● 09.07.16

● Links 7/9/2016: Sony Microsoft Bundling Case, Torvalds’ ‘sh*t-for-brains stupid patch’

Posted in News Roundup at 3:46 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The sale of a computer equipped with pre-installed software isn’t an unfair commercial practice because most customers prefer to buy a laptop they can use straight away, Europe’s top court has ruled in a victory for Sony.

• “Failure to indicate the price of each item of pre-installed software” isn’t misleading, the Court of Justice of the European Union added in its ruling (PDF) on Wednesday.

Server

• There’s little doubt that cloud computing will play an important role in data science for the foreseeable future. The flexible, scalable, on-demand computing power available is an important resource, and as a result, there’s a lot of competition between the providers of this service. Two of the biggest players in the space are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Kernel Space

• Great news for users of the open-source NVIDIA “Nouveau” graphics driver: the long-awaited boost patches are now queued up to land with Linux 4.9.

• The boost patches are about allowing the Kepler and newer graphics cards to achieve their “boost” frequencies, rather than their highest standard clock frequencies. With being able to hit these upper frequency thresholds, the performance should be more competitive with the proprietary driver. I tested the earlier version of these patches months ago and found great improvements: Nouveau “Boost” Patches Show Much Performance Potential.

• Ben Skeggs finally began pulling the work and is now in the Nouveau repository for then being sent into Linux 4.9 via DRM-Next.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman announced he’s planning on Linux 4.9 to be the next long-term supported kernel that he will maintain for a period two years.

• Luis Camacho Caballero is working on a project to preserve endangered South American languages by porting them to computational systems through automatic speech recognition using Linux-based systems. He was one of 14 aspiring IT professionals to receive a 2016 Linux Foundation Training (LiFT) scholarship, announced last month.

• Luis, who is from Peru, has been using Linux since 1998, and appreciates that it is built and maintained by a large number of individuals working together to increase knowledge. Through his language preservation project, he hopes to have the first language, Quechua, the language of his grandparents, completed by the end of 2017, and then plans to expand to other Amazonian languages.

• We’ve rebuilt the storage system using ElasticSearch as the document store. We have used it for many projects and have nothing but a good. The site is currently a mixture of Python and PHP, the priority has been given to get the original functionality back in place; then work with the community to decide which of the Gmane interfaces are relevant and what we need to change to bring it up-to-date.

• We’ll do our utmost to continue in Lars’ footsteps, his hardwork and dedication to maintain this valuable Internet resource.

• Thank you Lars for the hardwork that you’ve put into Gmane over the past nearly two decades, all of the Gmane users are greatful to you!

• Audio is an increasingly important component of the Linux plumbing, given increased use of Linux for media workloads and of the Linux kernel for smartphones. Topics include low-latency audio, use of the clock API, propagating digital configuration through dynamic audio power management (DAPM), integration of HDA and ASoC, SoundWire ALSA use-case managemer (UCM) scalability, standardizing HDMI and DisplayPort interfaces, Media Controller API integration, and a number of topics relating to the multiple userspace users of Linux-kernel audio, including Android and ChromeOS as well as the various desktop-oriented Linux distributions.

• Today, September 6, 2015, Linux kernel developer Jiri Slaby announced the release and immediate availability of the sixty-third maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 3.12 kernel series.

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.7.3 kernel.

• All users of the 4.7 kernel series must upgrade.

• Add another Linus Torvalds swearing incident to his long list of linguistic indiscretions. The Linux lord has unloaded on proposed new code in typically robust language.

• “I call BS”, Torvalds’ post opens. “Let me be very clear. I’m not applying that shit-for-brains stupid patch, and will not be pulling it unless somebody tricks me into it.”

• He’s got a point: his post goes on to ask why Andersson is asking him to approve code when it would mean “… a distribution is distributing the driver without the firmware”.

• Torvalds asks “what the hell is the point of such a thing” and concludes the post by saying “Stop pushing this shit.”

• LINUX FOUNDER Linus Torvalds has unleashed a foul-mouthed rant at a contributor over a piece of code with which he fundamentally disagrees.

• Torvalds, usually a complete wallflower who never uses colourful language or sarcasm in any way shape or form, has repeatedly told the community that he is not willing to consider tying firmware and driver modules together in a single unit.

• He was pushed on the issue yesterday with this comment: “Nobody has actually answered the ‘why don’t we just tie the firmware and module together?’ question.

• Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative open source project developing a Linux-based, open platform for the connected car, today announced that AutoIO Technology, Irdeto, Link Motion, Pocket Soft, sdtech and Synopsys have joined The Linux Foundation and Automotive Grade Linux.

• Like mobile and cloud, blockchain — first implemented in the original source code of bitcoin in 2009 — stands poised to profoundly disrupt business. If it lives up to its promise, it won’t just be financial institutions that are disrupted.

• “If you can transfer money or something of value through the internet just like another form of data, what else can you do with it? It provides a way to establish trust in the digital world,” says Angus Champion de Crespigny, Financial Services Blockchain and Distributed Infrastructure Strategy Leader, Ernst & Young. “How do you ensure something is the original copy of something on the internet? Prior to blockchain technology, you couldn’t.”

• “If you want to prove something happened in the digital world, there is no more secure place to do that,” he adds. “Once information is recorded on there, it is, for all intents and purposes, impossible to go back and retroactively change that. When there are such drastic new technologies that emerge, it isn’t just a matter of looking at your business and thinking how this technology is going to make your business more effective. What you should be doing is considering that maybe your business isn’t structured correctly for this new world.”

Graphics Stack

• For those making use of the xf86-video-ati DDX driver in a PRIME-capable system with Radeon GPU, there’s more effective tear-free rendering support with the latest development code.

• A fix landed in Mesa Git today that should address various performance issues people have been seeing in different rare setups. The fix mostly seems to be for Radeon/Intel users seeing low performance recently with glxgears but also appears to help those affected by the much talked about R9 290 regression.

• The fix by Michel Dänzer is loader/dri3: Always use at least two back buffers. Michel commented on the simple change, “This can make a significant difference for performance with some extreme test cases such as vblank_mode=0 glxgears.”

• A few months back I wrote about Arcan: A New Open-Source Display Server Built Atop A Game Engine.

• Bryce Harrington announced the release candidates on Tuesday for the upcoming Wayland 1.12 and Weston 1.12 compositor releases.

• Over the earlier development builds, Wayland 1.11.93 simply has a documentation fix and a test case fix. Weston 1.11.93 meanwhile has just a handful of fixes to different parts of that compositor playground.

Benchmarks

• In testing out a new Broadwell-EP system as well as for final validation of the new Phoronix Test Suite 6.6, I carried out a fresh Linux OS distribution comparison last week. Here are those results from Ubuntu, Clear Linux, Scientific Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora, Antergos, and Sabayon Linux.

Applications

• VideoLAN (also called VLC) is a very popular media player available for all major technology platforms. Work is progressing towards a 3.0 release and in this new video you can meet some of the developers working to make that happen.

• One of the things that are quite essential in life is reliable email, and as such one needs to get a fast, stable, feature-rich email client that is both easy to use and intuitive in functionality, Nylas N1.

Proprietary

• You don’t need to tell me. I know it already: you’re sick of hearing about Spotify on this site. But be a champ and suck it up, cos I’m back with another app, one that lets the world’s most popular (citation needed) music streaming service play nice on Ubuntu.

• You may not like the modern, minimalistic interface, but I say, look beyond that. The software works fine, we get new features that were lacking previously, the alpha version is actually stable enough for testing, you have been warned, and you can even have a bit of fun with the bots.

• Google Earth had quite a few issues on recent Linux distributions. Back when Ubuntu 16.04 was released, Google Earth wasn’t installable at all, and this was later fixed, but the app would still crash after a few seconds of usage, for many users. Furthermore, Panoramio pictures weren’t working.

• These issues should be fixed with the latest Google Earth 7.1.7.2600 for Linux. Furthermore, the update also brings support for the OAuth2, as well as updated Google and Google Earth logos.

• Harmony is a sleek desktop music player for Linux (and macOS & Windows) that can play your regular music files and online streaming services like Spotify and Soundcloud.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Oh boy, have you been patiently waiting for it — and now it’s finally coming. Yes, Rocket League for Linux will launch in beta on September 8. Developer’s Psyonix say they will only support SteamOS “officially”, though the game should be able to run on any modern Linux distro that Steam does, including Ubuntu.

• Rocket League, the race car-football (soccer) game fusion, will receive a new update on Thursday, September 8th. One of the biggest components of the update is the included OS X and SteamOS (including Linux distributions) support. The update also comes with a new Rumble mode, updates to classic Rocket Trails, and other changes.

• Earlier this year we heard of a science fiction MMORPG game making use of Unigine 2 after switching from Unreal Engine 4.

• Valve released a new Beta version of the next stable branch of its SteamOS gaming distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux, SteamOS 2.91, which was pushed to the brewmaster_beta channel on August 31, 2016.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• It was twenty years ago in 1996 that KDE was first announced. The project is celebrating with a new book. Elsewhere, Abode announced they’ve updated the old Netscape Flash plugin and said that development would continue. JP Buntinx recommended some distributions for the “darknet” and a new Linux usermode rootkit was described by anti-virus company Trend Micro.

• The powerhouse Kate text editor has advanced search-and-replace, including support for escape sequences and regular expressions, so you can make complex corrections without leaving your document.

• The Kate text editor is my favorite and has been my main workhorse for years. Kate has a lot of great features and is friendly to both touch-typing and pointy-clicky. It doesn’t quite have the eleventy-million features of Vim or Emacs, but then you don’t need the dexterity of a concert pianist to use it, either. I think it is the most user-friendly of the powerhouse text editors.

• During this year’s Akademy we had a few discussions about Wayland, and the Plasma and Neon team decided to switch Neon developer unstable edition to Wayland by default soonish.

