● 05.28.17

● Links 28/5/2017: Mesa 17.1.1, Wine 2.9, KDevelop 5.1.1

Posted in News Roundup at 2:45 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Have you ever heard someone say, “It’s impossible to do X with Linux”? Me too. This is the story of how I busted the myths about open source in my own head and used Linux to finish my PhD in fine arts.

Server

• Google, Facebook, and Twitter own giant data centers all over the planet, and they are built with racks of commodity hardware. If thousands upon thousands of small servers networked together are good enough for Google, Facebook, and Twitter, then shouldn’t they be good enough for you? Perhaps you remember IBM’s famous commercial The servers, they stole all our servers!

• In previous excerpts of the new, self-paced Containers Fundamentals course from The Linux Foundation, we discussed what containers are and are not. Here, we’ll take a brief look at the history of containers, which includes chroot, FreeBSD jails, Solaris zones, and systemd-nspawn.

• This series provides a preview of the new, self-paced Containers Fundamentals course from The Linux Foundation, which is designed for those who are new to container technologies. The course covers container building blocks, container runtimes, container storage and networking, Dockerfiles, Docker APIs, and more. In the first excerpt, we defined what containers are, and in this installment, we’ll explain a bit further. You can also sign up to access all the free sample chapter videos now.

• Enterprises that use Chef automation for infrastructure aren’t yet sold on the company’s Habitat project for application management.

• In Habitat, Chef has a novel way to package applications that the company claims will allow users to get the most out of Linux containers. But IT pros say they still must sort out how Chef Habitat overlaps with Docker, and whether Habitat is worth the additional time investment to learn.

Kernel Space

• A few moments ago, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the availability of another set of updated kernels for Linux-based operating systems, namely Linux 4.11.3, 4.9.30 LTS, 4.4.70 LTS and 3.18.55.

• These are all major updates and users should install them on their GNU/Linux distributions as soon as possible. According to their appended shortlogs (here, here, here and here), Linux kernel 4.11.3 changes a total of 198 files, with 1907 insertions and 856 deletions, Linux kernel 4.9.30 LTS changes 166 files, with 1650 insertions and 722 deletions, Linux kernel 4.4.70 LTS changes 111 files, with 996 insertions and 441 deletions, and Linux kernel 3.18.55 is here to change 61 files, with 427 insertions and 173 deletions.

• Richard Hughes of Red Hat has managed to support firmware updating of Logitech devices under Linux with fwupd.

Graphics Stack

• As promised, Collabora’s Emil Velikov announced today the general availability of the first point release of the latest Mesa 17.1 3D Graphics Library for Linux-based operating systems.

• Emil Velikov has announced the availability of Mesa 17.1.1 as the first point release to this quarter’s big Mesa 17.1 package.

• Mesa 17.1.1 adds more Vega 10 PCI IDs to RadeonSI, initial support for Raven Ridge APUs, RadeonSI tessellation fixes, i965/ANV fixes, GLVND now handles glXGetDriverConfig, and a range of other fixes.

Applications

• ​See what I stumbled upon, a good looking open-source system optimizer for Linux called Stacer. And after using it for a while, it’s become one of my must-have apps on all my Linux desktops. So Stacer is like CCleaner for Linux. Previously, I have used Bleachbit on Ubuntu but then I found Stacer and I am not looking back. Stacer is developed on electron and once again it’s just pretty. The app is organized into 5 sections; the Dashboard, System Cleaner, Startup Apps, Services and Uninstaller. Let’s look at them one by one.

• Last June, Canonical Software launched the development of Snap packages, which are intended to work on any Linux distribution. A week later, Red Hat announced its own version of universal packages, called Flatpak. In the months since, both Flatpak and Snap have been promoted as the solutions to the problems with traditional package formats. However, the solutions are not as complete as advertised and call for a rearrangement of the responsibility for security for which free software is simply not prepared.

• Cockpit is free, open source Server administration tool that allows you to easily monitor and administrator single or multiple Linux servers via a web browser. It helps the system admins to do simple administration tasks, such as starting containers, administrating storage, configuring network, inspecting logs and so on. Switching between Terminal and Cockpit is no big deal. You can the manage the system’s services either from the Cockpit, or from the host’s Terminal. Say for example, if you started a service in Terminal, you can stop it from the Cockpit. Similarly, if an error occurs in the terminal, it can be seen in the Cockpit journal interface and vice versa. It is capable of monitoring multiple Linux servers at the same time. All you need to do is just add the systems you wanted to monitor, and Cockpit will look after them.

• Buttercup is a cross-platform, free, and open-source password manager with which you can remotely access any of your accounts using a single master password. It features a modern minimal UI, password imports from 3rd-party apps, and basic merge conflict resolution.

• FreeFileSync is an open source free to download and use software that can sync your files easily to another disk while maintaining permissions and other important stuff. It is cross platform so you can use it on any OS without any problem. Let us see how to download and use it in Linux.

Proprietary

• Golem Project, creator of the first global market for idle computer power today announced it released Golem 0.6.0 for Ubuntu, macOS, and Windows. The team stated that the majority of changes are not directly visible to the user, but there are a few noteworthy modifications.

Instructionals/Technical

• Over the past year, major changes in American politics have left a lot of people feeling like they should be doing more to get involved.

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 2.9 is now available.

• Wine 2.9 is now officially available and it’s a very interesting one. Fantastic work from the Wine developers.

• The Wine 2.9 development release was announced today for GNU/Linux and Mac OS X users who want to run Windows games and apps on their personal computers.

Games

• Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation [GOG][Steam][Official Site] will come to Linux if Stardock see enough requests for it. The CEO of Stardock has requested to see how much interest there is.

• Epic Games has announced the release of Unreal Engine 4.16 as the latest feature release to the UE4 game engine.

• With detailed equipment and management aspects, Bounty Train [Official Site] also has plenty of thrills and chaotic fighting. It’s being ported to Linux and should be coming out sometime soon.

• Setting itself apart from the majority of visual novels by focusing on the player’s sense of hearing, BlindQuest: The Prison will also be coming to Linux if greenlit.

• Last year, GDQuest’s Nathan Lovato ran a succesful kickstarter: “Create Professional 2D Game Art: Krita Video Training”. Over the past year, he has produced a great number of videos for Krita, and has helped the Krita team out with release videos as well.

• I’ve been playing a bit of MidBoss [itch.io, Steam, Official Site], a new roguelike from Kitsune Games with the Linux port from Ethan Lee. Here’s what I think so far.

• Feral Interactive have just announced some exciting news! The Linux port of Dawn of War III [Steam, Feral Site] will come with OpenGL as the default, but like with Mad Max you will be able to check a box to enable Vulkan!

• We reported last on the upcoming availability of the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III real-time strategy (RTS) video game for GNU/Linux, SteamOS and macOS platforms on June 8, 2017, and, today, Feral Interactive announced that the port will come with support for the next-generation graphics technologies.

• Epic Games’ Alexander Paschall today announced the immediate availability of version 4.16 of the cross-platform and free Unreal Engine game engine for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

• Valve have pushed out another update to SteamVR, this time Linux has been given experimental support for SteamVR Home. Find the full changelog here.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• A new stable release for KIO GDrive is now available, version is 1.2.0. The main change is the integration with Plasma/KAccounts. Have a look at my previous post for more details.

