● 06.29.17

● Links 29/6/2017: Entroware, Wine-Staging 2.11, Plasma 5.10.3

Posted in News Roundup at 6:22 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• “We are excited that Technoethical has brought out such an impressive collection of hardware whose associated software respects user freedom. RYF certification continues to gain speed and momentum, thanks to companies like them. Users now have more options than ever when it comes to hardware they can trust, and I’m looking forward to what Technoethical will do next, ” said the FSF’s executive director, John Sullivan.

• I’m proud to announce that over the weekend LQ turned 17! I’d like to once again thank each and every LQ member for their participation and feedback. While there is always room for improvement, that LQ has remained a friendly and welcoming place for new Linux members despite its size is a testament to the community.

Desktop

• This past weekend I was sent a System76 laptop to review (Thanks guys and gals!). So the first thing I did was install the latest Kubuntu release (17.04) and added the System76-Driver PPA.

• Two powerful new Linux laptops have been announced by UK-based computer company Entroware.

• The Entroware Apollo is a 13.1-inch notebook made from aluminium, while the Entroware Hybris is a 17.3-inch desktop replacement goliath.

• Entroware, the UK-based hardware manufacturer, known for delivering high-quality, Linux-based desktops, laptops, and servers solutions powered by the popular Ubuntu operating system, today announced two new products.

• Entroware, the UK-based Linux hardware vendor have released two newer laptops and one of them could be a reasonable gaming unit.

• A new open source project hit Kickstarter a few days ago, and it caught our attention because it appears to be a versatile machine that’s fully compatible with Raspberry Pi and Odroid single-board computers.

• Created by Guillaume Debray, an optician with 10+ years experience in making and selling glasses, yet a passionate computer engineer with deep knowledge of programming and hardware assembly and manufacturing processes, the Diskio Pi project wants to be the ultimate open source tablet powered by Raspberry Pi.

• Diskio Pi is the result of 18 months of development, and, in fact, it seems to be some sort of versatile device built on top of a single-board computer. It’s currently compatible with Raspberry Pi 2, Raspberry Pi 3, Raspberry Pi Zero, Odroid C1, and Odroid C2 SBCs, and can run Ubuntu, Debian, Raspbian Pixel, or Android.

• The fantastic Chrome OS team over at Google is on a rampage, and after teasing us with the revamped sign-in/lock screens and new power management settings, today François Beaufort revealed yet another cool feature for our Chromebooks.

• This time, the developer announced on his Google+ page that the Chrome OS team is working on implementing an automatic “Sunset to Sunrise” mode for the upcoming Night Light feature, which should improve our sleep after using a Chromebook at night and ensures reduced strain on the eyes by limiting the amount of blue light emitted by the display.

• CodeWeavers‏, the commercial company behind the well-known CrossOver for Linux and Mac application that lets users install and run Windows apps and games is still working to release an Android version.

• Dubbed CrossOver Android, the project has been in development for the past year, and while it’s still in an Alpha state, it looks like it is already capable of running Windows software on Intel-based Chromebooks and Android tablets. Since then, the project kept updating CrossOver for Android with new features.

Server

• It is 7 years since OpenStack came into being…

• If you’re going to use Mesos or Docker Swarm, it’s very easy to decide which version you can use, either the community supported version or the enterprise grade supported offering.

• For Kubernetes you have to decide which option or options is most likely the right one for your business, this could be somehow challenging, especially in some cases if you’re going to build a hybrid and federated environment, e.g. with OpenStack, AWS and OTC (Open Telekom Cloud).

Kernel Space

• The Linux kernel contains a lot of code support for Xen. This code isn’t just meant to optimize Linux to run as a virtualized guest. As a type 1 hypervisor, Xen relies a lot on the support of the operating system running as dom0. Although other operating systems can be used as dom0, Linux is the most popular dom0 choice — due to its widespread use and for historical reasons (Linux was chosen as dom0 in the first Xen implementation). Given this, a lot of the work of adding new functionality to Xen is done in the Linux kernel.

• The Linux Foundation is announcing a new open-source project designed to bring automated protection to software-defined networks. The Open Security Controller (OSC) Project is a new software-defined security orchestration solution with a focus on multi-cloud environments.

• At the end of an action-packed Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley 2017 earlier this month, Abby Kearns, the Cloud Foundry Foundation executive director, sat down with TNS founder Alex Williams to ponder a very challenging year ahead. Kubo, the platform’s new lifecycle manager that integrates Kubernetes, is now production-ready. And while you’d expect such a move to draw attention and participation from Google, Microsoft coming closer into the fold — as the Foundation’s newest gold-level member, changes the ball game somewhat.

• Is the blockchain just a hype? Can it offer an exponential benefit above other existing technologies? In the second part of our interview series, our nine experts talk about their concerns, the advantages of this technology, the obstacles to experimenting with it and the industries that cannot be disrupted by the blockchain.

• The developers behind the open-source Hyperledger Fabric blockchain project have issued the software’s official release candidate.

• I am pleased to announce the release of the Xen Project Hypervisor 4.9. As always, we focused on improving code quality, security hardening as well as enabling new features. Our approach to security is also the reason why we delayed this release by 3 weeks: security issues that were discovered during the hardening phase of this release, were batched and handled using our Security Policy, which requires us to develop fixes for security issues in private and allows organisations on our pre-disclosure list to update their systems and software, before any code is made public. Consequently, we had to wait until June 20, before we could apply security fixes, build the final release candidate and test the final release candidate.

Graphics Stack

• Collabora is strengthening their graphics development team with a former Canonical developer working on Mir who was laid off during the Ubuntu maker’s recent restructuring.

• Alexandros Frantzis is now working for Collabora. He was a longtime Mir developer who had been with Canonical since 2010. Prior to Mir’s formation, he was lent to Linaro to work on their graphics needs.

• While Vulkan has taken much of the spotlight in the past year when it comes to multi-platform graphics APIs, OpenGL continues to be used by many games, a lot of commercial/workstation software continues relying on OpenGL and that will not change over night, and there it continues to be a widely-used graphics API even if it may not be as fast or customizable as Vulkan. While we previously heard there would likely not be a new version of OpenGL in the foreseeable future, it appears OpenGL 4.6 is on the way.

• Nvidia released a new version of its Vulkan graphics driver for both GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems adding support for new Vulkan and OpenGL extensions, as well as various performance improvements and bug fixes.

• Nvidia 381.10.10 Linux and Nvidia 382.68 Windows Vulkan drivers are now available, and they come improved interoperability with the latest Vulkan API by adding support for the VK_EXT_blend_operation_advanced and VK_NV_framebuffer_mixed_samples extensions.

• During the coding period, I discovered that MetaDisplay, main GObject of Mutter had a lot of X11 specific fields, so I had to move them into something else, which we (mentors and myself) decided to call MetaX11Display. A lot of code had to be modified, and that had to be carefully approached, so nothing got broken in the process. The “coding” I had done was just moving stuff around, between files, adjusting for new structure fields, and so on. It was, I might say, a rather boring experience. But, someone had to do it, as it is a requisite for all of my future work. Note that even at the moment of writing, all of X11 specifics have not been ironed out. While trying to efficiently split MetaDisplay, I stumbled upon MetaScreen, a structure which previously used to contain reference to X Screen it was managing. The comments in the code pointed out that, while Mutter used to contain more than one X Screen, nowadays it manages only one. So, again, we realized that structure needs to be split somehow, since it contains (as expected) lot of X11 specifics, but also some code that can be used for Wayland environment. The decision was made to move the fields into MetaDisplay and MetaX11Display, depending in which environment it might be useful. Sadly, I did not get around to start disassembling the screen management code in this period. So, that’s what my next adventure will be all about. All of the work that was done is available on my Github repository [1].

Benchmarks

• For those not yet well briefed on the Core-X series since the embargo expiry last week, the i7-7740X has four cores plus Hyper Threading. It has a 4.3GHz base frequency with 4.5GHz turbo frequency and an 8MB cache. The i7-7740X has a 112 Watt TDP, natively supports DDR4-2666 of dual-channel memory, and foregoes any integrated graphics.

• Since the Intel Core-X Series were announced last month at Computex, I’ve been excited to see how well this high-end processor will perform under Linux… Linux enthusiasts have plenty of highly-threaded workloads such as compiling the Linux kernel, among other packages, and thus have been very excited by the potential of the Core i9 7900X with its ten cores plus Hyper Threading and sporting a 13.75MB cache. With finally having an X299 motherboard ready, here are my initial Ubuntu Linux benchmarks for the i9-7900X.

• With NVIDIA just releasing a new beta Vulkan driver that in addition to having new Vulkan extensions and better Vulkan/OpenGL interoperability also has “various performance improvements”, I couldn’t resist running some benchmarks.

