● 06.05.17

● Links 5/6/2017: OpenELEC 8.0.4 and UberStudent

Posted in News Roundup at 1:34 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Those of you yearning for the experience of running a 1990s-vintage graphics workstation are about to have a good day: a developer named Eric Masson has resurrected the IRIX Interactive Desktop that shipped on Silicon Graphics Workstations and now offers it as a Linux desktop alternative.

Kernel Space

• After posting a number of NVIDIA GPU Linux benchmarks this week using their latest drivers, here is similar treatment on the Radeon side using their newest open-source driver code.

• For this article is a 12-way comparison of my available Radeon GCN GPUs compared to the NVIDIA GeForce 900/1000 series. All of the Radeon tests were done with their newest driver stack of Linux 4.12 Git + Mesa 17.2-dev built against the LLVM 5.0 SVN AMDGPU back-end via the Padoka PPA on Ubuntu 17.04. I’m also going to be doing similar R600g fresh benchmarks in celebration of Phoronix’s 13th birthday, those results will be coming out in the next few days for this much larger Radeon comparison going back a number of generations on the open-source driver.

• Things remain fairly calm for 4.12, although not quite as calm as it appeared earlier in the week. I think two thirds of the commits came in on Friday or the weekend..

• But timing aside, it all looks fairly normal. It’s all pretty small, nothing really stands out as unusual. Pretty much exactly the “standard distribution of patches”, with two thirds being drivers (GPU and rdma, but also scsi target, hid, input, md, scsi..) and the rest being a mix of arch (mainly x86 this time around), filesystems (overlayfs and misc) and other core code (mm and headers).

• Those holding interest in the Reiser4 file-system can now use it with the Linux 4.11 kernel.

• Reiser4 developers on Saturday released their updated patch to allow the file-system driver to work with the Linux 4.11 kernel, which was released as stable last month. There are no other known feature changes to Reiser4 itself for Linux 4.11.

Graphics Stack

• For those riding the stable Mesa 17.1 release train, the 17.1.2 update is expected this weekend.

Benchmarks

• It’s that time of the year where we see how the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack is working on past and present hardware in a large GPU comparison with various OpenGL games and workloads. This year we go from the new Radeon RX 580 all the way back to the Radeon HD 2900XT, looking at how the mature Radeon DRM kernel driver and R600 Gallium3D driver is working for aging ATI/AMD graphics hardware. In total there were 51 graphics cards tested for this comparison of Radeon cards as well as NVIDIA GeForce hardware for reference.

• As another interesting benchmark special for Phoronix’s 13th birthday is a comparison of Intel Kabylake, NVIDIA, and Radeon Vulkan vs. OpenGL Linux driver performance. Not only are we looking at the raw OpenGL/Vulkan performance but also the relative performance between graphics APIs on each vendor.

• This month will mark one year since the release of the Radeon 400 “Polaris” graphics cards. With the one year anniversary and also celebrating the 13th birthday of Phoronix, I ran some comparison tests showing the progress of the AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver stack over the better part of the past year using a Radeon RX 470 Polaris graphics card.

• Our latest featured article this week in the lead-up to Phoronix’s 13th birthday is a new OpenGL RadeonSI vs. Vulkan RADV driver comparison with six different Radeon graphics cards. This also features some older hardware tested making use of the experimental AMDGPU DRM driver, which is needed for RADV to work on more of the GCN card line-up.

Applications

• tl;dr: Get vmdebootstrap replacement from http://git.liw.fi/vmdb2 and run it from the source tree. Tell me if something doesn’t work. Send patches.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The awesome GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin has officially dropped support for the D3D12 API in favour of going all-in with Vulkan.

Games

• “Silver, a corrupt and sinister sorcerer, rules the land of Jarrah with an iron fist. He and his henchmen have abducted the village women as part of a pact with the almighty god, Apocalypse. Now, only one man can put a stop to Silver and his minions. That man is you, David, a promising young knight whose wife is among the captured. In order to succeed you’ll need to recruit allies, master your swordplay, learn the art of magic, and venture through hostile worlds teeming with Silver’s corrupt followers to find 8 lost artifacts. Begin your quest, and become a hero!”

• For those interested in the 0 A.D. open-source ancient warfare real-time strategy game, the next alpha release is in sight.

• Gemstone Keeper [Steam, Official Site], an ASCII twin-stick shooter that looks surprisingly decent is coming to Linux. The developer has been blogging about porting the game to Linux for those interested in reading more about it.

• I’ve been testing out Brawlerz Nitro [Steam, Official Site], a new Early Access top-down car combat game and it’s really quite fun already.

• In an impressive show of support, the post from the Stardock CEO asking for Ashes of the Singularity Linux version requests has more posts than reviews on Steam.

• Ash of Gods (Website – Kickstarter – Greenlight) is a mix of tactical combat RPG and visual novel being developed by Russian studio Aurum Dust and currently on Kickstarter. It uses Unity and should release on Win/Mac/Linux simultaneously at the end of 2017, with plans for console versions as well. Before we get into the thick of things, I suggest you lend an ear to their fantastic music while you’re here:

• I briefly wrote about Bionic Attack [Official Site, Steam] back in 2014 as I was excited by the style and the fact that it’s developed on Linux. Now, years later, it’s out and here’s what I think.

Distributions

• DEFT is a household name when it comes to digital forensics and intelligence activities since its first release way back in 2005. The Linux distribution DEFT is made up of a GNU/Linux and DART(Digital Advanced Response Toolkit), a suite dedicated to digital forensics and intelligence activities. DEFT is touted as a top choice among security and law enforcement agencies for the computer forensic investigations. But what makes DEFT such a capable distro? Let’s take a look.

• If you are looking for a dedicated media box for your living room or bedroom, the first thing you should consider is Kodi. This is a media center software package that delivers a very focused consumption experience. It can even be customized with “addons,” although some of them can be used for piracy — something we do not condone.

• Unfortunately, Kodi is not its own operating system, meaning it has to be run on top of an OS. Sure, you could use Windows 10, but that is overkill if you only want to run Kodi. Instead, a lightweight Linux distribution that only serves to run the media center is preferable. One of the most popular such distros is OpenELEC. It can run on traditional PC hardware, but also Raspberry Pi, and, my favorite — WeTek boxes. Today, version 8.0.4 achieves stable release. It is a fairly ho-hum update, focusing mostly on fixes and stability.

• ​There are Linux distros for the desktop, for gaming, for privacy, for penetration testing and there are quite a few Linux distros for education. One awesome alternative to the very popular Edubuntu is UberStudent. The developers seek to provide a Linux distro that focuses on teaching and learning for secondary and higher education students. Out-of-the-box, UberStudent provides an ideal platform for Linux newbies and all computer users with a focus on the core academic skills such as reading, studying, self-management skills, research, and writing. Let’s check out how this distro really fares.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the June 2017 issue. With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Last weekend I attended the openSUSE conference in Nürnberg. This is a really nice conference. Awesome location, great people, and an overall very relaxed atmosphere. I gave a talk about Nextcloud Security and what we plan to do in the future to make hosting a Nextcloud instance even easier and more secure.

