● 05.20.17

● Links 21/5/2017: Linux 3.18.53, Tizen 4.0

Posted in News Roundup at 6:51 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I’m a Linux user. And, as the old adage goes, “I don’t do Windows.”

• This is not an article about how Linux is superior to Windows. Truth be told, I don’t begrudge any person’s choice of computing environment—be it Windows, Mac, BSD, Amiga. What each person uses is truly up to them. Me? I use open source. I use free software. I use Linux.

• Excuse the hyperbole, but we’ve always wanted to use a click-baity sort of headline — just to see if they work. That being said, we’re not going to spoil the fun. To find the answer, you’re going to have to watch the video. Don’t worry, however — bad things rarely happen when Linux is involved.

Server

• Linux containers are gaining significant ground in the enterprise, which is not surprising, since they make so much sense in today’s business environment. With that said, container technology as we know it today is relatively new, and companies are still in the process of understanding the different ways in which containers can be leveraged.

• Although the promise of OpenStack and private cloud is huge, and still largely in front of us, the one challenge we’ve heard from people wanting to try it is “It’s a bear!” Its reputation, whether or not well-deserved, is one of being a real challenge for even skilled IT people to install and deploy. For those who feel that way, or for those who believe the hype and have so far chosen not even to try, Platform9 may be what you need.

Kernel Space

• Good news everyone,

• the Linux Test Project test suite stable release for *May 2017* has been released.

• Since the last release 264 patches by 28 authors were merged.

• I’m announcing the release of the 3.18.53 kernel.

• All users of the 3.18 kernel series must upgrade.

Applications

• I am proud to announce the release of OpenShot 2.3.3, which addresses many serious stability issues, and the launch of our amazing new website (www.openshot.org). It’s been a busy month so far, and I’m super excited to roll out these improvements!

• OpenShot 2.3.3 takes care of “many serious stability issues.” This release should address the top 25 crashes previously reported against this video editor. OpenShot 2.3.3 also uses a new version of openshot-qt, a new libopenshot point release, and a variety of other fixes.

• GitHub’s Ian Olsen announced the release and general availability of Atom 1.17 and 1.18 Beta milestones of the open-source and cross-platform hackable text editor for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

• Atom 1.17 is now the latest stable release of the application and introduces support for docks, an extension of the pane system engineered to accommodate various interface elements like tool panels (debugger controls, regex railroad diagrams, terminals, consoles, etc.) that you want to immediately toggle into and out of view.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• After announcing the upcoming availability of Total War: SHOGUN 2 and Total War: Shogun 2 – Fall of the Samurai to Linux and SteamOS platforms, Feral Interactive is today teasing gamers with the Linux and macOS port of the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III game.

• Released by Relic Entertainment and Sega in partnership with Games Workshop, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III launched on Steam for Microsoft Windows only three weeks ago, on April 27, 2017. It’s a real-time strategy (RTS) video game from the creators of the superb Warhammer 40,000 universe.

• After announcing SHOGUN 2 for Linux earlier this week, Feral Interactive has now announced the system requirements for this newest Linux game port being released next week.

• The minimum GPU requirements for SHOGUN 2 are a NVIDIA GeForce 600 series, AMD Radeon HD 6000 series, or Intel Iris Pro hardware. But they recommend a GeForce 700 series or Radeon R7 series for the best experience.

• Valve has gotten a reputation for promoting Linux as a platform for gaming, and thus many people have a very positive view of the company. But is there a darker side to Valve?

• The drive to be on the bleeding edge of technology powers the PC gaming community. We want nothing more than to run our ridiculously powerful rigs on barely stable beta drivers, with our CPUs overclocked to speeds that are neither advisable nor guaranteed to be safe for our systems.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The current world of high DPI works fine when dealing with a single montior and only dealing with modern apps. but it breaks down with multiple monitors.

• I copy&paste the script used on Kate and adapted for AtCore situation. So far everything is working, so I just need to have an icon done and submit the diff for approval and have it inside Craft.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• What we want to do differently this year is extending invitation to all people interested in GNOME content, whether it is upstream or downstream. We would especially like to see some Ubuntu folks attending. With Ubuntu moving to upstream GNOME, we are already seeing an increased number of docs patches coming from Ubuntu contributors, which is great, and I think having a joint documentation event could strengthen and expand the connections even more!

• Lately I found out that having a background ambient sound such as rain, wind, fireplace, really constrains me from any distraction.

• In doing so, inspired by Noisli.com, I created a GNOME Shell extension with similar functionality.

• Intrigeri emailed me to share that “During the Contribute your skills to Debian event that took place in Paris last week-end, we conducted a usability testing session” of GNOME 3.22 and Debian 9. They have posted their usability test results at Intrigeri’s blog: “GNOME and Debian usability testing, May 2017.” The results are very interesting and I encourage you to read them!

• The GNOME project has, after a period of contemplation, put forward a proposal to move to a GitLab installation on GNOME’s infrastructure. “We are confident that GitLab is a good choice for GNOME, and we can’t wait for GNOME to modernise our developer experience with it. It will provide us with vastly more effective tools, an easier landing for newcomers, and lots of opportunities to improve the way that we work. We’re ready to start working on the migration.”

• When we introduced HiDPI support in GNOME a few years ago, we took the simplest possible approach that was feasible to implement with the infrastructure we had available at the time.

Distributions

Reviews

• Feren OS is a polished and well-stocked Linux distro that comes close to being an ideal replacement for Microsoft Windows and macOS. In fact, this impressive Linux OS is a very attractive replacement for any Linux distro.

• The only impediment to this assessment is dislike of the Cinnamon desktop. Feren OS does not give you any other desktop options. However, it comes with a wide assortment of configuration choices that let you tweak the look and feel into almost any customized appearance you could want.

• It also is super easy to install. This makes it suitable for those migrating to Linux — or at least to this operating system. Feren OS offers a specialized software repository that is colorful and efficient to use. It has several specialized launchers to install and configure software packages with a single mouse click.

• To begin with, Antergos is one of those distros which I recommend with an air of upbeat confidence. And it has never let me down. I, being a distro hopper with an average of 3 distros per week, have found the love of my life in Antergos. It’s the marrying kind.

• Sadly, Antergos is also one of the most underrated members of Linux family. We’ll talk about that later though. First, we see why Antergos is awesome.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• The OpenMandriva team announced earlier this week that the second important update to the OpenMandriva Lx 3 series of the Linux-based operating system is being prepped with many of the latest applications and technologies.

• I happened across a new ISO image for the PCLinuxOS KDE desktop distribution this week.

• PCLOS is a classic rolling-release Linux distribution, so this is just a “roll-up” release, pulling all of the updates since the last release together to make new installations easier, faster and more reliable.

• Every time a new rolling release update is made we talk about those first two points, how it makes installation faster and easier, but I think my recent experience with two ASUS laptops shows that the last point can be important as well.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• openSUSE’s Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source applications that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

• With the release of release-notes-openSUSE on May 17th, 2017 the SUSE sponsored maintenance of openSUSE Leap 42.1 has ended.

• openSUSE Leap 42.1 is now officially discontinued and out of support by SUSE.