• With seeing the new NVIDIA 381.10.10 Vulkan beta Linux driver this morning, I ran a few benchmarks on the current selection of available Vulkan Linux games. Tests were done from the Intel Core i7 6800K box with a GeForce GTX TITAN X with my other systems in the office being busy with Intel Core X Series benchmarking.

• A few days back I posted some fresh P-State and CPUFreq governor tests on Intel hardware while now is a similar comparison on the AMD side with a Ryzen 7 1800X processor and Radeon R9 Fury graphics card.

Applications

• We stream nearly everything nowadays, Spotify, Netflix, Crunchyroll…These are just a few of the services that many people nowadays use to get their favourite media wherever they are, and they all have a common theme (besides being stream services); subscription payment plans.

• Pay a small fee each month and you can have all the media you want. But, there are free alternatives too, one of these is a wonderful program named Kaku.

• During a recent episode of Bad Voltage, each presenter had to name a small Linux utility we were surprised more people didn’t regularly use. Fellow Opensource.com Community Moderator Ben Cotton suggested this topic would be of interest to the Opensource.com community, and I think he’s correct. Thanks for the suggestion, Ben.

• The item I chose to highlight is a clipboard manager. For those of you not familiar with a clipboard manager, it’s a small program that runs in the background and keeps a history of everything you save to the clipboard. It sounds simple, and it is, but it will likely boost your productivity more than you’d initially anticipate. It also comes in handy when you copy something, only to realize that means you’ve lost something else in the clipboard that you actually needed.

• Next time you a file you want to send to a friend but don’t fancy the hassle of using Dropbox, try Wormhole.

• It’s a fast, free and secure way to send files to Linux and macOS users.

• For such a small python app it is truly cosmic: you just open a wormhole on your desktop in a Terminal and send a file through it. Then someone on another computer, anywhere else in the world, can open a wormhole on their end, punch in a code, and receive it.

• Summernote is a free, open-source, JavaScript library with which you can create WYSIWYG editors online. It is implemented using jQuery and Bootstrap.

• Cipher is an Ash module that makes it easy to perform aes-256-cbc encryption for files and directories. The ash-shell/cipher is licensed under the MIT License.

• We have just released Beast version 0.11.0: Beast 0.11.0 Announcement

• The announcement gives a high level overview of the changes (Soundfont support, multi threaded signal processing, new packaging, etc) and links to all the details like NEWS, tarballs, the binary package and shortlogs.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Wine Staging 2.11 contains improvements for the macOS preloader, which was added in the last release, and should now support all macOS versions >= 10.6. Besides these host system specific changes, several patches were added to fix individual game bugs. The Witcher 3 should now display the intro videos and contain less graphical glitches compared to Wine Staging 2.10. For GTA 5 it is no longer necessary to pass -GPUCount 1 as parameter or to change the PCI IDs to run the game on a NVIDIA graphic card (-DX10 is still required though). The handling of low level keyboard hooks has been improved to fix input issues in GTA 5. This release also changes the handling of clipping regions to fix the remaining mouse issues with Unity based games.

• Building off last week’s Wine 2.11 update is now the adjoining Wine-Staging release that adds in various experimental patches for more widespread testing.

• The Wine Staging team has put out their 2.11 release and it comes with some interesting fixes. They’ve done some adjustments to help run GTA 5 and The Witcher 3.

• As a reminder: Wine Staging is the testing area for future features and fixes to make it into the normal Wine development releases and then eventually a stable Wine build.

Games

• One of the major games for Linux is ‘Extreme Tux Racer’.

• Extreme Tux Racer is available for Android, Linux, Microsoft Windows, Macintosh operating systems and Ubuntu Touch.

• The goal of the game is to control Tux, or another chosen character, to get to the bottom of the hill. The character will slide down the hill of snow and ice on his belly. Along the way you can pick up herring.

• As it’s probably been one year or so since last trying out Epic Games’ new Unreal Tournament game in public alpha and with today’s update offering easier Linux access, I decided to try it out.

• I fired up the new Unreal Tournament release on a box running Linux 4.12 + Mesa 17.2-dev (via the Padoka PPA) on a Radeon RX 480 graphics card. Unfortunately, reliving my experiences from playing Unreal Tournament nearly two decades ago was short-lived… Unreal Tournament with its OpenGL 4 renderer quickly ran into troubles and there isn’t yet the Vulkan renderer exposed (there are Vulkan references within the UE4 binaries for this build, but the -vulkan or -VulkanRHI switches don’t appear to be working).

• Coming into my inbox a few minutes ago (Thunderbird is handy for RSS feeds!), Unreal Tournament has been updated again and Epic seem to have made it slightly easier to access the Linux version now.

• For those that don’t know or don’t remember, Epic Games are making a new Unreal Tournament and it’s completely free to download and play.

• Usually, you would need to be logged into their forum and go to a specific post to download it, but not any more. At the bottom of their release notes you will now find a direct download for the Linux client and server. However, they still aren’t listing Linux for download on the main downloads page. I imagine this is due to Linux still not having a proper launcher.

• Epic Games has released an updated version of its new, free-to-play Unreal Tournament game powered by Unreal Engine 4. With this latest update does come a new, easy-to-obtain Linux client!

• First up, with this new Unreal Tournament v0.1.12 release are performance improvements for low-end systems, integrated voice chat support, a new Bio Rifle mesh, improved Blitz mode, and other in-game improvements.

• The announcement is here, where it seems you do still need to opt-in to a beta with a password of “torvalds1969″ and then select “linux test 1″. I imagine it will be pushed into the main download within a few days. Their wording on it all is a little confusing, since it’s had a beta for a long time and they now announce it’s available, but you still need a beta.

• …it will have Linux support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today the KDE Project announced the release and general availability of the third stable update to the KDE Plasma 5.10 desktop environment, which was unveiled at the end of May 2017.

• Artful Aardvark (17.10) Alpha 1 images are now available for testing so we can release the alpha on Thursday.

• The Kubuntu team will be releasing 17.10 in October.

• This is the first spin in preparation for the Alpha 1 pre-release. Kubuntu Alpha pre-releases are NOT recommended for…

• Tuesday, 27 June 2017. Today KDE releases a Bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.10.3. Plasma 5.10 was released in May with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

• KDE Plasma 5.10.3 has been released as the newest bug-fix update to Plasma 5. For NVIDIA Linux users in particular this upgrade should be worthwhile.

• Today, I will talk about my work on Krita during the week 3-4 of the coding period.

• I’ve contributed to KDevelop in the past, on the Python plugin, and so far working on the Rust plugin, my impressions from back then were pretty much spot-on. KDevelop has one of the most well thought-out codebases I’ve seen. Specifically, KDevPlatform abstracts over different programming languages incredibly well and makes writing a new language plugin a very pleasant experience.

• There’s quite a lot of software that uses CMake as a (meta-)buildsystem. A quick count in the FreeBSD ports tree shows me 1110 ports (over a thousand) that use it. CMake generates buildsystem files which then direct the actual build — it doesn’t do building itself.

• There are multiple buildsystem-backends available: in regular usage, CMake generates Makefiles (and does a reasonable job of producing Makefiles that work for GNU Make and for BSD Make). But it can generate Ninja, or Visual Studio, and other buildsystem files. It’s quite flexible in this regard.

• Recently, the KDE-FreeBSD team has been working on Qt WebEngine, which is horrible. It contains a complete Chromium and who knows what else. Rebuilding it takes forever.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• We love the Papirus icon theme. It’s colourful, creative, and has really nice folder icons (which, yup, support the neat Folder Color app we mentioned a few weeks ago).

Distributions

New Releases

• New Q4OS Orion version 1.8.7 is available. The default start menu named ‘Bourbon’ has been tuned and polished a bit. First login Q4OS scripts, for example web browser automatic installer, now work on all supported architectures, including arm64 and armhf. As reported recently, we have made several significant modifications in Q4OS Orion to be ready for installation under other Debian based operating systems, so anyone is now enabled to gain Q4OS Orion based on Ubuntu as well as Devuan.

• System packages updates and important security fixes are provided as well. All the updates are immediately available for existing Q4OS users from the regular Q4OS repositories.

Gentoo Family

• For someone that has spent the past thirteen years defining himself as a developer of a Linux distribution (whether I really am still a Gentoo Linux developer or not is up for debate I’m sure), having to write a title like this is obviously hard. But from the day I started working on open source software to now I have grown a lot, and I have realized I have been wrong about many things in the past.

• One thing that I realized recently is that nowadays, distributions lost the war. As the title of this post says, difference is our strength, but at the same time, it is also the seed of our ruin. Take distributions: Gentoo, Fedora, Debian, SuSE, Archlinux, Ubuntu. They all look and act differently, focusing on different target users, and because of this they differ significantly in which software they make available, which versions are made available, and how much effort is spent on testing, both the package itself and the system integration.

