● 09.01.16

● Links 1/9/2016: Fedora 25 Alpha, GhostBSD 10.3, OpenBSD 6.0

Posted in News Roundup at 11:03 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) is a project of the Linux Foundation dedicated to creating open source software solutions for the automobile industry. It also leverages the ten billion dollar investment in the Linux kernel. The work of the AGL project enables software developers to keep pace with the demands of customers and manufacturers in this rapidly changing space, while encouraging collaboration.

• Walt Miner is the community manager for Automotive Grade Linux, and he spoke at LinuxCon in Toronto recently on how Automotive Grade Linux is changing the way automotive manufacturers develop software. He worked for Motorola Automotive, Continental Automotive, and Montevista Automotive program, and saw lots of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like Ford, Honda, Jaguar Land Rover, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru and Toyota in action over the years.

• One of the key accomplishments of Linux over the past 25 years has been the “professionalization” of open source. What started as a small passion project for creator Linus Torvalds in 1991, now runs most of modern society — creating billions of dollars in economic value and bringing companies from diverse industries across the world to work on the technology together.

• Hundreds of companies employ thousands of developers to contribute code to the Linux kernel. It’s a common codebase that they have built diverse products and businesses on and that they therefore have a vested interest in maintaining and improving over the long term.

• The legacy of Linux, in other words, is a whole new way of doing business that’s based on collaboration, said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation said this week in his keynote at LinuxCon in Toronto.

• Meet Bill Pollock, founder, CEO and chief editor of No Starch Press, who loves to put out books about Linux and Open Source for reasons he explains in the interview. But No Starch also publishes books about Legos, security, and a lot of other, seemingly unrelated topics that fall at least broadly under the “geek interest” label. Interested in hacking cars, teaching electronics to kids or showing an older friend or relative how to use Facebook? No Starch has you covered. Want to write a book? Pollock doesn’t publish a lot of titles, but you never know. He’s open to almost anything interesting about Linux and Open Source — and interested, if less so (for reasons he explains in the interview) in titles about proprietary software. FYI, Pollock is a Linux user himself, and does most of his editing with LibreOffice, so he has unimpeachable personal Open Source credentials.

Desktop

• In 1991, I was already an experienced Unix sysadmin and writer. I’m sure I saw Linus Torvalds’s famous Usenet message: “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones,” and I paid it no mind. Many people said similar things and little came of it. This time, it would be different.

Server

• TheSSS (The Smallest Server Suite) is one of the lightest Linux kernel-based operating systems designed to be used as an all-around server for home users, as well as small- and medium-sized businesses looking for a quick and painless way of distributing files across networks or to simply test some web-based software.

• We’re going to need to free up a hypervisor and put its load on other hypervisors, in order to pull out the one hypervisor and have some of its faulty hardware replaced — but there’s two problems;

• The hypervisor to free up has asserted required CPU capabilities most of the eligible targets do not have — this prevents a migration that does not involve a shut down, reconfiguration, and restart of the guest.

Kernel Space

• On Wednesday, when Linus Torvalds was interviewed as the opening keynote of the day at LinuxCon 2016, Linux was a day short of its 25th birthday. Interviewer Dirk Hohndel of VMware pointed out that in the famous announcement of the operating system posted by Torvalds 25 years earlier, he had said that the OS “wasn’t portable,” yet today it supports more hardware architectures than any other operating system. Torvalds also wrote, “it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks.”

• The 4.7 Linux kernel includes enhancements to security, automated testing prior to release, and an average 7.8 additions per hour over 10 weeks of development. Here is a look at what IT pros need to know about the OS that powers everything from mobile devices to servers and supercomputers.

• Blockchain technology first burst onto the scene as the underpinning of Bitcoin digital currency. Since then, open source distributed ledger technology has continued to evolve into an unparalleled asset tracker. It brings new efficiencies and much-needed transparency to online transactions in a world where assets move and change hands at Internet speeds.

• In June when I discussed basic network configuration, one thing I did not talk about then is routing. This article provides a very brief introduction to routing for Linux computers, designed for understanding simple environments.