Red Hat Family

• OpenStack is an open source cloud operating system that allows businesses to develop their own solutions for any operating needs, resulting in a lean, efficient, and effective private enterprise solution. At the very core of the cloud segment, is its foundation of the Linux software. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while continuing to grow in the mid-teens, will tremendously help to grow another segment of Red Hat’s business as they develop and grow their open source cloud software, Red Hat OpenStack. RHEL makes up nearly 67% of the $2 billion Linux market, which will allow them to cross-sell Red Hat OpenStack to new and continuing clients as the shift to the hybrid cloud grows. Red Hat has been actively marketing and selling their emerging cloud technologies, with this segment of their business growing at over a 35% CAGR. The transition to the cloud by companies all around the world will make up an addressable market of $5 billion for OpenStack, and we believe that Red Hat is in a position to take control of this market by leveraging their successful Linux operating system.

• A technology skills panel which convened at the recent Red Hat Summit in Boston consisted of the following key personnel:

• Ken Goetz, VP, Training Services, Red Hat Jan Mark Holzer, manager, Software Engineering & consulting engineer, Red Hat Tom Callaway, manager, Software Engineering & team lead, Education Outreach, Red Hat

• These executives answered questions from the audience regarding the current technology skills gap in the tech industry, what needs to be done, and what Red Hat is doing to help fix this through educational endeavors.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that enterprises in the ASEAN region have adopted Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to enable faster application delivery. Ranging from the telecommunications and financial services industries, organizations in ASEAN are deploying Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to enable their developers to more quickly develop, host, and scale applications in cloud environments.

• Cormier: In the past, developers would just go grab code and throw it over the wall to the operators. And now, what’s happening with DevOps, operators are giving developers a platform with all the pieces they need. By the time they’re done building [an app], it’s ready to be put in operation because it’s already on supported components. It’s on supported containers, for example, which is a Linux distro. They don’t have to replatform it. I’ve said it until I was blue in the face — a container is Linux. It’s just Linux carved up in a different way.

• So, even as things turn into ‘products by vendors’ or services through cloud, they’re generally started with some sort of open source community. The only place where I think there’s innovation going on [outside open source] would be some more niche areas, vertical applications where it just doesn’t lend itself to broad open source contribution in communities. But I’d say most of the broad-based innovation taking place today starts with open source.

Finance

Fedora

• Red Hat’s Jiří Eischmann is informing the Fedora Linux community today about the upcoming availability of some long-anticipated printing improvements to the Workstation edition of the operating system.

Debian Family

• We’re coming closer to the Debian/stretch stable release and similar to what we had with #newinwheezy and #newinjessie it’s time for #newinstretch!

• Hideki Yamane already started the game by blogging about GitHub’s Icon font, fonts-octicons and Arturo Borrero Gonzalez wrote a nice article about nftables in Debian/stretch.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Recent versions of the Ubuntu Linux distro fail to limit system access for guest accounts.

• This according to developer Tyler Hicks, who reported a bug that allows guest users to roam free of the confines expected to be placed on system access for guests.

• Canonical’s Timo Aaltonen informs users of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating systems that they can now install the latest Mesa 17.1.0 3D Graphics Stack from the X-Updates PPA repository.

Flavours and Variants

• Black Lab Software’s Roberto J. Dohnert is informing us today about the availability for download of two new official spins of the recently released Black Lab Enterprise Linux 11 operating system, with the Xfce and MATE desktop environments.

• Just a few moment ago, elementary OS developer and founder Daniel Foré announced the release and immediate availability for download of the first maintenance update to the elementary OS 0.4 “Loki” operating system.

• Today, elementary OS Loki — the latest version of the operating system — reaches a new milestone. Release 0.4.1 adds many new features, including an updated 4.8 kernel, improved Kaby Lake support, and most importantly, the all-new crowd-funded AppCenter!

Devices/Embedded

• Mistral’s 51 x 26mm “820 Nano SOM” features a Snapdragon 820 SoC, up to up to 6GB LPDDR4 and 128GB storage, plus WiFi, BT, GPS, and a 9-axis MEMS.

• Bangalore, India-based Mistral Solutions, which has previously released a Nano SOM computer-on-module built around the i.MX6, has now launched an 820 Nano SOM that taps Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820. The tiny module runs Linux or Android 7.0 “Nougat” on the Snapdragon 820, which features four Kryo cores — two at 2.2GHz, and two at 1.6GHz — plus a 624MHz Adreno 530 GPU, a Hexagon 680 DSP, and a 14-bit Spectra ISP. The strikingly small dimensions of the 820 Nano SOM, which are variably listed as 51 x 26mm and 51.5 x 24.5mm, are actually quite consistent with previous Snapdragon 820-based COMs.

• The Pi Desktop kit from Premier Farnell — the largest manufacturer of the Raspberry Pi — includes an add-on board containing: an mSATA interface, an intelligent power controller (plus real-time-clock and battery); a heat sink; a USB adapter (Micro-Type A); spacers and screws — and the box to keep it all in.

• The company said the kit can help Raspberry Pi fans turn the board into a Pi into a “fully featured Linux-based desktop” computer “within minutes” which can then be connected to a display via the HDMI interface.

• Axiomtek’s tough, Linux-ready “eBOX100-312-FL” embedded computer offers a Celeron N3350 SoC, a SATA bay, and 2x mini-PCIe, HDMI, GbE, and USB 3.0 ports.

• The “MSC Q7-AL” is a Qseven COM with Intel Apollo Lake, triple display outputs, and options including -40 to 85°C support, 64GB eMMC, and a 3.5-inch carrier.

• Aaeon’s “FWS-2271” network appliance offers Intel Apollo Lake SoCs, up to 16GB RAM, 4x to 6x GbE ports, 2x mini-PCIe slots, and shock/vibration resistance.

• The FWS-2271 network appliance for SOHO and SMB customers has updated Aaeon’s earlier Intel Braswell-based FWS-2260. Instead of Braswell, you get a choice of Intel Apollo Lake generation dual-core Celeron N3350 or quad-core Pentium N4200, both with 6W TDP. The Ubuntu-friendly device supports features including firewall, VPN, load balancing, software defined WAN (SD-WAN), Unified Threat Management (UTM), wireless Network Access Controller (NAC) and Virtual Customer Premise Equipment (vCPE).

• SiFive and Arduino unveiled a wireless-enabled “Arduino Cinque” board based on SiFive’s HiFive, featuring a RISC-V FE310 SoC and an ESP32 wireless SoC.

Phones

Tizen

• Samsung has teamed up with task management platform developer Hipaax to develop a task management solution for Samsung’s latest wearable, the Gear S3. The solution integrates the Gear S3, Hipaax TaskWatch platform and Samsung SDS EMM technology in order to improve Workforce Management. The solution will speed up the use of wearables in the workplace with the integration of business solutions with new capabilities which improve efficiency, increase staff’s productivity and provide an enhanced customer satisfaction.

• Tizen is a fairly new operating system when you consider the fact that there are only 4 smartphones in the world running the OS (including the newly-announced and newly-shown-off Samsung Z4), and its smartphones currently cater to the budget-friendly segment of the market (no high-end smartphones running Tizen just yet).

