● 08.25.16

● Links 25/8/2016: Linux Turns 25, NetworkManager Turns 1.4

Posted in News Roundup at 11:39 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• Immediately after announcing the release of Linux kernel 3.2.82 LTS, maintainer Ben Hutchings proudly informed the community about the availability of the thirty-seventh maintenance update to the Linux 3.16 LTS kernel series.

• In 1998, while out in California, I received a press notification for what looked to be an unusually compelling panel at an annual conference of internet service providers (be still, my geek heart) in San Jose.

• The chief executive of Red Hat, a little company offering a supported version of the operating system Linux, was to make an announcement. Also on the panel were a top executive from Intel and one from Netscape, internet pioneer Marc Andreessen’s company which, at the time, offered the most popular internet browser.

• The panel would also include the Finn Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, which turns a mature 25 this month. Torvalds was, and remains, a geek superstar guaranteed to draw adulatory crowds of programmers and system administrators. He was not a person one expected to see seated in an on-stage semi-circle with companies such as Intel and Netscape.

• From its obscure origins to its present primacy, Linux is now old enough to rent a car without having to pay extra for insurance. It has also been described as the “the greatest shared technology asset in history,” and it’s the chassis upon which a sizeable proportion of all the software on the planet is built. Here’s a quick look back at Linux’s history.

• Today marks 25 years since Linus Torvalds sent out his industry-changing message, asking for help testing a new operating system he had devised.

• On 25 August, 1991, he wrote: “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).”

• While Linux may not be the first operating system you think of, it is one of the most significant computing platforms ever developed. Linux powers everything from the world’s largest supercomputers to Android phones. Today, it turns 25 years old.

• Linux is now a quarter-century old. August 25, 2016 marks 25 years since the day Linus Torvalds posted a message announcing Linux to the world. “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu),” he wrote.

• Since then, Linux has taken the world by storm, powering millions of servers, a countless number of embedded devices, and most of the smartphones in the world—by way of Android.

• As you might expect, this week’s LinuxCon and ContainerCon 2016, held in Toronto, is heavy on the benefits and pitfalls of deploying containers, but several vendors aim to come to the rescue with flexible tools to manage it all.

• Take Datadog, a New York-based company that offers scalable monitoring of your containerized infrastructure—and just about everything else—from a single interface. This is an off-premise, cloud-based tool that can monitor tens of thousands of your hosts and integrate with stuff you already know, like AWS, Cassandra, Docker, Kubernetes, Postgre and 150 other tools.

• Linux turns 25 today. That’s four years older than Linus was when he invented it. That means Linus has spent more of his life with Linux than he did without it

• It has been more than a decade since CPU core clock frequencies stopped doubling every 18 months, which has shifted the search for performance from the “hardware free lunch” to concurrency and, more recently, hardware accelerators. Beyond accelerating computational offload, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and programmable logic devices (PLDs) have long been used in the embedded space to provide ways to offload I/O or to implement timing-sensitive algorithms as close as possible to the pin.

• Aug. 25 marks the 25th anniversary of Linux, the free and open source operating system that’s used around the globe in smarphones, tablets, desktop PCs, servers, supercomputers, and more. Though its beginnings were humble, Linux has become the world’s largest and most pervasive open source software project in history. How did it get here? Read on for a look at some of the notable events along the way.

• Happy birthday Linux. You’ve defined how we should be using and adoption technology. You’ve disrupted and continue to disrupt, industries all over the place. You’ve helped define what it means to share ideas openly and freely. You’ve shown what happens when we collaborate and work together. Free and Open Source is a win-win for all and Linux is the Gold Standard of that.

• You’d be forgiven for thinking Microsoft is actively trying to stop people using Windows 10 Anniversary Edition. A patch this week broke one of the key features of the OS: PowerShell.

• I walked into an apartment in Boston on a sunny day in June 1995. It was small and bohemian, with the normal detritus a pair of young men would scatter here and there. On the kitchen table was a 15-inch CRT display married to a fat, coverless PC case sitting on its side, network cables streaking back to a hub in the living room. The screen displayed a mess of data, the contents of some logfile, and sitting at the bottom was a Bash root prompt decorated in red and blue, the cursor blinking lazily.

• I was no stranger to Unix, having spent plenty of time on commercial Unix systems like OSF/1, HP-UX, SunOS, and the newly christened Sun Solaris. But this was different.

Graphics Stack

• The first pull request has been submitted of new Radeon and AMDGPU DRM driver updates to be queued in DRM-Next for landing with the Linux 4.9 kernel.

• To look forward to Linux 4.9 even though Linux 4.8 is still weeks from being released is PowerPlay support for Iceland GPUs, improved GPU reset, UVD and VCE power-gating for Carrizo and Stoney, support for pre-initialized vRAM buffers, TTM clean-ups, virtual display support, and other low-level changes. Many bug fixes also present.

• The AMDGPU virtual display support is useful and we have been looking forward to it. GPU reset improvements are also welcome for better recovery when the GPU becomes hung. As is the case lately, most of these changes are focused around the newer AMDGPU DRM driver over the mature Radeon DRM code.

• For those running Intel Haswell processors, hope is not lost in seeing new versions of OpenGL extensions with the Intel Mesa driver.

Applications

• Today, August 24, 2016, Lubomir Rintel released the final build of the NetworkManager 1.4 open-source network connection manager software used by default in almost all GNU/Linux distributions.

• After we released version 1.0 of NetworkManager, it took us sixteen months to reach the 1.2 milestone. This means that it took over a year for some newly added features to reach the user base. Now we are releasing the next major release after just four months.

• GNOME Music 3.22 is on its way, as well as the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, due for release next month on September 21, and it looks like we’re now able to get an early taste of what’s coming in GNOME’s default music playback app.

• GNOME Music 3.22 Beta has been released, distributed as part of the first Beta development milestone of the upcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, and it promises to offer better sorting of tracks in the Artists and Albums views, a “new playlist” entry to the Playlist dialog, and new keyboard shortcuts.

• bitmath is a Python module I wrote which simplifies many facets of interacting with file sizes in various units as python objects. A few weeks ago version 1.3.1 was released with a few small updates.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Agenda, a strategy simulation from Exordium Games where players control an evil organization seeking world domination, will come to Windows, Mac, and Linux on Sept. 21st, 2016.

• Players will direct covert operations to increase their control over countries’ economies, political parties, militaries, science institutions and media outlets. Operations will entail everything from low key kickbacks to military leaders to the brazen assassination of political rivals.

• Guild Software announced the release of a new maintenance update for their popular and cross-platform Vendetta Online MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) 3D space combat title.

• According to the release notes, Vendetta Online 1.8.385 is an important milestone, and it’s here to drastically improve the chat and effect delays reported by users during larger capship battles by implementing a new dynamic server packet-queuing and priority change system, which was tested internally with 200 close-proximity capships per battle.

• This is quite sad, it seems we have been left wondering for a while (years) about Subnautica, but a developer has now confirmed a Linux version is not being worked on.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• After being in development for the past two years, the open-source KDevelop IDE (Integrated Development Environment) software has finally reached the 5.0 milestone.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Nautilus from master, updated everyday, parallel installable, in less than 3 minutes. I cannot believe this is possible. Note that due to be sandboxed with no permission handling there are things that are not working, like opening with an application.

• For someone not aware of the whole platform and the Linux desktop, it’s difficult to see how many implications this bring to us and the changes that will allow in the upcoming months. This truly changes the game for GNOME (and any other desktop) as a project and platform, including 3rd party developers and companies using Linux desktops or that want to support it.

• I got a chance to attend GUADEC’16 which happened in Karlsruhe, Germany from 11 – 17 August. I stayed for the whole duration including Workshop Day, core days and the later BOF days which were very learning. I’m grateful to my mentor David Woodhouse who guided me all the time. I thank GNOME community for giving me the chance to speak at intern lightning talk and i tried my best to present my project in front of those great people. I hope to get a chance someday again to speak up. We have finished our GSoC project so i am free now to wander around to find some more places and tasks in GNOME’s huge shelter. My experience of attending GUADEC was awesome, despite being a less speaker i was very comfortable to talk and interact to people in the community. I made some new friends in the community and i came to know a lot more about it. I loved attending social events after the long day of great and motivating talks. I am thankful to the GUADEC organizers, i didn’t feel any problem for a second staying 6,000 kms away from home.

• I came back from Karlsruhe last week, where GUADEC 2016 took place.

• It was a wonderful event. Even though it was only my second GUADEC, I felt at home in this community, meeting with old and new friends.

• The topics were different but related: The Flock talk talked about how to make things better for a developer using Fedora Workstation as their development workstation, while the GUADEC talk was about the work we are doing to move Fedora to a model where the OS is immutable and separate from applications. A shared idea of the two talks is that your workstation is not your development environment environment. Installing development tools, language runtimes, and header files as part of your base operating system implies that every project you are developing wants the same development environment, and that simply is not the case.

• GUADEC has been a week full of memorable moments. As my friend Rares mentioned in his post, our newcomers group was welcomed by friendly community members right as we arrived at the hotel. For someone who has never attended a similar event before, this really helped with getting into the conference atmosphere.

• In the first couple days of the conference, I found myself meeting a lot of people that I knew from IRC. It felt really nice to finally know the person behind the internet nick. I was especially excited about getting to meet my mentor, Carlos Soriano =). In between the presentations I also took the time to prepare my own lightning talk about compressed files in Nautilus. Speaking in front of the GNOME community for the first time was a unique experience.

Distributions

New Releases

• Arne Exton informs us about the availability of a new stable build of its Puppy-derived PuppEX Linux Live CD distribution, version 160822, which is now using the latest kernel and software applications.

Slackware Family

• The LinuxCon headlines continue to dominate but, more importantly, our desktop weather apps are broken thanks to NOAA decommissioning the site. Liam Dawe looked back at 20 years of Valve and Sebastian “sebas” Kügler introduced new KDE kscreen-doctor. Slackware rolled out some updates including a rare kernel upgrade and The VAR Guy wants to hear about your first time.

Red Hat Family

• CentOS Project’s Jason Brooks is back again with some awesome news for those interested in using the CentOS Atomic Host operating system designed for running Docker containers on top of the RHEL-based CentOS Linux 7 platform.

• Open-source Linux vendor Red Hat Inc. has thrown in support for OpenStack Neutron and other new technologies with the latest release of its software virtualization package, in what looks like a bid to steal customers away from VMware Inc.’s more widely-used solution.

• Targeted at convergence, Red Hat Virtualization 4 is the first version of the platform that doesn’t include the word “enterprise,” in a move that suggests the company is hoping its virtualized stack will become the platform for convergence, rather than a server density product.

• OpenStack Neutron is the open-source networking project used by Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), which up until now has only been available as a preview. Many have criticized Neutron’s development for lagging behind the rest of OpenStack’s code base, and Red Hat was one of several vendors to concede that things could be sped up a bit. With the inclusion of the software in Red Hat Virtualization, the company says its Linux platform can be used to run both cloud-enabled and “traditional” workloads in concert.

• It’s easy for a virtual machine user to feel left out these days, what with containers dominating the discussion of how to run applications at scale. But take heart, VM fans: Red Hat hasn’t forgotten about you.

• RHV (Red Hat Virtualization) 4.0, released today, refreshes Red Hat’s open source virtualization platform with new technologies from the rest of Red Hat’s product line. It’s a twofold strategy to consolidate Red Hat’s virtualization efforts across its various products and to ramp up the company’s intention to woo VMware customers.