• Today we’re releasing Krita 3.1.4. This strictly a bug-fix release, but everyone is encouraged to update.

• We have released Qt 5.9.0 RC today. You can update it at the top of your Qt 5.9 beta(4) online installation or do clean installation by using qt online installer.

• Running just slightly behind schedule, the Qt 5.9 release candidate is now available for last-minute testing of this next tool-kit update.

• Together with the source code, we again provide a prebuilt one-file-executable for 64-bit Linux (AppImage), as well as binary installers for 32- and 64-bit Microsoft Windows. You can find them on our download page.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Linux Mint project leader and Cinnamon developer Clement Lefebvre published the first point release of the recently unveiled Cinnamon 3.4 desktop environment, which will be included in the upcoming Linux Mint 18.2 operating system.

• I recently spent some time tracking down a problem with GTK+ containers and drawing. Here is what I found out.

• Are you a member of the GNOME Foundation? Please consider running for Board.

• Serving on the Board is a great way to contribute to GNOME, and it doesn’t take a lot of your time. The GNOME Board of Directors meets every week via a one-hour phone conference to discuss various topics about the GNOME Foundation and GNOME. In addition, individual Board members may volunteer to take on actions from meetings—usually to follow up with someone who asked the Board for action, such as a funding request.

• GNOME Project’s Florian Müllner announced the availability of the GNOME Shell 3.25.2 and Mutter 3.25.2 development releases ahead of the soon-to-be-released GNOME 3.25.2 desktop environment.

• Florian Müllner has pushed out an updated Mutter 3.25.2 window manager / compositor release in time for the GNOME 3.25.2 milestone in the road to this September’s GNOME 3.26 release.

• Mutter 3.25.2 has a number of fixes ranging from fixing frame updates in certain scenarios, accessible screen coordinates on X11, some build issues, and more.

• For me, create GTK+ custom widgets is a very common task. Using templates for them, too.

• Ever since the original iPhone came out, I’ve had several ideas about how they managed to achieve such fluidity with relatively mediocre hardware. I mean, it was good at the time, but Android still struggles on hardware that makes that look like a 486… It’s absolutely my fault that none of these have been implemented in any open-source framework I’m aware of, so instead of sitting on these ideas and trotting them out at the pub every few months as we reminisce over what could have been, I’m writing about them here. I’m hoping that either someone takes them and runs with them, or that they get thoroughly debunked and I’m made to look like an idiot. The third option is of course that they’re ignored, which I think would be a shame, but given I’ve not managed to get the opportunity to implement them over the last decade, that would hardly be surprising. I feel I should clarify that these aren’t all my ideas, but include a mix of observation of and conjecture about contemporary software. This somewhat follows on from the post I made 6 years ago(!) So let’s begin.

Distributions

Reviews

• Imagine taking Linux Mint, placing the Cinnamon desktop on it and then theming it to not only to serve as a perfect drop-in replacement for Windows 7 but to be one of the most beautiful Linux desktops you’ve seen in a long while. That’s what Feren OS has managed — and has done so with aplomb.

• Feren OS first arrived in 2015 and recently unleashed their 2017 iteration of the platform…with stunning results. This is truly one of those instances that, upon installation, you’ll find yourself doing a double (or triple) take, asking, “Is this really Linux?” Not that the state of the Linux desktop is behind the competition, in fact, I consider many of the Linux desktops to be light years ahead of other desktops. But, Feren OS has achieved something special; they’ve created a Linux distribution that anyone could use, for nearly any purpose, with zero learning curve.

• Let’s take a look at this new(ish) distro to see exactly what makes it special. We’ll also dig deep to see what kind of caveats lay under the polish (if any).

New Releases

• The final release of the long-anticipated Devuan GNU/Linux 1.0.0 “Jessie” operating system was launched yesterday, ready to conquer your laptop or workstation without including systemd, nor any systemd-related packages.

• Started in November 2014, Devuan project’s goal was always to develop a fork of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution without the systemd init daemon. Why? Because the Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” operating system adopted systemd as default init replacement, a move that upset many users and developers.

• It took two and a half years for Devuan GNU/Linux to reach the 1.0 milestone and offer its community a stable, secure and reliable computer operating system that’s systemd-free. While based on the latest stable Debian release, Devuan uses its own software repository that appears to mirror the upstream development.

• Devuan just released their LTS stable Jessie system

• Devuan 1.0 is now officially available, the fork of Debian aiming for “init freedom” and shipping without systemd.

• Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 Stable is a major milestone in the new path drawn by the Devuan project and its development has provided an opportunity to lay down a strong foundation for the Devuan community. In the last two years we have put in place a powerful infrastructure to support the development and growth of Devuan [...]

• For users who are angry with Debian’s choice to adopt systemd, Devuan is available as an alternative which is easy to switch to from an existing install of Debian 7 or Debian 8. According to the Devuan website, the upgrade from Debian 7 is a "safe upgrade" and moving to Debian 8 is described as a "flawless switch" that "ensures the right to init Freedom and avoids entanglement."

• We are pleased to announce the release of Alpine Linux 3.6.0, the first in the v3.6 stable series.

• Natanael Copa, the developer of Alpine Linux, an open-source security-oriented GNU/Linux distribution based on BusyBox and musl libc, was proud to announce today the release and immediate availability of Alpine Linux 3.6.0.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• After being challenged by set backs, Mageia 6 is out in release candidate form.

• Everyone at Mageia is exceptionally happy and proud to announce the availability of the release candidate of Mageia 6. It has been a long road, but we are at the last step and Mageia 6 is just around the corner.

• “The extra time that this release has taken has had one huge benefit: the number of new and exciting additions to Mageia is staggering. They include the now far more mature Plasma to replace KDE4, the DNF and COPR stacks to supplement urpmi, big updates to the major desktops and the other large stacks and components, and lots of package updates,” said Donald Stewart in the release announcement.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• This year’s openSUSE Conference has so far been a blast and the talks from Day 1 of the conference have already been uploaded to the openSUSETV YouTube channel.

Red Hat Family

• One of the new capabilities in RHEL 7.4 is support for Network Bound Disk Encryption, which is a feature that enables organizations to encrypt the root volume of hard drives, without requiring users to re-enter the password after a system is rebooted.

• Containers are powerful, but APIs are the true driver of cloud computing technology. In this Q&A, Red Hat reveals the underlying importance of API technology and its impact.

• Red Hat, the enterprise software company, recently launched its telecoms practice which focuses on OpenStack and NFV and networking for CSPs as well as the provision of consultancy services. The aim is to take the best innovations coming out of the upstream Opensource communities and ecosystems and turn them into commercial-grade enterprise products so that CSPs can scale and build their business and offerings based on the new technologies. The labs are a catalyst for turning projects into products.

• Codenvy’s technology platform is based on the open-source Eclipse Che online developer workspace effort, providing a cloud based Integrated Developer Environment for building code.

Finance

Fedora

• Fedora Platform and Program Manager Jan Kurik informs today the Fedora Linux community about the fact that the upcoming Fedora 26 Beta milestone has been delayed for one week due to various blocker bugs and other issues.

