● 07.01.17

● Links 1/7/2017: Kubernetes 1.7 and Mesa 17.1.4 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 11:36 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• A new Linux operating system designed specifically for people who use their computers to create has landed. System76 has developed Pop!_OS for people working on “complicated, professional-grade software and products, sophisticated 3D models… or makers working on their latest invention”, among others, it says – good news for 3D artists and other creatives looking for an alternative to Windows or macOS.

• System76 has been assembling and selling computers with Ubuntu Linux for years… but starting this fall the company will shift to a new customized Linux distribution called Pop!_OS.

• The new operating system is basically a lightly modified version of Ubuntu with a customized version of the GNOME Shell user interface.

Server

• At DockerCon 17 in April, Docker Inc made a series of large announcements, including a shift to a new model with the Moby Project to build the Docker Engine. Now in June, the first major release of Docker built with the Moby Project is available in the form of the Docker 17.06 Community Edition release.

• The Moby Project is a refactoring of how Docker as a container platform is built, by breaking it down into aDocker series of community-focused efforts that includes LinuxKit and containerd among others.

• If you’re using containers in production, you know you need a DevOps tool to manage them. For many companies, Kubernetes is that program. The fast-developing, open-source, container-orchestration package has just released its newest version, Kubernetes 1.7, just over three months since the developers released Kubernetes 1.6.

• Haven’t heard of Kubernetes? You will. Natasha Woods, a Linux Foundation senior PR manager, asked, “What do Wink, Ancestry.com, Box, Buffer, GolfNow, and Ticketmaster have in common? The way they run their infrastructure. Taking a page from giants like Google, these companies are tapping into container orchestration technology Kubernetes.”

• The open-source Kubernetes 1.7 release is now available, providing users with new features to help manage and secure container infrastructure.

• Kubernetes 1.7 is the second major release of the open-source container orchestration platform so far in 2017 and follows the Kubernetes 1.6 release that debuted in March at the CloudNative Con/Kubecon event in Berlin, Germany. The Kubernetes project was first developed by Google and has been an open-source project run by the Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) since July 2015.

• The information technology world changes daily, and the demands of building scalable infrastructure become more important. Containers aren’t anything new these days, and have various uses and implementations. But what about building scalable, containerized applications? By itself, Docker and other tools don’t quite cut it, as far as building the infrastructure to support containers. How do you deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications in your infrastructure? This is where tools such as Kubernetes comes in. Kubernetes is an open source system that automates deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes was originally developed by Google before being donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a project of the Linux Foundation. This article gives a quick precursor to what Kubernetes is and what some of the buzzwords really mean.

• Developing and deploying cloud-native applications has become very popular—for very good reasons. There are clear advantages to a process that allows rapid deployment and continuous delivery of bug fixes and new features, but there’s a chicken-and-egg problem no one talks about: How do you get there from here? Building the infrastructure and developing processes to develop and maintain cloud-native applications—all from scratch—are non-trivial, time-intensive tasks.

• Kubernetes, a relatively new platform for running containerized workloads, addresses these problems. Originally an internal project within Google, Kubernetes was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2015 and has attracted developers from the open source community around the world. Kubernetes’ design is based on 15 years of experience in running both production and development workloads. Since it is open source, anyone can download and use it and realize its benefits.

• So why is such a big fuss being made over Kubernetes? I believe that it hits a sweet spot between an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution, like OpenStack, and a full Platform as a Service (PaaS) resource where the lower-level runtime implementation is completely controlled by a vendor. Kubernetes provides the benefits of both worlds: abstractions to manage infrastructure, as well as tools and features to drill down to bare metal for troubleshooting.

• The Container Host *is* the Container Engine, and Container Image Compatibility Matters

• Have you ever wondered, how are containers are so portable? How it’s possible to run Ubuntu containers on CentOS, or Fedora containers on CoreOS? How is it that all of this just magically works? As long as I run the docker daemon on all of my hosts, everything will just work right? The answer is….no. I am here to break it to you – it’s not magic. I have said it before, and I will say it again, containers are just fancy Linux processes. There is not even a container object in the Linux kernel, there never has been. So, what does all of this mean?

• Late last year, my team announced LinchPin, a hybrid cloud orchestration tool using Ansible. Provisioning cloud resources has never been easier or faster. With the power of Ansible behind LinchPin, and a focus on simplicity, many cloud resources are available at users’ fingertips. In this article, I’ll introduce LinchPin and look at how the project has matured in the past 10 months.

• Back when LinchPin was introduced, using the ansible-playbook command to run LinchPin was complex. Although that can still be accomplished, LinchPin now has a new front-end command-line user interface (CLI), which is written in Click and makes LinchPin even simpler than it was before.

Audiocasts/Shows

• In our second live show at FOSS Talk Live, we have a competition to see who can write the best program in 19 lines, and discuss bugs through the ages. There is a video of this episode available on YouTube.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds took to the stage in China for the first time Monday at LinuxCon + ContainerCon + CloudOpen China in Beijing. In front of a crowd of nearly 2,000, Torvalds spoke with VMware Head of Open Source Dirk Hohndel in one of their famous “fireside chats” about what motivates and surprises him and how aspiring open source developers can get started. Here are some highlights of their talk.

• If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.12 kernel will be officially released before the weekend is through. Here’s a recap of some of the most exciting changes for this imminent kernel update.

• With the support of its members, The Linux Foundation hosts open source projects across technologies including networking, security, cloud, blockchain and more. This collaborative development model is helping technology advance at a rapid pace in a way that benefits individuals and organizations around the world.

• Check out the session highlights for the new Diversity Empowerment Summit (DES), which will take place Sept. 14, 2017, in Los Angeles as part of Open Source Summit North America.

Graphics Stack

• Just as scheduled, last night marked the release of Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) v1.6 being released.

• AMD has silently pushed out an updated AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 driver but the changes are unknown.

• We have some OpenGL numbers for Radeon Vega Frontier Edition on AMDGPU-PRO under Linux.

• Unfortunately it looks very unlikely to receive a review sample of the newly-launched Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, but when searching OpenBenchmarking.org, I was pleased to find someone last week had uploaded some initial Radeon Vega Frontier Edition numbers… Though sadly, it’s just for Xonotic with OpenGL. Unfortunately not any more demanding OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan results, but I’ll keep monitoring to see for more Vega result uploads as more get their hands on the hardware.

• I have been able to verify that it’s an authentic upload, the IP address makes sense for who it likely is, etc. The driver version is 4.5.13489. The AMDGPU-PRO 17.20 Frontier Edition driver publicly released this week is 4.5.13486, so it’s slightly different from the launch-day driver.

• Andres Rodriguez of Valve has published initial support for the OpenGL EXT_external_objects within Mesa, the new GL extensions likely to be part of OpenGL 4.6.

• Mesa 17.1.4 is now available as the newest stable point release for the Mesa 17.1 series.

• Mesa developer Andres Gomez is pleased to inform the Linux community about the immediate availability of the fourth maintenance update to the Mesa 17.1 3D Graphics Library for GNU/Linux distributions.

• Yes, that’s right, Mesa 17.1.4 is now available and it brings a bunch of performance improvements for Intel and AMD Radeon users. This seems to be the biggest update of the series so far, and includes a large number of patches for the Intel i965 OpenGL graphics driver.