Fedora

• New Kernel means new set of updated lives.

• I am happy to release the F24-20160823 updated lives isos.

• Long story short, Fedora 24 came out and I’m given the taste of the same medicine: the video on the ASUS is completely busted. I was able to limp along for now by using the old kernel 4.4.6-301.fc23, but come on, this is clearly a massive regression. Think anyone is there to bisect and find the culprit? Of course not. I have to do it it myself.

• So, how did F24 ship? Well… I didn’t test beta versions, so I don’t have much ground to complain.

• Autocloud was released during the Fedora 23 cycle as a part of the Two Week Atomic Process.

• Previously, it used to listen to fedmsg for successful Koji builds. Whenever, there is a new message the AutocloudConsumer queues these message for processing. The Autocloud job service then listens to the queue, downloads the images and runs the tests using Tunir. A more detailed post about it’s release can be read here.

• During the Fedora 24 cycle things changed. There was a change on how the Fedora composes are built. Thanks to adamw for writing a detailed blogpost on what, why and how things changed.

• The purpose of our Modularity initiative is to support the building, maintaining, and shipping of modular things. So, in order to ensure these three requirements are met, we need to design a framework for building and composing the distribution.

• In terms of the framework, in general, we are concerned about the possibility of creating an exponential number of component combinations with independent lifecycles. That is, when the number of component combinations becomes too large, we will not be able to manage them. So that we don’t accidentally make our lives worse, we must limit the number of supported modules with a policy and provide infrastructure automation to reduce the amount of manual work required.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• The elementary OS developers are currently working very hard on the next major release of the Ubuntu-based distro, elementary OS 0.4 “Loki”, and they are planning on an elementary Hackfest event in Paris, France.

Devices/Embedded

• Aerotenna has launched an open source, $499 “OcPoc” drone flight controller that runs Linux on an Altera Cyclone V ARM/FPGA SoC.

• Lawrence, Kansas based Aerotenna, which bills itself as “the leading provider of innovative microwave sensors and flight control systems,” describes OcPoC (Octagonal Pilot on Chip) as a ready-to-fly, open source flight control platform. The system integrates an IMU, barometer, GPS, and a CSI-camera interface.

Phones

Android

• Xiaomi took the wraps off their latest smartphone offering, the Redmi Note 4, earlier today, and as is expected from the budget-friendly Redmi series, the device offers a premium look, specifications, and features, and more importantly, an ultra-affordable price tag.

• The Redmi Note 4 retains the premium full metal unibody construction that was introduced with its predecessor, but now comes with a brushed metal finish and chamfered edges that looks and feels even better. The design language is quite similar as well, with the Redmi Note 4 also coming with a fingerprint scanner on the back.

• Under the hood, the Redmi Note 4 comes with a 5.5-inch Full HD display that is covered with a 2.5D curved glass panel. The phone is powered by a MediaTek Helio X20 processor, that is backed by the Mali-T880MP4 GPU and 2 GB or 3 GB of RAM. 16 GB or 64 GB are the on-board storage options available, which also dictates how much RAM you get, and you also get expandable storage via microSD card to cover all your needs. Keeping everything running is a huge 4,100 mAh battery.

• Apple customers are generally a shockingly loyal bunch. The company’s high repeat customer rate can be attributed to a combination of factors that concern iPhones themselves as well as Apple’s industry-leading customer service. Dealing with Apple’s customer care department has always been a pleasure compared to dealing with rival companies, and iPhones themselves have historically been very reliable, offering a consistently smooth user experience that people love.

• Spire, the wearable that promises to help you with healthy breathing and mindfulness, was previously only available for iOS devices. But that should change with an update rolling out now.

• The seventh iteration of Android (Nougat) has finally been released by the mighty Google. If you happen to be the owner of a Nexus device, you might see this update very soon. Everyone else…you know the drill.

• So after an extended period of waiting for the update to trickle through your carrier and onto your device, what can you expect to happen to your Android device once its center has become a creamier shade of Nougat?

• Nokia is definitely coming out with a few Android smartphones later this year, but today’s Nokia has little in common with the company that ruled the mobile phone industry for years.

• For starters, the devices that will be released this year, or the next, will be made by a third-party company. Nokia won’t be manufacturing phones anymore and most likely it won’t manage the way they are sold through retailers and authorized resellers.

• Thanks in part to Samsung’s Galaxy Note lineup and Apple’s iPhone 6s Plus, large-screened phones are becoming more popular than ever. Time spent on these large phones, sometimes called “phablets,” grew by 334% year-over-year in 2015, according to data from Flurry Analytics.

• Still, few phone makers other than Samsung ssnlf have made good use of these larger devices. Google goog is hoping to change this with its newest version of Android. Called 7.0 Nougat, it notably features the ability to view apps in a split-screen mode. The software update, which Google began pushing out to certain Nexus devices this week, makes it possible for Android users to interact with more than one app simultaneously.

• Real multitasking has finally come to stock Android — and it’s about time

• Thanks in part to Samsung’s Galaxy Note lineup and Apple’s iPhone 6s Plus, large-screened phones are becoming more popular than ever. Time spent on these large phones, sometimes called “phablets,” grew by 334% year-over-year in 2015, according to data from Flurry Analytics.

• Still, few phone makers other than Samsung have made good use of these larger devices. Google is hoping to change this with its newest version of Android. Called 7.0 Nougat, it notably features the ability to view apps in a split-screen mode. The software update, which Google began pushing out to certain Nexus devices this week, makes it possible for Android users to interact with more than one app simultaneously.

• Android and iOS have been in a user-interface war for years. Who is winning really depends on who you ask, but a secret feature buried in the code for Android 8.0 Nougat shows a feature that would give Android the upper hand.

• Android Police uncovered details and screenshots of a navigation bar customizer hidden in the code for Android Nougat. It’s not currently active, as it was pulled from the code base for being “not ready,” but a tipster managed to recreate the feature and provide screenshots.

• A new version of Android is here, and it looks to be a solid, if relatively low-key, upgrade. Whenever Android 7.0 (Nougat) gets to your device, you’ll probably be happy with it.

• It also means that it’s time, once again, to see how Android has separated itself from iOS. If you’ve been thinking of pledging allegiance to a new platform, then here are some new, Nougat-y features that you won’t find on any iPhone.

• Not too long ago, the idea of smartphone encryption set off a global debate.

• Now, with the release of Android 7.0, the rise of secure messaging apps, and a public awakening on cyberspying, encrypting your chats and data is easier than ever—encryption is a now marketable selling point for the world’s tech giants—even as the political controversy heats up once more.

• A year after the 2013 Edward Snowden intelligence leaks lit a political fire around spying and privacy, the American tech giants Apple and Google added full-disk encryption to iPhones and Android devices. Police, intelligence agencies, governments, criminals, hackers, and all sorts of prying eyes around the globe would be increasingly locked out of the ubiquitous device that knows so much about us all.

• LG’s V20 is set to debut on September 6th, but mobile leaker Evan Blass has already got his hands on a high-resolution image of the Android flagship and posted it to Twitter. The image shows off a rather bland-looking smartphone with an uncluttered home screen devoid of any duplicate apps and unnecessary bloatware. What we can see from this image is LG’s commitment to the second screen concept it debuted with last year’s V10.

Free Software/Open Source

Education

• Kids are naturally curious about how things work, and with a new trend in hardware companies creating open source hardware products, it’s a great time to teach kids about electronics. But modern technology can seem too complex to even begin to understand. So where do you start?

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• In the beginning, by which we mean V7, Unix didn’t have a pager at all. That was okay; Unix wasn’t very visual in those days, partly because it was still sort of the era of the hard copy terminal. Then along came Berkeley and BSD. People at Berkeley were into CRT terminals, and so BSD Unix gave us things like vi and the first pager program, more (which showed up quite early, in 3BSD, although this isn’t as early as vi, which appears in 2BSD). Calling a pager more is a little bit odd but it’s a Unix type of name and from the beginning more prompted you with ‘–More–’ at the bottom of the screen.

• All of the Unix vendors that based their work on BSD Unix (like Sun and DEC) naturally shipped versions of more along with the rest of the BSD programs, and so more spread around the BSD side of things. However, more was by no means the best pager ever; as you might expect, it was actually a bit primitive and lacking in features. So fairly early on Mark Nudelman wrote a pager with somewhat more features and it wound up being called less as somewhat of a joke. When less was distributed via Usenet’s net.sources in 1985 it became immediately popular, as everyone could see that it was clearly nicer than more, and pretty soon it was reasonably ubiquitous on Unix machines (or at least ones that had some degree of access to stuff from Usenet). In 4.3 BSD, more itself picked up the ‘page backwards’ feature that had motived Mark Nudelman to write less, cf the 4.3BSD manpage, but this wasn’t the only attraction of less. And this is where we get into Unix fossilization.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The crowdfunding campaign for Earth-friendly EOMA68 Computing Devices project on Crowd Supply ends August 26th.

• We wrote previously about why you should support the Earth-friendly EOMA68 Computing Devices project. It’s built around devices with interchangeable parts, based on unencumbered hardware standards, and with a dedication to protecting and promoting user freedom. The project’s decision to raise funds via Crowd Supply means that you can support their work with anonymous payments, and without the use of proprietary JavaScript.

• The Google Summer of Code is about to end and it’s time for an update on the libbrandt development.

Public Services/Government

• The private sector and government departments have been urged to adopt Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to increase their efficiency and competitiveness, writes ALI TWAHA.

• FOSS is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance to suit their needs, something that is not possible with commercial software currently being used in most government departments.

• Speaking during the seventh African conference on FOSS at Speke Resort hotel in Munyoyo, ICT minister Frank Tumwebaze said government departments will gradually integrate the use of FOSS to reduce the cost of public service delivery.

• “Presently, government has been spending over $40m (Shs132bn) annually on commercial software from the like of Oracle systems and Microsoft Cooperation. [Using] FOSS will result into enormous savings that can be re-injected into other under-funded areas,” Tumwebaze said.

• A Science, Technology and Innovations driven economy may soon be a reality in Uganda if Cabinet approves a free and open software being developed.

• Speaking at the 7th Africa Conference on Open Source Software at the Commonwealth Resort in Munyonyo on Monday, Mr James Saaka, the executive director of National Information and Technology Authority Uganda, said there is a lot of registered software being used but is very costly.

• He said globally, people develop Free Open Source Software (Foss) which Uganda would emulate for national development.

• Mr Saaka said the country is in the initial stages to develop Foss, adding that the software can spur investment in research and development.

• “We see that the Proprietary software is still expensive and if we are going to develop more online services, we can’t afford but use alternative means to develop our e-government service,” Mr Saaka said.

• He also added that in Uganda, there is an advent of talent skilled in Foss and can help in innovations.

• Open Source is the best option for e-Governance. Its open nature allows constant improvements from the open source community, and when built in the correct method using firewalls, the security is protected as well. The best part of the open source for Governments is that the overall cost of building these solutions are much less than other frameworks as it is built, improved, and maintained by a strongly, connect open source community. Truly… ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• The oil and gas industry has long collected huge volumes of data, but it hasn’t always known quite what to do with it all. Often, the terabytes aren’t even stored on computer systems that readily talk to each other.

• Industry insiders are used to it, said Michael Jones, senior director of strategy at the oil and gas software maker Landmark. But it’s not OK, he said. So, about a year ago, Jones and some of his oil industry colleagues set about to fix it.