• I attended the Saturday keynote which triggered a reaction on my side that I wanted to share. This is only my personal opinion and I’m sure a lot of people think differently. But I can’t help my self.

• The talk was about management of infrastructure and automation. It was a really good talk from a technical perspective. Very informative and detailed. But in the middle of the talk, the presenter mentioned that he was involved in building autonomous military submarines. This is of course controversial. I personally wouldn’t get involved in actual weapon development, building things which sole purpose is to kill people. But I understand that people have different opinions here and I can live with such a disagreement.

Red Hat Family

• 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, according to Red Hat, Inc.

• Three letters guide the way I work: GSD—get stuff done. Over the years, I’ve managed to blend concepts like feedback loops (from lean methodologies) and iterative improvement (from Agile) into my everyday work habits so I can better GSD (if I can use that as a verb). This means being extremely efficient with my time: outlining clear, discrete goals; checking completed items off a master list; and advancing projects forward iteratively and constantly. But can someone still GSD while defaulting to open? Or is this when getting stuff done comes to a grinding halt? Most would assume the worst, but I found that’s not necessarily the case.

• A significant number of Red Hat Summit 2017 presentation videos and breakout sessions (all of them?) have been posted to YouTube. Four presentation themes emerged for me: 1) OpenShift / containers / microservices, 2) Java related stuff, 3) Ceph and/or Gluster filesystems, and 4) Microsoft products on Linux (SQL Server, .Net, etc).

Finance

• Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) was upgraded by Zacks Investment Research from a “hold” rating to a “strong-buy” rating in a research note issued on Tuesday, May 2nd. The firm presently has a $101.00 price target on the open-source software company’s stock. Zacks Investment Research‘s price objective points to a potential upside of 10.33% from the company’s current price.

Fedora

• Jitsi started in the year 2003 as a college project and has grown ever since. In the year 2015, Atlassian acquired it, making a long-term investment in keeping Jitsi open source, community-based and pushing the envelope of great video conferences. (Source).

Debian Family

• Although I use Linux for all day-to-day computing, I have two old laptops with Windows XP licenses, and I have them configured to dual-boot Windows or Linux. Every now and then I need to run a Windows application that won’t work under Linux; they’re handy then. And even though Windows XP support ended long ago, Microsoft decided to make a patch for the WannaCrypt worm available for XP.

• So I have done my (hopefully) last uploads for Stretch (r0) today and want to share how pleased I’ve been with this release cycle. It was the smoothest freeze I’ve witnessed so far, I really liked the clear and documented rules from the Release Team, their regular release infos on d-d-a and publically logged IRC meetings plus the easy-to-remember URL http://release.debian.org (nicely redirecting to https), where one can easily find those relevant dates, emails and rules. Plus, useful bug views via https://udd.debian.org. There is more, but to me the last (and probably most important) factor to all this has been that most of this actually hasn’t been new in this release cycle, but rather that by now a significant number of developers are aware of this and mostly have acted accordingly and communicated this further.

• I couldn’t put it off any longer. Debian 9 is due to be released next month, and I figured I had better upgrade from 7 (“wheezy”) to 8 (“jessie”) before that happens. I had done a fresh install of 8 to my wife’s computer back in December, but for my computer, with its countless customizations and installed applications, I wanted to take advantage of Debian’s ability to upgrade the operating system without doing a clean install. (Long time readers may recall that I upgraded from 4 to 5 and from 5 to 6, but did a fresh installation of 7.)

Derivatives

• TeX Live 2017 has been released! CTAN mirrors are busy updating.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system may have given up on Ubuntu for phones and tablets. But as expected, third-party developers are picking up where Canonical left off.

• UBports was originally founded to port Ubuntu to devices that weren’t originally supported by Canonical. Now that Canonical doesn’t really support any of those devices anymore, UBports is picking up the slack.

• Development is still in the early stages, but at this point any phone that shipped with Ubuntu Touch software can now be updated to run an UBports build.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint 18.2 “Sonya” is expected to land sometime this month, already later than the expected May release. Mint team leader Clement Lefebvre has announced that it is just around the corner with the Cinnamon and MATE edition currently undergoing functional testing. He also said that we should expect a beta release to land early this month.

• We’ve got some details on the new update with regards to the desktop environments. Cinnamon has been upgraded to version 3.4 and MATE has been bumped to version 1.18. LightDM will be adopted as the login manager; out of the box it supports guest sessions and should look pretty stylish, at least according to Lefebvre.

Devices/Embedded

• Aaeon’s “EPIC-KBS7” SBC supports 6th or 7th gen Intel Core CPUs, and offers wide-range power, 2x GBE ports, 4x USB 3.0 ports, and SATA, HDMI, and mini-PCIe.

• Our 2017 hacker board survey is now live. To earn a chance to win a free SBC, participate in our 3-minute survey of these 98 sub-$200 hacker-friendly SBCs.

• Over the last year, LinuxGizmos has reported on dozens of new community backed, open spec, hacker- and developer-friendly single board computers that run Linux and Android. We’ve added these to a curated list of earlier boards to publish a catalog of 98 SBCs. The boards included in our survey must be priced under $200 (not counting shipping), have a promised shipment availability by July, and meet our relatively flexible selection criteria for open source compliance (see farther below).

• Highlights for me include Odroid-C2 which does make a nice PC client and is very suitable for hacking into some project like the Raspberry Pi and the like. It’s one drawback is that it’s still not supported completely by Linux. It needs some magical bits to boot. Then there’s FireFly RK3399 which comes close to what I want for a server except RAM is limited to 4GB and SATA requires use of USB or M.2 PCIe. Other better boards are too expensive to make the list. The doubly priced Marvell Community Board is an example.

Phones

Tizen

• Samsung has announced that its new Smart TV dubbed The Frame will begin rolling out globally any moment from now. The Frame saw its first exclusive launch events in Switzerland and Norway a few days back, precisely of May 30 and 31st respectively. The launch event is billed to expand to other regions next week, including the United States, Belgium, Korea, Germany and Austria.

Android

• Is it the Jelly phone for everyone? We wouldn’t say so, but there is definitely a market for it. Some people do prefer a simpler experience with the ability to download just a few extra applications. It’s kind of like a smart feature phone of sorts… or a good secondary device for the glove compartment. And while it won’t be making anyone jelly, it is probably worth the asking price if its uniqueness piqued your interest.

• Intrinsyc’s “Open-Q 835” dev board showcases the octa-core Snapdragon 835 SoC, which is also headed for Android phones, and eventually, Windows laptops.

• Intrinsyc has launched the first development board based on Qualcomm’s 10nm-fabricated Snapdragon 835 SoC, which combines four Cortex-A73-like cores clocked at up to 2.3GHz and four lower powered ARM cores clocked to 1.9GHz. The sandwich-style Open-Q 835 Hardware Development Kit, which runs Android 7 “Nougat,” with a note to “contact sales for Windows 10,” is on sale in an early adopter version that sells for $1,149. The kit supports “premium-tier consumer and enterprise devices, including smartphones, VR/AR head-mounted displays, IP cameras, tablets, and mobile PCs, says Intrinsyc.