• There are still a few things in the stack which need to be shaken out – we need a newer Xwayland in Neon, we want to wait for Plasma 5.8 to be released, we need to get the latest QtWayland 5.7 build, etc. etc.

• KDE developers have decided to switch to Wayland by default for KDE Neon’s unstable/developer OS.

• KDE Neon, of course, is the project providing daily spins of the bleeding-edge Ubuntu packages atop Ubuntu. Now moving forward with the new developer/unstable packages is the usage of KDE Plasma on Wayland by default.

• On the heels of the Plasma 5.7′s new Task Manager backend, the upcoming Plasma 5.8 LTS release will sport substantially rewritten Pager and Activity Pager widgets, aimed at improving efficiency and conserving resources in a typical Plasma Desktop setup.

• Finally, things were moving again, and store.kde.org was born!

• Soon, it will be set up the KDE repositories for this project and more news is coming.

• The revolution has started, and it looks like the next-generation display server, Wayland, is here to stay, being adopted by more and more GNU/Linux distributions every month.

• Krita 3.0.1 is the first release after Krita 3.0. With the new release schedule we’re trying to release every six weeks, with a combination of new features and bug fixes. This release already contains the first results of the 2016 Google Summer of Code projects, as well as kickstarter-funded features, the work of new contributors Eugene Ingerman, Nishant Rodrigues, Miroslav Talasek and Laurent Jospin and the work from students mentored by Dmitry: Grigory Tantsev and Alexey Kapustin.

• Today, September 6, 2016, a new version of the Krita open-source digital painting software has been released, build 3.0.1, and it’s the first bugfix and feature release for the major Krita 3.0 series.

• Release highlights of Krita 3.0.1 include the ability to tweak the Brush settings in the pop-up palette, soft proofing support, which lets you see how your artwork will look like when its converted to CMYK (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black), as well as various improvements to the mirror tools by adding extra options.

• While I’ve been running PC-BSD on some systems for years I hadn’t tried out any of its rolling-release FreeBSD 11.0-based spins under the new TrueOS brand nor had I tried out the project’s Qt-based Lumina Desktop Environment since it reached 1.0.

• Martin Gräßlin, KDE’s KWin expert, today blogged that KDE Plasma show-horse neon would soon be defaulting to Wayland in the unstable branch. Folks using the unstable will probably need to be aware of the change. What’s unstable today will be stable tomorrow, so some folks wondered how this decision might affect NVIDIA users. Gräßlin said in the comments that NVIDIA hardware will still default to X. He added in another comment that Wayland will be the default, but not exclusive, graphic server. Another asked if NVIDIA is planning on supporting Wayland and a discussion at Phoronix several weeks ago indicated that NVIDIA has been mum on the subject for quite a while. The general consensus was NVIDIA has lost interest in supporting Wayland.

• Having come a quarter away around the world in part to meet up with my Kubuntu colleagues, it was surprising to hear that some people thought (at a KDE meeting?) that Kubuntu is dead.

• Not a chance. We’re having elections right now for some Kubuntu Council positions that end this year. We have four candidates for three positions, which seems very healthy to me. By the way, if you are a Kubuntu Member and have not gotten your ballot, please contact Aaron Honeycutt, since the vote closes on the 12th of September.

• We ended up meeting for more than 4 hours plus lunch yesterday, the first day of BoF meetings. Then Phil had to leave, which still seems sad, as we all miss his gentle, kind wisdom and humor.

• During the meeting, we accomplished a great deal, mostly cleaning out the Trello. We now have one and only one board, which has been mostly evaluated card by card, commented, and tagged. We hope that this will make it much easier to find a task to work on when you have a bit of spare time. If you have a login to Trello, but need inviting to the board, please check with someone in #kubuntu-devel Freenode IRC. Feel free to create cards when needed, and assign yourself and someone else to it. Many of the items on our Wishlist contain things we really do want, but do not have the time or skills to do. So pitch in as you can.

• The QtCon / Akademy organizers have published the videos of last weekend’s conference presentations.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The Orca open-source screen reader and magnifier utility used by default in many GNU/Linux distributions, especially those running the GNOME desktop environment, has received a major update recently.

• The fact of the matter is that we’re talking about Orca 3.22, which is currently under massive development as part of the upcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, due for release on September 21, 2016, and it a Beta 2 milestone had been pushed to public testers a few days ago.

• This is a follow-up to my other item about wrapping up Outreachy. Diana posted part two of her analysis from first-time GNOME user experience testing.

• In this test, Diana asked testers to simulate an “unboxing” of a new system. The tester logged in to GNOME using a fresh “test” account so they get the first-time user experience. After allowing each tester to explore GNOME via three broad scenario tasks, Diana asked them to rate their reaction to GNOME using emoji, and followed up with several interview questions.

Distributions

• One of the common questions I get asked is “which Linux distro is best for developers?” The short answer is that it depends. The long answer takes the form of this article. This piece will dive into the different Linux distros favored by developers. It’ll also provide some insight as to why there is no automatic (simple) answer for why one developer chooses one distro over another.

• To provide a more accurate look at this entire situation, I’m going to provide a break down of each consideration when making a developer friendly Linux distro selection. As you read, one must start off with the right development applications. Without these, selecting a distro is meaningless.

• The Calamares team announced recently the availability of the first point release to the new stable series of the distribution-independent system installer used in many GNU/Linux distributions, Calamares 2.4.

New Releases

• Today the Black Lab development team is pleased to release “Onyx” Beta 2 – this brings us one step closer to the stable release of Black Lab 8 due in late November. Our team is continuously dedicated to bringing you the best Linux desktop – Black Lab is and will continue to be the standard bearer, introducing cutting-edge features without sacrificing usability and stability or a unique, intuitive desktop interface.

• Slackel 6.0.7 Live Openbox beta1 has been released. Slackel is based on Slackware and Salix.

• The 64-bit iso images support booting on UEFI systems. The 32-bit iso images support both i686 PAE SMP and i486, non-PAE capable systems. Iso images are isohybrid.

• The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.7.6

Screenshots/Screencasts

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• QtCon, Akademy and VideoLAN Dev Days in Berlin this past week kept many developers busy, but openSUSE’s rolling release kept going forward.

• Tumbleweed had one new snapshot since that last article was published and more is expected this week.

• Snapshot 20160901 provided Mozilla updates for both Firefox and Thunderbird in the repositories. Firefox updated to version 48.0.2 and Thunderbird to version 45.3.0.

Red Hat Family

• To hear Scott McCarty say it, the biggest barriers to the adoption of software containers in the enterprise are as much political as they are technical.

Finance

Fedora

• The Modularity working group is looking to flesh out a set of personas to help focus the work being done by the team. Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might interact with a “product” in different ways. They are not market segments but should be thought of as user archetypes.

• Personas can be useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of users to guide decisions about a product. They should be based on user research and can include all types of information about that particular person. Our personas include information related to behavior patterns, goals, skills, pain points, attitudes and daily activities. If you want to learn more about personas and their use, I recommend your start here.

• I’m wanting to do some development on my laptop so as MariaDB has replaced mySQL I’ve installed that. It was simple enough all you need to do is run dnf install mariadb done.

Debian Family

• Today, I wrote sicherboot, a tool to integrate systemd-boot into a Linux distribution in an entirely new way: With secure boot support. To be precise: The use case here is to only run trusted code which then unmounts an otherwise fully encrypted disk, as in my setup:

• Debian Project released recently a new update to the kernel packages of its current stable distribution, namely Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 “Jessie”, patching four security flaws discovered by various hackers and researchers.

• Salvatore Bonaccorso is the one to inform the community about the new Linux kernel security update for Debian Jessie via the Debian Security Advisory DSA-3659-1 announcement, which details a total of four security flaws, namely CVE-2016-5696, CVE-2016-6136, CVE-2016-6480, and CVE-2016-6828.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• With Ubuntu 16.04LTS (Xenial Xerus), Canonical has introduced incremental improvements to the popular server and cloud versions of its operating system, but if you were looking for exciting changes to desktop Ubuntu, this version isn’t it.

• The 16.04 release is an iterative, not necessarily massive improvement. But this is an Long Term Service (LTS) version, which means that there’s a team working on keeping it solid for five years. So, into the next decade, 16.04 gets patched and fixed, as other versions continue to be released on a regular basis.

• If I asked you about Plexydesk you’d probably look at be blankly. I last mentioned the promising widget-toting project five years ago today. Curious as to what became of it I went on a Google today. It only took a few characters strokes to discover that the project is still very much alive.

• I don’t drive, so self-driving cars should be right up my one-way street, right?

• I can’t feign interest. I’m not a particularly mechanical person, barring a brief spurt of Moto-X (the sport, not the handset) at the turn of the decade. I don’t even like Top Gear.

• Intel’s graphic update tool has been updated to support Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Fedora 24. It offers users the Intel 2016Q2 graphics stack.

Devices/Embedded

• SeeedStudio’s “ESP3212” COM taps Espressif’s IoT-focused ESP32 follow-on to the ESP8266 SoC, which uses a faster Tensilica LX6 MCU and adds BLE and sensors.

• Espressif’s highly integrated and highly anticipated ESP32 follow-on to its popular ESP8266 wireless system-on-chip is now shipping. It’s available as part of a tiny SeedStudio ESP3212 computer-on-module, as well on Espressif’s own, slightly larger ESP-WROOM-32 reference design board and more expansive ESP32 Development Board.

• Arduino, the world’s leading open-source software and hardware ecosystem, is being used to power Farmbot, the revolutionary farming robot that is built fully on open source. Farmbot is a computer numerical control (CNC) farming machine and software package for small scale, hyper local, DIY food production. It is controlled by and Arduino RAMPS stack and connected to the Internet using Raspberry Pi 2. The platform is designed to be simple, scalable, hackable, and easily made.