• This week, at Landmark’s Innovation Forum & Expo at the Westin hotel in northwest Houston, the company unveiled the beginnings of a collaborative its members called groundbreaking. In a move to drive technology further, faster — and, perhaps, take a bigger piece of the burgeoning big-data market — Landmark is pushing its main computing platform into the cloud, for all to use.

Open Access/Content

• New flow visualizations using data from weather radar networks depict nocturnal bird migrations, according to a study published August 24, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Judy Shamoun-Baranes from University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and colleagues.

Programming/Development

• I finally reached a point where I could start running the go version of sm-photo-tool. I finished the option validation for the list command. While I was testing it I noticed how much faster the Go version felt. Here are the python vs Go versions of the commands.

Standards/Consortia

• The revision of the European Interoperability Framework and the importance of data and information standardisation for promoting semantic interoperability for European Public Services will be presented by Dr. Vassilios Peristeras, DG Informatics, ISA unit at the SEMANTiCS 2016 conference which takes place in Leipzig on September 13th and 14th 2016. The title of the presentation is “Promoting Semantic Interoperability for European Public Services: the European Commission ISA2 Programme” (slideset to appear here soon).

Leftovers

• Heading into the Summer Olympics, NBCUniversal executives were bullish on ratings for Rio de Janeiro. With a host city just one hour ahead of the Eastern Time Zone and a mountain of data pointing toward heightened interest in the games, NBCU projected that Rio would outpace the 2012 London Games in viewership.

• It did not. Instead of a bulletproof success story, Rio delivered a complex portrait of the rapid changes affecting the TV business and of a viewership still hungry for Olympics coverage, but also for new ways to consume it.

• Over 15 days of competition, NBCU’s Olympics coverage averaged 27.5 million viewers across all platforms, including digital streaming — down 9% from 2012. But traditional TV ratings told a far grimmer story, one that began with Nielsen numbers that showed viewership for the Aug. 5 Opening Ceremony decline 28% from London.

Health/Nutrition

• Last week, researchers studying maternal mortality in the U.S. reported an ominous trend: The rate of pregnancy-related deaths in Texas seemed to have doubled since 2010, making the Lone Star State one of the most dangerous places in the developed world to have a baby. Reproductive health advocates were quick to blame the legislature for slashing funding in 2011–12 to family-planning clinics that serve low-income women, calling the numbers a “tragedy” and “a national embarrassment.”

• Now a 15-member state task force has issued its own maternal mortality report, offering a new view of what might be going on. The bottom line: Maternal deaths have indeed been increasing in Texas, members said, and African-American women are bearing the brunt of the crisis. For 2011 and 2012, black mothers accounted for 11.4 percent of Texas births but 28.8 percent of pregnancy-related deaths.

• And how do we communicate the health risks from contaminated water without causing panic? Sometimes people don’t even want to know about water contamination, as they have so many other things they are already dealing with – water is just another one of many worries. Community wide communication is a real challenge on a large reservation.

• Young women voters have a lot to worry about this election cycle, from a flurry of anti-abortion messaging to diminishing access to reproductive services.

• Just this month, in fact, Congress put the brakes on vital legislation that would fund efforts to prevent the spread of Zika because they’re arguing over birth control.

• I have grown up in a generation of women who can take for granted our right to vote, work for money, own land, and not be treated as property—but I can never take for granted my right to choose what to do with my own body.

• Like 58 percent of the women who use the pill, I rely primarily on birth control to treat many medical conditions. I have hormone-based migraines, endometriosis, and polycystic ovary syndrome, which puts me at a higher risk for a whole slew of other health issues—from cardiovascular disease to diabetes.

• But I’m lucky. Birth control treats all three of my conditions where other methods have failed.

• Of the tens of thousands of Lousianans who had their homes flooded this month, most do not have flood insurance. They weren’t supposed to need it, because flooding had never been a problem where they live. And now it is clear that the federal emergency help they receive will be wholly inadequate.

• Louisiana’s flood victims are in a terrible predicament, and they are not alone. In the America of 2016, thousand-year catastrophes seem to be occurring on a monthly schedule, while we remain stuck with pre-greenhouse home insurance. That is leaving countless families economically devastated.

Security

• Victims of the Wildfire ransomware can get their encrypted files back without paying hackers for the privilege, after the No More Ransom initiative released a free decryption tool.

• No More Ransom runs a web portal that provides keys for unlocking files encrypted by various strains of ransomware, including Shade, Coinvault, Rannoh, Rakhn and, most recently, Wildfire.

• Aimed at helping ransomware victims retrieve their data, No More Ransom is a collaborative project between Europol, the Dutch National Police, Intel Security, and Kaspersky Lab.

• Wildfire victims are served with a ransom note demanding payment of 1.5 Bitcoins — the cryptocurrency favored by cybercriminals — in exchange for unlocking the encrypted files. However, cybersecurity researchers from McAfee Labs, part of Intel Security, point out that the hackers behind Wildfire are open to negotiation, often accepting 0.5 Bitcoins as a payment.

• Most victims of the ransomware are located in the Netherlands and Belgium, with the malicious software spread through phishing emails aimed at Dutch speakers. The email claims to be from a transport company and suggests that the target has missed a parcel delivery — encouraging them to fill in a form to rearrange delivery for another date. It’s this form which drops Wildfire ransomware onto the victim’s system and locks it down.

• A trojan thought to have died out resurfaced with new attacks and a new and improved version, launching new attacks on routers running Linux-based firmware located in India’s cyber-space.

Defence/Aggression

• The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers of the world rule.

• The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica.

• It’s quite possible both of these stories are misleading. But they do raise questions about why the spooks want to sensationalize these Russian hacks while NYT chooses to downplay them.

• The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers of the world rule.

• Arguing that carrying firearms on campus will be as effective against random gun violence as carrying dildos, thousands of students at the University of Texas at Austin protested the state’s insane new open carry law Wednesday by gleefully hoisting “Armed With Reason” and “Guns Do Kill People” signs along with over 4,500 donated dildos, flesh color to fluorescent, in what may prove to be the state’s largest ever anti-gun rally. The #CocksNotGlocks campaign, started by one alum as a bit of “defiant nonsense” aimed at fighting absurdity with absurdity, kicked off on the first day of classes by drawing big crowds, with some inventive students juggling dildos and others hawking them with “Come get a dick!”

• The campaign seeks to repeal Senate Bill 11, signed into law by GOP Gov. Gregg Abbott in June but only implemented August 1, allowing students or faculty at public universities to carry their favorite guns to class, because what could possibly go wrong? The law has been vociferously opposed at the relatively progressive Austin campus, where many spoke against it at earlier public forums, an esteemed Architecture Dean resigned rather than live with it, and three professors sought an injunction to block guns from their classrooms; a federal judge just denied their request. Campaign organizers have asked students to “open carry” or hang the sex toys on backpacks until the law is changed: “Why leave your dildos at home if other people won’t leave their guns at home? Wear ‘em proudly until SB11 is repealed.”

• Turkey and coalition allies launch air strikes Wednesday morning against the Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) stronghold of Jarabulus, on the Syrian side near the Turkish border. At the same time, Turkish artillery on the ground pounded the town. With Manbij in the hands of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, Jarabulus is the last town affording a smuggling route for men and arms from Turkey into Syria’s al-Raqqa, the HQ of Daesh in the country. Turkey has left Jarabulus alone for years and winked at the Daesh smugglers. Why is it acting now?

• Five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, his face bloody and bruised from bomb blast, stares out in bafflement at a world in which somebody had just tried to kill him. Pictures of his little figure in the back of an ambulance in Aleppo have swiftly become the living symbol of the slaughter in Syria and Iraq.

• In the past there would have been more demands for spurious responses to the latest atrocity in Syria, with calls for the immediate overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad or no-fly zones – measures that sound positive but are never going to happen. This time round there is greater wariness internationally about such quick-fix solutions, opening the way for more realistic action to reduce the present horrendous level of violence.

• I am always edgy about proposing anything that might mitigate the barbarity of the war in Syria and Iraq because explaining what aspects of the situation, however murderous, cannot be changed looks like justifying them. For instance, British policy since 2011 has been that Assad should go, but this was never going to happen because he controlled most of the population centres and was backed by Russia and Iran. To pretend otherwise might sound benign, but was in reality providing the ingredients for war without end.

• Sharp changes in the war on Syria have impacted the policy of the Turkish government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Initially Mr. Erdogan believed that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would fall precipitously. It did not. Rather than overthrow Mr. Assad, the war has placed Turkey itself in danger — a ‘failed coup’ on July 15 came alongside a renewed war against Turkey’s Kurdish population, just as Islamic State (IS) attacks in the country have raised alarm bells about Mr. Erdogan’s adventurism. An adjustment of Turkey’s policy is now on the cards. The President’s August 9 trip to Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin and the warm words exchanged when the Iranian Foreign Minister came to Turkey on August 10 indicate a change.

• Employees of 25 of the nation’s largest defense companies—such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Raytheon—are choosing to fill the coffers of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over those of her rival, GOP nominee Donald Trump.

• That’s according to a new analysis by Politico, published Wednesday and based on federal campaign finance filings.

• Indeed, Politico found that Clinton—whose hawkish tendencies have been front-and-center during the 2016 campaign—is leading Trump “by a ratio of 2-to-1 in campaign donations from employees working for defense giants like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. That’s a sharp turnaround from 2012, when defense contractors gave more to then-Republican nominee Mitt Romney than to President Barack Obama.”

• Specifically, employees of those 25 firms have donated $93,000 to Clinton, compared with $46,000 for Trump. “Clinton’s donor rolls also include more than two dozen top defense executives, while Trump’s show just two,” Politico adds.

• After the Olympic games in Rio drew to a close, another set of games have begun: military exercises between the United States and South Korea to prepare for a possible armed conflict with North Korea.

• Turkey has “launched a major military intervention in Syria,” the Guardian reports, dispatching tanks and warplanes to purportedly reclaim the city of Jarabulus, currently held by the Islamic State (ISIS), and to attack Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria.

• “At 4am this morning, operations started in the north of Syria against terror groups which constantly threaten our country,” said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Ankara on Wednesday, according to the Guardian. Turkey’s government classifies Kurdish nationalists as terrorists, although Erdoğan also pointed to a bomb attack that killed 54 in Southern Turkey, which the Turkish regime blamed on ISIS, as justification for Wednesday’s siege in Syria.

• Turkey’s onslaught is backed by the U.S., while the Kurdish group that Turkey is targeting, the leftwing Kurdish nationalist YPG, is also backed by the United States.

• “If Turkey’s forces drive out ISIS,” observes the Christian Science Monitor, “it could lead to a messy confrontation between the Turkish government and the U.S.-backed YPG.”

• And while Turkey has long battled against Kurdish nationalists both within and outside of its borders while the West turned a blind eye, Wednesday marks the first large-scale Turkish military operation against Kurdish militias in Syria.

• When Pope Francis visited the U.S. Congress in September 2015, he boldly posed a moral challenge to his American hosts, asking: “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society?”

• “Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money,” he solemnly concluded. “Money that is drenched in blood.”

• In this case, it’s innocent Yemeni blood.

• During his almost eight years in office, President Obama has approved a jaw-dropping, record-breaking $110 billion in weapons sales to the repressive Saudi regime, all with Congressional backing.

• “In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and stop the arms trade,” Pope Francis said. Our lawmakers have failed miserably at heeding the Pope’s call.