Free Software/Open Source

• When Docker creator Solomon Hykes announced the Moby Project at DockerCon, he said it was very close to his heart. It was the second most important project since Docker itself.

• What makes the Moby Project so special for Hykes is that it fundamentally changes the Docker world. It changes the way Docker is being developed and consumed. It changes the relationship between Docker the company and Docker the ecosystem, which is the open source community around the project. It changes the entire business model.

• Open source software is now widespread almost everywhere, from servers to smartphones. But there’s one place where open source is still not common: The world of policing. Here’s why open source and software freedom matter so much — and deserve more attention — in the realm of predictive policing.

• Like virtually every other type of profession and industry, policing has been transformed by software over the past decade. Police now rely on software tools that use machine learning and data analytics to predict where and when crime will occur. The strategy is called predictive policing.

• The Apache Software Foundation, which was founded in 1999, hardly gets any press compared to the Linux Foundation, when it comes to open source groups doing telecommunications and data center software.

• Conference keynote speeches can unify attendees around ideals or principles that cut across a broad swath of a particular field. Such was Chris Aedo’s recent OSCON keynote, which he summarizes in this short interview video. Chris works as the program manager, developer advocacy for IBM. OSCON is the annual O’Reilly Open Source conference. c

• YouTube has incited similar criticisms due to its decision to pander to pressures from advertisers to demonetize users based on the pretenses of fighting hate speech. The move sparked a backlash from YouTube celebrities and alternative media hosts who saw it as an attack on the popularity of independent and alternative media compared to corporate media sources.

• Frustration mounted as the woman gave evasive answers which seemed to add up to “No, we refuse to commit to allowing general access to this code.” Which seemed to confirm everyone’s worst fears about what was going to happen to Unix source code access in general.

• At which point Henry Spencer stands up and says (not in these exact words) “I will write and share a conforming implementation.” – and got a cheer from the assembled.

Web Browsers

• Online advertising is an important revenue source for websites and online publications, but an increasing amount of “invasive” ads have had a negative effect on user opinion.

• Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and cofounder of the Mozilla project, has created a new browser designed to improve the browsing experience for users, while allowing publishers to earn an income.

• Called Brave, the browser aims to revolutionise the way Internet advertising, publisher revenue, and web browsing works by using cryptocurrency and anonymous data collection.

Chrome

• Publishers will get a six-month headsup before Google kills intrusive advertising on Chrome, sources close to the ad giant have reportedly said.

• Google will also hand online publishers a special tool to make sure that their ads are “compliant”, the WSJ was told, called “Ad Experience Reports” – ostensibly to be based on the recommendations of industry group the Coalition for Better Ads, of which Facebook and Google are members.

Mozilla

• Servo – that rendering engine written in Rust – can be built from source. But there are also nightly builds available.

• We are delighted to announce that WebVR will ship on by default for all Windows users with an HTC VIVE or Oculus Rift headset in Firefox 55 (currently scheduled for August 8th). WebVR transforms Virtual Reality (VR) into a first-class experience on the web, giving it the infinite possibilities found in the openness and interoperability of the Web Platform. When coupled with WebGL to render 3D graphics, these APIs transform the browser into a platform that allows VR content to be published to the Web and instantaneously consumed from any capable VR device.

Databases

• NoSQL databases are one of those fun topics where people get all excited because it’s cool and new. But, they’re really not new, they’re different from SQL databases, and they have different use cases. NoSQL is not going to make world peace or give you your own private holodeck but, aside from those deficiencies, it is pretty cool.

• CrateDB 2.0 features clustering enhancements and SQL improvements. The enterprise edition adds authentication and authorization features for enhanced security, which are not provided in the open source version.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• With proprietary software pressured and giving ground to open source competition, however, the process for selling software has become more challenging. It is possible, of course, to monetize open source software directly. A variety of mechanisms have been tried, from dual licensing to support and service to open core. It is inefficient and significantly less profitable than selling proprietary software was, however. Even the best in the industry depended heavily on volume to make up for the difficulty in converting users of free software to paid customers. MySQL, for example, reportedly was at its peak able to convert one in a thousand users to a paid product. Combined with generally lower margins (though Pivotal might disagree) due to increased competition from other open source projects, and it’s not difficult to understand why it’s harder for commercial organizations to extract revenue relative to proprietary competitors. Red Hat, then, is the exception that proves the rule.

BSD

• A new STABLE update for TrueOS is available! Released on a six month schedule, STABLE updates represent a significant step forward for TrueOS (see our earlier post discussing this change). There is more extensive testing of new features and less experimental work in STABLE images, resulting in a more solid and usable experience.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Like other young professionals, I have worked many odd jobs over the years, slowly spinning my strange and broad range of experience into a neatly packaged service. Dabbling in open source editing and design software was once a hobby. Now, I use GIMP every day.

• When I think of the primary driving factors of how I have built my own personal brand, GIMP sits at the top of the list. In celebration of its 19th birthday, I have compiled a top 10 list of how GIMP has positively impacted my life.

• GDB 8.0 has been released as the newest feature release for this widely-used GNU Debugger.

Licensing/Legal

• There’s been a lot of confusion about the recent Artifex v. Hancom case, in which the court found that the GPL was an enforceable contract. I’m going to try to explain the whole thing in clear terms for the legal layman.

Programming/Development

• The short version is that Kotlin is a JVM-based language originally released in 2011 by the JetBrains (makers of IntelliJ) team from St Petersburg, Russia. Like Scala, an inspiration for the language, Kotlin is intended to improve on the Java foundations both syntactically and otherwise while trading on that platform’s ubiquity.

• Scala is a modern, object-functional, multi-paradigm, Java-based programming and scripting language that’s released under the BSD 3-Clause License. It blends functional and object-oriented programming models. Scala introduces several innovative language constructs. It improves on Java’s support for object-oriented programming by traits, which are stackable and cannot have constructor parameters. It also offers closures, a feature that dynamic languages like Python and Ruby have adopted.

• I started coding when I was about 9. I made embarrassing Geocities websites first, with sparkly fairy gifs that I am now incredibly grateful weren’t archived anywhere. I quickly got bored of that — thank God — and moved onto programming little Javascript clocks, finding my own hosting space and building a tiny online presence. I was able to do this because I became friends with a couple of women online who were slightly older and already doing the work I found fascinating. They were building cool personal sites in PHP, they were coding little site add-ons and offering them for free on their websites, they were offering free hosting space to women who wanted a subdomain. They were the reason I was able to progress so quickly, and maybe the reason I even progressed at all. They inspired me, they helped me and they supported the community.

Leftovers

• The newspaper stood by its reporter and went to press with the scoop. The ads were duly pulled but Mossberg got a raise and, in the process, learned two things. The first is that when you come up with a story that powerful corporations don’t want published, you need a publisher that is strong enough to stand up to bullying; the second is that corporations are always ruthless in the pursuit of their interests.

• A Harvard Business Review analysis shows the healthcare workforce has grown by 75 percent since 1990, but 95 percent of new hires aren’t doctors.

• In this post, I will try to make the case for null results. I’m up against Sanjay Srivastava’s gut feeling, so this better be convincing. Ok, here we go: Four reasons why we should love null results.

