its own charter in treating Hillary Clinton as the nominee long before the primaries even began.

• Included in the documents was a DNC dossier of possible attacks from Republican presidential candidates on Clinton, outlining counterpoints to their arguments in preparation for Clinton’s coronation as the Democratic nominee. The documents unquestionably prove the DNC violated their own charter and undermined democracy by strategizing for Clinton to win the Democratic primaries and general election.

• One of those strategies included manipulating media coverage for her benefit.

• “Use specific hits to muddy the water around ethics, transparency, and campaign finance attacks on HRC,” noted one of the leaked memos. In July, Guccifer 2.0 released additional documents to The Hill, including a DNC memo from March 2015 to Clinton campaign operatives outlining ways to legally solicit Clinton’s SuperPACs. The DNC made no efforts to dispute the content of the leaked documents. Instead, they offered a vague statement saying they were taken and leaked by suspected Russians hackers.

• On August 12, Guccifer 2.0 released more documents, which included congressional contact lists and passwords. This leak likely served to make public that the recent hacks of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee were committed by Guccifer 2.0.

• The Polish government has approved a new bill that foresees prison terms of up to three years for anyone who uses phrases like “Polish death camps” to refer to Auschwitz and other camps that Nazi Germany operated in occupied Poland during the second world war.

• He said, “I see Nigerian journalists pretending to be oblivious of the devastating role that the media has played in major conflicts on the continent. For instance, the case of the role of the press in triggering the Rwandan Genocide is instructive for Nigeria as we are increasingly polarized and divided along the ethnic lines with the press fanning the embers of division and separation.

• “The immediate concern for me is for the press not to be used as a wedge for separating us, but for the press to be an adhesive for bridging the gaps.”

• A group of popular Facebook meme pages have launched a revolt against Facebook’s increasingly strict and bizarre censorship.

• The revolt, which includes some of Facebook’s biggest comedy pages, aims to catch Facebook’s attention in a show of dissatisfaction with the social network’s current policy enforcement system.

• “I have gone through a lot of post blocks and seen a lot of friends getting into issues with losing their accounts or pages even over the most inoffensive posts like this picture of Drake as a n64 controller that got my post blocked,” said one of the revolt’s organizers, Devin Shire, in an interview with Breitbart Tech.

• Index strongly condemns the indefinite closure of newspaper Özgür Gündem by a Turkish court.

• The silencing — even temporarily — of one of Turkey’s last independent papers underscores the severe erosion of freedom of expression in the country. This crackdown on critical voices has accelerated since the attempt to overthrow the country’s democratically elected and increasingly autocratic president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

• “Waves of arrests rippling across the country have swept up journalists, academics and even artists and are rightly raising concerns around the world. This latest attack on media freedom sends a clear signal that president Erdogan is intent on playing politics with the public’s right to information and journalists’ right to report,” Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg said.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The National Security Agency’s website was offline for almost a full day until Tuesday evening, in an unexplained outage that began shortly after hackers claimed to have stolen a collection of the agency’s prized cyber weapons.

• China’s consumers are a prized bunch: Where they go, payments providers follow. This summer, that means they’re all going to Europe.

• Alipay, the payments platform owned by Alibaba spinoff Ant Financial, began offering its service in Europe this summer. To be clear, it’s aimed squarely at Chinese tourists visiting the continent. They’ll be able to pay for their shopping using the Alipay app at merchants who have signed onto the platform. European customers looking for a new payments channel will just have to wait. “In China, in most cities, you don’t really need to carry cash or a wallet anymore,” says Rita Liu, the Ant Financial executive in charge of Alipay’s European roll-out. “You can use Alipay in restaurants, shops, everywhere.”

• When director Oliver Stone called and asked him to play the lead in a movie about Edward Snowden, who exposed massive government surveillance programs, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was excited and nervous.

• Not because he was playing a man some have called a hero and others have labeled a traitor. He admits he didn’t really understand the controversy surrounding Snowden.