• The Tizen Developer Conference (TDC) 2017 holding in San Francisco, U.S. will be wrapping up today. The annual gathering has seen industry leaders, as well as developers, service partners and others involved in the Tizen platform, gather to brainstorm. One topic that was discussed extensively during the course of the conference was the Tizen 4.0 OS, the next-generation in the firmware. As the main developer of Tizen, Samsung showcased its latest advancements related to the OS and several Samsung executives also presented keynote speeches on the same top.

• Samsung showed off the latest Artik module: a Cortex-R4-based, 40 x 15mm “Artik 053” COM with built-in WiFi that runs Tizen 4.0’s new Tizen RT RTOS variant.

• Samsung announced Tizen 4.0 with .NET and Xamarin hooks, coming soon to its new Z4 phone, and revealed a “Tizen RT” RTOS that runs on a new Artik 053 module.

• At the Tizen Developer Conference (TDC) in San Francisco, Samsung Electronics announced version 4.0 of its Tizen Linux distribution, which for the first time includes functional variants of Tizen for different use cases. The first of these is a Tizen RT distribution designed for IoT devices, ranging from “high-end products such as TVs and mobile devices as well as low-end products such as thermostats, scales, bulbs, and more,” says Samsung.

• Anyone hoping that Samsung would use its Tizen operating system to shake up the mobile market has again had their dreams dashed, after the company emitted a for-n00bs phone running the OS.

Android

• Google’s plan to improve the Android experience involves more than just tweaking the operating system. It also requires developers to up the quality of their work, and now Google has a new way to warn app creators whose work isn’t up to snuff. Long story short, if your app ranks in the bottom 25 percent when it comes to certain stability, battery or rendering metrics, you’ll be hearing from the search giant through the developer console.

• The current specs race and the bid to have computing power in our smartphones that is vastly superior to that in most of computers has proven to be a necessity when it comes to Android smartphones. For flagship devices, this is not a major problem as the large cost of the device means OEMs can afford to add expensive components, but what about for the super low-cost devices?

• Google is making another go at getting cheap Android phones to support its latest software, an attempt to lock more consumers in the developing world into the internet giant’s services.

• The new program, called Android Go, was announced at the Alphabet Inc. division’s I/O developer conference on Wednesday in Mountain View, California. It bakes features directly into Google’s mobile operating system that are designed specifically for cheap phones, including software to manage cellular data costs. The service will launch in 2018.

• In 1997, 3D Realms, the development team behind Duke Nukem 3D, released Shadow Warrior for the PC. It remains one of the best first person shooters ever made, and now you can finally play it on your Android smartphone or tablet for just $2.99, thanks to publisher Devolver Digital and the game’s Android developer, General Arcade.

• I remember the precise moment I understood smartwatches. I had been using a massive Samsung phablet for a week, trying to understand how people were using these relatively new devices. When it buzzed in my pocket, I thought “I wish I could look at a smaller screen.”

• Though we got out first peek at Android O back in March, Google finally revealed more details this week at its I/O developers conference about the soon-to-drop version of Android.

• Though we’re still quite a ways away from the official release, we now a lot more about the update. At first glance, many of the new changes are subtle, building on updates Google introduced last year with Nougat. (Yes, it’s another boring year for Android.)

• Android O is currently available to developers and those brave enough to take part in the public beta.

• Keep in mind as you go through these slides, features often change during development. So things may look different this fall when Android O gets a proper name and release. But until then, the following are features you can expect when Android O hits your device.

• Of all the current phones that are going to be updated to Android O after Google releases the new operating system, only the Pixel will take advantage of Project Treble. What that actually means is that Google might update the phone even after the mandatory two-year period for software updates expires.

• Today, at the Google I/O keynote, the Android team announced first-class support for Kotlin. [...] Starting now, Android Studio 3.0 ships with Kotlin out of the box

• ICC Examin allows since version 1.0 ICC Color Profile viewing on the Android mobile platform. ICC Examin shows ICC color profile elements graphically. This way it is much easier to understand the content. Color primaries, white point, curves, tables and color lists are displayed both numerically and as graphics. Matrices, international texts, Metadata are much easier to read.

• Google has never been one to settle or to do things in a way that is not decidedly “Google”. So it should have come as no surprise to anyone that they began working on a project that had many scratching their heads. The project is called Fuschia and most people that follow Google and Android closely, know of this new platform.

• “This time, things will be different,” or so Google says with each major dessert-flavored Android release that it pushes to phones and tablets. But looking at Android Marshmallow and Android Nougat over the past two years proves that’s not entirely true.

• After years of rumors and speculation, Google finally announced a plan to put a Google-blessed, car version of Android in a production vehicle. Audi and Volvo have both signed up to have their “next gen” vehicles powered by Google’s OS. Previously we’ve seen “concept” Android-as-a-car-OS displays from Google in the form of a “stock Android” car OS in a Maserati and an FCA/Google concept for a “skinned android” infotainment system. With Audi and Volvo, the “concepts” are over, and we’re finally seeing a work-in-progress product that will actually make it to market. And while previous concepts were quietly shown off with no one willing to comment, Google finally seems ready to talk about how Android in the car will work.

• When the cheers died down, Cuthbertson quoted a colleague who had tried Kotlin and then gushed, “I think I am in love.” The romance isn’t restricted to Google. Elsewhere on the web, a programmer wrote, “I’m so jaded that I didn’t think it was possible to love a language ever again, but Kotlin is just gorgeous.” Another called Kotlin “our good lord and savior.” A third: “Oh my God, this is it. This is what loving a programming language is like.”

• More than 2 billion devices run on the Android operating system, Google said Wednesday at its I/O developer conference. It’s not just popular phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S8. The TVs you watch and the cars you drive also use the software.

• Google has taken a major step toward turning Android into a complete operating system for cars that doesn’t require the use of a phone. The company announced partnerships with Audi and Volvo today, ahead of this week’s I/O developer’s conference, that will see those carmakers build new branded infotainment systems using Android 7.0 Nougat.

• The HTC U Ultra and U Play introduced a totally new design language and user experience to consumers, a radical departure from HTC’s track record in years past. While that history proved popular with reviewers and tech aficionados, it didn’t exactly translate into mass market appeal. Hence the changes HTC introduced this year.

• It will succeed Nougat, which was released late last year, and will introduce brand new functionality to Android smartphones and tablets.

• Android is the most popular mobile platform in the world and, as ever, there will be plenty of pressure on the company to deliver the features that millions of its users want.

• It doesn’t come as a surprise, though, as Android’s share of the mobile market continues to grow, and claimed a record 88 per cent of the global market back in November 2016. iOS, meanwhile, bagged just 12.1 per cent of the market.

• Today’s Google I/O presentation was as wide-ranging as the company’s various ventures into future technology, though the biggest cheers of excitement were inevitably reserved for Android. I just got my first taste of Google’s next iteration, codenamed Android O, and it looks like it’s targeting exactly the areas where Google’s mobile OS needed improvement.