• Every computer attached to a network requires some type of routing instructions for network TCP/IP packets when they leave the local host. This is usually very straightforward because most network environments are very simple and there are only two options for departing packets. All packets are sent either to a device on the local network or to some other, remote network.

• While Microsoft’s ReFS file-system has been around for a few years to date there is no mainline Linux kernel driver supporting this file-system that’s more advanced than NTFS. But there is now a read-only ReFS Linux driver and it’s proprietary.

• ReFS is ultimately looked at as the next-gen successor to NTFS on the Windows side with better resilience, improved reliability, and more. If you are sharing data with Linux systems though hopefully you are using NTFS or even FAT32 for better interoperability but if you are already using ReFS, a read-only Linux driver is now available.

Graphics Stack

• With word coming out last week that the RADV open-source Vulkan driver can now render Dota 2 correctly, I’ve been running some tests the past few days of this RADV Vulkan driver compared to AMD’s official (but currently closed-source) Vulkan driver bundled with the AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver.

• Bryce Harrington announced the release today of Wayland 1.12 beta and the associated Wayland compositor update.

• Ahead of next month’s official Wayland/Weston 1.12 debut, version 1.11.92 was released today. The Wayland 1.12 beta has no new changes over the earlier alpha while Weston has some shell fixes, dropping shell_interface from libweston, and a DRM compositor change. The bare release announcements can be found here.

• In the X server, the input driver assignment is handled by xorg.conf.d snippets. Each driver assigns itself to the type of devices it can handle and the driver that actually loaded is simply the one that sorts last. Historically, we’ve had the evdev driver sort low and assign itself to everything. synaptics, wacom and the other few drivers that matter sorted higher than evdev and thus assigned themselves to the respective device.

• When xf86-input-libinput first came out 2 years ago, we used a higher sort order than all other drivers to assign it to (almost) all devices. This was of course intentional because we believe that libinput is the best input stack around, the odd bug non-withstanding. Now it has matured a fair bit and we had a lot more exposure to various types of hardware. We’ve been quirking and fixing things like crazy and libinput is much better for it.

Applications

• Most of the time, having a password protected user is all you need to keep your files private and protected from prying eyes. There are those few times when you need to allow access to your account to another person, sometimes there are folders or files you would like to keep away from being accessed. Now we can password protect folder with several handy tools. In the Windows world, these tools are quite easily available for Windows but today we will look at a few options available for the Linux user.

• OpenShot 2.1 is the latest feature release of this promising open-source video editing solution.

• OpenShot 2.1 adds support for displaying audio waveforms on clips, improves property editing, provides a new selection dropdown, supports user-configurable keyboard mapping, timeline improvements, a new tutorial system, performance gains for effects, improved transitions, and much more. There are also many bug fixes as well as support for Windows 64-bit.

• One of the difficulties a new Linux user faces while switching from Windows is finding a good download manager. If you are or have been Windows user you might be familiar with download managers like Internet Download Manager (IDM), Download Accelerator Plus (DAP) etc. There is nothing to worry for Linux users as there are many alternatives Download managers for Linux. And yes these are open source; means you can download them for free. The article below is about few of the popular and free Linux download managers available on the web.

• Multiload-ng, a graphical system monitor for Xfce, LXDE, and MATE panels, was updated to version 1.2.0 recently, getting color schemes support, a redesigned preferences window, and more.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• With having just wrapped up the Windows 10 vs. Linux Radeon Software Performance benchmarking roundabout, I decided to run some very quick tests with Wine and Wine-Staging while gauging interest to run a larger Wine comparison.

• After finishing up the AMD tests for the multi-OS/driver comparison, I installed Wine 1.9.17 followed by Wine-Staging 1.9.17 on the Ubuntu system while using the latest open-source Radeon driver (Linux 4.8 + Mesa 12.1-dev) and carried out some basic tests. Of the games I ran for the earlier article, I just chose The Talos Principle and Tomb Raider for now to gauge interest and because they ran cleanly out-of-the-box with Steam on Wine without having to deal with any hacks or extra steps… Tests were done with the Radeon R9 Fury.

