● 09.16.16

● Links 16/9/2016: Uber Uses GNU/Linux, Dell’s New Laptops

Posted in News Roundup at 6:57 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Considered a research experiment rather than the first drum roll in a fully autonomous automotive revolution, Uber plan to use the data it gleans in the lifts — free for passengers willing to trust them — in order to learn more about how self driving cars behave and react when in the real world on real asphalt and under real driving conditions.

• In Mashable’s first-hand account of what’s it’s like to be take a ride in a self-driving Uber you’ll notice that, like Tesla, that Ubuntu helps power Uber’s self driving smarts.

• And TechCrunch’s Signe Brewster, in a write up of her experience in the same vehicle, says she “came away from my ride trusting the technology. The self-driving car detected obstacles, people and even potholes, and responded intelligently.“

Desktop

• Dell joined the Intel Kaby Lake party and announced that the latest update to its XPS 13 notebook PC will feature the new 7th generation (Kaby Lake) processors. The company will also offer a developer version of the lightweight laptop that comes loaded with Ubuntu, and the XPS 13 received a new color option in the form of Rose Gold.

• The Dell XPS 13 is the company’s thinnest and lightest laptop offering, weighing in starting at 2.7 lbs. and coming as thin as 9mm. The machined-aluminum and carbon fiber chassis, along with the display’s Corning Gorilla Glass, gives the device a durable, yet sleek construction.

• Rejoice Linux fans; the OS will work on laptops with Intel’s Kaby Lake chips.

• Three new models of Dell’s slick XPS 13 Developer Edition will be available with Ubuntu OS and 7th Generation Core processors in the U.S. and Canada starting on Oct. 10.

• Dell has refreshed its popular XPS 13 laptop with Intel’s seventh-generation Core processors. The update brings a longer battery life, among other improvements, and a new rose-gold option for those who want a change from the usual silver.

• The move brings Dell’s XPS 13 in line with other hardware carrying Intel’s new chips, such as the recently-released Lenovo Yoga 910.

Kernel Space

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.7.4 kernel.

• All users of the 4.7 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 4.7.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.7.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

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

• Immediately after announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.7.4 as the latest stable and most advanced kernel version, Greg Kroah-Hartman published details about the twenty-first maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series.

• Today, September 15, 2016, renowned kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman informed the Linux community about the availability of the fourth maintenance update to the Linux 4.7 kernel series.

• Linux kernel 4.7.4 is now the most advanced stable kernel that exists for GNU/Linux operating systems. However, looking at its appended shortlog and the diff from the previous maintenance version, namely Linux kernel 4.7.3, we can’t help but notice that the changes implemented in today’s release are pretty small in number. Only 59 files were changed, with 614 insertions and 282 deletions.

Graphics Stack

• On September 15, 2016, Michel Dänzer had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the xf86-video-amdgpu 1.1.1 update to the open source AMDGPU graphics driver for AMD Radeon GPUs on GNU/Linux platforms.

Applications

• I don’t spend as much time reading as I should, even though I own a Kindle and an Android tablet.

• It’s not that I have a shortage of things to read, either. I have a huge backlog of eBooks.

• The reason is simple that when I’m “idling” I’m typically in front a regular computer, be it my desktop or a laptop.

• I’ve been on the hunt for a simple, straight-forward ePub reader app for the Linux desktop. Calibre is overkill (not to mention more of an eBook manager than an eBook reader) and the apps available in the Ubuntu Software store look horribly outdated.

• Looking for a free, easy-to-use REST client for the Linux desktop? Don’t lose sleep: get Insomnia.

• A new version of cross-platform music player Museeks is now available to download. The Museeks 0.7.0 update adds a number of improvements, including the ability to see cover art of playing tracks, a new first-run guide to help you add music to the player, and an option to run the app with a native window titlebar.

• GNU Bash 4.4 was released today with a wide variety of new features and changes.

• The writing bug bit me again recently, so I started seeking alternatives and came across bibisco. The application is a personal project of Andrea Feccomandi, who is its sole author. It’s licensed under the GPLv2, and freely downloadable from the website, with builds for Windows and 32- or 64-bit Linux. The source code is available on GitHub.