• “The applications that are fueling the IoT market are astonishing, and open source technology is playing a big role in it,” said Federico Musto, CEO of Arduino S.r.L. “Predicted to become a $6 trillion market by 2021, the IoT market is starting to take shape with advancements in wearables, healthcare, smart homes and cities, law enforcement, automotive, and, of course agriculture. We are proud to be a part of Farmbot, and look forward to continuing to fuel IoT deployments.”

Phones

Tizen

• Following the release of the Samsung Z2 in India, Tizen Experts present you with custom Z2 wallpapers / backgrounds to celebrate the release of Tizen’s 3rd phone. This batch of wallpapers have a Tizen theme and support the Samsung Z1 / Z2 / Z3 smartphones. You can download them directly from our site either using your mobile devices and apply them easily to your Tizen smartphones.

• Whenever the Samsung Z2 launch in Kenya, the device might just make it as the cheapest Tizen OS powered smartphone ever. The exact date the Z2 will go official in Kenya has not yet been disclosed by Samsung but Samsung Electronics East Africa has teased the estimated price the device will fetch when finally launched.

• Samsung Electronics East Africa held an event in Nairobi where the Tizen OS was introduced to the East Africa market as well as Samsung’s strategy as regards the Tizen OS in the East Africa market, particularly in Kenya. According to Sijmon Kariithi, Director of Internet and Mobile (IM) at the East Africa Regional branch of Samsung Electronics, the Korean company plans to release a Tizen-powered smartphone and other household appliances in Kenya which would run on its Tizen operating system.

• The Samsung Gear S3 is yet to ship after it was launched, but we are already seeing Tizen-based apps that are designed for the smart wearable. Its not just any app but high profile apps and one of them is the HERE WeGo app developed by German company, HERE. The app offers comprehensive mapping experience whether you are searching for places, planning travel routes by car, on foot and by public transit.

Android

• Suspected state-sponsored hackers have intensified their attempts to break into the online accounts of Iranian rights activists in recent weeks by exploiting security vulnerabilities in Android smartphones, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran has learned.

• On August 11, 2016 an unknown person sent a message on Facebook to a prominent Iranian political activist living in Paris and introduced himself as a former student. The hacker said he had created political stickers with the activist’s photo on them. He then sent a file, with an APK suffix, to the activist claiming that the file contained the stickers.

• But the file actually contained malware. Soon after the activist opened the file, the hacker was able to take over the activist’s Facebook page and sent similar messages to the activist’s friends, some of whom worked at Radio Farda, Deutsche Welle and the BBC. One of the friends fell for the trap and lost access to his Gmail account for several hours.

• Google is expected to release two new HTC-built smartphones later this year, the Pixel and Pixel XL. Although Google has long used its Nexus brand to debut new versions of Android, the two new devices this year are rumored to ship with something even newer than Google’s delicious Android 7.0 Nougat.

• Twitter leaker and Android developer LlabTooFeR claims that the Pixel and Pixel XL will come with Android 7.1, meaning that there’s a good chance we’ll never see brand new phones running the just-announced version of Google’s new OS.

• Google appears to be planning some added security for upcoming Chromebooks. The company’s Chromium code repository mentions a fingerprint sensor for Chrome OS, as first spotted by Chrome Unboxed.

• Led by Apple, Samsung, and others, fingerprint sensors are currently the most popular—not to mention fastest—method of biometric authentication. Windows 10 PCs also use biometric authentication via Microsoft’s Windows Hello feature. Microsoft favors facial recognition and retina scanning in its Windows 10 devices, but it also supports fingerprint scanning.

• There’s much anticipation about Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi’s long-awaited entry into the U.S. market. And we don’t have long to wait. Kinda. TechCrunch understands that Xiaomi will begin selling its first mainstream product in the U.S. — an Android set-top box — as soon as next month.

• The Mi Box was announced and demoed all the way back in May at Google I/O, but so far the company has remained quiet on when it will go on sale. A source inside Xiaomi, however, told TechCrunch that it will be made available to consumers in the U.S. and other selected markets in “early Q4 2016.” That could indeed mean October.

• The price has also been kept quiet to date, but we also understand that the box will cost less than $100.

• Xiaomi declined to comment.

• When Google releases its next pure Android phones, they’ll launch running Android 7.1 according to the latest leak. The news comes from @LlabTooFeR, a leaker known for revealing nuggets of HTC-centric information before it’s confirmed.

• Perhaps notably, the tweet refers to the next phones as the Pixel and Pixel XL, rather than any form of Nexus, corroborating rumours that Google is shifting its hardware strategy this year.

• LG just announced the V20, a successor to last year’s V10 smartphone. In 2015, the V10 stood out for its unique, sturdy design, a great camera, and audiophile-grade music playback. LG has retained two of those strengths and introduced others for the sequel. And as we already know, this is the first smartphone to run Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box. It’s set to begin rolling out globally this month and will be available in three color options: titan (dark gray), silver, and pink. Specific pricing will vary by carrier.

• Android 7.0 Nougat is the major revision of Android for 2016/2017. The upgrade first became available for phones in August 2016. However, depending on the device you have, there’s a good chance you’re still waiting. If this is the case, there’s one question you’ll want answered: is this Android OS update actually worth getting excited about?

• If you’ve been hankering after a super-flashy revamp to make it seem we’ve entered a new era of Android, you may be disappointed. Android 7.0 Nougat’s goals are more about preparing for the future of Android app development, adding little tweaks here and there, with the end result being that in use your device will feel faster.

Free Software/Open Source

• To be sure, the list of open source tools for DevOps is growing. Why? Because DevOps itself is growing, and open source is a natural choice for this development methodology.

• First coined around 2009, the term DevOps refers to an approach to IT that emphasizes collaboration between the development and operations groups. It arose out of the agile software development movement and applies some of the same principles to the application lifecycle management (ALM) process. DevOps is difficult to define because it’s more of a movement or a philosophy than a rigid set of rules or practices. Organizations that employ DevOps are characterized by a high degree of cooperation, few internal “siloes,” heavy use of automation, continuous testing and integration, and faster development and deployment of applications.

• In the time since DevOps was first imagined, its popularity has increased tremendously. In fact, a RightScale survey found that 74 percent of organizations and 81 percent of enterprises say they are using DevOps.

• Pixar Animation Studios has open sourced its Universal Scene Description (USD) technology. USD is an extremely powerful toolset that helps filmmakers in reading, writing, editing, and rapidly previewing 3D scene data.

• “USD is the core of Pixar’s 3D graphics pipeline, used in every 3D authoring and rendering application, including Pixar’s proprietary Presto animation system,” according to Pixar.

• USD is aimed at performance and large-scale collaboration among many artists that makes it ideal for the complex modern pipeline, allowing dozens of creative people working on the same project.

• One of the most notable features of USD is Hydra, a high-performance preview renderer capable of interactively displaying large data sets.

• Pixar engineers gave a live demo of USD at SIGGRAPH 2016, International Conference and exhibition on Computer Graphics & Interactive Techniques. The demo shows real time rendering capabilities of USD technologies.

• By using open source IoT app standards, Indian entrepreneurs will be able to sell their IoT apps globally. App store customers can run these apps on any type of enterprise or industrial hardware. India’s software industry is uniquely positioned to benefit from IoT. India can combine low-cost, innovation and revenue generation in any future IoT solution. IoT is the next big thing, and India should do everything possible to drive it.

• Google is developing a new operating system named Fuchsia, and the early source code is already public. Google itself and Fuchsia’s developers haven’t explained what the OS is for—but we can dig into the source code to learn more.

• I discovered open source software while I was a student at the University of Lomé in Togo in 2004. From that very first day, I was in love with the philosophy and knew this would be a big part of my life.

• I joined the National Open Source Users Association (ATULL) and became an active member. Then, as a student, I created an open source web application for the managing of college activities, and it won 3rd place at the African Conference on Open Source Software in Morocco in 2007. Thanks to the award, I got a first class ticket from the Francophonie International Organization to attend the Open Source Software World Meeting in 2008.

Events

• The OPNFV Project, a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), today announced the 2017 OPNFV Summit will be held in Beijing, China, June 12-15, 2017 at the JW Marriott Beijing. The Summit provides an opportunity to reach the innovative communities, developers and companies transforming the networking industry through open source NFV.

• Registration for the 2017 OPNFV Summit is available here. Those interested in sponsoring the event can find more details here. Additional information, including the Call for Proposals, agendas and co-located events will be available in the coming months, so check the OPNFV Summit website for updates.

SaaS/Back End

• Fast and efficient software testing is easy with Docker, says Laura Frank of Codeship, who will be presenting a talk called “Building Efficient Parallel Testing Platforms with Docker” at LinuxCon + ContainerCon Europe next month.

• Since my first OpenStack Summit back in San Diego in 2012, there has been one unique defining characteristic that made the event different than any other in the technology world – the event was where developers and users all gathered in the same place.

Databases

• As the OpenStack cloud computing arena has spread out, a whole ecosystem of tools has been growing along with it. Tesora, familiar to many as the leading contributor to the OpenStack Trove open source project, has focused very heavily on Database-as-a-Service tools for OpenStack deployments. It has also pursued partnerships. For example, Tesora has a partnership with OpenStack heavy-hitter Mirantis. The company has made available the first ever plug-in to automate configuration and deployment of its database as a service (DBaaS) platform with Mirantis OpenStack.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• If you read some stories about how OpenOffice is reaching the end of the road, you might think OpenOffice was becoming insecure. That’s half true. OpenOffice doesn’t have the programmers it needs to be safe. That’s because all its good developers moved to its fork, LibreOffice, years ago. LibreOffice is as safe as any program can be.