• The uptake for Microsoft’s long-suffering search engine, Bing, continues to be so dismal that Redmond has resorted to paying people to use it.

• The “loyalty scheme” offers points that can be exchanged for charity donations or music, games, devices and other stuff on the Microsoft Store. Users are awarded three points per search, up to 30 a day at Level 1.

• To get an idea of what they’re worth, 5,300 gets you a £5 Xbox digital gift card, which equates to 10 per cent off a current-gen game. That’s quite a grind – 176 days of furious Binging for pennies. But hit Level 2, by bashing Bing for 500 points per month, and you can reap 150 points a day.

• Under this scheme, the company will reward users for using Bing with points, which can later be exchanged for charity donations or freebies available on the Microsoft Store.

Health/Nutrition

• She added that the US said it carried out a missile strike in Syria for poisoning its own people, “when the people of Flint have been poisoned for over three years now. Now we’re being punished for not being able to pay the city for the poison.

• In the aftermath of the House vote, many people have asked: Why are politicians struggling to find consensus on the AHCA instead of pursuing universal coverage? After all, most advanced industrialized countries have universal health care.

• On May 8, the SC sought response from the Centre and four states on a PIL seeking ban on female genital cutting, which is mainly practised by Dawoodi Bohras, a Shia Muslim sect.

• Dr. Dena Nazar testified in a hearing before a Referee in Oakland County that she examined the 9-year-old girl at Kids Talk, a child advocacy center and found several physical indications that FGM had been performed. She concluded the scarring and fused tissue were not from any medically necessary procedure.

Security

• Researchers from the British security firm Secarma have predicted that, based on what happened with the WannaCry ransomware, the next NSA exploit to be weaponised could be one named ExplodingCan.

• Windows XP isn’t as vulnerable to the WannaCry ransomware as many assumed, according to a new report from Kryptos research. The company’s researchers found that XP computers hit with the most common WannaCry attack tended to simply crash without successfully installing or spreading the ransomware. If true, the result would undercut much of the early reporting on Windows XP’s role in spreading the globe-spanning ransomware.

• “A small portion” of Windows mobile users hoping the unexpected cool new update would start the month off the right way got burned yesterday. Microsoft “accidentally” released a development build of Windows 10 that can transform your phone into jelly if you try to install it.

• “We apologize for this inconvenience,” said Microsoft Windows and Devices Group software engineer Dona Sarkar in a blog post last night.

• The Social Insurance Institution (Kela) has been hit by a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that crashed some of its online services on Friday and Saturday. Kela says it will provide more information as it becomes available. The state social services agency suffered disruptions for two and a half hours on Friday evening and for about four hours on Saturday.

• Of course, preventing covert channels using ICMP/DNS etc. is a good idea in general. But often in modern networks today there are so many other ways of getting data in and out of a network, that using a ICMP tunnel is something the attackers often does not need to do.

• I’m in the process of designing my own centralized Let’s Encrypt solution.

Defence/Aggression

• Yusuf Akçayoğlu, the CEO of IGA Airports construction, said they undertook a difficult task, vowing that the new airport would also start a new age in terms of aviation as it was with the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul in 1453.

• The Islamist militant group had terrorised the north-eastern corner of Nigeria since a wave of attacks in 2009.

• As a sociologist, I am increasingly concerned that the tornado of media coverage that swirls around each such mass killing, and the acute interest in the identity and characteristics of the shooter — as well as the detailed and sensationalist reporting of the killer’s steps just before and during the shootings — may be creating a vicious cycle of copycat effects similar to those found in teen and other suicides.

• An investigation into the foreign funding of extremist Islamist groups may never be published, the Home Office has admitted.

• The inquiry commissioned by David Cameron, was launched as part of a deal with the Liberal Democrats in December 2015, in exchange for the party supporting the extension of British airstrikes against Isis into Syria.

• But although it was due to be published in the spring of 2016, it has not been completed and may never be made public due to its “sensitive” contents.

• An investigation into the foreign funding and support of jihadi groups that was authorised by David Cameron may never be published, the Home Office has admitted.

• The inquiry into revenue streams for extremist groups operating in the UK was commissioned by the former prime minister and is thought to focus on Saudi Arabia, which has repeatedly been highlighted by European leaders as a funding source for Islamist jihadis.

• The unsayable in Britain’s general election campaign is this. The causes of the Manchester atrocity, in which 22 mostly young people were murdered by a jihadist, are being suppressed to protect the secrets of British foreign policy.

• Critical questions – such as why the security service MI5 maintained terrorist “assets” in Manchester and why the government did not warn the public of the threat in their midst – remain unanswered, deflected by the promise of an internal “review”.

• The alleged suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, was part of an extremist group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, that thrived in Manchester and was cultivated and used by MI5 for more than 20 years.

• The superstar was performing in the city’s Etihad Stadium – the grounds of Manchester City Football Club – when he announced he was dedicating his song, Angels, to those who died in the attack.

• But halfway through one line in the song, he stopped singing and was visibly upset on the large screens projecting his face to thousands of fans.

• Cholera cases in Yemen could quadruple in the next month to 300,000, the regional director of Unicef said Friday, calling the spread of the disease in the war-ravaged country “incredibly dire.”

• Speaking by phone after visiting Yemen, the agency’s regional director, Geert Cappelaere, said he had never seen a cholera outbreak of that size in the country, which already is contending with the risk of a famine and a collapse of the health care system because of the war.

• Half the cholera cases in Yemen belong to children, Mr. Cappelaere said, and parents have little recourse because many hospitals and clinics are closed or lack supplies.

• UK opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn has called for some “difficult conversations” with Saudi Arabia, accusing it and other Gulf countries of promoting extremist ideologies.

• In a speech delivered at the northern town of Carlisle on Sunday, Corbyn, who is running for Prime Minister for the socialist Labour party in the upcoming election on Thursday, said that British values of tolerance must be maintained.

• Tensions have resurfaced in a sustained media onslaught that has again cast Qatar as a threat to stability and security in the Persian Gulf. At the heart of the latest argument among members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are incendiary comments attributed to Qatar’s Emir Tamim at a military graduation ceremony May 23.

• A report published on the Qatar News Agency (QNA) website later that day alleged that the emir stated that Qatar had a tense relationship with President Trump’s administration, described Hamas as “the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” and called Iran “a big power in the stabilization of the region.” Qatar TV later reported the emir’s alleged speech on its evening news program before the government communications office claimed — belatedly, on May 24 — that the QNA website had been hacked and false statements posted on it.

