● 07.24.17

● Links 24/7/2017: Linux 4.13 RC2, Mesa 17.2 RC1, Akademy Coverage

Posted in News Roundup at 8:01 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• There are few things in a Linux enthusiast’s life more fun than buying a new Linux laptop. One could even argue that the mere act of “spec’ing out” a new unit is more exciting than the actual use of the laptop itself.

• In this article, I’m going to walk you through the decision making progress of buying a new Linux laptop vs. procuring a good second hand one instead. I’ll share the advantages and disadvantages to each option.

Server

• I’ve been convinced about the merits of configuration management for machines for a while now; I remember conversations about producing an appropriate set of recipes to reproduce our haphazard development environment reliably over 4 years ago. That never really got dealt with before I left, and as managing systems hasn’t been part of my day job since then I never got around to doing more than working my way through the Puppet Learning VM. I do, however, continue to run a number of different Linux machines – a few VMs, a hosted dedicated server and a few physical machines at home and my parents’. In particular I have a VM which handles my parents’ email, and I thought that was a good candidate for trying to properly manage. It’s backed up, but it would be nice to be able to redeploy that setup easily if I wanted to move provider, or do hosting for other domains in their own VMs.

Audiocasts/Shows

• A few weeks ago we had the opportunity to chat with Ryan Gordon, a.k.a. Icculus, about his experience and as a games porter and a wider range of subjects related to Linux. This was supposed to be a one hour podcast, but we ended up talking for more than 2. Why is that? Well, Ryan had so many interesting things to say that we just could not let him leave so fast. So for once we have decided to do a two-parts podcasts. We hope you enjoy this as much as we did. Just a reminder: doing this kind of podcasts is a LOT of work (more than a dozen of hours) so please consider supporting us via Patreon if you like what we do, and want us to continue doing this.

Kernel Space

• Here are some numbers about how much weight the kernel gained during the Linux 4.13 merge window that closed last week.

• Things are chugging along, and we actually had a reasonably active rc2.

• Normally rc2 is really small because people are taking a breaher and haven’t started finding bugs yet, but this time around we have a bigger-than-average rc2. We’ll just have to see how that translates to the rest of the release cycle, but I suspect it’s just the normal variability in this thing (and because I released -rc1 one day early, I guess rc2 was one day longer than usual despite the normal Sunday release).

• Changes all over, although the diffstat is dominated by the new vboxvideo staging driver. I shouldn’t have let it through, but Greg, as we all know, is “special”. Also, Quod licet Iovi, and all that jazz - Greg gets to occasionally break some rules.

• If you just ignore that new staging driver, the remainder is still about half driver patches (networking, rdma, scsi, usb). The rest looks normal too: architecture updates (x86, sparc, powerpc), filesystem (nfs, overlayfs, misc), networking and core kernel. And some new bpf testcode.

• Time for some more testing, people. You know the drill.

• Linus

• The second release candidate of the Linux 4.13 kernel is now available for testing.

• The development cycle of the upcoming Linux 4.13 kernel series, whose release cycle was kicked off last week by none other than Linus Torvalds, continues today with the second Release Candidate (RC) milestone.

• According to Linus Torvalds, this second Release Candidate of Linux kernel 4.13 is bigger than average, as the Linux creator would have expected to see things starting off a little slow at this stage of development, which could suggest the Linux 4.13 kernel cycle getting eight RCs instead of the usual seven that a normal release gets. But, after all, it’s too early to make any predictions.

• This page is an attempt to track ongoing developments in the Linux development community that have a good chance of appearing in a mainline kernel and/or major distributions sometime in the near future. Your “chief meteorologist” is Jonathan Corbet, Executive Editor at LWN.net. If you have suggestions on improving the forecast (and particularly if you have a project or patchset that you think should be tracked), please add your comments below.

• Now it appears the godfather of Linux has started to put all that bile to good use by reviewing products on Google+.

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA and Carnegie Mellon University have developed a new open-source shading language in step with a new compiler framework.

• David Airlie and Bas Nieuwenhuizen have been landing some more last minute RADV Vulkan driver fixes ahead of the Mesa 17.2 branching.

• As reported this weekend, RADV Is Almost Ready For SteamVR With Mainline Mesa. Besides that, it’s been getting some corrections with Mesa 17.2 in addition to performance improvements since 17.1.

• Mesa release manager Emil Velikov went ahead and branched Mesa 17.2 from Git master with new developments now being for Mesa 17.3.