• Two IS supporters murdered an imam because they viewed his practice of Islamic healing as “black magic”, a jury has heard.

• Jalal Uddin, 71, suffered multiple injuries to his head and face in an attack, thought to have involved a hammer, in a children’s play area in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, on the evening of February 18 this year.

• The Crown say the Bangladeshi national was targeted after he left the mosque where he usually prayed, ate a meal at a friend’s house and then walked home.

• Mohammed Hussain Syeedy, 22, and Mohammed Abdul Kadir, 24, were said to have developed “a hatred” of Mr Uddin when they discovered last year that he practised Ruqya healing – which involves the use of amulets.

• By reducing historic mausoleums in Timbuktu to dusty piles of rubble, Islamic extremists desecrated holy sites, leaving residents ashamed and impoverished, a lawyer said Wednesday at the trial of the man accused of leading the destruction.

• Mayombo Kassongo, who represented victims at the trial of Muslim radical Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, said locals expressed “shame at seeing their saints stripped naked.”

• Al Mahdi led pickax-wielding rebels who wrecked the simple mud-brick mausoleums covering the saints’ tombs in June and July 2012 in the famed city in the Saharan nation of Mali. Kassongo said the destruction of the World Heritage-listed sites was also a financial blow to residents, crippling tourism in the remote African city.

• Al Mahdi pleaded guilty and expressed remorse Monday for his role in leading the destruction of nine mausoleums and a mosque door in Timbuktu and urged Muslims around the world not to commit similar acts.

• “They are not going to lead to any good for humanity,” he said.

• The trial is continuing despite Al Mahdi’s guilty plea to give Timbuktu residents a chance to speak about the impact of the destruction and to allow prosecutors and his defense lawyer to discuss a possible sentence.

• Prosecution lawyer Gilles Dutertre said Al Mahdi played “a key role” in the 2012 destruction and urged judges to sentence him to between nine and 11 years in prison.

• Newly released files have exposed the role Margaret Thatcher personally played in securing one of the UK’s biggest and most controversial arms deals.

• The previously secret files show how officials helped then Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher carefully negotiate the notorious Al-Yamamah deal which saw Britain sell fighter jets to Saudi Arabia.

• The documents detail a meeting and private lunch between Mrs Thatcher and King Fahd, soon after which the £42bn contract was clinched, sparking anger form arms-trade campaigners.

• It came back to haunt Tony Blair who intervened to stop an investigation into the deal, that was exploring claims of ran a multimillion-pound “slush fund”.

• A bipartisan quartet of lawmakers is circulating a letter that seeks to delay a pending arms sale to Saudi Arabia.

• The lawmakers are targeting the arms sale as part of their opposition to U.S. support for the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen against Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

• Lawmaker criticism of U.S. support for the campaign has recently grown louder, following Saudi airstrikes that hit a school and a hospital, killing dozens of civilians.

• The $1.15 billion arms sale, which the State Department approved on Aug. 9, would include up to 153 tanks, hundreds of machines guns, ammunition and other equipment.

• By law, Congress has 30 days to block the sale, but the lawmakers are concerned that notification was given during Congress’s summer recess and that the 30-day period will end with lawmakers having just returned to D.C.

• “Any decision to sell more arms to Saudi Arabia should be given adequate time for full deliberation by Congress,” the letter to President Obama will say, according to a draft. “We are concerned, however, that the timing of this notification during the August congressional recess could be interpreted to mean that Congress has little time to consider the arms deal when it returns from recess within the 30 day window established by law.”

• A Filipino maid has reportedly died in Saudi Arabia after seeing her alleged rapist in the hospital where she was confined.

• Imra Edloy, 35, was rushed to King Salman Hospital in Riyadh on 13 August with severe injuries suspected to be from sexual assault. She fell into a coma soon after arriving in the hospital.

• While she was unable to identify her attacker, before falling unconscious she pointed at her employer when asked who abused her, ABS CBN News reports.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• When Charles Dickens, the English novelist, was detailing the “soft black drizzle” of pollution over London, he might inadvertently have been chronicling the early signs of global warming.

• New research led by Australian scientists has pegged back the timing of when humans had clearly begun to change the climate to the 1830s.

• What’s the difference between these two pipelines? Only variations are the origin of the oil they may transport and their location as far as I can tell since they are described as competing pipelines.

• Oh, and the Keystone XL pipeline was vetoed by President Obama a year ago this past February because Congress tried to ram through approval, attempting to “circumvent longstanding and proven processes for determining whether or not building and operating a cross-border pipeline serves the national interest,” according to the president.

• In both cases — Keystone XL and the Dakota Access — the planned pipelines traversed Native American tribal lands and/or water systems upon which these sovereign nations relied. The affected tribes have protested the credible threats these pipelines pose to their health and safety as well as their heritage and sovereignty.

• As peaceful prayer camps grow in North Dakota against the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, demonstrators in Washington, D.C. are marching and chanting in solidarity while a U.S. federal court hears arguments regarding the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s motion to halt pipeline construction.

• Though the Obama administration in March put a halt on drilling for oil and gas in Atlantic, the dolphins and whales inhabiting the waters are still at risk, says one ocean conservation group, as proposed seismic airgun blasting to look for reserves of the fossil fuels would leave the marine mammals “profoundly impacted.”

• The scale of the threat they face was laid bare on Wednesday with a pair of new maps released by by Oceana. Based on extensive research from Duke University’s Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab, the maps—one for bottlenose dolphins and the other for endangered humpback, fin, and sperm whales—show the overlapping areas of the proposed blasting in the area stretching from Delaware to Florida and the density of the whales and dolphins in those waters over a 12-month period.

Finance

• A gathering Monday in Washington, D.C., featured a bipartisan group of former government officials agreeing on the benefits of slashing the nation’s safety net.

• This week marks the 20th anniversary of “welfare reform,” the 1996 law passed by Congress and administered by President Bill Clinton that strictly limited the amount of federal cash assistance that the poorest Americans can receive — transforming the Aid for Families with Dependent Children program into the more restrictive Temporary Aid for Needy Families.

• One of the main impacts of the law was to help double the number of American households living in extreme poverty in America – defined as living on less than $2 a day.

• The Capitol Hill event, hosted by the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and the Progressive Policy Institute, which has been referred to as President Bill Clinton’s “idea mill,” celebrated the 20th anniversary of the law. Its architects said they had no regrets about its passage.

• Former Michigan Republican governor John Engler, who pioneered state-level welfare cutbacks and who today serves as the head of the corporate lobbying group the Business Roundtable, recounted how Bill Clinton’s support helped make national welfare reform possible.

• “It was pretty stunning in 1992 to have a Democratic candidate for president, albeit a 12-year veteran in the governor’s office talking about ending ‘welfare as we know it,’” he said. “That was a pretty decisive moment.”

• Right-wing praise for Bill Clinton was a reoccurring theme at the event. Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation scholar who has been dubbed the “intellectual godfather” of welfare reform, claimed that Clinton took up the same cause as Ronald Reagan, allowing him to outmaneuver George W.H. Bush. “In my perspective that’s the issue that put Clinton in the White House in ’93,” Rector said.

• As fall approaches, millions of moms and dads are scrambling to prepare for the first day of school, excited to support their children’s success.

• But are schools ready to receive our kids and foster that success? Increasingly, the answer is no.

• In at least 18 states, local government funding levels are declining, according to an analysis by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. And as a result, many schools will open with fewer teachers than last year, among other detrimental losses.

• As lawmakers throw up their hands and say, “sorry, there’s just not enough money,” we must ask: Where has all the money gone?

• Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has reiterated his opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), saying on Tuesday that President Barack Obama’s push to get the trade deal passed during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress is “outrageous” and “absolutely wrong.”

• Stiglitz, an economics professor at Columbia University and chief economist of the Roosevelt Institute, made the comments on CNN’s “Quest Means Business.”

• His criticism comes as Obama aggressively campaigns to get lawmakers to pass the TPP in the Nov. 9 to Jan. 3 window—even as resistance mounts against the 12-nation deal.

• Echoing an argument made by Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director Mark Weisbrot, Stiglitz said, “At the lame-duck session you have congressmen voting who know that they’re not accountable anymore.”

• Mississippi parents are challenging the public funding of charter schools on the grounds that it’s not constitutional.

• The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an advocacy group, filed a motion for a summary judgment this week on behalf of the parents, for a speedy answer to this question.

• The only debate in the case is that of constitutionality, which makes it prime for answering, SPLC told Hinds County Chancery Judge Dewayne Thomas. The SPLC in July backed the lawsuit by several parents against Governor Phil Bryant, the Mississippi Department of Education, and the Jackson Public School District that challenged the funding of state charter schools.

• Plaintiffs say that because the privately-run, publicly-funded, corporate institutions are not overseen by the state or local superintendents, they do not qualify as “free” schools and therefore shouldn’t be eligible for taxpayer money. Three charter schools in Jackson are currently slated to receive $4 million in public funds this year.

• The plaintiffs project that the state and Jackson will transfer $4 million this year to three charter schools. About one-third of that money is collected from property taxes on buildings, vehicles and equipment.

• More and more businesses are exploiting what is known as the “1099 worker loophole”—hiring workers as “independent contractors” instead of as regularly employed workers. In some cases, companies have laid off all or most of their regular workers and then hired them back, but as independent contractors.

• In The New York Times recently, the paper’s former Washington bureau chief, the veteran journalist Hedrick Smith, asked an important question: “Can the States Save American Democracy?” Smith, who traveled the country to write his latest book, Who Stole the American Dream?, also serves as the executive editor of the Reclaim the American Dream website, where he keeps a keen eye on efforts to revitalize politics closest to where people live. In his op-ed essay he answered his own question by reporting that “a broad array of state-level citizen movements are pressing for reforms… to give average voters more voice, make elections more competitive and ease gridlock in Congress.”

• The Democratic primary of 2008, much like that of 2016, featured a sharp debate on global trade — about who writes the rules, who benefits, and who, ultimately, is harmed.

• And like 2016, the 2008 discussion was largely dominated by so-called trade agreements, namely the North American Free Trade Agreement. Signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993, NAFTA encompassed the economies of Mexico, Canada, and the United States, and its implementation was accompanied by the usual lofty promises.

• Whether these promises were fulfilled is another question entirely. Barack Obama, during his run for the presidency, made his view quite clear.

• After noting that Hillary Clinton celebrated NAFTA in her memoir, calling it a “legislative victory,” Obama lamented that “One million jobs have been lost because of NAFTA.”

• “And yet, 10 years after NAFTA passed, Senator Clinton said it was good for America,” he continued. “Well, I don’t think NAFTA has been good for America — and I never have.”

• Martin Shaw has recently criticised 38 Degrees for adopting a neutral stance on whether or not the UK should leave the European Union. Quite a lot of members voted for Brexit on 23 June; probably around half. It’s no wonder that some people find this surprising – Brexit is a polarising issue, and it’s been widely observed that social media feeds can amplify a sense that all our friends share all our views. Particularly in the immediate aftermath of the vote, when emotions were running high, I heard some 38 Degrees members on both sides of the divide express incredulity that they shared values and campaigns with people who’d voted the opposite way to them.

• In this week’s episode of “On Contact,” Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges sits down with Rob Urie, author of “Zen Economics,” to discuss “the capitalist labyrinth.”