• Whatever Google ends up calling it, the Mountain View, California, company is prepping its next major Android release: Android O. On March 21, it made everything official except the name.

Free Software/Open Source

• Mobile carrier Sprint has culminated four years of research into Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) with a new open source offering designed to make core networks more efficient through new-age virtualization techniques.

• Building a community around an open-source project requires a number of practices regarding support, pull requests handling, licensing, and more, writes Pete Warden, TensorFlow Mobile lead at Google.

• A great challenge in the early life of a new project, explains Warden, is providing support to those who are using it. At first, the only available experts are the developers themselves, who have to find a way to integrate their day-to-day tasks with other support duties. This is not entirely straightforward, since it may take developers outside of their comfort zone and potentially distract them from their main tasks. The TensorFlow team dealt with this challenge by establishing a rotation among all engineers, so each engineer took responsibility for a particular area for one full week approximately once every couple of months.

• “It really doesn’t have a downside,” Donovan said of the proliferation of open source software in the telecom industry. He explained that operators can either choose to simply obtain open source solutions for free through open source groups, or they can opt to participate in open source communities by designing and building solutions.

• AT&T’s transformation from traditional telco to an open source champion was largely driven by John Donovan, the company’s chief strategy officer and group president. Donovan took the stage at Light Reading’s Big Communications Event today to tell those questioning the necessity of open source projects that they are “dead wrong.”

• Donovan said that competition from over-the-top players, cable companies, and others are making it critical for AT&T to move to open source. “Our open source projects have doubled in the past year,” Donovan said, adding that sitting around and operating in a traditional telecom mode is no longer effective.

• The Mesa renderer in Haiku presently ventures into software rendering. Haiku uses software for rendering frame buffers and then writes them to the graphics hardware. The goal of my project is to port Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) Driver for i915, from the Linux kernel to Haiku with the help of DragonflyBSD’s Linux Compatibility layer, so that those drivers can be later extended to add OpenGL support (Mesa3D) for hardware accelerated 3D rendering.

• Except for those folks living under rocks (sounds uncomfortable), everyone knows about or at least has heard of bitcoin. However, not everyone understands the technology of bitcoin, which extends well beyond Internet-based currency.

• Mobile operators are embracing open source like never before, and there’s a lot of confusion around the myriad projects and efforts that are underway, but that doesn’t worry Sprint’s vice president of technology Ron Marquardt.

Events

• It’s been almost a year since I, Filipe and Aracele were having a beer at Alexander Platz after the very last day of QtCon Berlin, when Aracele astutely came up with a very crazy idea of organizing QtCon in Brazil. Since then, we have been maturing such an idea and after a lot of work we are very glad to announce: QtCon Brasil 2017 happens from 18th to 20th August in São Paulo.

• This talk will illustrate the application areas for Input Methods by example, presenting short introductions to several international writing systems as well as emoji input. It will explain why solid Input Methods support is vital to KDE’s goal of inclusivity and how Input Methods can make the act of writing easier for all of us.

• The first training “Free and Open Source Software Compliance” is on June 23rd at KDAB’s Berlin training center. It will be held in German. Trainings in English at this and our other locations will follow later in the year. If you would like to learn how to navigate Open Source licensing with confidence, read more and sign up here.

• A good understanding of the Linux kernel memory model is essential for a great many kernel-hacking and code-review tasks. Unfortunately, the current documentation (memory-barriers.txt) has been said to frighten small children, so this workshop’s goal is to demystify this memory model, including hands-on demos of the tools, help installing/running the tools, and help constructing appropriate litmus tests. These tools should go a long way toward the ultimate goal of automating the process of using memory models to frighten small children.

• With the Internet of Things, the realms of embedded Linux and enterprise computing are increasingly intertwined, and serverless computing is the latest enterprise development paradigm that device developers should tune into. This event-driven variation on Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS) can ease application development using ephemeral Docker containers, auto-scaling, and pay-per execution in the cloud. Serverless is seeing growing traction in enterprise applications that need fast deployment and don’t require extremely high performance or low latency, including many cloud-connected IoT applications.

Databases

• The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces today that the first beta release of PostgreSQL 10 is available for download. This release contains previews of all of the features which will be available in the final release of version 10, although some details will change before then. Users are encouraged to begin testing their applications against this latest release.

• More details on the changes to find with PostgreSQL 10 Beta 1 can be found via the informative release announcement posted this morning to PostgreSQL.org.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Just a quick heads up. I just created and saved an Excel file using Excel 2016, which cannot be opened again with it. Glad our swiss army knife LibreOffice can 😉

• It’s funny to see Excel can open the ODS I created using LibreOffice (as source I used the XLSX file) better than it’s “native” format….

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Sadly, by design, Windows 10 S isn’t designed to handle Linux distributions.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• I care a lot about free software, not only as a Debian Developer. The use of software as a service matters as well because my principle free software development is on just such a project, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. The AGPL helps by allowing anyone who is suitably skilled to install their own copy of the software and run their own service on their own hardware. As a project, we are seeing increasing numbers of groups doing exactly this and these groups are actively contributing back to the project.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Last week, we presented a new paper that describes how children are thinking through some of the implications of new forms of data collection and analysis. The presentation was given at the ACM CHI conference in Denver last week and the paper is open access and online.

Programming/Development

• Unfortunately, this rosy portrait bears no relation to reality. For starters, the profile of a programmer’s mind is pretty uncommon. As well as being highly analytical and creative, software developers need almost superhuman focus to manage the complexity of their tasks. Manic attention to detail is a must; slovenliness is verboten. Attaining this level of concentration requires a state of mind called being ‘in the flow’, a quasi-symbiotic relationship between human and machine that improves performance and motivation.

Leftovers

Science

• Artificial intelligence can put words right into your mouth. A new system takes a still image of a person and an audio clip, and uses them to create a doctored video of the person speaking the audio. The results are still a little rough around the edges, but the software could soon make realistically fake videos only a single click away.

Health/Nutrition

• RSPH and the Young Health Movement (YHM) have published a new report, #StatusOfMind, examining the positive and negative effects of social media on young people’s health, including a league table of social media platforms according to their impact on young people’s mental health.

• Instagram and Snapchat are the social media platforms that have the worst impact on children’s mental health, according to a study published by Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) and the Young Health Movement (YHM).

• In contrast, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs tests every patient being admitted. If patients tests positive, they are isolated and treated, making it harder for the bacteria to spread.

• The VA reported in January that testing and isolating patients had helped reduced MRSA infections by 80% since 2007.

• That practice is costly, though. It requires single hospital rooms.

• Congress moved to protect medical marijuana by including in its stop-gap federal spending bill a provision barring the Justice Department from using federal funds to go after the drug in states where medical marijuana is legal, but now, President Trump says that doesn’t matter.

• Are the insurance marketplaces created by the Affordable Care Act really on the verge of collapse, as President Trump and GOP leaders have repeatedly claimed?

• Three months ago, this story would have started like this: It depends on where you look and who you ask.

Security

• While we are all mesmerized by the presidential crises, a small, but quite significant change occurred in Congress: the Senate Sergeant at Arms approved the use of Signal by Senate staff. Signal, a product of Open Whisper Systems, provides end-to-end encryption for Apple and Android phones.

