● 06.12.17

● Links 12/6/2017: Linux 4.12RC5, KDE Frameworks 5.35.0, Tanglu 4

Posted in News Roundup at 4:05 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Meet the Slimbook Pro, the latest Linux laptop from hardware company Slimbook. It has an aluminium body, a HiDPI display and enough room for 2 hard drives.

Server

• When NASA first started to evaluate building its Nebula cloud compute project, it evaluated dozens of languages, eventually settling on Python 2.6. In 2010, NASA joined with Rackspace to create the OpenStack project, with Nebula becoming the Nova compute project.

• Carbon is the sixth major release from OpenDaylight and follows the Boron release that debuted in September 2016. OpenDaylight first started in April 2013 as Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, with the goal of building an open SDN platform.

• Phil Robb, Interim Executive Director for OpenDaylight told EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet that from the beginning, OpenDaylight was designed to be a general-purpose development platform for building programmable networks He noted that early releases of OpenDaylight put the core platform in place.

• For cloud services vendor Rackspace, going private has been a very positive experience, according to CTO John Engates. In a video interview with eWEEK, Engates details how becoming privately owned has helped the company advance its cloud initiatives.

• In August 2016, Rackspace announced that it was going private in a $4.3 billion deal led by Apollo Global Management. Rackspace delivers both public and private OpenStack cloud services and also provides managed support offerings for other cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS).

• Streaming video provider Toons.TV — owned by Finnish enterprise Rovio Entertainment and most famous for its Angry Birds cartoon series — has amassed some 8.5 billion streaming views in the past four years. Marcia Villalba, Full Stack Developer at Rovio Entertainment spoke at the recent Serverlessconf conference in Austin to discuss how her team reoriented towards a serverless approach to meet these challenges and to speed up their backend systems.

Kernel Space

• Oh well, the “all the rc’s have been nice and small this release around” thing definitely didn’t continue all the way.

• It’s not like rc5 is *huge*, but it definitely isn’t the nice and small one I was hoping for. There’s nothing in partiocular that looks very worrisome, and it may well just be random timing – the rc sizes do fluctuate a lot depending on just which subsystem gets synced up that particular rc, and we may just have hit that “everybody happened to sync up this week” case.

• Anyway, rc5 is our biggest rc this release (obviously not counting rc1, which contains all of the the merge window). And it definitely does have stuff all over: we’ve got driver updates (gpu, networking, scsi, block layer and sound are the biggest, but there’s stuff all over), we’ve got arch updates (arm[64], powerpc, sparc, x86), and we’ve got filesystems (btrfs, ext4, and unusually several ufs fixes thanks to recent bug reporting activity).

• But we _also_ have various documentation yupdates, generic networking, some key handling fixes, and perf and kvm fixes.

• So it really isn’t one thing, it’s just a lot of different small stuff.

• And it’s not like it’s actually unreasonably big, it mainly stands out because the 4.12 release cycle so far has been fairly calm.

• Anyway, I really hope this was just a random timing fluke. Partly I hope that because of just general wishes for releases to calm down, but in particular I will be traveling the next week+, and while I’ll have internet and my trusty laptop, I was hoping that things would be calm while I’m off gallivanting around the world.

• Of course, maybe it will be extra calm exactly _because_ people got their patches out of the way. I can hope.

• Anyway, go out and test,

• Linus

• Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 4.12-rc5 kernel as the fifth weekly test candidate for what will become Linux 4.12 stable later this month.

• Being Sunday evening and all that, Linus Torvalds just made its regular announcement a few moments ago informing the community about the release of the fifth RC (Release Candidate) milestone of the upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel series.

• Linux kernel 4.12 RC5 does not follow in the footsteps of last week’s Release Candidate 4 milestone, nor any of the other previous RCs and appears to a slightly bigger patch that adds numerous updated drivers, especially GPU, SCSI, networking, sound, and block layer ones, various improvements for the ARM, ARM64 (AArch64), x86, SPARC and PPC (PowerPC) hadware architectures, and updates to the Btrfs, EXT4 and UFS filesystems.

• Heather Kirksey leads the OPNFV community that is changing the way the telecoms industry innovates and the way it works. She talks to Alan Burkitt-Gray

Graphics Stack

• While Qt 5.10 has queued initial Vulkan support, it isn’t too much right now beyond some helpers and allowing Vulkan inside a QWindow as well as a new QVulkanWindow sub-class. I.e. Vulkan isn’t being used to render Qt, but there is a Vulkan renderer now in-development for Qt 3D.

• The latest Mesa 17.2-dev code has initial support for Intel’s next-generation Cannonlake hardware.

Applications

• SDL2 now has initial support for the JACK Audio Connection Kit sound server.

• SDL2 is now capable of targeting the multi-platform JACK sound server. It’s a bit surprising JACK support for SDL has taken so long, but now it’s there.

• Just weeks after the Opus 1.2 beta, the release candidate for this forthcoming audio codec update / library has been released.

• Libopus 1.2-rc1 is now available with additional fixes and improvements over the previous work in the 1.2 series, that included some ARM optimizations, low-bit-rate quality tuning, and more.

• I am very happy to report that the Nikita Noark 5 core project tagged its second release today. The free software solution is an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark 5 used by government offices in Norway.

• Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from versions 141 and 142.

• Twitter is arguably the biggest social media network after Facebook and that comes to us as no surprise since it is clear how it appeals to many users as not just a social site for exchanging photos but also as one to that helps one stay updated with online news and connected to various networking services.

• The IMAGE team of the research laboratory GREYC in Caen/France is pleased to announce the release of a new major version (numbered 2.0) of its project G’MIC: a generic, extensible, and open source framework for image processing. Here, we present the main advances made in the software since our last article. The new features presented here include the work carried out over the last twelve months (versions 2.0.0 and 1.7.x, for x varying from 2 to 9).

• I had to go check but it has been over 3 years since the last psmisc release back in February 2014. I really didn’t think it had been that long ago. Anyhow, with no further delay, psmisc version 23.0 has been released today!

• This release is just a few feature update and minor bug fixes. The changelog lists them all, but these are the highlights.

• Inkscape is the typical go-to vector graphic creation tool for Linux users, and even though it hasn’t been too long since I wrote on an alternative, Vectr, but today I will bring you yet another more feature-rich alternative that I am sure you will like.

• Gravit is a free vector graphic creation tool developed with a more intuitive workflow to suit the needs of both beginner, designers and professionals alike. The company is of the notion that “anyone can make designs for free, anywhere and anytime”.

• One of the critical areas under Linux performance monitoring has to be CPU usage and system load. There are several Linux performance monitoring tools to keep an eye on how things are unfolding on a system.

• During last weeks I was finally able to push out some releases of Gammu and related tools. Those were mostly waiting for quite some time in Git, but still will be useful for many users.

• [...]

• Wammu release will follow shortly in next days, the most important change there being license change to GPLv3 or later.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The self-described score attack type game involves controlling an entity that absorbs universes to grow.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The Xfce desktop has integrated hybrid sleep support.

• Hybrid sleep writes the hibernation image to swap space and then suspends to RAM (S3 mode), allowing fast resume and ensuring you won’t lose your data even if you run out of battery or otherwise lose power.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Frameworks are 70 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the Frameworks 5.0 release announcement.

• This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

• The KDE Neon development team is announcing the availability of the recently released Qt 5.9 open-source and cross-platform application framework in the testing repositories of the KDE Neon Developer Unstable Edition operating system.

• Because of the issues between KDE Plasma’s KWin window manager and the next-generation Wayland display server that the KDE Neon devs encounter with the Qt 5.8 release of the widely-used application framework, they decided to jump straight to version 5.9, which they say it’s more promising.

• The latest version of Indicator KDE Connect lets you send files to multiple Android devices, delete or sync your Google Contacts, and more.

• An unofficial Latte Dock PPA finally provides Ubuntu users with an easy way to install Latte Dock and run it on the Plasma desktop.

• A blue light filter may soon come built-in to the KDE Plasma desktop. Developers have been working on adding color correction features to the KWin (the KDE window manager/compositor) in Wayland.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• If Gnome 3 was a person, it would be a generic mannequin in a clothing store, with no visible eyes or a belly button. Those come as extensions, but you can only have eyes fully closed, mind. Welcome to another article that tries to make Gnome 3 more palatable to normal people.

• Over the years, I’ve gone from total scorn to mild disdain and some modest fun when it comes to this particular desktop environment, thank Fedora for that, but it still fails in so many simple, trivial areas I sometimes have to listen to Aqua’s Barbie Girl for a few hours on constant loop in order to keep myself from committing acts of violence. Let us tweak.

• Given the success of this pattern of project-related updates in Gtk, maybe we can try to do this for Builder too. We’ve had lots of updates this past week in Builder and related projects.

• Focusli is a GNOME extension that lets you play and layer nature sounds in the background, which may help you study better and relax.

• Arc is a new applications menu for GNOME Shell. It replaces the ‘Activities’ button with a simple, two-panel app menu and search box.

• Version 2.0 is the next major release of GNOME’s Tracker software for file meta-data indexing and searching.

• Tracker is usually deemed a “metadata indexer”, although that’s just half the truth. Even though Tracker could be essentially considered that in its very early days, it made a bold move back in 0.7.x to using Sparql as the interface to store and retrieve this metadata, where both the indexers and the applications using this metadata talk the same language.

• When United GNOME theme first came out I didn’t write about it because in as much as it was inspired by a concept of Ubuntu 18.04’s now-scrapped Unity 8 desktop, it was more buggy than I could stand.

• Thanks to a recent update, the theme has come to see many changes and UI tweaks which overall make it better than at its initial release. Now, I can tell you about it.

Distributions

• ​We all of us have the hard disk that stores our heart pictures, videos, famous games, Eminem songs and many things. Most of all hard disk serves us a way to store orcreate a backup. But what are you going to do if just want the exact clone of your hard disks? How are you going to unhide all hidden files? What if your computer goes dead and you want to backup everything before going for hard way repair? This is time Clonezilla comes in the game.

