● 09.23.16

● Links 23/9/2016: Latest Microsoft and Lenovo Spin (Now in ‘Damage Control’ Mode)

Posted in News Roundup at 6:56 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• LXLE is a super-lightweight, Lubuntu-based Linux distribution that should breath life in to most old machines. However, the big difference that LXLE offers over many other lightweight operating systems is that it has a focus on eye candy.

• Just because you’re running a lightweight operating system, it doesn’t need to look like something from The Matrix!

• I decided to install LXLE on an old Compaq Netbook that I had lying around the house. It’s fairly low-powered, having a first generation 1.6 GHz single core Intel Atom CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and a 160 GB 5400 RPM hard disk drive. This should be the perfect little machine to test LXLE on.

Server

• Seen by some as competing for supremacy in the software-defined networking (SDN) controller space, the ONOS Project and the OpenDaylight Project just released respective platforms within one day of another.

• Today, the ONOS Project announced its eighth quarterly platform release, called Hummingbird, described as “the only SDN control plane that can support both disruptive and incremental SDN for service providers and enterprises seeking to virtualize and optimize to keep agile pace with the explosion of mobile devices, video and Big Data applications.”

• So you have an application that is composed around containers. You have lightweight base images, a centralized container registry, and integration with the deployment and continuous integration (CI) pipeline — everything needed to get containers working at full scale on your hardware. For running a multitier application, you spent time on using a service discovery mechanism for your application containers. You have a logging mechanism that pulls out the information from each container and ships them to a server to be indexed. Using a monitoring tool that is well suited for this era when machines are disposable, you see an aggregate of your monitoring data, giving you a view of the data grouped around container roles. Everything falls nicely into place.

• AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other IaaS offerings all set their pricing in relation to running stuff as internal infrastructure. Take Elastic MapReduce or AWS’s managed Hadoop compute cluster. Does anyone actually use it and think, “yeah, that’s worth the money”? Would they think that even if the goofy bugs and idiosyncrasies were fixed? Remember, this is another service on top of AWS, so EC2 is a sort of base price.

• For small to midsized departments, it’s cheaper to run stuff on Amazon than at home because you need fewer people to manage it. That said, a tangled web of instances in the public cloud quickly becomes unwieldy, and eventually, someone has to manage it. Usually the issue is forced by the finance department. For larger, internet-scale services, you start to find Amazon’s pricing doesn’t scale so well.

• The growth of Linux is clearly something that Microsoft is aware of…

Kernel Space

• Being a LiFT Scholarship 2016 recipient on paper is like a dream come true. It’s an opportunity to work even harder, train harder, and stay competitive in what you really do best,

• Today open source and Linux are absolutely up there in the top, it’s an opportunity to sharpen my open source skills from newbie to Ninja Pro. With The Linux Foundation and Linus Torvalds, you just feel like you’re learning and mastering Kung fu from Bruce-Lee.

• The LiFT Scholarship will help me to prepare for my LFCE (Linux Foundation Certified Engineer), and hopefully pass it and add it to my belt. The LFCE badge really shows the world that you can play like Messi or Score like T.Henry of Arsenal.

Graphics Stack

• Intel Open-Source Technology Center developer Jason Ekstrand presented earlier today at XDC2016 with a presentation entitled “The Anatomy of a Vulkan Driver” where he covers how he and fellow Intel developers brought up the first open-source Vulkan driver and had it ready for launch-day when Khronos formally unveiled the specification earlier this year.

• The early part of the presentation will be boring to anyone who frequently reads Phoronix with the dozens of articles I’ve written since February concerning progress on the Intel Vulkan driver, Vulkan itself, etc. The early part of the presentation just provides a basic overview of what is Vulkan, the need for Vulkan, etc etc… But the latter half of the presentation is what’s interesting when he talks more about the design decisions, how he and basically three Intel developers brought up this driver (along with the support of many other Intel developers), and other commentary surrounding the Intel Linux Vulkan driver’s design.

• The latest stable release of the Nouveau X.Org driver is now available for users of this open-source NVIDIA DDX component in conjunction with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver.

• The xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.12 release happened nine months ago so there are some changes that came together in that tine, but then again the most interesting innovations in the open-source Linux graphics stack fall outside the DDX drivers the past few years. In total since the v1.0.12 release were just seven commits.

• In addition to being the organizer of XDC2016, Martin Peres also participated in several presentations at this week’s conference in Helsinki. One of these pesentations by Martin was concerning 2D X.Org acceleration.

• Martin basically presented on that rendering 2D on a modern X.Org Server is barely faster than CPU rendering, unless compositing. While being barely faster, it consumes more power than CPU-only rendering. But the good news is that more and more software is moving away from X-based rendering.

• With the next GTK+ release there will be the GTK Scene Kit, Qt5 already has changed its renderer, and other projects are moving over to purely CPU-based rendering or GPU rendering with projects like Servo’s WebRender, Google’s Skia, and the new Intel FastUIDraw project.

• Harry Wentland of AMD just presented at the XDC2016 conference about DAL, the big Display Abstraction Layer code-base, which many AMD Linux users have been waiting to see merged in order to have Polaris audio support and this is one of the stepping stones for seeing FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync and other modern display capabilities.

• We have been covering DAL for months since AMD open-sourced it and since then they’ve been trying to clean it up, remove some redundancies compared to what core DRM offers, etc. DAL is a big piece of the puzzle that’s left for getting mainlined so the AMDGPU open-source kernel driver can be closer to feature parity with the closed-source driver and what’s provided on Windows.

• On the first day of the XDC2016 conference this week in Finland NVIDIA presented over their GBM vs. EGLStreams debate that’s been ongoing for months with NVIDIA’s lack of GBM API support by their driver being what’s preventing the binary blob from working with current-generation Wayland compositors. In that session they called for a new community-driven API to suit the needs of device memory / surface allocation and could succeed the Generic Buffer Manager. By the end of XDC2016, some progress has already been made.

Benchmarks

Applications

• A new stable version of the Audacious open-source and cross-platform audio playback application has been announced for both GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows platforms, version 3.8.

• Audacious 3.8 has been in development since early August when the first Beta milestone was announced, and it received a second Beta build in early September. But now the wait is finally over, and you can get your hands on the final release, which brings tons of new features and improvements.

• Probably the most important change implemented in Audacious 3.8 are the ability to run multiple instances of the application, something that wasn’t possible with any of the previous releases except the Beta versions of the 3.8 milestone. Best of all, each running Audacious instance remembers its own configuration.

• Today I released version 2.1 of Wad Compiler, a lazy functional programming language and IDE for the construction of Doom maps.

• Images and the command line. They seem an unlikely pair, don’t they? There are people who’ll tell you that the only way you can manipulate and view graphics is with GUI applications like GIMP.

• For the most part, they’re wrong. Command-line image tools do much of what their GUI counterparts can, and they can do it just as well. Sometimes, especially when dealing with multiple image files or working on an older computer, command-line tools can do a better job.