• On May 12, hackers hit more than a hundred countries, exploiting a stolen N.S.A. tool that targeted vulnerabilities of Microsoft software. The attacks infected only machines running on Windows operative system. Among the victims are public administrative bodies such as NHS hospitals in the UK. Investigate Europe spent months to investigate the dire dependency of European countries on Microsoft – and the security risks this entails

• Current and former NSA officials say the agency informed Microsoft about the theft of the exploit named EternalBlue after learning of it, making it possible for the Redmond software giant to issue a patch for it in March. The exploit was used in the WannaCry ransomware attacks over last weekend.

• The group that released NSA exploits for Windows, which were used in massive ransomware attacks last weekend, has accused Microsoft of being hand-in-glove with The Equation Group, a group that is believed to be a front for the NSA.

• But for more than five years, the NSA kept using it — through a time period that has seen several serious security breaches — and now the officials’ worst fears have been realized. The malicious code at the heart of the WannaCry virus that hit computer systems globally late last week was apparently stolen from the NSA, repackaged by cybercriminals and unleashed on the world for a cyberattack that now ranks as among the most disruptive in history.

• The so-called Shadow Brokers, who claimed responsibility for releasing NSA tools that were used to spread the WannaCry ransomware through the NHS and across the world, said they have a new suite of tools and vulnerabilities in newer software. The possible targets include Microsoft’s Windows 10, which was unaffected by the initial attack and is on at least 500m devices around the world.

• Ransomware is on the rise. On a single day, WannaCrypt held hostage over 57,000 users worldwide, demanding anywhere between $300-$600 in Bitcoin. Don’t pay up and you’ll not be seeing your data again. Before I get into the thrust of this piece, if anything, let WannaCrypt be a siren call to everyone to backup your data. Period. End of story. With a solid data backup, should you fall prey to ransomware, you are just an OS reinstall and a data restore away from getting back to work.

• There are many Microsoft apologists, astro-turfers, and so-called journalists on the make who, at times like this, keep a low profile and furiously try to spread the message in Web forums that "computers users" are at risk.

• Alas, the harsh truth must at last be faced: if you do not use Windows, then the chances of a ransomware attack are close to zero.

• On Monday, researchers said the same weapons-grade attack kit was used in a much-earlier and possibly larger-scale hack that made infected computers part of a botnet that mined cryptocurrency.

• GSTN, set up to provide IT infrastructure for GST rollout, will not be impacted by the WannaCry ransomware attack, as its systems do not run on Microsoft software, the network’s CEO Prakash Kumar said today.

• The Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) is gearing up to handle about 3 billion invoices every month under the new indirect tax regime and will complete the beta testing of its software tomorrow.

• “Our software is not based on Microsoft windows operating system and hence we are immune. We operate on Linux software which is not affected by the ransomware attack,” Kumar told PTI.

• More than 60 lakh excise, service tax and VAT assessees have enrolled on the GSTN portal between November 8, 2016 and April 30, 2017. Currently, there are 80 lakh such assessees.

• According to data released today by Kaspersky Lab, roughly 98 percent of the computers affected by the ransomware were running some version of Windows 7, with less than one in a thousand running Windows XP. 2008 R2 Server clients were also hit hard, making up just over 1 percent of infections.

• Operations and clinic appointments were cancelled and patients were still being diverted from accident and emergency departments on Thursday.

Defence/Aggression

• Things in the Valley have not been this bad in two decades. I don’t measure this by violence, terrorism and fatalities – we have seen much worse years on that count. I say this because battling Pakistan’s armed proxies is much more straightforward than taking on your own people on the street. And cloaking militancy with a protective sheet of civilian agitations, women and teenagers among them, means many of the old conflict zone formulas won’t work.

• That’s because counterterrorism work depends on a high level of trust among partner nations, international security experts say. The partners rely on each other to use the highly sensitive information, which sources may have risked their lives to gather, judiciously and to mutual benefit.

• Violate that trust by loosely sharing intelligence from at-risk sources, the experts add, and information critical to stopping one attack – or prevent a new means of carrying out deadly attacks – can dry up.

• An unnamed European official has told the Associated Press that his country may stop trusting America with secrets

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• First of all, the case in itself was remarkably thin. Second, Assange has never been charged with any crime. The European Arrest Warrant (EAW) was issued to question him. Such an interview was conducted last November. So, reasonably, the EAW have lost its function.

• So, now… what?

• When Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, jumped bail and sought asylum in Ecuador’s embassy five years ago to avoid a Swedish rape investigation, he was considered by many a hero of transparency, internet freedom and resistance to the secret state.

• So when Sweden’s prosecutors announced on Friday that they were abandoning their attempt to extradite him, invalidating the warrant for his arrest, Mr. Assange proclaimed it a happy moment of vindication. “Today was an important victory,” he said.

• A legal advisor to Julian Assange says the Australian Government needs to do more to help grant him a safe passage to Ecuador.

• Swedish prosecutors announced on Friday that they would discontinue an investigation into allegations of rape against the Wikileaks founder, which Mr Assange labelled an ‘important victory’.

• WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has always been under political persecution without any real charges, the Ecuadorian foreign minister told RT, calling for a prompt decision by the UK to grant him safe passage.

• Julian Assange’s mother has called on the Australian Prime Minister to help her son seek political asylum abroad,

• Christine Assange said she was “very pleased” after Swedish authorities announced they were dropping a rape allegation against him.

• But she told ABC Radio Brisbane: “I’m officially calling on Malcolm Turnbull to step in, act like a Prime Minister, and protect a citizen.”

• “I’d like him to take to task Sweden for what they’ve done breaching his human rights and lying to the media, and I would like him to pressure the UK Government to allow him safe passage to Ecuador.”

• Whether or not he’ll walk free depends on the UK.

• Swedish prosecutors announced today that they were dropping their investigation of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange into allegations of rape.

• Director of Public Prosecutions Marianne Ny and Chief Prosecutor Ingrid Isgren held a press conference in Stockholm today to discuss the decision, saying it was made not because they believe Assange to be innocent necessarily, but because they were unable to formally serve him the allegations during an interview at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, UK in November 2016, where Assange has been in exile since 2012.

• Sweden’s director of public prosecutions has decided to drop the rape investigation into Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

• The move comes ahead of a Stockholm court’s examination of a demand by Mr Assange’s lawyers that Sweden drop his European arrest warrant.

• Mr Assange has lived in the Ecuadoran embassy in London since 2012, trying to avoid extradition to Sweden.

• Today, May 19th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes documents from the “Athena” project of the CIA. “Athena” – like the related “Hera” system – provides remote beacon and loader capabilities on target computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system (from Windows XP to Windows 10). Once installed, the malware provides a beaconing capability (including configuration and task handling), the memory loading/unloading of malicious payloads for specific tasks and the delivery and retrieval of files to/from a specified directory on the target system. It allows the operator to configure settings during runtime (while the implant is on target) to customize it to an operation.