Proprietary

• Google today is rolling out the Chromium/Chrome 54 web-browser beta, which incorporates several new features for web developers plus media platform improvements for Chrome on Android.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is coming to Linux (and macOS) later this year, games publisher Feral Interactive has announced.

• The sumptuous looking crowd-funded space shooter ‘Everspace’ will launch on Linux before the month is out, games developers Rockfish Games have announced.

• After waiting a while Rocket League finally launched on Linux in Beta form this month. It was fully worth the wait [my article here], but I wanted to speak to one of the main people behind the port itself.

• I would like to thank Timothee “TTimo” for taking time out of his busy developer life to answer my questions.

• Hopefully you will find this interesting.

• CryENGINE 5.3 had been planning to ship in mid-October with a number of new features — including Vulkan support — but now it’s delayed at least one month.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today, September 15, 2016, KDE developer and ex-Kubuntu maintainer Jonathan Riddell has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the Beta preview of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment.

• Now that KDE Plasma 5.7 series reached end of life two days ago with the release of the fifth maintenance update, KDE Plasma 5.7.5, it is time for us to look further to the next major version, KDE Plasma 5.8, which not only it will be supported for two years as the first LTS (Long Term Support) Plasma desktop, but will also offer a comprehensive list of new features and improvements.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Now that the Release Candidate of the soon-to-be-released GNOME 3.22 desktop environment is out, it’s time to take a look at some more features that are coming to it this fall.

• GNOME 3.21.92 was announced this morning as GNOME 3.22 RC2, which serves as the final development milestone prior to next week’s official GNOME 3.22.0 official desktop debut.

• A quick follow up to the issue of broken weather forecasts in GNOME Weather on Ubuntu 16.04: they’re working again! Not automatically, obviously. If you’re running Ubuntu 16.04 you’ll need to install any pending updates, among them new bindings for the ‘libgweather’ library that adds support for the new METAR data bindings.

Distributions

• Distrowatch started their much discussed ranking system in 2002.

• Whilst only a guide to the success of a distribution it provides an interesting historical view over how the Linuxsphere has changed in the past 14 years.

• Each distribution has a page counter which counts the hits it receives each day and these are counted up and used as a hits per day count for the Distrowatch rankings. To prevent abuse only 1 page count is registered from each IP address per day.

• Now the merits of the numbers and how accurate they are may be up for debate but hopefully the following list will be an interesting insite into the history of Linux.

• This list looks at the rankings since 2002 and highlights the distributions that have hit the top ten in any given year.

• There are some interesting facts to accompany this list. For instance there is only 1 distribution that has been in the top 10 throughout all 14 years although if you count Red Hat and Fedora as one distribution then you could say 2.

• Another interesting fact is that only 3 Linux distributions have ever held the top spot at the end of any given year. You can get one point for each distribution you name.

• 28 distributions have appeared in the top 10 in the past 14 years proving that whilst it maybe easy to rise to success it is just as easy to fall out of favour.

• This list is in alphabetical order because it would be hard to do it on rankings as they fluctuate so much per distribution.

Reviews

• Lets start with the positives because there are many. The first thing is that Linux Lite works and it is easy to use.

• You can install most of the major packages using a simple tool and you can install updates and drivers quite easily.

• There is a major downside and that is the lack of EFI support. I could understand this if Linux Lite was targeting older hardware but it comes in a 64-bit version and I would imagine most 64-bit computers are EFI enabled.

• The target audience for Linux Lite is clearly the average computer user but it is at an immediate disadvantage to Linux Mint which is easier to install and just as easy to use.

• I will leave it on a positive though. The artwork within Linux Lite is excellent with really good theming and hey, Steam works.

Red Hat Family

• Earlier this year a Red Hat logo was spotted at 300 A Street in Boston sparking rumors of an expansion. Well, today it was confirmed. In other news, Gary “the Everyday Linux User” walked us down memory lane with a glance back at distributions that graced the top 10 at Distrowatch.com. Marcel Gagne has put “Cooking With Linux” on YouTube and another project has jumped the GNU ship.

• Open source giant Red Hat is opening a new office in Boston and will be adding new jobs there, the company said Thursday.

• Red Hat, which has more than 9,000 employees and is headquartered in Raleigh, has said it plans to double its work force over the next several years while aiming to more than double revenues to some $5 billion.