• Let’s take a look at four command-line tools that can ably handle many of your basic (and not-so-basic) image manipulation tasks.

• As a member of the 389 Directory Server (389DS) core team, I am always excited about our new releases. We have some really great features in 1.3.5. However, our changelogs are always large so I want to just touch on a few of my favourites.

• 389 Directory Server is an LDAPv3 compliant server, used around the world for Identity Management, Authentication, Authorisation and much more. It is the foundation of the FreeIPA project’s server. As a result, it’s not something we often think about or even get excited for: but every day many of us rely on 389DS to be correct, secure and fast behind the scenes.

Proprietary

• Vivaldi browser has taken the world of internet browsing by storm, and only months after its initial release it has found its way into the computers of millions of power users. In this interview, Mr.Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner talks about how he got the idea to create this project and what to expect in the future.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• I am delighted to announce that CodeWeavers has just released CrossOver 15.3.0 for both Mac OSX and Linux. CrossOver 15.3.0 has important bug fixes for both Mac and Linux users.

Games

• Frictional Games, the developers of ‘SOMA’ [Official Site] have released their sales figures. The game sold about 450,000 copies of which 5,000 was from Linux gamers. So that’s around 1.1%.

• It’s been one year since Frictional Games launched SOMA as their latest science fiction survival horror game. The game is supported on Windows, OS X, Linux, and PlayStation 4. This game saw close to half a million sales, but just over 1% of them were from Linux gamers.

• Frictional Games shared via a tweet that of the 450,000+ SOMA sales, Linux accounted for only around 5,000 sales, or about 1%. SOMA is powered by Frictional Games’ in-house HPL Engine 3.

• Boyle Wolfbane wanted to rule the world. He failed. Miserably. Forced into retirement early, Boyle now spends his days arguing with haunted trees and scaring off the occasional knight. At least he still has Fang, his loyal storm wolf. Things could be worse. He could have been born a hero.

• Aveyond 4 is a game filled with humour and fun. The 30+ hour RPG will keep you engrossed in its humorous storyline, witty dialogues, beautiful artwork and soothing music. The game features seven playable characters, each with his/her unique personality and dozens of areas to visit, monsters to fight and items to collect. What’s more? Along with the main storyline, there are dozens of side quests you can complete to earn special rewards, ranging from a bag of gold to a magical creature.

• Do not adjust your monitors, you read that correctly. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Chaos Rising and Retribution are officially coming to Linux and will be released on September 29th [Feral Mini-site].

• Rocket League was one of the most eagerly-awaited Linux ports and, since its release earlier this month, I’ve already spent a fair couple of hours playing. I’m not the only one – Liam loves it – and going by the comments on the site and IRC, plenty of others are also having a blast with the game.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) now has support for atomic mode-setting and nuclear page-flipping!

• This atomic mode-setting and nuclear page-flipping support is designed for the Linux 4.8 kernel and newer and so far has just been tested with the Intel DRM driver.

• Samsung developer Chris Michael commented with the nearly thousand lines of new code that on working systems it provides “buttery smoothness.”

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The latest updates for KDE’s Plasma, Applications and Frameworks series are now available to all Chakra users.

• The Plasma 5.7.5 release is the final bugfix update for the 5.7.x series, as 5.8.0 will be released soon. It includes a month’s worth of bugfixes and new translations, with notable changes found in the plasma workspace, sddm-kcm and networkmanager packages.

• Today, September 22, 2016, Chakra GNU/Linux maintainer Neofytos Kolokotronis announced that the rolling operating system is now getting the latest software updates and technologies.

• When you run into bugs, try to report them via “apport”, which means using ubuntu-bug packagename in the commandline. Once apport has logged into launchpad and downloaded the relevant error messages, you can give some details like a short description of the bug, and can get the number. Please report the bug numbers on the qa site in your test report.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Less than 48 hours from when GNOME’s release team unveiled version 3.22 (Karlsruhe), openSUSE Tumbleweed users are getting the full upstream experience of the latest GNOME.

• Snapshot 20160921 made 3.22 available to user, but there were plenty of other snapshots during the week that brought new packages to Tumbleweed users.

• Dominique Leuenberger, a member of the openSUSE release team, wrote that there were five snapshots this week in an email to developers on the openSUSE Factory Mailing List.

• The Linux Kernel updated to 4.7.4 and VirtualBox updated a version in the 20160920 snapshot. Snapshot 20160914 updated KDE Frameworks to 5.26.0 and KDE Applications 16.08.1.

Distributions

New Releases

• Today, September 22, 2016, SystemRescueCd developer François Dupoux proudly announced the availability of an updated version of his Linux-based system recovery Live CD.

• This is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.19 – Core Update 105 which patches a number of security issues in two cryptographic libaries: openssl and libgcrypt. We recommend installing this update as soon as possible and reboot the IPFire system to complete the update.

• Ok, so this is the way I see it. Porteus is fine as a USB based distribution if you just want to use a web browser and maybe type a document.

• For everything else it is just too difficult and for no real reward. For instance I could create a Xubuntu or Lubuntu persistent USB drive and all the hardware stuff would work out of the box and I would have access to the full software repositories.

• With Porteus it feels like you are fighting it and if something is difficult to master then it needs to provide some reward for the effort such as having something so cool that you go wow.

• Yes it is small at around the 300 megabytes mark and it boots quickly. The download screen is a good idea and whilst the idea of save files isn’t new (Puppy does it, as do persistent *buntu distributions) the concept is a decent one.

• The fact that you have to mess around with configuration files to get it to work and the fact that there is a concept of cheat codes and the fact that finding and installing software is so convoluted just makes it too much effort.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• openSUSE’s Douglas DeMaio today announced the availability of Leap 42.2 Beta 2. This beta includes a beta of Plasma 5.8 LTS. Elsewhere, Valorie Zimmerman announced a beta for Kubuntu 16.10 for testers as well. Red Hat dominated the headlines today and not just for their continued success on Wall Street while the Microsoft/Lenovo story is running a close second. The Free Software Foundation needs input for their new swag line and LibreOffice won a Bossie Award.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Inc. appears to be shaking up the Docker ecosystem with the launch of its OpenShift Container Platform 3.3 along with a new project called the Open Container Initiative Daemon (OCID) that aims to optimize production deployments of containers.

• OpenShift Container Platform 3.3 is Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, formerly known as OpenShift Enterprise. The project underwent a major evolution in version 3, with Red Hat making it a container-based system built on top of Kubernetes.

• The latest version is based on Kubernetes 1.3, which was released last July, and integrates Docker Engine 1.10 instead of the latest 1.12 release, as that’s not currently supported by Kubernetes.

• When Red Hat launched its OpenShift Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud in 2013, the focus was on making life easier for developers. OpenShift’s theme remains the same but Red Hat has made it crystal clear that developing on the cloud today means using containers. The name says it all: Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.3.

• Linux and open-source cloud supremo Red Hat is looking at adapting its licensing to please enterprise customers who want greater flexibility in the way they pay for software and services, including a possible pay-as-you-go model.