• According to the documentation (see Athena Technology Overview), the malware was developed by the CIA in cooperation with Siege Technologies, a self-proclaimed cyber security company based in New Hampshire, US. On their website, Siege Technologies states that the company “… focuses on leveraging offensive cyberwar technologies and methodologies to develop predictive cyber security solutions for insurance, government and other targeted markets.”. On November 15th, 2016 Nehemiah Security announced the acquisition of Siege Technologies.

• WikiLeaks has published a new batch of the ongoing Vault 7 leak, detailing a spyware framework – which “provides remote beacon and loader capabilities on target computers” – allegedly being used by the CIA that works against every version of Microsoft’s Windows operating systems, from Windows XP to Windows 10.

• Dubbed Athena/Hera, the spyware has been designed to take full control over the infected Windows PCs remotely, allowing the agency to perform all sorts of things on the target machine, including deleting data or uploading malicious software, and stealing data and send them to CIA server.

• Masood Anwar’s story triggered a global search for the plane that blew the lid off the notorious “extraordinary rendition” programme. It all started with the registration number of a private jet that had whisked away a terrorism suspect from Karachi.

• Has WikiLeaks become a tool of Russian propaganda? Platform founder Julian Assange, 45, responds to the accusations, addresses the effects of hackers on Western elections and talks about the “WannaCry” attack.

• Swedish prosecutors announced this morning that they were terminating their 7-year-old sex crimes investigation into Julian Assange and withdrawing their August 20, 2010, arrest warrant for him. The chief prosecutor, Marianne Ny, said at a news conference this morning (pictured below) that investigators had reached no conclusion about his guilt or innocence, but instead were withdrawing the warrant because “all prospects of pursuing the investigation under present circumstances are exhausted” and it is therefore “no longer proportionate to maintain the arrest of Julian Assange in his absence.”

• [...]

• But that celebration obscures several ironies. The most glaring of which is that the legal jeopardy Assange now faces is likely greater than ever.

• Almost immediately after the decision by Swedish prosecutors, British police announced that they would nonetheless arrest Assange if he tried to leave the embassy. Police said Assange was still wanted for the crime of “failing to surrender” — meaning that instead of turning himself in upon issuance of his 2012 arrest warrant, he obtained refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy. The British police also, however, noted that this alleged crime is “a much less serious offence” than the one that served as the basis for the original warrant, and that the police would therefore only “provide a level of resourcing which is proportionate to that offence.”

• That could perhaps imply that with a seriously reduced police presence, Assange could manage to leave the embassy without detection and apprehension. All relevant evidence, however, negates that assumption.

• Just weeks ago, Donald Trump’s CIA director, Mike Pompeo, delivered an angry, threatening speech about WikiLeaks in which he argued, “We have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.” The CIA director vowed to make good on this threat: “To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.”

• Days later, Attorney General Jeff Sessions strongly suggested that the Trump DOJ would seek to prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks on espionage charges in connection with the group’s publication of classified documents. Trump officials then began leaking to news outlets such as CNN that “U.S. authorities have prepared charges to seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.”

• There has possibly been some back room deal that led to the Swedish authorities dropping rape charges against Julian Assange, said former MI5 officer Annie Machon. Other activists and analysts provide their views.

• Swedish prosecutors dropped the rape investigation against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange ending a seven-year standoff and will revoke its arrest warrant, according to the Swedish Prosecution Authority.

• Assange has been in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, and with the threat of extradition to the US for leaking classified national security documents hanging over him.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Fortunately, the water hasn’t flooded the vault itself. It only got to the entrance of the tunnel, where it froze. (The seeds are stored at minus 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit.) But the incident has raised questions over the durability of a seed bank that was supposed to operate without people’s intervention.

• A research conducted by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found almost one fourth of armed conflicts in ethnically divided countries happen at the same time as climatic problems. The researchers studied armed conflicts and climate-related natural disasters between 1980 and 2010 using event coincidence analysis.

• Samuelsson said that Volvo’s first purely electric vehicle will arrive in 2019. He also paid a mighty compliment to Elon Musk’s EV outfit. "It must be acknowledged that Tesla has managed to offer such a car for which the people are queuing. In the area, we should also have space, with high quality and attractive design," he told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Finance

• Daniel Graf, Uber’s head of product, said the company applies machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day.

• [...] our aim is that NAFTA be modernized to include new provisions to address intellectual property {sic} rights, regulatory practices, state-owned enterprises, services, customs procedures, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, labor, environment, and small and medium enterprises.

• The letter did not, however, offer details about what the scope of these negotiations would include.

• New video hit the internet today showing the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, looking on as armed security guards from his entourage violently attacked protesters demonstrating outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence in Washington.

• Cisco said on Wednesday that it will cut an additional 1,100 employees as part of an expanded restructuring plan.

• The cuts come on top of the 5,500 job cuts, or 7 percent of its workforce, announced in August 2016, the enterprise technology company said.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Personal information – from your age, location to whether you own a home and what music you like – held by Facebook allows political parties to target specific voters with tailored messages when they purchase advertising space from the social media platform.

• In a single brief meeting with Russian officials, President Trump not only divulged classified information, he also handed them a damaging account of his decision to fire James Comey

• Trump’s cybersecurity order cribs from his predecessor, despite campaign bluster.

• "Those networks all have to be crawling with foreign intruders, not just [Gizmodo and] ProPublica," said Dave Aitel, chief executive officer of Immunity, Inc., a digital security company, when we told him what we found.

• Experts told ProPublica and Gizmodo that they wouldn’t be surprised if foreign intruders have already managed to breach those networks.

• "[It's] bad, very bad," said Jeremiah Grossman, chief of security strategy for cybersecurity firm SentinelOne. "I’d assume the data is already stolen and systems compromised."

• The team found multiple unsecured wireless networks, unsecured and open wireless printers, misconfigured routers, an unsecured website from which they could "download a database that appears to include sensitive information on the club’s members and their families" and more.

• As the Interior Department considers unprecedented changes to protected lands, avenues for public input have been curtailed.

• New video hit the internet today showing the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, looking on as armed security guards from his entourage violently attacked protesters demonstrating outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence in Washington.

• Nine people were hospitalized after the skirmish, and the State Department issued a stern statement condemning the attack.

• One does not need to be a Marvel superhero or Nietzschean Übermensch to rise to this responsibility. But one needs some basic attributes: a reasonable level of intellectual curiosity, a certain seriousness of purpose, a basic level of managerial competence, a decent attention span, a functional moral compass, a measure of restraint and self-control. And if a president is deficient in one or more of them, you can be sure it will be exposed.

• Trump is seemingly deficient in them all. Some he perhaps never had, others have presumably atrophied with age.

• Despite his astonishing incompetence, the overwhelming majority of Republicans stand with him. And in a recent poll of Trump voters, only 2% would change their vote to be against him.

• Most on my side literally cannot understand how these polls could be true. But I believe that we must accept them, and then, as citizens, we need to reckon this radical disconnect between us.

• Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday waded into the flamewar for the soul of the Democratic Party that Bernie Sanders started in 2016, with an impassioned speech decrying the increasing concentration of money and power in the highest, most rarefied echelons of American society.