Debian Family

• Debian developer Michael ‘mika’ Prokop has announced today that his team over at Debian Forensics will include and maintain a bunch of digital forensics tools, along with their dependencies, in the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” release.

• The fourth release candidate of the installer for the upcoming Debian 9.0 “Stretch” release is now available.

• Debian Installer Stretch RC4 has some fixes to the debian-installer, a slightly updated Linux 4.9 kernel, IPv6 network auto-configuration improvements, support for the Orange Pi Plus / Plus 2, and a variety of other alterations.

• The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the fourth release candidate of the installer for Debian 9 “Stretch”.

• Debian 9.0 now has an official release date.

• The Debian Release Team has shared they plan to officially release Debian 9.0 “Stretch” on 17 June.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• Well, last month Canonical released a new version of Ubuntu which is version 17.04. This will be the last version with unity and canonical will be switch back to GNOME. If you are that kind of person that likes to have everything updated to the latest version you should consider upgrading. If you are LTS kind of person, just keep using your LTS version and wait for 18.04 LTS. Below are some tips to do after installing Ubuntu 17.04.

• Lubuntu maintainer Simon Quigley was kind enough to inform us today about the availability of the first daily build ISO images of the upcoming Lubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, with the LXQt desktop environment.

• The development cycle of the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system started two months ago when Canonical’s Adam Conrad gave the green light to all maintainers and developers involved in the project, and the first Alpha milestone is now approaching fast.

Devices/Embedded

• The $70 “Waggle” remote controller device for 3D printers offers a mobile app with a video feed and temp controls, plus a cloud-based slicing service.

• A Seoul-based startup called Ateam Ventures is closing in on its $10,000 Kickstarter goal for a Waggle 3D printer controller equipped with WiFi and a 720p video camera. The early bird packages are gone, but you can pre-order a Waggle for $70, discounted from the $99 retail price. The campaign runs through June 15, with shipments due in September.

• FriendlyElec’s “NanoPi M2A” SBC combines the quad -A53 Samsung SoC of the NanoPi M2 with the more advanced footprint, layout, and features of the NanoPi M3.

• NComputing’s “RX-HDX” thin client joins ViewSonic’s newly revised “SC-T25” as the second major Citrix HDX ready thin client based on the Raspberry Pi 3.

• Is the Raspberry Pi ready to take over the low-end thin client market? This week, NComputing unveiled the RX-HDX, its second Raspberry Pi based thin client. In addition, ViewSonic announced a software upgrade for the Pi-based SC-T25 thin client that it announced last year.

• CubieTech’s’s “CubieAIO-A20” SBC and mini-PC run on a WiFi/BT-ready, Allwinner A20 “Einstein-A20” COM, and offer mSATA, GbE, mini-PCIe, and 7x USB ports.

Phones

Tizen

• As the popularity of Samsung‘s Tizen-based Smart TVs continues to increase, more and more developers continue to provide useful apps that bring more useful and entertaining contents to users right in their homes. Samsung’s range of SmartTVs is now revealed to have gotten the Starz app specifically built for it. Starz made the announcement today that its STARZ app is now available for some Samsung Smart TVs in the U.S.

Android

• Having guided you through the not-all-that-straightforward process of switching from Android to iOS, we’re back to tell you how to go in the opposite direction. (Make your mind up will you?) Going from Apple-powered devices to Google’s platform is either ridiculously easy or rather taxing, depending on your current setup.

• This week, the first beta for Nova Launcher 5.2 arrived on Google Play. Along with some minor fixes and performances improvements, the latest update adds customizable notification dots to the launcher. You can decide where on the app icon they will appear and how large they will be. And just like the real dots, Nova Launcher’s notification dots will match the color scheme of the app icon they appear on.

• Running commands on Linux seems so complicated for the layman that it may as well be a foreign language. But for the die-hard terminal users, or for those who are just curious about the Linux experience, there’s a new Android launcher that gives your home screen a command line makeover.

• Industry sits at 3.2 Billion smartphones in use globally. 4 out of 5 smartphones in use has some version of Android on it, the rest are iPhones (lots of older iPhones still in circulation, Apple’s installed base is significantly higher than its actual sales percentage, as the device has a passionate following). I now separate out also the pure Google Android ie Play Store capable devices and the forked Androids ie AOSP (Android Open Source Platform) devices mostly out of China and India. They are 32% of all Androids in use, so 26% of all smartphones in use.

• Andy Rubin’s Essential firm just posted another teaser image of a new smartphone that it will unveil on May 30.

Free Software/Open Source

• Google software engineer Jessica Frazelle is an experienced open source contributor, having participated in Docker, Go, Kubernetes, and the Linux kernel. Over time, she’s spotted a number of tools and tips for building and nurturing large open source projects, which she shared in her talk at OSCON 2017, The Life of a Large-Scale Open Source Project.

• Kylin is an OLAP engine on Hadoop. As shown in Figure 1, Kylin sits on top of Hadoop and exposes relational data to upper applications via the standard SQL interface.

• What do Linus Torvalds, Dirk Hohndel, Michael Widenius, Solomon Hykes, Nithya Ruff, Sam Ramji, Lennart Poettering, Boris Renski, Madhura Maskasky, Theodore Ts’o, Wim Coekaerts, and Mark Shuttleworth all have in common? Each of them has founded or led major open source projects.

• Also, each of them is an immigrant to the U.S., child of an immigrant or a non-U.S. national.

• Software-Defined Networking disrupted the network into many fragments. Now, the open-source community must package for real-world users, according to Arpit Joshipura (pictured), general manager of networking and orchestration at The Linux Foundation.

• The new version is built on a new architecture, allowing significant streamlining of individual tools and support for performance-enhancing technologies such as Apache SparkTM. This new framework brings improvements to parallelization, capitalizing on cloud deployment and making the process of analyzing vast amounts of genomic data easier, faster, and more efficient.

Events

• The automotive electronic industry is now, more than ever, facing cybersecurity, connectivity, and software time-to-market challenges. Recently, in fact, vehicles have been hacked in several ways (e.g., physical and remote unlocking/control) and by different means (i.e., CAN bus, OBD-II, emulated cellular networks, etc.).

• [...]

• In the meantime, EG-VIRT has taken on the challenge and has already started its activity, focusing on the implementation of a proof-of-concept based on a KVM-enabled AGL distribution on ARM. From this activity, a first set of patches have been published by Virtual Open Systems and will be demonstrated at the Automotive Linux Summit 2017 in Tokyo during my presentation “How to Introduce Virtualization in AGL? Objectives, Plans and Targets for AGL EG-VIRT.” You are all invited to join the event and the online discussion!

Web Browsers

Chrome

• The chart above shows the percentage market share of the 4 major browsers over the last 6 years, across all devices. The data is from StatCounter and you can argue that the data is biased in a bunch of different ways, but at the macro level it’s safe to say that Chrome is eating the browser market, and everyone else except Safari is getting obliterated.

SaaS/Back End

Databases

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• We’ve had quite a few changes over the past month, and we wanted to clue everyone in on all the happenings.