• In summary, the evidence so far shows that there are six inter-related aspects of blowback:

• Salman Abedi and his father were members of a Libyan dissident group – the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) – covertly supported by the UK to assassinate Qadafi in 1996. At this time, the LIFG was an affiliate of Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and LIFG leaders had various connections to this terror network. Members of the LIFG were facilitated by the British ‘security services’ to travel to Libya to fight Qadafi in 2011. Both Salman Abedi and his father, Ramadan, were among those who travelled to fight at this time (although there is no evidence that their travel was personally facilitated or encouraged by the security services). A large number of LIFG fighters in Libya in 2011 had earlier fought alongside the Islamic State of Iraq – the al-Qaeda entity which later established a presence in Syria and became the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). These fighters were among those recruited into the British-backed anti-Qadafi rebellion. UK covert action in Libya in 2011 included approval of and support to Qatar’s arming and backing of opposition forces, which included support to hardline Islamist groups; this fuelled jihadism in Libya. One of the groups armed/supported by Qatar in 2011 was the February 17th Martyrs Brigade which, some reports suggest, was the organisation which Ramadan Abedi joined in 2011 to fight Qadafi. Qatar’s arms supplies to Libya in 2011 also found their way to Islamist fighters in Syria, including groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and ISIS.

• The Prime Minister should resign over her alleged failure to prevent the London Bridge terror attack, a former senior aide to the last Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has said.

• Former Downing Street director of Strategy, Steve Hilton, on Monday claimed the Theresa May was “responsible” for the attack that left seven people dead and many more injured, and called for her to resign rather than seek re-election.

• Terrorist attacks are designed to instill fear and put entire cities under virtual siege. In Europe, the strategy seems to be working. Governments are responding to a string of high-profile terrorist attacks with billions of euros in spending to harden the Continent’s defenses. Buildings are being blast-proofed. Barricades have gone up on packed pedestrian promenades. It’s no longer unusual to see soldiers patrolling in the center of a city.

• The threat is real, but the response needs to be proportionate. We can be sure that terrorists will strike the Continent once again, as they did this past weekend in London. Now is not the time to be complacent. But it’s important to remember that the risk of dying in a terrorist attack is dramatically lower than just about anywhere else on the planet.

• As a killer of European residents, terrorism remains extremely rare. Even in 2016, the year of the Brussels bombings and truck attacks in Nice and Berlin, it ranked far behind sporting accidents, heat waves, traffic accidents and suicide, not to mention mass killers like heart disease, respiratory illness and cancer.

• Trump has not spoken out against that strategy, and in their call he praised Duterte for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”

• “Many countries have the problem, we have the problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that,” Trump said, according to the transcript.

• President Donald Trump appeared to endorse Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal campaign against suspected drug dealers, according to a transcript of an April phone conversation between the two.

• The attack in Manchester was devastating. But last week as I shed tears for the victims, my anger was growing, in particular against what is widely referred to as the Muslim anti-Prevent lobby, who have campaigned against Prevent but now coming out offering us their condolences.

• It’s high time we examined some of those groups — ask yourself whether such groups have hindered or helped in reducing the threat of terrorism in our country.

• The anti-Islamists are your allies, not the “moderate” Islamists.

• The ultimate inspiration for such people is Wahhabism, the puritanical, fanatical and regressive type of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia, whose ideology is close to that of al-Qaeda and Isis. This is an exclusive creed, intolerant of all who disagree with it such as secular liberals, members of other Muslim communities such as the Shia or women resisting their chattel-like status.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• WHAT makes a leader great? And has Australia ever had a truly great political leader?

• Apparently we have had 10 — including several you have probably never heard of.

• A former top political advisor has compiled a definitive list of the greatest political figures in Australian history and it is nothing if not surprising.

• John Adams has warned that “hyperpartisanship” and relentless attempts to seize power by the political class has sent Australia into a “national decline”.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• This is murder—even if Trump’s willful ignorance of climate science prevents him from seeing it as such.

• Fast forward a matter of months, and Moscow and Riyadh have become the main protagonists of the pact to cut output — agreed in December and extended last week — and are even discussing possible cooperation in their core Asian markets. “It is a new ‘axis of love’,” one senior Gulf official said of the relationship.

• The Dakota Access pipeline has already spilled 84 gallons of oil into the environment in South Dakota, and the pipeline is not even in operation. Although this was a relatively small spill, it nevertheless shows how vulnerable Iowa’s landscape is to spills from this pipeline.

Finance

• In recent discussions with people newly interested in the burgeoning token economy, one thing I’ve noticed is that the concept of cryptoeconomics is largely foreign to people. Cryptoeconomics is the fundamental catalyst for this whole movement, so I think that needs to change.

• The Swiss leaks and Panama papers open a window on the tax-dodger’s world

• Befitting a surprise election, the manifestos from the main parties contained surprises. Labour is shaking off decades of shyness about nationalisation and tax increases for the rich and for the first time in decades has a policy agenda that is not Tory-lite. The Conservatives, meanwhile, say they are rejecting “the cult of selfish individualism” and “belief in untrammelled free markets”, while adopting the quasi-Marxist idea of an energy price cap.

• Despite these significant shifts, myths about the economy refuse to go away and hamper a more productive debate. They concern how the government manages public finances – “tax and spend”, if you will.

• More than 1,300 academics from the European Union have left British universities in the past year, prompting concerns of a Brexit brain drain.

• There has been a 30% rise in departures of EU staff in just two years, according to data released by dozens of universities under the Freedom of Information Act.

• Among those universities most affected were Cambridge, which lost 184 staff in the past year, up 35% on 2014-15, and Edinburgh, which lost 96 EU staff, up from 62 in 2014-15. However, the figures do not take into account new staff arriving from the EU.

• Sunday 4 June 2017 00.05 BST

• On 8 June, voters will go to the polls for perhaps the most important UK general election since 1945. The importance arises in great part from profound differences in economic policy, reflecting different views of the nature and health of the British economy.

• The Conservative manifesto calls for continued austerity, which will tend to slow the economy at a crucial juncture, against the backdrop of Brexit negotiations. Their spending cuts have hurt the most vulnerable and failed to achieve their intended debt and deficit reduction targets.

• In contrast, Labour’s manifesto proposals are much better designed to strengthen and develop the economy and ensure that its benefits are more fairly shared and sustainable, as well as being fiscally responsible and based on sound estimations.

• We point to the proposed increases in investment in the future of the UK and its people, labour market policies geared to decrease inequality and to protect the lower paid and those in insecure work and fair and progressive changes in taxation.

• There is no future for the UK in a race to the bottom, which would only serve to increase social and economic inequality and further damage our social fabric. On the contrary, the UK urgently needs a government committed, as is Labour, to building an economy that really works “for the many, and not only the few”.

• In difficult times people get the opportunity to pause and reflect on just how good our public services are. From the police to our NHS teams of doctors, nurses and other frontline staff, we can and do rely on the fact that they are never found wanting. When it’s time to stand up and be counted – even when there are fewer to count – they turn up. The harsh reality is that the people who do these tough, sometimes thankless, jobs need to be able to count on us and whilst it’s been good to hear praise from politicians, I hope many take the time to reflect.

• Despite overwhelmingly being in support of leaving the European Union at the Brexit referendum, farmers are increasingly gloomy now that they are staring down the reality of what leaving will entail.

• In two years, confidence levels on the outlook for the next three years, as measured by the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), have plummeted to just above zero from a high of 19 points on the positive side, in the wake of the general election being called and Brexit being set.

• The NFU takes regular soundings of its members and measures their confidence on a scale of 0-100 positive and 0-100 negative points, with zero representing a neutral outlook.