Games

• We told you earlier about the new features coming to the Nautilus, Polari, and Mutter components of the forthcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, and now Adrien Plazas informs us about the availability of the second Beta release of GNOME Games 3.22.

• GNOME Games is a recent addition to the GNOME 3 Stack, and it has been engineered as a library manager for your video games, allowing hardcore Linux gamers to effortlessly pick and play a game directly from the beautiful and dark user interface of the open-source application.

• Solus developer and package maintainer Joshua Strobl informs the GNU/Linux community about some of the latest applications and technologies that landed in the distribution’s software repository.

• Puzzle fans can’t be bored with all the great games we have on Linux. Sekwere has joined the ranks and now has a Linux version available on Steam.

• It has nearly all positive reviews, with only 5 negative. One of the negative reviews is simply complaining about achievements being added in, so I tend to ignore junk reviews like that.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• A new maintenance update of the lightweight Enlightenment open-source desktop environment has been released recently for Linux kernel-based operating systems, namely version 0.21.2.

• As you might have already guessed, Enlightenment 0.21.2 is the second point release in the stable 0.21 series of the graphical desktop environment used in various GNU/Linux distributions, and it promises to address more than 30 reported issues, but also to add various much-needed improvements to keep it stable and reliable. All the details about the new changes are available for your reading pleasure at the end of the article.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• LWN reports on the sad death of Vernon Adams, designer of the Oxygen font and author of the invaluable how to use Font Forge guide.

• We had been planning the upgrade for a while, but had to do the upgrade on a quick notice, as a bug that leaked user emails was found in the forum. Thanks to Justin Clift for pointing out the issue to us!

• This means that it was possible for someone to find out user emails from the forum. For those users who have their email as public, this is not a issue, but some of you want to keep your email to yourself. The bug meant that these email addresses could also be found.

• Last week, I spent 4 days at the Krita Sprint in Deventer, where several contributors gathered to discuss the current hot topics, draw and hack together.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The upcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop environment is still in the works, and a first Beta build was seeded to public beta testers last week, bringing multiple enhancements and new features to most of its core components and apps.

• While GNOME 3.22 Beta was announced on August 22, it appears that the maintainers of certain core packages needed a little more time to work on various improvements and polish their applications before they were suitable for public testing. And this is the case of GNOME Control Center, which was recently updated to version 3.21.90, which means 3.22 Beta.

• We reported earlier on the upcoming features of the several GNOME components and apps, including Nautilus, Polari, Mutter, and GNOME Games, and now we would like to tell you about some of the goodies landing the GTK+ 3.22 toolkit this September.

• The Mutter window and compositing manager is yet another important component of the popular GNOME desktop environment that received many improvements during the GNOME 3.22 development cycle, besides Polari and Nautilus.

• A second Beta development snapshot of the upcoming Mutter 3.22 release, which will be available on September 21, 2016, as part of the launch of the highly anticipated GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, has been made available for public beta testing by one of its maintainers, namely Florian Müllner.

• This month, the GTK+ team will publish the first in a series of long-term stable releases. This will make GTK+ more predictable and reliable, while not inhibiting future GTK+ improvements.

Distributions

New Releases

• After being in development for the past three months, the Salix 14.2 Xfce Edition operating system has finally hit the stable channels, and it is now available for download.

• Based on the Slackware 14.2 GNU/Linux distribution and built around the lightweight and highly customizable Xfce 4.12 desktop environment, Salix 14.2 Xfce Edition ships with numerous improvements and new features that some of you who managed to test-drive the Beta and Release Candidate pre-releases are already accustomed with. Of course, many of the core components and default applications have been updated to their latest versions.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Linux users come in many shapes and sizes, but those in the business world typically steer clear of the bleeding edge. That’s why the OpenSUSE project recently switched to a two-pronged development approach, with one version focused on constant updates and another on enterprise-grade stability. On Wednesday, the latter took a big step forward.