• “I was just flattered and honored because I grew up loving Oliver Stone movies,” says Gordon-Levitt, a boyish-looking 35-year-old who asks everyone to call him “Joe.” “But then I was like, ‘Man you know, the truth is I don’t really know that much about Edward Snowden…’ I looked into it, and one of the first things I noticed is everyone tries to simplify it, but it’s not simple. It’s just not simple.”

• Sure, it’s speculation, but it’s pretty informed speculation and it makes a lot of sense. There’s still plenty of talk about what to do about the DNC hack, and we’ve talked about “cybersecurity firms” (who profit from FUD and scare stories) arguing that we should “declare cyberwar” on Russia based on loose attribution. But, as Snowden notes, this hack and partial release could very well be a warning shot that escalation won’t end up looking good for the US if they go that route.

• This secretive group of hackers, branded as “one of the most sophisticated cyberattack groups in the world” by security experts at Kaspersky Lab, then released one file as proof of legitimacy and another that would be ‘auctioned’ off for a massive 1m bitcoin – equivalent to over $550m.

• On Monday, Motherboard reported that a hacker or group of hackers called “The Shadow Brokers” had dumped what it claimed was a cache of NSA hacking tools. In the wake of that rather extraordinary claim, the security community has feverishly compared notes, largely on Twitter, to try to figure out whether the data is legitimate, and what exactly the collection of files contains.

• One of those researchers was Matt Suiche, the CEO of UAE-based cybersecurity company Comae. In his analysis, he used the Github API to find an email address linked to one of the accounts that published the data. If law enforcement were to dig into this case, then that email account is likely of interest to investigators: perhaps they could find out more about the user’s identity, or their location.

• Earlier this month Comcast told the FCC that the cable company wanted to be able to charge broadband customers a premium for privacy, and that blocking the ISP from doing so would hurt broadband adoption, raise broadband prices, and harm consumers. While Comcast was justly mocked for this position, many didn’t realize that this is something AT&T has been doing for years, the ISP charging its U-Verse broadband customers $30 to $50 more every month if they want to opt out of “AT&T Preferences,” a deep packet inspection snoopvertising service that tracks user behavior all around the Internet.

• Prompted by Verizon’s use of stealth tracking technology and this new troubling plan to make privacy a luxury option for consumers, the FCC has been cooking up some new, relatively basic broadband privacy protections. To derail these plans, AT&T and Comcast have turned to what I affectionately refer to as fauxcademia, or industry-funded think tanks specifically designed to pee in the public discourse pool influence regulatory policy under the guise of objective science.

• The University of Melbourne has moved to allay privacy concerns amid revelations it is tracking students through their wi-fi usage.

• The university said the practice, which looked at where people were moving around campus, helped institutions improve retention rates and the experience of students.

• One of the many revelations from the Snowden files was that Canada’s spy agency has been tracking people as they connect to WiFi in different public locations. And if Canada is doing it, you can be pretty sure the NSA and GCHQ are doing the same, since neither is known for being backward in using whatever means it can to snoop on huge numbers of people. Of course, you’d expect spy agencies to be up to these kinds of tricks, and you might also be unsurprised to learn that shops are also tracking you using your WiFi connection.

• At first sight it looks like the GCHQ website has been hacked.

• Or is it some obscure code to test visitors? Or some technical malfunction?

• However, it quickly becomes clear that some letters have been removed.

• It is part of a new campaign from the Cheltenham-based communications based.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The unprecedented deployment of a bomb-defusing robot by Dallas police to kill an armed suspect raised several questions. While these robots have sometimes acted as part of a negotiation team in the past, no police department had previously rigged one up with an explosive device to take a suspect out.

• One question that remains unanswered is whether this use of the Dallas PD’s robot violated its own policies. Gawker’s Andy Cush filed a public records request for PD policies on using robots to kill and discovered Dallas law enforcement was basically making things up as it went along.