• Radeon™ ProRender is a powerful physically-based rendering engine that enables creative professionals to produce stunningly photorealistic images. Built on highly efficient, high-performance Radeon™ Rays technology, Radeon™ ProRender’s complete, scalable ray tracing engine uses open industry standards to harness GPU and CPU performance for swift, impressive results.

• The Mir project has always been about how best to develop a shell for the modern desktop. It was about addressing concerns like a security model for desktop environments; convergence (which has implications for app lifecycles); and, making efficient use of modern hardware. It has never been only about Unity8, that was just the first of (hopefully) many shells written using Mir. To that end, the Mir developers have tried to ensure that the code wasn’t too tightly coupled to Unity8 (e.g. by developing demo servers with alternative behaviors).

• Last week in part one of this two part series about the fundamentals of Xwayland, we treated Xwayland like a black box. We stated what its purpose is and gave a rough overview on how it connects to its environment, notably its clients and the Wayland compositor. In a sense this was only a teaser, since we didn’t yet look at Xwayland’s inner workings. So welcome to part two, where we do a deep dive into its code base!

• SPIR-V is the binary shader code representation used by Vulkan, and GL_ARB_gl_spirv is a recent extension that allows it to be used for OpenGL as well. Over the last weeks, I’ve been exploring how to add support for it in radeonsi.

• As a bit of background, here’s an overview of the various relevant shader representations that Mesa knows about. There are some others for really old legacy OpenGL features, but we don’t care about those. On the left, you see the SPIR-V to LLVM IR path used by radv for Vulkan. On the right is the path from GLSL to LLVM IR, plus a mention of the conversion from GLSL IR to NIR that some other drivers are using (i965, freedreno, and vc4).

• Keith Packard has published another update on his work around DRM leases and his objective of improving the open-source driver stack for SteamVR / Linux VR.

• The main area he’s been working on is DRM leases for VR HMDs. His latest blog post concerns work on Vulkan’s EXT_display_control, DRM integration, etc.

• A few days back NVIDIA released the Vulkan 381.10.10 Linux beta that featured performance improvements as well as new Vulkan/OpenGL interoperability extensions. That beta driver has already been succeeded by a new driver.

Applications

• José is a general purpose cryptography toolkit which uses the data formats standardized by the JOSE IETF Working Group. By analogy, José is to JOSE what GPG is to OpenPGP and OpenSSL is to X.509.

• Buildah is a new tool that we released last week for building containers without requiring a container runtime daemon running. –nodockerneeded

• We are proud to announce the new release of Poppins 0.3 beta. This release is a big improvement including new features and bug fixing.

• Poppins 0.3 beta is PHP7 ready. It was tested on Debian 8 and 9, CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 16.04 server. Please read the release notes and edit your config files before upgrading.

• Recently a client expressed interest in developing a pre-built Home Theater PC (HTPC) solution with Digitial Video Recorder (DVR) functionality for Over The Air (OTA) broadcasts. They considered both low-end devices, like the Raspberry Pi, and high-end devices like dedicated PCs. As part of their marketing research, they wanted to have a broader perspective of existing solutions on Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. Out of respect for the open-source community’s efforts, our client has kindly agreed to let us publish a subset of the report that summarizes HTPC solutions with built-in OTA recording and playback capabilities.

• We are very excited to announce the release of KeePassXC 2.2.0! We have worked long and hard to bring you lots of new features and bug fixes in a well-rounded release.

• As I told you guys in my previous post, I’m here now to show you some new, cool stuff about LabPlot. First let me introduce you the synopsis of my project’s proposal:

• “Currently, the visualization and analysis of data is only possible on static data that was imported into or generated in one of LabPlot’s data containers. The goal of the project is to add support for streaming data. At the moment LabPlot has no support for this kind of data processing even though it is very important for this feature to be available in a scientific data plotting software.”

• This article introduces free software alternatives on GNU/Linux towards graphic design & 2D animation software on Windows. Yes, I write this article for those switching to GNU/Linux. You’ll find here replacements for Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator, Paint Shop Pro, CorelDRAW, and even Macromedia Flash MX. I hope this list helps you finding what you need!

• Our engineering team intensively worked in the past few months on the development of our new Linphone 4.0 app for desktop platforms. We are glad to announce that this new version has officially been released on June 14!

• We consequently improved the app’s look and feel with a more user-friendly and modern user interface. We also implemented various new features to bring new specific possibilities for a desktop usage and reach the same level of usability as in our mobile versions.

Proprietary

• This is time for a new review of what has been going on in Arch development this month. Quite a lot actually, it’s exciting that several things I’ve been working on during the last couple of months begin to flourish into pretty interesting and usable features.

• There is another interesting thing happening, is a very good synergy between the WikiLab project I’m working on now, which you must grow tired of hearing about, and FreeCAD developement. FreeCAD fuels the project development, which in turns fuels FreeCAD with bugfixes and new features. Me and other FreeCAD community members are really keen to pursue and extend that synergy further with other projects.

• My favourite CAD software used to run on at least ten different platforms, including my trusty SGI Indy. There was even a Linux student version. Evidently the market spoke, and for nearly twenty years the software has been Windows-only.

• [...]

• The lesson might appear to be Windows’ disinclination to be contained, but a licensing issue with the CAD software took a few weeks to resolve. In the interim I continued to do remarkable things with FreeCAD. I’ll use the proprietary software for details related to transferring the files, but FreeCAD is very close to keeping my CAD experience Windows-free.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine Staging development team announced the availability of a new version of their optimized Wine builds, based, of course, on the latest Wine development release.

• Coming a week after the release of Wine 2.11, Wine Staging 2.11 is here to inherit all of its improvements and new features, including OpenGL support for the Android driver, support for security labels, better dictionary support in WebServices, relay debugging support on ARM64 (AArch64), and a new registry file parser for RegEdit.

Games

• Yup, I am still digging in that Linux Gamers survey we conducted back in March 2017. Now on to a very different topic… no more GPU stories. This time we will be reviewing what gamepads Linux gamers are currently using.

• We’re pleased to announce the release of version 0.4 of Minoca OS. In the eight months since we released 0.3, our very first open source release, a lot has changed. Most notably Minoca is now sporting the early signs of a desktop. And of course no desktop would be complete without an application to run on it. So we’ve added fceux, an NES emulator, which we used to test both graphics performance and sound. Hopefully you’ll be better at Super Mario Brothers than Chris, who I watched blatantly kill Mario probably upwards of 50 times in the name of testing sound. Here’s what, how, and why we did it.

• [...]

• Finally, the pinnacle of OS development, being able to emulate a video game console from the late 80s, with a window manager from the same time period. We’re all done here, right?

• We’re looking at this release as a jumping off point. Doing the legwork in getting X running opens up new possibilities for Minoca OS. Having a modern desktop, or even a browser running now feels like it might be within reach. I haven’t looked into it at all, but I wonder how much of Chrome would compile now. Tackling a kernel display framework might be doable now that there’s something in user mode to consume it. Or maybe it’s time for a new lightweight GUI to go with a lightweight OS. Or heck, maybe we should just get more of libretro up and running.