Arch Family

• Howdy Arch Linux users! I’ve got a good news for you. Meet Cylon, a maintenance program for Arch Linux and derivatives. It is a menu-driven Bash script which provides updates, maintenance, backups and system checks for Arch Linux and its derivatives such as Antergos, Manjaro Linux etc. Cylon is mainly a CLI program, and also has a basic dialog GUI.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Like most Linux vendors today, SUSE is keeping busy updating it portfolio to support the growing demand for container management and services. So far this month, SUSE has announced two different efforts to improve its container portfolio.

• On June 27, SUSE announced its SUSE Manager 3.1 update, which provides new capabilities for organizations to manage software across both container and cloud infrastructure. SUSE Manager has been part of the SUSE portfolio since 2011, when the company was still part of Novell.

• “SUSE Manager’s new container management and compliance capabilities will enable customers to automate orchestration and provisioning of their container-based services while ensuring container compliance from the same tool they are already using to manage their Linux infrastructure,” Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president for Enterprise System Management Software at IDC, said in a statement.

Red Hat Family

• For years, when Red Hat’s clients and potential customers wanted to meet with software firm execs to talk about working together, they would schlep out to Red Hat’s nondescript meeting space in Westford.

• But now they’ll get a different view. The North Carolina-based software firm this week opened a new global executive briefing center on A Street in the Fort Point section of South Boston. There, clients can touch wall-sized video screens to learn more about their Red Hat projects or the software development work the company has done for others. After a day of brainstorming or deal-making, they can relax in a “speakeasy” — a hidden room with a bar that will be managed by the operators of Drink, the Congress Street nightclub.

• I’ll admit, as a real estate reporter, I’m not too well-versed in the intricacies of Boston’s tech scene. So when I showed up to tour Red Hat Inc.’s new Boston office earlier this week, I had to confess: I didn’t actually know what the open source software giant actually did.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the opening of its new facility in the Seaport District of Boston. The space is home to Red Hat’s state-of-the-art Global Executive Briefing Center, a new Red Hat Engineering Lab, and the first U.S. east coast location for Red Hat Open Innovation Labs.

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

• The Debian project is one of the world’s oldest surviving Linux distributions and can trace its release history back to 1993. The project attracts many developers with over one thousand people contributing to the project with code, artwork and documentation. The Debian project maintains a massive number of software packages with a very open infrastructure which makes contributing to (and borrowing from) Debian quite easy. These factors, along with Debian’s famed stability, have caused over one hundred GNU/Linux distributions over the years to base themselves on Debian.

• The Debian team released Debian 9 (code name Stretch) on June 18th and the new version offers a number of interesting changes. For example, the MySQL database has been replaced with its fork, MariaDB. The Debian-rebranded packages of Icedove and Iceweasel have been replaced by their upstream counterparts, Thunderbird and Firefox. According to the release announcement over 90% of Debian’s huge collection of packages can now be verified through reproducible builds, which is great news for people who want to verify the source code they have access to matches the code used to make their executable files. In some situations administrators can now set up the X display software to run without root user access, making the display software a little more secure.

Derivatives

• A new release of Raspbian GNU/Linux came out last week. Along with some nice additions like a new version of Scratch and a new Python IDE (Integrated Development Environment), this release follows up on the Raspbian for x86 released in January.

• The response to that release was far higher than the developers expected (you would think by now that the people at the Raspberry Pi Foundation would have learned to raise their expectations).

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical today published a new installation of the Ubuntu Foundations Team weekly newsletter to inform the Ubuntu Linux community on the progress made since last week’s update.

• In April 2017, Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth announced that their support of the Ubuntu phone convergence was no longer something they were going to invest in. Looking back on this decision, I can understand where they were coming from. Let’s face it, we live in an Android/iOS landscape and all other entries into this space are just spinning their wheels.

• Considering other projects that failed to garner needed traction such as WebOS, Firefox OS, among others, it’s understandable why Canonical decided to refocus their efforts into other areas. Well, at least with cloud services. I differ with them on IoT and believe they’re destined to repeat mistakes found with convergence.

• Ubuntu’s Unity interface is gone, which means there’s one less desktop to choose from in Linux-land. And while dozens remain to choose from, Unity was one of the most polished out there. Many will miss its detail and design.

• One of the desktops that is nearly as well polished, and therefore worth Unity fans considering, is the not-quite-as-new-kid on the block, Elementary OS.

• Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, today announces that its IoT OS, Ubuntu Core, is available on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 – the general-purpose compute product from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 (CM3), announced in January 2017, is a micro-version of the Raspberry Pi 3 intended to provide a simple, cost optimised single board computer.

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #511 for the weeks of June 12 – 25, 2017, and the full version is available here.

Flavours and Variants

• Generally speaking, Ubuntu Budgie 17.04 left a nice impression on me. You can order your own copy of this operating system here.

• It felt solid, fast and stable. There were no glitches apart from the screen-related issue at the very beginning of the boot process.

• There were issues here and there of various severities. If Debian wallpapers in Ubuntu-based distribution can only cause a smile, the software search issues in the default package manager are something that should be really dealt with.

• Ubuntu MATE developer Martin Wimpress announced that, in collaboration with Luke Horwell, he plans to revamp the Software Boutique default graphical package manager of the Ubuntu MATE operating system.

• It’s been a while since Ubuntu MATE’s Software Boutique received any major changes, but it finally looks like it will get some much-needed attention as developer Luke Horwell gave users a sneak peek to the upcoming Software Boutique version that’ll be shipping with Ubuntu MATE 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) later this year.

• A new and improved software store is coming to Ubuntu MATE — and potentially other Linux distros, too.

• Previewed by MATE developer Martin Wimpress earlier today, the new ‘Software Boutique’ lets users search for and install Snap apps, as well as search out all apps available in the Ubuntu archives.

Devices/Embedded

• Normally, Linux Picks and Pans does not review such early new beta releases. However, the framework and unique features of Xinix OS make it such a radically different Linux distro that I kept coming back to tinker with it. The latest update was posted on June 15.

• If you enjoy delving into unchartered territory with software, check out this latest version. It shows solid improvements over earlier efforts. Otherwise, wait for later upgrades as Xinix OS gets more developed.

• Download Xinix OS here. The Vanilla Edition (VE) is for devices like desktops and laptops. The Embedded Edition (EE) is for routers and set-top boxes.

• Ubuntu Core running on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, which is a micro-version of the Raspberry Pi 3 that slots into a standard DDR2 SODIMM connector, means developers have a route to the production and can upgrade functionality through the addition of snaps- the universal Linux application packaging format.

• Device manufacturers can also develop their own app stores, all while benefiting from the additional security of Ubuntu Core.

• Avalue’s “EMS-SKLU-Marine” is an IEC EN60945 certified computer with 6th Gen Core CPUs, -20 to 60°C support, plus 2x GbE, 4x USB 3.0, M2, and mini-PCIe.

• The EMS-SKLU-Marine is designed for maritime applications such as control room or engine room, integrated bridge systems, propulsion control or safety systems, and boat entertainment systems. Avalue touts the 240 x 151 x 75mm box computer for being smaller than typical boat computers while complying with IEC EN60945 ruggedization standards.

• DFI’s rugged, Linux-ready “DV970” COM Express Basic Type 7 module debuts the server-class, 16-core Atom C3000, and supports 4x 10GbE-KR and 16x PCIe 3.0.

• DFI promotes the DV970 as the first COM Express Basic Type 7 module based on the Intel Atom C3000 “Denverton” SoC, but it’s the first product of any kind that we’ve seen that uses the SoC. Intel quietly announced the server class, 16-core Atom C3000 in late February, with a target of low-end storage servers, NAS appliances, and autonomous vehicles, but it has yet to publicly document the SoC. The C3000 follows other server-oriented Atom spin-offs such as the flawed, up to 8-core Atom C2000 “Rangeley” and earlier Atom D400 and D500 SoCs.

• Intel’s veiled threat to file patent infringement suit against any company emulating x86 Win32 software on ARM-based computers has probably slayed Microsoft’s Cellular PC dream.

• Renesas unveiled a “RZ/G1C” SoC for HMI applications with 1x or 2x 1GHz Cortex-A7 cores and a PowerVR SGX531 GPU, plus a Linux-supported starter kit.

• The RZ/G1C SoC joins other similarly Yocto Project supported Renesas RZ/G SoCs such as the dual-core RZ/G1E and RZ/G1M with 1GHz Cortex-A7 and 1.5GHz Cortex-A15 cores, respectively. There’s also an RZ/G1N that is almost identical to the RZ/G1M and an octa-core RZ/G1H with 4x Cortex-A15 and 4x -A7 cores.

• On Crowd Supply, an $18 “µduino” board that targets wearables and sensor devices offers an Arduino Leonardo compatible in a half-inch square package.