• The first beta version of OpenSUSE Leap 42.2 is now available, giving enterprises and other stability-minded users the chance to check it out and get a taste of what’s coming in the final release, which is due Nov. 16. This is the first key update to the Leap software since OpenSUSE adopted its dual-path approach late last year with OpenSUSE 42.1.

• “Leap is for pragmatic and conservative technology adopters,” Ludwig Nussel, the release manager for OpenSUSE Leap, said in the software’s official announcement. “Testing the beta helps make Leap even more mature, so we encourage as many people as possible to test it.”

• Today, August 31, 2016, the openSUSE Project, through Douglas DeMaio, has proudly announced the availability of the first Beta pre-release version of the upcoming openSUSE Leap 42.2 Linux operating system.

Red Hat Family

• Linux-based open source solutions provider Red Hat has been named in Forbes “World’s Most Innovative Companies” list, the company said on Tuesday. Red Hat was ranked as the 25th most innovative company in the world. The ‘World’s Most Innovative Companies’ list has firms that investors feel are most likely to come up with the next big innovation.

Finance

Fedora

• Today we have the newest installment of the F24 Updated Lives, carrying on average 690 Mb of updates over the Gold Images from two months ago.

• Today, August 30, 2016, the Fedora Project was pleased to announce the immediate availability for download and public testing of the Alpha pre-release build of the upcoming Fedora 25 operating system.

• The biggest new feature of the Fedora 25 Alpha milestone is the migration to the next-generation Wayland display server in addition to X11 (a.k.a. X.Org Server), which is enabled by default on systems that support it, but it’s available only for the Workstation edition that’s built around the GNOME desktop environment.

• Supplemental wallpapers are the non-default wallpapers provided with Fedora. Fedora ships GNOME’s supplemental wallpapers by default. We collect an additional set for each release of Fedora and offer it as an optional package. Wallpapers shipped with Fedora that are not the default GNOME wallpapers are called “supplemental” wallpapers.

Debian Family

• At this year’s FrOSCon I repeted my presentation on DNSSEC. In the audience, there was the suggestion of a lack of proper monitoring plugins for a DANE and DNSSEC infrastructure that was easily available. As I already had some personal tools around and some spare time to burn I’ve just started a repository with some useful tools. It’s available on my website and has mirrors on Gitlab and Github. I intent to keep this repository up-to-date with my personal requirements (which also means adding a xmpp check soon) and am happy to take any contributions (either by mail or as “pull requests” on one of the two mirrors). It currently has smtp (both ssmtp and starttls) and https support as well as support for checking valid DNSSEC configuration of a zone.

Derivatives

• Tails is a live operating system that can be used from USB, SD card or DVD disc having size more than 4 GB.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical’s Michael Vogt has been happy to announce the release and immediate availability of a new maintenance update of the Snapd daemon that implements support for Snap universal binary packages in GNU/Linux distributions.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Tizen

• Samsung have launched the Gear S2 smartwatch, classic and sport versions, in quite a few countries globally this year. There is however another variant that has not reached many foreign shores as of yet! Today, Samsung and the TIM mobile network have launched the first smartwatch in Italy that features an embedded SIM (eSIM). This work has been done in collaboration with international digital security firm Gemalto, who through its platform, will ensure the proper management and customization of the mobile radio service directly within the eSIM.

• In a few hours time, Samsung will officially unveiled the new Tizen-powered Gear S3 smartwatch in a ceremony taking place at berlin’s Tempodrom arena tonight. The event is sure going to be a big one and you wouldn’t want to miss out on this one. Unfortunately, the launch is an invite only event, but you don’t have to worry, Samsung has got you covered.

Android

• The “Poplar Board,” based on HiSilicon’s quad-core Hi3798C V200 SoC, is the first SBC to implement Linaro’s “96Boards Enterprise Edition TV Platform” spec.