• When President Donald Trump sits down for dinner in Saudi Arabia, caterers have ensured that his favourite meal — steak with ketchup on the side — will be offered alongside traditional local cuisine.

• At Nato and the G7 summits, foreign delegations have had word the new US president prefers short presentations and lots of visual aids.

• With a cascade of leaks, a war with the FBI, and the announcement of the appointment of a special counsel to investigate allegations of wrongdoing, Donald Trump’s grotesque presidency now hangs by a thread. By the hour, it seems, the possibility of impeachment, of him being declared incompetent to govern—or, at the very least, of his own party bringing irresistible pressure on him to resign—grows.

• And as that pressure grows, so balloons the peril of our moment. For the 18 months that Trump has been center-stage politically, he has shown an extraordinary commitment to demagoguery, to flirtations with mob violence, to peddling conspiracy theories, to military grandstanding to distract attention from his problems, and to race-and-religion-baiting whenever the mood suits. He has demonstrated utter contempt for the separation of powers, extraordinary hostility to the free press, and a disconcerting fondness for dictators the world over. He has also shown himself to be brittle and thin-skinned, relishing the ability to use his vast platform to attack those he deems to be his personal “enemies,” but unable to tolerate disagreement or dissent when it is directed at him.

• Why do I rehash all these known traits now? Because—cornered, humiliated, and increasingly in legal peril—Trump will likely resort to all of the tricks of the demagogue as he fights for his survival. This is a man who has never played fair in his life, who takes pleasure in inflicting hurt on those weaker than himself, and who believes that ideals, or simply basic decency, are mere annoyances in the one game that matters: the game of power.

• Donald Trump sets off on Friday to create the fantasy of an Arab Nato. There will be dictators aplenty to greet him in Riyadh, corrupt autocrats and thugs and torturers and head choppers. There will be at least one zombie president – the comatose, undead Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria who neither speaks nor, apparently, hears any more – and, of course, one totally insane president, Donald Trump. The aim, however, is simple: to prepare the Sunni Muslims of the Middle East for war against the Shia Muslims. With help from Israel, of course.

• Even for those used to the insanity of Arab leadership – not to mention those Westerners who have still to grasp that the US President is himself completely off his rocker – the Arab-Muslim (Sunni) summit in Saudi Arabia is almost beyond comprehension. From Pakistan and Jordan and Turkey and Egypt and Morocco and 42 other minareted capitals, they are to come so that the effete and ambitious Saudis can lead their Islamic crusade against “terrorism” and Shiism. The fact that most of the Middle East’s “terrorism” – Isis and al-Qaeda, aka the Nusrah Front – have their fountainhead in the very nation to which Trump is travelling, must and will be ignored. Never before in Middle Eastern history has such a “kumidia alakhta” – quite literally “comedy of errors” in Arabic – been staged.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Temporary censorship of Matthew Caruana Galizia – who worked on the Panama Papers – raises concern over Facebook’s power to shape the news

• UK Prime Minister and noted authoritarian Theresa May has promised that if she wins the upcoming general election, her party will abolish internet access in the UK, replacing it with a government-monitored internet where privacy tools are banned and online services will be required to vet all user-supplied content for compliance with rules about pornography, political speech, copyright compliance and so on — and search engines will have to emply special British rules to exclude banned material from their search results.

• Yesterday, during her speech describing the current Tory Manifesto, Theresa May revealed that she plans to build a "new Internet," over which the government has complete control. The goal in the Tory internet plan is to become "the global leader in the regulation of the use of personal data and the internet." The manifesto states: [...]

• This must be the first of multiple steps towards abolishing digital borders in Europe, not the last, several interest groups today demand in an open letter to the EU institutions.

• Something remarkable happened in Sweden this week: a list of 15,000 people with the wrong political opinions was used to block those people from the @Sweden account, and thereby preventing these people from communicating over Twitter with that part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The government tried defending the block as only concerning neo-nazi right-wing extremists, which was a narrative that held water in legacy media until somebody pointed out that the Ambassador of Israel (!) was among the blocked.

• [...]

• The Ministry of Foreign Affairs unblocked everybody and destroyed the blocklist – but only after getting Freedom-of-Information requests to have it handed out. This is an extremely illegal act in Sweden, as all governmental documents are transparent by default and must be handed out on request, with no counterdemands allowed. Destroying records is illegal in the first place. Destroying records after they are against-all-efforts-to-cover-up embarrassing, and after they have been requested, goes directly against the Swedish Constitution since 1766.

• The line between legitimate protest and unlawful obstruction needs to be carefully drawn. But these excessive laws make it impossible to make that determination. No government should have the right to stifle protest in this way. Australia, and the rest of the world, should be very wary of the outcome of this case.

• The EU must take decisive action against digital borders that today divide the people of Europe, discriminate against minority language speakers, inconvenience millions and cause substantial losses to the EU economy.

• We love the internet because it creates fantastic opportunities to express ourselves and to innovate.

• But do we love it enough to pass it on to future generations?

• Theresa May is planning to introduce huge regulations on the way the internet works, allowing the government to decide what is said online.

• Particular focus has been drawn to the end of the manifesto, which makes clear that the Tories want to introduce huge changes to the way the internet works.

• A lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency — and no, it’s not a joke.

• Amy Johnson, a PhD student and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is suing the CIA for failing to turn over documents, as part of a public records request, about the agency’s social media policies and how it manages its official Twitter account.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.

• Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.

• But there was no disagreement about the damage. From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.’s sources. According to three of the officials, one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building — a message to others who might have been working for the C.I.A.

• An unsealed federal search warrant affidavit obtained by The News is the first public acknowledgment that agents are using secret devices that masquerade as a cell tower to find people who entered the U.S. illegally, privacy and civil liberty experts said.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Shahid Buttar concurred. "Once you start giving agencies fancy toys, and somebody is making money off of it, they are going to use them for more things, and ultimately oppress your rights," Buttar told the Free Press.

• Three EU countries – Belgium, France, and the Netherlands – have determined that Facebook is breaking their privacy laws, while Germany and Spain are still investigating the US company. The news was announced in a joint statement from the Contact Group of the data protection authorities (DPAs) of the Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and the German city of Hamburg. As a result, the French authorities have imposed a fine of €150,000 (about $166,000) on Facebook. The move comes hard on the heels of a €3 million fine (around $3.3 million) imposed by Italy on Facebook’s subsidiary WhatsApp last week over its handling of customer data.

• Well you should still look at privacy software because …

• This will probably be the last alpha before the first stable release in the 7.0 series.

• EDRi’s Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow Sid Rao created a platform called ALTwitter, which combines the metadata collected from public Twitter accounts of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and presents them graphically. Without going through all their tweets, one can learn a lot about their work areas, the devices they use, the types of websites they refer to, when they are the most active, and so on. What we can learn about the person only based on these metadata is indeed much more than we would first expect!

• Twitter is dumping its support for Do Not Track (DNT), changing how it shares user data with third parties, and holding any web browsing data it collects for a longer duration—all to better aid in ad targeting, of course.