• According to the Boston Globe and the Boston Business Journal, Red Hat has leased 40,000 square feet at an office building in South Boston.

• Raleigh, North Carolina tech giant Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) has officially signed a lease at 300 A St. in Boston’s Fort Point neighborhood, a brick-and-beam office that’s adjacent to the future headquarters of General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE).

• Red Hat is expected to announce the deal later today. The Business Journal first reported in April that Red Hat was considering opening an office in Boston. A Red Hat representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

• The 300 A St. office, which contains about 45,000 square feet of space, will be Red Hat’s first major presence in Boston. It is expected to include an executive briefing center where clients can see firsthand the work the company does.

Finance

Fedora

• Chapeau Linux developer Vince Pooley is back in action after being away the entire year, and it looks like his preparing to launch a new version of the Fedora-based GNU/Linux distribution.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu app developer Keshav Bhatt informs Softpedia today, September 15, 2016, about the release of the Beta of his up and coming graphical user interface (GUI) for Canonical’s Snapcraft tool for creating Snap universal binary packages.

Devices/Embedded

• GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton informs us today, September 15, 2016, about the availability of a new build of his RaspAnd project that lets users run Google’s Linux-based Android mobile operating system on Raspberry Pi single-board computers.

• Dronecode’s Platinum members are 3DR, Intel, and Qualcomm. Dronecode, which uses Linux as its base, is sponsored by The Linux Foundation. Dronecode’s governance, however, is completely independent of the Foundation.

• This fork happened because of the Platinum’s members’ “overwhelming desire to be able to make a proprietary autopilot stack.” They were able to do this, wrote Tridgell, because “the structure and bylaws of Dronecode are built around exceptional power for the Platinum members, giving them extraordinary control over the future of Dronecode. This is a fundamental flaw in a project meant to promote free and open-source software as it means that the business interests of a very small number of members can override the interests of the rest of the members and the community.”

• Aaeon’s rugged, fanless “Boxer-6639” industrial box-PC features 6th Gen Intel (Skylake) processors plus triple GbE, dual HDMI, and six RS-232/422/485 ports.

Free Software/Open Source

• Google’s latest open-source project is ETC2Comp and should be quite exciting for game developers and indirectly will benefit gamers too — especially mobile gamers and those interested in VR.

• National security and open source are not usually paired together in the same sentence.

Toyota

• Today, the Open Source Robotics Foundation announced a whole bunch of stuff, including a big pile of money from Toyota Research, what is probably an even bigger pile of money from Toyota Research, and the formation of the for-profit Open Source Robotics Corporation. That last thing might sound a little worrisome, since corporation-ness and open source-itude are often at odds, but we checked in with OSRF CEO Brian Gerkey, who explained how it’s all going to work.

• Toyota Research Institute (TRI) today announced that it will join forces with the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) and its newly-formed for profit subsidiary Open Source Robotics Corporation (OSRC) to expand the development of both open source and proprietary tools for Toyota’s fast-growing robotics and automated vehicle research initiatives.

AT&T

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• True, NetBeans has its die-hard supporters. Zoran Sevarac, a member of the NetBeans Dream Team, for example, likes the proposed deal. “It’s a great thing, and it means that NetBeans has an exciting future. The NetBeans community is very positive about this step and sees this as a logical (and good) way to proceed.”

• Gosling, in a Facebook post, agreed. “NetBeans is moving to Apache! Oracle has decided to open up NetBeans even more, so that folks like me can more easily contribute to our favorite IDE. The finest IDE in existence will be getting even better, faster!”

• It’s a nice thought, but the community is small and getting smaller still. Still, unlike OpenOffice, NetBeans does has significant programmers who want to improve it, so perhaps NetBeans may yet reinvent itself. I’m just not betting on it.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Free Software Foundation recently fired a transgendered employee of the FSF, just for being trans, because some transphobic cissexist people wrote negativly about her. The FSF fired her because they thougdt she, rather than the assholes bullying her, was causing the FSF potential damage. As a result, she was fired from the FSF.

• Following yesterday’s GCC 5 vs. 6 vs. early 7 benchmarks, to no surprise LLVM’s Clang compiler was brought up in the comments. I had already been running some fresh LLVM Clang benchmarks on this same Intel Xeon system and have those results to share now with Clang 3.8 and the newly-released Clang 3.9.