• In case it isn’t clear, the situation looks dire for OpenOffice. Meanwhile, The Document Foundation recently announced the releases of LibreOffice 5.2 and 5.1.5. LibreOffice 5.2, and LibreOffice is gaining much traction with new levels of compatibility with mainstream office applications. We will follow up on the OpenOffice debate shortly.

• The Document Foundation (TDF) has celebrated the opening session of LibOCon with the announcement of LibreOffice 5.2.1, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family.

• LibOCon is a showcase of the project activity, and will feature over 60 talks in three days, covering development, QA, localization, ODF, marketing, community and documentation, a business session in Czech focused on large deployments of LibreOffice, and a meeting of the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA).

• Details of the conference, including the program and collateral activities such as the traditional “hacknight” – a hands-on session where developers hack over food and drinks – are available on the event website: http://conference.libreoffice.org.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Glencoe Software, the world-leading supplier of image data management solutions for the academic, biotech, pharma and publication industries, is delighted to announce a new partnership with the Carl Zeiss Microscopy GmbH, Jena, Germany. Glencoe Software and ZEISS will collaborate to extend the open source Bio-Formats image file conversion library to support whole slide images compressed with the JPEG XR compression scheme, like those recorded by the ZEISS Axio Scan.Z1 virtual slide scanner.

BSD

• We’ve known for a while that FreeBSD has been working on a CentOS 7 compatibility layer while now that work has finally landed in FreeBSD ports.

• As of yesterday, linux_base-c7 landed in ports for installing the CentOS 7 base packages. This will allow running newer Linux binaries built for modern CentOS/RHEL 7 era systems on FreeBSD, assuming the source isn’t available or isn’t compatible natively with FreeBSD. Previously CentOS 6 was the default port used for this Linux binary compatibility with FreeBSD.

Public Services/Government

• Its true that hackers in other countries can identify vunerabilities in open source software.

• But they can also hack proprietary software like Microsoft Windows.

• But with open source software – where all the underlying code is open so people can look at it, suggest changes and improve on it – at least problems can be quickly patched up.

• Moreover open source software can be more powerful, cheaper (good news for taxpayers!) and reliable!

• After all, the Sun uses it too. They run their website on WordPress – the open source blog software.

• Did they think we wouldn’t notice?

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• In October, Cogitis, a French ICT service provider for local public administrations, will share as open source software MutualiTIC, its case management system.

• MutualiTIC improves communication and cooperation, and creates a digital workflow, says Cogitis. The solution offers web-based services that are tailored to elected officials, staff at municipalities and inter-municipal cooperatives.

Open Hardware/Modding

Programming/Development

• The following paragraphs will define the most simple and minimal approach which is a base case of how this workflow works, the extensions paragraph defines some extensions which help you dealing with several common usecases. You will likely end up using the base workflow with one or two extensions.

• Stepsize is a UK startup focused on developer tools. The firm is aiming to put a degree of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into DevOps. Stepsize Layer is a desktop application for developers that automatically adds context to code bases. It does this by hooking up tools used to develop software, structuring historical data and attaching this to the piece of code.

• Around this time last year, I wrote a brief introduction to various markup languages for this column. The topic of language selection has come up several times recently, so I thought it might be time to revisit the subject with my biases more overt. I’m here to explain why I prefer the languages I do, not to prescribe anything for you. After all, I’m no doc-tor.

• I was introduced to LEGO Mindstorms eighteen months ago while applying for a STEM grant at a local library. LEGO Mindstorms are kits to create customizable, programmable robots

• Throughout my software engineering career, I’ve struggled with and against jargon. Intellectually, I understand jargon as a set of specialized terms meant to facilitate smooth and precise communication, particularly in a professional context. It binds groups together: it’s the secret handshake, the side-long wink, the showing that yes, you’re in the club too, you belong. Experientially? I know the ways jargon can keep you out as you feel along, grasping for knowledge in the dark.

• BuckleScript 1.0 brings almost full compatibility with OCaml features and an improved FFI with the aim of avoiding writing unsafe JavaScript stubs. InfoQ has spoken with Bloomberg’s Hongbo Zhang, BuckleScript creator at Bloomberg.

Standards/Consortia

• The company responsible for drafting the Z-Wave home networking standard has made certain parts of the technology publicly available.

• In an attempt to lure hardware and software developers to the standard, Sigma Designs last week released a public version of Z-Wave’s interoperability layer, which ensures that devices ranging from door locks to security cameras can share information.

• The company has added the software to Z-Wave’s open-source library. The code represents the “language” that defines how devices from different manufacturers talk to each other, said Raoul Wijgergangs, vice president of Sigma Design’s Z-Wave business. That makes it easier for home owners to connect devices with an internet gateway and control them remotely using a phone, computer, or tablet.

Leftovers

• Finger trouble with onboard navigation systems led to an Air Asia flight making a two-hour internal hop in Australia before its scheduled journey to Malaysia.

• An investigation report by the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau (ATSB) into the March flight disclosed the cockup, which it said was down to the A330′s captain “inadvertently enter[ing] the wrong longitudinal position of the aircraft.”

• He had copied down the aircraft’s position co-ordinates from a sign displayed at the airport terminal gate while initialising the Airbus’ systems. Instead of entering 15109.8 east (i.e. 15˚ 19.8′ east), the captain entered 01519.8, resulting in “a positional error in excess of 11,000 km.”

• British Airways has apologised to passengers facing delays after an IT glitch affected check-in desks.

• Passengers complained of delays at check-in and at the baggage drop, and on the tarmac waiting for take-off.

• The airline said passengers were able to check in at Heathrow and Gatwick Airports “although it is taking longer than usual”. It advised passengers to check in online.

• “We are sorry for the delay to their journeys,” BA added.

• There was further disruption for passengers at London City Airport on Tuesday after, police said, protesters “locked themselves together” on the runway.

• BA encouraged customers affected by the IT problems to check in online before they reached the airport. It told customers that some flights had been cancelled on Monday “due to operational reasons” but that specialists were “working to resolve this issue”.

Science

• Software applications exist to serve practical human needs, but they inevitably accumulate undefined and defective behaviors as well.

• Because software flaws are often left undiscovered until some specific failure forces them to the surface, every software project ships with some degree of unquantified risk. This is true even when software is built by highly skilled developers, and is an essential characteristic of any complex system.

Health/Nutrition

• UNITAID, the drug financing mechanism, has put out an appeal calling for ideas on solutions to overcome intellectual property barriers that may be preventing progress in public health. The deadline for submissions is coming near.

Security

• If any of us have ever been in a planning meeting, a variant of this has no doubt come up at some point. It came up for me last week, and every time I hear it I think about all things we don’t know we don’t know. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it works a bit like this. I know I don’t know to drive a boat. But because I know I don’t know this, I could learn. If you know you lack certain knowledge, you could find a way to learn it. If you don’t know what you don’t know, there is nothing you can do about it. The future is often an unknown unknown. There is nothing we can do about the future in many instances, you just have to wait until it becomes a known, and hope it won’t be anything too horrible. There can also be blindness when you think you know something, but you really don’t. This is when people tend to stop listening to the actual experts because they think they are an expert.

• Another milestone behind us. The 0.6.0 release brings the promissed CentOS/RHEL 7 compatibility. This means that our Copr EPEL-7 repository as well as Fedora’s EPEL-7 repository will now provide the latest versions of USBGuard. Check it out!

• One more very good piece of news is that USBGuard was accepted in Debian and is available in Sid (unstable). A big thanks goes to Muri Nicanor and others involved in this packaging effort!

• While listening to the Security Now podcast, I have listened first with amusement then with horror to Steve reading email from Mozilla about the security problems with WoSign CA.

• Their list of woes is long, read the linked email for details, but one thing turned up during the email which I was not aware of: StartCom (owner of the StartSSL certificate authority) was apparently recently bought by WoSign CA! Apparently one of the security bugs StartSSL has (had?) was that with properly modified POST request (yes, I guess you can do it in the Developer Tools of your Firefox) you can get certificate linked to the root ceritificate “CA 沃通根证书” (or “WoSign CA Free SSL Certificate G2” with another value of the parameter). Awesome!

• What’s even more interesting is that I am a paying customer of StartSSL CA and I have never been made aware of the change of ownership. The only other mention of the possible change of ownership I found was on the Wikipedia page, which linked to the blogpost, which is now unavailable due to “legal review of the site” […]. Even better!

• There is growing evidence that the data center is driving toward a more software-centric security model that will be core to network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) technology. This new model means that security performance in NFV will be key.

• Out of the box, Nextcloud servers do not run with server-side encryption. Follow these steps to enable an extra layer of security for Nextcloud.

Defence/Aggression

• Newly published documents from Edward Snowden have shed more light on American surveillance operations in the UK.

• Leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have revealed how his former employer used the US spy base at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire to conduct ‘kill or capture’ missions in its global shadow war.

• In a damning exposé published Monday, The Intercept reporter Ryan Gallagher dives into the inner workings of National Security Agency’s (NSA) largest overseas spying base, the U.K.’s Menwith Hill Station, and reveals concrete evidence that the British government is complicit in the United States’ targeted killing program.

• Citing top-secret documents obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Gallagher reports, “The files reveal for the first time how the NSA has used the British base to aid ‘a significant number of capture-kill operations’ across the Middle East and North Africa, fueled by powerful eavesdropping technology.”

• And given the British government’s repeated assertion that activities at Menwith Hill “have always been, and continue to be” carried out with its “knowledge and consent,” the findings are all the more damning.

• “For years, Reprieve and others have sought clarification from the British government about the role of U.K. bases in the U.S. covert drone program, which has killed large numbers of civilians in countries where we are not at war,” Kat Craig, legal director of London-based human rights group Reprieve, told The Intercept. “We were palmed off with platitudes and reassured that any U.S. activities on or involving British bases were fully compliant with domestic and international legal provisions. It now appears that this was far from the truth.”

• Leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have revealed how his former employer used the US spy base at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire to conduct ‘kill or capture’ missions in its global shadow war.

• The new files published by the Intercept partly lay to rest speculation by journalists and campaigners over what really goes on at the US base.

• They show that secretive NSA kill-capture operations in the Middle East have been developed and initiated from inside the base’s heavily guarded perimeter wire.

• Just when you thought you couldn’t be shocked by the NSA’s snooping anymore, new leaked documents show the agency’s reach extends far beyond American borders.

• In a statement released on Tuesday, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said that he was sorry — not for calling President Barack Obama a “son of a whore,” but that “it came across as a personal attack on the U.S. president.”

• The contorted apology, read to reporters at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations forum in Laos by Duterte’s spokesperson, Ernie Abella, came after Obama responded to the slur by canceling a meeting with the new leader that had been scheduled for Tuesday.

• Duterte, whose first months in office have been marked by nearly 3,000 killings in a campaign of extrajudicial assassinations of suspected drug dealers and addicts carried out by the police and death squads, launched into a profanity-laced tirade against Obama on Monday when asked by reporters how he would respond to criticism of the killing spree from the American president.

• Twelve years ago President Karimov jailed his own nephew, Jamshid Karimov, for the “crime” of writing an article in a state publication which suggested modest improvements to his uncle’s economic policies. Like other prominent dissidents, young Karimov ended up chained to a bed in a psychiatric ward being pumped mind altering drugs to re-educate him.

• The American public is so inundated with propaganda on the Syrian conflict that a rational policy that could minimize the death toll is almost impossible to formulate, a problem addressed by Rick Sterling.

• Again, you’ll note that the United States is portrayed as an innocent and noble defender of cybersecurity freedom, when it’s the one often engaging in frequently-unprovoked attacks the world over. Of course, Clinton and friends are well aware that the vast majority of the time it’s impossible to know where an attack came from, and any hacker worth his or her salt simply doesn’t leave footprints. That makes a real-world military or economic response to a nebulous, usually-unprovable threat simply idiotic. You’d assume Clinton knows this and was just doing some light pandering to the audience.

• But this rhetoric alone is still dangerous in that it opens the door wide to using hacking — much like communism and Islamic extremism and numerous “isms” before them — as a nebulous, endlessly mutable justification for a litany of bad US behavior. You could, for example, covertly hack a government, publicize its hacking response to your hack, using the press to help you justify military action. Given the US and global media’s historical complicity in helping governments begin wars with jack shit for evidence, it shouldn’t be hard to see how hacking is going to be a useful bad policy bogeyman du jour for decades to come.

• Despite some repeated, painful lessons on this front stretching back generations, forcing the government to show its math before it resorts to violence is simply not the US media’s strong suit. And with hacking and cybersecurity being subjects the press and public are extra-violently ignorant about, we’ve created the opportunity for some incredible new sleight of hand when it comes to framing and justifying US domestic and international policy. If history is any indication, by next time this year we’ll be blaming everything under the sun on Russian hackers because after all, two anonymous senior government officials said so.

• Healthy skepticism will be our ally as we stumble down the rabbit hole. While it’s no surprise that Russia, like the United States is deeply-involved in nation state hacking, you’ll note that actual evidence linking the Putin Administration to the recent rise in US hacking attacks remains fleeting. Most reports simply cite a single anonymous US government source, or security firms with a vested interest in selling services and products. That’s not to say Putin and friends aren’t busy hacking the US, but whether a country is responding to similar attacks by the United States (pdf) — or is actually involved at all — is rather important to transparently document before you begin trotting out awful new policies or worse, real world bombs.

• Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump detailed his proposals for an expansion of U.S. military power as his race with Democrat Hillary Clinton tightens, in an appeal to service members and veterans who could give him a critical boost in November.

• If elected, Trump would ask Congress to lift military spending caps, increase defense spending, and seek a plan from generals to counter Islamic State in his first 30 days in office, he said in a speech Wednesday in Philadelphia.

• Trump also said he would increase the size of the army to about 540,000, the Marine Corps to 36 battalions, the navy to a number of surface ships and submarines “approaching” 350, and the Air Force to at least 1,200 fighter aircraft.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The FBI generally likes to keep as much information as possible out of the public’s hands, so its decision to release its files on the Hillary Clinton email investigation are probably best viewed as a one-off, rather than the leading edge of a new era of transparency.

• The agency certainly couldn’t pretend there isn’t significant public interest in the content of the investigative files. The outcome of a presidential election could very well hinge on the voting public’s interpretation of the documents’ content.

• And the FBI certainly has an interest in clearing the air of any hints of politically-motivated favoritism. That the investigation occurred at all does some damage to Clinton’s credibility, while the decision not to pursue prosecution doesn’t do much for the FBI’s.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• When an earthquake struck Oklahoma on Saturday, one of the first steps state officials took was to shut down 37 of the state’s 3,200 active disposal wells — a move that drew national attention to the link between oil and gas drilling and earthquakes.

• Protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota turned violent on Saturday.

• Demonstrators supporting the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe faced off with private security officers from Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners.

• Video from the scene showed security officers threatening protesters with dogs.

• As All Things Considered reported, hundreds of Native Americans from tribes across the country have set up a camp near the construction site in North Dakota. The Army Corps of Engineer approved the oil pipeline in July allowing it to run under the Missouri river close to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation.

• For months, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota has been protesting the construction of a $3.8 billion (paywall) oil pipeline that would cut through four US states. Last week, the protests reached unprecedented size. Hundreds of environmental activists joined the local community of about 8,000. The BBC reports that the largest gathering of Native Americans in over a century, with over 90 tribes represented, is currently underway in Cannonball, North Dakota.

• The Native tribes and environmentalists say the pipeline would disrupt a sacred burial ground, as well as threaten water quality in the area. They say that the Army Corps of Engineers should never have granted permits for its construction.

• Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has raised significantly more money than Donald Trump in the heart of the Republican fundraising territory—the oil and gas industry.

• So, just as a refresher, it’s always good to remember that we live on an ocean planet. Most of the Earth’s surface is salt water, studded with the large islands we call continents.

• It’s worth recalling this small fact – which can slip our minds, since we humans congregate on the patches of dry ground – because new data shows just how profoundly we’re messing with those seven seas. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has published an extensive study concluding that the runaway heating of the oceans is “the greatest hidden challenge of our generation”.

• When we think about global warming, we usually fixate on the air temperature. Which is spiking sharply – July was the hottest month ever measured on our planet. But as the new study points out, 90% of the extra heat that our greenhouse gases trap is actually absorbed by the oceans. That means that the upper few meters of the sea have been steadily warming more than a tenth of a degree celsius per decade, a figure that’s accelerating. When you think of the volume of water that represents, and then try to imagine the energy necessary to raise its temperature, you get an idea of the blowtorch that our civilization has become.

• An American Indian tribe succeeded on Tuesday in getting a federal judge to temporarily stop construction on some, but not all, of a $3.8bn four-state oil pipeline, but its broader request still hangs in the balance.

• James Boasberg, a US district court judge, said on Tuesday that work will temporarily stop between North Dakota’s state highway 1806 and 20 miles east of Lake Oahe, but will continue west of the highway because he believes the US army corps of engineers lacks jurisdiction on private land.

• An American Indian tribe succeeded Tuesday in getting a federal judge to temporarily stop construction on some, but not all, of a $3.8 billion four-state oil pipeline, but its broader request still hangs in the balance.

• U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said Tuesday that work will temporarily stop between North Dakota’s State Highway 1806 and 20 miles east of Lake Oahe, but will continue west of the highway because he believes the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lacks jurisdiction on private land.

• He also said he will rule by the end of Friday on the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s challenge of federal regulators’ decision to grant permits to the Dallas, Texas-based operators of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which will cross North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois.

• The Fennovoima nuclear firm’s parent company, Voimaosakeyhtiö SF (VSF), fired one of its executives because he expressed safety concerns to the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK). VSF admitted this to Yle after initially denying it.

Finance

• A Dubai real estate mogul had a prison sentence disappear. Manufacturing executives in El Salvador dodged having to clean up a case of dangerous lead contamination. Two global financiers embezzled $300 million from an Indonesian bank but got off light.

• Welcome to the world of international arbitration court. BuzzFeed reporter Chris Hamby spent 18 months penetrating the court and tracing its influence.

• The story focused on Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn—or “its left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn,” in the Times‘ formulation. The point of the piece is to blame Corbyn for the fact that “the Labour Party is in shambles: Its leader and its members of Parliament are in a virtual civil war, and it is deeply unpopular with the broader electorate.”

• Labour’s unpopularity is easy to exaggerate; its projected national share of the vote in the last local elections, held in May 2016, was 31 percent, a percentage point ahead of the Conservatives; this is considered unpromising, as opposition parties that are soon to become governing parties generally do better than that, but it’s an improvement over May 2015 (four months before Corbyn assumed leadership), when Labour trailed by 6 percentage points.

• In pushing trade agreements, it is fair to say anything, even if it has no relationship to the truth. Therefore it is not surprising to see Fareed Zakaria (Washington Post, 9/1/16) pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) by claiming that it will boost growth, and attacking Bernie Sanders for opposing “trade policies that have lifted hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people out of poverty.”

• First, the impact on growth will be trivial. According to the International Trade Commission’s assessment, the TPP will boost the annual growth rate over the next 15 years by less than 0.02 percentage points. And this projection does not take account of the negative impact of the protectionist measures in the TPP, such as stronger and longer copyright and patent protection. These measures have the same impact on the protected items as tariffs of several thousand percent.

• [...]

• Actually, in standard trade theory, most of the benefits from lowering tariffs accrue to the countries that lower them. In trade theory, it benefits their consumers. Overall, trade balances are not affected. This is why the very pro-TPP Peterson Institute shows that by far the largest gains to TPP accrue to Vietnam: It lowers its tariffs the most under the terms of the deal.