• A Chelmsford, Mass. based startup called µduino has gone to Crowd Supply to fund what it claims is the “smallest Arduino ever created.” The 12 x 12mm device is smaller than the smallest Arduino compatible we’ve heard of, which is the Pemi’s 20 x 11mm BeanDuino DigiSpark clone. Unlike the BeanDuino, the µduino deploys its micro-USB port flat to the surface, rather than sticking up vertically, and it features a more powerful 32-bit, 16MHz ATMEGA32U4 instead of an 8-bit ATtiny85 MCU.

Phones

Tizen

Android

• The next wave of fingerprint readers on smart devices could be more inconspicuous than they are now. Earlier this year, Synaptics announced a new range of fingerprint sensors that can be integrated under polymers, ceramics, and glass, potentially providing more functions to Android soft buttons. Rumor has it that Apple has also been experimenting specifically with under-display fingerprint readers, and that’s the area that Qualcomm has been focusing on as well. At Mobile World Congress Shanghai, the chip maker showed off its first ultrasonic-based, under-display fingerprint sensors in a prototype of the existing Vivo Xplay6 smartphone.

Free Software/Open Source

• Today’s digital marketers use an ever-increasing amount of software to plan, organize, execute, measure, and report on marketing campaigns.

• Marketers often refer to the various software they use as the “marketing stack.” In many cases, that software is proprietary.

• There are several very good reasons why marketers should consider building out their marketing stack on open source software. One is that there’s an excellent range of open source software they can choose from; here are three others.

• I had a wonderful run at Google — more than six years — and decided it was time for a change of scene, both career-wise and geographically. I had worked extensively with the team at OSU’s Open Source Lab during my time at Google and had consistently been impressed with their support of the open source community and their leadership in bringing open source into computer science education. My new role allows me to support both aspects of their mission, and I am very excited to join them.

• After blogging about casync I realized I never blogged about the mkosi tool that combines nicely with it. mkosi has been around for a while already, and its time to make it a bit better known. mkosi stands for Make Operating System Image, and is a tool for precisely that: generating an OS tree or image that can be booted.

• Yes, there are many tools like mkosi, and a number of them are quite well known and popular. But mkosi has a number of features that I think make it interesting for a variety of use-cases that other tools don’t cover that well.

• Users of Freedreno, the open-source graphics driver support for Adreno on Linux distributions, will be pleased to know that a new update has been released in the past week. Lead developer Rob Clark discussed many of the details in his blog, which highlight above all the support for Adreno 500 series GPUs. Among the highlights include compute shaders for OpenGL and OpenGL ES, improved performance and improved Linux distribution support.

• AMD is looking to penetrate the deep learning market with a new line of Radeon GPU cards optimized for processing neural networks, along with a suite of open source software meant to offer an alternative to NVIDIA’s more proprietary CUDA ecosystem.

• In September of 2016, Baidu released the initial version of DeepBench, which became the first tool to be opened up to the wider deep learning community to evaluate how different processors perform when they are used to train deep neural networks. Since its initial release, several companies have used and contributed to the DeepBench platform, including Intel, Nvidia, and AMD.

• GitHub is home to many open-source development projects, a lot of which are featured on XDA. The service wants more people to contribute to open-source projects with a new initiative called Open Source Friday. In a nutshell, GitHub will be encouraging companies to allow their employees to work on open-source projects at the end of each working week.

• Even if all of the products you use on a daily basis are based on closed source software, much of the technology world operates using software based on open source software. A lot of servers are based off of various GNU/Linux based operating systems such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Much of the world’s infrastructure depends on open source software.

• GitHub is inviting every one – individuals, teams, departments and companies – to join in Open Source Friday, a structured program for contributing to open source that started inside GitHub and has since expanded.

• Organizations everywhere are implementing container technology, and many of them are also turning to Kubernetes as a solution for orchestrating containers. Kubernetes is attractive for its extensible architecture and healthy open source community, but some still feel that it is too difficult to use. Now, new tools are emerging that help streamline Kubernetes and make building container-based applications easier. Here, we will consider several open source options worth noting.

• Look for increased interest – and growth – in Open Source software and programming options. That’s the word from NodeSource, whose recent survey found that most (91%) of enterprise software developers believe new businesses will come from open source projects.

• Sony on Tuesday open-sourced its Neural Network Libraries, a framework meant for developing artificial intelligence (AI) solutions with deep learning capabilities, the Japanse tech giant said in a statement. The company is hoping that its latest move will help grow a development community centered around its software tools and consequently improve the “core libraries” of the framework, thus helping advance this emerging technology. The decision to make its proprietary deep learning libraries available to everyone free of charge mimics those recently made by a number of other tech giants including Google, Amazon, and Facebook, all of whom are currently in the process of trying to incentivize AI developers to use their tools and grow their software ecosystems.

Events

• My talk was manly about the Gentoo Kernel related Projects past and future specifically about the Gentoo Kernel Continuos Integreting system we are creating:

• https://github.com/gentoo/Gentoo_kernelCI

• SeaGL is a grassroots technical conference, taking place in Seattle, WA, United States in October 6-7th. It’s dedicated to spreading knowledge about the GNU/Linux community and free/libre/open-source software/hardware. I went last year, and there’s a lot of cool people with amazing stories on multiple open source topics. Now, we want to hear from you.

• The free software community in Bilwi organized FLISoL (Latin American free software install fest) this year as the only city in Nicaragua holding this event on April 22nd (Masaya holding it a week later). I had previously got in touch with one of the community members, Robert Müller, at the Central American Free Software Meeting in 2016, but I had never visited Bilwi before. FLISoL took place at URACCAN. Since this university does not offer many engineering programs, the expected audience was a little different than I was used to.

• Samsung has a lot instore for you at this year’s SDC. The main sessions will begin from 18th while the workshops will happen a day before as part of a Pre-event hands on workshop taking place on October 17th. You can find the complete Session Catalog from here and the pre event workshop schedule can be found here. Some of the top Samsung representatives will be sharing their work at the event and will give an insight on the upcoming products and services from Samsung.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Unused features blur the focus of LibreOffice, and maintaining legacy capabilities is difficult and error-prone. The engineering steering committee (ESC) collected some ideas of what features could be flagged as deprecated in the next release – 5.4 – with the plan to remove them later. However, without any good information on what is being used in the wild the decision is very hard. So we run a survey in the last week to get insights into what features are being used.

• When you think of GIMP, you think of Wilber; when you think of OpenSUSE, you picture the gecko; and when you think of Mozilla you picture 1990s t-rex clipart.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• After leaving Sun I was pleased that a group of former employees and partners chose to start a new company. Their idea was to pick up the Sun identity management software Oracle was abandoning and continue to sustain and evolve it. Open source made this possible.

• We had made Sun’s identity management portfolio open source as part of our strategy to open new markets. Sun’s products were technically excellent and applicable to very large-scale problems, but were not differentiated in the market until we added the extra attraction of software freedom. The early signs were very good, with corporations globally seeking the freedoms other IDM vendors denied them. By the time Oracle acquired Sun, there were many new customers approaching full production with our products.

• History showed that Oracle could be expected to silently abandon Sun’s IDM portfolio in favour of its existing products and strong-arm customers to migrate. Forgerock’s founders took the gamble that this would happen and disentangled themselves from any non-competes in good time for the acquisition to close. Sun’s practice was open development as well as open source licensing, so Forgerock maintained a mirror of the source trees ready for the inevitable day when they would disappear.

• Sure enough, Oracle silently stepped back from the products, reassigned or laid off key staff and talked to customers about how the cost of support was rising but offering discounts on Oracle’s products as mitigation. With most of them in the final deployment stages of strategic investments, you can imagine how popular this news was. Oracle become Forgerock’s dream salesman.

• As service providers report a number of successful production deployments of network functions virtualization, it is important to consider the infrastructure beneath it all — and the available options. The leading software platforms for NFV infrastructure are OpenStack and VMware’s vCloud NFV. But service providers can choose from a number of OpenStack options, including sourcing from a supplier or open source internal development.

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• While not as prominent as GNU Emacs or GNU Nano, GNU Moe was released today as the latest release of this text editor.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is urging Europe’s governments to create incentives for public sector organisations and others to use open data. A good way for governments to promote sharing and reuse of data, and to improve public administration, is the creation of data-driven eGovernment services, says Barbara Ubaldi, Head of Unit, Digital Government and Open Data at the OECD.

Programming/Development

• Rust is designed to be interoperable with C interfaces. Currently it is not able to call C++ libraries directly.

Leftovers

• Swiss-based email and vpn outfit ProtonMail has welcomed the European Union’s decision to fine Google a record-breaking £2.1bn over its practice of downgrading the search results of competitors, saying that it was the victim of these practices last year.

• She added: “Instead, Google abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results, and demoting those of competitors.