• TrueOS, the FreeBSD-derived operating system originally known as PC-BSD, has changed its -STABLE cycle practices.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The 3.1.0 release of the Mailman mailing list manager is out. “Two years after the original release of Mailman 3.0, this version contains a huge number of improvements across the entire stack. Many bugs have been fixed and new features added in the Core, Postorius (web u/i), and HyperKitty (archiver). Upgrading from Mailman 2.1 should be better too. We are seeing more production sites adopt Mailman 3, and we’ve been getting great feedback as these have rolled out. Important: mailman-bundler, our previous recommended way of deploying Mailman 3, has been deprecated. Abhilash Raj is putting the finishing touches on Docker images to deploy everything, and he’ll have a further announcement in a week or two.” New features include support for Python 3.5 and 3.6, MySQL support, new REST resources and methods, user interface and user experience improvements, and more.

Public Services/Government

• OS² is an association for Danish municipalities to pool together efforts in building a free and open source IT infrastructure. I first heard about it at the LibreOffice conference happening in Aarhus back in 2015 through a talk about “BibOS” and “TING”. The early efforts has since then inspired a formal association for municipalities which hosts a number of open source IT components. The components are developed, installed and supported by external suppliers who are hired by municipalities individually or together. This approach has benefits both for the municipality and the suppliers compared to traditional license-based solutions.

Licensing/Legal

• A recent federal district court decision denied a motion to dismiss a complaint brought by Artifex Software Inc. (“Artifex”) for breach of contract and copyright infringement claims against Defendant Hancom, Inc. based on breach of an open source software license. The software, referred to as Ghostscript, was dual-licensed under the GPL license and a commercial license. According to the Plaintiff, those seeking to commercially distribute Ghostscript could obtain a commercial license to use, modify, copy, and/or distribute Ghostscript for a fee. Otherwise, the software was available without a fee under the GNU GPL, which required users to comply with certain open-source licensing requirements. The requirements included an obligation to “convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License” of any covered code. In other words, under the open source license option, certain combinations of proprietary software with Ghostscript are governed by the terms of the GNU GPL.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• This project by Bill Wong allows you to view your current speed without looking away from the road or refocusing your eyes. Wong connected an Arduino Uno to his car’s OBD-II port and programmed it to display his current speed on a seven-segment display. From there, the speed is projected through a Fresnel lens and onto a small piece of windshield-mounted teleprompter glass.

• Aleph Objects Inc. (Loveland, CO), maker of LulzBot 3D printers, and IC3D Industries (Columbus, OH), a producer of premium 3D-printing materials, jointly announced the availability of what they claim is the world’s first-ever certified open source hardware 3D-printing filament.

Programming/Development

• MySQL introduced a native JSON data type in MySQL 5.7. So like an integer, a char, or a real, there became a way to store an entire JSON document in a column in a table of a database—and this document in a column could be roughly a gigabyte in size! The server would make sure it was a valid JSON document and then save it in a binary format that’s optimized for searching. This new data type has probably been responsible for more upgrades of MySQL than any other feature.

Leftovers

• The New York Philharmonic is the oldest symphony orchestra in the USA, but looked to the future to promote its history and embarked on an ambitious digitisation project. More than 1.3 million pages of printed programmes, photographs, conducting scores and other items from its annals have been made permanently available online to the public in the Leon Levy Digital Archives.

Health/Nutrition

• How bad is the Republican rewrite of Obamacare? So bad, apparently, that the GOP candidate for Montana’s lone congressional seat allegedly assaulted a reporter rather than answer a question about it.

• Theresa May promised us £8 billion more, every year, for the NHS in ‘her’ manifesto. In fact, she is providing no extra money at all.

• The game was given away by Damian Green on yesterday’s (May 21) Andrew Marr show. He said the money would be found by redirecting funds that were already within the NHS…

• A court has just made a major ruling against the Conservative Party. And in doing so, it could expose the Tories’ stealth privatisation of the NHS.

• With sunny weather approaching Sacramento, sunscreen is a wise choice for anyone with outdoor activities planned this Memorial Day weekend.

• But according to a nonprofit organization, more than 70 percent of sunscreens on the market either don’t work or contain harmful ingredients, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Friday.

• The report by the Environmental Working Group looked at 880 sunscreens and found that 73 percent of them were ineffective or contained “worrisome” ingredients such as oxybenzone and retinyl palmitate. The former can cause hormone issues and the latter can potentially increase the risk of skin cancer.

• Researchers from the University of Oxford say that a spike of 30,000 deaths in January 2015 happened due to avoidable problems in the healthcare system. The deaths mostly occurred in the elderly population who are more affected by changes to health and social care. Their research showed a large range of health system failures.

Security

• A vulnerability in Samba, the standard Windows interoperability suite of programs for Linux and Unix, can be exploited remotely to gain access to Linux machines that have port 445 exposed.

• Ciaran Martin, the head of the agency’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), said it is unacceptable for boards to plead ignorance about the threat from cyber attacks.

• But it is a system that’s going to fail in the "Internet of things": everyday devices like smart speakers, household appliances, toys, lighting systems, even cars, that are connected to the web. Many of the embedded networked systems in these devices that will pervade our lives don’t have engineering teams on hand to write patches and may well last far longer than the companies that are supposed to keep the software safe from criminals. Some of them don’t even have the ability to be patched.

• Fast forward five to 10 years, and the world is going to be filled with literally tens of billions of devices that hackers can attack. We’re going to see ransomware against our cars. Our digital video recorders and web cameras will be taken over by botnets. The data that these devices collect about us will be stolen and used to commit fraud. And we’re not going to be able to secure these devices.

• The second stable point release of the major Kodi 17 “Krypton” open-source and cross-platform media center was launched the other day, on May 24, 2017, but it was missing some binary add-ons, so Martijn Kaijser announced today Kodi 17.3.

• You might have read the news this morning about a wormable code-execution bug discovered in the Samba free software re-implementation of the SMB/CIFS networking protocol, which existed in Samba for more than 7 years.

• When choosing an operating system, there are many different factors that are taken into consideration. However, security is becoming increasingly important. You only need to look at the news to see the increasing number of data breaches that are occurring around the world at present. Choosing an operating system with care is your first step when defending your personal data. With that in mind, read on to discover the reasons why Linux is more secure than Windows.

• CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi has announced today the availability of a new stable kernel update for users of the CloudLinux 7 and CloudLinux 6 Hybrid operating systems, addressing multiple security issues and bugs.

• This new CloudLinux 7 stable kernel comes less than 24 hours after the release of the Beta kernel with the same version number, specifically 3.10.0-614.10.2.lve1.4.50, which replaces kernel-3.10.0-427.36.1.lve1.4.47 and is available for download as we speak from the production repository of CloudLinux 7 operating system series.

• We know the Australian government has one of the worst record of data breaches in the world. So naturally, rather than addressing their incompetencies, the Australian government has decided to roll out an e-health record for every Australian citizen. And it’s opt-out only.

• We browsed through the tool and found that every state Chipotle operates in had restaurants that were breached, including most major cities. The restaurants were vulnerable in various time frames between March 24th and April 18th, 2017. Chipotle also operates another chain called Pizzeria Locale, which was affected by the hack as well.