• The two dive into the concept of the “economic man” or “economic woman” that Urie introduces in his book. Urie explains that humans are conditioned to feel that capitalism is a “natural” state of being. It’s “the integration of psychology with corporate desire,” he explains.

• Urie and Hedges then discuss the “radical alienation” produced by capitalism, particularly how the system is responsible for nuclear weapons, climate change and even imperialism. “Alienation is the bedrock of consumer culture,” Hedges notes.

• I will be speaking about basic income in Turku, Finland, tomorrow Thursday August 25, at a seminar organized by the Finnish Pirate Party and Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) Finland.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Outgoing UKIP leader Nigel Farage has urged Republicans to “get your walking boots on” and drum up support for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

• He appeared before 15,000 activists in Jackson, Mississippi, being introduced by and sharing the stage with Mr Trump.

• And he said the party could “beat the pollsters” in the presidential race.

• Mr Trump, who is trailing his rival Hillary Clinton in the opinion polls, backed the UK’s exit from the EU.

• In a tweet last week, Mr Trump said: “They will soon be calling me Mr Brexit.”

• Mr Trump introduced Mr Farage as the man who “brilliantly” led the UK Independent Party’s campaign to secure a vote on the future of the UK’s 40-year membership of the European Union.

• Some GOP operatives and other political observers are starting to suspect that Donald Trump’s campaign is structured more as a publicity tour than a quest for the White House.

• Federal disclosures released this past weekend help make the case that the real estate mogul, at the very least, is not conducting a traditional campaign operation.

• They show, among other things, that Trump’s organization spent more money in July on the now-iconic “Make America Great Again” red hats, Trump T-shirts, and mugs than on the staff whose job it is to run the campaign.

• The Trump campaign paid more than $1.8 million to two vendors — California-based headwear-maker Cali-Fame and Louisiana’s Ace Specialties — for T-shirts, mugs, stickers, and the red hats (which the campaign spent over $400,000 on alone).

• If Bernie and Our Revolution continue to evade the present-day realities of “the madness of militarism,” their political agenda will be significantly more limited than what our revolution requires for a truly progressive future.

• Bernie Sanders returns to the political stage on Wednesday to try to do what no progressive has successfully done in decades—keep alive national grassroots momentum that led millions to support him and his agenda in 2016’s presidential nominating contests.

• At 9 PM Eastern, Sanders will address 2,600-plus meetings across the country to lay out the next steps in pushing the nation’s politics toward the progressive left. He will kick off a new group called Our Revolution, which will support like-minded candidates running for office and hold pro-corporate officeholders accountable on key issues.

• Left commentary berates mainstream media for serving up ‘too much Trump.” Fair enough, but left writers also flood us with endlessly repetitive Trump coverage.

• Left commentary claims that at election time an endless stream of writers overemphasize the ephemeral and ignore the serious. True, but left writers also continually repeat what people already know while offering few usable lessons for the future.

• Left commentary worries that Sanders will ratify the idea that politics is only about candidates and leave nothing lasting in place. Also fair, but left writers not only worry about this prospect, we contribute to it when we fixate on one person’s possible choices and ignore our own responsibility for achieving more.

• Left commentary bemoans distraction. Sensible, but the complaint becomes ironic when left writers continually repeat that elections don’t matter while not addressing what does matter, the longer term.

• I have been repeatedly asked in media interviews about such use of language by Trump. So far as I can tell, he is simply using effective discourse mechanisms to communicate what his wants to communicate to his audience. I have found that he is very careful and very strategic in his use of language. The only way I know to show this is to function as a linguist and cognitive scientist and go through details.

• Let’s start with sentence fragments. It is common and natural in New York discourse for friends to finish one another’s sentences. And throughout the country, if you don’t actually say the rest of a friend’s sentence out loud, there is nevertheless a point at which you can finish it in your head. When this happens in cooperative discourse, it can show empathy and intimacy with a friend, that you know the context of the narrative, and that you understand and accept your friend’s framing of the situation so well that you can even finish what they have started to say. Of course, you can be bored with, or antagonistic to, someone and be able to finish their sentences with anything but a feeling of empathy and intimacy. But Trump prefers to talk to a friendly crowd.

• Meanwhile, concerns are growing about a potential conflict of interest between the Clinton Foundation and the government during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. And on Monday, it was announced that an additional 14,900 documents from Clinton’s private email server would be released by the State Department before the November election.

• Contrary to recent headlines, Donald Trump isn’t reaching out to African-Americans. He isn’t even talking to us. He’s talking past us, and saying exactly what his alt-right base wants to hear him saying to black folks.

• Donald Trump is telling African-Americans that our biggest problems are simply the result of listening to the wrong white people.

• During the four years Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation run by her husband took tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments and corporations.

• Many of these donors had a lot riding on Clinton’s decisions. Saudi Arabia gave the foundation up to $25 million, and Clinton signed off on a controversial $29 billion sale of fighter jets to the country. Oil companies gave the foundation around $3 million, and Clinton approved a lucrative gas pipeline in the Canadian tar sands they’d long sought.

• We’ve known the basics of this story for months now. But another media feeding frenzy over the foundation kicked off again on Monday, when the State Department was forced to release emails showing that the foundation’s leadership tried to land its top donors meetings with the secretary of state.

• Campaign donors will see and hear a lot from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the next month as she embarks on a fundraising tour, but voters will have little clue as to what she says behind closed doors.

• The FBI’s reports linked to Hillary Clinton’s role in the death of Vince Foster, a White House counsel and her friend, have allegedly gone missing. A journalistic investigation says it could be Clinton’s humiliation that pushed Foster to suicide.

• According to Daily Mail, documents containing interviews of Clinton conducted after Foster’s death in July 1993 have vanished from the National Archives.

• The report claims that author and journalist Ronald Kessler visited the National Archives and Records Service in College Park, Maryland multiple times to review the reports submitted by FBI agents investigating Foster’s suicide.

• The Clinton campaign is attempting once again to sweep important questions under the rug about top aide Huma Abedin, her family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Saudi Arabia, and her role in the ballooning Clinton email scandal.

• The New York Post ran a detailed investigative piece over the weekend about Ms. Abedin’s work at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs from 1995 through 2008, a Sharia law journal whose editor in chief was Abedin’s own mother.

• This is not some accidental association. Ms. Abedin was, for many years, listed as an associate editor of the London-based publication and wrote for the journal while working as an intern in the Clinton White House in the mid-1990s.

• Her mother, Saleha Abedin, sits on the Presidency Staff Council of the International Islamic Council for Da’wa and Relief, a group that is chaired by the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

• Perhaps recognizing how offensive such ties will be to voters concerned over future terrorist attacks on this country by radical Muslims professing allegiance to Sharia law, the Clinton campaign on Monday tried to downplay Ms. Abedin’s involvement in the Journal and the Muslim Brotherhood.

• As the numerous and obvious ethical conflicts surrounding the Clinton Foundation receive more media scrutiny, the tactic of Clinton-loyal journalists is to highlight the charitable work done by the Foundation, and then insinuate – or even outright state – that anyone raising these questions is opposed to its charity. James Carville announced that those who criticize the Foundation are “going to hell.” Others Clinton loyalists insinuated that Clinton Foundation critics are indifferent to the lives of HIV-positive babies or are anti-gay bigots.

• That the Clinton Foundation has done some good work is beyond dispute. But that fact has exactly nothing to do with the profound ethical problems and corruption threats raised by the way its funds have been raised. Hillary Clinton was America’s chief diplomat, and tyrannical regimes such as the Saudis and Qataris jointly donated tens of millions of dollars to an organization run by her family and operated in their name, one whose works has been a prominent feature of her public persona. That extremely valuable opportunity to curry favor with the Clintons, and to secure access to them, continues as she runs for President.

• The release of documents shedding more light on connections between the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton-led State Department has touched off a new political firestorm only weeks before voters begin heading to the polls in the 2016 election.

• Republican nominee Donald Trump — himself a foundation donor — has called for a special prosecutor to investigate the foundation, and Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, has said the new disclosures are “evidence of the pay-to-play politics.” By contrast, the Clinton campaign has argued that there is no proof of any quid pro quo — a message echoed by her supporters in the pundit world.

• As the rhetoric about the Clintons’ public and private financial dealings intensifies, here is a brief review of the major investigative reporting that has been done about the Clinton Foundation.

• An Army training presentation on insider threats included Hillary Clinton among a rogue’s gallery of killers and leakers, citing the former secretary of state as an example of “careless or disgruntled employees,” NBC News confirmed on Tuesday.

• The unclassified slide, which first emerged on a Facebook page that spoofs the military, was confirmed by a U.S. military officials, who said it was used as part of a lesson on how to secure classified materials and improve safety.

• A spokesperson from the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command said the slide was developed 18 months ago.

• “As is common with Army training requirements, the local unit was given latitude to develop their own training products to accomplish the overall training objective,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Germans who are critical of Islam and mass migration are fleeing to the site VK, known as the Russian Facebook to avoid censorship of their remarks and possible raids on their homes.

• There are a lot of TV and print and talk shows about terrorism here and terrorism there. It is a serious matter, terrorism is. What makes it worrisome is that it is not well defined, and it seems some government officials want it that way.

• Some of you may not recognize total censorship or censorship as terrorism. The Peoples got punished over the last few years for having an opinion about corruption in Colville tribal government from the top down. Letters to the editor were removed from our tribal newsprint in total.

• The “Clowncil” and its staff are lying about the censorship imposed since 2013. And now the Clowncil, through its staff, are lying about the censorship again, as they lifted “total censorship” and replaced it with “censorship.”

• Please re-read the December 2014 Tribal Tribune (TT) edition, page A6 “Letter To The Editor Policy.” “Policy” restricts tribal members’ freedom to have a letter also printed in outside newspapers while getting printed in the TT (paragraph 1) with a threat of total censorship; narrows the scope of topics a tribal members may write about (paragraph 3); requires a “respectful/professional tone” but does not define it, leaving censorship in whole (paragraph 4); Editor determines his or her own “facts” (paragraph 5); Editor determines what “hatred, contempt, suspicion or wrongdoing, scorn or ridicule” means and will censor according to the editor’s “belief” (paragraph 6). These standards are outside the bounds of journalistic “libel laws;” therefore, they narrow the scope of free speech and free thought, and, in actuality, eliminate both.

• Since 9/11, Britons are increasingly watched, shadowed and snooped. This week the wall featuring the mural was smashed. I suspected silent censorship. Turns out it was a dopey builder. So, as it turns out, I was being somewhat paranoid and hasty. But is that worse than being sluggishly trusting and complacent? I was raised in Uganda where the state censored the media, books, art, and song lyrics. Citizens there were more alert to the danger than we are in the UK.

• But Williford said a list of words some deem offensive has him questioning a relatively new campus guideline.

• [...]

• Hill said “Just Words” is merely a suggestion — not censorship.

• “We are not doing that at all. As a matter of fact, we`re trying to improve and have open dialogue,” Hill said.

• Also on the list: ‘ghetto,’ ‘Nazi’ and even ‘politically correct.’

• Cloudflare has made it clear that the company isn’t going to block piracy sites without a proper court order. In addition, it now opposes an injunction requested by the RIAA, under which it would have to disconnect alleged MP3Skull accounts based on a keyword and IP-address.