• By now, of course, you’ve probably heard that the EU Commission has fined Google €2.4 billion for antitrust violations, specifically regarding shopping search (there are at least two other investigations going on around antitrust questions involving Android and Adsense). The specific issue leading to this fine is that Google, for years, has been pushing its own comparison shopping results in response to searches on products, and other comparison search vendors feel this is unfair, as users are more likely to just jump to Google’s shopping options in the boxes up top — usually called the “onebox” (for what it’s worth, I almost never click on those boxes, in fact, I almost never use Google for product search, preferring other, better, dedicated sites — but that’s a single anecdotal point, while the EU is citing some data it claims supports its position). Anyway, rather than digging all that deep, let’s go with three thoughts I had in reading through the EU’s announcement (linked above), Google’s response and some of the other coverage.

• [...]

• So… if this isn’t going to hurt Google and isn’t going to help other companies in the market, then… what’s the point exactly? Yes, Google could have done things differently, but this doesn’t help really.

Science

• American campuses have drifted away from academia and toward administration. The shift badly impacts the traditional mission of both college and students.

• Legacy systems have a bad reputation among computer people. Pretty much no one wants to work on COBOL-based mainframe software. All the typing that goes on when you buy a plane ticket in person is because of SABRE, and one comes to think about whether the fee that travel agents charge is just due to the burden of battling that inscrutable software. We may know horror stories of a sad company that simply cannot move away from Windows 95, or Windows 3.1, because they have an old and unmaintained chunk of critical infrastructure that runs there, and that for $reasons has not been replaced with something newer.

• It is hard to imagine having the ability to control the outcome of those systems. They are Too Big To Fail, and most definitely outside of the experience of “everyday people”.

Health/Nutrition

• Beef is widely recognized as the most climate-damaging of all foods. A new study by the Natural Resources Defense Council on food consumption in the US calculates that each kilogram of beef produces 26.5 kilograms of CO2 emissions — the highest among all the foods observed in the study, and five times more than chicken or turkey meat.

• Animal agriculture is responsible for 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, making it a significant contributor to climate change. Of those emissions, 65 percent come from beef and dairy cattle.

• The government is deliberately underfunding the NHS in an attempt to speed up its plans to privatise the health service, senior doctors have said.

• Members of the British Medical Association (BMA) accused Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, of “consciously” creating a crisis in NHS hospitals while scapegoating doctors “to distract the public from an underfunded service under severe and intense strain”.

• This is “in order to accelerate its transformation plans for private sector takeover of healthcare in England”, said the motion passed by representatives at the union’s annual representative meeting in Bournemouth.

Security

• “Who would think your printer could be used as an access point to your networks?” he tells the BBC.

• The Gateway Terminal India (GTI) impacted is operated by Danish shipping giant AP Moller-Maersk, which has experienced outages in its computer systems globally. The GTI has a capacity to handle 1.8 million standard container units.

• Once a single [Windows] computer on a network was infected, Petya leveraged Windows networking tools like Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and PsExec to infect other computers on the same network.

• At least two officials from security companies have taken aim at IT teams in businesses after the latest Windows ransomware attack that spread from Europe to other parts of the world overnight.

• In an internal memo to staff, one WPP firm said it was the target of “a massive global malware attack, affecting all Windows servers, PCs and laptops”. It warned employes to turn off and disconnect all machines using Windows.

• Even if a bug isn’t your fault it’s still your responsibility, and in this post I’ll explain how to apply that in practice.

• Today, June 28th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes documents from the ELSA project of the CIA. ELSA is a geo-location malware for WiFi-enabled devices like laptops running the Microsoft Windows operating system. Once persistently installed on a target machine using separate CIA exploits, the malware scans visible WiFi access points and records the ESS identifier, MAC address and signal strength at regular intervals. To perform the data collection the target machine does not have to be online or connected to an access point; it only needs to be running with an enabled WiFi device. If it is connected to the internet, the malware automatically tries to use public geo-location databases from Google or Microsoft to resolve the position of the device and stores the longitude and latitude data along with the timestamp. The collected access point/geo-location information is stored in encrypted form on the device for later exfiltration. The malware itself does not beacon this data to a CIA back-end; instead the operator must actively retrieve the log file from the device – again using separate CIA exploits and backdoors.

• The ELSA project allows the customization of the implant to match the target environment and operational objectives like sampling interval, maximum size of the logfile and invocation/persistence method. Additional back-end software (again using public geo-location databases from Google and Microsoft) converts unprocessed access point information from exfiltrated logfiles to geo-location data to create a tracking profile of the target device.

• First things first. If you’re running Windows. Patch your systems! The latest variant of Petya, GoldenEye, can attack if, and only if, one of your Windows PCs still hasn’t been patched with Microsoft’s March MS17-010. Microsoft thought patching this bug was important enough that it even patched it on its unsupported Windows XP operating system.

• The Royal Navy’s brand new £3.5bn aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth is currently* running Windows XP in her flying control room, according to reports.

• Defence correspondents from The Times and The Guardian, when being given a tour of the carrier’s aft island – the rear of the two towers protruding above the ship’s main deck – spotted Windows XP apparently in the process of booting up on one of the screens in the flying control room, or Flyco.

• There has been a lot of talk about zero trust networks lately, but little consensus about what they actually are. Similar to DevOps or software defined networking, that zero trust means something a little different to everyone is becoming clear. That said, there is one thing we can all agree on: The network cannot be trusted.

• At its core, zero trust is a security model. Any system operating in a way that completely removes trust from the underlying network is said to be conformant to the model. As you might imagine, there are many ways to accomplish this goal, some more robust than others. All zero trust implementations, however, rely on extensive authentication and authorization processes that can be sprinkled liberally throughout the infrastructure.

• There are few commercial options available in the zero trust space, and even then the options are far from comprehensive. Most present vendor lock-in challenges, and none provide a full end-to-end implementation, which would require complexities such as secure introduction and workload authenticity. That said, building toward a zero trust network is a capability most organizations possess, and doing so will help ensure that they are well-positioned to weather the architectural shakeup that will no doubt occur in the coming years.

• CVE-2017-9445 is regarding a vulnerability opened by systemd that could allow malicious actors to crash the program or run programs via a specially crafted DNS response.

• Canonical informs Ubuntu users that it updated the systemd packages in the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) and Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating systems to patch a recently discovered security issue.

• The new systemd vulnerability (CVE-2017-9445) appears to affect the systemd-resolved component, which could allow a remote attacker to crash the systemd daemon by causing a denial of service or run malicious programs on the vulnerable, unpatched machines by using a specially crafted DNS response.

• People expect their anti-virus to protect them from malware and exploits but sometimes, even these products have their own vulnerabilities. Leandro Barragan and Maximiliano Vidal, researchers at network security firm Core Security, have found a number of possible exploits in the Web Management Console for Kaspersky’s Anti-virus for Linux File Servers.

• The draft budget said, in an amendment proposed by Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, that it “prohibits the DOD from using software platforms developed by Kaspersky Lab due to reports that the Moscow-based company might be vulnerable to Russian government influence.”

• I know. That’s harsh.

• But it’s true. If you haven’t yet replaced Windows, across the board, you absolutely stink at your job.

• For years, we’ve had one trojan, worm and virus after another. And almost every single one is specifically targeting Microsoft Windows. Not MacOS. Not Linux. Not DOS. Not Unix. Windows.

• Wannacry managed to infect hundreds of thousands of highly vulnerable Windows installations around the globe. It was a huge problem for many major institutions that fill their organizations with the operating system from Redmond, Washington.

• But did you learn your lesson? No.

• Then another bit of ransomware comes along, called NotPetya, and manages to take out critical systems at freaking Chernobyl. Also airports and banks. Oh, and hospitals. Can’t forget about the hospitals.

• Indeed, it would appear that the pace of change is slowing, with Metropolitan Police using Windows XP on 35,000 PCs in April 2015, 27,000 in August 2016, and 19,000 in December last year, according to Freedom of Information (FOI) Act requests.

• The superficial resemblance to Petya is only skin deep. Although there is significant code sharing, the real Petya was a criminal enterprise for making money. This is definitely not designed to make money. This is designed to spread fast and cause damage, with a plausibly deniable cover of “ransomware.”

• Security firm Symantec confirmed that Petya uses the “Eternal Blue” exploit, a digital weapon that was believed to have been developed by the U.S. National Security Agency and in April 2017 leaked online by a hacker {sic} group calling itself the Shadow Brokers.

• And while it owes its rapid spread in part to EternalBlue, the same stolen NSA exploit WannaCry leveraged, it lacks several of the traits that made WannaCry—which turned out to be an unfinished North Korean project gone awry—easier to stop.

• News organizations reported potentially serious disruptions around the world, with organizations throughout Ukraine being hit particularly hard. In that country, infections reportedly hit metro networks, power utility companies, government ministry sites, airports, banks, media outlets, and state-owned companies. Those affected included radiation monitors at the Chernobyl nuclear facility. A photograph published by Reuters showed an ATM at a branch of Ukraine’s state-owned Oschadbank bank that was inoperable. A message displayed on the screen demanded a payment to unlock it. Meanwhile, Reuters also reported that Ukrainian state power distributor Ukrenergo said its IT systems were also hit by a cyber attack but that the disruption had no impact on power supplies or broader operations. Others hit, according to Bloomberg, included Ukrainian delivery network Nova Poshta, which halted service to clients after its network was infected. Bloomberg also said Ukraine’s Central Bank warned on its website that several banks had been targeted by hackers.