• The move was mooted by chief executive Jim Whitehurst during a conference call for Red Hat’s Q2 2017 financial results this week. The firm detailed the progress it has been making in expanding its cloud business based around its OpenStack distribution, OpenShift application platform, JBoss middleware and tools such as its Ceph software-defined storage.

• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.3 debuts as the company backs the new OCID project to build a new container engine for Kubernetes.

• Red Hat announced on Sept. 22 OpenShift Container Platform 3.3 as well as a new project called Open Container Initiative Daemon (OCID) in a bid to optimize enterprise container deployments in production.

• Red Hat is continue to grow its business, with more million-dollar deals than ever before and a growing OpenStack cloud business.

• [...]

• While Red Hat Enterprise Linux remains the flagship product, cross selling across multiple Red Hat product categories is a key driver of growth.

• According to Red Hat CFO Frank Calderoni over 70 percent of the top 30 deals in the quarter included one or more components from a group of Application Development and emerging technologies offerings. He also noted that Financial services and government were Red Hat’s top verticals in second quarter.

• “Seven of the top 30 deals had OpenStack in there, nine had RHEV,” Whitehurst said. “We had three OpenStack deals alone that were over $1 million. So I think we’re seeing really, really, really good traction there.”

• Whitehurst is also optimistic about the competitive positioning of Linux in the cloud as opposed to on-premises workloads.

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Among the changes is (long overdue) support for copy and pasting between native Ubuntu Touch apps and old-skool legacy Ubuntu apps.

• Ubuntu Phone fan Popescu Sorin has uploaded a short video showing how copy/paste between native Mir apps and XMir apps works in this latest release.

Flavours and Variants

• Softpedia was informed today, September 22, 2016, by Željko Popivoda from the Linux AIO team about the general availability of an updated version of their Linux AIO Linux Mint project, based on Linux Mint 18.

• That’s right folks, the moment you’ve all been waiting for is here, and you can now have a single, live, bootable ISO image that contains all the official flavors of the Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” operating system, including Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon, Linux Mint 18 MATE, Linux Mint 18 KDE, and Linux Mint 18 Xfce.

Devices/Embedded

• The “Roqos Core” dual-band WiFi-ac router runs Debian on a quad-core Atom E3845, and offers a cloud-based security and parental controls service.

• A Tysons, Virginia headquartered startup called Roqos has begun shipping a home WiFi router, along with cloud-based “advanced cybersecurity and parental control features” sold on a subscription basis. The Roqos Core router costs $19 along with $17 a month for the Roqos Service, with a commitment of 12 months, or $223 total including the Core. After that you can choose to drop the service and continue to use the router without the extra security and parental controls.

Phones

Tizen

• During the Forum “Internet of Things” (IoT), that was held on September 22, 2016 in Media Center MIA “Russia today” (Moscow), DIGMA presented the world’s first Tizen-based tablet running version 3.0 of the Operating System (OS) with a new “architecture designed for the Internet of Things”. This tablet is aimed squarely at businesses and government enterprise organizations that require data security and device stability from their OS and required apps.

Android

• Google is buying up massive swaths of vertical real estate to advertise its upcoming October 4th hardware event. Billboards in the United States, building-side projections in Germany — timed to coincide with Cologne’s Photokina exhibition — and even a freaking statue have all popped up in recent days. It feels very much like the bubbling start to a high-pressure marketing campaign that’s going to boil over as Google’s announcement day approaches. This isn’t atypical for Google, which has previously dominated Times Square with its Android advertising, but the difference is that the big ads are focused on the hardware now. Hell, Google’s video teaser literally transmogrifies the digital search box into the outline of a physical phone.

• Folks, if you’re looking for a compact smartphone that’s got as much power and capability as the laptop on your desk, the Galaxy S7 is the way to go. It has all of the latest features you want wrapped up in a water resistant shell that’s somewhat impervious to life’s little accidents. And it’s a mere 5.1-inches, which makes it comfortable enough for a variety of hand sizes. But if you’re not entirely keen on going the Samsung route because of its not-stock Android software, we’ve also offered up a few other choices for your consideration. We won’t let you traverse this journey alone.

• Today, September 22, 2016, Softpedia was informed by Arne Exton about the the immediate availability of an updated version of his popular, yet commercial AndEX Live system.

Free Software/Open Source

• The UPSat team of engineers is proud to announce the delivery of the first completely open source software and hardware satellite.

• A major step towards UPSat’s launch has being completed. Its successful delivery to Innovative Solutions In Space (ISISpace) took place on August 18th in Delft, Netherlands.

• UPSat is the first complete delivery to ISISpace as part of the QB50 project. Engineers from the University of Patras (Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics & Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering) and Libre Space Foundation, the makers of UPSat, in cooperation with Von Karman Institute and ISISpace engineers have successfully concluded all checkout tests and delivery procedures, to enable UPSat’s integration to the NanoRacks launch system.

• After attending my first ever GitHub Universe (yes, it was awesome) as Axosoft’s evangelist for GitKraken, I learned that open source is super sexy. And, well…closed source is delightfully naughty, too! So, basically, two spaces that are supposed to be mortal enemies are now friends with benefits.

• One of the biggest decisions small business owners make when launching an ecommerce site is deciding on which shopping cart to offer. Long gone are the days when a PayPal button on your website was sufficient. If you plan to run a modern online storefront that’s appealing to customers, a shopping cart is a must.

• New hardware strategies are taking shape in the Internet of Things space. In one of the more interesting new moves, SolidRun, a maker of System on Module (SoM) solutions, Single Board Computers (SBC) and Industrial PCs, today announced new products designed to reduce the required footprint, simplify the development process, and shorten the time to market for Intel Braswell-based IoT products. SolidRun claims that it now offers the world’s smallest scalable SoM solution for Intel’s 14nm Braswell family of quad-core processors.

• Meanwhile, Nextcloud, a new company forked from the ownCloud cloud platform is focusing on IoT as well. The company, Canonical and Western Digital have launched an Ubuntu Core Linux-based cloud storage and Internet of Things device called Nextcloud Box. It bundles the open source Nextcloud service and can be driven by a Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi 3 devices. This is essentially a turnkey and easy way to roll your own private cloud and manage it, but its base with Ubuntu Core enables the device to act as an extensible IoT gateway at home, controlling other devices and connecting them with their owners.

• SolidRun’s new 14nm Intel Braswell chip based MicroSoM is designed to make harnessing Braswell chips for IoT applications simple.

• Smartphone users who communicate and often do teamwork like to have three different things. For starters, they like to easily communicate with their friends, family or work partners. Secondly, they want to use as fewer tools as possible, so it is ideal to have all their stuff in the same place. Last but not least, they want all this with the certainty of being secured and have their privacy assured.

• For anyone feeling this is their description, know that there is an app comprising all that: Riot, a secure messaging environment that brings online collaboration into one workspace. It is launching publicly this week, after a successful beta phase under the codename Vector. Riot is built on Matrix, an open standard for decentralized persistent communication.