• This month, the online service provider CloudFlare stood up for its website-owner customers, and for all users of those websites, by telling a court that CloudFlare shouldn’t be forced to block sites without proper legal procedure. Copyright law limits the kinds of orders that a court can impose on Internet intermediaries, and requires courts to consider the pros and cons thoroughly. In this case, as in other recent cases, copyright (and trademark) holders are trying to use extremely broad interpretations of some basic court rules to bypass these important protections. As special interests keep trying to make things disappear from the Internet quickly, cheaply, and without true court supervision, it’s more important than ever that Internet companies like CloudFlare are taking a stand.

• The current dispute between CloudFlare and a group of record labels arose from the labels’ case against the music streaming site MP3Skull. The website’s owners never appeared in court to defend themselves against a lawsuit by the labels. The labels, who are all members of the Recording Industry Association of America, won a court judgment by default in March of this year. The judgment included a permanent injunction against the site and those in “active concert and participation” with it. On the last day of June, the labels’ lawyers sent the order to CloudFlare and demanded that they immediately stop providing services to various Internet addresses and domain names connected with MP3Skull.

• Good riddance to NPR’s comment section, which is shutting down Tuesday after eight years. There has to be a better way for news organizations to engage with the public.

• NPR is joining a growing list of media organizations that have said “finito” to comments including, ‘This American Life,’ Reuters, Recode, Mic, The Chicago Sun-Times, Popular Science, CNN, The Toronto Star and The Week.

• When comments sections were initiated on news sites, they were hailed as a means to democratize the media, allowing a two-way conversation between readers and the journalists who serve them.

• Singapore is planning to cut off web access for public servants as a defence against potential cyber attack – a move closely watched by critics who say it marks a retreat for a technologically advanced city-state that has trademarked the term “smart nation”.

• Some security experts say the policy, due to be in place by May, risks damaging productivity among civil servants and those working at more than four dozen statutory boards, and cutting them off from the people they serve. It may only raise slightly the defensive walls against cyber attack, they say.

• Ben Desjardins, director of security solutions at network security firm Radware, called it “one of the more extreme measures I can recall by a large public organisation to combat cyber security risks”. Stephen Dane, a Hong Kong-based managing director at networking company Cisco Systems, said it was “a most unusual situation” and Ramki Thurimella, chair of the computer science department at the University of Denver, called it both “unprecedented” and “a little excessive”.

• Until recently the tools for mass communication were expensive and in the hands of a small number of gatekeepers. Then, the price rapidly fell towards zero. With the Internet and the World Wide Web (that just turned 25 years old) anyone can communicate with the world by words, pictures, sound, and video – 24/365 – on a shoestring budget.

• Still, people need to know about you. So fame, reputation, and status are factors to take into consideration. But content, quality (in some sense) and virality is the new gold standard.

• This has upset the people who used to be in power, like bigwig politicians. They used to have their press releases copy-pasted into the media news flow without too much hassle. Today they still are visible in the slowly dying mainstream media. But on the Internet, they have to compete for attention with everybody and everything else.

• Also, media proprietors, the copyright industry and the big brick and mortar chains are upset – just to mention a few.

• It could have been very different.

• Tim Berners-Lee – who invented the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) together with his friends at W3C at Cern – decided not to patent this method of connecting the dots in the Matrix, but to give it to the world.

• There is a story in a major British newspaper The Daily Mail, which reports that there are now stories that Melania Trump, who was a nude model in her past – that is not under question, had also been an Escort model ie a hooker ie a prostitute and has been working as a hooker, ie Escort in New York before she married Donald Trump. I do take it upon myself to ridicule and laugh at Donald Trump’s absurd political run this year. I did laugh at Melania when she was caught plagiarizing Michelle Obama’s speech at the Republican Convention in July and as it since emerged, she has lied about having a college degree from Ljubljana University in Slovenia, which she does not (they have removed references to the fake degree from her website since this news broke out). But this blog is not at war with Trump’s third wife, bought by Trump sixteen years ago, to rear some kids for Trump that Trump himself won’t bother to get to know until they’ve grown up to be adults. Wives, that Trump buys from East Europe and replaces roughly every 16 years. I was mainly focused on mocking Trump himself.

• [...]

• The Trump attorneys attacked Liberal America and Andrew Bradford insisting he must apologize or be sued .Andrew is not rich enough to defend himself against a Billionaire’s attorney attack-dogs so he relented and wrote an apology. Its quite an epic apology which does its best to keep all of the accusations still in view, and he also published in full the attorney’s letter. A letter which uses such phrases as “Melania Trump was a sex worker after moving to the United States” haha. So it is that letter in verbatim, which is now on the blogsite and further hopefully adding to smear Melania Trump’s name. But still, I feel very strongly about freedom of speech and feel a strong personal sense of support to Mr Bradfort that I have never met. I have never even heard of their publication, the Liberal America. But I now of course add my blog to the support of that issue. I link from this blog to Liberal America and I urge my readers to go read Andrew’s very smart article where he deals with the attorneys’ demand for apology.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The parents of America’s digitally literate teenagers are largely in the dark about their children’s internet activity, new research has shown.

• The new study on teen internet use by the National Cyber Security Alliance found that only 13% of teens thought their parents understood the extent of their internet use.

• The survey of 804 online teens and 810 parents of teens found that 60% of teens have created accounts for apps or social media sites without their parents’ knowledge. Only 28% of parents thought their teens had accounts they didn’t know about.

• The gap between what teens are doing and what their parents know about is indicative of what the NCSA is calling a “digital disconnect between American teens and parents”.

• Messaging your gun-toting, drug-trafficking friends by way of encrypted message isn’t proof that you’re a gun-toting drug-trafficker, an Ontario court has ruled.

• That useful bit of information comes after police booked a Hamilton man following a search of his room that turned up a 9mm Smith & Wesson unloaded handgun, a sock full of bullets, and a few grams of cocaine. They slapped five criminal charges on him, and hauled him before a judge.

• The Hamilton man was caught up in the investigation as police looked into a suspected drug trafficking ring. He just happened to be living at an address that was connected to the investigation.

• But his defense lawyers were quick to pick apart the search warrant that allowed the cops to bust down his door, and pry open his safe.

• In a new level of dumb, Germany and France are demanding strong encryption for all citizens at the same time as they demand this strong encryption to be breakable. They also demand messaging providers of end-to-end encryption to provide police with keys they don’t have, and for terrorists to stop using freely available strong encryption without a messaging provider. You really couldn’t sound dumber if you tried.

• Horrible laws often follow major terrorist attacks. After 9/11, the U.S. Congress passed the Patriot Act. After the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris last year, European powers contemplated sweeping, strikingly bold internet surveillance laws. Following a July attack in Nice, French officials have passed laughably absurd laws against Muslim women wearing burkinis at public beaches.

• But after an ISIS-linked man ignited a bomb in a Shiite mosque in Kuwait last year, killing 27, the mother of all troubling laws was rushed through the country’s Parliament. The law requires that all citizens, residents and visitors to the country submit DNA samples to enter or stay in the country. It was passed in the name of national security and in helping identify victims of large scale attacks.

• You may think you are discreet about your political views. But Facebook, the world’s largest social media network, has come up with its own determination of your political leanings, based on your activity on the site.

• And now, it is easy to find out how Facebook has categorized you — as very liberal or very conservative, or somewhere in between.

• Try this (it works best on your desktop computer):

• Go to facebook.com/ads/preferences on your browser. (You may have to log in to Facebook first.)

• That will bring you to a page with your ad preferences. Under the “Interests” header, click the “Lifestyle and Culture” tab.

• Then look for a box titled “US Politics.” In parentheses, it will describe how Facebook has categorized you, such as liberal, moderate or conservative.

• (If the “US Politics” box does not show up, click the “See more” button under the grid of boxes.)

• In the wake of 9/11, New York City police repeatedly violated safeguards meant to protect lawful political and religious activities from unwarranted surveillance, according to the department’s own inspector general.

• A report (pdf) from the New York Police Department (NYPD)’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), released Tuesday, found the department to be “often non-compliant with a number of the rules” by failing to secure proper authorization or extensions for investigations of political activity, particularly those involving Muslims.

• The probe examined a sample of all closed cases between 2010 and 2015, some of which were opened as far back as 2004. More than 95 percent of the cases, according to the document, involved Muslims or political activity associated with Islam.

• Following a successful, albeit brief consultation during a Philippine Computer Society meeting on June 28, the NPC partnered with a variety of groups from civil society, the research community, and the government to hold back-to-back consultations on July 13 and 14 at the University of the Philippines Diliman and Ateneo de Davao University, respectively. FMA participated in both consultations as a co-organizer. FMA organized another public consultation in Cebu City on July 28, whereas UP Manila hosted the last round on August 16.

• Now, don’t get me wrong. These are dangerous files, and I can understand why social media companies would want to close the barn door on the raging wild horses that once were in their stable.

• But underlying it all appears to be a notion of property that I’m a bit troubled by. Even if Shadow Brokers stole these files from NSA servers — something not at all in evidence — they effectively stole NSA’s own tools to break the law. But if these sites are treating the exploits themselves as stolen property, than so would be all the journalism writing about it.

• Finally, there’s the question of how these all came down so quickly. Almost as if someone called and reported their property stolen.

• The US is still probing the extent of a recent cyber leak of what purports to be hacking tools used by the National Security Agency, the nation’s top intelligence official said Wednesday.

• “We are still sorting this out,” James Clapper, director of national intelligence, said at an event at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California.

• “It’s still under investigation,” Clapper said. “We don’t know exactly the full extent – or the understanding – of exactly what happened.”

• The tool kit consists of malicious software intended to tamper with firewalls, the electronic defenses protecting computer networks. The leak has set the information security world atwitter – and sent major companies rushing to update their defenses.

• We all know that the NSA uses word games to hide and downplay its activities. Words like “collect,” “conversations,” “communications,” and even “surveillance” have suffered tortured definitions that create confusion rather than clarity.

• There’s another one to watch: “targeted” v. “mass” surveillance.

• A hacker named 1×0123 claims he has the other half of the recently-leaked NSA hacking toolkit for sale — but samples of the dataset are only available if you can figure out his cryptographic puzzle.

• On Sunday, the hacker posted on Twitter that he was selling the entire archive of files for $8,000, seemingly undercutting the mysterious “Shadow Brokers” hacking group that leaked one-half of the archive last week at various file-sharing websites with claims of an “auction” for the rest.

• It appears that 1×0123 is indeed a hacker who has found and sold security vulnerabilities in the past. Even ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden praised him in April for finding an issue on the Freedom of the Press website.

• An unprecedented data dump, of security exploits believed to originate form within the US National Security Agency (NSA) has left some firms scrambling to fix security holes dating back years, and revealed the extent to which the NSA stockpiles cyber-weapons..

• The dump includes attacks on network products from several vendors, including Cisco and Juniper. These so-called ’zero day exploits’ take advantage of software vulnerabilities which have been found, and kept secret from the vendor. Until the vendor knows and fixes these weaknesses, they can be attacked, and the exploits can be used with ’cyber weapons’. The dump appears to show the US agency is stockpiling these exploits, but that another power gained access to its stash of weapons – revelations which could have serious ramifications for the US cyber security and cyber warfare team, as well as for foreign relations.

• Juniper confirmed exploits leaked by the Shadow Brokers group appear to affect its firewalls, but has not yet patched the vulnerabilities.

• The firewall manufacturer is “investigating the recent release of files reported to have been taken from the so-called Equation Group,” Juniper’s security incident response manager Derrick Scholl wrote in a corporate blog post.