• Since there’s a sale going on, I’m going to take another quick look at some of the best sales of Linux games going on right now.

• Cossacks 3 [Steam, Official Site], the strategy title from GSC Game World that is currently in Beta for Linux just got a patch today. It seems the developers are making progress on the Linux issues.

• I really do have to hand to them, they truly stuck at it and put out a Linux version after a long delay and they continue to refine the Linux version to improve it.

• Micro Machines: World Series has steered on to Steam with day-one Linux support. This modern entry in the Micro Machines franchise features plenty of action.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• am pleased to announce that Qt 5.9.1 is released today. It contains all the latest bug fixes and improvements from Qt 5.9 branch.

• Qt Creator 4.3.1 is included in the Qt 5.9.1 offline installer packages and available via the online installer.

• The Qt Company, through Jani Heikkinen, is pleased to announce today the availability of the first point releases of the recently launched Qt 5.9 LTS application framework and Qt Creator 4.3 IDE.

• Shipping with all the latest performance improvements and bug fixes from the long-term supported Qt 5.9 branch, Qt 5.9.1 is the first patch release of the series, which means that it doesn’t add any new functionality.

• “Our intention is to make more frequent patch releases for Qt 5.9 LTS than before. So if your most desired fix is not included in Qt 5.9.1 there will be more patch releases in the coming months,” says Jani Heikkinen in today’s announcement.

• Kirigami is a QtQuick based components set that brings a lot of useful reusable components to QtQuick UI’s. Among these we’re easy to create menus, unit based scaling, drawers and all sorts of navigation options. It was a lot of fun exploring all these pieces we could fit together to create a user-friendly interface. As a way of getting to know Kirigami, I was tasked with giving the Behaim Globe app a small redesign using these components.

• We’ve worked on this for the past two years and have finally reached an acceptable state where we don’t end up pulling in hundreds of packages.

• While initial implementations of things like the email message parser and the DAV and IMAP library brought huge dependencies like KIO, DBus and even Akonadi (that would arguably have been resolvable on a packaging level, but… not a great situation anyways). With all that removed Kube now depends on ~75 packages less (the exact number will depend on factors such as your distros packaging), as well as drastically reducing it’s runtime entanglement (we no longer need dbus, klauncher, external KIO processes, …).

• Latte Dock is a really neat desktop dock app (and a whole lot more) for the KDE Plasma desktop — now it’s about to get a whole heap o’ beans better.

• DE developer Martin Gräßlin has written more about KWin’s auto test suite with KDE system administrators having set up a new continuous integration system.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Canonical’s Will Cooke is today reporting on the latest or upcoming improvements that the Ubuntu Desktop and Snappy team plans to implement in the Ubuntu Linux operating system.

Distributions

• Linux-based operating systems are often used by developers to get their work done and create something new. Their major concerns while choosing a Linux distro for programming are compatibility, power, stability, and flexibility. Distros like Ubuntu and Debian have managed to establish themselves as the top picks. Some of the other great choices are openSUSE, Arch Linux, etc.

• After a long wait, the Calamares 3.1 stable branch of the universal Linux installer received its first point release, an incremental bugfix update that adds various improvements, and fixes some of the latest issues or crashes that have been reported lately by users.

• Calamares 3.1.1 is now available for download for OS integrators who want to ship it on their upcoming ISO snapshots for their GNU/Linux distributions, and it looks like it includes salting improvements for user passwords, better support for very small screens with 800×600 resolutions, and adds the Crashreporter debugging facility for the first time in the release tarball.

Reviews

New Releases

• Clonezilla Live and GParted Live developer Steven Shiau is pleased to announce the release and immediate availability for download of a new stable version of his widely-used Clonezilla Live project.

• We are happy to announce the release of Calculate Linux 17.6, marking the 10th anniversary of the project.

• This new version features installation in LXC/LXD containers, theme customization, more stability with automagic dependencies support, better security as editing the kernel params now requires a password and system update can be only performed by users authorized to do so. You will find the details below.

• Calculate Linux Desktop featuring KDE (CLD), Cinnamon (CLDC), Mate (CLDM), or Xfce (CLDX) environments, Calculate Linux Scratch (CLS), Calculate Directory Server (CDS), Calculate Scratch Server (CSS), Timeless and Calculate Linux Container (CLC) are available for download.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Arch Family

• Over the years, Arch Linux has had the misfortune of being maligned as one of the more challenging modern Linux distributions. That’s a shame, because Arch Linux is one of the most solid distributions you’ll find. Nonetheless, new users finding their way over to the official Arch Linux installation guide may choose to return to the likes of Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Now, however, there are other options, due to the release of some very user-friendly takes on the Arch Linux distribution, including Antergos.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• This week I can only offer you 3 snapshots (0625, 0626 and 0628); Due to issues with openQA during the last weekend, the two snapshots 0623 and 0624 were discarded (even though they would have been good). 0627 was held back because we would have shipped a non-working bind in there (after OpenSSL changed the location of the engines again). But as usual, of course, a discarded snapshot just means the updates reach you one snapshot later.

Red Hat Family

• CentOS maintainer Johnny Hughes recently published a new security advisory for user of the CentOS 7 operating system series to inform them about an important kernel security update.

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

• Debian has a reputation for being an expert’s Linux distribution. System administrators and users who remember when Linux’s main interface was the command line, but for the ordinary user, it is a distribution to be feared. It took a comprehensive revamp, the story goes, to make Debian suitable for users in the form of derivative distributions like Linux Mint and Ubuntu that focus on user-friendliness. However, the truth is, far from being intimidating, Debian has plenty to offer any level of user.

• Sure, two decades ago, Debian was intimidating. In 1999, I took three tries to install it for the first time myself. But way back then, every distribution was hard to install.

• Times have changed since then, and Debian has changed with it. These days, Debian has nothing on the truly challenging distributions, like Arch, Gentoo, or Linux From Scratch. It is simply more comprehensive.

• Last year I looked at Debian GNU/Hurd, using the network installer to set up a working environment in kvm. Since them I haven’t really looked at it very much, so when I saw the announcement of the latest release I decided to check it out and see what has changed over the last few months. I also thought it might be interesting to try and run some of my own software on the system to see if there are any compatibility issues I need to be aware of. This resulted in a detour to port some code to Python 3 and a few surprises when code written on a 64-bit system found itself running on a 32-bit system.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Macbuntu is no stranger to Dedoimedo. We first used this lovely project slash transformation pack in Gnome 2 many years ago and then again about three winters counter clockwise with a Salamander edition of Ubuntu. Now we shall attempt this lovely work again on top of Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak. I’ve written this just before the Zesty release, but the idea is 100% identical and valid.

• Before we continue, you may ask, why you do dis, I feel no pain. Wait, I got confused. That’s a Zohan line. What I meant is, why touch the default Ubuntu setup? Well, we’ve already done some work in my essential tweaking guide, so we’re notching up to the next level. This will give you some serious street credit in your local coffee shop. Probably not, but worth a try.

• PackageKit is a distribution-agnostic API for managing installed software packages on a system. For irritating reasons, Ubuntu was stuck for a long time on an old version of PackageKit, but we recently managed to remove the blockers and update to a modern version.