• Navatar, an indoor navigation system for students who are blind, launched this month as a free, open-source project that is available for Android phones.

• Navatar was developed by a research team led by Eelke Folmer, an associate professor of computer science and engineering, and developed with funding from Reader’s Digest Partner’s for Sight Foundation and Google Research.

• “Navigating campus environments can be quite a challenge for blind students and having to rely on a sighted guide is a significant loss of independence,” Folmer said. “With Navatar we aim to remove this barrier and help more blind students pursue a college degree.”

• Navatar overcomes a number of the obstacles traditionally associated with indoor navigation systems for blind users. Unlike existing systems, Navatar doesn’t require any instrumentation and only relies on low-cost sensors available in smartphones and a digital map of the environment.

Events

• With no disrespect intended to the other geomatics conferences around (and there are many with high-quality and extremely relevant programmes), the FOSS4G (‘Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial’) conferences are different. FOSS4G 2016 (24-26 August) was held in the former plenary chamber of the German Bundestag in Bonn yet, despite this prestigious setting, the atmosphere was very laid-back. Participants dressed in shorts and FOSS4G T-shirts, a beer (or two) in the (late) afternoon, a sense of humour throughout the whole event and a very vibrant social programme (the ice-breaker at the wonderful BaseCamp Hostel Bonn and the Rhine cruise were instant hits!) summed up the vibe at FOSS4G.

• On September 22, 2016, Canonical’s Daniel Holbach had the great pleasure of informing the Ubuntu Linux community that the next UOS (Ubuntu Online Summit) event will be taking place in mid-November.

• That’s right, we’re talking about the Ubuntu Online Summit event for the next major release of the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, namely Ubuntu 17.04, whose codename is yet to be announced by Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth shortly after the release of Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) on October 13, 2016.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Today, September 22, 2016, Chris Coulson from Canonical published two security advisories to inform the Ubuntu Linux community about the availability of the latest Mozilla products in all supported releases.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Every year, InfoWorld editors and contributors pick the top open source software for data centers, clouds, developers, big data analysts, and IT pros. LibreOffice has been selected amongst InfoWorld’s top picks in open source business applications, collaboration, and middleware.

• The OpenSolaris-derived Illumos project is rolling out its new bootloader project to use on new systems in place of its old GRUB (v0.97) legacy bootloader.

• This new bootloader for Illumos is derived from the FreeBSD boot loader. Illumos developers are switching away from GRUB-Legacy to this new loader in order to support functionality like UEFI booting, RAID-Z, and other modern features. The FreeBSD loader won the decision for the Illumos job rather than GRUB2.

CMS

• WordPress never fails to surprise the web development community. Over time, it has evolved into one of the best Content Management Systems (CMS) out there. And currently, it powers more than 25% of the web. Besides its popularity, WordPress is also known for usability and an easy-to-develop environment.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Funding

• A dozen companies have chipped in to develop an open-source, cloud-based translation productivity tool (aka CAT tool). On September 13, 2016, the translate5 project closed a second financing round among supporters, bringing the total raised to EUR 40,000.

• Mautic, the open source marketing automation software vendor, has successfully closed a $5 million A Round, led by G20 Ventures and Underscore.VC. A big win for the growing cloud-based marketing company.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• In advance of the Fall fundraiser and Winter holidays, we at the Free Software Foundation (FSF) want to make sure we have the snazziest possible selection of useful and stylish apparel, books, and other items.

• If there was no GNU then Linux Kernel would have had a different future.

• Landing in the mainline GCC compiler stack for next year’s GCC 7.1 release is initial enablement on ARMv8.2-A support.

Licensing/Legal

• The MIT License is the most popular open-source software license. Here’s one read of it, line by line.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• When you need to design water supply or urban drainage master plans and you don’t dispose of the adecuated tools, you pass a hard time. Me and my partner Josep Lluís we knew it by experience. We had many trouble to develop hydraulic projects without using a software affordable from an economic point of view, user-friendly and integrable with GIS technologies.

Programming/Development

• Perl 6 came out in general release around Christmas 2015, and since then I’ve heard a lot of questions about it, both from people in and out of the Perl community. Jeff Goff is a longtime member of the Perl community and a good friend who’s been heavily involved in Perl 6 development, so I asked him a few of the questions from what I’ve been hearing others ponder.

• Jeff has been speaking on the topic at conferences this year, including the upcoming OSCON London event. Get the inside scoop from my interview with him.

Leftovers

Science

• An extensive DNA study confirms what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have always believed: they’re the oldest living civilisation on the planet.

• “We know that we were here forever, but Western science is slowly catching up,” says a Facebook post from Indigenous Australian rights organisation Sovereign Union, led by activist and Euahlayi leader Ghillar Michael Anderson.

• In fact, their relationship to the land stretches back over 50,000 years, according to new scientific research published in the journal Nature. Led by Professor Eske Willerslev of the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with a host of Indigenous elders, the research team sequenced the genome of 83 Aboriginal Australians (from groups covering 90 percent of Australia’s land mass) and 25 Highland Papuans.

• There will never be a horse like Mr. Ed, the talking equine TV star. But scientists have discovered that the animals can learn to use another human tool for communicating: pointing to symbols. They join a short list of other species, including some primates, dolphins, and pigeons, with this talent. Scientists taught 23 riding horses of various breeds to look at a display board with three icons, representing wearing or not wearing a blanket. Horses could choose between a “no change” symbol or symbols for “blanket on” or “blanket off.” Previously, their owners made this decision for them. Horses are adept at learning and following signals people give them, and it took these equines an average of 10 days to learn to approach and touch the board and to understand the meaning of the symbols.

Health/Nutrition

• The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been arm-twisting journalists into relinquishing their reportorial independence, our investigation reveals. Other institutions are following suit

• It’s a nice idea that if you become rich enough, you can start to play God – but there are clear limits to the Facebook creator’s apparent omnipotence

Security

• On Thursday afternoon Yahoo confirmed a massive data leak of at least 500 million user accounts, which is a very big deal.

• Though the data breach obviously spells trouble for those with YahooMail accounts, users with hacked accounts need to keep in mind that the breach goes so much further.

• Yahoo owns a bunch of other major sites like Flickr, Tumblr and fantasy football site Rivals.com, which means the 500 million users affected by the data breach also have to worry about their personal information associated with all additional Yahoo services.

• Hackers strongly believed to be state-sponsored swiped account records for 500 million Yahoo! webmail users. And who knew there were that many people using its email?

• The troubled online giant said on Thursday that the break-in occurred in late 2014, and that names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers, were lifted.

• This comes after a miscreant calling themselves Peace was touting copies of the Yahoo! account database on the dark web. At the time, in early August, Yahoo! said it was aware of claims that sensitive information was being sold online – and then today, nearly two months later, it alerted the world to the embarrassing security breach.

• YOU KNOW that Brian Krebs guy? Well, his website has been hit with a huge denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that he couldn’t handle on his own.