• Data on farmers’ investment intentions adds to the gloom. One in five farmers said they were reducing their investment, while only half that number were planning to increase their investments in the next year, as a result of the EU referendum.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A labor activist who was investigating labor conditions at a Chinese factory that makes shoes for Ivanka Trump’s brand was arrested by police, and has now disappeared, say his wife and a China labor rights group. Two other activists are also missing, and are also presumed to have also been detained by Chinese authorities for nosing around in Ivanka’s supply chain.

• “The Tories have been conducting a stage-managed, arms-length campaign, and have treated the public with contempt,”

• The announcement by World Bank President Jim Young Kim came during a visit to Saudi Arabia by President Trump, who was accompanied by his wife, Melania, daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

• That Trump essentially used the Rose Garden podium yesterday to give a giant “Fuck you” to the rest of the world is bad enough. But that he paraphrased Hitler in so doing raises a stench that even the cretins who head the Republican Party ought to blanch at.

• Although the polls haven’t been very accurate in the U.K., the errors have usually run in the same direction: Conservatives tend to beat their polls there.

• Way too many Americans think about politics in the way of the Olympics — like it’s some big event that happens every few years, all but forgotten until the ad campaigns start up again. That’s unacceptable from an intellectual perspective and also a practical one.

• By treating the world simply as an arena for competitive advantage, Trump, McMaster and Cohn sever relationships, destroy reciprocity, erode trust and eviscerate the sense of sympathy, friendship and loyalty that all nations need when times get tough.

• A new poll suggests Labour could be on course for a shock win at the general election – but only if all those considered least likely to vote turn out to cast their ballot on Thursday.

• The Ipsos Mori survey shows the Conservatives have a five point lead of 45-40 – but it reveals a separate result for “all giving a voter intention”, putting Labour on 43 and the Tories on 40. The overall result is reached by stripping out the “don’t knows” and those historically unlikely to vote, who include black and ethnic minorities as well as the under 35s and the least well off older people.

• Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement was not really about the climate. And despite his overheated rhetoric about the “tremendous” and “draconian” burdens the deal would impose on the U.S. economy, Trump’s decision wasn’t really about that, either. America’s commitments under the Paris deal, like those of the other 194 cooperating nations, were voluntary. So those burdens were imaginary.

• No, Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from this carefully crafted multilateral compromise was a diplomatic and political slap: It was about extending a middle finger to the world, while reminding his base that he shares its resentments of fancy-pants elites and smarty-pants scientists and tree-hugging squishes who look down on real Americans who drill for oil and dig for coal. He was thrusting the United States into the role of global renegade, rejecting not only the scientific consensus about climate but the international consensus for action, joining only Syria and Nicaragua (which wanted an even greener deal) in refusing to help the community of nations address a planetary problem. Congress doesn’t seem willing to pay for Trump’s border wall—and Mexico certainly isn’t—so rejecting the Paris deal was an easier way to express his Fortress America themes without having to pass legislation.

• Congratulations on coming out of the Guardian closet and admitting that you have been a secret Jeremy Corbyn admirer all along. Your column, “I used to be a shy Corbynite but I’m over that now”, was excellent.

• Interestingly, I noticed Jonathan Freedland, the paper’s senior commentator and its Corbyn-denigrator-in-chief (he has some competition!) – and your boss, I suppose – wrote an oped a couple of days ago admitting he may have misjudged Corbyn. Maybe that was the moment you finally sparked up the courage to come clean about liking Corbyn.

• British politics has long been infamous for the personal nature of media attacks on leaders, but the hostility faced by Mr. Corbyn has been something else. It’s been driven in part by his steadfast refusal to play ball with the mainstream media — he doesn’t take press questions after every public speech, and often ignores questions out of the context of a planned interview, often preferring to respond to criticism on his own terms, through social media. He doesn’t wheel out his family for photo opportunities. He’s made a point of focussing on talking to people directly, as was the case with his first performance at Prime Minister’s Questions in 2015, when he relied on questions gathered from the public. An avowed socialist, he has no qualms talking about re-nationalising infrastructure or raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy, an approach shunned by Labour since the days of Tony Blair. He doesn’t even look like many think a politician should: his trademark beard came well before fuzz became fashionable while his casual, sometimes maverick, dressing style had some Conservatives seething when he first entered Parliament.

• The Democrats’ strategy could be summed up in two words: Donald Trump.

• He was, they asserted again and again, unacceptable, immoral and corrupt. Every focus group they assembled raised serious questions about his disparagement of various ethic groups, his brutish mannerisms, his business ties to foreign governments, his lack of qualifications. Almost every professional polling firm showed deep and mounting disapproval of his behavior—he was, they calculated, the most unpopular candidate in American history. Many in the Republican establishment criticized or outright denounced him. And yet, defying all the confident predictions right up until election night, Trump managed to eke out a shocking victory, relying particularly on a surge of “forgotten voters” in the Midwest.

• Jeremy Corbyn has torn into Theresa May’s security record in the wake of the London Bridge attack, accusing her of trying to “protect the public on the cheap”.

• In a speech in Carlisle, the Labour leader highlighted the 20,000 police officers cut while Ms May was Home Secretary and Prime Minister, and said the police “must get the resources they need”.

• Speaking less than 24 hours after the latest terror outrage following a short political truce, the Labour leader also said the aim of terrorists was “plainly to derail our democracy” – and that the election must not be postponed.

• After the Manchester Arena terror attack, Amber Rudd told the public: “We must not imply that this terrorist activity wouldn’t have taken place if there had been more policing … good counter-terrorism activity is because you have a close relationship between the policing and intelligence services.”

• This kind of rhetoric may seem persuasive and eloquent but, as so often with politicians trying to avoid blame, it is untrue. It is untrue because it misses a key and huge fundamental point to the protection of our national security: community policing intelligence.

• Police officers embedded in the community, there to help, there to listen, there to understand the community they serve. It is in the community where the best intelligence is learnt and gathered, from the people who notice a change in behaviour of their friends and neighbours, allowing early intervention and monitoring.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Mukaddes Alataş, a Kurdish human rights activist from Diyarbakir, was recently arrested for “being a member of a terror organization.” Her crime? She posted about the Armenian Genocide on social media and engaged in women’s rights activism.

• [...]

• Turkey not only denies the Armenian Genocide but also violently crushes any voice that dares tell the truth about it. Meanwhile, those who incite mass murder against dissident academics and peace activists are protected, promoted, and awarded.

• Multiple sites expressing criticism towards Islam were found to be blocked, possibly under Article 156(a) of Indonesia’s Criminal Code which prohibits blasphemy against religions. Even though Indonesia’s government announced that it would primarily be blocking sites hosting pornographic materials and gambling applications, we found numerous other sites to be blocked as well.

• Soti Triantafyllou is set to appear in court on July 21 on charges of using racist language in an article that included a quote, which she attributed to 13th-century Venetian traveler Marco Polo, that said, “The militant Muslim is the person who beheads the infidel, while the moderate Muslim holds the feet of the victim.”

• Bahrain on Sunday suspended the country’s only independent newspaper indefinitely over a column that insulted a “sisterly Arab country”, state news agency BNA reported, the second time the publication has been banned this year.