• The other study of the broader device market found only 17% of manufacturers had taken steps to secure gadgets.

• Here’s how the bug works. All a naughty website has to do is use the character string ‘$MFT’ in the directory name where a website keeps its images. Windows expects to see the four characters $MFT only in a special metadate file on your PC. When it sees those characters as a directory name, however, it causes enough problems that an affected PC will begin to slow down and eventually hang. At that point your only recourse is to reboot the machine. In some cases, the problem may even trigger the dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD).

• Short answer: Ubuntu or Debian are not vulnerable to the flaw. In fact all other Unix-like operating system such as macOS, FreeBSD and others are not vulnerable to the flaw. However, you must take care if you are using Samba software (e.g. disable SMBv1) on Linux or Unix-like system. Make sure you disable SMB version 1 on Windows clients.

• A 7-year-old critical remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in Samba networking software that could allow a remote attacker to take control of an affected Linux and Unix machines.

Defence/Aggression

• References are already being made to former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, whose 1972-1986 regime was characterized by martial law and synonymous with arbitrary arrests, detention, disappearances, as well as extrajudicial killings.

• In Britain, police are expanding their investigation into Monday’s suicide bombing in Manchester that killed 22 and left dozens injured. Many of those killed were young girls. While the Manchester story has dominated international headlines, far less attention has been paid to other stories this week involving the deaths of civilians. In Syria and Iraq, U.S.-led or backed airstrikes have killed dozens of civilians in the last week alone. Meanwhile, in Yemen, the human rights group Reprieve says U.S. Navy SEALs killed five civilians during a raid Tuesday night on a village in Ma’rib governorate. To talk more about how the media covers civilian casualties, we speak with two of the founders of The Intercept: Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald.

• The British government operated an “open door” policy that allowed Libyan exiles and British-Libyan citizens to join the 2011 uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi even though some had been subject to counter-terrorism control orders, Middle East Eye can reveal.

• Several former rebel fighters now back in the UK told MEE that they had been able to travel to Libya with “no questions asked” as authorities continued to investigate the background of a British-Libyan suicide bomber who killed 22 people in Monday’s attack in Manchester.

• [...]

• British police have said they believe the bomber, who returned to Manchester just a few days before the attack, was part of a network and have arrested six people including Abedi’s older brother since Monday.

• Home Secretary Amber Rudd has said that Abedi was known to security services, while a local community worker told the BBC that several people had reported him to the police via an anti-terrorism hotline.

• When President Rodrigo Duterte explained his decision to declare martial law across a wide swath of the southern Philippines, he described one of the most chilling scenes imaginable: a beheading.

• In a news conference that made headlines around the world, Duterte said the police chief in Malabang was stopped at a checkpoint on his way home from work and slaughtered by terrorists on the spot. “They decapitated him then and there,” he said.

• The Philippine president’s claim spread quickly, with much of the local and foreign press reporting it as fact. Soon, unconfirmed reports of “beheadings” became a major part of the story line.

• James O’Brien highlighted these remarkable exchanges between Theresa May and a former police officer, who predicted having to put soldiers on the streets due to police cuts.

• Damian O’Reilly told the Home Secretary that’s what would happen at the Police Federation Conference in 2015.

• Theresa May, then the Home Secretary, dismissed his comments as “scaremongering”.

• But two years later, that has come true. And James O’Brien said the figures are almost unbelievable. Since 2010 when Mrs May became Home Secretary, 1,337 trained firearms officers have seen their jobs cut.

• Theresa May has launched an extraordinary attack on Jeremy Corbyn, accusing him of saying the Manchester terror attack had been caused by British foreign policy as she sought to place the atrocity at the heart of the election campaign.

• The prime minister used a press conference at the end of her first G7 summit to resume her election campaign by directly targeting the Labour leader after he had said the war on terror was not working.

• A United Nations envoy called off talks with the rival leaders of ethnically divided Cyprus on Friday after failing to find “common ground” on convening a final summit to aim for an overall reunification deal.

• It is seen as the biggest setback to the negotiations since they began two years ago, but the U.N. said the years-long peace process had not collapsed.

• Espen Barth Eide had been meeting separately with the leaders and said that despite serious efforts to overcome differences there is “no prospect” for agreement on the summit’s details. He said he would consult with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on the next steps.

• The UK’s full participation in European Union security and intelligence co-operation will be critical to the fight against terrorism after Brexit, leading British security experts have said, as Theresa May announced wide-ranging new plans to counter extremism.

• The growing demands for the prime minister to face down anti-EU forces in the Tory party and make membership of bodies such as Europol, the EU’s criminal intelligence agency, a top priority, came amid fears that Brexit could leave the UK with inferior access to key European databases and deprive British police forces of vital tools in high-level, pan-European anti-terror probes.

• The Washington Post has published, without any disclosure, an op-ed by Podesta Group lobbyist Stephen Rademaker pushing for weapons made by Rademaker’s client Lockheed Martin.

• This is the third time in two months that the Post has published op-eds by defense industry lobbyists. Two previous op-eds were by staff columnist and BGR lobbyist Ed Rogers on behalf of Raytheon.

• In early April, after President Trump decided to bomb a Syrian air force base using Raytheon missiles, Raytheon lobbyist Ed Rogers took to the opinion section of Washington Post to lavish praise on the president. Rogers’ lobbying firm BGR received $120,000 in 2016 for lobbying on “defense and communications procurement; defense appropriations and authorizations,” for Raytheon, Media Matters reported at the time.

• When Saudi Arabia announced last week a $20-billion investment in a U.S. infrastructure fund managed by Blackstone Group LP, many noticed that it came shortly after presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner personally negotiated a $110-billion arms sale to the country. What went unnoticed — and is largely unknown — is how important Blackstone is to the Kushner family company.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Swedish prosecutors recently dropped the investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange has always denied the allegations, which he calls a pretext for his ultimate extradition to the U.S. to face prosecution under the Espionage Act. Since 2012, Assange has taken refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. It’s not clear whether he will emerge any time soon. Last month, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions confirmed that the U.S. has prepared a warrant for Assange, calling his arrest a “priority.” To talk more about Julian Assange, we speak with two of the founders of The Intercept: Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald.

• Earlier this week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly joked about Trump using a saber on the press and U.S. Senator Jim Risch told CNN the press should be questioning the Washington Post about its sources. Then, on May 16, The New York Times reported that President Donald Trump allegedly asked former FBI director James Comey to consider putting journalists in prison for publishing classified information. If the request, which is allegedly detailed in a memo from Comey, is true it represents a serious risk to reporters, according to First Amendment attorneys.

• The idea that journalists could be jailed in the U.S. for doing their job is not new. Under the George W. Bush administration, New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail on contempt of court charges for refusing to testify about the identity of a source. The Obama administration prosecuted more individuals for leaking classified information than any other U.S. president and used the threat of prison in its unsuccessful seven-year battle to compel New York Times reporter James Risen to testify about his sources.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• More importantly, a cargo rig like the Supermarche shows how to make cycling work at scale.

• One in every three bites of food, van Engelsdorp said, is directly or indirectly pollinated by honeybees, who pollinate about $15 billion worth of U.S. crops each year. Almonds, for instance, are completely reliant on honeybee pollination.