• Krebs is that security guy. He is bound to have some enemies out there, so we expect that sooner or later someone will take the credit for ruining the pathway to his pages.

• For now we have Krebs to explain what happened and who helped him deal with it. The short version is that there was great big whack of an attack on him, and that he needed assistance from security firm Akamai.

Defence/Aggression

• Less than a month ahead of its commissioning, the Navy’s next-generation destroyer Zumwalt (DDG-1000) suffered an engineering casualty that could take up to two weeks to repair, Navy officials confirmed to USNI News on Tuesday. The ship’s crew – currently pier side at Naval Station Norfolk, Va. – found the fault in the ship’s engineering plant on Sept. 19 ahead of at-sea tests. Zumwalt is now undergoing repairs that may take anywhere from 10 days to two weeks.

• President Obama on Friday vetoed legislation that would allow families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia in U.S courts, setting up a high-stakes showdown with Congress.

• “I recognize that there is nothing that could ever erase the grief the 9/11 families have endured,” Obama wrote in his veto message. “Enacting JASTA into law, however would neither protect Americans from terrorist attacks nor improve the effectiveness of our response to such attacks.”

• Obama’s move opens up the possibility that lawmakers could override his veto for the first time with a two-thirds vote in both chambers.

• Republican and Democratic leaders have said they are committed to holding an override vote, and the bill’s drafters say they have the support to force the bill to become law.

• The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) unanimously passed through both chambers by voice vote.

• But the timing of the president’s veto is designed to erode congressional support for the bill and put off a politically damaging override vote until after the November elections.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Apparently the legal battle between a bunch of contractors providing “smart meter” equipment to the city of Seattle and FOIA clearinghouse MuckRock isn’t over. The last time we checked in, a judge had overturned his own hastily-granted injunction, relieving MuckRock of the impossible demands placed on it by miffed tech provider Landis+Gyr — which included handing over the details of everyone who might have seen Landis+Gyr’s documents and “retrieving protected information that may have been downloaded” from the site.

• MuckRock was allowed to reinstate the documents and Landis+Gyr walked away from a debacle of its own making. Another contractor utilized by Seattle Power and Light (Ericsson) had pursued a similar injunction but dropped MuckRock from its complaint, following Landis+Gyr into battle against the entity that had released the documents to requester Phil Mocek: the city of Seattle.

• But there’s still one company pursuing a case against MuckRock. The EFF, on its way back into court to fight the tenacious litigant, points out that Elster Solutions, LLC is still hoping to hold MuckRock accountable for publishing documents received from the city of Seattle. But it’s impossible to ascertain why it’s going after MuckRock.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• The future of humanity depends on math. And the numbers in a new study released Thursday are the most ominous yet.

• Those numbers spell out, in simple arithmetic, how much of the fossil fuel in the world’s existing coal mines and oil wells we can burn if we want to prevent global warming from cooking the planet. In other words, if our goal is to keep the Earth’s temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius—the upper limit identified by the nations of the world—how much more new digging and drilling can we do?

• Here’s the answer: zero.

Finance

• CNN Money has found multiple whistleblowers from Wells Fargo who were willing to go on the record and report that they were fired in retaliation for coming forward to report the massive fraud in which Wells Fargo employees opened up 2,000,000 fake accounts in their customers’ names, raiding their real accounts to open them, then racking up fees and penalties, and trashing their customers’ credit ratings.

• CNN also spoke to a former Wells Fargo HR manager who explained how the retaliatory firings worked: employees who blew the whistle would be monitored closely for minor infractions (e.g. being two minutes late for work), then fired “with cause.”

• The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed in the wake of the Enron fraud, makes it a jailable, criminal offense to fire whistleblowers; it also makes the CEO and CFO personally, criminally liable for failures to create secure means by which whistleblowers can come forward without fear of retaliation.

• China has a massive “tourism deficit” — the difference between the money that tourists spend in China and the money that Chinese people spend abroad: $206B from June 2015-June 2016, up from $77B in 2013. The missing money is hard to explain, since China doesn’t export that many tourists.

• But there’s one explanation that fits the facts, according to Bloomberg: Chinese millionaires going abroad with “suitcases full of cash,” which they convert to overseas real-estate, undeclared luxury goods, or just anonymous deposit accounts in offshore banks. Chinese corruption has hit surreal levels: for example, one civic official had so much cash in his apartment that the police who raided him were unable to count it with bill-counting machines. Instead, they weighed it by the ton and estimated its value by weight.

• On Thursday, Tesla filed a lawsuit against three Michigan officials (PDF)—Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, Attorney General Bill Schuette, and Governor Rick Snyder—on the grounds that the state is violating the electric vehicle company’s right to sell Teslas directly from the manufacturer instead of through a dealer.

• Former European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso on Friday put up a spirited defense of his right to work for U.S. bank Goldman Sachs, after the commission opened an ethics probe into his move, and he accused it of acting arbitrarily.

• “Why would I not have the right to work where I choose, if it is a legal entity, obviously, not a drug cartel?” a visibly agitated Barroso, who is a former Portuguese prime minister, said in his first public comments to reporters at an event in Cascais near Lisbon.

• Goldman appointed Barroso as non-executive chairman of its international arm in London two weeks after Britons voted for Brexit in June and he said he would advise it on issues arising from the negotiations for Britain to leave the European Union.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The presidential election cycle will progress to the next phase with the much-anticipated presidential debates. Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump will take the debate stage on Sept. 26 at Hofstra University for the first of three scheduled debates. But for the third party candidates – Independent Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson, and Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein – did not qualify to participate and therefore will not be included in the televised event. But, could Stein be invited to the presidential debates? Well, not to the first one, but she still has a chance to participate in the debates following.

• In order to qualify to participate in the presidential debates, candidates must be polling at 15 percent in five national surveys leading up to the debates. As it stands now, according to a NBC News poll, Johnson is polling at 10 percent and Stein is polling at 4 percent. Different polls show varying percentages; for instance, a recent Reuters poll put at Johnson at 6.6 percent and Stein at 2.2 percent. Regardless, the two candidates are well below the threshold and will not participate in next week’s debate. Instead, Clinton and her running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, and Trump and his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, will have their voices heard on Monday as they battle it out on the issues.

• The mainstream media is getting a lot of flack for not doing enough to stop Donald Trump’s rise to the cusp of having all the power, and deservedly so. In fact, I’m going to that exact thing here today. But rather than focus on the news as a whole, I want to focus on one outlet in particular: NBC. I’m singling them out because it’s not just that they haven’t done enough to stop the potential threat that is Donald Trump’s impending presidency — it’s that they’re actively endorsing it, all while pretending they cut ties well over a year ago with the man they helped make a star. We talk about it on this week’s Unpopular Opinion podcast …

• The hacker website that leaked Colin Powell’s politically embarrassing emails struck again Thursday, this time releasing what appears to be the personal emails of a White House staffer working with Hillary Clinton’s campaign — and what purports to be an image of Michelle Obama’s passport.