• This is the first time in a number of months I’ve carried out a large comparison of GCC vs. Clang using the latest compiler releases. For today’s article are the GCC 5.4.0, GCC 6.2.0, and GCC 7.0.0 20160904 compiler benchmarks compared to LLVM Clang 3.8.0 and the new Clang 3.9.0 release. Interestingly, these benchmarks show a number of performance regressions in the generated binaries under Clang 3.9.

Public Services/Government

• The open data and open source movements seen in today’s cities are often associated with massive troves of online data, cutting-edge predictive analytics algorithms, data-tracking sensors, and other forward-thinking solutions. Taken another way, they are viewed as a world of complex, highly technical people with complex, highly technical tools addressing complex, highly technical issues. Yet is this really always the case?

• Take a task as straightforward as releasing a report. Chicago’s Executive Order No. 2011-7 dictates that the city must issue a long-term Annual Financial Analysis (AFA) report. The AFA report, prepared by the city’s Office of Budget and Management (OBM), provides a framework for the city’s annual budget as well as a guide for financial and operational decision-making.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• A new open source Arduino smartwatch has been created and is now available to back with pledges starting from just $99 for the DIY source files or if you prefer all the hardware included, pledges start from $180 with shipping expected to take place during January 2017.

• Powered by and 32 bit Arm Cortex processor equipped with a 16bit 1.5″ OLED display, this awesome DIY smartwatch is perfect for any makers, hobbyists or developers looking to create their own applications or platforms for wrist worn wearables or Internet of Things.

• Watch the video below to learn more about this DIY Arduino smartwatch, which comes equipped with Bluetooth low energy connectivity allowing you to use the power of your smartphone to push notifications and messages directly to your wrist.

Programming/Development

• PHP developer Pascal Martin has offered an early look at possible changes and new features for PHP 7.2 along with very early contenders for PHP 8.0.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• It is essential that policy makers reform the systems for financing R&D, and de-link the costs of R&D from the prices of products.

• First, let’s reflect on why we have high drug prices. When we grant monopolies on products, through patents or other measures, the company that has the monopoly exploits the monopoly, fairly predictably, to maximize profits, and increasingly, this means aggressive pricing.

• Why do we have public policies to create monopolies? Because that is part of our system of funding R&D. That is really the only reason to create the monopolies in the first place.

• But, there is an alternative that would do a better job of funding R&D, with low drug prices, and that is a system that is based on delinkage.

Defence/Aggression

• The total U.S. budgetary cost of war since 2001 is $4.79 trillion, according to a report released this week from Brown University’s Watson Institute. That’s the highest estimate yet.

• Neta Crawford of Boston University, the author of the report, included interest on borrowing, future veterans needs, and the cost of homeland security in her calculations.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The 45-year-old Australian has been holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London since June 2012, seeking refuge there after exhausting all his legal options in Britain against extradition to Sweden.

• Assange has refused to travel to Stockholm for questioning over the rape allegation, which he denies, due to concerns Sweden will extradite him to the US over WikiLeaks’ release of 500,000 secret military files on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

• This is the eighth time the European arrest warrant has been tested in a Swedish court. All of the rulings have gone against him.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Exxon is lobbying the UK government to stop them pushing for electric vehicles as a way of tackling climate change or air pollution, according to documents obtained under Freedom of Information rules (FOI) by DeSmog UK.

• The documents reveal the firm lobbied UK transport department officials in three separate presentations given after the UK signed up to the Paris agreement on climate change last year.

• The 06:19 BST service from Milton Keynes to Euston left the track at about 07:00 BST, Network Rail said.

• A portion of the train derailed and was then hit by another train. It was a “glancing blow” and the other train continued on its way.

• A man was treated for a neck injury and a woman treated for chest pains.

• London Midland and Virgin services remain “severely disrupted” from the north-west, Scotland, and the Midlands.

Finance

• As Techdirt noted in 2014, by agreeing to the “fast track” procedure for trade deals, Congress has essentially given up its power to change them. That’s a two-edged sword. Although it makes the ratification process simpler, because things like TPP and TTIP must be accepted or rejected in their entirety, it also means that political bosses have no ability to tweak the text to make it more likely the deals will be ratified. That’s coming back to bite one of the people who introduced the fast track bill, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch.