• A Bahrain tribunal has ordered the dissolution of the country’s top opposition group in the country, in the context of an increasingly marked campaign launched by the Sunni authorities against the Shiite component (majority) of the population.

• Last month, a government advisory body passed a constitutional amendment which means civilians suspected of attacking security forces can be tried in military courts.

• A Thai law student arrested for sharing an article about the country’s new king that was posted on Facebook is this year’s winner of South Korea’s most prestigious human rights award.

• A year into the agreement, the European Commission said that Facebook and YouTube, which is owned by Google, have both managed to remove 66% of reported hate speech.

• Communist-run Cuba held an open-air covers concert in a Havana park on Thursday, celebrating 50 years since the release of the band’s landmark album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

• The government once frowned upon the Beatles as a decadent Western influence.

• Beatlemania has flourished belatedly on the Caribbean island, where authorities in the 1960s and 1970s considered Beatles songs “ideological diversionism.”

• Citizens of a free society should never take their freedom for granted. Unless they remain vigilant and are prepared to resist the political and corporate forces that erode the freedoms of speech and expression, liberty will inevitably recede.

• In a free society, writers are sentinels of liberty. They communicate ideas, propose theories, challenge orthodoxy, and pass the story of the nation from one generation to the next.

• A controversy swirling around Ottawa author Lowell Green’s latest non-fiction book is yet another skirmish in the struggle against censorship in Canada. The battle pits the scrappy former radio broadcaster against the forces of political correctness and corporate power.

• Overshadowed by Syria and Iraq, the war in Yemen has long struggled to compete for media attention. But it is also bedevilled by a lack of reliable information both for news organisations trying to cover the humanitarian crises and for aid agencies trying to access and help those most in need. And now, just as a cholera epidemic threatens to spiral out of control, IRIN has learnt that the nominal government of Yemen and its Saudi Arabian-led backers have moved to prevent journalists and human rights workers from travelling on UN chartered flights to the capital, further reducing coverage and access at a critical moment.

• The Film Censorship Board (LPF) has directed Measat Broadcast Network Systems Sdn Bhd (Astro) to take immediate action to review and censor the contents in the drama series The Magnificent Century – which allegedly contains scenes that are not suitable for the Muslim community.

• Iranian authorities have granted a license to publish a Kurdish novel that focuses on the role of the father figure in patriarchal society after it was partially censored for years.

• The Fence and My Father’s Dogs by renowned Kurdish author Sherzad Hassan was published in Kurdish in the early 1990s.

• It was then translated into Farsi.

• Even with the First Amendment guaranteeing the right to freedom of expression, it’s possible to cross a line – and that’s what comedian Kathy Griffin did with a photo of her holding a bloody, decapitated head representing President Donald Trump.

• As the kerfuffle continues to simmer on social media, fans and foes of the president are squaring off. Outraged Trump supporters insist Griffin broke the law, and that the Secret Service should investigate her for “threatening” the president. And ironically, many of the folks making the loudest noise are simultaneously demanding a halt to the probe into possible Russian interference with the U.S. election process.

Privacy/Surveillance

• We can feel pretty certain that the London Bridge attackers did the following things: owned smartphones; and used Google, YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp. That isn’t because owning those things and using those services marks you out as a terrorist: it’s because it marks you out as someone living in the west in the 21st century.

• The problem, as those companies (actually only two: Google owns YouTube, and Facebook owns WhatsApp) are discovering, is that politicians aren’t too picky about the distinction. Speaking outside 10 Downing St this morning, Theresa May was much more aggressive in her tone than previously. The London Bridge attack had its roots in Islamic extremism, she observed: “We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed. Yet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies that provide internet-based services, provide.” She continued: “We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements that regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremism and terrorism planning.”

• Aaron Swartz once said, “It’s no longer OK not to understand how the Internet works.”

• He was talking to law-makers, policy-makers and power-brokers, people who were, at best, half-smart about technology — just smart enough to understand that in a connected world, every problem society has involves computers, and just stupid enough to demand that computers be altered to solve those problems.

• Paging Theresa May.

• Theresa May says that last night’s London terror attacks mean that the internet cannot be allowed to provide a “safe space” for terrorists and therefore working cryptography must be banned in the UK.

• On December 23, 2016, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017. This in itself is nothing extraordinary. What came as a shock was the news that US Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) would be elevated to the unified command plan (UCP) as the fourth functional combatant command, pending review of CYBERCOM’s efficacy by the Pentagon of course. The National Defense Authorization Act allocates $75 million a year to CYBERCOM for upkeep of current facilities, training of personnel, acquisition of hardware, and development and deployment of new programs.

• Your mobile phone can open you to attack as well. Knowing that, DeMott was resistant at first to getting a smartphone. “I didn’t get the iPhone 1 or 2,” he says. “My first iPhone was like the 4 or something. I did originally wait on that.”

• Former National Security Agency senior executive and whistleblower Thomas Drake revealed himself this week as the source for a lawsuit alleging the NSA conducted “blanket, indiscriminate surveillance” of Salt Lake City during the 2002 Winter Olympics.

• In a declaration filed in discovery in the case in U.S. district court in Utah, Drake asserted the NSA, in coordination with the FBI, scooped up and stored the content of emails and text messages sent and received by anyone in the city and Olympic venues – including American citizens.

• A former top spy agency official who was the target of a government leak investigation says the National Security Agency conducted blanket surveillance in Salt Lake City during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah, according to court documents.

• Ex-NSA official Thomas Drake wrote in a declaration released Friday that the NSA collected and stored virtually all electronic communications going into or out of the Salt Lake City area, including the contents of emails and text messages.

• The declaration by Thomas A. Drake contradicts one given earlier this year by the former director of the NSA, Michael Hayden, that said neither the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP), nor any other NSA intelligence-gathering activity, was involved in indiscriminate and wholesale surveillance in Salt Lake City or other Olympic venues during the 2002 Winter Games.

• In other words, “the next generation of Skype” (for realsies) has gone from sensible business tool to looking like the contents of a child’s stomach after a birthday party where it had gorged on dolly mixtures and cake and then vomited it all over the back of daddy’s Volvo on the way home.

• Other writers may be less kind.

• The code said, “Talk is a messaging app where you fully control the contacts and your child uses the Talk app to chat with you in Messenger.”

• In the U.K., a parliamentary committee report published last month alleged that social media firms have prioritized profit over user safety by continuing to host unlawful content. The report also called for “meaningful fines” if the companies do not quickly improve.

• And to be honest, I am more concerned with my data in the hands of unaccountable corporate behemoths, than with government.

• Bullshit expressed as data, on the other hand, is relatively new outside scientific circles. Multivariate graphs didn’t begin to appear in the popular press until the nineteen-eighties, and only in the past decade, as smartphones and other information-gathering devices have accelerated the accumulation of Big Data, have complex visualizations been routinely presented to the general public. While data can be used to tell remarkably deep and memorable stories, Bergstrom told me, its apparent sophistication and precision can effectively disguise a great deal of bullshit.

• British Prime Minister Theresa May has used Saturday’s terrorist attack to again push for a ban on encryption.