• Donald Trump’s views on the Paris climate accord are “evolving,” according to his top economic adviser, who signaled the president may be willing to bow to pressure from European leaders and stay in the agreement if the U.S. wins assurances it can scale back its carbon-cutting commitment.

• After German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other Group of Seven leaders pressed the U.S. to remain part of the pact of nearly 200 nations, Trump stressed his commitment to environmental protection.

• “We made it clear that we want the U.S. to stick to its commitments,” Merkel told reporters after a closed-door G-7 meeting in Sicily on Friday. “There were very different arguments from us all urging the president to hold to the climate accord.” She said the discussion was conducted in a very “honest” atmosphere, leading to a “very intense exchange.”

• If you want to truly understand what’s happening in the energy industry, the best thing to do is to travel deep into the heart of American coal country, to Carbon County, Wyoming (yes, that’s a real place).

• The state produces most coal in the US, and Carbon County has long been known (and was named) for its extensive coal deposits. But the state’s mines have been shuttering over the past few years, causing hundreds of people to lose their jobs in 2016 alone. Now, these coal miners are finding hope, offered from an unlikely place: a Chinese wind-turbine maker wants to retrain these American workers to become wind-farm technicians. It’s the perfect metaphor for the massive shift happening in the global energy markets.

• A shadowy international mercenary and security firm known as TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline with military-style counterterrorism measures, collaborating closely with police in at least five states, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. The documents provide the first detailed picture of how TigerSwan, which originated as a U.S. military and State Department contractor helping to execute the global war on terror, worked at the behest of its client Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, to respond to the indigenous-led movement that sought to stop the project.

Finance

• Germany’s auto industry today hit back at criticism from U.S. President Donald Trump by insisting that it had created more than 100,000 jobs in the U.S., which would be endangered by trade restrictions.

• Trump described Germany as “bad, very bad” because of its car sales in a meeting with EU officials Thursday. “See the millions of cars they are selling in the U.S. Terrible. We will stop this,” Trump said, according to Der Spiegel.

• US President Donald Trump made an immediate impact at his first G7 summit today – by insulting Germany.

• He blasted Angela Merkel’s trade policies, telling EU chiefs Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk: “The Germans are bad, very bad. Look at the millions of cars they’re selling in the US. Terrible. We will stop this.”

• There are two great dangers when managing your own money and, indeed, the rest of your affairs. The first is reacting too much to recent events. The other is reacting too little.

• And when it comes to what’s now happening in this country, the second danger is every bit as risky as the first.

• To cut to the chase, it is becoming increasingly clear that Americans should be taking reasonable steps to diversify their investments outside the U.S., including holding assets in currencies other than dollars, and where possible to acquire a second passport.

• Yes, I’m serious. Jewish-, Irish- and Italian-Americans, for example, should be checking out whether they qualify automatically for dual citizenship. Others should be looking into their options too. It is always a good thing to be diversified globally and to have the option of leaving the country and living and working elsewhere. But right now it is more important than usual.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Republican multimillionaire Greg Gianforte won Montana’s only US House seat on Thursday despite being charged a day earlier with assault after witnesses said he grabbed a reporter by the neck and threw him to the ground.

• Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee County, Wis., reportedly directed some of his officers to hassle a man at an airport after Clarke and the man had a brief verbal exchange, according to a new report.

• Trump seems indifferent to, and at times disdainful of, this deeply rooted global commitment. He begs off mentioning human rights publicly, as he did on Sunday, in Riyadh, where he spoke to Arab and Muslim leaders from around the world. "We are not here to lecture," he said. "We are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship. Instead, we are here to offer partnership–based on shared interests and values–to pursue a better future for us all."

• But Trump has developed a habit of embracing those whose values are antithetical to our own.

• Jeremy Corbyn has dramatically cut Theresa May’s previously commanding lead in approval ratings among voters, according to the latest Opinium/Observer poll, in a further sign that the race for Downing Street may be tightening with 10 days to go until the general election.

• The narrowing of May’s lead suggests her decision to call a snap election and then focus her campaign almost entirely on her leadership, contrasting it with Corbyn’s, may be backfiring.

• More than a third of voters (37%) say their opinion of the prime minister is more negative than at the start of the campaign, against 25% who say it is more positive.

• The opposite is true of the Labour leader, with 39% saying they have a more positive view of Corbyn compared with 14% who now have a more negative view.

• Theresa May launched an extraordinary attack on Jeremy Corbyn today as she accused him of suggesting the Manchester terror attack was Britain’s “own fault”.

• In a clear sign the Tories are rattled by their tumbling poll ratings, Mrs May turned the Manchester bombing into a full-scale political row.

• The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race, has asked President Trump’s political organization to gather and produce all documents, emails and phone records going back to his campaign’s launch in June 2015, according to two people briefed on the request.

• The letter from the Senate arrived at Trump’s campaign committee last week and was addressed to the group’s treasurer. Since then, some former staffers have been notified and asked to cooperate, the people said. They were not authorized to speak publicly.

• As Air Force One took off from Brussels and President Trump headed to the Group of Seven Summit in Sicily to fight new battles against the global consensus on trade and climate change, European leaders were as confused as ever over where his United States is heading.

• Previous months have seen one reassurance effort after the other. Vice President Pence and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis have been clear in their efforts to explain that the United States remains a reliable partner and ally.

• And European audiences have listened, nodded and said, fine. But it would be nice to hear those words from the man occupying the Oval Office.

• President Donald Trump still refuses to back the 2015 Paris agreement to fight climate change, blocking efforts by world leaders meeting in Sicily to get the new U.S. leader to endorse the treaty, Italy’s prime minister said on Friday.

• But there was agreement on other issues such as Syria, Libya and fighting terrorism, Paolo Gentiloni told reporters in Taormina, Italy, where the heads of the world’s seven major industrialized economies (G7) are meeting.

• “There is one open question, which is the U.S. position on the Paris climate accords… All others have confirmed their total agreement on the accord,” Gentiloni said. “We are sure that after an internal reflection, the United States will also want to commit to it,” he added.

• Former acting CIA director John McLaughlan on Friday responded to reports that President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner discussed setting up a secret communications line between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, saying if such reports are true, it would be considered espionage.

• “I don’t want to overstate this because obviously there is a lot we don’t know — we don’t know the exact content of the conversation. We don’t know the objective that was a part of the conversation — those things we don’t know,” McLaughlan said on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” Friday.

• Robert Mueller’s special investigation may just be starting, but for President Donald Trump and his aides, it’s already entered one of the most legally treacherous phases.

• Now that Trump’s current and former aides and allies officially know a probe exists, they’re responsible for preserving all available information that might be relevant. That’s a task complicated by the rise of auto-delete apps like Confide, Signal and WhatsApp, as well as the move his campaign staffers have made into the White House.

• The Labour leader was called “monstrous” by Boris Johnson for his comments about the war on terror, but senior Tories haven’t always thought that way

• When I stood on Albert Square at the vigil in Manchester, there was a mood of unwavering defiance.

• The very act of thousands of people coming together sent a powerful message of solidarity and love. It was a profound human impulse to stand together, caring and strong. It was inspiring.