New Releases

• KXStudio, an open-source, free, user-friendly and easy-to-use GNU/Linux distribution optimized for professional audio production, has been updated to version 14.04.5, based on Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS (Trusty Tahr).

• KXStudio 14.04.5 is a small bugfix update or ISO snapshot if you want to call it that, designed only to provide those who want to deploy the Linux-based operating system on new computers with a fresh installation medium that contains up-to-date applications and plugins.

• The developers of the Debian-based Robolinux distro are happy to announce the release and immediate availability of Robolinux 8.8.1 Xfce, LXDE, Cinnamon, and MATE editions.

• Based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux 8.8 “Jessie” operating system series, Robolinux 8.8.1 is here packed with over 200 updated components and security patches that have been released through the Debian Stable software repositories during the past several months.

• Robolinux 8.8.1 is powered by Debian Jessie’s latest Linux 3.16 kernel, includes the Mozilla Firefox 53.0 web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird 45.6.0 email and news client applications, and comes with more than 120 custom built wireless, graphics and printer drivers.

• The development team behind the Debian-based antiX MX GNU/Linux distribution announced the immediate availability for download of the first point release of the antiX MX-16 “Metamorphosis” series.

• The antiX MX-16 “Metamorphosis” operating system series launched last year in mid-December based on the Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 “Jessie” distribution, but without the systemd init system. This release defaults to sysVinit init system, and it’s using a highly customized, lightweight Xfce 4.12.2 desktop environment.

• This release took exceptionally long to complete, and we apologize for that. Tanglu 4 has been ready and sitting in the pipeline for months, but we did not have enough manpower to handle the last mile of the release process, especially due to our project leader being busy with work on another Debian derivative for Purism, a company that builds security-focused Linux-based computers.

• Due to that experience with the Dasyatis release, we will make a couple of changes to how we develop Tanglu. No final decision has been made on any of the changes yet, but it looks like we will transform Tanglu into having one continuously updated rolling-release branch where fresh new stuff is added and the main development happens, and one stable release tracking the last respective Debian stable release. That way, the distribution will become much easier to maintain for a small team (a rolling-release branch requires less manpower to maintain). By aligning our stable releases with Debian, we will also greatly reduce the maintenance cost of stable releases by benefiting from Debian’s security support. Of course, those stable releases will have all the Tanglu modifications, and will likely be directly branched off the rolling release track. This means that there will be one stable Tanglu release per stable Debian release, and a continuously updated rolling Tanglu release for people who like to have the latest and greatest software and maybe participate in Tanglu development.

Gentoo Family

• Porteus Solutions’ Tomasz Jokiel is pleased to announce the release of a new maintenance update for the Gentoo-based Porteus Kiosk operating system designed for deployment on public access computers.

• Powered by a kernel from the long-term supported Linux 4.9 branch, specifically version 4.9.30, Porteus Kiosk 4.4.0 launches two and a half months after the previous point release in the 4.x series of the kiosk operating system with the Google Chrome 58.0.3029.110 and Mozilla Firefox 52.1.2 ESR web browsers.

• Gentoo’s Yury German is informing the community of the Linux-based operating system via a mailing list announcement that the Gentoo security team will no longer support the SPARC architecture.

• The previous built in puppet portage package provider (I’m just going to shorten it to PPPP) only supported very simplistic package interactions. Mainly package name (with slot) install and uninstall. This has proven fairly limiting, if you want to install a specific version of a package and lock it down you were forced to call out to exec or editing package.{mask,unmask,keywords} files.

Arch Family

• A few years ago I acquired an HP Chromebook 11, which I talked about in an article on this site at that time. I talked about how I ran Linux software side-by-side with Chrome OS thanks to the likes of Crouton. Since then, the machine has had some basic use, and rather ironically, used as an offline machine, where I would use it for typing purposes mostly, being that the machine has a lovely keyboard and is very battery efficient. But I recently felt it was time to ditch Papa Google’s influence on the machine and get rid of Chrome OS – enter Arch Linux ARM.

• Back when I had my first look at the machine and installed Crouton, it seemed that installing Linux properly to the machine (eg. completely replace Chrome OS) didn’t seem feasible for a machine with an ARM processor such as the HP Chromebook 11. Thankfully, I was either wrong back then or perhaps things have simply improved the last couple of years, as installing a proper Linux distro on one of these little machines and blowing away Google’s product is quite easy to do. Now the amount of GNU/Linux distributions that properly support this particular machine are not plentiful, being an ARM machine with very particular hardware and firmware, but thankfully Arch Linux ARM (the ARM port of Arch Linux) does. Or more specifically, it supports the Samsung Chromebook 11, which seems to be the exact same machine, just with different branding.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• The GNOME shell team around Florian Müllner has a some more nice things in the pipeline for GNOME 3.26 that are not quite ready for a screen cast yet. A great way to learn about them is to come to GUADEC in Manchester, July 27 – August 3. See you there!

Debian Family

• The development team behind the Parrot Security OS ethical hacking and security-oriented GNU/Linux distribution announced that they are considering a possible switch from Debian GNU/Linux to Devuan GNU/Linux as the base of the OS.

• The surprising announcement came was posted a couple of days ago on Twitter, and it reads “Our release team is evaluating a possible migration of our project from Debian to Devuan.” A few users reacted negatively to the idea of moving the entire operating system from Debian to Devuan, a fork of the former, but without using systemd.

• As some of you already know we do need a replacement for alioth.debian.org. It is based on wheezy and a heavily modified version of Fusionforge. Unfortunately I am the last admin left for alioth and I am not really familiar with fusionforge. After some chatting with a bunch of people we decided that we should replace alioth with a stripped down version of new services.

• Well, I made this map using data from http://db.debian.org. As an example, currently, there are 27 Brazilian DDs. However, there are 23 DDs living in Brazil.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• It’s now been nearly two months since Canonical announced they were abandoning their Unity 8 / Ubuntu Phone dreams and about the same amount of time since the forks started around Unity 8, Mir, and Ubuntu Touch itself.

• This newsletter is to provide a status update from the Ubuntu Kernel Team. There will also be highlights provided for any interesting subjects the team may be working on.

• This week we review the Tuxedo Infinitybook Pro 13, use Atom to write Sinclair BASIC and go to a Cory Doctorow book signing. We explain how you can protect your bits with Lantern and go over your feedback.

• The MAAS team is happy to announce the introduction of development summaries. We hope this helps to keep our community engaged and informed about the work the team is doing. We’ll cover important announcements, work-in-progress for the next release of MAAS, and bugs fixed in released MAAS versions.

• I’ve been working to implement file system benchmarking as part of the test process that the kernel team applies to every kernel update. These are intended to help us spot performance issues. The following announcement I just sent to the Ubuntu kernel mailing list covers the specifics:

Devices/Embedded

• Axiomtek’s 3.5-inch, extended temp “CAPA312” SBC offers Apollo Lake SoCs, dual GbE ports, dual mini-PCIe slots, SATA and HDMI ports, and four USB 3.0 ports.

• Aaeon’s “Nano-002N” mini-PC runs Fedora or Windows on Intel’s dual-core Skylake-U CPUs, and offers dual HDMI and GbE ports, 4x USB 3.0, and M.2 expansion.

Phones

Tizen

Android

• Arne Exton is informing Softpedia about the availability of a new build of his commercial RaspAnd Android-based operating system for embedded devices, such as Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi 2.

• Still based on Google’s Android 7.1.2 “Nougat” mobile operating system, RaspAnd Nougat 7.1.2 Build 170605 is here to replace last month’s RaspAnd Nougat 7.1.2 Build 170519 release by upgrading Kodi Media Center to version 17.3, which is the latest in the series patching a nasty vulnerability known as the “subtitle hack.”

• RaspAnd Nougat 7.1.2 Build 170605 also comes pre-installed with various updated apps, among which we can mention Spotify TV 1.2.0, Rotation Control Pro 1.1.2, Google Play Games 3.9.08, Clash of Clans 9.24.9, Gmail 7.4.23, and Aptoide TV 3.2.1. The GAPPS package is also included to give users access to Google’s services.

• The third Android O Developer Preview hit the Internet yesterday, giving us just one more version before Android O hits final release. While Google’s new OS seems to be mostly in a finished state, there are a few new additions to this third developer preview that are worth mentioning.

Free Software/Open Source

• Google’s newest open-source project is called Lullaby.

• For those following the progress on Purism’s new inventory of Librem 13 v2 and 15 laptops shipping with Coreboot, the Librem 13 v2 laptop code is now in upstream Coreboot.

• Over the past several months it’s become increasingly clear that copyright holders, authorities, and sundry third parties intend to do something about the dramatic rise of infringing modified Kodi setups. This week, after several addons including the popular Phoenix went down, accusatory fingers were pointed all around. So who is really to blame for the Kodi crackdown?

• Kodi is free, open-source software built specifically for entertainment purposes. It lets you play videos, music, podcasts and other digital media files from the internet, local storage or a home network.

Events

Web Browsers

Chrome

• With Chrome 59′s stable release this week, Google’s attention is shifting to Chrome 60 that is currently in beta and then Chrome 61 that is in development.

Mozilla

• On April 17, Mozilla and Stanford Law held a panel to discuss the role of the First Amendment in the patent law, and specifically the impact on the patent eligibility of software and genes sequences.

• Joining me on the panel were Dan Burk, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law; Sandra Park, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project; and Wendy Seltzer, strategy lead and policy counsel at the World Wide Web Consortium, as well as moderator Elvin Lee, Mozilla’s Product and Commercial Counsel.

Databases

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• There’s also one more side effect of reading code daily – diffs. It’s easy to spot inconsistencies, outdated code or an incorrect man page.

• The first beta for FreeBSD 11.1 is out right on schedule.

• A new stable update of TrueOS has been published recently as a significant step forward for the FreeBSD-based operating system by adding new functionality and updating many of the core components.

• I will discuss the wins and some of the pitfalls on these implementations with the hope to help attendees in being able to sell BSD as a viable, cost effective and flexible option to solve problems that they may be having in their organisation.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The third (version 0.3) release of GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro) is now available.