• Deutsche Bank AG said Friday it does not intend to pay $14 billion to settle civil claims with the U.S. Department of Justice for its handling of residential mortgage-backed securities and related transactions.

• The bank confirmed in a statement that the Justice Department had proposed a settlement of $14 billion and asked the German bank to make a counter proposal.

• George Osborne has said he will stay in the Commons to “fight for the things I care about” as he launches a think tank to promote the Northern Powerhouse.

• Mr Osborne, who was sacked as chancellor by Theresa May, said: “I don’t want to write my memoirs because I don’t know how the story ends.”

• There had been a “bit of a wobble” by Mrs May over the project, he said.

• No 10 says Mrs May is building on his plan to create a northern economy to rival London and the South East.

• We’ve written quite a lot for years about the massive problems with “corporate sovereignty” provisions in trade agreements — so-called “investor state dispute settlement” (ISDS) provisions — that allow companies to “sue” countries for regulations they feel are unfair. These aren’t heard by courts, but rather by “tribunals” chosen by the companies and the countries. Some supporters of these provisions claim that there’s really nothing wrong with them because they help encourage both investment in different countries and more stable and fair regulations.

• The 12 countries that signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade pact earlier this year agreed Monday that they will not renegotiate the deal, Japan’s TPP minister Nobuteru Ishihara said.

• The minister also told reporters the 12 nations confirmed they will move ahead with domestic processes quickly to adopt the U.S.-led trade pact.

• Ishihara’s remarks came after he joined ambassadors and other representatives from 11 countries for a TPP meeting at the official residence of U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy in Tokyo.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Beacon Global Strategies is a shadowy consulting firm that’s stacked with former Obama administration officials, high profile Republicans and a number of Hillary Clinton’s closest foreign policy advisers. But beyond its billing as a firm that works with the defense industry, it is unclear for whom specifically the company works, exactly what it does, and if Beacon employees have tried to influence national security policy since the firm’s founding in 2013.

• And now the Obama administration has complicated the effort to find out — at least until after the presidential election. Last week, the State Department delayed its response to a 2015 public records request for any correspondence between Beacon and agency officials until May 2017.

• One of Nigel Farage’s closest aides, who headed Ukip’s media operation for three years, has said the party has “disintegrated” and that she has joined the surge of members and supporters turning to the Conservatives.

• Alexandra Phillips said Theresa May had delivered on all key elements of Ukip’s 2015 election manifesto “within a matter of months”, leaving her former party with few places to go in policy terms.

• “I think ideologically the Tories are doing the Ukip dance now,” she said, pointing to policies on Brexit, immigration, grammar schools and fracking. Phillips said Farage had been “inspirational” to work with and would be remembered as “one of the most incredible politicians of our generation”.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Brazilian Congressman Jair Bolsonaro is his country’s Donald Trump, with two important differences: 1) he’s an even more extreme hate-monger than his American counterpart; and 2) he has numerous sons who are carbon copies of him and have used their dynastic advantages to get elected to their own political offices throughout the country. As a result, the Bolsonaro family now spearheads a radical, nationwide, proto-fascist, alarmingly growing movement in Brazil grounded in evangelical fervor, über-nationalism, extreme law and order, hostility toward LGBTs, and a longing for restoration of the country’s prior military dictatorship.

• Apple is having trouble removing porn from iMessage’s new GIF search feature. Overnight, Deadspin noticed a highly sexual My Little Pony GIF appearing in searches for the word “butt,” but the problem goes well beyond that.

• A woman who emailed The Verge this afternoon says her eight-year-old daughter, while trying to send a message to her dad, was presented with “a very explicit image” of “a woman giving oral sex to a well endowed male.” Her daughter hadn’t searched for anything explicit, just the word “huge.”

• “I see the image come up like, holy shit, whoa whoa whoa, that’s a hardcore porn image,” Tassie Bethany, whose daughter discovered the image, tells The Verge by phone. “I grabbed the phone from her immediately. She typed in the word ‘huge,’ which isn’t sexual in any nature. It’s just a word, not like butt or anything else.”

• This week, police carried out a vicious crackdown on demonstrators in the southern Chinese fishing village of Wukan, about 150 miles away from Hong Kong. After police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at villagers protesting over land rights disputes, information about the crackdown is being entirely blocked in mainland China. For a short while, foreign journalists became the only news source about the crackdown, but they are being expelled from the village after fetching $3,000 bounty per journalist.