• The “under $100” Poplar Board is aimed primarily at Internet connected TV set-top box (STB) developers, but it also targets hobbyists and the open-source community, according to HiSilicon’s announcement. The SBC, which is the first to adopt Linaro’s “96Boards Enterprise Edition TV Platform” form-factor specifications, was developed for use in “Digital Home applications including Digital TV and Set Top Boxes,” says HiSilicon.

• We all know that new smartphones can be expensive, especially when we add up the overall cost a new Android smartphone is on a 24-month contract. Sure, there are more choices than ever before for customers to get their hands on new Android smartphones, but the fact is that they still cost a fortune. Well, if you thought the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge and Motorola Moto Z were expensive, you’ll love this list of the 10 most expensive Android smartphones from around the world.

• Google launched the first Android phone in the US in 2008, and there are now 1.4 billion Android users around the world.

• The total ecosystem is huge: 400 companies partner with 500 carriers to produce over 4,000 distinct phones, tablets, and TVs running Android.

• How does one sell a new smartphone brand in the world’s fastest growing market that already has more than 65 established players?

• If we go by what has been happening in India in the recent months, cheap marketing gimmicks is the answer you are looking for.

• India is the world’s second largest smartphone market. Over 65 brands compete against each other to grab a share of over 25 million smartphones that are shipped every quarter. Given the market size and future potential, it seems like a lucrative business model to launch a new smartphone brand, selling those phones are a different matter altogether, considering established brands like Samsung, Micromax, Xiaomi and others already sell smartphones priced under $100.

Free Software/Open Source

• eBay’s ecommerce platform creates a huge amount of data. It has more than 800 million active listings, with 8.8 million new listings each week. There are 162 million active buyers, and 25 million sellers.

• “The data is the most important asset that we have,” said Seshu Adunuthula, eBay’s head of analytics infrastructure, during a keynote at Apache Big Data in Vancouver in May. “We don’t have inventory like other ecommerce platforms, what we’re doing is connecting buyers and sellers, and data plays an integral role into how we go about doing this.”

• Encouraged by a potential customer – a large, German university – the German start-up company NextCloud has improved the resource monitoring capabilities of its eponymous cloud services solution, which it makes available as open source software. The improved monitoring should help users scale their implementation, decide how to balance work loads and alerting them to potential capacity issues.

• NextCloud’s monitoring capabilities can easily be combined with OpenNMS, an open source network monitoring and management solution.

Events

• On Friday QtCon starts and there will be of course an update about the current state of Wayland support in Plasma. See you during the lightning talk session on Friday between 17:30 and 18:30 for my lightning talk “We are in Wayland!”

• For all you open source data scientists out there, this hour-long recorded webinar explains the big data tools and services you can use on Amazon. I learned a lot of data science lingo watching this video.

• FOSSCON 2016: Free & Open Source Software CONference was hosted at the International house of Philadelphia on Aug 20th 2016, and showcased nearly 20 vendors and nearly as many talks (plus ‘lightning talks’) and a Key Signing party.

• September is the Software Freedom Day month (among other things) since 2005 (SFD 2004 was in August) and this year is no exception! As of last night we have a total of 58 events in 34 countries, with only 42 fully registered (you can see the location on our famous SFD map). There is always a delay between wiki page creation (which includes the plan, speakers, date and location) and the registration which ask organizers to specify where the event will happen.

SaaS/Back End

• Open source Big Data tools are undoubtedly seen as fresher, hotter and more capable than proprietary resources, but companies are growing tired of sifting through open source for the magic combination that will make their data profitable.

• Some are starting to miss the stewardship of the “proprietary dinosaur,” yet they can’t afford to miss out on open-source innovation. One company is aiming to turn its awkward position in the middle into a value proposition to solve customer conundrums.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• Today, August 31, 2016, the GhostBSD project was pleased to announce the general availability of the final release of their GhostBSD 10.3 “Enoch” operating system based on the latest FreeBSD technologies.

• GhostBSD 10.3 has been in development for the past 12 months, during which the development team released two Alpha builds, a Beta milestone, and a Release Candidate, which pretty much contained all the features contained in the final version.

• Kicking off September the OpenBSD developers announced the release of OpenBSD 6.0.