• The Conservancy provides various kinds of administrative services for free software projects, while promoting the free software ethical ideals and the use of copyleft. It also does GPL enforcement for Linux and some other non-GNU, GPL-covered software packages. In doing so, it undertakes a crucial job.

• We are pleased to announce the new release of GNU Guix and GuixSD, version 0.13.0!

Public Services/Government

• In Italy, the Forum Italia was opened in March, timed to coincide with the launch of ‘Developers Italia’, a digital government transformation team and software development community focusing on open source software development.

• The ICT standards rules impact Slovakia’s eGovernment strategy, which was updated last year. One of the targets defined in the strategy is that by 2020, 40% of public administration ICT systems in Slovakia should use open source software. According to this strategy, the government is to complete a study on the advantages and disadvantages of open source software before then end of this year.

• Public sector organisations that want to assess the level of interoperability of their online service have one more week to use the Interoperability Maturity Model survey. The 30 minute, online survey is available here until 17 June.

• Bracken helped set the unit up in 2011, and his resignation was followed by those of several other GDS staff members.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• I recently finished a paper that presents a novel social computing system called the Wikipedia Adventure. The system was a gamified tutorial for new Wikipedia editors. Working with the tutorial creators, we conducted both a survey of its users and a randomized field experiment testing its effectiveness in encouraging subsequent contributions. We found that although users loved it, it did not affect subsequent participation rates.

Leftovers

• Yahoo stockholders today approved the terms of the acquisition of the company’s Internet business by Verizon for $4.48 billion. What once was Yahoo’s primary business will be merged with Verizon’s AOL unit to create a business to be called “Oath.”

Science

• Don’t try to wrong a raven, not even once. It’s not going to forget and it’s probably going to shun you for a long time.

• When it comes to animal personalities, there are dogs, which are loyal and usually love you no matter what. And on the other side are ravens, who are only too happy to remember what you look like and ostracize you, according to a study published this week in the journal Animal Behavior. The researchers trained nine ravens by hand for the purpose of testing — or, really, taunting — them to see if these birds could tell fair from unfair. Spoiler alert: They can. They will bear a grudge, and this is what makes these bitter corvids birds after my own heart.

• These nine ravens were raised in captivity, growing to become familiar with the researchers. Then came the test.

• Peer review is supposed to act as a sanity check on science. A few learned scientists take a look at your work, and if it withstands their objective and entirely neutral scrutiny, a journal will happily publish your work. As those links indicate, however, there are some issues with peer review as it is currently practiced. Recently, Benjamin List, a researcher and journal editor in Germany, and his graduate assistant, Denis Höfler, have come up with a genius idea for improving matters: something called selected crowd-sourced peer review.

Health/Nutrition

• A federal prosecutor dropped a bombshell in court Wednesday, telling a federal judge that the government estimates that as many as 100 girls may have had their genitals cut at the hands of a local doctor and her cohorts.

• This week, while everyone was distracted by former FBI director James Comey’s testimony, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell put the Republican health-care overhaul on fast track. His caucus is writing its bill in secret, and McConnell’s move means he could bring the legislation up for a vote anytime, without holding a single public hearing. All signs indicate that Senate Republicans are preparing to copy their colleagues in the House and jam through a massively destructive piece of legislation before the public knows what’s going on.

• Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill raised the alarm during a Thursday hearing on the Department of Health and Human Services budget. “Will we have a hearing on the health-care proposal?” McCaskill asked pointedly of a flummoxed Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who turned to his staff for help. After Hatch sputtered that Democrats were invited to participate regardless of whether a hearing was held, McCaskill retorted by recounting the months-long process of public hearings and amendments that the Affordable Care Act went through. Then she launched into a fiery, indignant speech.

Security

• Criminal hackers have started using a novel malware attack that infects people when their mouse hovers over a link embedded in a malicious PowerPoint file.

• The method—which was used in a recent spam campaign that attempted to install a bank-fraud backdoor alternately known as Zusy, OTLARD, and Gootkit—is notable because it didn’t rely on macros, visual basic scripts, or JavaScript to deliver its payload. Those methods are so widely used that many people are able to recognize them before falling victim.

• A new way to find errors in the Linux kernel code has seen the light of day. This is the result of new research from the IT University in Copenhagen.

• We present a qualitative study of 42 variability bugs collected from bug-fixing commits to the Linux kernel repository. We analyze each of the bugs, and record the results in a database. In addition, we provide self-contained simplified C99 versions of the bugs, facilitating understanding and tool evaluation.

• It can be days before vulnerabilities shared on the Dark Web are being published made public through the NVD and advisories, researchers have discovered.

• On Wednesday, cybersecurity firm Recorded Future revealed the results of research into whether vulnerabilities are disclosed in the Dark Web — the unindexed area of the Internet which can only be reached via the Tor network — as well as security sources before they are published to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD).

• I find articles like this frustrating for the simple fact everyone keeps talking about security, but nobody is going to do anything. If you look at the history of humanity, we’ve never been proactive when dealing with problems. We wait until things can’t get worse and the only actual option is to fix the problem. If you look at every problem there are at least two options. Option #1 is always “fix it”. Option #2 is ignore it. There could be more options, but generally we pick #2 because it’s the least amount of work in the short term. Humanity rarely cares about the long term implications of anything.

• Microsoft has discovered a group of advanced hackers it calls Platinum using Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT) Serial-over-LAN (SOL) to conceal communications from the firewall.

• As HTTPS deployment grows, middlebox and antivirus products are increasingly intercepting TLS connections to retain visibility into network traffic. In this work, we present a comprehensive study on the prevalence and impact of HTTPS interception.

• All systems behind a hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) interception product are potentially affected.

Defence/Aggression

• When the numbers of casualties figure between 7-10 including babies, injured are more than 100 and the victims lost their properties and wealth of more than 100 crores. Dozen of women were raped by the Bengali speaking Muslim settlers in Chittagong.

• Though some Buhhist organisations and Human Rights Groups in India took the streets to protest, the leading political party of India BJP and Central Govt of India led by BJP did not show any concern on the severe plight on the people of Chittagong in recent times.

• An ignorant and embattled commander-in-chief has aligned the United States with Saudi’s theocratic monarchy and its international brigade of Sunni foot soldiers, known as ISIS. The militants of ISIS are Wahhabists, devotees of a Saudi fundamentalist tradition, which abhors Shiism, democracy and women’s rights as contrary to the wishes of Allah. ISIS loathes the heretics of Iran even more than it despises the infidels of the West.

• The two men were not the random victims of bad timing in a dangerous place, as initial reports indicated. Rather, the journalists’ convoy was specifically targeted by attackers who had been tipped off to the presence of Americans in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

• The terror group has been attempting to eliminate the Yazidi people as part of its ethnic cleansing efforts.

• A Dearborn cleric popular among Islamic State extremists helped radicalize one of the terror suspects in the London attacks that killed seven people Saturday, according to reports.

• The Navy’s next-generation aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, is a monument to the Navy’s and defense industry’s ability to justify spending billions on unproven technologies that often deliver worse performance at a higher cost.

• Qatar media network Al Jazeera has claimed that it was the victim of a major cyberattack targeting all of its systems, websites and social media platforms.

• Two weeks after an alleged cyber attack on Qatar’s state news agency resulted in the publishing of a fake news story, the Qatari-funded broadcasting company Al-Jazeera claims that the company’s “websites and digital platforms” are being targeted in “systematic and continual hacking attempts.” The attack comes as officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation continue to assist the Qatari government in Doha in investigations into an April breach of systems at the Qatar National Bank, as well as the previous media breach.

• They also actively promote everything from faith schools to Sharia courts, burqas, gender segregation, de facto or de jure blasphemy and apostasy laws and the silencing of criticism or rejection of Islam with calls for “respect” and “tolerance” of the disrespectful and intolerant. These political manifestations of Islamist terrorism are constantly legitimised and wrapped in human rights language for public consumption in order to, in actuality, deny human rights.

• There are no Islamic parties in the UK yet there is a drive which is pushing communities to vote based on faith first, country second. As a secular democracy this is frightening not least because there is a global rise in religious fundamentalism. One only has to look at Narendra Modi in India and Donald Trump in the USA to see great nations, being strangled with ever-narrow hegemonies.

• [...] this is not simply just about Western foreign policy. There is something else at play, and has been for a number of centuries. We must have the courage to name the elephant in the room.

• The NSO takes the view that jihadist attacks are primarily motivated by foundational religious texts, and Britain can no longer ignore this. We can no longer bury our heads in the sand and pretend there is no doctrinal motivation. An honest conversation, however difficult, must now take place, [...]

• Instead of helping real refugees in local safe zones or paying Third World countries to host them, the EU has transformed itself into a deadly honey pot: Thousands die on their way to the promised land, mostly from diseases, murder or drowning. The human smuggling mafia is a cruel business known for selling fake life vests and suffocating hopefuls in airtight containers.

• Smugglers and trafficking gangs, which make millions of pounds extorting migrants who dream of reaching Europe, are now said to be burying alive those they deem not “fit enough to travel”.

• The US Air Force’s 56th Fighter Wing at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona today cancelled “local flying operations” for F-35A fighters after five incidents in which pilots “experienced hypoxia-like symptoms,” an Air Force spokesperson said in a statement. Hypoxia is a deficiency in oxygen reaching the body through the circulatory system.

• “In order to synchronize operations and maintenance efforts toward safe flying operations we have cancelled local F-35A flying,” said 56th Fighter Wing commander Brigadier General Brook Leonard. “The Air Force takes these physiological incidents seriously, and our focus is on the safety and well-being of our pilots. We are taking the necessary steps to find the root cause of these incidents.”

• The cancellation of F-35A operations is currently restricted to Luke Air Force Base, the primary pilot training base for the F-35A. The Air Force also trains F-35A pilots at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The 56th Fighter Wing’s squadrons at Luke train pilots from the US Air Force as well as from other nations buying the F-35A, including Norway, Italy, and Australia. All the pilots training at Luke will be briefed on the incidents and on the procedures the pilots affected used to successfully restore oxygen and land the aircraft safely, a 56th Fighter Wing spokesperson said. The 56th’s Air Operations Group will also hold a forum with pilots to discuss their concerns.