• Ebba Blitz isn’t a typical technology industry CEO and the company she leads isn’t a typical security vendor either. Blitz joined AlertSec after a career in journalism in Sweden where she honed her craft of making complex subjects more understandable which is what she’s now doing in a different capability with security at AlertSec

• “We help small and medium sized companies get the same level of security that larger enterprises normally have, in terms of full-disk encryption and we manage it for them,” Blitz said.

• The Chernobyl nuclear power plant has also had to monitor radiation levels manually after its Windows-based sensors were shut down.

• Josh and Kurt talk about security through obscurity, airplanes, the FAA, the Windows source code leak, and chicken sandwiches.

• If you’re using a Windows laptop or PC you could add another group to the list: the CIA.

• The whistleblowing platform released what appears to be the CIA’s user manual for the ELSA project as evidence. WikiLeaks began releasing Vault 7 on March 7, with the first full part comprising 8,761 documents. The previous release took place on June 22 and was dedicated to the CIA “Brutal Kangaroo” hacking tool.

• DNN Platform is a popular content management system (particularly with state and local governments) based on Windows Server and the ASP.NET framework for Microsoft Internet Information Server. DNN Platform is open source and available for free—making it attractive to government agencies looking for something low cost that fits into their existing Windows Server-heavy organizations. A review of the HTML source of each of the sites attacked by Team System DZ showed that they were running a vulnerable version of the content management system DNN Platform—version 7.0, which was released in 2015.

Defence/Aggression

• The body of Elise Dallemagne was burnt during the cremation ceremony in May 2017 in Bangkok – mother took her ashes home to Belgium. She now seriously doubts the police version of the disappearance and the death of her daughter and seeks for help publicly. Since we know about the history of Koh Tao with murdered and disappearing young tourists this case has at least a faded smell… Another missing tourist, Russian citizen Valentina Novozhyonova, has not been found to this day and many people on Koh Tao also doubt the police reports about her fate…

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• John Pilger made the following remarks in presenting the 15th Martha Gellhorn Prize to the American journalist Robert Parry at a dinner in London on 27 June 2017…

• There are too many awards for journalism. Too many simply celebrate the status quo. The idea that journalists ought to challenge the status quo – what Orwell called Newspeak and Robert Parry calls ‘groupthink’ – is becoming increasingly rare.

• More than a generation ago, a space opened up for a journalism that dissented from the groupthink and flourished briefly and often tenuously in the press and broadcasting. Today, that space has almost closed in the so-called mainstream media. The best journalists have become – often against their will – dissidents.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• The world could emit enough carbon to bust the Paris Agreement target of between 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius in anything from four to 26 years if current levels continue, the article said.

• Well, actually better than free. California produced so much solar power on those days that it paid Arizona to take excess electricity its residents weren’t using to avoid overloading its own power lines.

• Oil will continue to flow through the Dakota Access Pipeline through the summer while authorities conduct additional review of the environmental impact, after a judge on Wednesday ordered more hearings in coming months.

• Oil will continue to flow through the Dakota Access Pipeline this summer and into the fall, despite the ruling from a federal judge last week that the Trump administration must conduct additional environmental review of the project.

• Exposing the agenda behind the 1,172-mile-long, $3.8 billion pipeline financed by Energy Transfer Partners and 17 financial institutions such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas of France, was an idea she and former boyfriend, Kyle Thompson, had been planning for months, she said.

• A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20% by 2021, creating an environmental crisis some campaigners predict will be as serious as climate change.

• New figures obtained by the Guardian reveal the surge in usage of plastic bottles, more than half a trillion of which will be sold annually by the end of the decade.

• The demand, equivalent to about 20,000 bottles being bought every second, is driven by an apparently insatiable desire for bottled water and the spread of a western, urbanised “on the go” culture to China and the Asia Pacific region.

• UK risks becoming ‘dumping ground’ for plastic after Brexit Read more More than 480bn plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016 across the world, up from about 300bn a decade ago. If placed end to end, they would extend more than halfway to the sun. By 2021 this will increase to 583.3bn, according to the most up-to-date estimates from Euromonitor International’s global packaging trends report.

• Perry is also a supporter of nuclear energy. “No clean energy portfolio is truly complete without nuclear power,” Perry added this afternoon. Research into advanced nuclear reactors and small modular reactors, he said, would be “a game changer.” The secretary was vague on details about how exactly the Department of Energy (DOE) would boost the ailing nuclear energy industry—this year, major reactor builder Westinghouse suffered a bankruptcy—but he did offer a few ideas. “One of the things we want to do at Department of Energy is make nuclear energy cool again” to young people who might want to study it, Perry said. He later added, “this industry has been strangled all too often by government regulations.”

Finance

• Make no mistake: Despite the cosy ties with Washington, India, essentially, is on its own against China.

• The UK is in turmoil. Sixteen months ago, when David Cameron announced the date of the EU referendum, we were the fastest growing economy in the western world and the envy of Europe. The Brexiteers were convinced that Europe was on its way to ruin. Now Britain is becoming the laughing stock of Europe. The pound has weakened. Inflation is six times higher than the 0.5% it was a year ago. Today, inflation is 2.9% and wage growth is 1.7%. Europe is growing faster than Britain.

• And the prime minister, Theresa May, who has suffered heavy defeats in the House of Lords and in the general election that she chose to call, has not listened to parliament, business or the people.

• And Brexit. Hard, soft, clean – these are not useful terms. I took no part in the referendum campaign – I thought both sides massively exaggerated their case, and thought a vote to leave would mean some short-term economic downside through uncertainty, and some medium and long-term upside opportunity. I still think that – and the short term is not over yet. So what sort of Brexit? Yes, of course we should prioritise economic benefit over immigration – if we stuff up the economy no-one will want to come here anyway. Yes, of course we should want to leave the Customs Union; as Trade Minister of the fifth largest economy in the world I found it deeply frustrating that I was not at the “top table” in the WTO.

• So why not head for the bracing waters of the Norway, or EEA, option, as an interim holding pattern while we work out the permanent answer? Out of the Customs Union, in the Single Market, the chance – maybe limited – to negotiate restrictions to free movement of people, and no ECJ. It would have the necessary element for the EU27 of being “less good than membership” because we would be required to take whatever Brussels decides by way of market regulation – but in the near-term the current stock of regulation is what we work with already. I have little doubt that this option would be the most attractive and reassuring to investors now scratching their heads when they wonder whether to put their money, their ideas, their enterprise and their talents to work in the UK.

• And that’s central to our future success. Unless we continue to make Britain the destination of choice for increasingly mobile talent and capital, we will resume the decline that 40 years ago was arrested and then reversed by Margaret Thatcher. So while of course acknowledging that there is a role for government – did anyone suggest there wasn’t? – can we please once again be the party of low taxes, the smaller state, stronger society, the open economy and enterprise? In the post-Brexit world this will be more important than it ever has been.

• Metaphors, according to Orson Scott Card, are a way of holding the most truth in the least space. And their power to explain things fast can be startling. Take the quantum mechanical concept of the Higgs field, which gives mass to particles. Physicist David Miller likened it to a busy cocktail party full of guests. Small particles were ordinary people, who could move through the party with relative ease. Large particles, though, were more like important guests. They would attract attention as they passed and would find their movement impeded. Congratulations: you now have a grasp of one of the most complex concepts in particle physics.

• Wait a moment, though. You were able to appreciate a bunch of inferences in that metaphor because you learned about atoms in high school science. Without that knowledge, the metaphor isn’t so helpful. In fact, it could become actively dangerous. Take the evolutionary concept of ‘survival of the fittest’. It sounds simple enough, until you realise that in evolution ‘fit’ doesn’t mean physical health. It means fitness to survive in a given environment. That’s taught nowadays, but misunderstandings of Darwin’s metaphor resulted in the eugenics movement.

• This is the lupine charm of the analogy. It helps you feel that you’re smart, that you’ve understood something difficult. And that holds true whether or not you have the supporting knowledge to have properly grasped the concept. If not, it’s bewitched you into thinking you’ve learned something when in fact you’re worse off than before. No-one is immune. In the overwhelming rush of modern media, we all want facts and we want them fast.

• One third of non-British workers are considering leaving the UK, with highly skilled workers from the EU most likely to go, according to new research into the impact of Brexit on the jobs market.

• The consultancy firm Deloitte found 47% of highly skilled workers from the EU were considering leaving the UK in the next five years. In a report on Tuesday, it warns of serious implications for employers, raising the pressure on ministers to come up with sensible immigration plans and to find ways to improve the skills of UK workers and make better use of robots in the workplace.