• In terms of the attack on Bernie Sanders for opposing the world’s poor, Zakaria is again confused. In the standard trade story, capital is supposed to flow from rich countries like the United States to poor countries in the developing world. That would mean rich countries run trade surpluses, and poor countries run trade deficits. This allows poor countries to sustain consumption levels even as they build up their capital stock.

• Yet now geoeconomics has reached an extremely worrying zone of turbulence. Since the end of the Cold War in 1989 – and of “history” itself, according to academic simpletons – it’s never bee so dire. Greed led globalization to be “defeated”by inequality. In a nutshell, low inflation – due to global competition – led to the proverbial “expansionary” monetary policies, which inflated housing, education and health care, squeezing the middle class and allowing unlimited wealth flowing to a 1 percent minority of asset owners.

• Yet even in de-acceleration, China was responsible for more than 25 percent of global economic growth in 2015. It remains the key global turbine – while at the same time carrying the self-attributed burden of being the representative of the Global South in global economic governance.

• When it comes to applying rules of international law and ethics, the U.S. government and its mainstream media operate with stunning hypocrisy, what might be called “moral idiocy,” says Lawrence Davidson.

• The web firm Tencent tcehy has become the most valuable company in Asia, and one of the top 10 in the world by market capitalization.

• It wasn’t so long ago that Tencent was racing neck-and-neck with Samsung — their share prices were both up by a third on the year — to overtake state-owned China Mobile and steal the title of the most valuable company in Asia.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation will shut down its fundraising affiliates in Sweden and the United Kingdom if Hillary Clinton wins the U.S. presidency in November, a spokesman for the global charity said this week.

• The foundation has in recent weeks begun announcing planned new donor restrictions to allay criticism that wealthy supporters might be expecting special treatment from the U.S. government in return.

• Both the William J. Clinton Foundation UK in London and the Clinton Foundation Insamlingsstiftelse in Stockholm will close if Clinton becomes president because of their acceptance of foreign funding, Brian Cookstra, a spokesman for the Clinton Foundation in New York, said in one of a series of emails responding to questions from Reuters.

• In his New York Times column yesterday, Paul Krugman did something that he made clear he regarded as quite brave: He defended the Democratic Party presidential nominee and likely next U.S. president from journalistic investigations. Complaining about media bias, Krugman claimed that journalists are driven by “the presumption that anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt, most spectacularly illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton Foundation.” While generously acknowledging that it was legitimate to take a look at the billions of dollars raised by the Clintons as Hillary pursued increasing levels of political power — vast sums often received from the very parties most vested in her decisions as a public official — it is now “very clear,” he proclaimed, that there was absolutely nothing improper about any of what she or her husband did.

• Krugman’s column, chiding the media for its unfairly negative coverage of his beloved candidate, was, predictably, a big hit among Democrats — not just because of their agreement with its content but because of what they regarded as the remarkable courage required to publicly defend someone as marginalized and besieged as the former first lady, two-term New York senator, secretary of state, and current establishment-backed multimillionaire presidential front-runner. Krugman — in a tweet proclamation that has now been re-tweeted more than 10,000 times — heralded himself this way: “I was reluctant to write today’s column because I knew journos would hate it. But it felt like a moral duty.”

• [...]

• That American journalists have dispensed with muted tones and fake neutrality when reporting on Trump is a positive development. He and his rhetoric pose genuine threats, and the U.S. media would be irresponsible if it failed to make that clear. But aggressive investigative journalism against Trump is not enough for Democratic partisans whose voice is dominant in U.S. media discourse. They also want a cessation of any news coverage that reflects negatively on Hillary Clinton. Most, of course, won’t say this explicitly (though some do), but — as the wildly adored Krugman column from yesterday reflects — they will just reflexively dismiss any such coverage as illegitimate and invalid.

• It should be the opposite of surprising, or revealing, that pundits loyally devoted to a particular candidate dislike all reporting that reflects negatively on that candidate. There is probably no more die-hard Clinton loyalist in the U.S. media than Paul Krugman. He has used his column for years to defend her and attack any of her critics. Indeed, in 2008, he was the first to observe that — in his words — “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality,” comparing the adulation Clinton’s 2008 primary opponent was receiving to the swooning over George W. Bush’s flight suit. He spent the 2016 primary maligning Sanders supporters as unstable, unserious losers (the straight, white, male columnist also regularly referred to them — including female and LGBT Sanders supporters — as “bros”). And now he’s assigned himself the role as Arbiter of Proper Journalism, and — along with virtually all other Clinton-supporting pundits and journalists — has oh-so-surprisingly ruled that all journalism that reflects poorly on Hillary Clinton is unsubstantiated, biased, and deceitful.

• Outside Senator Bernie Sanders’s first general-election rally for Hillary Clinton on Monday, a small group of Clinton supporters and former Sanders backers glared at one another.

• [...]

• “Never Hillary!” the former Sanders supporters yelled back, as some declared they would vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential nominee.

• Kent Redfield, a UIS Professor Emeritus of Political Science, said, “Most people really don’t know who they are or what they stand for. But again, we’ve never had an election where you’ve had the two main party candidates with such high unfavorables. It could be that [the third party] will retain strength and then, if they’re getting combined 15% of the vote, then that could tip the balance in a very close state.”

• So far, neither Johnson nor Stein have reached the necessary 15% across the five national polls to be invited to the debate stage, but it’s clear that many Americans would like to see any serious third-party candidates on that stage with Clinton and Trump this fall.

• Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton start the race to November 8 on essentially even ground, with Trump edging Clinton by a scant two points among likely voters, and the contest sparking sharp divisions along demographic lines in a new CNN/ORC Poll. Trump tops Clinton 45% to 43% in the new survey, with Libertarian Gary Johnson standing at 7% among likely voters in this poll and the Green Party’s Jill Stein at just 2%.

• Presidential debates should be an opportunity for the American people to decide the direction of our nation. But since 1987, everything about the debates has been predetermined by the party bosses who run Washington.

• Consider that 76% of Americans want the presidential debates to include Gary Johnson and me. Yet the phony Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) is trying to rob voters of the open debates they want.

• The CPD is actually a private corporation that refuses to disclose its current funders or sponsors. The Democratic and Republican National Committees both select its leaders. The CPD literally excludes the 50% of voters who reject their parties.

• This two-party cartel posing as a public service “commission” admitted in a 1987 press conference that independent candidates and alternative political parties should be excluded from the debates, and they create artificial barriers to exclude them.

• Would you eat at a restaurant that only offered two unpalatable menu options —especially when more tasty choices were available? Watching a presidential debate with only Clinton and Trump is like having to choose between liver and tripe. And why is this, especially when there are at least two other, more appealing, candidates to choose from?

• Because the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), a private corporation run by establishment Democrats and Republicans, doesn’t want you to know you might have better choices. It’s incredibly ironic that their website states they want to “provide the best possible information to viewers and listeners.” That could not be further from the truth.

• The CPD is like one of those exclusive clubs where you have to know somebody influential to get in. But this is America — the land where we were raised to believe anyone could become president. Unfortunately, this is no longer true. Because campaigns are not publicly financed, a candidate needs millions of dollars to buy advertising to build familiarity — or the media needs to be unbiased enough to give equal coverage to all the candidates, which it doesn’t.

• Only 50% of Americans identify as being either Democrat or Republican, and only 9% of these voted in the primaries. A huge segment of the population does not identify with either party, so why can’t we hear about what third parties have to offer? Because the CPD wants you to vote for one of their pre-chosen candidates.

• Rapper-turned-mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs said he thinks that black voters “got a little bit shortchanged” by Barack Obama’s presidency, and urged the black community to “hold our vote” as a way to spur meaningful action by political leaders. “The heat has to be turned up so much that as a community, we’ve got to hold our vote,” Diddy told the Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC Sunday. “Don’t pacify yourself; really revolutionize the game. Make them come for our vote. It’s a whole different strategy, but I think we need to hold our vote because I don’t believe any of them.”

• The entertainment icon explained that while he thinks that Obama has done “an excellent job” as president, he also feels that the first black presidency didn’t fully deliver on its promise.

• When a handful of liberal advocacy organizations convened a series of focus groups with young black voters last month, the assessments of Donald J. Trump were predictably unsparing.

• But when the participants were asked about Hillary Clinton, their appraisals were just as blunt and nearly as biting.

• “What am I supposed to do if I don’t like him and I don’t trust her?” a millennial black woman in Ohio asked. “Choose between being stabbed and being shot? No way!”

• “She was part of the whole problem that started sending blacks to jail,” a young black man, also from Ohio, observed about Mrs. Clinton.

• Last week’s Federal Bureau of Investigation release of materials relating to their investigation of Hillary Clinton has reignited the political firestorm surrounding EmailGate. How the Democratic nominee mishandled her emails while she was secretary of state is again front-page news, which is bad news for Hillary. Particularly because the FBI’s data dump demonstrates clearly that Clinton is either dumb or dishonest—and perhaps both.

• [Sidney] Blumenthal’s email read exactly like classified NSA reporting, as anybody acquainted with our SIGINT would immediately recognize. As one veteran agency official told me back in January, Blumenthal’s email was NSA information with “at least 90 percent confidence.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• I was watching a comedy program on TV the other night, and I was shocked at how often they made fun of people who take their faith seriously (especially Christians). I think such programs should be banned, don’t you?

• The awarding of Sh26 million in damages against The Standard and ordering the defendants to publish an apology to the plaintiff and Sh20 million against the Daily Nation have significant implications on media freedoms in the country.