• The leader of al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen says his forces have often fought alongside US- and Saudi-backed militia and supporters of former Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi against the Yemeni army and the popular Houthi Ansarullah movement.

• Qasim al-Rimi, the ringleader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), made the remarks to the terrorist group’s media arm al-Malahem from an undisclosed location in war-torn Yemen on Sunday, adding that his militants had teamed up with an array of other “factions,” including Salafist groups and the “Muslim Brotherhood,” who are both key militias on Hadi’s side.

• U.S. special forces have joined the battle to crush Islamist militants holed up in a southern Philippines town, officials said on Saturday, as government forces struggled to make headway and 13 marines were killed in intense urban fighting.

• The Philippines military said the United States was providing technical assistance to end the siege of Marawi City by fighters allied to Islamic State, which is now in its third week, but it had no boots on the ground.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• The Democratic Unionist Party, whose support looks set to keep Theresa May in Downing Street at least for the time being, are a far-right party with a track record of Donald Trump-style climate change denial.

• While the US President has described global warming as a “hoax”, the DUP’s former environment minister once claimed it was a “con”.

• In addition to controversial views on science, the DUP is known for its links to Loyalist paramilitary groups, anti-abortion stance and accusations of a prejudiced attitude towards the LGBT community.

Finance

• The new Tory “bastards”. Never take the electors for granted. Never believe what they tell pollsters. They have left Theresa May’s government clinging to office, devastated and in disarray. They have left Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour opposition defeated yet cock-a-hoop. Scottish nationalism has been dealt a blow. The Liberal Democrats have failed to recover. Ukip has been demolished. Most alarming, de facto power has been handed to a small band of Ulster fundamentalists. It is hard to recall a more chaotic election result in recent British history.

• Most important, May called this election specifically to strengthen her hand in the forthcoming Brexit negotiations. To this end, she presented herself as a “strong and stable” leader. A vain, wooden, egotistical campaign put her face on every poster. As Tory dissident Anna Soubry put it: “She made it about ‘me’, and ‘me’ lost.” It is hard to believe she can long survive.

• Senior Tory and Labour MPs called on Theresa May to forge a new cross-party approach to Brexit as fears grew that the prime minister’s weakness could lead to the imminent collapse of talks on the UK’s exit from the European Union.

• In a dramatic demonstration of May’s loss of authority, as a result of Thursday’s general election – which stripped her of a Commons majority – the MPs demanded that she in effect drop her own Tory “hard Brexit” plans in favour of a new “national” consenus, that would be endorsed by members from all sides of the House of Commons.

• The board of directors at Uber Technologies is meeting today to discuss CEO Travis Kalanick stepping aside for a period, according to reports published this morning by Reuters, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

• Kalanick taking a leave of absence is one of several recommendations coming out of an internal report on Uber headed up by Eric Holder, who served as Attorney General during the Obama Administration. The Holder inquiry also recommends that Emil Michael, Uber’s senior vice president of business, be asked to leave the company, according to the Times.

• Most of the MPs elected last week want to avoid a so-called “hard Brexit”, pro-EU politicians claim.

• Having called Thursday’s election to seek an increased mandate for her Brexit strategy, Theresa May ended up losing seats and her Commons majority.

• Conservative ex-minister Anna Soubry said: “The people have spoken – and they have rejected a hard Brexit.”

• Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon said the government’s view of Brexit had not changed.

• With Brexit negotiations about to begin in the shadow of a hung parliament, the advice of the former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, comes to mind. This spring he gave the stark advice: Britain should “avoid negotiating with Brussels at all costs”.

• Varoufakis knows what he is talking about, as he was finance minister for the Syriza government in 2015 and in that role had to negotiate with the EU and the IMF over the extension of Greece’s debts. The terms offered were so harsh that the Greek government campaigned successfully for a “no” vote in the July 2015 referendum on the terms of a further bailout. He resigned immediately after the vote when the Greek Prime Minister revealed to him that he intended to betray the referendum result.

• Yanis Varoufakis is also an expert on game theory and its application to economic systems. If anyone knows how to conduct high-stakes negotiations, it should be him.

• Theresa May’s Brexit plans should be dropped urgently, according to the Scottish government.

• Scotland’s Brexit minister, Michael Russell, told the BBC’s Sunday Politics Scotland programme that Mrs May’s leadership was now “untenable”.

• He said Scotland’s proposals published last year could be a starting point for the UK government and devolved administrations to draw up a new plan.

• The SNP is still the third largest party in Westminster with 35 seats.

• “It’s extremely important that the entire Brexit policy from Theresa May is scrapped and that they start again,” Mr Russell said.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• “The number of times I would have been expected to be called by the president of the United States would be zero because there has to be some kind of arm’s-length relationship given the jurisdiction that various people had.”

• President Trump’s fierce protectionist rhetoric is a cause of great concern for Indian IT companies. Since his election, IT companies have all said they will increase their hiring onsite and will lower their dependence on the work visa. Wipro said that by the end of the first quarter, over 50% of its headcount in the US would be locals.

• Finland’s eurosceptic Finns party picked an anti-immigration hardliner as its leader on Saturday in a move that the prime minister said might lead to a break-up of the ruling coalition.

• At a Finns party congress, 56 percent of those voting backed European Parliament member Jussi Halla-aho, who wants Finland to leave the European Union.

• Donald Trump has told Theresa May in a phone call he does not want to go ahead with a state visit to Britain until the British public supports him coming.

• The US president said he did not want to come if there were large-scale protests and his remarks in effect put the visit on hold for some time.

• The call was made in recent weeks, according to a Downing Street adviser who was in the room. The statement surprised May, according to those present.

• There’s at least one definition of President Donald Trump that we can all agree on—he’s the tweeting president.

• Unlike his predecessor, Trump has provided the public with an unfiltered look at the chief executive’s immediate thoughts, inventing a new word along the way. His volatile tweets have derided his own staff, the public, and even overseas political leaders. Twitter also serves as Trump’s public forum, where he blocks people critical of him. And he uses the micro-blogging service as his own personal media outlet. Tuesday night, for example, he tweeted that he would nominate Christopher Wray to replace James Comey as the FBI director.

• During the presidential campaign, some imagined that the more overtly racist elements of Donald Trump’s platform were just talk designed to rile up the base, not anything he seriously intended to act on. But in his first week in office, when he imposed a travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries, that comforting illusion disappeared fast. Fortunately, the response was immediate: the marches and rallies at airports, the impromptu taxi strikes, the lawyers and local politicians intervening, the judges ruling the bans illegal.

• The whole episode showed the power of resistance, and of judicial courage, and there was much to celebrate. Some have even concluded that this early slap down chastened Trump, and that he is now committed to a more reasonable, conventional course.

• That is a dangerous illusion.

• It is true that many of the more radical items on this administration’s wish list have yet to be realized. But make no mistake, the full agenda is still there, lying in wait. And there is one thing that could unleash it all: a large-scale crisis.

• It can be difficult to untangle the convoluted narratives coming out of the White House. So we’ve teamed up with PolitiFact to list a nonpartisan explanation of the facts. Here are the biggest lies the Trump administration told this week:

• Responding to a lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a liberal watchdog group, the Justice Department wrote that revenue from foreign governments at Trump businesses would not constitute emoluments as defined in the Constitution.

• The U.S. Department of Justice argued Friday that President Trump’s businesses are legally permitted to accept payments from foreign governments while he is in office, and thus Trump is not in violation of a constitutional clause barring the acceptance of emoluments.

• For almost two decades now, I’ve been studying large-scale shocks to societies: how they happen, how they are exploited by politicians and corporations, and how they are even deliberately deepened in order to gain advantage over a disoriented population. I have also reported on the flipside of this process: how societies that come together around an understanding of a shared crisis can change the world for the better.

• The testimony of James Comey proved long on atmospherics and short on ethics. While many were riveted by Comey’s discussion of his discomfort in meetings with President Trump, most seemed to miss the fact that Comey was describing his own conduct in strikingly unethical terms. The greatest irony is that Trump succeeded in baiting Comey to a degree that even Trump could not have imagined. After calling Comey a “showboat” and poor director, Comey proceeded to commit an unethical and unprofessional act in leaking damaging memos against Trump.

• Comey described a series of ethical challenges during his term as FBI director. Yet, he almost uniformly avoided taking a firm stand in support of the professional standards of the FBI. During the Obama administration, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch gave Comey a direct order to mislead the public by calling the ongoing investigation a mere “matter.” Rather than standing firm on the integrity of his department and refusing to adopt such a meaningless and misleading term, Comey yielded to Lynch while now claiming discomfort over carrying out the order.

• [...]

• Donald Trump continues to show a remarkable ability to bring out the worst in people — supporters and critics alike. In this case, he was able to bait Comey with his tweets and cause Comey to diminish his own credibility. If the comments of Trump were grossly inappropriate, Comey’s response to those comments were equally inappropriate.

• In which her body was a question-mark

• querying her lies; her mouth a ballot-box that bit the hand that fed. Her eyes? They swivelled for a jackpot win. Her heart was a stolen purse;

• her rhetoric an empty vicarage, the windows smashed.

• Then her feet grew sharp stilettos, awkward.

• Then she had balls, believe it.

• When she woke,

• her nose was bloody, difficult.

• The furious young

• ran towards her through the fields of wheat.

• Tory grandee Lord Heseltine has torn into Theresa May, saying neither she nor the Tory government can survive Thursday’s disastrous election result.

• And the Conservative peer said Mrs May will “never” fight another election as Tory leader.

• Rebellious Lord Heseltine visited almost every broadcast studio in Westminster to tear strips off the floundering Prime Minister.

• Asked if the government would last, he told BBC Radio 4: “No. It will not go immediately because there is no appetite for another general election and every party in the house will calculate in their own self-interest.

• Jeremy Corbyn could be heading for Downing Street if a second general election is held this year, a new poll has found.

• The Survation poll for the Mail on Sunday finds that Labour would win 45% of the vote to the Conservatives’ 39%, if voters were sent back to the polls.

• Thank you, Jeremy Corbyn.