• It’s a conviction major tech platforms are listening to closely, especially since Mundt’s agency is in the midst of a high-profile investigation into whether Facebook abused its dominance as a social network by forcing customers to agree to unfair terms about the way the company uses their data. Mundt’s words may have sounded mundane, but his implication was anything but: the world’s foremost antitrust regulators were publicly discussing whether they should intervene if a transaction weakens consumer privacy protections, a pervasive concern in the era of big data.

• Will Obama’s legacy come to be, as Snowden seems to suggest, that he normalized police state surveillance?

Civil Rights/Policing

• Katarzyna Bialasiewicz | DreamstimeKatarzyna Bialasiewicz | DreamstimeOnce again, cops are arguing that they need to be allowed to have sex with suspects in order to investigate prostitution allegations. And once again, lawmakers and journalists are acting like exploitation and assault of sex workers by law enforcement is a rare occurrence, rather than a national epidemic.

• “He was shot twice in the legs first. [He fell] and his shooter got over him and shot him three times in the chest. That’s a murder.”

• Badawi was imprisoned June 17, 2012, for having asked on his blog for more tolerance toward non-Muslims and a greater openness of mind on the part of Saudi Arabia.

• When: Friday 16 June, 9-10am Where: Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Embassy, 16 Curzon St, Mayfair, London W1J 5HP (Map)

• Sahdev married to Hasan in 2014. The athlete, 23, alleged that she was tortured to embrace Islam. She had earlier claimed that Ranjit had concealed his religion before marriage.

• Jackie Stewart Gravois, an attorney with the Harris County Public Defender’s Office, added: “That’s going to be up to the discretion of the prosecutor.”

• Saudi Arabia is sending Wahhabi preachers to Kosovo in a bid to further radicalize the local population, the German government said on Wednesday.

• People are dying right now for the sin of apostasy just as they have been for the past 1400 years. Indeed, a new report has just highlighted what a very real problem this is, and how it is exclusively an Islamic problem. The annual Freedom of Thought report published by the International Humanist and Ethical Union found that 13 nations punish apostasy with the death penalty.

• The 13 countries are all Islamic: Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

• But the event could be overshadowed by a surprise attendee: Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court and shunned by the United States for the past decade.

• Islam now enjoys the same kind of moral protection from blasphemy and ridicule that Christianity once (wrongly) enjoyed. All last week, for example, I received furious emails and messages in response to two articles I wrote about the Manchester attack, telling me I was wrong to defend the use of the phrase ‘Islamist extremism’.

• If he is elected, Dr. Mohebi said, there will be no more killings. “We should have special parks for dogs instead, like we have special women-only parks for women who want to go running without their Islamic scarves,” he said.

• Yep. A recent two-year survey by the Tahirih Justice Center found 3,000 known and suspected cases of forced marriage in the United States during that time period alone.

• He also warned that the process is already underway: in Europe, Christian women are being raped and murdered by Muslims, and the men are unable to protect them. The rapists are sentenced to one-year probation maximum.

• “This goes on in today’s Europe, and we are next in line,” Father Dmitri cautioned.

• During her tenure, she began to suspect that girls in the area were facing systematic sexual abuse from a group of older Asian {sic} men. From 2004 onwards, Rowbotham made more than 100 referrals to the police and social services, but the girls too often found themselves dismissed as unreliable witnesses.

• Emma told Katie that she reported at the age of 13 that she had been raped, but authorities chose to do nothing – and told her not to mention the ethnicity of the assailants.

• The conviction and jailing of Jakarta governor Basuki Purnama for blasphemy caps a rising trend of Islamic intolerance

• “It’s clear: jihad and Islamization are not subjects that Icelandic politicians and media opinion-makers want Icelanders to discuss. That’s all the more reason why it must be discussed,” he added.

• Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s guards beat up protesters at the Turkish embassy in Washington after meeting with Trump

• On Monday police in Khartoum arrested Al-dosogy two days after he requested a judge to allow him to change his religion to atheism, a move that was tantamount to renouncing his faith.

• [...]

• “When we fail to condemn evil, when we see it. It persists forever,” Nduka Uzuh, also tweeted.

• The Freethinker interviews Maryam Namazie and Marieme Helie Lucas ahead of the International Conference on Freedom of Conscience and Expression in the 21 Century scheduled to take place in London between July 22 and 24, 2017.

• The West Papua National Committee (KNPB) reports that Saverius Mokai Gebse and Reimundus Ndiken were both arrested on 5th May 2017 for signing the Global Petition for an Internationally Supervised Vote in West Papua.

• Eleven members signed the International Parliamentarians’ declaration, calling for a self-determination vote in Papua.

• “For the last couple of years my husband had been harassing me in order to get rid of me as I gave birth to two daughters. Recently, I came to know that he was having illicit relationship with a woman whom he wanted marry. Unable to handle torture at my husband’s hands, when I left home to commit suicide, policemen rescued me and took me back home.”

• “After returning home, my husband again started harassing me, but I tried to make myself strong for the sake of two daughters. On Saturday, when I asked him to give Rs 20 to buy some edible items for two girls, he got infuriated and slapped me. Later, when I confronted him, he gave me triple talaq and pushed me out of home,” she said.

• A police force is to be investigated after officers refused to attend when a London family were allegedly pelted with stones by a mob of youths yelling “Jews”.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• On the first anniversary of the adoption of the EU regulation on the Open Internet which governs the aspects of Net neutrality, and as the ARCEP (French Telco regulator) publishes its first report on the state of the Internet, we paint a dark picture of its implementation in France and within the EU.

• While the ARCEP report reveals some positive points, it also draws too elegiac an assessment, leaving in the dark everything that is not progressing. La Quadrature thus wishes to draw its own —darker— assessment of the state of Net neutrality, and more broadly, of the role of technical intermediaries in exercizing fundamental freedoms in the digital environment.

• If you go to CNN.com today, the front page of their website will take up just shy of 100 MB of RAM while it is loaded. By comparison, the same page from the year 2000 takes literally 1/10th that (thanks Archive.org).

• CPU usage is even worse. The idle CNN.com from the year 2000 just sits there. Happily eating just about 0% of even the slowest CPUs. Today’s version gobbles up a good 10% of the i7 sitting in front of me—while sitting idle. For a single page. Displaying a few news headlines.

• As the EU Council, the European Parliament and the European Commission enter the dark rooms of trialogues on the WIFI4EU draft regulation, European community networks and the open-wifi community wanted to remind them of the importance of the inclusion of all actors in the development of local connectivity.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Netflix offers a great alternative to piracy, and for dozens of millions of people it’s a favorite pastime. However, recent claims that the company is winning the war on piracy may be a bit overstated. In fact, the rapid rise of streaming piracy poses a grave threat, as millions of people regularly watch Netflix content through unofficial sites and apps.

• Researchers from three leading British institutions are using BitTorrent to share over 150 GB of unique high-resolution brain scans of unborn babies with colleagues worldwide. Using the popular file-sharing protocol is a “no-brainer,” according to a Research Associate, who says that dealing with people’s misconceptions toward torrents was one of the biggest challenges.

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