• Remember how lots of people (including plenty of you right here) were saying that it was no big deal that Gawker was shut down due to a campaign financed by Peter Thiel? Remember how people said it wouldn’t mean any harm for anyone else as long as they “don’t publish someone’s sex tape?” Remember how we pointed out that Thiel’s funding campaign included plenty of other lawsuits that had nothing to do with sex tapes? Yeah, about that. It appears that Thiel’s favorite lawyer, Charles Harder, who he apparently helped set up in his own law firm with ongoing support for a variety of cases to take down Gawker, has now become the go-to lawyer for another famous hater of media: Donald Trump and his friends. Trump, of course, has repeatedly publicly stated that he has sued a reporter just to cost him money. So, Trump and Harder seem perfect together.

• Last week, Harder, representing Donald Trump’s wife, Melania, sued The Daily Mail and a random blogger in Maryland, claiming defamation. The inclusion of the blogger was weird, but many are saying it was to get the specific jurisdiction they wanted, in Maryland (where anti-SLAPP laws can’t be used).

• According to UK developer Littleloud, Sweatshop HD is an iPad game that “challenged people to think about the origin of the clothes we buy”.

• But it has now been removed from Apple’s online marketplace. Why? Well, because the App Store gatekeeper was “uncomfortable selling a game based around the theme of running a sweatshop”.

• Norwegian politicians from the Christian People’s Party are shocked that there is porn on the Internet, and want it eliminated – censored off all the Internet pipes as though the pornography doesn’t exist. This highlights how offline-born politicians still have both feet firmly in the clouds – such censorship is not just a violation of all modern principles, but is also completely ineffective. Regardless, seeing the UK went along with this silly idea, the Christian People’s Party in Norway, which holds a balance-of-power position in Norwegian parliament, are pushing the concept.

• The three-day U.S.-ASEAN Summit in Vientiane, Laos, starts today, and with U.S. President Barack Obama becoming the first U.S. president to visit the country, foreign media have been parachuted into Laos to cover the landmark event.

• But foreign journalists “have been told that their articles and broadcasts will have to be approved by a censor before publication,” Amnesty International reports, and “escorts” may be appointed to accompany reporters during their stay in Laos.

• The human rights organization also says that journalists have said they “may not be allowed to raise questions on certain human rights issues by the authorities.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• I’d just finished parking my car in the covered garage at Reagan National Airport just across the river from Washington, D.C. when I noticed a dark green minivan slowly creeping through the row behind me. The vehicle caught my attention because its driver didn’t appear to be looking for an open spot. What’s more, the van had what looked like two cameras perched atop its roof — one of each side, both pointed down and slightly off to the side.

• I had a few hours before my flight boarded, so I delayed my walk to the terminal and cut through several rows of cars to snag a video of the guy moving haltingly through another line of cars. I approached the driver and asked what he was doing. He smiled and tilted the lid on his bolted-down laptop so that I could see the pictures he was taking with the mounted cameras: He was photographing every license plate in the garage (for the record, his plate was a Virginia tag number 36-646L).

• From a hotel in Hong Kong, Edward Snowden shocked the world in 2013 by disclosing the extent of U.S. intelligence spying. Then he vanished before fleeing to Moscow. Handelsblatt found the people who hid Snowden — refugees with nothing, and everything to lose.

• Mass hacking is now one of the FBI’s established tactics for fighting crime on the dark web. In February 2015, the agency hit at least 4,000 computers all over the world in an attempt to identify visitors of a child pornography site.

• But questions remain about another FBI operation from 2013, in which the agency may have hacked users of a dark web email service called TorMail even if they weren’t suspects of a crime. Now, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is trying to unseal the court docket sheet containing the search warrant used to deploy malware against users of the service. If the ACLU were then to get access to the warrant itself, it may reveal the true scale of the FBI’s controversial hacking campaign.

• So we already know that the FBI’s legally mandated reports to Congress on NSL numbers are bogus. Now we learn that FBI has devolved its 702 work to field offices which has led to the discontinuation of one of the key oversight mechanisms on their counting process: an outside check.

• Newly released internal NSA documents reveal how the US spy agency used the Iraq war to develop its global surveillance infrastructure, which was later brought to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The documents, called WARgrams, also contain messages sent to a vast body of NSA employees between 2003 and 2004 by the then NSA director Michael Hayden.

• According to a report by Motherboard, the documents bring to light for the first time how the NSA asked its staff for “unprecedented degrees of cooperation”, in efforts to develop and establish its global surveillance system. The documents also reveal the agency’s rapid shift in priorities, detailing its move from providing intelligence support to wartime coalition forces to assuming the role of a “pervasive” and “intelligent-driven” leading component in the global war on terrorism.

• Around 70 WARgrams were sent out, the first of which, sent out in the days or weeks leading up to the start of the war in March 2003, characterised Operation Iraqi Freedom as “an intense attack of relatively short duration intended to overwhelm the Iraqi ability to respond.” In Hayden’s own words, the WARgrams were “designed to keep us all ‘in the loop’ with the latest developments during the campaign.”

• The Delta IV Heavy, introduced in 2004, is the most powerful rocket in American history, and this was only the ninth time it had launched. Even more exclusive, however, was its top-secret cargo: Inside its nearly seven-story-high nose cone was an Advanced Orion, the world’s largest satellite. About eight hours after launch, when the most advanced spy craft ever built went into geosynchronous orbit, it unfurled its gigantic mesh antenna, larger than a football field, and began eavesdropping on the Earth below.

• Newly published documents from the beginning of the Iraq invasion reveal how the NSA used the “war on terror” to develop its global intelligence capabilities and strengthen the surveillance network exposed by Edward Snowden.

• The information was revealed in a series of documents dating back to 2003-2004, referred to as WARgrams. This was essentially a series of newsletter-style communiqués distributed to a vast number of NSA employees by the agency’s former director, Michael Hayden. These short messages, which number close to 70, contain colorful (when not redacted) descriptions of the NSA’s plans to insert itself into the Iraq war effort. The revelation was made by VICE’s Motherboard, which obtained the documents through an FOI request from back in 2008.

• As the controversial Investigatory Powers Bill inches closer to becoming law, NSA documents reveal that the agency used the Iraq war to develop and expand its surveillance infrastructure

• Newly released internal NSA missives from the early days of the Iraq war show how quickly the agency’s priorities shifted from providing wartime intelligence to coalition troops to being a “pervasive” part of the “intelligence-driven” global war on terror.

• The documents, which have surfaced for the first time, outline how the NSA asked its employees for “unprecedented degrees of cooperation” to set up the global surveillance infrastructure revealed by Edward Snowden with the stated aim of combating terrorism worldwide.

• The documents, called WARgrams, were newsletter-style messages sent in 2003 and 2004 by then-NSA Director Michael Hayden to what seems to be a large contingent of NSA employees. (Motherboard has reached out to the NSA to learn more about who, exactly, received the WARgrams.)

• The first WARgram pitched Operation Iraqi Freedom as “an intense attack of relatively short duration intended to overwhelm the Iraqi ability to respond.” It was sent sometime in the days or weeks leading up to the March 20, 2003 start of the war. Hayden wrote WARgrams were “designed to keep us all ‘in the loop’ with the latest developments during the campaign.”

• The latest leak about the NSA’s overseas spying transgressions took the unlikely form of a little-noticed YouTube video — one that covered mostly-wonkish subject matter. The details of the NSA’s malware attack on the French “White House” were revealed during an interview with Bernard Barbier, the former head of the French Intelligence Service, by a local engineering school. The video, of course, has since been removed, but not before French paper Le Monde picked up on the content of the interview.

• Matt Suiche parses it all out — an inadvertent confirmation of a Snowden document leaked in 2013 that contained an itinerary item about a discussion between French and US intelligence officials concerning a (at that time “alleged”) “May 2012 cyber attack on the French Presidential network.”

• The surveillance apparatus used by German intelligence to collect and store masses of communications and internet data may have taken a hit after a classified document that accused the spies of “serious legal violations” leaked online.

• The 60-page analysis, conducted by Andrea Voßhoff, the German federal data protection commissioner, slammed how the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) stores data on citizens and demanded for key databases to be deleted with immediate effect.

• The report was made in July 2015 after a visit to Bad Aibling in southern Germany, which is jointly managed by the US National Security Agency (NSA). The audit was conducted in light of the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013 that exposed how major agencies such as the FBI, NSA and UK’s GCHQ use sophisticated tools to collect data in bulk.

• The universal credit welfare programme was sent back to the drawing board because spies warned that it was insecure and could lead to millions of people being hacked, a report reveals.

• Experts working for GCHQ, the government’s listening agency, contacted Downing Street in alarm after being “fobbed off” by the Department for Work and Pensions over security flaws in the benefits programme.

• As a result plans to launch the service next year were abandoned. Today only about 300,000 people are receiving benefit payments through universal credit and the system will not be fully operational until 2022 at the earliest.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Colorado legislators legalized recreational marijuana use and now law enforcement agencies in bordering states are camping out on highways hoping for easy busts. All roads in and out of the state are now “drug corridors.” This has led to suspicionless stops and seizures by police officers — predicated on nothing more than a vehicle being on a strip of highway leading to or from a supposed “source” state.

• Not every bust goes as easily as officers might have hoped. Nebraska deputies tried to make drug conspiracy charges stick to a pair of Minnesotans arrested while on their way to Colorado with more than $60,000 in cash. The conviction didn’t stick because it isn’t against the law to conspire to perform an act that is legal in another state. It’s illegal to buy or sell marijuana in both Minnesota and Nebraska, but not in Colorado, where the two were headed. The charges went away but the $60,000 in cash is likely going to remain in Nebraska law enforcement’s possession.

• Another traffic stop in another Midwestern state has been ruled unconstitutional, partially because Kansas law enforcement officers believed the driver being a resident of marijuana-friendly Colorado was pretty much all the reasonable suspicion they’d need to perform a search.