• An initial scan of the messages appear to show chatter mostly regarding event planning details, such as requesting an invoice for a stage used at a Clinton campaign event. In one exchange, the advanced planning team expresses concern that the media might notice a group of protesters at one event.

• A Silicon Valley titan is putting money behind an unofficial Donald Trump group dedicated to “shitposting” and circulating Internet memes maligning Hillary Clinton.

• Oculus founder Palmer Luckey financially backed a pro-Trump political organization called Nimble America, a self-described “social welfare 501(c)4 non-profit” in support of the Republican nominee.

• Luckey sold his virtual reality company Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, and Forbes estimates his current net worth to be $700 million. The 24-year-old told The Daily Beast that he had used the pseudonym “NimbleRichMan” on Reddit with a password given him to by the organization’s founders.

• Nimble America says it’s dedicated to proving that “shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real,” according to the company’s introductory statement, and has taken credit for a billboard its founders say was posted outside of Pittsburgh with a cartoonishly large image of Clinton’s face alongside the words “Too Big to Jail.”

• “We conquered Reddit and drive narrative on social media, conquered the [mainstream media], now it’s time to get our most delicious memes in front of Americans whether they like it or not,” a representative for the group wrote in an introductory post on Reddit.

• Kevin Zeese told the Guardian that Stein, her vice-presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka and 100 of her supporters were willing to risk arrest at the debates, the first of which will be held at New York’s Hofstra University on Monday.

• “About 300 people have already signed up to protest, 100 are willing to risk arrest,” Zeese said.

• “We hope Jill and Ajamu will not get arrested as we want them to respond in live time to the debate but when you are on the frontlines, things are not always in our control.”

• The Commission on Presidential Debates announced on Friday that the third-party candidates Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson had failed to qualify for the first debate.

• To earn a spot on the debate stage, the commission requires each candidate meet a 15% support threshold, determined by an average of five pre-selected national polls, and qualify for the ballot in enough states that it would be mathematically possible to receive the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

• The commission calculated that Stein had 3.2% support in an average of the five selected polls. Johnson also failed to make the cut, with a polling average of 8.4%.

• ‘The DNC was biased in favor of one candidate – Hillary Clinton – from the beginning and throughout the process,” the plaintiffs wrote in their original lawsuit. The complaint, which was filed in federal court in Florida, alleges fraud, as well as negligence as it relates to a Russian Hack on the DNC server. The Bernie backers contend that the trove of DNC emails posted by Wikileaks further proves that the Democratic Party was working against Bernie Sanders from the start.

• However, in a motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed this week, attorneys with the DNC fired back. They believe that the lawsuit is completely without merit, and that the Bernie supporters are using “litigation as a political weapon against a national party (and to support their SuperPAC) in the middle of an election.” They also don’t believe the Bernie backers have standing to even bring the lawsuit.

• Now that Hillary Clinton is statistically tied with Donald Trump in the polls according to Real Clear Politics, Democratic Party loyalists are looking for a new scapegoat. Some individuals have decided to attribute blame to millennials. Mother Jones’ Editor-in-Chief, Clara Jeffery, took to Twitter to declare her hatred for millennials after learning that Hillary Clinton loses a substantial amount of millennial voters to third-party candidates.

• Echoing this frustration with millennials, James Kirchick of The Daily Beast—an outlet that does not disclose to readers the fact that Chelsea Clinton sits on the board of their parent company, IAC—smugly purports that these pesky millennials would probably be more inclined to support Hillary Clinton if it weren’t for their “moral relativism, historical ignorance, and narcissism.” Some want to hold Jill Stein accountable for a potential Trump victory, while others argue Bernie Sanders will be culpable if Trump wins, given that he “convinced” millennials that “Clinton was in the pocket of Wall Street,” and is “a tool of wealthy elites.”

• I, too, would like to jump on this bandwagon and advance my own hypothesis as to which individual we can blame in the event Trump wins. If Clinton loses, really, there’s only one person you can blame: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Since Nigeria’s cybercrime act was voted into law in May 2015 authorities have used the accusation of cyber stalking to harass and press charges against at least five bloggers who criticized politicians and businessmen online and through social media.

• Cyber stalking, which falls under Section 24 of the act, carries a fine of up to 7 million naira (USD$22,000) and a maximum three-year jail term for anyone convicted of knowingly sending an online message that “he knows to be false, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred, ill will or needless anxiety to another.”

• If you have been using social media for a while, you’re probably familiar with people being offended by online content.

• The debate over how media should censor their apps is not new.

• What is new, however, is Instagram’s new feature in answer to this complaint. They have created a way that users can make personalized lists of words they don’t wish to see in the comments on their feeds.

• The words can be anything, from swear words to words surrounding discourses such as gender and race. If you don’t want those words commented on your pictures, poof, they’re gone.

• We think this is a great move. In the past, many people have been angry with companies for their censorship policies.

• Twitter bans many offensive words altogether. Instagram’s solution seems to be a simple yet brilliant one. Instead of banning words for every user, the individual gets to make their own choice on what their Instagram comments will show, based on what offends them personally.

• This makes a lot of sense, since offensiveness, like many things, is very subjective. Words, particularly swear words, that offend one person may be a common part of another’s vocabulary.

• YouTube is looking for “heroes” to help moderate its content and comments sections, but early feedback has been overwhelmingly negative with users describing it as crowdsourced censorship.

• Users who join the Heroes program, which was announced Tuesday, will earn points for adding captions and subtitles to videos, flagging inappropriate videos and answering questions on the site’s Help forum.

• Accruing points will earn them privileges like joining video chats with others in the Heroes program, exclusive previews of upcoming product launches and the ability to flag abusive videos en masse instead of one at a time.

Privacy/Surveillance

• A Kuwaiti lawyer has filed a formal constitutional challenge to his country’s controversial mandatory DNA law, which is reportedly set to take effect in November 2016.

• The law mandates DNA collection from all citizens and resident foreigners, a total of about 3.5 million people, plus all visitors to the tiny Gulf state. The law was quickly passed by the Kuwaiti Parliament after a July 2015 terrorist attack in the capital left nearly 30 people dead. By having a large database of everyone’s DNA, presumably it would be easier to identify victims of terrorism or perhaps even criminal suspects.

• The law, believed to be the first of its kind anywhere in the world, is viewed by many critics as being not only ineffective as a tool to combat terrorism but as being a potentially huge privacy liability if this database were to be stolen or hacked. Still, anyone who refuses collection could be subject to imprisonment or a fine of about $33,000, according to the Kuwait Times.

• Britain’s spooks are tapping startup geeks to help fight the growing battle against cyber threats, opening the insular intelligence agency to innovation and kickstarting ambitious plans for Britain to become a world leader in cyber security.

• Hackers using NSA-related hacking tools could exploit a major cyber security vulnerability impacting hundreds of thousands of Cisco switches, routers, and other networking gear.