• Overall, 36% of non-British workers in the UK said they were thinking of leaving within the same period, representing 1.2m jobs out of 3.4 million migrant workers in the UK. Just more than quarter (26%) said they were considering leaving within three years.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Halderman emphasized that “our highly computerized election infrastructure is vulnerable to sabotage, and to cyberattacks that could change votes.”

• Three prominent CNN journalists resigned Monday night after the network was forced to retract and apologize for a story linking Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund under congressional investigation. That article — like so much Russia reporting from the U.S. media — was based on a single anonymous source, and now, the network cannot vouch for the accuracy of its central claims.

• This past Thursday the New York Times vomited up a hit piece on little ol’ me – a guy who has been doing stand-up comedy for nearly 20 years and thought maybe that comedy could be used to inform and inspire audiences, rather than just make fun of the differences between men and women.

• At first when you’re the center of a smear job, you’re annoyed and frustrated. But as I read further through the piece, I realized it was a master class in how to write propaganda for one of the most “respected” news outlets in our country. I’m actually grateful it was written about me because now I can see with my own eyes exactly how the glorious chicanery is done. I count no less than 15 lies, manipulations, and false implications in this short article, a score that even our fearless prevaricator-in-chief Donald Trump would envy.

• So here now is a “How To” for writing propaganda for the New York Times – using the smear piece against me as an example.

• DEMONSTRATING ONCE AGAIN that official business will not deter him from his mission to make America creepy again, Donald Trump interrupted a phone call to Ireland’s new leader on Tuesday to ask a “beautiful” Irish reporter where she was from, summon her over to his desk, and praise her “nice smile.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• “In terms of the data protection regulation the age limit is in principle 16 years, but at the national level, it may be defined between 13 and 16 years,” said Anu Talus, the Justice Ministry’s legislative counsellor.

• This is no time for progressives to get complacent.

• The ACLU is celebrating twenty years of making the internet better. On June 26th, 1997, the ACLU prevailed in Reno v. ACLU, with the Supreme Court striking down the anti-indecency portions of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA).

• As can be gathered by the law’s name, it was written from a position of morality and panic — the fear that the internet’s connectivity would drown the nation’s youth in easily-accessible porn. And yet, the law survives today as one of the most important factors in the internet’s speedy growth, thanks to Section 230, which prevents service providers and social media platforms from being held civilly responsible for users’ posts and actions.

• But it might not have been that way. In 1996, the ACLU didn’t even have a website of its own and most legislators had nothing more than bill sponsors’ parades of horribles to go on. So, for the children, the CDA criminalized “obscene or indecent” material if it could be viewed by minors.

• In its 7-2 decision, Canada’s Supreme Court found that a court in the country can grant an injunction preventing conduct anywhere in the world when it is necessary to ensure the injunction’s effectiveness.

• In Google v Equustek, the Supreme Court of Canada has upheld a worldwide interlocutory injunction against Google forcing the search engine to globally de-index Datalink’s websites being used to unlawfully sell the intellectual property of Equustek. The decision was welcomed by the music industry but disappointed associations advocating for free expression

• A small Canadian firm has acquired an injunction against Google from the Supreme Court of Canada that is being called the first global de-indexing order.

• Equustek, a Vancouver-based maker of networking devices, sued a former distributor called Datalink Technologies. Equustek accused Datalink of illegally re-labeling products and stealing Equustek intellectual property to make its own products.

• For the past few years, we’ve been covering the worrisome Google v. Equustek Solutions case in Canada. The case started out as a trademark case, in which Equustek claimed that another company was infringing on its trademarks online. That’s fine. The problem was that the lower court issued an injunction against Google (a non-party in the case) that said it had to block entire sites worldwide. Blocking sites already raises some concerns, but the worldwide part is the real problem. In 2015, an appeals court upheld that decision, and earlier today the Canadian Supreme Court agreed with both lower courts in a 7-2 decision.

• In the wake of a terrorist attack in London earlier this month, a US congressman wrote a Facebook post in which he called for the slaughter of “radicalized” Muslims. “Hunt them, identify them, and kill them,” declared US Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican. “Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.”

• Higgins’ plea for violent revenge went untouched by Facebook workers who scour the social network deleting offensive speech.

• But a May posting on Facebook by Boston poet and Black Lives Matter activist Didi Delgado drew a different response.

• “All white people are racist. Start from this reference point, or you’ve already failed,” Delgado wrote. The post was removed, and her Facebook account was disabled for seven days.

• Given that, as we discussed in our original post, there is no legitimate legal claim here, the only thing that the threat letter seems to have done is piss off a ton of people about Zillow. That’s bad.

• And it doesn’t seem to be getting better. Rather than doing what I thought the company would do on Tuesday (i.e., admit that it fucked up, slap the lawyer on the wrist, apologize profusely and promise to put in place better processes to avoid this sort of thing from happening again), the company is trying to justify its decision. The Verge has the followup letter that was sent by Zillow’s VP of Communications & Public Affairs, trying to better “explain” the reasoning for the original letter. It doesn’t help. It actually makes things worse.

Privacy/Surveillance

• WeChat now has 937.8 million active users, more than a third of whom spend in excess of four hours a day on the service. To put that in context, consider that the average person around the world spends a little more than an hour a day on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter combined. Tencent’s services are so pervasive in China that startups there find it difficult to refuse forging alliances with or accepting investment dollars from the company.

• The Pro Publica journalist argues that those fighting to better protect privacy aren’t wasting their time, even as the Information Age accelerates. And she explained her optimism at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-hosted by The Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, with an analogy. Consider the Industrial Revolution, she urged.

• As Julia Angwin has observed, “if I don’t do anything to help my children learn to protect themselves, all their data will be swept up into giant databases, and their identity will be forever shaped by that information.”

• ON WEDNESDAY, ONE day after Facebook announced that 2 billion people use its service every month, ProPublica released a bombshell investigation into the company’s hate-speech censorship guidelines. The report included documents revealing that Facebook’s rules often end up protecting the rights of those in power over those who are powerless. These two revelations are inextricably entwined, each enabling and necessitating the other.

• Facebook is the biggest social network on the planet—more than a quarter of the human race uses its site—precisely because it so actively censors and curates its community and follows local laws that enable it to exist even in oppressive countries. And because it is so huge, people who most need a platform for expression online can’t afford to not be on it—even if that means enduring seemingly arbitrary censorship.

• When street protests erupt in major cities such as London, the police build fences around the protesters, cutting them off from the rest of the world. They become an island in the middle of the city, like a construction site or broken down bus that everybody else goes around. The police then set about arresting one person at a time, taking their name and photograph and then slowly letting them leave in different directions. This strategy is called kettling.

• Facebook helps kettle activists in their arm chair. The police state can gather far more data about them, while their impact is even more muted than if they ventured out of their home.

• [...]

• Facebook is redefining what it means to be a friend.

• Is somebody who takes pictures of you and insists on sharing them with hundreds of people, tagging your face for the benefit of biometric profiling systems, really a friend?

• If you want to find out what a real friend is and who your real friends really are, there is no better way to do so then blowing away your Facebook and Twitter account and waiting to see who contacts you personally about meeting up in the real world.

• If you look at a profile on Facebook or Twitter, one of the most prominent features is the number of friends or followers they have. Research suggests that humans can realistically cope with no more than about 150 stable relationships. Facebook, however, has turned Friending people into something like a computer game.

• This research is also given far more attention then it deserves though: the number of really meaningful friendships that one person can maintain is far smaller. Think about how many birthdays and spouse’s names you can remember and those may be the number of real friendships you can manage well. In his book Busy, Tony Crabbe suggests between 10-20 friendships are in this category and you should spend all your time with these people rather than letting your time be spread thinly across superficial Facebook “friends”.

• In a blog post on Tuesday, the firm announced that it has reached the two billion active users milestone, which means more than a quarter of the earth’s population are logging onto the bloody thing every month.

• Nobody trusts anybody, and it’s probably going to end up affecting end users the most. The Snowden leaks showed the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations routinely intercepted network hardware to insert backdoors. The exploits leaked by the Shadow Brokers indicated the NSA was very active on the software exploit front as well.

• In response to the Snowden leaks, it appears the Russian hardware/software purchasers are stepping up their due diligence efforts. This comes at a time when the Russian government is suspected of hacking away at the American democratic process, as Reuters reports.

• The final piece is a statutory instrument called a Technical Capability Notice (TCN) intended to be served on comms services providers to compel decrypted access, i.e. provided the authorities have a warrant and have passed certain proportionality tests intended to safeguard misuse of the power.

• Lawmakers in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Federal Assembly, voted 363-0 on Friday in favor of adopting amendments regulating VPN services, censorship circumvention software and other so-called “anonymizers,” regional media reported afterwards.