• It is no exaggeration to say that the British Labour Party leader has changed progressive politics in the UK, and perhaps the wider West too, for a generation. The bearded, 68-year-old, self-declared socialist has proved that an unashamedly, unabashedly, unapologetically left-wing offer is not the politics of the impossible but, rather, a politics of the very much possible. Last Thursday’s election result in the UK is a ringing confirmation that stirring idealism need not be sacrificed at the altar of political pragmatism.

• In these dark, depressing times of Trump and Brexit, of the fallout from the Great Recession and the rise of the far right, Corbyn has reminded us that a politics of hope can go toe to toe with a politics of fear. Millions of people will turn out to vote for a leader who preaches optimism over pessimism, who offers inspiration instead of enervation.

• Supporters of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) are demanding Theresa May allow a banned loyalist march as part of an agreement by the Northern Irish party to prop up a minority Conservative government.

• The Portadown Loyal Orange Lodge (LOL), who are currently prevented from marching in the flashpoint Gavaghy Road following a long history of sectarian violence, put out a statement amid speculation as to what concessions the DUP could demand in return for striking a deal with the Tories.

• Shock comeback for Brexit back-stabber Michael Gove as he lands major new job in Theresa May’s cabinet reshuffle

• Ireland’s Prime Minister has issued a warning to Theresa May over her plans to do a deal with the DUP to prop up a Tory minority government.

• Enda Kenny, who has been Taoiseach since 2011, said he had indicated his “concern” to the Prime Minister over the plan.

• Mr Kenny suggested that the arrangement, if poorly handled, could jeopardise the peace process in Northern Ireland.

• When Theresa May called the general election at the end of April, the UK economy was struggling, inflation was on the rise and Brexit talks were looming. Seven weeks later, seemingly nothing has really changed.

• The economy is still struggling. May went to the country when Britain was officially the slowest-growing country in the European Union for the first time since the mid-1990s. It was announced during the campaign that inflation had edged up to 2.7%, and Brexit negotiations are supposed to start in a week’s time.

• In reality, however, everything has changed. May has been politically wounded, almost certainly fatally, by her failure to secure the whopping mandate that initially seemed possible. She hoped that Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, would be impressed by the size of her landslide majority. Instead, she looks weak and vulnerable.

• Some of the more unorthodox candidates in the British general election have captured the attention of election-watchers around the world.

• Among those to have raised the most eyebrows is Lord Buckethead, who appeared alongside Theresa May on the podium as results were read out for the Maidenhead constituency.

• Theresa May has lost the support of Conservative members who want her to resign after her election failure, according to a large survey.

• Almost 60 per cent of grassroots Tories told the ConservativeHome website that the Prime Minister must fall on her sword after destroying her Commons majority.

• The results were described as “astonishing” by the website’s editor, former MP Paul Goodman, who said: “It is the most damning finding in one of our polls that I can remember.”

• Theresa May is not a team player, even though she is captain of the team.

• This led to own goals which the owners of her club, the British voters, could not tolerate.

• Instead of working with the other players Mrs May relied on three people not on the team at all – close aides Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy and her husband Philip.

• Mr Timothy and Ms Hill paid for their captain’s mistake with their jobs.

• At the time of writing, Mr May remains in place.

• Fired-up Jeremy Corbyn today vows to finish what he started by getting rid of Theresa May within a matter of days.

• He plans to use the Queen’s Speech as his first opportunity to topple the floundering PM.

• In an exclusive interview with the Sunday Mirror, Mr Corbyn is champing at the bit and buzzing with enthusiasm.

• And over a cappucino he says it is time for Mrs May to wake up and smell the coffee.

• A February 2017 report in OpenDemocracyUK suggests that the Arlene Foster-led DUP has played host to murky dealings.

• Theresa May was left isolated and undermined last night as the resignation of her two chiefs of staff failed to stop the furious Tory backlash.

• The Prime Minister has been told by Cabinet ministers she must overhaul her leadership style and change her economic policy if she wants to remain in power for the time being.

• The YouTube video artist Cassetteboy made his anti-Brexit stance clear last week when he mocked the prime minister with the words: “It is wrong to believe the fable that Theresa May belongs at the negotiating table.”

• It is a sentiment echoed by millions of voters, many of them newly registered millennials, who used the general election to demand many things from MPs, including a softer Brexit than the one planned by May.

• Cassetteboy’s video was viewed almost one million times in the two days before the election. It’s not the first time his cut-up edits of prime ministerial speeches have proved a hit, but this time it seemed to resonate with 18- to 25-year-olds just as they were signing up in droves to vote.

• Young people and social media users were bombarded with divisive attack adverts by the Conservatives that appear to have had little impact.

• Despite £1.2 million being spent, the Tories failed to win over a majority of young voters.

• After May 2015, Labour appeared so far from power that many supporters conceded the next election in advance. The party was 99 seats behind the Conservatives (331-232), it had been wiped out in Scotland and boundary changes loomed. Such was the scale of Labour’s defeat that to achieve a majority of one it required a swing of 8.75 per cent across the UK. Not only had the party lost seats, it had gone backwards in those it needed to win.

• But Labour’s 2017 result, which saw it achieve its biggest improvement in vote share since 1945 (from 30.4 per cent to 40.0 per cent) has dramatically reshaped the electoral map in its favour. My analysis, the first to be published, shows that a majority at the next election, whether it comes this year or in 2022, is now within Labour’s reach. As well as gaining 30 MPs (from Canterbury to Kensington), Jeremy Corbyn improved the party’s performance elsewhere, turning safe Conservative seats into marginals.

• Theresa May had set Britain on a course for a hard Brexit, prioritising sovereignty at the expense of close economic ties. Nevertheless, most EU governments had hoped she would win big on 8 June, so that she would be strong enough to face down the Tory right in pushing through painful compromises. They now face a prime minister whose authority is crumbling. Yet the general election makes the prospect of a softer Brexit plausible.

• May’s instincts are probably to keep pushing for the hard Brexit that her right wing desires. But there is no parliamentary majority for a hard Brexit. Just a few pro-EU Tories could join opposition MPs to defeat May. If she wants to pass the Brexit deal – and the many Brexit-related laws that are required – she will have to collaborate with Labour and other opposition MPs.

• Such a volte-face would be uncharacteristic of May. But if she doesn’t reinvent herself as a soft Brexiter, it is hard to see how she can stay in office. And if she falls, her successor will find that survival means working with the opposition to achieve a softer version of Brexit.

• The MP tipped to challenge Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership if Labour had been destroyed in the election is now prepared to serve in his shadow cabinet, the Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

• Yvette Cooper, who resigned from the front bench just days after Mr Corbyn won the leadership, would take up the position of shadow home secretary if it was offered it in a reshuffle.

• It came as other leading critics including Angela Eagle and Chuka Umunna made it clear they were willing to make a return, despite public declarations of Mr Corbyn’s unsuitability for the leadership.

• Jeremy Corbyn is preparing a Queen’s Speech that he will attempt to push through Parliament should Theresa May prove unable to govern.

• Labour wants to challenge the Prime Minister’s authority after she was embarrassed by failing to secure a House of Commons majority in Thursday’s general election.

• As a result, she will be forced to rely on the support of the Democratic Unionist Party’s (DUP) ten MPs – raising the prospect that the Conservatives could struggle to pass key legislation such as a Queen’s Speech or budget.

• Google searches for how to join the Labour party have surged following the shock election result which saw it gain 30 seats.

• Although they were expected to sustain heavy losses after the country went to the polls, the party put in its best performance in years winning a total of 262 seats with 649 out of 650 counted.

• Now searches on the social media appear to show a fresh wave of potential support for the party after it was credited with energising young people in particular.

• A powerful man—your boss—invites you to discuss business after hours in an intimate setting. You feel uneasy. The man has crossed the line before, singling you out, blowing you kisses, whispering softly in your ear. But to turn him down would be an insult. And let’s face it, you’re a little intrigued. Someone powerful is paying attention to you.

• The two top aides to British Prime Minister Theresa May resigned Saturday, shouldering some of the blame for an election that proved a disaster for the Conservative Party, a headache for Britain’s exit from the European Union _ and potentially a fatal blow to May’s premiership.

• Joint chiefs of staff Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill formed part of May’s small inner circle and were blamed by many Conservatives for the party’s lackluster campaign and unpopular election platform, which alienated older voters with its plan to make them pay more for long-term care.

• The shocking election result in the United Kingdom – the Conservatives losing their majority and the creation of a hung Parliament; and Jeremy Corbyn being more successful than any recent Labor candidate – cutting a 20 point Theresa May lead down to a near tie – gives hope to many that the global shift to the right, fueled by the failures of governments to meet the basic needs of their population and growing economic insecurity, may be ending.

• [...]

• The Corbyn campaign showed that a political leader urging a radical progressive transformative agenda can succeed. Many in his own party, the neo-liberal pro-war Blairites, claimed Corbyn could not win, tried to remove him from leadership, and sabotaged and refused to assist his campaign.

• Corbyn showed he could win the leadership of the UK in the future, maybe sooner than later. While Theresa May is in the process of forming a minority government with a small radical conservative party from Northern Ireland, there has already been a backlash, mass petitions and protests against it and UK history has shown in similar circumstances that the second place finisher, may, in the end form the government. Corbyn is taking bold and radical actions. He is preparing to present a Queen’s speech in which he will say that he and his party are “ready to serve” and will continue to push his program through Parliament. He is calling on other parties to defeat the government in Parliament.

• May will face Conservative MPs Monday or Tuesday to make a plan for the future. Graham Brady, who leads the prominent 1922 committee of Conservative lawmakers, said the party has two options moving forward. It either sticks with the plan to rule with the Democratic Unionist Party or calls a new election.

• “There are only two choices. One is for us to get on, in what I think is the responsible way, and try to form a government and try to offer the right kind of responsible leadership that the country needs,” Brady told BBC Radio 4 Sunday, according to Reuters. “The other would be to go back to the country for another general election.”