• The vulnerability, disclosed by Cisco csco last week, has impacted at least 859,000 devices, according to Shadowserver Foundation, an independent cyber security group and Cisco partner that has been scanning Cisco routers and switchers worldwide.

• Of those devices affected, 259,000 are located in the U.S., 44,000 are in Russia, and another 43,000 are in the U.K. Cisco said Shadowserver would share data with owners of the affected devices and related IP addresses. If customers want detailed reports, they “can contact Shadowserver and get their section of the scan results,” said a Cisco spokesperson.

• Less scoping with its all-seeing eye than apparently shooting itself in the foot, the NSA gets another battering in this intriguing but troubling documentary, released in the slipstream of Oliver Stone’s Snowden. It’s a tale of two surveillance systems: Trailblazer, the pre-2006 digital-comms sweep that failed to anticipate 9/11, vs ThinThread, the DIY precursor developed on the downlow by former NSA technical director-turned-whistleblower Bill Binney. A crack analyst who pioneered the concept of meta-data (“the data about the data”), Binney is a conduit for a fascinating run-through of postwar intelligence-gathering, starting with the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which he claims he predicted. Yet lambasting rival security factions for their incompetence and cronyism, while compacting bigger issues about privacy and democracy, A Good American is in danger of coming across like an NSA internal review. Rather than adversarially pinning him, it cheerleads Binney as a homespun American mathmo maverick bucking big government. At one point he says of his methodology: “You never ask for permission, only forgiveness.” In the film, as in real life, the crucial questions are posed too fleetingly too late.

• London design studio Up Creatives has created posters, titles and animated sequences for A Good American, a documentary about NSA whistleblower William Binney and his ThinThread surveillance system

• As Oliver Stone’s Snowden struggles at the box office—moviegoers, apparently, prefer the unambiguous heroism of Captain “Sully” Sullenberger—the fate of the real Edward Snowden, and the meaning of his actions, is once again the subject of heated debate.

• To bring you up to speed: Last week, the United States’ three largest human rights organizations—the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International—launched a campaign to pressure the Obama administration to pardon Snowden. A few days later, in a rather ham-fisted effort to counter the flattering portrait in the Stone film, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released three pages of a classified report denouncing Snowden as a “serial exaggerator and fabricator,” who did “tremendous damage to national security.” As my colleague Barton Gellman, who received and reported on the Snowden leaks for the Washington Post, put it, the House’s report was “one-sided,” “incurious,” “contemptuous of fact,” and “trifling.” (Bart, you’ll notice, has misplaced his word-mincer. In fact, he may never have owned one.)

• This is a response to a petition by Leopold and Vice to unseal court dockets containing electronic surveillance affidavits, orders, etc. The step forward towards more transparency is welcome news, but it appears the wheels of justice aren’t grinding any faster. This petition was submitted to the court in 2013.

• Default mode for nearly any case involving law enforcement surveillance is pitch-black darkness. The government asks for cases to be sealed with alarming (and annoying) frequency, often claiming the potential exposure of law enforcement means and methods would be detrimental to the business of catching criminals. This makes no sense considering the technology used is decades old and the methodology has been common knowledge for nearly the same length of time.

• And yet, these requests are granted more often than not. Howell’s district (Washington DC) presides over an extremely high percentage of sealed cases.

• Opera earlier this week released a new version of its browser, Opera 40, which comes with a free virtual private network service built in. The official rollout follows five months of user experimentation with a beta version. The company evaluated beta users’ feedback and subsequently brought on additional servers, added options for global or private browsing, and created versions that would run on iOS and Android. The VPN creates a secure connection to one of Opera’s five servers around the world, letting users spoof their IP address.

• A careless agent. A cache of hacking tools left on a remote and unsecured computer. A shadowy group of Russian hackers. A fire-sale on the deep web.

• This is the current focus of a inquiry into a cache of NSA exploits that were dumped on to public websites last month by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, four people with direct knowledge of the probe investigation told Reuters.

• The tools enabled hackers to exploit software flaws in computer and communications systems from vendors such as Cisco Systems and Fortinet. Hacking group auctions ‘cyber weapons’ stolen from NSA Read more

• Sources close to the investigation into how NSA surveillance tools and zero-day exploits ended up in the hands of hackers has found that the agency knew about the loss for three years but didn’t want anyone to know.

• Calyx is a famous, heroic, radical ISP that has been involved in groundbreaking litigation — they were the first company to ever get a secret Patriot Act warrant unsealed, fighting for 11 years to overturn the gag order.

• Calyx is structured as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, meaning that they can accept donations and provide tax-receipts for them.

• Here’s where things get interesting!

• In 2013, Sprint acquired a competitor called Clearwire in order to gain control of the company’s wireless spectrum in order to launch Sprint’s LTE/4G business. Now, that spectrum was originally allocated for educational purposes before being sublicensed to Clear, and it came with the requirement that non-profits get unlimited access at very low prices.

• And Calyx, remember, is a nonprofit.

Civil Rights/Policing

• I have for a number of years now been involved with a global group of whistleblowers from the intelligence, diplomatic and military world, who gather together every year as the Sam Adams Associates to give an award to an individual displaying integrity in intelligence.

• This year’s award goes to former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, who exposed the CIA’s illegal torture programme, but was the only officer to go to prison – for exposing CIA crimes.

• The award ceremony will be taking place in Washington on 25 September at the “World Beyond War” conference.

• Last year’s laureate, former Technical Director of the NSA Bill Binney, is currently on tour across Europe to promote an excellent film about both his and the other stories of the earlier NSA whistleblowers before Edward Snowden – “A Good American“.

• As soon as we get a call from Chelsea, we will let you know the news. (It will most likely be in the mid-late afternoon Central Standard Time.)

• In a blog post that Fight for the Future released yesterday, Chase Strangio, Chelsea’s ACLU attorney, explained that there is some concern about whether she will even be able to call us after the hearing. (This is because the board could decide to punish her with indefinite solitary confinement, which could start immediately.)

• Along with Stein’s concerns about aggressive policing, she viewed the climate of fear as adding to the tension.

• “There are background elements here in which there is fear across the board. We live in a Garrison State now, we live in a society divided by fear. That’s why we call not only for accountable policing and community control, but also for a truth and reconciliation commission.”

• Stein says these fears are particularly prevalent in the African-American community.

• “People are up in arms and feel like they are on the firing lines simply for sitting in their car while black.”

• A line of police officers stand in the dark on a Charlotte, North Carolina, highway. They look like an occupying force with their helmets and face shields and various weaponry strapped all over their armored clothing. A large bus illuminates them with its headlights. The front of the bus declares in bright lights: “NOT IN SERVICE”.

• It’s as if these police responding to protests of Tuesday’s shooting death of Keith Scott are carrying with them a lighted banner that declares what black Americans already know: they are not in service. Not for us.