• Amid a deep political crisis in Brasil, the goal is to develop a collaborative, pedagogical, supra-partisan and effective format of civic campaign for elections to be replicated and improved on future occasions.

• Official German State TV and State Radio reported that “a handful of right wing extremists” have attacked the president and disturbed the otherwise peaceful and welcoming reception of the President. This is simply not the case, as seen in the video…

• The attorney alleges troopers didn’t offer medical attention because they were preoccupied with suspicions that Galloway had illegal drugs.

• The wife of former CIA officer and whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling says she’s concerned about the health of her husband, who was sentenced last year to serve three years in a Colorado prison.

• Sterling was convicted of espionage for leaking information to a journalist about a dubious U.S. government operation meant to deter Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He says he didn’t do anything wrong. The prosecution came as part of President Barack Obama’s crackdown on government leaks.

• Sterling is set for release in 2018. But his wife, Holly Sterling, told The Colorado Independent by phone from St. Louis, Missouri, that she worries health issues he’s having in prison might mean she’ll never see him on the outside again.

• “I’m concerned my husband may die,” she said. “I’m extremely concerned.”

• In the past few months, Jeffrey Sterling, 49, who says he has a history of atrial fibrillation, has been “subjected to unresponsive and dismissive medical care” at the Colorado federal correctional institution known as FCI Englewood, according to an Aug. 11 complaint he filed. Holly Sterling provided a copy of the complaint to The Independent.

• An interesting decision by a federal judge in Florida suggests this district, at least, may not be amenable to the warrantless use of Stingray devices… or any other method that harvests cell site location data in real time.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Twenty-five years ago on August 6 1991, the first publicly available website was launched and the World Wide Web (WWW) was born.

• It was created by the now internationally known Sir Tim Berners-Lee who, just eight months earlier, first posted the simple text page on an internal web server hosted by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

• In the 1980’s, Berners-Lee had been looking at a way for physicists to share information around the world without all using the same types of hardware and software.

• When Google Fiber jumped into the broadband market in 2011, the company knew full well that disruption of an entrenched telecom monopoly would be a slow, expensive, monumental task. And five years into the project that’s certainly been true, the majority of Google Fiber launch markets still very much under construction as the company gets to work burying fiber across more than a dozen looming markets. Wall Street, which initially laughed at the project as an experiment, has been taking the project more seriously as Google Fiber targets sprawling markets like Atlanta, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

• This week however things took an interesting turn with the news that Google Fiber was pausing deployments in Silicon Valley and Portland, Oregon, to take stock of possible wireless alternatives. Neither deployment was formally official (both cities were listed as “potential” targets); and Google Fiber execs are simply considering whether or not it makes financial sense to begin using some fifth generation (5G) technologies to supplement existing fiber deployment.

• This isn’t really surprising; Under the guidance of former Atheros CEO Craig Barratt, Google has filed applications with the FCC to conduct trials in the 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz millimeter wave bands, and is also conducting a variety of different tests in the 3.5 GHz band, the 5.8 GHz band and the 24 GHz band. The company also recently acquired Webpass in the hopes of supplementing fiber with ultra-fast wireless wherever possible. Wireless has been on Google’s radar for several years. It’s a great option in cities where construction logistics are a nightmare, or in towns where AT&T’s using regulations to hinder fiber deployment.

DRM

• Issues arising from the often-controversial US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prompted the Electronic Frontier Foundation to head to court in recent weeks to address what it sees as violations of free speech and the right to freely use copyrighted content in some instances.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Collective management organisations (CMOs) in African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) member states, and Africa at large, have the potential to contribute to the growth and development of creative industries. However, they need to be supported, guided and supervised to ensure that they achieve the purpose for which they are established.

• Needless to say, lawyers are now involved in resolving the more mundane issues of ownership of the Blue Zone blood samples. But even if a court hands down its judgment for this particular case, the larger ethical issues will remain, and become ever-more pressing as the importance and value of DNA databases continues to rise.

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