• Facebook Inc. was fined 110 million euros ($122 million) by the European Union for misleading regulators during a 2014 review of the WhatsApp messaging service takeover on the same day the EU threatened to heavily penalize Patrick Drahi’s Altice NV for implementing for a second time a deal before getting regulatory clearance.

• Facebook counts a quarter of the world’s population – 1.94bn accounts – as monthly active users, with 354m in Europe. WhatsApp has 1.2 billion users, while Facebook-owned Instagram has 700m monthly active accounts. This vast scale has given it an air of an unstoppable behemoth trampling over rivals and across borders.

• However, politicians across Europe have started to question the role of tech giants in EU member states. Where once there was a feeling that the capitalism and tech ideas coming from the US were good for Europe, attitudes are changing.

• The AI voice assistant in question is Mycroft, and the so-called "challenging" of market heavyweights is beyond silly. Mycroft has 36 contributors, with minimal outside interest. A total of 104 developers have bothered to follow it on Github, and it has garnered fewer than 1,000 stars (a way for developers to register interest). Another project associated with data infrastructure, Kubernetes, meanwhile, has 1,191 contributors, 23,205 stars, 1,733 people watching it, and 8,163 forks. That is what "challenging X for market superiority" looks like.

• The head of the Hamburg Institute for Legal Medicine, Klaus Püschel, has called for the DNA of everybody in Germany – including tourists – to be collected and stored. As a story in the German news magazine Der Spiegel (Google Translate version) reported, Püschel wants this because [...]

• The use of data analytics by political parties has piqued the interest of the Information Commissioner’s Office, a UK public body that protects data rights. On Wednesday it launched a formal investigation into the targeting of voters through social media by political parties, warning that any messages sent to people based on identifying data could be breaking the law.

• Privacy advocates are fearful that MindGeek, which has over 100 million daily visitors to its sites that include PornHub and Brazzers, could create a database of adult viewing habits on a scale never seen before. MindGeek is "the largest adult entertainment operator globally," according to the porn industry press.

• "Most internet-connected things have a Bluetooth functionality … I basically showed how I could connect to it, and send commands to it, by recording audio and playing the light," he told AFP later.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A four-hour meeting in Brussels ended in agreement not to enforce the ban which is already in place between a number of ‘mostly Muslim’ countries, however, reports claim that other measures were still being considered.

• Simply put, the ripple effects of this could create an economic tsunami the likes of which terrorists are dreaming of, but instead it will be at the hand of government directive.

• Yemen has entered its third year of war, and war crimes are being committed at an escalating rate. For Yemen’s children, facing a man-made famine, this conflict between Houthi rebels and a coalition led by Saudi Arabia has begun a new phase of horrors.

• As Techdirt readers will recall, in 2013 David Miranda was held by the UK authorities when he flew into Heathrow airport, and all of his electronic equipment was seized, in an act of blatant intimidation. His detention was under Schedule 7 of the UK’s Terrorism Act, which, as its name implies, is supposed to be used only if someone is involved in committing, preparing or instigating “acts of terrorism.”

• That was clearly ridiculous in Miranda’s case, and it’s just as outrageous in the latest example of UK border bullying, this time against Muhammad Rabbani. He’s a British citizen, and the international director of Cage, which describes itself as “an independent advocacy organisation working to empower communities impacted by the War on Terror.”

• Andrew Carter Thornton II (ACT II) is a name unknown to most except as a piece of historical trivia – the man who fell from the sky in 1985 with millions of dollars of cocaine strapped to his body. To a few others, he’s one of the men tied to a drug operation that was fueling and fueled by government corruption, whose roots were traced as far as the Kentucky Governor’s mansion. But reality, revealed through his FBI file, is even stranger, tracing the corruption surrounding ACT II back to the CIA.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Obama-era ruling came after a massive campaign by online activists who successfully saw off the lobbying might of the US’s largest cable companies. A similar battle will now ensue as the month’s long process of reviewing the rules begins. At the end of the review a final FCC vote will decide the future of internet regulation; court challenges are inevitable whatever the result.

• "When Donnelly strolled in an unthreatening way toward FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly to pose a question, two guards pinned Donnelly against the wall with the backs of their bodies until O’Rielly had passed," the report said. "O’Rielly witnessed this and continued walking."

• Republicans succeeded in a party-line vote to start replacing the rules, which keep Internet providers from blocking or slowing down your Internet at will. The rules also keep corporations from getting paid to prioritize certain content’s delivery to users over others.

• The Federal Communications Commission voted 2-1 today to start the process of eliminating net neutrality rules and the classification of home and mobile Internet service providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act.

• [...]

• The FCC plans to take comments on its plan until August 16 (the docket is available here), and then make a final decision sometime after that.

• The rules won’t disappear overnight. In a party-line vote today, the FCC formally agreed to start the process of gathering feedback before drafting a more specific plan, which could take months (#bureaucracy). But FCC chair Ajit Pai has made it clear that, barring a successful legal challenge, the agency will give up its authority to actually enforce net neutrality regulations.

• Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to kill net neutrality under the guise of "Restoring Internet Freedom." The lone FCC commissioner in favor of the Open Internet Order and the net neutrality rules we had enjoyed over the last few years, Mignon Clyburn, said the change would be better named "Destroying Internet Freedom" instead of "Restoring Internet Freedom."

• The vote on Thursday, led by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, will kick off consideration of a proposal to relax regulations on companies such as Comcast and AT&T.

• But returning to 1990s-era Internet regulation would require more of the Title II utility-style regulation that Pai abhors, not less. If we had 1990s and early 2000s regulatory policy, Internet providers would be forced to open their networks to companies that want to resell Internet access, potentially unleashing a wave of competition in a market where today’s consumers often have no choice of high-speed broadband providers.

DRM

• Rooted users started noticing the app gone from Google Play on their devices over the weekend, and Netflix eventually confirmed it did this intentionally. The streaming service is now using Google’s Wildvine DRM to block the app from rooted devices that don’t pass Wildvine’s security status, and its Google Play listing will not appear for devices that fail a SafetyNet check, which not only rules out rooted phones but also unrooted phones that are bootloader-unlocked.

• Netflix may no longer work on your rooted or unlocked device, due to an update to the app. Netflix now fully relies on Google’s Widevine DRM, the company told Android Police. The change comes not long after Netflix enabled downloads for offline viewing, which could be one reason for the change.

• If you have a rooted Android device, be aware that you may no longer be able to use the Netflix app going forward. The streaming company confirmed that its latest app update will block devices that are not “Google-certified or have been altered” from accessing the mobile service.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Members of the European Parliament will vote today on draft rules that would allow citizens to enjoy legally purchased music and movie streaming subscriptions when they travel to another EU country. It’s hoped that improved access to content will help to dampen frustrations and reduce Internet piracy.

• ‘Pirate’ sites Sci-Hub and LibGen face millions of dollars in damages in a lawsuit filed by Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers. Elsevier has requested a default judgment of $15 million against the defendants for their "truly egregious conduct" and "staggering" infringement.

• The Library of Congress has released MARC records that I’ll be doing more with over the next several months to understand the books and their classifications. As a first stab, though, I wanted to simply look at the history of how the Library digitized card catalogs to begin with.

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