• The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals — in stripping away the immunity granted to two Kansas Highway Patrol officers by the lower court — points out the many flaws in the officers’ reasoning. [PDF link]

• Peter Vasquez was pulled over because his temporary tag was unreadable. Once the temporary tag had been verified as legitimate, he should have been free to go. Instead, it was merely the start of a fishing expedition by the officers, who hoped to find the Colorado resident in possession of an illegal substance.

• Ten Indian trade unions staged one of the largest strikes in human history on Friday, with tens of millions of public sector workers participating in a shutdown of parts of the Indian economy to protest Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s economic plans.

• But if you’re an American relying on cable news, it would be hard to know it ever happened.

• Not a single American cable news network ran a segment focused on India’s massive strike, even on Labor Day, the U.S.’s annual holiday dedicated to workers.

• The strike came after Modi began a push for increased foreign investment and privatization of some state-run industries. Unions fear these policies will undermine both wages and employment.

• I get that this cute labeling of pot smokers as lacking integrity is part of his script (he used almost the same lines in both speeches), perhaps to avoid thinking about what it means that our nation can’t best fight the alleged biggest threat to it because of outdated laws. But either he has given no thought about the words that are falling out of his mouth (indeed, he also seems to have no understanding of the the words “adult” and “mature” mean, which are other words he tends to wield in profoundly troublesome fashion), or the nation’s top cop really can’t distinguish between law — and that, not even in all states anymore — and ethics.

• Earlier that day, that “famous” 29-year-old walked out of the five-star luxury Hotel Mira in Kowloon and sparked an intensive global manhunt not seen since the search for al-Qaeda’s Osama Bin Laden after the Sept. 11, 2001, bombings.

• Edward Snowden, a former U.S. intelligence contractor, became the most wanted fugitive in the world after leaking a cache of classified documents to the media detailing extensive cyber spying networks by the U.S. government on its own citizens and governments around the world.

• To escape the long arm of American justice, the man responsible for the largest national security breach in U.S. history retained a Canadian lawyer in Hong Kong who hatched a plan that included a visit to the UN sub-office where the North Carolina native applied for refugee status to avoid extradition to the U.S.

• The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has concluded that forensic bite-mark evidence is not scientifically valid and is unlikely ever to be validated, according to a draft report obtained by The Intercept. The report, titled “Forensic Science in Criminal Courts: Ensuring Scientific Validity of Feature-Comparison Methods,” is marked as a “predecisional” draft created August 26 that is not to be quoted or distributed, though the title page suggests the report will be made public sometime this month.

• The report reviews a handful of common forensic practices, so called feature-comparison disciplines, or pattern-matching practices — bite-mark analysis, fingerprint and firearm analysis, shoe tread analysis, and DNA mixture analysis — each of which involves an “expert” looking at a piece of evidence and eyeballing whether it matches a particular image, person, or object. The report discusses whether each practice has been scientifically validated, what it would take to do so, and how each practice should be used in the courtroom — if at all.

• Even for China, where companies have struggled with race issues in their marketing previously, the latest inflight magazine from the country’s flagship airline will likely come as a shocker.

• Air China’s Wings of China carries a long feature on visiting London, with almost a third of the magazine dedicated to tourist attractions in Britain’s capital and other famous towns such as Oxford. The main article, titled “London the city of ‘hat tricks’,” covers Brits’ apparent fondness for all kinds of hats.

• Then, after a section on transport options and lifestyle and cultural activities in London, Wings of China offers some “Tips from Air China.”

• Last spring, New Mexico’s governor signed a bill into law that would prevent law enforcement from seizing people’s assets without securing a criminal conviction. This was likely prompted by the New York Times’ publication of footage from Las Cruces asset forfeiture seminar in which the speaker basically said asset forfeiture is used by law enforcement to “shop” for things they want.

• Several months later, the city of Albuquerque was sued by state legislators because its police refused to stop seizing assets — mainly vehicles — without obtaining convictions. The city claimed the new law only applied to state police, and anyway, it was only performing a valuable community service by taking cars away from members of the community.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (Berec) – which represents all the EU’s communications regulators – has finally published guidelines clarifying how telecom companies should treat the data they handle, months after a law concerning the matter was published.

• In the past, apps and other online services could, in theory, pay more to ensure their products ran smoothly. That appealed to network providers, who saw it as a way to boost profits.

• But Berec says only a limited number of services will be able to ask for special treatment, and then only so long as it is not to the detriment of others.

• The new rules also set out consumers’ right to be free to access and distribute information and content, run applications and use services of their choice, so long as they are not illegal.

• The publication has been welcomed by digital rights experts.

• We’ve noted for years that usage caps on fixed line broadband connections are little more than a major, unnecessary price hike on uncompetitive markets. But while caps certainly are little more than a cash grab, there’s another less talked about problem at play: nobody is making sure ISP usage meters are accurate. That has resulted in a number of instances where an ISP will bill users for consumption when the power is off, and even some instances where ISPs confused MAC addresses and billed the wrong customer for additional monthly consumption.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Intellectual property rights awareness campaigns are increasingly targeting the younger population, as early as primary school, according to several country presentations at the World Intellectual Property Organization enforcement committee this week. WIPO is also developing an Education Took Kit for teachers of children aged 5 to 18. However for some countries, this education should encompass a broader view on IP than only enforcing rights.

• Hopefully you will recall that Take Two Interactive had been facing down two lawsuits brought by Lindsay Lohan and Karen Gravano over character depictions in the company’s opus, Grand Theft Auto V. Both filed suit over publicity rights and likeness concerns in New York. Lohan claimed that a character in the game that evaded paparazzi after having sex in public and made some oblique references to similar-sounding movies that Lohan had acted in, along with a female character on the game’s cover art, were both ripping off her personage. Gravano, meanwhile, claimed that a different character, one which made references to starring in a reality show about mobster wives and evading mob retribution, was ripping off her personage. While both suits failed to address the fictional differences in the characters, which were both composite characters parodying their celebrity archetypes, Take Two attempted to defend itself with those facts and tried to get the case dismissed. Strangely, the court at the time allowed the case to move forward…

• Adopted in May, the first Indian intellectual property policy brought some concerns that the focus on IP rights might dampen India’s willingness to use the IP flexibilities to safeguard national policy space. It was also perceived by some as giving in to pressure from the foreign pharmaceutical industry for India to strengthen patent protection. However, a high level Indian official in an interview this week said the policy caters to Indian development needs and India is aware of its pioneering role in certain sectors like access to medicines.Rajiv Aggarwal, Joint Secretary at the Indian Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion Ministry of Commerce & Industry sat down with Intellectual Property Watch’s Catherine Saez to describe how India’s IP policy came into being, to what aim, what it is expected to change in the Indian IP landscape, and how Indian is standing fast to its principle of balance.

Trademarks

• Donut Taco Palace in Austin, Texas, is famous for their ‘Longhorns donuts’. These donuts are modelled after the Hook ‘em Horns hand gesture which is made in support of the University of Texas’ Longhorns American football team. These donuts of allegiance satisfied the sweet tooth of many Longhorns fans until last month, when the University of Texas became aware of the situation. They sent a cease and desist letter to the owner of the shop, Angel Feng, citing trademark infringement.

• If you’re a gadget watcher or an Apple fanatic, then you already know that tomorrow is Apple’s big fall event when it announces new hardware products. Unlike basically every other tech blog in the world, we tend not to cover the announcements (or all of the rumors leading up to those announcements). Every so often something interesting will come out of them and we’ll write up that, but for the most part, we recognize that other sites are going to cover the basic beats and we’re not the kind of publication that wants to spend our time writing up promotional copy for tech companies. But, sometimes there’s some overlap in our usual coverage and these kinds of events. Brian Conroy, a trademark lawyer in Ireland who has a fun blog of trademark-related issues realized that Apple may have leaked some details via its trademark applications.

Copyrights

• We’ve spent some time and energy in these pages poking at Bethesda and its parent company, Zenimax, over each’s overtly ridiculous stances on protecting what it views as its intellectual property in the past. But even a bad actor in the IP arena can get things right in other ways and Bethesda has shown itself to be fairly good in the past in the area of connecting with its fans. This is one of the more underappreciated aspects involved in digital business models, in which the digital realms where we operate open up content producers to direct interaction with their customers. Done right, this will ingratiate a business with its community, fostering a loyalty it might otherwise not have. Done really right, it gets a company all of that plus a PR bonus that can only come from these organic interactions.

• But here’s why this isn’t really a laughing matter: many of the legacy industry players, including Warner Bros. and the MPAA who represent WB, have been pushing very heavily for a revamp of the DMCA that would include a “notice and staydown” provision — such that once a copyright holder representative sent a notice claiming a work was infringing, platforms would basically be required to block that content from ever appearing again. In response, many of us have pointed out just how bad companies like Warner Bros. are at issuing takedowns, and we’re told that such mistakes are rare. But they’re not rare. We see them all the time. And if notice and staydown were in place, it could create all sorts of problems.

• Notice, too, that it wasn’t just WB’s own site that was the target of this bogus takedown. Just two slots above it are the official Amazon sales link for the movie. Elsewhere in the list were official IMDB pages as well. Yes, Google is actually better than most at going through these notices and rejecting ridiculous requests like this, but most other companies are not. If you send a notice, it’s treated as accurate, and down go those sites. Some may consider that fair game when it’s something as ridiculous as WB taking down its own sites, but it’s not so funny when it’s someone else’s work — like the time Fox sent DMCA notices taking down Cory Doctorow’s book, Homeland, just because it had the same title as a TV show.

• Meanwhile, we keep hearing from companies like Warner Bros. about how Google is really to blame, and that it’s “obvious” when there’s infringing content that should be taken down. If it’s so “obvious” why can’t WB gets its act together and not take down its own sites? Perhaps it isn’t so obvious after all and perhaps we shouldn’t make copyright policy based on the bogus claims of companies so clueless that they’re issuing DMCA takedowns on their own websites or other official channels?

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