• The first alpha of the Artful Aardvark (to become 17.10) has now been released!

Flavours and Variants

• Lubuntu Artful Aardvark Alpha 1 (soon to be 17.10) has been released! Also in this release (in addition to the usual LXDE ISO) is an experimental image with LXQt instead of LXDE.

Devices/Embedded

• Libre Computers’ $25 to $35 “Le Potato” is an RPi 3 clone that runs Android 7.1 or Linux 4.13 on a quad -A53 S905X. There’s no WiFi, but you get HDMI 2.0.

• A Shenzhen based Libre Computer Project from Shenzhen Libre Technology Co. Ltd. has gone to Kickstarter to launch the first of a series of “Libre Computer Boards” called Le Potato. The project has so far received less than $4K toward its $25K all or nothing goal, with the campaign due to finish on July 24. However, if the project doesn’t fund, “we will utilize our other pre-prepared financing option and go directly to retail,” says the company.

• Husarion unveiled an Arduino-ready “Core2” robotics board for web based prototyping, plus a Linux-ready “Core2-ROS” that adds an RPi 3 or Tinker Board.

• San Francisco based robotics firm Husarion, which has previously launched an industrial picker robot called the RoboCore, has gone to Crowd Supply to pitch a new Husarion Core2 prototyping platform for the robotics maker community. The $89 Cortex-M4 based Core2 controller board, which includes an ESP32 WiFi adapter, is also available in a version that runs Linux and Robot Operating System called the Core2-ROS. The ROS version replaces the ESP32 with a WiFi-ready Raspberry Pi 3 or Asus Tinker Board SBC.

• The team at Premier Farnell has been hard at work developing a desktop solution for the Raspberry Pi. The Pi Desktop is a revolutionary kit for your Raspberry Pi that will turn it into a full blown desktop.

Phones

Tizen

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• I have been involved in open source software for a long time, since before anyone coined the term “open source.” My first introduction to Free software was GNU Emacs on our campus Unix system, when I was an undergraduate. Then I discovered other Free software tools. Through that exposure, I decided to installed Linux on my home computer in 1993. But as great as LInux was at the time, with few applications like word processors and spreadsheets, Linux was still limited—great for writing programs and analysis tools for my physics labs, but not (yet) for writing class papers or playing games.

• So my primary system at the time was still MS-DOS. I loved DOS, and had since the 1980s. While the MS-DOS command line was under-powered compared to Unix, I found it very flexible. I wrote my own utilities and tools to expand the MS-DOS command line experience. And of course, I had a bunch of DOS applications and games. I was a DOS “power user.” For me, DOS was a great mix of function and features, so that’s what I used most of the time.

• The FreeDOS Project has just reached its 23rd birthday! This is a major milestone for any free software or open-source software project.

• If you don’t know about FreeDOS, it’s a small project that replaces MS-DOS, which was the mainstay operating system for most personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s. During that era, I was a huge MS-DOS fan. I used DOS for everything and considered myself a DOS “power-user”. I even wrote my own utilities and tools to expand the MS-DOS command-line environment and make DOS more useful.

• I was aware of other operating systems, of course. In the early 1990s, my university installed Windows in the PC computer labs. But if you remember Windows 3.1 at the time, it was a pretty rough environment. I didn’t like that you could interact with Windows only via a mouse; there was no command line. I preferred working at the command line.

• A Puppet module might only be some 500 lines of code and a bunch of tests, but that doesn’t mean it’s effortless to maintain. Puppet modules should run on a range of operating systems and support a range of Puppet versions (and hence, Ruby versions)—and that in and of itself makes it quite challenging.

• So while a single person could easily write a Puppet module, what happens when that person gets sick? Changes jobs? Or simply loses interest?

• NodeSource, the Node.js company, has announced the results of a new survey fielded among enterprise software developers ranking open source projects across a variety factors, including hiring, entrepreneurism and the likelihood of IPOs in the near future.

• The survey, which was aimed at gauging the momentum of Node.js within the open source software ecosystem, revealed that fully 91 percent of enterprise software developers believe new companies will be created from open source projects. While Node.js was the most-chosen option, with 74% of respondents expecting new Node companies to appear in the market, Docker came in closely behind at 51 percent, and 22 percent believe it will be MongoDB.

• Open source is everywhere in government, but many agencies still struggle with the specifics of choosing, contracting for and contributing to open-source software projects. GCN spoke with open-source advocates in government and industry, and came away with five fundamental lessons.

• [...]

• More broadly, Jones said, one of the biggest myths about open source is “that it’s a purely charitable activity where it’s going to cost you to do it.”

• “Most of the costs that people mention are costs they’re already incurring,” he said, even if agency leaders don’t recognize it. “The IT folks are already bringing free software into your shop. Your IT staff is already writing software — even if they’re not software developers — that is useful not just for them but for other people.”

• Network operators like AT&T are making their networks virtual to support increasing demand and new services and open source and virtualisation go hand-in-hand, but operator resistance could impact their move toward 5G-ready networks.

• Telecom networks are under tremendous pressure to perform.

Events

• I recently wrote about the great experience many of us had visiting OSCAL in Tirana. Open Labs is doing a great job promoting free, open source software there.

• They are now involved in organizing another event at the end of the summer, FOSScamp in Syros, Greece.

• On Monday, 5th of June, a massive event in Russian IT industry ended. The X International IT-Olympics “IT-Planet” for students and young specialists took place in the city of Sochi, Russia, which hosted 2014 Winter Olympic Games. Finals for the contest and the accompanying conference took place over four days. The days were filled with the contest itself, lesson, and master-classes from major player in the local and worldwide IT industry, recreational activities. Among the sponsors, there were companies like Cisco, Oracle, Huawei, Intel, InterSystems, AT Consulting, 1C, GNU/Linuxcenter. Of the 17000 participants, only little more than 300 took part in the final tier of the contest. The finals were preceded with two tiers of contests, held over the previous year, that decided if the candidate was of sufficiently knowledgable to take part in such a big event.

• A microconference on containers will be featured at this year’s Linux Plumbers Conference, which will be held in Los Angeles, CA, US on 13-15 September in conjunction with The Linux Foundation Open Source Summit.

Web Browsers

• The Brave web browser is a project from a new company called Brave Software. It was founded by Brendan Eich, who is the inventor of JavaScript and former developer and CTO at Mozilla; he hopes to dramatically re-invent the advertising model of the web while strengthening user anonymity and security. Brave’s value proposition is that instead of being served advertisements from web sites that use the revenue to pay their bills, users can opt to directly pay the content providers of their choosing with cryptocurrency. Also, there is a recognition of the utility of targeted advertising, so users have an option of saving a local, protected profile that can be used anonymously to obtain targeted advertisements instead of having their online behavior tracked and sold by a third party.