• Now Chinese citizens are being arrested for spreading reports about the crackdown.

• Fear and loathing are stalking the corridors of the SABC as staff tell of editorial interference, threats, intimidation and surveillance at the broadcaster’s Auckland Park headquarters.

Privacy/Surveillance

• It’s a good point, one fresh in the mind of millions thanks to the just-delivered OPM report. The government appears willing to take security seriously if it means doling out tax dollars to dozens of agencies with cyberstars in their eyes and crafting bad legislation, but not so much when it comes to actually ensuring its own backyard is locked down.

• Chaffetz was one of the legislators behind the 2015 attempt to turn the DOJ’s Stingray guidance into law, laying down a warrant requirement for US law enforcement. Unfortunately, the bill went nowhere. Presumably, a thorough investigation into law enforcement use of this repurposed war tech might prompt more legislative cooperation in the future.

• Chaffetz has done little to endear himself to security and law enforcement agencies since his arrival on the Hill. In addition to the failed Stingray warrant bill, Chaffetz also partnered with Ron Wyden to attempt to add a warrant requirement for law enforcement GPS tracking — something the Supreme Court almost addressed in its US v. Jones decision.

• Today’s main stories: NSA whistleblower Bill Binney, protagonist of the film The Good American which is premiered in the UK tonight, reveals that the 9/11 attacks in New York and many more recent terrorist attacks across Europe could have been avoided if the US had not relied on methods of mass surveillance. Bill Binnie and the film’s director, Friedrich Moser join us in the studio to discuss the ethics of mass surveillance and whether Edward Snowden could receive a presidential pardon.

• As Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr mount another attempt to legislate holes in encryption, national security officials are offering testimony suggesting this is no way to solve the perceived problem. Another encryption hearing, again hosted by a visibly irritated John McCain (this time the villain is Twitter), featured testimony from NSA Director Michael Rogers [PDF] and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Marcel Lettre [PDF] — neither of whom offered support for mandated backdoors.

• As nice as that sounds, the testimony wasn’t so much “We support strong encryption,” as it was “We support strong encryption*.”

• Lettre’s testimony follows statements of support for encryption — and opposition to legislated backdoors or “golden keys” — with the veiled suggestion that the government will be leaning heavily on tech companies to solve this problem for it.

• The House Intelligence Committee just released a report — ostensibly done to insist President Obama not pardon Snowden — that is instead surely designed as a rebuttal to the Snowden movie coming out in general release tomorrow. Why HPSCI sees it as their job to refute Hollywood I don’t know, especially since they didn’t make the same effort when Zero Dark Thirty came out, which suggests they are serving as handmaidens of the Intelligence Community, not an oversight committee.

• There will be lots of debates about the validity of the report. In some ways, HPSCI admits they’re being as inflammatory as possible, as when they note that the IC only did a damage assessment of what they think Snowden took, whereas DOD did a damage assessment of every single thing he touched. HPSCI’s claims are all based on the latter.

• There are things that HPSCI apparently doesn’t realize makes them and the IC look bad — not Snowden — such as the claim that he never obtained a high school equivalent degree; apparently people can just fake basic credentials and the CIA and NSA are incapable of identifying that. The report even admits a previously unknown contact between Snowden and CIA’s IG, regarding the training of IT specialists. BREAKING: Snowden did try to report something through an official channel!

• Oliver Stone’s “Snowden,” a quiet, crisply drawn portrait of the world’s most celebrated whistle-blower, belongs to a curious subgenre of movies about very recent historical events. Reversing the usual pattern, it could be described as a fictional “making of” feature about “Citizenfour,” Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary on the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. That film seems to me more likely to last — it is deeper journalism and more haunting cinema — but Mr. Stone has made an honorable and absorbing contribution to the imaginative record of our confusing times. He tells a story torn from slightly faded headlines, filling in some details you may have forgotten, and discreetly embellishing the record in the service of drama and suspense.