• President Trump has told British Prime Minister Theresa May he will cancel his state visit to Britain, the Guardian reported today, supposedly on the grounds that there will be mass protests. But while some official disappointment may be expressed, behind the scenes there will be no sorrow in Downing Street. Although I don’t want to exaggerate the U.S. president’s importance in last Thursday’s snap election in Britain — the main issues were domestic — this was a very hard-fought contest. Had a few hundred votes gone the other way in a handful of constituencies, May’s Conservatives might still have their parliamentary majority. And there is a serious argument that, on the margins, Trump helped swing the electorate against the Tories — in three ways.

• PRIME ministers expect to see their authority battered, but in the election on June 8th Theresa May suffered a grievous blow—and at her own hands, too. In the small hours, exit polls and the early vote count seemed to point not to the solid victory she had hoped for, but to the most surprising election outcome of all: a hung parliament, or at best a tiny Tory majority.

• As we went to press, the Tories were losing seats in London and other urban areas, especially where voters opposed Brexit last June. Gains they hoped to make in the north and West Midlands, partly thanks to a collapse of the UK Independence Party, did not offset this. Nor did losses by the Scottish Nationalists in Scotland.

• Theresa May’s two closest aides have resigned amid calls for the Prime Minister to sack them or face a leadership challenge on Monday.

• Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, Mrs May’s joint chiefs of staff, had faced fierce criticism over their role in the Tory election campaign as the party failed to secure a majority and the Prime Minister was left clinging to power.

• The pair have both now walked away from Downing Street as the PM turns her attention to trying to strike a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party.

• Mrs May fell eight seats short of a House of Commons majority and she will now be reliant on the DUP’s 10 MPs to add to the 318 Tories in order to get the 326 seats needed to pass legislation.

• The Tory-backing press are unwilling to spin Theresa May’s humiliating election result, turning on the prime minister as she fights to stay in Downing Street.

• The Daily Mail, The Times, The Telegraph and The Sun all appeared stunned by the hung parliament the election delivered. Their front pages on Friday focussed on the embattled prime minister losing the Tories’ majority in the election she chose to call.

• After a day of the prime minister trying to carry on as if she had won the mandate she sought for the imminent Brexit talks, the papers twisted the knife.

• A majority (59.48%) of Tory members now believe Mrs May should resign, according to a snap survey by the Conservative Home website yesterday.

• Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn has advocated for the cancellation of US President Donald Trump’s visit to the UK, citing disagreements over the Paris climate accord and the President’s criticism of London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

• “Cancellation of President Trump’s State Visit is welcome, especially after his attack on London’s mayor & withdrawal from #ParisClimateDeal,” Mr Corbyn tweeted.

• Jeremy Corbyn has said Labour will invite parties to defeat the government and vote for Labour’s manifesto in a “substantial amendment” to the Queen’s speech, as well as suggesting the party would also kill off the “great repeal bill”.

• “We are ready and able to put forward a serious programme which has great support in this country,” he said, though the Labour leader conceded his party “didn’t win the election”.

• “We are going to put down a substantial amendment to the Queen’s speech which will be the main points of our manifesto, so we will invite the House to consider all the issues we’ve put forward – jobs-first Brexit, policies for young people and on austerity,” he said.

• Meanwhile Mrs May is trying to persuade the 10 DUP MPs to enter into a formal coalition agreement with the Tories, as opposed to a less formal “confidence and supply” arrangement, ministers have told ITV News

• Medics in flapping white coats could’ve grabbed Theresa May in Downing Street and nobody would’ve blinked an eye.

• The Tory leader is in denial, the self-inflicted election trauma endured so horribly painful she’s unable to face up to what happened to herself and the party.

• Failing to mention outside No 10 the humiliating loss of the majority, pretending everything’s hunky-dory, proved this Prime Minister’s genuinely lost it.

• Because behaving as if nothing’s changed when everything’s changed isn’t iron leadership but the breathtaking delusion of Conservative hurtling towards the exit door.

• The election results are in and I have to say I’m surprised. No, stunned. Floored. Like Labour supporters everywhere this morning, I just can’t make sense of it.

• What’s puzzling me is not the party’s exceptional performance, but the long line of commentators, pundits and politicians now shaking their heads in disbelief. Having spent nearly two years kicking Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, and vilifying their supporters, they convinced themselves the pair were nothing but, at best, a pair of incompetent losers; at worst, dangerous, even treacherous, ideologues. They predicted doom at the polls because, as we all know, the British don’t like losers and they don’t like IRA-loving Marxist vegetarians who secretly want to tax your gardens and surrender the country to Islamists. A very few have had the decency to apologise.

• Jeremy Corbyn has predicted Theresa May will be forced into another general election within months, insisting: “We are ready any time.”

• A buoyant Labour leader – appearing in a TV interview, while the Prime Minister was absent – predicted her attempt to cobble together a deal with the DUP would fall apart.

• “I think it’s quite possible there will be an election later this year – or early next year,” Mr Corbyn told the BBC’s Andrew Marr programme.

• The UK election didn’t deliver the increased majority that PM Theresa May was seeking, but it wasn’t for lack of trying: the UK Conservative party spent £1.2m on social media smear ads that painted Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a terrorist sympathiser, a useful idiot for Scottish separatism, and an incompetent.

• I made it to my sofa just in time for the exit poll on Thursday. Home from knocking doors in Dudley North, my plan was to watch it, have a shower and go to bed. I wasn’t much up for reliving 2015 all over again. What’s the point in staying up to agonise over the seats we were going to lose? Better to get an early night, face the grim reality in the morning. That was until David Dimbleby read out the exit poll results.

• At 6.45am, with only a few seats left to declare, I turned in.

• I was wrong about the result. And like Jess Phillips and many others who underestimated Corbyn and his movement, I’m happy to admit it. Happy, because we have back in parliament some brilliant MPs who I thought we wouldn’t. As Corbyn prepares to announce his shadow cabinet (note that both he and John McDonnell struck conciliatory tones this morning towards former dissenters in the PLP), attention will focus on the make up of his opposition front bench.

• Jeremy Corbyn has drawn level with Theresa May in a poll asking who would be the best Prime Minister.

• Both party leaders scored 39 per cent after a swing of 11 points in Mr Corbyn’s favour in the days since since 7 June.

• The poll, conducted by YouGov for The Sunday Times, shows the Labour leader obliterating the 39-point lead Ms May had on the same question when she called the general election.

• The Conservative Party ran an ineffective social media campaign during the general election that failed to attract new voters and did not energise its traditional base, researchers said on Friday.

• Theresa May’s online advertising campaign was pushed towards swing voters but used a message that appealed largely to current supporters, an analysis of social media posts showed. This could have been a factor in the Conservative Party failing to win the majority of seats initially anticipated.

• Data from We Are Social, an agency, revealed that the Labour Party increased its following by 61 per cent across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in the six weeks after the election was called. The Conservatives’ following rose by just 6 per cent in the same period.

• ‘I’ve challenged the DUP as to why they do not publish their donations,’ says Alliance party politician

• The two top aides to British Prime Minister Theresa May resigned Saturday, shouldering some of the blame for an election that proved a disaster for the Conservative Party, a headache for Britain’s exit from the European Union – and potentially a fatal blow to May’s premiership.

• Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, trying to pacify her Conservative Party after a major setback in the country’s election on Thursday, on Saturday let go her top two aides, who had earned reputations for secrecy and arrogance.

• The aides, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, Mrs. May’s co-chiefs of staff, resigned after reports that senior Conservative ministers in the prime minister’s cabinet had warned her that they would challenge her leadership of the party unless she became more inclusive, consulted more widely and fired Ms. Hill and Mr. Timothy.

• When she became prime minister, Mrs. May brought the two loyal aides with her from the Home Office, which she had run for six years. She relied heavily on them, and they were fiercely protective of her but offended many.

• Theresa May’s plan for a loose alliance with the Democratic Unionists to prop up her government was thrown into confusion last night after after the Northern Ireland party contradicted a No 10 announcement that a deal had been reached.

• A Downing Street statement on Saturday said a “confidence and supply” agreement had been reached with the DUP and would be put to the cabinet on Monday. But the DUP last night put the brakes on that announcement, saying talks were continuing, not finalised. The DUP leader, Arlene Foster, said “discussions will continue next week to work on the details and to reach agreement on arrangements for the new parliament”.

• For Irish-Americans, this is yet another Death of Little Nell moment. Theresa May’s foolish gambit in calling a snap election in order to facilitate Britain’s withdrawal from the EU has set in motion a chain of events that could well lead to the dissolution of the “United Kingdom” and the devolution of the Celtic countries — Scotland, all of Ireland, and perhaps Wales and Cornwall as well — from the British crown.

• Ruth Davidson on Saturday raised the prospect of her new group of Scottish Tory MPs torpedoing a hard Brexit as Theresa May found herself trapped between her party’s Leave and Remain supporters.

• Davidson cast her first vote as a teenager in 1997 — the year Tony Blair’s New Labour ended 18 years of Conservative British rule.

• At a gathering of senior staff in Conservative campaign headquarters in central London, one of May’s top operatives told the sitting prime minister that she risked crashing and burning like Sarah Palin did in 2008. Palin had made a blistering start after being picked as John McCain’s running mate in the U.S. only to falter because she did not know how to sustain a national effort. To the operative, May was overly controlling and her inexperience would tell during a short, intense campaign.

• May listened with good grace, according to a person who witnessed that encounter and relayed it not long afterward. May changed nothing. The British prime minister then still looked to be headed for a landslide, 20 points ahead in the polls. Though she had never run a national campaign before, she didn’t delegate like David Cameron had done so effectively in 2015.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are a violation of human rights, and are often used against religious minorities, according to a new report by Amnesty International.

• An Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) on Saturday sentenced a man to death for sharing blasphemous content about Islam on social media, a government prosecutor said.

• A Thai man has been jailed for 35 years for Facebook posts deemed insulting to the royal family, a watchdog said, in one of the harshest sentences handed down for a crime that insulates Thailand’s ultra-rich monarchy from criticism.

• Do they have chimps operating big red “CENSOR!” buttons at Facebook and Twitter?