• Brave is an open-source browser derived from Chromium, and as such it is based on the Blink web engine. Advertisements and user tracking are blocked by default as a built-in feature in Brave, as opposed to other browsers that offer that functionality via plugins. In 2016, Brave announced that, on top of blocking advertisements, it would let users choose to replace them with other advertisements that are sourced from a curated list of partners. Revenue from these ads would go to Brave Software as well as being shared with the publishers and others.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Back in February, realLIST company Stitch made a risky bet: taking its flagship data scouring platform Singer to an open-source model. The tool lets devs extract, transform and load (ETL, as folks in the know call it) data from sources and into different targets.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Ten years ago today heralded the release of the GNU General Public License version 3. Through several iterations over two years, public drafts enabled the community to develop a license that better addressed the changing software freedom landscape. From Tivoization, to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, to the rise of software patents, many threats to software freedom had arisen since the creation of GPLv2. These threats still exist today, but hackers have for the past ten years had the right tool in their tool kit to fight back, with the GPLv3 being one of the most widely used free software licenses in the world.

• There are some additional milestones to celebrate at the end of June.

• The Free Software Foundation is celebrating that the GPLv3 license has turned ten years old. Crazy to think it’s already ten years old when recalling the early drafts, it feels just like a few years ago.

Public Services/Government

• NASA has been creating code for decades and boasts more than 300 public open-source projects. The agency’s challenge is not getting buy-in for open source so much as it is managing the enthusiasm for it.

• Organisations should take steps to improve their oversight of the use of open source code in software deployed within their business before new EU data protection laws begin to apply, an industry expert has said.

• The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) is pleased to announce this year’s OSEHRA Leadership Award winners. Numerous individuals were nominated this year and three were chosen through a vote by the OSEHRA community based on their outstanding achievements in health information technology and innovative health care. They were honored in a special ceremony during the 6th Annual OSEHRA Open Source Summit June 13-15, 2017 in Bethesda, MD.

Licensing/Legal

• It’s my strong opinion that your company should avoid the Grsecurity product sold at grsecurity.net because it presents a contributory infringement risk.

• Grsecurity is a patch for the Linux kernel which, it is claimed, improves its security. It is a derivative work of the Linux kernel which touches the kernel internals in many different places. It is inseparable from Linux and can not work without it. it would fail a fair-use test (obviously, ask offline if you don’t understand). Because of its strongly derivative nature of the kernel, it must be under the GPL version 2 license, or a license compatible with the GPL and with terms no more restrictive than the GPL. Earlier versions were distributed under GPL version 2.

• Currently, Grsecurity is a commercial product and is distributed only to paying customers. My understanding from several reliable sources is that customers are verbally or otherwise warned that if they redistribute the Grsecurity patch, as would be their right under the GPL, that they will be assessed a penalty: they will no longer be allowed to be customers, and will not be granted access to any further versions of Grsecurity. GPL version 2 section 6 explicitly prohibits the addition of terms such as this redistribution prohibition.

• Linux lord Linus Torvalds thinks he’ll be able to give the world version 4.12 of the Linux kernel next week.

• In his post to mark the release of 4.12 release candidate seven, Torvalds wrote “It’s fairly small, and there were no huge surprises, so if nothing untoward happens this upcoming week, this will be the final rc.”

• “But as usual, I reserve the right to just drag things out if I end up feeling uncomfortable about things for any reason including just random gut feelings, so we’ll see.”

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Bio-on is challenging the research world and announcing its new programme entitled ” The Matter, is how we change our world ” with which the company that created Minerv PHAs, the revolutionary natural and 100% biodegradable bioplastic , wants to involve researchers, inventors and scientists from public or private institutions to discover new applications for the bioplastic. To change the world and help safeguard the planet.

• [...]

• “We believe this sends an important signal to both the scientific community and the market because our technology has obtained over 60 patents to date and has proven it can be applied in a number of sectors. We are now making it available in open source”.

• If you would like to be able to measure your sleep patterns more accurately as well as improve your sleep, nightly dream function or meditation you may be interested in a new open source device called the Neuroon Open which has been designed by a team of developers based in San Francisco California.

Open Data

• Cranston created the platform because she hadn’t seen anything similar available to art historians, her target user base. It emerged from her first project, Mapping Titian, which focused only on the Italian painter’s works. One particularly neat feature of Mapping Paintings is that it lets you filter through its database and overlay the paths of selected artworks on one map. So you can compare how different pieces by the same artist have traveled or where artworks currently owned by the same museum came from.

Open Access/Content

• Marking a major milestone for the sustainability of free-culture production, David Revoy’s popular free-culture fantasy web comic, Pepper & Carrot, about a young witch (Pepper) and her cat (Carrot), has been adapted into a motion-comic style animation by Nikolai Mamashev, produced by Konstantin Dmitriev’s Morevna Project.

Programming/Development

• At PyCon 2017, Kavya Joshi looked at some of the differences between the Python reference implementation (known as “CPython”) and that of MicroPython. In particular, she described the differences in memory use and handling between the two. Those differences are part of what allows MicroPython to run on the severely memory-constrained microcontrollers it targets—an environment that could never support CPython.

• CPython is the standard and default implementation that everyone loves and uses, she said. But it has a bad reputation when it comes to memory use. That has led to some alternate implementations, including MicroPython.

• Our worldwide team of engineers and developers continues to grow with new additions in Core, Graphics & Web! Welcome Denis Pynkin, Alexandros Frantzis and Santosh Mahto!

• Since our founding in 2005, Collabora has been at the forefront of Open Source technology, developing solutions that power today’s leading products across a number of industry segments, included in millions of devices worldwide. Our team of highly skilled engineers and developers – nearly 100 strong – are among the most motivated and active Open Source contributors and maintainers around the world. They have a passion for technology and Open Source, and these new Collaborans are no different!

Leftovers

Science

• We would like to tell them to wait until they get into the real world where they will have to stop all this messing about and start working. Then the real time spent on the internet starts.

• Though there are various records laws that prevent the government from completely purging information gathered by its agencies, the government can take information offline. That means the data is available, but only in one physical location. Lindsey pointed out that this makes it very difficult for community organizers to get access to data about their home regions.

• Under Obama, the science division was staffed with nine employees who crafted policy on STEM education, crisis response and other key issues, according to the report.

• The science division of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was unstaffed as of Friday as the three remaining employees departed this week, sources tell CBS News.

• Alpaslan Durmus, the head of curriculum for the ministry of education, said that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was “controversial” and would be removed from school programmes by 2019.

Hardware

• This is where the story gets famously unclear. Both Sams and Kildall were asked many times in later years about the events of August 22, 1980. Their stories are so factually disparate that it seems impossible to attribute their differences to mere shading or interpretation. Someone (or perhaps both), it seems, was simply not telling the truth.

Health/Nutrition

• Near the end of a profile of Amanda Chantal Bacon, founder of the “wellness” brand Moon Juice, the New York Times Magazine noted that many of the alternative-medicine ingredients in her products are sold—with very different branding—on the Infowars store. That’s the site run by Alex Jones, the radio show host and conspiracy theorist who has said that both the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and the Boston Marathon bombing were staged. Moon Juice is frequently recommended by Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness blog, Goop; it’s a favorite of Hollywood celebrities and others who can afford things like $25 “activated cashews.” Infowars, on the other hand, is a dark corner of the American right, heavy on guns, light on government intervention, and still very mad at Obama.

• In the wake of the federal government’s historic female genital mutilation investigation in metro Detroit involving the Dawoodi Bohra, a small Indian Muslim sect, advocates seeking to end genital cutting say they are getting backlash like never before from fellow members of their sect for speaking out against the practice.