• Highlights for OpenBSD 6.0 include Linux-only binary emulation being removed due to being unmaintained and seldom used, updates to all the Open*/Libre packages like LibreSSL and OpenSSH, continued work on SMP improvements, ARMv7 platform improvements, and W^X support being enabled by default for the base system.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Version 2.2.1 of the GNU Scientific Library (GSL) is now available. GSL provides a large collection of routines for numerical computing in C.

• This is a bug fix release to correct a backward compatibility issue with the Cholesky decomposition, introduced in the recent 2.2 version.

• The full NEWS file entry is appended below.

Public Services/Government

• Public administrations in Switzerland have the right to share their software under an open source licence, conclude Prof. Dr. Tomas Poledna and Prof. Dr. Simon Schlauri, two legal specialists, in a report for the Canton of Bern (Switzerland). The canton says that the report clears the way for the IT department to make available to others the business solutions that were developed for the Bern administration.

• Amid a rising China and Russia, the Pentagon’s slow pace on the software front could cost it tactically for years to come.

• Unless the Defense Department and its military components levy increased importance on software development, they risk losing military technical superiority, according to a new report from the Center for a New American Security.

• There is no secret that I am a born Russian living in the United Kingdom. I travel to my motherland for different reasons from time to time.

• I must admit that I am not that fond of the current Russian government. They more often talk about the use of free open source software than make any practical steps toward applying it. I even wrote several critical articles about this a few years ago.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• The French government is assessing how it evaluates its public policies. The assessment of its ‘Évaluer les politiques publiques’, (public policy evaluation, EPP) started in July and will last until December. Following 68 EPPs, it is now time to study the evaluation itself, comments SGMAP, France’s government modernisation unit.

• For the last several years, I’ve been studying under an open organization and future of work guru. And for longer than I can remember, I’ve felt that business should operate differently—really move at the speed their people can innovate rather than standing on who’s held office the longest.

• So you can imagine how long it took for me to embrace the open organization mindset. It was rather like an old school touchdown dance in my mind. I’m excited by the value proposition open organizations present.

• Knowing I wanted to be engaged in a company that leverages the value of those at its table, I decided to begin seeking out one I could join. I knew the impact I could personally have on the world could become exponential if I did.

Open Hardware/Modding

Leftovers

• Thrill-seekers have been left stuck on a rollercoaster at Alton Towers which last year crashed, seriously injuring five people.

• The theme park visitors were on the Smiler when there was a “temporary stoppage” but nobody was injured, a spokesman said.

• The £18 million ride at the Staffordshire attraction smashed into another carriage on June 2, 2015.

Security

• The new NetworkManager release 1.4.0 adds new features to change the current MAC address of your Ethernet or Wi-Fi card. This is also called MAC address “spoofing” or “cloning”.

• The Tor Project, through Nick Mathewson, is pleased to inform the Tor community about the release and general availability of yet another maintenance update to the Tor 0.2.8 stable series.

Finance

• An international trade deal being negotiated in secret is a “turbo-charged privatisation pact” that poses a threat to democratic sovereignty and “the very concept of public services”, campaigners have warned.

• But this is not TTIP – the international agreement it appears campaigners in the European Union have managed to scupper over similar concerns – this is TISA, a deal backed by some of the world’s biggest corporations, such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, Walt Disney, Walmart, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase.

• A little-known international arbitration system is gaining global power and allowing multinational corporations to sue entire countries.

• Buzzfeed News spent months reporting on the scope and power of the investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, and just published a nearly 10,000-word investigative report on the system. If you don’t have two hours to go through the whole tome, here are some highlights.

• Apple’s official statement on the European Union ruling against its Irish tax arrangements tells you all you need to know about what is at stake: You can have taxes or you can have jobs, but Apple is in no mood to deliver both.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Wednesday picked up an endorsement from another member of former President George W. Bush’s administration.

• “Secretary Clinton has demonstrated her skills as Secretary of State, especially but by no means exclusively in helping other Asian countries counter Chinese bullying in the western Pacific,” James Clad, the former deputy assistant secretary of Defense under Bush, said in a statement.