• Juniper identified an exploit affecting its NetScreen firewall devices that run on the ScreenOS operating system. Initial analysis of the exploit “indicates it targets the boot loader and does not exploit a vulnerability on ScreenOS devices,” Scholl wrote in the post.

• On Tuesday, Ixia’s application and threat intelligence unit discovered an exploit that targets Watchguard Firewalls, according to Steve McGregory, senior director of the ATI group said in emailed comments to SCMagazine.com. Four of the exploits affect TopSec firewalls, primarily used in China, he added.

• WE ARE getting closer to unmasking the Shadow Brokers. Last week, the group put hacking tools from the National Security Agency up for auction, including security flaws in companies’ systems and remote access tools. There have been no serious bidders, but the documents have been confirmed as the real deal, raising the spectre of another whistleblower at the agency.

• Initially, the prime suspect was Russia, but this theory has now been downgraded. Certain naming conventions in the files point to scripts only accessible on a machine physically isolated from the network and therefore inaccessible to anyone not physically present in the NSA building. The idea that it was an accidental upload has also been debunked, shifting the focus internally.

• However, it couldn’t have been Edward Snowden, pictured, as it looks like the tools were stolen around October 2013, five months after he fled to Hong Kong.

• Last week, an anonymous group calling itself the Shadow Brokers leaked a bunch of National Security Agency hacking tools. Whoever they are, the Shadow Brokers say they still have more data to dump. But the preview has already unleashed some notable vulnerabilities, complete with tips for how to use them.

• All of which means anyone—curious kids, petty criminals, trolls—can now start hacking like a spy. And it looks like they are.

• Curious to learn if anyone was indeed trying to take advantage of the leak, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt—a security researcher at NYU—set up a honeypot. On August 18 he tossed out a digital lure that masqueraded as a system containing one of the vulnerabilities. For his experiment, Dolan-Gavitt used a Cisco security software bug from the leak that people have learned to fix with workarounds, but that doesn’t have a patch yet.

• Within 24 hours Dolan-Gavitt saw someone trying to exploit the vulnerability, with a few attempts every day since. “I’m not surprised that someone tried to exploit it,” Dolan-Gavitt says. Even for someone with limited technical proficiency, vulnerable systems are relatively easy to find using services like Shodan, a search engine of Internet-connected systems. “People maybe read the blog post about how to use the particular tool that carries out the exploit, and then either scanned the Internet themselves or just looked for vulnerable systems on Shodan and started trying to exploit them that way,” Dolan-Gavitt says. He explains that his honeypot was intentionally very visible online and was set up with easily guessable default passwords so it would be easy to hack.

• France and Germany pushed Tuesday for Europe-wide rules requiring the makers of encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram to help governments monitor communications among suspected extremists.

• Privacy advocates argue that encryption is essential to online security, notably for banking transactions. But security experts say encrypted apps are increasingly used by extremists to hide their location, coordinate operations and trade weapons and sex slaves.

• Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said French authorities have detained three people this month with “clear attack plans,” but police need better tools to eavesdrop on encrypted text conversations utilizing the kinds of powers used to wiretap phones.

• The National Security Agency is lying to us. We know that because of data stolen from an NSA server was dumped on the internet. The agency is hoarding information about security vulnerabilities in the products you use, because it wants to use it to hack others’ computers. Those vulnerabilities aren’t being reported, and aren’t getting fixed, making your computers and networks unsafe.

• On August 13, a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers released 300 megabytes of NSA cyberweapon code on the internet. Near as we experts can tell, the NSA network itself wasn’t hacked; what probably happened was that a “staging server” for NSA cyberweapons — that is, a server the NSA was making use of to mask its surveillance activities — was hacked in 2013.

• For the second installation of Nick Asks the NSA, I offer Congress my services as to what questions in their oversight capacity they should be asking NSA about the Shadow Broker leak.

• It now safe to say that the “Equation Group” leak by Shadow Brokers is real and consists of a genuine trove of NSA tools used to hack firewalls. The leaked code references known programs, uses a particularly unusual RC6 and cruddy crypto techniques previously associated with NSA implants, and the Washington Post has confirmed the authenticity of the materials with two anonymous ex-NSA employees.

• When the mysterious Shadow Brokers dumped a cache of hacking tools used by an NSA-linked group last week, researchers quickly identified a number of the spy agencies’ targets, including American security companies like Cisco, Juniper, and Fortinet.

• But until now, no one noticed that the leaked files suggest the NSA has also been targeting—and was likely able to hack—firewalls made by Huawei, a Chinese manufacturer of network infrastructure often seen as a threat to American companies given the suspicion that the Chinese government might have a backdoor and could spy in its products. The revelation is contained in an instruction file part of the leak.

• Within one of the leaked files (TURBO_install-new.txt) there are references to VRP 3.30, a version of Huawei’s proprietary operating system. While 3.30 is an older version, it still appears to be popular, according to a search on Shodan, which returns more than 1,600 devices running that version, mostly in China.

• The code leaked by the Shadow Brokers group last week has set off calls from security researchers and tech groups for a national conversation about vulnerability disclosure policy.

• The code contains about a dozen vulnerabilities affecting firewall manufacturers that many industry professionals believe to be exploits used by the National Security Agency (NSA).

• While the Obama administration’s Vulnerability Equities Process (VEP) calls on intelligence agencies to disclose security vulnerabilities by default, tech companies and security pros are concerned by the prospect of an unknown number of zero-day vulnerabilities possessed by intelligence agencies.

• The Shadow Brokers leak highlights the need for transparency in the government’s disclosure process, according to Mozilla senior policy manager Heather West. “If the government chooses to engage in lawful hacking, it must also support responsible disclosure,” she wrote in an email to SCMagazine.com.

• The Director of National Intelligence’s office has cleared another FISA court opinion [PDF] for release. These are getting far more interesting to read, even if little seems to be changing about the FBI/NSA’s collection methods. The process is now a little bit more adversarial, thanks to the USA Freedom Act, which introduced the possibility of someone arguing on behalf of the surveilled and in the interest of privacy and the Fourth Amendment.

• Unfortunately, this opinion finds the FISA court mostly unimpressed with the counterarguments. The discussion involved the use of pen register orders to capture “post-cut through” dialing digits — the sort of thing the court determined to be content, rather than metadata in the past.

• This time around, the court seems more amenable to the government’s arguments that any digits obtained along with dialed phone numbers is fair game — whether or not the orders actually allow for the collection of communications content.

• A judge issued an arrest warrant Tuesday for former Riverside County District Attorney Paul Zellerbach after he failed to appear at a court hearing to answer questions about an eavesdropping operation so vast it once accounted for nearly a fifth of all U.S. wiretaps.

• The warrant, however, will not be sent to law enforcement for Zellerbach to be arrested unless he does not show up for another hearing on wiretaps, now scheduled for Sept. 30.

• “He should have been there,” said Jan Ronis, the attorney who subpoenaed Zellerbach. “But he just blew us off. We could have had court today.”

• It’s not uncommon for Zellerbach to go missing when people need him. When Zellerbach ran the DA’s office, he was rarely there. The DEA found his office to be just as accommodating, with or without him, though. Although the DEA was supposed to run its wiretap warrant requests through federal judges and have them signed by the district attorney himself, it often found it easier to obtain a signature from whoever happened to be at the office and run them by Riverside County judge Helios Hernandez, who approved five times as many wiretap applications as any other judge in the US.

• The wiretap applications’ reach frequently exceeded their jurisdictional grasp, traveling far outside of Riverside County, California, to be deployed against suspects as far away as North Carolina. But that was only one issue with the warrants applications approved by Zellerbach’s office.

• The DOJ’s lawyers didn’t like the DEA’s skirting of federal rules for wiretap applications.

• Since January, the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) has been using small aircrafts to spy on residents for as much as 10 hours a day, without informing the public, in a project financed by a private donor and facilitated by a private company, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

• The BPD, Bloomberg’s Monte Reel wrote, has been using aerial surveillance to investigate “all sorts of crimes, from property thefts to shootings.” The cameras capture an area of roughly 30 square miles and transmit images to analysts on the ground, while footage gets automatically saved to hard drives for later review.

• The technology comes from a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems. Its president, Ross McNutt, developed a similar tool for the Pentagon while working for the U.S. Air Force in 2006. Over time, he modified the technology for commercial use. McNutt eventually pitched the service to the BPD after his company had faltered in finding a department for a long-term contract. He opened his office in Baltimore in January, above a parking garage, denoted only by a piece of paper taped to his door that reads, “Community Support Program.”

• When all you have is repurposed war gear, everything looks like a war zone.

• It’s not just the Pentagon handing out mine-resistant vehicles and military rifles to any law enforcement agency that can spell “terrorism” correctly on a requisition form. It’s also the FBI acting as a gatekeeper (and muzzle) for cell phone-tracking hardware originally developed for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• The latest addition to the pantheon of “war gear, but for local law enforcement” is aerial surveillance. While this sort of surveillance is nothing new — police have had helicopters for years — the tech deployed to capture recordings is.

• Bloomberg has a long, in-depth article on aerial surveillance tech deployed by the Baltimore Police Department — all without ever informing constituents. Baltimore isn’t the first city to deploy this repurposed military tech. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department gave the same gear a test run back in 2014. The LASD also did little to inform the public about its purchase, claiming that people might get paranoid and/or angry if they knew.

• Baltimore’s acquisition of Persistent Surveillance Systems’ 192-million megapixel eye in the sky also occurred under the cover of governmental darkness. The tech was given to the police and paid for by a private donor — which kept the public out of the loop and any FOIA-able paper trail to a minimum.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The North Carolina Highway Patrol is urging people not to jump to conclusions as state agents investigate how a deaf driver with a history of minor offenses ended up dead after leading a trooper on a 10-mile chase.

• The family of Daniel Kevin Harris said he was unarmed and suggested the sequence of events last week was a tragic misunderstanding — the type the state’s training manual warns troopers to avoid when dealing with the hearing impaired.

• The investigation into the shooting is ongoing, Secretary Frank Perry of the state Department of Public Safety said in a news release.

• “Let us all refrain from making assumptions or drawing conclusions prior to the internal and independent reviews” by the patrol, the State Bureau of Investigation and the district attorney, said Perry, whose agency oversees the Highway Patrol.

• A number of (hearing) friends from a bunch of my (different) social circles recently sent me — almost simultaneously — links to news stories about Deaf people getting killed by cops who couldn’t communicate with them.

• This is nothing new. It’s been happening for ages. Someone with a gun gets scared and pulls the trigger, and someone else is dead. Maybe that person is Deaf. Maybe that person is Black. In any case, that person is now dead, and that’s not okay. (Maybe that person is both Deaf and Black, and we mention the second part but not the first. That’s disability erasure that, statistically, correlates highly with race; that’s also not okay.)

• I’ve been deaf as long as I can remember, and I’ve known these stories happened for a long, long time. But this is the first time I’ve watched them from inside the conversations of a Deaf community — for some definition of “inside” that includes confused mainstreamed-oral youngsters like me who are struggling to learn ASL and figure out where they fit.

• As self-driving cars move from fiction to reality, a philosophical problem has become the focus of fierce debate among technologists across the world. But to the people actually making self driving cars, it’s kind of boring.

• The “trolley problem” is the name for a philosophical thought experiment created as an introduction to the moral distinction between action and inaction. The classic example is a runaway mine cart, hurtling down tracks towards a group of five oblivious people. With no time to warn them, your only option is to pull a switch and divert the cart on to a different track, which only has one person standing on it. You will save five lives, but at the cost of actively killing one person. What do you do?