• [...]

• For example, according to activists, the Bohra group is telling its followers to put a thumb down on certain YouTube videos that feature genital mutilation survivors talking about their ordeals and condemning the practice. The goal, activists say, is to get so many negative reviews of the video that YouTube will take the videos down.

• In the years after health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act unfurled in Multnomah County, Oregon, cardiac arrests among those newly covered fell 17 percent, researchers report this week in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

• The pilot study, led by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University and the Heart Institute of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, is just an observational study—it can’t determine causation—and it only looked at the one county. But, the authors argue, the data begs for follow-up.

• “Despite general agreement that expanded insurance coverage leads to positive health effects, the mechanism of this benefit and effect on health outcomes remains poorly understood,” they note. In past small studies, findings have been murky on whether health insurance significantly alters major health events—such as cardiac arrests.

• For the new study, the researchers pulled census data of Multnomah’s population (around Portland) of about 636,000, as well as EMS reports of cardiac arrests. They looked at reports of those deadly events from 2011 to 2012, which was pre-ACA insurance expansion, and from 2014 to 2015, which was post-ACA expansion. They considered 2013 a transition period.

• Some eat it raw, others cook it. Some make it into jerky, and others grind the cooked, dried remains into a brown powder and fill capsules.

• However it’s done, eating the placenta after childbirth is thought to ward off postpartum depression and boost milk production, among other things. There is no solid scientific evidence backing these benefits, though, and cooking it reduces the nutritional content. Nevertheless, the practice of eating the fetus-nourishing organ has strayed from the fringe in recent years, with celebrities such as January Jones and Kim Kardashian joining in. In a December 2015 blog post, Kardashian went through her thought process, noting anecdotes of other women who had good experiences. “So,” she wrote, “I thought, why not try it? What do I have to lose?”

Security

• Tuesday’s Petya slam dunk by the bad guys, which may or may not have been a state sponsored swipe at Ukraine, was only one of several wake-up calls during the last couple of months for the folks taking care of IT security.

• At least they should have been wake-up calls, but by the carnage left behind it looks as if a lot of folks have been operating their server rooms on autopilot. Not only were there patches at the ready to plug the vulnerabilities Petya used to do whatever it did (other than the fact that it probably wasn’t ransomware, what it did hasn’t been entirely sorted out yet), but I’ve heard credible first hand reports from several largish corporations that didn’t have available backups.

• An out-of-bounds write was discovered in systemd-resolved when handling specially crafted DNS responses. A remote attacker could potentially exploit this to cause a denial of service (daemon crash) or execute arbitrary code.

• Isn’t that clear? The attacker is loading a custom kernel module as root in your machine. They don’t use Netfilter to break into your system. The problem is not Netfilter, the problem is your whole machine being under their control.

• India is pressing Microsoft Corp to offer a sharply discounted one-time deal to the more than 50 million Windows users in the country so that they can upgrade to the latest Windows 10 operating system in the wake of ransomware attacks.

• Thanks to the myriad methods thieves have devised to fleece unsuspecting cash machine users over the years, there are now more ways than ever to get ripped off at the ATM. Think you’re good at spotting the various scams? A newly released ATM fraud inspection guide may help you test your knowledge.

• Leaked NSA exploits have now been the basis for two massive cyberattacks. The first — Wannacry — caught hospitals and other critical infrastructure across several nations in the crossfire, using a tool built on the NSA’s ETERNALBLUE exploit backbone. The second seems to be targeting Ukraine, causing the same sort of havoc but with a couple of particularly nasty twists.

• This one, called Petya, demanded ransom from victims. Things went from bad to worse when email provider Posteo shut down the attacker’s account. Doing so prevented affected users from receiving decryption keys, even if they paid the ransom.

• It soon became apparent it didn’t matter what Posteo did, no matter how clueless or ill-advised. There was no retrieving files even if ransoms were paid. Two separate sets of security researchers examined the so-called ransomware and discovered Petya is actually a wiper. Once infected, victims’ files are as good as gone. No amount of bitcoin is going to reverse the inevitable. The ransomware notices were only there to draw attention to the infection and away from the malware’s true purpose.

• For over 20 years, Microsoft stomped on its competitors and then defended itself against the resulting antitrust lawsuits. But with desktop Windows waning in importance and its desktop software rivals largely gone, Microsoft seemed to have turned a new leaf. Or had it?

• In the one software sphere left where it still has rivals — antivirus and security software — Microsoft is up to its old anti-competitive tricks. Late last year, Eugene Kaspersky, founder of the eponymous antivirus company, said, “When you upgrade to Windows 10, Microsoft automatically and without any warning deactivates all ‘incompatible’ security software and in its place installs… you guessed it — its own Defender antivirus. But what did it expect when independent developers were given all of one week before the release of the new version of the OS to make their software compatible?”

• Recently I got Dell XPS 13 as my new work laptop and I use it with the TB16 dock. This dock doesn’t seem to fully work with Linux, only monitors work. But if you go to BIOS settings and set the Thunderbolt Security level to “No security”. Then suddenly almost everything is working.

• Static source code analysis is a great way for finding bugs and quality-related issues that end up becoming security problems. Some of these issues are mere buffer overflows that were somehow able to sneak by, while others are actual security oversights involving user session fixation, code injection and configuration faults, such as hardcoded cryptographic keys.

• According to a Forrester Research report, open source software code currently comprises 80 percent of an average application’s overall code. IBM Application Security Open Source Analyzer offers control and visibility over rapidly expanding open source risks and helps to identify vulnerable open source components in your organization’s software code, as detailed in our recent infographic.

Defence/Aggression

• Civilians held hostage by Islamist militants occupying a southern Philippine city have been forced by their captors to loot homes, take up arms against government troops and serve as sex slaves for rebel fighters, the army said on Tuesday.

• Spanish authorities alleged Chadlioui was a “well-known” radical cleric who recruited fighters for Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (Isil) and allegedly acted as the “spiritual leader” of the group.

• Chinese President Xi Jinping has warned against “impermissible” challenges to Beijing’s authority over Hong Kong.

• Mr Xi was speaking at the swearing-in of the territory’s new leader Carrie Lam, as it marks 20 years since its handover to China from Britain.

• Authorities in north-eastern Nigeria have begun digging a 27km (17 mile) trench around the University of Maiduguri to prevent attacks by Boko Haram Islamist militants.

• ‘He claimed they got what they deserved and those who had pledged allegiance to the Caliphate like him had the job of defending Islam and converting everyone, as the Koran says those who don’t want to convert to Islam are infidels and have to die.

• Except for the grieving Pandith family , their sympathisers, friends and J&K police who expressed anger against separatists and stone-pelters, no public protests and demonstrations were held in Srinagar or any other part of the Valley on Saturday . Normal life went as usual, with a sense of apathy .

• According to documents from the two-year-old case, Sullivan planned to unveil his “Islamic State of North America” with an attack on a concert or club that would kill hundreds of people.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• The initiatives Trump talked about today were a hodgepodge of new announcements and old policy, focusing on nuclear energy and fossil fuel exports. Despite calling for energy independence, Trump’s speech steered clear of renewable energy like wind or solar. Trump has falsely stated that climate change is a “hoax” and has appointed officials with close ties to the fossil fuel industry to top energy posts.