• The rally by more than 100 reporters in the rain outside a court in Yangon was the first significant show of opposition to the telecommunications law, introduced in 2013, that bans the use of the telecoms network to “extort, threaten, obstruct, defame, disturb, inappropriately influence, or intimidate.”

• There are several reasons for this, including some that have nothing to do with Section 230. For instance, even if Section 230 did not exist and platforms could be liable for the harms resulting from their users’ use of their services, for them to be liable there would have to be a clear connection between the use of the platform and the harm. Otherwise, based on the general rules of tort law, there could be no liability. In this particular case, for instance, there is a fairly weak connection between ISIS members using Twitter and the specific terrorist act that killed the plaintiffs’ family members.

• When Franco Caraccioli was a third-year law student in San Diego, someone apparently played a malicious prank on him. He got a Facebook friend request from an account called “Franco Caracciolijerkingman.” Caraccioli describes what happens next in the lawsuit he filed against Facebook the following year:

• “The JERKINGMAN ACCOUNT included videos and pictures of Mr. Caraccioli sexually arousing or pleasuring himself,” Caraccioli wrote (PDF) in 2015. “Mr. Caraccioli believes that the JERKINGMAN ACCOUNT was sent to every friend that Mr. Caraccioli has in his community because of the amount of messages or calls he received that day, requests which several friends did in fact accept.”

• In the wake of Saturday’s horrific attack on London—the third high-profile terrorist incident in the United Kingdom in the past three months—British policymakers were left scrambling for better ways to combat violent extremism. Prime Minister Theresa May called for new global efforts to “regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremism and terrorist planning,” charging that the internet cannot be allowed to be a “safe space” for terrorists.

• In the speech in which she committed to keep governing despite calls to stand down, the prime minister made reference to extending powers for the security services. Those powers – which include regulation of the internet and forcing internet companies to let spies read everyone’s private communications – were a key part of the Conservative campaign, which failed to score a majority in the House of Commons.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The surprising story that quickly followed the somewhat-less-surprising Intercept leak was the arrest of Reality Leigh Winner for the leak of the document. It was an incredibly fast leak investigation that apparently began when The Intercept reached out for comment after obtaining the document on May 30th.

• There’s been a lot of talk that The Intercept acted carelessly when speaking to government officials and burned its source. But the evidence trail laid down by the FBI’s affidavit suggests Winner did most of the burning herself. The document given to The Intercept was either an original printout or a scan of it. It showed telltale creases where it had been folded and placed into an envelope by the leaker.

• The whole blog post and Ancestry’s response to comments are worth reading. It appears the language restricting legal action to arbitration remains, but on the whole, it appears Ancestry is addressing the issues raised by Joel Winston’s post.]

• Joel Winston — current consumer protection lawyer and former New Jersey attorney general — is offering up the periodic reminder that terms of service are rarely written with the user’s best interests in mind. Winston highlights the demands Ancestry.com makes in exchange for using its paid service. Two-thirds of those highlighted are standard operating procedure for far too many services. [h/t War on Privacy]

• Manchester and London are not the only cases where the authorities were informed in advance about individuals. A 2015 article in The Intercept looked at ten high-profile terrorist attacks around the world, and found that in every single case, at least some of the perpetrators were already known to the authorities. Strong encryption is not the problem: it is the inability of the authorities to act on the information they have that is the problem. That’s not to suggest that the intelligence services and police were incompetent, or that there were serious lapses. It’s more a reflection of the fact that far from lacking vital information because of end-to-end encryption, say, the authorities have so much information that they are forced to prioritize their scarce resources, and sometimes they pursue the wrong leads and miss threats.

• We wrote about this problem back in 2014, when an FBI whistleblower confirmed what many have been trying to explain to governments keen to extend their surveillance powers: that when you are looking for a needle, adding more hay to the stack makes things worse, not better. What is needed is less mass surveillance, and a more targeted approach. Until Theresa May and leaders around the world understand and act on that, it is likely that more attacks will occur, carried out by individuals known to the authorities, and irrespective of whether they use strong crypto or not.

• As we’ve pointed out for many, many years, Senator Ron Wyden has been banging the drum, asking the Director of National Intelligence to reveal how many Americans are having their communications swept up under Section 702 of the FISA Act. We have posts going back to 2011 of Wyden asking for a number and being stonewalled. At the time, many tried to brush it off as nothing to be concerned about — after all, the “F” in FISA is supposed to stand for “Foreign” and so it was assumed (incorrectly) that Americans’ communications were mostly unlikely to be caught up in the matter. Of course, as we now know quite well, that’s not even remotely true. Between the Snowden revelations and other declassified FISA court orders, we know that tons of Americans had their communications swept up, without any kind of warrant. Throughout all of this time, Wyden kept asking that question over and over again, without getting any answers. Last year, others finally joined in, with a large bipartisan group from the House Intelligence Committee all (finally!) asking the same question.

• James Clapper, Barack Obama’s former director of National Intelligence, has said the issue of criminals and terrorists going dark by using end-to-end encrypted systems is causing issues in the United States.

• “The so-called going dark phenomenon — a situation that was dramatically accelerated by the Snowden revelations — in our country, I don’t think we’re in a good place here,” Clapper said at the National Press Club on Wednesday.

• “I think there needs to be a very serious dialogue about giving criminals, terrorists, rapists, murderers, etcetera, a pass.”

• Usenet provider Eweka has lost another court battle with Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN. The service provider must identify a former customer who’s accused of uploading copyright-infringing material. According to the court, the provider is obliged to do the same in future cases, without a court order.

• Russia is making good on its threat to crack down on VPN and proxy services that provide access to blocked sites. A new law submitted to the State Duma will see the country’s telecoms watchdog identify such services and compel their hosts to hand over operators’ personal details. Should block bypassing continue, access to the service will be terminated by the country’s ISPs.

• Perhaps the most serious threat to privacy from automatic facial recognition comes from the fact that people are taking and sharing so many images of themselves that it is easy to acquire them to create vast databases. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know that the NSA has been doing that for a while [...]

• The existence of these dots was long-rumored, but it wasn’t until 2005, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation broke the code on a Xerox printer’s output, that the scope, method and capabilities of this technique came to light.

• Spread throughout the pages were barely visible yellow dots, each less than a millimeter in diameter, repeated over and over in the same rectangular pattern. You could see them by zooming in on the pages and adjusting the color. Or, if you had the original printed papers, you could have inspected them with a magnifying glass and a blue LED light.

• Attacks in other countries are apparently just pre-game warmups for terrorists. The only way to prevent a domestic attack is to never ask questions about Section 702 again, apparently. If we don’t trust our government to respect our privacy and civil liberties, it’s not because the NSA constantly abused its Section 702 collection programs (and then hid these abuses from its oversight). No, the real villain here is the man who exposed this abuse to the general public.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Organizers put attendance at Sunday’s event — in honor of hundreds killed when Chinese troops crushed pro-democracy protests in Beijing — at about 110,000, the fewest since 2008. The police put the figure at 18,000 at the height of the event. In the run-up to the vigil, only about 1,000 people joined an annual march May 28 to protest the crackdown, the fewest in nine years and the second-smallest number since the marches started.

• Taner Kilic, along with 22 other lawyers in the Aegean coastal province of Izmir, was detained on Tuesday for suspected links to the network of Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who Ankara blames for last year’s failed coup.

• The timing of the DoJ release was clearly premeditated to send a message to would be leakers that the long arm of the law moves fast. The implied narrative is that mere hours after the leaked document was released they had already collared the leaker. Additionally, the search warrant is worded to throw as much blame on The Intercept as possible. The truth is that Ms Winner was doomed, regardless of what The Intercept did to protect their source – which was, basically, nothing.

• It doesn’t take a genius to understand that when such large numbers of immigrants are invited from countries with such anti-democratic, anti-enlightened, and anti-Jewish sentiments, on average we will be importing their culture, too. At that point, it becomes a cumulative effect and a numbers game. Instead of inviting in individual of merit to assimilate into our values, we invite in the values of the Middle East.

• Join our protest at the Saudi Embassy

• 9-10am, Friday 16 June

• There are several ways the many problems with American policing could be addressed, but maybe a good starting point would be the way good cops are treated. It takes a concerted effort to remove a bad officer from the force. And, far too often, an ousted officer simply finds a new agency to work for.

• Good cops are a relative rarity. There are several who go through their career with a minimal number of sustained complaints, but that alone isn’t enough to earn them the label of “good.” Far too many are unwilling to speak up when misconduct occurs. Of course, the entire system discourages officers from speaking up. Those that do are ostracized, at best. At worst, they’re pressured into giving up their law enforcement career.

• In a rare move West Midlands Police tweeted a warning asking the public to check the accuracy and ‘exercise caution’ before sharing images over social media channels.

• The statement entitled ‘Hoax/Fake messages’ read: “Over the last few days a number of stories and images have been circulating about assaults and attacks on the Muslim community.

• “We have looked into these and can assure you that they are a hoax.

• Gina Haspel, the new No. 2 at the CIA, played a leading role in the torture of terror suspects following 9/11. Now German lawyers are seeking criminal action against her.

• What is the goal of terrorism? According to British Prime Minister Theresa May, who is now putting together a coalition government after the Conservative Party lost their governing majority, terrorists seek to “silence our democracy.” But she also suggests that a proper response to terrorism is to redefine or abridge human rights—which, by her own logic, actually does more to advance terrorist goals than it does to thwart them.

• The fact that he isn’t named specifically, and that the complaint is just that he was “present” is crazy. Of course he was present. He was doing his job, reporting on protests. Assuming this goes forward, Cantu should have very strong First Amendment defenses, and might consider suing the government for civil liberties violations.

• While I’m hardly sympathetic to arguments by law enforcement when they round up large groups of people at protests that it’s difficult for them to determine who’s really a journalist and who is not, at least you can sort of understand how that might happen — even if you disapprove. But once the fog of the moment has passed it is absolutely bizarre for prosecutors to push forward with an indictment against someone who is clearly there as press.