• It’s the message that police have always been sending black Americans. Blacks make up about 13% of the US population, and yet accounted for 27% of the approximately 1,146 people killed by police in 2015. “Not in service” is the message we got when Tamir Rice was killed, when Freddie Gray was killed, when Eric Garner was killed. This was the message we got when Terence Crutcher was killed this week while asking for service. We understand that if our police force really does exist to protect and serve, it does not exist to protect and serve us.

• The department’s actions are indicative of an agency that seldom has trouble retaining anything it designates as “guilty” property. So secure was the sheriff’s office in its belief that it would ultimately prevail — despite never bringing criminal charges against the couple whose assets it seized — that it moved ahead with converting the property to cash without having any legal right to do so.

• The Ostipows are now suing [PDF] the sheriff and his deputies in federal court for blithely blowing past even the minimal protections granted to victims of asset forfeiture. In addition to $1 million+ in damages, the Ostipows are seeking declarations that the asset forfeiture processes deployed by the sheriff’s department are Constitutional violations and the compelled released of documents requested by the couple in an earlier FOIA request.

• Malthe Thomsen on Tuesday accepted a settlement offer amounting to 500,000 kroner in his lawsuit against the New York City Police Department and the State of New York for unlawful detainment and coercing a false confession in a sexual abuse case.

• Thomsen had sought $7 million (48 million kroner) in the case but settled for the much smaller amount, his lawyer Jane Fischer-Byrialsen told Danish media.

• “I think that Malthe deserved much more and should be compensated with much more than he was. But sometimes one needs to be realistic and weigh the risks of continuing a legal case against the money you know you can get here and now,” she told TV2.

• Thomsen sued both the former coworker who accused him of sexually assaulting children at an upscale Manhattan daycare institution and the New York City Police Department, which he says coerced a false admission out of him.

• In February Express.co.uk reported the Scandinavian country has seen a huge surge in crime since the start of the migrants crisis in Europe with a rise in sex assaults, drug dealing and children carrying weapons.

• The force’s increased lack of control in the country was revealed in a report by Sweden’s National Criminal Investigation Service, where attacks on officers were detailed, including police cars being stoned by masked groups.

• At the time around 50 areas were put on a “blacklist” which are then divided into three categories from “risk areas” to “seriously vulnerable”.

• Violence and confusion has spread across Charlotte after a second night of protests was interrupted by gunfire when one protester shot another.

• North Carolina governor Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency on Wednesday, and called for help from the National Guard and the Highway Patrol.

• A day after North Carolina’s governor declared a state of emergency amid violent protests following the police killing of a black man, Charlotte’s police chief said Thursday the agency will not publicly release video footage of Keith Lamont Scott’s death.

• A black officer from the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department killed Scott, 43, on Tuesday outside an apartment complex while serving a warrant on somebody else. The officer, who has been placed on administrative leave, said Scott had a handgun as he got out of a vehicle and did not follow orders to drop it. Friends and family members maintain Scott was carrying a book—an assertion flatly denied by Kerr Putney, the police chief. At a press conference, he said the authorities retrieved a handgun Scott “was holding in his hand when he got out of the vehicle.”

• [...]

• The Charlotte police agency requires officers to wear body cams. At least three officers on the scene were wearing body cams. Officer Brentley Vinson, the shooter, was not wearing one at the time of the incident.

• A man who murdered a Glasgow shopkeeper for “disrespecting Islam” has released messages from prison calling on supporters to behead other “insulters”.

• Tanveer Ahmed, 32, admitted stabbing Asad Shah to death in his shop because he felt his victim was “disrespecting the prophet Mohamed” with his beliefs as an Ahmadi Muslim.

• Now, he is encouraging others to do the same in extremist audio messages that appear to have been recorded and released after he was jailed for life.

• Chelsea Manning went before a three-member disciplinary board at Fort Leavenworth on September 22 and was punished with 14 days of solitary confinement.

• The punishment stems from administrative charges the United States Army brought against Manning after she attempted suicide in July. The Army charged her with “resisting the force cell move team,” “prohibited property,” and “conduct which threatens” the “good order and discipline” of the facility.

• In a statement from Manning, she indicated the Army acquitted her of the “resisting” charge. But she was found guilty of the “conduct which threatens” offense and the “prohibited property” charge, which was for having an “unmarked copy” of Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman.

• Iranian women have been posting photographs and videos of themselves cycling in public, in defiance of a fatwa that claims riding a bike poses a threat to a woman’s chastity. Journalist Masih Alinejad, the founder of My Stealthy Freedom, has urged women to post the images of themselves with the hashtag #IranianWomenLoveCycling.

• Earlier this month, Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini issued a fatwa prohibiting women from cycling in public. “Riding a bicycle often attracts the attention of men and exposes the society to corruption, and thus contravenes women’s chastity, and it must be abandoned,” he told state media.

• In one courageous video, a mother and daughter are seen riding together, and issuing a direct message to Ayatollah Khameini, saying, “It is our absolute right and we are not going to give up.”

• In July, it was reported that a group of women in the country’s north were stopped by law enforcement while riding bicycles and required to sign pledges not to repeat the ‘violation.’

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• So, just a few hours ago, the reports were still spreading that the Senate would absolutely include Ted Cruz’s preferred language that would block the (largely symbolic, but really important) transfer of control over the IANA functions of ICANN away from the Commerce Department. We’ve explained over and over and over again why this is important — including once this morning in response to Donald Trump suddenly taking a stand (an incredibly ignorant one, but a stand) on the issue.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Now, while the letters “T” in both logos do look kinda-sorta similar, there’s a slight chance that’s because it’s a single freaking letter in the English language and there are only so many ways to depict a capital “T” in a recognizable way. The only real stylistical similarity in the two “T”s is the outjuts in the mid-section of the stem in each letter — known as “median spurs” and found on lots and lots of typefaces. Other than that, the letters are actually fairly distinct in style. And, of course, the rest of each logo has a shit-ton of other components which all severely demonstrate the source of each logo. This makes customer confusion laughably unlikely, particularly given that the Texas Rangers are known by the public to be in the sporting industry, even though the team claims it holds trademarks on its logo for use on beverages and food services.

Copyrights

• Swedish Internet service provider Bahnhof is giving copyright trolls a taste of their own medicine. The company has sent a settlement request to the group that’s spearheading the copyright trolling efforts in Sweden, asking them to pay up for alleged trademark infringement, or else.

• The European Commission has promised a number of things related to IT in its State of the European Union address. Two promises that stand out are another harshening of the copyright monopoly in combination with a promise of public and free wifi from all public authorities. These are obviously in direct conflict, as a public wifi is easily (and commonly) used to circumvent digital distribution monopolies – and politicians seem completely unaware that these two promises probably shouldn’t be in the very same set of press releases.

• In the European Commission’s Digital Agenda RSS feed, there was a recent barrage of press releases related to the evaluation of the European Union Copyright Directive – the EU’s equivalent of the DMCA – where the Commission decided it was a good idea to introduce the “ancillary copyright” on news snippets for legacy news organizations. Yes, that’s the complete moronity commonly known as the “Google Tax”, which I wrote about in a previous post.

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