• All kinds of tweaks and changes can be made to the basic problem, to examine different aspects of moral feeling. What if, rather than pulling a switch, you stop the mine cart by pushing one particularly large person in its way? What if the five people are all over the age of 80 and the one person is under 20? What if the five people are in fact five hundred kittens?

• As self-driving cars inch closer to the mainstream, a common debate has surfaced: should your car be programmed to kill you if it means saving the lives of dozens of other people? This so-called “trolley problem” has been debated at universities for years, and while most consumers say they support automated vehicles that prioritize the lives of others on principle, they don’t want to buy or ride in one, raising a number of thorny questions.

• Should regulations and regulators focus on a utilitarian model where the vehicle is programmed to prioritize the good of the overall public above the individual? Or should self-driving cars be programmed to prioritize the welfare of the owner (the “self protective” model)? Would companies like Google, Volvo and others prioritize worries of liability over human lives when choosing the former or latter?

• [...]

• It’s still a question that needs asking, but with no obvious solution on the horizon, engineers appear to be focused on notably more mundane problems. For example one study suggests that while self-driving cars do get into twice the number of accidents of manually controlled vehicles, those accidents usually occur because the automated car was too careful — and didn’t bend the rules a little like a normal driver would (rear ended for being too cautious at a right on red, for example). As such, the current problem du jour isn’t some fantastical scenario involving an on-board AI killing you to save a busload of crying toddlers, but how to get self-driving cars to drive more like the inconsistent, sometimes downright goofy, and error-prone human beings they hope to someday replace.

• Indonesia’s current criminal code can send individuals to prison for “communist activities” for up to seven years.

• Indonesia maintained its ban on communism in its revision of the country’s criminal code system—controversial laws that have been in place for more than five decades.

• Nearly two years ago, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division began an investigation into the Ferguson Police Department for racial bias in the aftermath of the police shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager. What federal investigators found wasn’t pretty: a police department that consistently engaged in unconstitutional policing and that thought of the overwhelmingly Black community it was supposed to protect and serve as revenue sources for the city’s government. After the Justice Department’s report was released, it was only fair to ask how many other local institutions in the Ferguson area were afflicted with bias.

• Yesterday, the answer came when a federal court held that the Ferguson-Florissant School District’s system for electing its school board members violates the Voting Rights Act. The court recognized what many Ferguson-area residents know all too well: Once official discrimination — in education, housing, and public infrastructure — was outlawed in the Ferguson area, it shifted in form to other means of achieving the same ignoble goals.

• Photographs and video of French police officers issuing tickets to Muslim women — for violating new local ordinances that ban modest beachwear as an offense against “good morals and secularism” in more than a dozen towns along the Riviera — spread widely on social networks on Wednesday, prompting waves of outrage and mockery by opponents of the laws.

• As the sister of a murder victim who opposes the death penalty, the Delaware Supreme Court’s decision in early August declaring the state’s death penalty statute unconstitutional gives me hope. The court’s decision affirms what death penalty opponents have known all along: Delaware’s death penalty doesn’t achieve justice for many reasons.

• The death penalty not only violates the rule of law, but it is costly, biased, prone to error, and ineffective at reducing violent crime and healing communities. Delaware’s statute, however, was particularly flawed. It had allowed a jury to recommend death without getting the approval of all 12 jurors, and it had allowed the judge in a capital case to override the jury’s sentencing recommendation to not put the convicted to death. Because the Delaware scheme diluted the historic role of a unanimous jury in criminal proceedings — to the point of denying capital defendants their constitutional right to a jury trial — the court struck it down.

• In the summer months, 84 inmates at the Price Daniel Unit, a medium-security prison four hours west of Dallas, share a 10-gallon cooler of water that’s kept locked in a common area. An inmate there can expect to receive one 8 oz. cup every four hours, according to Benny Hernandez, a man serving a 10-year sentence at the prison. The National Academy of Medicine recommends that adults drink about twice that amount under normal conditions and even more in hot climates. According to Hernandez, in the summer the temperature in his prison’s housing areas can reach an astonishing 140 degrees.

• The prison provides ice for the cooler twice a day, but the ice has long melted before the hottest part of the day, he wrote in a post on Prison Writers, a website where inmates share their experiences behind bars. “Prisoners look upon the summer months in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) with dread and trepidation,” he wrote. “For one is acutely aware that one may not survive another summer. Many do not.”

• Bradford University’s pioneering department devoted to peace education and research is honouring its founding professor. The world’s conflicts make it a timely event.

• On August 16, 2016, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) made another step in the intimidation and silencing of Ukrainians with dissenting opinion – SBU searched the apartment of Myroslava Berdnyk, a popular blogger and political writer who openly criticizes the post-Euromaidan authorities and exposes Ukrainian nationalism. She was detained for interrogation and later released.

• As with many other Ukrainians who refuse to join the anti-Russia crusade of the government in Kyiv, Myroslava Berdnyk now stands accused of undermining the territorial integrity and inviolability of Ukraine.

• Myroslava’s case is particularly significant and important because she is the daughter of Oles Berdnyk, a famous Ukrainian dissident who spent many years in Soviet prisons who was also a famous writer, writing many science fiction novels.

• The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) said Tuesday that graduate students who work as teaching and research assistants at private colleges are employees—a ruling with “big implications” for both higher education and organized labor in the United States.

• After 14 years of being held without charge, Guantánamo prisoner Abu Zubaydah, who was subject to brutal torture and is known as the “guinea pig” for the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) “enhanced interrogation program,” made his first appearance on Tuesday before the Periodic Review Board and requested to be set free.

• In a statement (pdf) read by his personal representative, he explained how he “initially believe that he did not have any chance or hope to be released” but has “come to believe that he might have a chance to leave Guantánamo.”

• Further, Zubaydah “expressed a desire to be reunited with his family and begin the process of recovering from injuries he sustained during his capture.” Among other abuses, the detainee lost an eye while in CIA custody.

• Abu Zubaydah, 45, made his first appearance Tuesday on video from Guantanamo in a hearing before a Periodic Review Board, 14 years after the last day of a month-long interrogation at a CIA black site in Thailand. It was the first time the “enhanced interrogation techniques” approved by the Bush administration were used on a detainee.

• Back then, Abu Zubaydah still had his left eye.

• Representatives from the media, nongovernmental organizations, and academia were permitted to view the unclassified opening portion of the hearing from a conference room at the Pentagon, but the segment does not include any statement or comments from the detainee. It was the first glimpse outside observers got of Zubaydah since a photo of his face with an eye patch was published by Wikileaks in 2011; at one point he was touted as al Qaeda No. 3.

• [...]

• Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al Abidin Muhammad, was captured in a raid of a Faisalabad, Pakistan, house on March 28, 2002, suffering severe bullet wounds. The interrogation techniques used on him included stress positions, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box, and waterboarding, among others.

• Most notably perhaps, he was waterboarded 83 times.

• So-called ‘burkini bans’ in France have come under fierce criticism after images surfaced this week of police in Nice surrounding and forcing a Muslim woman to remove some of her clothes.

• A burkini, or burquini, is a full-body swimsuit “intended to accord with Islamic traditions of modest dress,” as Wikipedia put it.

• Last week, Nice became the latest of 15 French towns to ban the garment, arguing that it “overtly manifests adherence to a religion at a time when France and places of worship are the target of terrorist attacks.” Last month, 86 people were killed in the seaside resort town when a truck drove into a Bastille Day celebration.

• He’d left the water running, flooding neighbors’ apartments. He’d been running around outside naked. By the time police arrived, he was standing in the window of his fourth-floor apartment on Farwell Avenue — a few blocks from where I live in the diverse, unpredictable Chicago neighborhood called Rogers Park — threatening to jump.

• He pointed his finger at the cops, pretending he had a gun. “Fuck the police,” he said. The standoff lasted four hours.

• But eventually he capitulated. The forces of sanity held sway. He was taken to a hospital. No one was hurt. (Phew-w-w!) And life in Rogers Park moved on.

• [...]

• Sixteen years — of war — later, I remain transfixed by that question. Why must social authority be symbolized with escalating bombast? Assault rifles, body armor, MRAPs? Then a scene from Robert Duvall’s 1997 movie The Apostle flickered for an instant in my mind. Billy Bob Thornton’s character, a racist with a bulldozer, is threatening to demolish the church that Duvall, a preacher on the run from the law, has constructed with his racially mixed congregation. Duvall sets his Bible in front of the bulldozer and Thornton is immobilized, indeed, reduced to tears. His hatred melts; the threat disappears.

• Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.

• The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

• An Indianapolis homeowner who called police to report an attempted armed robbery at his house was apparently mistaken for the suspect and shot in the stomach by a responding officer, authorities said.

• Carl Williams, a 48-year-old black man, called 911 early Tuesday morning and told the emergency dispatcher that an armed man tried to assault his wife outside their home, then stole her car keys and drove away in her car, according to a statement from the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department.

• When two officers arrived at the property on the city’s east side, the homeowner, who was also armed and apparently prepared to confront the carjacker, emerged from his home, a law enforcement official told ABC affiliate RTV6.

• Four former employees of Silicon Valley tech icon Hewlett-Packard have filed an age discrimination lawsuit alleging they were ousted amid a purge of older workers.

• Hewlett-Packard began layoffs in 2012, before the company broke into HP Inc. and HP Enterprise last year, and have escalated the layoffs since, eventually hitting tens of thousands of workers.

• The goal “was to make the company younger,” said the complaint filed Aug. 18 in U.S. District Court in San Jose. “In order to get younger, HP intentionally discriminated against its older employees by targeting them for termination … and then systematically replacing them with younger employees. HP has hired a disproportionately large number of new employees under the age of 40 to replace employees aged 40 and older who were terminated.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Drobetsky was a masters degree student at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. In her assigned 5-page reflection paper of the Benjamin Button movie, she apparently copied from Wikipedia and a blog post by Richard Larson. The allegations are “that a portion of one sentence in the reflection paper was copied word for word from the Wikipedia article, and portions of two other sentences were copied word for word from the Larson blog, without quotation marks, citation or attribution.”

• The school dismissed Drobetsky for plagiarism in violation of school policy – she sued in Illinois state court for readmittance, recover of the $53,000 paid to the school, etc.

• The internet is an unprecedented platform for innovation, opportunity and creativity. It’s where artists create; where coders and entrepreneurs build game-changing technology; where educators and researchers unlock progress; and where everyday people live their lives.

• The internet brings new ideas to life everyday, and helps make existing ideas better. As a result, we need laws that protect and enshrine the internet as an open, collaborative platform.

• But in the EU, certain laws haven’t caught up with the internet. The current copyright legal framework is outdated. It stifles opportunity and prevents — and in many cases, legally prohibits — artists, coders and everyone else from creating and innovating online. This framework was enacted before the internet changed the way we live. As a result, these laws clash with life in the 21st century.

• What does the EU Commission intend to propose when it releases its next copyright package next month?

• This is a question that has been haunting EU copyright enthusiasts for a few months now.

• This is a reference for a preliminary ruling from the Dutch Supreme Court. It was made in the context of proceedings between Sanoma (the publisher of Playboy magazine) and GS Media, concerning the publication by the latter on a website that it operates (GeenSijl) of hyperlinks to other websites hosting unpublished photographs taken for a forthcoming issue of Playboy

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