• Our exclusive ComRes poll today shows Labour has reduced the Tory lead from 18 to 12 points in two weeks.

• So when Emmanuel Macron openly swerved to avoid a greeting with Trump at NATO Headquarters it was sooo visually satisfying.

• Jeremy Corbyn is perfectly right to relate this week’s Manchester terrorist atrocity to British foreign policy in the Middle East. Whenever Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron struggled to explain why British blood and finance had to go on toppling regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, they were explicit: it was “to prevent terrorism in the streets of Britain”. The reason was given over and over again: to suppress militant Islam.

• As Brazil is engulfed by a political crisis, we are joined in studio for an extended exclusive interview by Brazil’s former President Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached last year in what many describe as a legislative coup. Her removal ended nearly 14 years of rule by the left-leaning Workers’ Party, which had been credited with lifting millions of Brazilians out of poverty. Rousseff is a former political prisoner who took part in the underground resistance to the U.S.-backed Brazilian dictatorship in the 1960s. She was jailed from 1970 to 1972, during which time she was repeatedly tortured. Rousseff would later become a key figure in the Workers’ Party under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. She was elected president in 2010 and re-elected in 2014. Her successor, Brazilian President Michel Temer, is now facing mounting calls to resign or be impeached, following explosive testimony released by the Supreme Court accusing him of accepting millions of dollars in bribes since 2010. This week, he authorized the deployment of the Army to the capital Brasília as tens of thousands of protesters marched to Congress to demand his resignation.

• Donald Trump appeared to shove Montenegro’s Prime Minister out of the way in a bid to get to the front of a group of Nato leaders – a moment which was captured on film.

• The US President was walking with other world leaders at when he seemed to forcibly push aside Dusko Markovic.

• The incident was captured on film on the first day of a key summit at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels.

• Tory Defence Secretary Michael Fallon was left red-faced after slating what he thought was a Jeremy Corbyn quote – before realising they were actually Boris Johnson’s words.

• The top Conservative was attacking the Labour leader live on Channel 4 News this evening.

• Boris Johnson faces criticism today after calling Jeremy Corbyn “monstrous” – for saying something he said himself 12 years ago.

• The Tory Foreign Secretary slammed the Labour leader in a high-profile press conference with his US counterpart, Rex Tillerson.

• President Donald Trump spoke at the NATO headquarters in Brussels on Thursday and asked NATO members to pay their fair share, a message that didn’t appear to sit well with some of the leaders in attendance.

• “Everything else he’s done has been a complete disaster,” Boehner said. “He’s still learning how to be president.”

• A bipartisan pair of lawmakers is calling on the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to hold a hearing on a planned sale of precision-guided munitions kits to Saudi Arabia.

• The kits, which turn so-called dumb bombs into so-called smart bombs, are part of a $110 billion arms deal finalized by President Trump last weekend during his trip to Saudi Arabia — and they’re prompting a fight in the Senate.

• “The possession of precision-guided weapons should not be conflated with possessing dynamic targeting capabilities; the ability to strike an enemy and avoid civilian casualties requires extensive training, stringent targeting approval processes and clear rules of engagement,” Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) wrote to Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) on Thursday.

• Donald Trump’s presidency has been clouded in controversy from its very inception, with multiple federal investigations into his campaign’s ties to Russia looming over the White House before he even assumed the Oval Office. Now, it appears his odds of impeachment are growing not even six months into his tenure as commander-in-chief.

• The Economist Intelligence Unit, a nonpartisan organization comprising over 100 country experts and economists across the globe, upgraded Trump’s likelihood of impeachment from low to moderate Friday, following calls for the president’s removal officially reaching the floor of Congress.

• Only one in 10 people supports Theresa May’s plan to bring back fox hunting, according to a poll for The Independent.

• The survey of voters, conducted by ORB, found that 64 per cent disagree with the statement that the ban on fox hunting should be reversed, and a very high proportion (46 per cent) say they “disagree strongly”. Just 11 per cent agree with the policy, and a quarter (25 per cent) neither agree nor disagree.

Censorship/Free Speech

• This bill asks social media companies to take down content, including perfectly legal material, [...]

Privacy/Surveillance

• A little-noticed article in the Consumerist dropped a bombshell: Google is now deliberately tracking your offline activity, your credit card purchases, in order to feed information back to advertisers about what ads had an effect on you – not just at the individual level, but even at the device level.

• The mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur for Privacy (SRP) & the EU-supported MAPPING project are collaborating to organise a structured public consultation about new legal measures at international law intended to improve the protection of privacy in this age of ubiquitous surveillance.

• There’s this whole “Life comes at you fast” shtick that folks on Twitter use to point out people’s hypocrisy. Suddenly Democrats care about federalism when it comes to immigration law enforcement! Suddenly Republicans don’t care about federalism when it comes to immigration law enforcement! I try not to engage in the shtick too much, because it feels more like point-scoring than actual debate.

• But I can’t help but bring it up right now. Yesterday, a story about federal surveillance abuses made the rounds in the conservative parts of Twitter I pay attention to, not the tech-security circles where I usually see such discussions.

• But here’s the problem. I believe the record in Wallace indicates that it is a GPS case, not a cell-site case. Wallace’s holding hinges on the assumption that the government was not obtaining records directly but was instead obtaining records from a third party that had received the information in the ordinary course of business. But I don’t think that happened in Wallace. Instead, the government’s agent accessed the information directly, "pinging" the phone to obtain location information. In response to the ping, the phone would have turned on its GPS receiver, obtained its GPS coordinates, and sent that information to the government. The information the government received was the data collected by the GPS in the phone, not the business records from AT&T about what cell towers were connected to the phone.

• Here’s the suppression-hearing transcript, which I have obtained from PACER. There’s no discussion of cell-site location. Instead, it’s all about accessing GPS data.

• More worrying than these technical issues, which can probably be overcome, is a fundamental shift in Aadhaar’s role in Indian society. Now that most people there have an Aadhaar number, the government is trying to use it for everything – and to make it compulsory despite privacy concerns.

• The chip, known internally as the Apple Neural Engine, would improve the way the company’s devices handle tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence — such as facial recognition and speech recognition, said the person, who requested anonymity discussing a product that hasn’t been made public. Apple declined to comment.

• The company appears to have made major concessions to China in the development of the system, giving Beijing the ability to remove features like OneDrive, manage all telemetry and updates and also to allow the government to use its own encryption algorithms within its systems.

• Before you can fix this problem, you need to understand it. That means knowing what your ISP can (and cannot) detect (and modify) in your traffic. HTTPS traffic is already relatively secure–or, at least, its content is. Your ISP can’t actually read the encrypted traffic that goes between you and an HTTPS website (at least, they can’t unless they convince you to install a MITM certificate, like Lenovo did to unsuspecting users of its consumer laptops in 2015). However, ISPs do know that you visited that website, when you visited it, how long you stayed there, and how much data went back and forth.

• Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which is set to expire at the end of this year, is the legal basis for NSA programs that broadly sweep up electronic communications. The programs are meant to target non-US citizens overseas, although critics have long charged that Americans are unnecessarily caught up in the net. Section 702 is used to authorize the controversial PRISM program, which the NSA uses to collect information from tech companies.