• In the context of this director’s career, “Snowden” is both a return to form and something of a departure. Mr. Stone circles back to the grand questions of power, war and secrecy that have propelled his most ambitious work, and finds a hero who fits a familiar Oliver Stone mold. Edward (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, leaning hard on a vocal imitation) is presented as a disillusioned idealist, a serious young man whose experiences lead him to doubt accepted truths and question the wisdom of authority. He has something in common with Jim Garrison in “J.F.K.” and Ron Kovic in “Born on the Fourth of July,” and also with Chris Taylor and Bud Fox, the characters played by Charlie Sheen in “Platoon” and “Wall Street.”

• This article is getting a collective “oh, shit, that’s bad” kind of reaction from many online — and that’s about right. But, shouldn’t it also be something of a call to action to build a better system? In many ways, it’s still incredible that the internet actually works. There are still elements that feel held together by duct tape and handshake agreements. And while it’s been surprisingly resilient, that doesn’t mean that it needs to remain that way.

• Schneier notes that there’s “nothing, really” that can be done about these tests — and that’s true in the short term. But it seems, to me, like it should be setting off alarm bells for people to rethink how the internet is built — and to make things even more distributed and less subject to attacks on “critical infrastructure.” People talk about how the internet was originally supposed to be designed to withstand a nuclear attack and keep working. But, the reality has always been that there are a few choke points. Seems like now would be a good time to start fixing things so that the choke points are no longer so critical.

• The day after the New York premiere of Oliver Stone’s new movie, “Snowden,” the three largest human rights organizations in the U.S. teamed up to launch a campaign calling on President Obama to pardon the NSA whistleblower.

• Snowden himself spoke via video from Moscow at a press conference Wednesday morning alongside representatives from the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International.

• Snowden called whistleblowing “democracy’s safeguard of last resort” and argued that if the Obama administration does not reverse its practice of prosecuting whistleblowers, it would leave a legacy of secrecy that is damaging to democracy.

• Three human rights groups on Wednesday urged President Obama to pardon Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who leaked secret documents about National Security Agency surveillance in 2013 and is living in Russia as a fugitive from criminal charges.

• The start of the campaign coincides with the theatrical release this week of the movie “Snowden,” a sympathetic, fictionalized version of his story by the director Oliver Stone. Together, the film and the campaign, called “Pardon Snowden,” opened a new chapter in the debate about the surveillance Mr. Snowden revealed and about whether his leaks will go down in history as whistle-blowing or treason.

• This week, Edward Snowden, multiple human rights and civil rights groups, and a broad array of American citizens asked President Obama to exercise his Constitutional power to pardon Snowden. As a former CIA officer, I wholeheartedly support a full presidential pardon for this brave whistleblower.

• All nations require some secrecy. But in a democracy, where the government is accountable to the people, transparency should be the default; secrecy, the exception. And this is especially true regarding the implementation of an unprecedented system of domestic bulk surveillance, a mere precursor of which Senator Frank Church warned 40 years ago could lead to the eradication of privacy and the imposition of “total tyranny.”

• That today we are engaged in a meaningful debate about whether such a system is desirable is almost entirely due to the conscience, courage and conviction of one man: Edward Snowden. Without Snowden, the American people could not balance for themselves the risks, costs and benefits of omniscient domestic surveillance. Because of him, we can.

• For this service, the government has charged Snowden under the World War I-era Espionage Act. Yet Snowden did not sell information secretly to any enemy of America. Instead, he shared it openly through the press with the American people.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Last month we submitted comments to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an agency within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, opposing its proposal to gather social media handles from foreign visitors from Visa Waiver Program (VWP) countries. CBP recently provided its preliminary responses (“Supporting Statement”) to several of our arguments (CBP also extended the comment deadline to September 30). But CBP has not adequately addressed the points we made.

• [...]

• As we said in our comments, we do not doubt that CBP and DHS are sincerely motivated to protect homeland security. However, the proposal to collect social media handles has serious flaws—and the government has failed to adequately address them.

• Sarah Harrison, Courage’s acting director and longtime WikiLeaks journalist, has sat down for several interviews to discuss various news items happening this week: the premiere of Oliver Stone’s film ‘Snowden,’ Harrison’s return to the UK after years of effective exile, and WikiLeaks’ US releases.