• US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and Energy Secretary Rick Perry have been making some headlines for publicly rejecting the conclusions of climate science. But in between wrongly claiming that climate scientists just don’t know how much of a contribution humans make to recent global warming (answer: roughly 100 percent), they have also been parroting a new line—that climate science needs a “red team” to take on the scientific consensus.

Finance

• Twenty years ago, Google revolutionized search with a simple idea: Pages that have many links going to them are likely to be more useful than pages that don’t. Blockchain uses an equally simple idea that may be just as revolutionary: If every member of a large network has the same data, along with a complete record of any changes made to that data, the data will be impossible to falsify.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Jeremy Corbyn swoops into Home Secretary’s Amber Rudd constituency tomorrow as Labour bids to pile pressure on marginal seats.

• The party is on a permanent election footing and Mr Corbyn hopes to capitalise on the momentum of his surprise ballot box performance to boost support in key battlegrounds.

• He begins by holding a rally in the East Sussex town that gave its name to Britain’s most famous battle – Hastings.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Even accepting that free speech ends where criminal law begins, that doesn’t justify fining the platforms. If people are posting “illegal” content, go after them for breaking the law. Don’t go after the tools they use. By putting massive liability risks on platforms, those platforms will almost certainly overcompensate and over censor to avoid any risk of liability. That means a tremendous amount of what should be protected speech gets silence, just because these companies don’t want to get fined. Even worse, the big platforms can maybe hire people to handle this. The littler platforms? They basically can’t risk operating in Germany any more. Berlin is a hotbed of startups, but this is going to seriously harm many of them.

• Failure to comply will result in a 5m euro penalty, which could rise to 50m euros depending on the severity of the offence.

• German lawmakers have passed a controversial law under which Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies could face fines of up to €50 million ($57 million) for failing to remove hate speech. The Network Enforcement Act, commonly referred to as the “Facebook law,” was passed by the Bundestag, Germany’s parliamentary body, on Friday. It will go into effect in October.

• Even this response is bullshit. Note, first of all, there still isn’t any apology there. Second, notice that they’re still prattling on about how the action was justified and are also happy that McMansion Hell won’t be using images from Zillow, even though the site and its founder, Kate Wagner absolutely could do so if doing so meets the standards of fair use (which all of the examples I’ve seen on the site so far almost certainly do). Third, “decided not to pursue legal action against Kate Wagner.” Well, no fucking duh. This is because any lawyer with an ounce of knowledge on these topics has already explained that you have no actual legal claim here at all. Fourth, this was not done “out of an abundance of caution” or “to protect” your partners. It appears to have been done in a fit of anxious cluelessness, in a manner that made Zillow look terrible and petty — not to mention clueless on the law.

• Despite it being almost two years past the statute of limitations, Welter engaged the services of Kelly/Warner LLC to file a defamation lawsuit. The complaint [PDF] contains nothing but conclusory claims about the supposed libel. (Basically, “false statements were made and were false.”) The complaint was accompanied by a proposed injunction, which included a list [PDF] of 107 URLs –including YouTube videos and a variety of other websites — Welter wanted delisted. But Welter still needed somebody to trigger this judicially-abusive chain of events.

Privacy/Surveillance

• For a long time I’ve been struggling to find a useful purpose for Facebook, because most of the things I care to use social media for can usually be done more effectively elsewhere.

• Sharing common interests and starting conversations with people can be done more easily on microblogging services like Twitter and Mastodon where thoughts are distilled in smaller chunks and there’s no social obligation on you to follow me in the first place.

• I get my news from Twitter, the BBC and numerous newspaper websites, not Facebook. Similarly, everyone I communicate with on a regular basis via instant messaging uses WhatsApp, Signal or Skype.

• FOIA terrorist Jason Leopold has scored another win, securing a copy of an Intelligence Community Inspector General’s investigation from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It’s the sort of thing that’s rarely released, most likely because it comes from the inner sanctum’s inner sanctum. Maybe this one just seemed too damning to keep secret — not for the ODNI or the Intelligence Community, but for the unnamed (well… redacted) ODNI employee who was caught abusing all sorts of policies, procedures, and laws while on the clock.

• Having been told “no” twice by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, the DOJ is asking the Supreme Court to overturn the decision finding Microsoft did not need to hand over communications stored in foreign data centers in response to a US warrant.

• The Appeals Court told the DOJ that statutory language simply didn’t agree with the premise pushed by the government: that US-issued warrants should allow the law enforcement to dig through “file cabinets” not actually located at the premises (United States) searched. The court noted jurisdictional limitations have always been part of the warrant process (although recent Rule 41 changes somewhat undercut this). That the information sought is digital rather than physical doesn’t change this. The court suggested the DOJ take it up with Congress if it doesn’t like the status quo. The DOJ has proposed legislation but likely feels a Supreme Court decision in its favor would be a swifter resolution.

• The messaging world has moved from desktop to mobile, to secure mobile messengers for consumer, and to less secure messengers that work on multiple platforms for business.

• The future requires a model that combines security for multi-device communication on all platforms — desktop, mobile, tablet, smart devices and wearables. Phone number-based identity is not a good foundation for this future.

• A federal judge in Utah has ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to provide documents and data to a group suing the government alleging “blanket” warrantless surveillance of Salt Lake-area residents during the 2002 Olympic Winter Games.

• Rocky Anderson — the Salt Lake City mayor at the time of the 2002 Olympics — represents plaintiffs Mary Josephine Valdez, Howard Stephenson, Deeda Seed, Will Bagley and Thomas Nelson Huckin, who filed suit in 2015 in U.S. District Court for Utah in Salt Lake City.

• This week, the political heads of the intelligence services of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (the “Five Eyes” alliance) met in Ottawa. The Australian delegation entered the meeting saying publicly that they intended to “thwart the encryption of terrorist messaging.” The final communiqué states more diplomatically that “Ministers and Attorneys General [...] noted that encryption can severely undermine public safety efforts by impeding lawful access to the content of communications during investigations into serious crimes, including terrorism. To address these issues, we committed to develop our engagement with communications and technology companies to explore shared solutions.”

• UK privacy warrior the Open Rights Group (ORG) has aligned itself with 83 organisations and people from the so-called Five Eyes group of countries to oppose the sort of encryption-eroding shite that their leaders are purporting.

• “It’s become clearer than ever in recent months that this law is not fit for purpose. The government doesn’t need to spy on the entire population to fight terrorism. All that does is undermine the very rights, freedoms and democracy terrorists seek to destroy.

• The City announced in early June that it would begin transferring video to Microsoft for analysis.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A 23-year-old woman from Bengaluru was denied a pre-booked accommodation at a Hyderabad hotel on Saturday morning because she was a “single lady traveller”.

• Actress Soha Ali Khan has been accused of not being Muslim enough in the comments thread of a picture she posted on Instagram.

• Saglam said that throughout the journey the man had been verbally harassing her by saying she should not be wearing shorts during Ramadan.

• The man was detained but following questioning — in which he reportedly said he had been “provoked” — he was set free, causing a new outcry.