• The legislation would ban the use of any software that enables access to digital content otherwise barred by Moscow’s censors if adopted, according to Meduza, an English-language news site devoted to Russian affairs.

• Total mobile industry subs? Ericsson has just counted that at the end of Q1 the world has 7.6 Billion total subs (for 7.5B total humans). I had the number at 7.8B so first off, we are pretty close and secondly, obviously, more mobile subs than humans. Nice to see that number now verified.

Civil Rights/Policing

• According to the indictment, the three officers allegedly falsified reports and tried to conceal the events surrounding Mr McDonald’s death “to shield their fellow officer from criminal investigation”.

• However, it is important to recognise that there are aspects of Cosby’s treatment that form part of a disturbing pattern in allegations of this kind. Cosby has been prosecuted twice. First in a court of law, and second in the court of public opinion. His case has become a barometer for societal attitudes to offences of this kind.

• The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has no good news for the lying law enforcement officers who were hoping to walk off with $167,000 of someone else’s money. Two years ago, the district court ruled in favor of Straughn Gorman, who was subjected to two lengthy traffic stops in less than an hour by officers hoping to help themselves to cash he was carrying in his RV.

• After stopping Gorman for a non-violation (driving too slow in the left lane), State Trooper Greg Monroe spent roughly a half-hour trying to obtain consent to search Gorman’s RV. His reasonable suspicion? Gorman’s use of the word “chick” to describe the girlfriend he was driving to visit and the supposedly “rehearsed” aspects of his employment history. Trooper Monroe performed an extensive background check on Gorman while hoping to prolong the stop until a K-9 unit could be deployed, but even his non-routine call to an El Paso DEA records center failed to drag out the traffic stop long enough for it to arrive.

• An Arkansas man was arrested early Wednesday after police said he rammed his vehicle into a newly installed stone monument of the Ten Commandments at the Arkansas Capitol grounds. The man also streamed the toppling of the one-day-old structure live on Facebook.

• Capitol authorities identified the driver as 32-year-old Michael Tate Reed of Van Buren, Arkansas. He was arrested immediately after the crash.

• Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of Paypal, was granted New Zealand citizenship despite spending only 12 days in the country, new documents have revealed.

• The government ombudsmen has forced New Zealand authorities to release further details of Thiel’s highly unusual citizenship process because it was deemed in the public interest.

• On Thursday, Nathan Guy – who oversaw Thiel’s citizenship application as minister of internal affairs in 2011 – said Theil had been “a great ambassador for New Zealand, a great salesperson”. “He is a fine individual, good character, he has invested a lot in New Zealand, he’s got great reach into the US and I am very comfortable with the decision that I made.”

• “We feel strongly that Walmart had an obligation to stop this young person at three in the morning who had been walking around in their store with an 18-inch machete and five-inch hunting knife and didn’t purchase them and… no one did anything to stop her,” Nelson’s family attorney, Robert Bingle, said.

• A federal appeals court has upheld the conviction and two-year sentence of the California journalist who was found guilty under a federal anti-hacking law last year.

• On Monday, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it was not persuaded by arguments made by Matthew Keys’ defense attorneys. In a hearing earlier this month, his lawyers said that while their client may have handed over a username and password that resulted in a brief defacement of one Los Angeles Times article, this did not constitute actual “damage” as described in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

• As Ars reported earlier, Keys was accused of giving out a username and password for his former employer KTXL Fox 40′s content management system (CMS) to members of Anonymous and instructing people there to “fuck some shit up.” Ultimately, that December 2010 incident resulted in someone else using those credentials to alter a headline and sub-headline on a Los Angeles Times article. (Both Fox 40 and the Times are owned by the Tribune Media Company.) The changes lasted for 40 minutes before editors reversed them.

• In a speech today, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly said that airlines that don’t get on board with new security procedures could see electronic devices banned on their airplanes—or be barred from flying the US altogether.

• The public defender, Brendon Woods, has argued since December 2016 that a recent upgrade is inadequate for Alameda County and has resulted in many mistaken jailings. In March 2017, a local judge rejected Woods’ demands to fix the software, which is known as Odyssey Court Manager and made by Tyler Technologies.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The lack of content on the internet in local languages and the lack of local digital skills, especially among women and girls, remain central challenges for the digital economy, speakers said during a panel discussion at the recent World Summit on the Information Society Forum 2017 (WSIS Forum 2017).

• For decades now, AT&T has promised that an incredible boon in broadband investment is waiting just around the corner — but only if AT&T gets what it wants from the government. Whether it’s gunning for tax cuts and subsidies, or looking for approval of its latest megamerger, AT&T’s an absolute master of the regulatory carrot and a stick game. Even if the carrot is entirely hallucinated, as we saw when AT&T threatened to curtail already minimal fiber optic deployment unless net neutrality was killed.

• Last year, the cable industry quietly launched one of the most misleading and successful lobbying efforts in the industry’s history. The target? A plan concocted by the former FCC that would have let customers watch cable programming without having to rent a cable box or use a CableCARD. Given the industry makes $21 billion annually in rental fees off of this entrenched hardware monopoly, the industry got right to work with an absolute wave of disinformation, claiming that the FCC’s plan would confuse customers, increase piracy, and was (with a little help from Jesse Jackson) somehow even racist (seriously).

• Charter Communications has filed a complaint against Verizon, saying the telco violated New York state’s public service law and regulations by denying access to utility poles.

Intellectual Monopolies

• For years, the intellectual property system, created to protect products of the mind including inventions, held little interest for the continually evolving ancestral culture of indigenous peoples. But the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities are now discussed in many fora, including the World Intellectual Property Organization, where the focus is how to use the IP system to protect indigenous knowledge and genetic resources from misappropriation and exploitation. And the UN organisation just issued two publications on possible ways to use the IP system to do just that.

• On the side of the 34th session of the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC) held from 12-16 June, WIPO launched two new publications. The first is a Practical Guide [pdf] to Intellectual Property for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. The second is Key Questions [pdf] on Patent Disclosure Requirements for Genetic Resources and Traditional Knowledge.

Copyrights

• We already wrote about the new Copyright Office report on DMCA 1201 — the section of the law that deals with the “anti-circumvention” provisions of the DMCA. That post focused on the realization by the Copyright Office that the current setup of 1201 does significant harm to security research, as researchers are often frightened to actually investigate certain technologies out of a fear that they may accidentally violate copyright law in getting around some sort of “technological protection measure.”

• But there’s much more in the report as well, and I want to focus on one part, in particular, because it demonstrates a disturbing way in which the Copyright Office thinks about copyright law. But to understand why, we need some background. One of our big complaints about Section 1201 is that it says that circumventing a “technological protection measure” (TPM) is a violation of copyright law by itself. That’s always troubled us, because it means you can violate copyright law even if you’re not infringing on anyone’s copyright. And that seems… wrong. And it’s why 1201 has been cited in various lawsuits that clearly have nothing whatsoever to do with copyright: such as cases about printer ink cartridges and garage door openers. And the courts have struggled with this quite a bit. Thankfully, there have been some good rulings, noting that interpreting 1201 this way is bonkers, and a clear abuse of the law for issues that have nothing to do with copyright. But… not all courts.

• Stories about both the abuse of the DMCA process and the peril YouTubers regularly find themselves subject to by way of intellectual property laws are both legion, but to see the truely egregious nature of the abuse of this sort of thing, it takes a story about them intersecting. We appear to have such a story on our hands in the form of a music composer hired to work on a video game that then began sending DMCA notices to YouTubers over a contractual dispute with the game publisher. This story weaves a strange path, so let’s dig in.

• Earlier this year, we brought to you the story of one man’s quest to sue all of the news organizations for using a clip of his Facebook video in which his partner is giving birth to his child. Kali Kanongataa sued ABC, NBC, Yahoo, CBS, Microsoft, Rodale and COED Media Group for reporting on the video and showing a clip of it, claiming copyright infringement. It was an odd claim for many reasons, not the least of which being that Kanongataa made the stream public and available on his Facebook page, not to mention the obvious Fair Use case to be made by the news groups reporting on the matter. The suits didn’t work, of course, with most or all of them having now been dismissed.

• Last week the Supreme Court ruled that convicted sex offenders can’t be barred from social media, as that would violate their free speech rights. Internet provider Cox Communications argues that if this is the case, then pirating subscribers should certainly not be disconnected from the Internet solely based on copyright holder complaints.

• A crackdown on groups that provide unauthorized IPTV services has continued today with the blocking of several portals. Operation ‘Pirate On Demand’ is being carried out by the Guardia di Finanza (GdF), a department under Italy’s Minister of Economy and Finance. Nine locations have been blocked so far and two people have been arrested.

• UK anti-piracy group FACT is doing its best to scare anyone who goes near a pirate Kodi add-on. After sellers of pirate boxes and add-on developers, streaming users are now on notice as well. It’s a scary proposition but threatening talk is much easier than action.

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