• After she assisted Edward Snowden escape from Hong Kong to Moscow, and stayed with him in Sheremetyevo Airport in Russia with hopes of reaching Latin America, Harrison was advised to stay out of the UK, where British terrorism laws threaten to criminalize journalistic work. She’s lived in Berlin for the last three years, but since David Miranda’s recent legal success challenging his 2013 detention in Heathrow, Harrison’s lawyers suggested she could attempt to return home.

• As a number of outlets have reported, the DOJ IG just released a report on FBI’s impersonation of a journalist in 2007 to catch a high school student making bomb threats. As I will explain in more detail in a follow-up post, it somewhat exonerated the Agents who engaged in that effort. It also gives reserved approval of an interim policy FBI adopted this June (that is, well after the press complained, and just as the IG was finishing this report) that would prevent the FBI from pulling a similar stunt without higher level approval.

• But some of the details in the report — as well as one of its recommendations — suggests that the FBI would still be able to pretend to be a software company including a software update. Here’s the recommendation.

• In June, not long after Donald Trump attacked an Indiana-born judge because he was “Mexican,” I went to go see Representative Raúl Labrador in the Longworth Office Building on Capitol Hill. Labrador, an Idaho Republican, cuts an unusual profile in Washington. Born in Puerto Rico, he was raised Mormon by a single mother in Las Vegas and now, as he told me, represents “one of the most conservative districts in the United States, one of the whitest districts in the United States.” Labrador came to Congress as part of the Tea Party wave of 2010 and later helped found the Freedom Caucus, the House’s conservative vanguard. He was also a pivotal member of a bipartisan group of eight House members who, in early 2013, came together in hopes of producing comprehensive legislation to fix the nation’s immigration system.

• Today, nearly every word of that last sentence feels as if it were ripped from a political fiction of “West Wing”-level implausibility. Immigration is the conflict that has eaten the 2016 elections — relegating other pressing issues to the margins, embodying Washington’s political dysfunction, further polarizing a divided country and, above all, fueling the presidential campaign of a man who began his candidacy by vowing to build a wall to keep Mexico from sending “rapists” to America. In recent weeks, even Trump’s own campaign seems to have grown alarmed by the political toxicity of what it has unleashed, embarking on a series of incoherent revisions before settling back on hard talk about creating a “special deportation task force.”

• Why are white men poised to get rich doing the same thing African-Americans have been going to prison for?

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• We’ve noted for years that one way incumbent broadband providers protect their duopoly kingdoms is by quite literally buying state laws that protect the status quo. These laws, passed in roughly twenty different states, prevent towns and cities from building their own broadband networks or in some instances from partnering with a private company like Google Fiber. Usually misleadingly presented by incumbent lobbyists and lawmakers as grounded in altruistic concern for taxpayer welfare, the laws are little more than pure protectionism designed to maintain the current level of broadband dysfunction — for financial gain.

• Earlier this year, the FCC tried to use its Congressional mandate under the Communications Act to eliminate the restrictive portions of these laws in two states. But the FCC’s effort was shot down as an overreach by the courts earlier this month, and the FCC has stated it has no intention of continuing the fight. That leaves the hope of ending these protectionist laws either in the hands of voters (most of whom don’t have the slightest idea what’s happening) or Congress (most of whom don’t want the telecom campaign contributions to stop flowing).

DRM

• In the wake of Apple’s controversial announcement that it’s newest strain of iPhones will not be including a headphone jack, it’s been reported that the company is now sending out survey emails to Macbook Pro users that reference a potential removal of the headphone port in future models.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• It’s football season again, which means some significant portion of America is routinely spending some significant chunk of its weekends watching some significant portion of male college students give some significant portion of each other irreparable brain damage. It’s an American thing, I suppose. Also, an American thing is the acquisition of overly broad trademarks that border on the laughable. Intersecting these two bastions of American pride is Boise State, with a recent NY Times article discussing how the school managed to trademark athletic fields that include grass that is blue, with attorneys working with the school suggesting that any non-green colored field might result in trademark action.

Copyrights

• Telecoms companies were as surprised as anyone when Jean-Claude Juncker announced Wednesday (14 September) that the European Commission wants every city and village in the EU to offer some free public Wi-Fi by 2020.

• “We panicked for five minutes. Then we realised it’s not serious,” one industry source said.

• Juncker mentioned the plan during his annual “State of the Union” speech early yesterday.

• But the proposal that was published a few hours later doesn’t actually guarantee free wireless internet access.

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