• “For Republicans and Democrats alike, everything in national security requires clarity and steadiness, whether managing nuclear weapons or balancing great power rivalries.”

• Clad talked about the importance of never losing sight of national interest. He said that is a “discipline which Secretary Clinton possesses in full measure.”

• “Our adversaries must never hear flippancy or ignorance in America’s voice,” he added.

• “They should never take satisfaction from an incompetent president. Giving an incoherent amateur the keys to the White House this November will doom us to second or third class status.”

• Clad tied in his own experiences, saying he has seen what can happen when “American reliability falters.”

• “It’s not pretty, for us or for the world,” he said.

• Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald says Democrats have adopted a “Cold War McCarthyite kind of rhetoric” by accusing many its critics of having ties to Russia. “It’s sort of this constant rhetorical tactic to try and insinuate that anyone opposing the Clintons are somehow Russian agents, when it’s the Clintons who actually have a lot of ties to Russia, as well,” Greenwald said. “I mean, the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton helped Russian companies take over uranium industries in various parts of the world. He received lots of Russian money for speeches.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• The United Nations’ comments on a controversial Singaporean blogger “effectively narrows the definition of ‘hate speech’ under international law,” a U.S. human rights advocacy group says.

• Seventeen-year-old Amos Yee (余澎杉) faces potential jail time after posting controversial material related to the beliefs of Christians and Muslims in videos, blogs and Facebook posts. The trial, which started on Aug. 17, is still on-going, but Yee has pleaded guilty to three of six charges of intending to wound religious feelings and two counts of not reporting to a police station.

• The end may be nigh for trolls on Skype and Xbox. Microsoft is launching a customer support service that allows users to report hate speech. Conversely, the new system also includes an appeals forum to reinstate contested content.

• For hate mongers on the internet, Microsoft would become judge, jury and executioner. On Friday, the software conglomerate rolled out a new system for airing grievances regarding hate speech posted on Microsoft-hosted services.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Since Edward Snowden stepped into the limelight from a hotel room in Hong Kong three years ago, use of the Tor anonymity network has grown massively. Journalists and activists have embraced the anonymity the network provides as a way to evade the mass surveillance under which we all now live, while citizens in countries with restrictive Internet censorship, like Turkey or Saudi Arabia, have turned to Tor in order to circumvent national firewalls. Law enforcement has been less enthusiastic, worrying that online anonymity also enables criminal activity.

• Tor’s growth in users has not gone unnoticed, and today the network first dubbed “The Onion Router” is under constant strain from those wishing to identify anonymous Web users. The NSA and GCHQ have been studying Tor for a decade, looking for ways to penetrate online anonymity, at least according to these Snowden docs. In 2014, the US government paid Carnegie Mellon University to run a series of poisoned Tor relays to de-anonymise Tor users. A 2015 research paper outlined an attack effective, under certain circumstances, at decloaking Tor hidden services (now rebranded as “onion services”). Most recently, 110 poisoned Tor hidden service directories were discovered probing .onion sites for vulnerabilities, most likely in an attempt to de-anonymise both the servers and their visitors.

• With a name like the National Security Agency, America’s chief intelligence outfit might at least attempt to promote American security online. At the very least, one would hope its activities don’t actively undermine U.S. cybersecurity. But—bad news—a recent leak of the agency’s digital spy tools by a myterious group called the Shadow Brokers shows how the agency prioritizes online surveillance over online security.

• FBI Director James Comey is gathering evidence so that in 2017 America can have an “adult” conversation about breaking encryption to make crimefighters’ lives easier.

• Speaking at Tuesday’s 2016 Symantec Government Symposium in Washington, Comey banged on about his obsession with strong cryptography causing criminals to “go dark” and making themselves harder to catch. Comey said that once the election cycle is over, he will be resuming his push to force technology companies to bork their own products, and this time armed with plenty of supporting documentation.