• “The official was killed by the mob while he was performing his duties. It’s a very sad and unfortunate incident,” Vaid said.

• In interviews with more than a dozen mothers and pregnant women working at tech startups, women described experiences ranging from being “guinea pigs” for companies that don’t yet have maternity leave policies to facing outright hostility to their pregnancies. Several women asked not to be identified out of fear of retaliation.

• Hakim’s message is contrary to the Iraqi Constitution, which guarantees freedom of belief and expression and criminalizes incitement against others and against compelling others to adopt or reject a specific faith.

• Both are Muslims, and both are critical of Muslim extremism, and for way too many Democrats that point of view is not legitimate.

• Alam then sought RAB’s help, and the girl was rescued from the house of alleged rapist Yasin’s ‘so-called’ relatives on Thursday night.

• On Monday, June 19, 22-year-old University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier died six days after returning to Ohio from North Korea in a coma, USA Today reports. He’d been serving a sentence of 15 years of hard labor for allegedly stealing a poster and suffered from extreme brain damage. In a Facebook post that’s since been deleted, University of Delaware anthropology professor Kathy Dettwyler responded to this news by claiming Otto “got exactly what he deserved.”

• Govts in India or the Judiciary must not join or favour any Eid-ul-Fitr or Eid-ul-Adha celebrations as these are against non-Muslims and humanity.

• Hindu underage girl ‘forcibly converted and married off’ in Pakistan’s Tharparkar under ‘Islamic bullying’.

• In a letter to EU heads of state its president Donald Tusk said that “illegal arrivals” to Italy had rocketed by 26 per cent over the last year and urged them to approve more cash to train and equip the Libyan coastguard. Related articles

• Eurocrats ultimately want the Libyans to take over the entire search and rescue operation in the central Mediterranean, believing that this is the only way to smash the business model of smuggling gangs.

• Controversy regarding Muslim kindergartens was recently stirred when a study by Austrian-Turkish Professor Ednan Aslan found more than 10,000 children aged from two to six attend around 150 Muslim preschools in Vienna which teach the Koran and pave the way for “parallel societies,” according to AFP.

• And, as always, the burden will be borne by travelers. Airlines are being given some time to make these changes, but there doesn’t appear to be a hard deadline for compliance. If foreign airlines don’t live up to the DHS’s expectations, passengers will presumably be informed about the fate of their electronic devices after they’ve already taken them to the airport. The DHS encourages foreign travelers to keep themselves apprised of these changes, but doesn’t say how they’re supposed to obtain this information when making travel plans. All that’s being recommended is staying in “close contact” with their airline of choice, which sounds like the sort of pen pal relationship no one’s in any hurry to engage in.

• When a lawyer sends a demand to another lawyer, the one doing the sending had better be on top of their law game. Otherwise, things will go badly. And when they go badly, they end up being discussed here.

• Conservative blogger (and lawyer) Scott Johnson got hit with a subpoena ordering him to preserve evidence possibly relevant to a legal challenge of Trump’s travel ban from a courtroom halfway across the country. The advance subpoena informed Johnson of his pending obligation to preserve (with production expected later) certain notes pertaining to certain blog posts pertaining to his attendance of a reception for conservative writers held by Trump at the White House.

• In a sequel to this particular magic carpet ride, however, I have now been caught up in the so-called “travel ban” litigation challenging President Trump’s executive orders “protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States.” On June 10, I was served with a letter and draft subpoena from Tana Lin of the Keller Rohrback law firm’s Seattle office alerting me to my “document preservation obligations with respect to documents that are relevant or potentially relevant to this litigation.” Lin represents plaintiffs in Doe v. Trump, venued before Judge James Robart in the federal district court for the Western District of Washington.

• [...]

• To me, it all feels like glorified harassment of a conservative writer. Is it conceivable that if I had covered the reception for the New York Times, Lin would be demanding my notes? I doubt it.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Opponents of net neutrality often claim the rules placed “onerous burdens” on small and large ISPs alike. But when push comes to shove, you’ll rarely see any of these folks provide hard evidence of such “burdens.” Usually, opposition is driven by a fundamental misunderstanding of what the rules do, and by a conflation of the rules with nebulous partisan worries that net neutrality somehow represents “government run amok.” That confusion is, quite often, courtesy of “insight” on the subject from the likes of Ted Cruz, who has repeatedly tried to insist that killing the popular consumer protections somehow “restores freedom” (citation needed).

• So we’ve been talking the past month about a push by the marketing industry (a company by the name of “All About The Message,” specifically) to exempt “ringless voicemail” from existing robocalling and privacy rules. Ringless voicemail lets a company leave a marketing or political message in your inbox without your phone ringing. But such technology is currently prohibited by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) , which prohibits such marketing efforts without the “prior express consent of the called party.”

• The Federal Communications Commission’s empty slots are about to be filled. President Donald Trump will nominate Republican Brendan Carr to the FCC’s fifth and final commissioner position, the White House announced last night.

• Carr served as FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai’s Wireless, Public Safety, and International Legal Advisor for three years. After Trump elevated Pai to the chairmanship in January, Pai appointed Carr to become the FCC’s general counsel.

• A few years ago, large ISPs began taking advantage of a lack of competition in the broadband market by imposing arbitrary, unnecessary and confusing usage caps and overage fees. Initially, these companies tried to claim that this was necessary to manage congestion on their networks. As data emerged indicating that this claim was bullshit, large ISPs were ultimately forced to acknowledge as much and back away from the claim.

• Verizon Wireless said it is disconnecting a small group of customers who use vast amounts of data in rural areas where Verizon relies on roaming agreements with smaller network operators.

• “Earlier this month we notified a small group of customers who are out of contract and primarily use mobile data on other wireless companies’ networks that we won’t be their service provider after July 30, 2017,” a Verizon spokesperson told Ars today. “This only affects a few people who primarily roam on other networks and does not affect customers who primarily use Verizon’s own network.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• The Canadian Supreme Court today upheld a pharmaceutical industry appeal against a tool used in certain cases to overturn patents on products that could be seen as not meriting a patent monopoly. The ruling could effectively block a generic version of a patented drug from being on the market.

• In the eagerly-awaited AstraZeneca Canada v Apotex ruling, Canada’s Supreme Court has struck down the “promise doctrine” and clarified the requirement for patent utility

• The Supreme Court of Canada has released its eagerly-awaited ruling in AstraZeneca Canada v Apotex, striking down the so-called “promise doctrine” and clarifying the requirement for patent utility.

Copyrights

• Two years ago, Techdirt wrote about an industry study of Spain’s “Google tax”, which requires a Web site to pay for sending traffic to publishers when it quotes snippets of their texts. Just as everyone who actually understands the Internet predicted, Spain’s new law had a disastrous effect on the publishing industry there, especially on smaller companies. Despite that unequivocal evidence, the law is still in place, and it’s a further sign of how pointless it is that only now has the Spanish Center for Reprographic Rights (Cedro) finally managed to sign up its first deal with a news aggregator, called Upday (original in Spanish). Cedro is claiming that this “pioneering” move possesses a “strategic importance” because it recognizes the rights of those whose publications appear elsewhere as snippets.

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