• The letter, signed by companies including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Uber, requests that lawmakers consider changes before reauthorizing 702, such as increasing transparency and oversight, as well as narrowing the amount of information collected under such programs. The companies also asked for more leeway in disclosing national security demands.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A Dakota Access Pipeline protester accused of endangering a police plane with his drone was found innocent of all charges on Thursday.

• At the conclusion of a one-day bench trial, Judge Allan Schmalenberger determined that Aaron Shawn Turgeon, also known as Prolific the Rapper, did not put the pilot of the surveillance plane or the protesters below at substantial risk of bodily injury under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.

• Police called his use of the drone "an act of violence."

• A group of refugees who have spent more than 18 years living in condemned buildings at a British military base in Cyprus have won a legal victory after the appeal court ordered the home secretary to reverse an earlier decision and consider admitting them to Britain.

• But despite one of the judges calling the refugees’ living conditions “quite unacceptable”, their legal battle will almost certainly continue: the government has indicated it will seek leave to appeal to the supreme court and, pending that decision, is seeking a stay on the order that it must reconsider the group’s position.

• In a unanimous decision the Court of Appeal has today (25 May 2017) found that Theresa May acted unlawfully by refusing to consider allowing entry to the UK to a group of refugee families stranded on the British Sovereign Base Areas (SBA) in Cyprus.

• The unlawful decision was made in November 2014 when Mrs May was Home Secretary. The Court of Appeal has ordered the current Home Secretary to urgently reconsider the refusal of entry noting that “there can be no justification for any future decision which leaves these Claimants’ position unresolved for any further length of time”.

• Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte joked Friday that soldiers could rape up to three women, as he reassured them of his full support under his newly imposed regional martial law.

• Duterte, who often peppers his language with man-on-the-street curses, made the comments in jest during a speech at a military base to lift the spirits of troops tasked with quelling what he says is a fast-growing threat of Islamist terrorism.

• President Rodrigo Duterte on Friday expressed his intention to take responsibility for the actions of soldiers in Mindanao the implementation of martial law.

• Duterte assured the soldiers of the 2nd Mechanized Infantry (Magbalantay) Brigade of the Philippine Army in Iligan City that they had his full support.

• Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte joked on Friday (May 26) that soldiers could rape up to three women, as he reassured them of his full support under his newly imposed regional martial law.

• Upon his return from Russia, the President gave a press conference where he explained at length his decision to declare martial law across Mindanao.

• But perhaps just as significant was his on-the-spot sacking of Secretary Benjamin Reyes of the Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB) for repeatedly saying there are about 1.8 million drug users in the country. This official figure contradicts the President’s own guesstimate of 4 million.

• Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is telling troops fighting Muslim militants for the control of southern Marawi city to use martial law powers to defeat the Islamic State group-linked extremists.

• Duterte said in a Friday speech to the troops in Illigan, near Marawi on southern Mindanao island, “you can arrest any person, search any house without warrant.”

• Brazilians know their political crises better than most. On social media, some like to joke that the chaos of Donald Trump’s Presidency is simply gringos imitando—foreigners copying us. Others suggest that Brazil should offer the U.S. assistance in setting up impeachment proceeding—a frequent Brazilian trauma. Such dark humor is a necessary refuge in a country where stability rarely lasts for long. The latest crisis erupted last week, when the Supreme Court placed President Michel Temer under investigation for corruption and obstructing justice. On Wednesday of this week, protesters overran government buildings in Brasília, setting fire to the agriculture ministry, and police reportedly responded by shooting live ammunition. Less than a year after the former President Dilma Rousseff was removed from office, Temer faces the possibility of a similar fate. And with right-wing populism on the rise in the country as it is elsewhere in the world, the stakes are as high as they have ever been.

• The president of the Philippines has come under fire for joking about rape in a speech to soldiers.

• While speaking at a military camp after imposing martial law across the south of the country, he said they were allowed to rape up to three women.

• This was the second rape joke Rodrigo Duterte has been condemned for making since announcing his candidacy.

• President Rodrigo Duterte joked on Friday that soldiers could rape up to three women, as he reassured them of his full support under his newly-declared martial law in southern Philippines.

• Duterte made the comments in jest during a speech to soldiers on Mindanao island, where he imposed military rule law on Tuesday to try to crush ISIL-linked fighters, who have been battling the army after laying siege to Marawi City.

• Dennis Uy, an oil trader from Davao City who counts Duterte as a family friend…

• [...]

• Duterte is embarking on an up to 9-trillion-peso ($180 billion) infrastructure plan during his six-year term to bring opportunities closer to poorer provinces like his own. If the president realizes his goal, Uy, 43, is well-placed to reap the dividends.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Letter says 450,000 comments may have been spam from net neutrality enemies

• Of course, that’s not the only goal Facebook has. Like so many aspects of the media business over the last three decades, the future of web publishing is currently being decided not by journalism organizations, but by the platform-owning tech companies that collect and distribute the world’s information. More recently, this has manifested itself in a standards battle currently being waged by Facebook, Google, and Apple, all of which own a proprietary format that transforms articles into clean, readable formats on mobile.

• Fourteen people who say their names and addresses were attached to anti-net neutrality comments without their permission have asked the US Federal Communications Commission to notify other victims of the impersonation and remove fraudulent comments from the net neutrality docket.

• Comcast has sent a formal cease and desist letter to Fight for the Future (FFTF) demanding control of its pro-net neutrality website, comcastroturf.com. FFTF set up comcastroturf.com to allow people, real Americans, to check the millions of FCC comments to see if their name has been used to submit a fake comment to the FCC about net neutrality.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• As part of the campaign to raise awareness of fair use and its benefits, Wikipedians in Australia are adding a banner on the English Wikipedia, and Electronic Frontiers Australia and the Australian Digital Alliance have also set up a new site called Fair Copyright. It would be nice to think that all this hard work would lead to the recommendations of those Australian government reports being implemented at last. But as Techdirt noted last month, the copyright industry has built up a fund of $11 million specifically to fight changes to copyright law in Australia, so we can expect fierce resistance to any such moves.

• Facebook has updated its Commerce Policy to include a ban on "products or items" that facilitate or encourage unauthorized access to digital media. The new rule has almost certainly been put in place to stop the further spread of "fully loaded" set-top devices running modified Kodi and similar software.

• A Colombian biologist was facing up to eight years in prison for sharing a scientist’s thesis on the online documents portal Scribd. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation is reporting that Diego Gómez has been cleared of criminal copyright violations in a country that, unlike the US, has no broad fair-use defense to infringement allegations.

• Remember, to hear the MPAA tell it, piracy is really killing the movie industry. It’s been whining about piracy for basically my entire lifetime, and constantly predicting its own demise if “something” is not done. And, despite the fact that Congress has repeatedly obliged Hollywood in ratcheting up copyright anti-piracy laws and despite the fact that the MPAA has been clearly wrong repeatedly (such that the new technologies it feared actually helped expand Hollywood’s business), the studios continue to push for awful changes to copyright law, citing the horrors of piracy.

• And yet… now it’s coming out that Disney not only had a good year last year, it had the best year ever for a movie studio.

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