• “The conversation we’ve been trying to have about this has dipped below public consciousness now, and that’s fine. Because what we want to do is collect information this year so that next year we can have an adult conversation in this country,” he said, AP reports.

• FBI Director James Comey warned again Tuesday about the bureau’s inability to access digital devices because of encryption and said investigators were collecting information about the challenge in preparation for an “adult conversation” next year.

• This is not just insulting, but counterproductive. Plenty of experts have been trying their damnedest to have an “adult conversation” with Comey, explaining to him why he’s wrong about the risks of “going dark,” while others have — in fairly great detail — explained the serious dangers behind Comey’s approach.

• Comey’s response to these efforts so far has been the equivalent of sticking his fingers in his ears and screaming “nah, nah, nah — can’t hear you!” while repeating his “nerd harder” mantra.

• An “adult conversation” has to be one where someone in Comey’s position is able to admit that maybe, just maybe, he’s wrong. It’s not one where he gets to keep demanding a new conversation until people tell him that night is day. Because that’s just silly.

• This new claim about an “adult conversation” is also stupidly counterproductive. All it’s going to do is make the actual experts here — like the authors of that MIT paper on the dangers of backdoor — dig in and have absolutely no interest in dealing with Comey. How could you when he so flippantly brushes off all the work they’ve done already?

Civil Rights/Policing

• Sen. Leila de Lima admitted that there is a need to intensify the campaign against illegal drugs in the country but with the least number of killings.

• The neophyte senator suggested that the country’s criminal justice system and law enforcement should be reformed.

• “There should be no shortcuts in trying to achieve law and order in our society,” De Lima said in an interview with CNN Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday morning.

• The senator added that law enforcers and prosecutors should be trained in the “proper manner” for them to be more efficient.

• Senator Leila M. de Lima has filed the seventh legal challenge against the plan to bury dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos at the Libingan ng Bayani, on the eve of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments on the divisive issue.

• In her 38-page petition, De Lima said that “no President has the power to rewrite history.”

• De Lima argued that interring Marcos’ remains at the heroes’ cemetery would go against the very spirit of the 1987 Constitution, as the charter was crafted precisely to prevent the abuses committed under his regime.

• Standing up and singing the Star-Spangled Banner before sporting events is a time honored American tradition. It is a rousing anthem that champions in song the nation’s values of freedom and liberty for all. It is also meant to remind fans in the stadium and at home that there are more important things that unite us than sporting rivalries.

• At the heart of this ritual is a profound contradiction. It too often serves as a force for forgetfulness. In belting out “O say can you see” Americans are allowed to unthinkingly celebrate the USA. They can forget for a moment the illegal invasions of foreign countries that have left millions dead. They can turn the mind away from the black citizens being killed by police with seemingly almost total legal immunity. They can close their eyes to the fact that they are now an oligarchy ruled by corporate elites and their bipartisan political supporters instead of a vibrant democracy governed for, by and of the people.

• There is a also a deeper forgetting at play. It is to overlook the country’s history of systematic racism starting with slavery. It is to be given a few minutes pause to close one’s eyes to its tradition of classism at home and economic exploitation abroad. It is a stirring moment of collective amnesia to an America’s past that from the beginning has continually betrayed its avowed commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for many of its citizens as well as those it has oppressed around the world.

• [...]

• Kaepernick’s rejection of the anthem is therefore a political protest that should not and cannot be ignored. Unfortunately, so much of the coverage is on that action itself as opposed to what it represents.

• The tragedy of the anthem is that its music all too commonly drowns out genuine voices for justice. It is a blaring cacophony of American triumph that silences all critical reflection. The tune and the words stir emotions so that those singing it no longer have to hear the cries of its country’s victims.

• Even before the FBI identified new cyberattacks on two separate state election boards, the Department of Homeland Security began considering declaring the election a “critical infrastructure,” giving it the same control over security it has over Wall Street and the electric power grid.

• The latest admissions of attacks could speed up that effort possibly including the upcoming presidential election, according to officials.

• “We should carefully consider whether our election system, our election process, is critical infrastructure like the financial sector, like the power grid,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said.

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