• There’s been plenty of talk about the rapid arrest of Reality Winner (and, yes, people are still baffled that a real person is named this) and the fact that the tracking dots on printers may have helped track her down (along with the fact that she was one of only a few people who had recently touched that document). Fewer seem to have focused on the details in the leak, about how the Russians quite likely hacked e-voting vendors to a much deeper level than suspected. That seems like really important information for the public to understand — especially for those of us who have been screaming from the mountaintops for years about the lack of security in e-voting machines.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• In Sunde’s opinion, people focus too much on what might happen, instead of what is happening. He often gets questions about how a digitally bleak future could look like, but the truth is that we’re living it.

• The future of the decentralised nature of the Internet is at stake with the negotiations on the European Electronic Communications Code. La Quadrature du Net publishes its first voting lists on amendments that have been tabled in committees1 and refers to the factsheets (pdf) drafted by netCommons. As anticipated, the lobbying of the telcos has been very useful with many amendments – especially from the right wing – that aim to protect oligopolistic positions of major telcos, undermining any attempt of openess for new actors and rights of users.

• So we’ve noted for a long time that while net neutrality is framed as a “partisan” issue, it really isn’t. Data has consistently shown overwhelming, bipartisan public support for the concept and the rules, in large part because of the way most people have been treated by marginally-competitive TV or broadband providers. But to help sow dissent among the public, large ISP lobbyists (and the lawmakers paid to love them) have been immensely successful in framing this as a hotly contested subject, usually by portraying the effort, incorrectly, as a “government takeover of the internet.”

• This week, the head of the Federal Communications Commission and a Republican US senator each called net neutrality a “slogan” that solves no real problems, with the senator also arguing that the Internet should have paid fast lanes.

• “It’s a great slogan,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said, when asked by a radio host what net neutrality is. “But in reality what it involves is Internet regulation, and the basic question is, ‘Do you want the government deciding how the Internet is run?’”

• So we’ve already spent a lot of time talking about how underneath the hype, the “internet of things” is a bit of a shitshow. A lack of device security and a general apathy toward anything resembling privacy standards has resulted in an absolute torrent of new attack vectors being introduced into millions of homes and devices nationwide. Many of these devices are being quickly compromised in a matter of minutes for use in historically massive DDoS attacks, and most security analysts believe it’s only a matter of time before they contribute to an attack on essential infrastructure putting notable lives at risk.

• If you want to see what the US broadband sector really looks like, you should take a look at West Virginia — a state where regional incumbent Frontier Communications holds so much sway over the state legislature, efforts to improve connectivity in the state have spent a decade in the gutter. Local Charleston Gazette reporter Eric Eyre has quietly done an amazing job the last few years chronicling West Virginia’s immense broadband dysfunction, from the State’s use of broadband stimulus subsidies on unused, overpowered routers and overpaid, redundant consultants, to state leaders’ attempts to bury reports highlighting how a cozy relationship with companies like Frontier, Verizon and Cisco has led to what can only be explained as systemic, statewide fraud on the taxpayer dime.

• So we’ve discussed at length how somebody is gaming the FCC’s comment system, using a bot to post hundreds of thousands of fake comments in support of the agency’s plan to kill net neutrality. We’ve also made it pretty clear that the FCC doesn’t appear interested in doing much about this, because these bogus (and in some instances dead) people “support” the FCC’s plan to gut consumer protections governing the already uncompetitive broadband market.

• I’ve had some first-hand experience with the FCC’s apathy, given I’ve been trying to get them to remove (or even address) a post supporting the death of net neutrality made in my name, falsely claiming I run an “unregistered PAC” and am upset that Title II “diminished broadband investment, stifled innovation, and left American consumers potentially on the hook for a new broadband tax” (none of which is true, it should go without saying). While the agency says it’s looking into my complaint, you simply don’t get the sense that tackling public proceeding comment fraud will be a top agency priority anytime soon.

DRM

• Our posts about Denuvo have come at so furious a pace as of late that it feels silly to do any sort of recap here at the start of this post. If you aren’t up on the DRM’s saga, go read through our reporting, because it’s a fascinating study in both hubris and inevitability in the DRM space. Suffice it to say that Denuvo was once thought to be an unbeatable DRM, except that in the past few months the timeline for breaking through it and cracking the games it is supposed to protect has been whittled down to mere days.

Intellectual Monopolies

• In celebrating the x86 architecture’s 39th birthday yesterday—the 8086 processor first came to market on June 8, 1978—Intel took the rather uncelebratory step of threatening any company working on x86 emulator technology.

• Chipmaker Intel has issued a veiled warning to Microsoft and Qualcomm over the plan by the two to run Windows 10 on the ARM platform, using the approaching 40th anniversary of the x86 processor to say that it will defend any infringement of its 1600 patents fiercely.

• [...]

• “We do not welcome unlawful infringement of our patents, and we fully expect other companies to continue to respect Intel’s intellectual property {sic} rights,” Intel’s executive vice-president and general counsel Steven Rodgers and director of Systems and Software Research Richard Uhlig said.

Trademarks

• Another day, another sigh-inducing trademark dispute in the craft beer industry. As we’ve discussed for some time now, the beer industry has a massive problem on its hands in the form of a deluge of trademark disputes between competitors. This has largely been the result of a huge uptick in craft brewers opening new businesses saddled alongside the tradition of creatively naming different beers and the limitations of the English language. Sometimes, however, you get a good old fashioned trademark dispute where one side is simply claiming similarities so tenuous as to be laughable.

• Last time we checked in with Kellogg’s, makers of various breakfast and cereal products, they were happily sending out threat letters to a Mayan archaeology group that is only involved in the breakfast industry insofar as its employees eat breakfast, over its inclusion of a toucan bird in its logo. While Kellogg went on to settle that dispute, in light of its trademark claim being immensely dumb and a PR nightmare, the whole episode still left many of us wondering just how knowledgeable Kellogg’s legal team is on trademark matters. Archaeology teams are not, generally, part of the breakfast or food industries. This seemed to be either bullying without a purpose or a brand of criminal stupidity at work. But, hey, even megalithic corporations with unlimited legal resources make mistakes.

• You may recall that earlier this year, mid-sized convenience store company Wawa filed a trademark suit against the Dawa Food Mart, a single location food market in New Jersey. At the time, we pointed out several problems with the lawsuit, including the stature of the companies being vastly different, the offerings of the companies not being particularly identical, and the fact that it was clear that the Korean owner of Dawa was not attempting to trade on Wawa’s name (Dawa means “welcome” in his language). What all of this amounted to was pretty clearly a low likelihood of any actual confusion in the marketplace, which was nearly admitted to when Wawa’s reps excused the legal action away as obligated under trademark law, despite that not being actually true.

Copyrights

• The problems associated with Canada’s copyright notice-and-notice system have been well chronicled. The Canadian system – which was acknowledged as equivalent to the U.S. notice-and-takedown approach in the TPP – allows rights holders to send notifications alleging infringement to intermediaries who are obligated to forward the notifications to their subscribers. The intermediary does not disclose the identity of the subscriber and it falls to the rights holder to pursue further action if they so choose. Unfortunately, the failure to include regulations stipulating what may be included in a forwarded notice has led to rampant misuse of the system, with anti-piracy companies sending millions of notifications that include demands for payments over unproven allegations.

• At a time when Europe is pushing for much greater filtering and takedowns, it’s worth a reminder that these kinds of systems pretty regularly takedown perfectly legitimate content — either content that is fair use or that is licensed. Case in point: this past Sunday, Ariana Grande held a huge benefit concert in Manchester called One Love Manchester. As you no doubt know, a few weeks back there was a bombing at Grande’s concert in Manchester, and her decision to put on a massive benefit concert right back in Manchester just a couple weeks later is impressive.

• If you thought the monkey selfie lawsuit couldn’t get any weirder, well, you underestimated the monkey selfie case. If you don’t remember, the details of this case go back a few years to when a photographer named David Slater got some press attention by claiming that a macaque monkey in Indonesia had come up to his camera, that was on the ground, and taken some selfies. As we explained ages ago, there is no copyright in such photos, because the copyright law in the US, in the UK (where Slater is from) and in Indonesia (where the monkey is) makes it clear that copyright is only available for human creations. Slater has long disagreed about this (and we’ve received some threats here and there, and he’s trashed us personally for claiming the lack of copyright in those images). But… the lawsuit here was a bizarre twist on that. Slater wasn’t suing anyone… instead, PETA, the group known more for its stupid publicity stunts than anything it’s actually done to help animals, decided to sue Slater. PETA argued that it should hold the (non-existant) copyright on behalf of the monkey. Just because. And, on this, we agree with Slater that this is insane and an abuse of the legal system.

• The copyright trolling business is getting weirder and weirder. Brad Heath directs our attention to a ruling in a bizarre case in the 7th circuit appeals court, in which we discover the existence of housing copyright trolls, who drive around looking for houses just a tad too similar to their copyright-covered designs. Really.

• Back in 2012, Techdirt wrote about one of the longest-running copyright sagas. It involved a 2-second rhythmic sample from the Kraftwerk track “Metall auf Metall”, which was used by the German rapper Sabrina Setlur in a single called “Nur Mir”. After the case had ping-ponged around various German courts for 12 years, a decision by Hamburg’s highest regional court seemed to be the end of the matter, as Tim Cushing described in his comprehensive post. But in 2016, Germany’s constitutional court took a look, and now a press release from the country’s highest court (original in German), the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH), informs us that the case is still not yet over, and that it is moving up a level.

• The revision of the copyright monopoly in the European Union continues its way through the European law factory. From Julia Reda, we learn that the Internal Market “IMCO” Committee has now voted, and that some bad things are gone from the proposal, some bad things remain, and some sensible things have entered. Most importantly: the mandatory upload pre-screening censorship is gone, but the profoundly stupid “Google News tax” remains.

• Cloudflare can be held liable for copyright infringements committed by its customers, even if the websites in question are hosted abroad. A California District Court concluded that cached copies on Cloudflare’s servers tie alleged infringements directly to the United States.

• A man who sold retro-gaming systems with thousands of installed games has faced the wrath of Nintendo and Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN. The Raspberry Pi-based consoles contained many titles for old gaming systems including Gameboy, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Megadrive and Playstation. But, despite their age, BREIN says that infringement of all kinds must be punished.

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