• Mesa 17.2 is another huge quarterly update for this 3D user-space driver stack and will be released as stable in August. This is a huge update for nearly all of the drivers involved; I’ll be around with my usual feature overview/recap shortly. It’s been a big stride for both the OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

• Those using Radeon graphics for your Steam VR Linux gaming experience will soon be able to use the mainline Mesa stack with the necessary RADV changes almost all being in place.

• RADV has worked with SteamVR on Linux for some months, but you’ve had to rely upon a branched version of Mesa that offers all the necessary Vulkan extensions required by SteamVR. The day is finally coming where the mainline open-source Radeon Vulkan driver stack has all those extensions in place, as discussed here.

• Following this morning’s Mesa 17.2 branching, the first release candidate of this quarterly update to Mesa 3D is now available.

Benchmarks

• A few days back I posted some fresh AMD Ryzen compiler benchmarks of LLVM Clang now that it has its new Znver1 scheduler model, which helps out the performance of Ryzen on Linux with some of the generated binaries tested. But it was found still that Haswell-tuned binaries are sometimes still faster on Ryzen than the Zen “znver1″ tuning itself. For continuing our fresh compiler benchmarks from AMD’s new Ryzen platform, here are the latest GCC numbers.

Applications

• Dash to Panel is a customizable open source extension for the GNOME Shell that moves the dash into GNOME’s main panel; combining app launchers and the system tray into one panel like that of KDE Plasma and Windows 7+.

• Are you tired of your default terminal or looking for an alternative which can look cool as well as perform operation in your system? If yes, Terminus is for you which is modern terminal designed to be highly customizable, it will let you enjoy CLI. If you are using Linux since there were CRT monitors with Linux then check out Cool-Retro-Term, which is another great looking terminal application. Terminus is built using web technologies based on Electron, it is cross-platform modern age terminal available for (Linux, Windows and Mac), on Linux it is a full terminal which can spawn with a global hotkey, tabs persist after restart, Auto-dock to anyside of any screen, full Unicode and double-width character support. On Windows it supports Classic CMD, PowerShell and Bash on Windows. On Mac it just works. Multiple app themes and a myriad of community color schemes for the terminal. Color scheme editor included. Install plugins from the NPM repository, or create your own with Typescript and Angular framework.

• Panel Indicators always comes in handy when you have to do some productive work on your desktop computer, to access quick functions of different applications these indicators saves you a lot of time, some indicator give you information you want to receive, it all depends on your needs. Today presenting you some useful indicators which may help you and makes your desktop experience much better. Following all the indicators are developed by just one guy and available through his PPA.

• MKVToolNix developer Moritz Bunkus announced the release and immediate availability for download of MKVToolNix 14.0.0, a major release of the open-source and cross-platform MKV (Matroska) manipulation app.

• MKVToolNix 14.0.0 “Flow” is here just one month after the MKVToolNix 13.0.0 “The Juggler” release, and it looks like it adds a great number of new features and enhancements, along with numerous bug fixes and some build system changes. First off, the application is now officially translated into the Romanian language.

• new version the Brackets code editor is available to download. This update adds native menus on Linux, inline CSS code hints, and a whole heap more.

• Today I have released kiskadee 0.2.2. This minor release brings some architecture improvements, fix some bugs in the plugins and improve the log messages format. Initially, lets take a look in the kiskadee architecture implemented on the 0.2 release.

Proprietary

• In the previous post I described what UndoDB is, now I will describe how the technology works.

• The naïve approach to record the execution of a program is to record everything that happens, that is the effects of every single machine instruction. This is what gdb does to offer reversible debugging.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Today, developer Asymmetric announced that its comedy, wild west RPG, West of Loathing, is poised to launch for PC, Mac, and Linux on August 10th.

• Simulation video games (“Sims”) describe a wide range of video games, generally designed to closely emulate real life activities. Examples of this genre include operating a copy of a real-life vehicle, or participating in recreating historical events. Sims differ from other PC games in that their raison d’être isn’t always to entertain, at least not primarily. Simulation games remain popular among gamers, offering players the experience of the real world.

• Kingdoms and Castles [GOG, Steam, Official Site] is the first title to be released after being crowdfunded on Fig and it has day-1 Linux support. This city-builder has a nice style to it, but is it any good?

• A lovely little game, Refunct, just crossed my Steam installation. A simple platformer developed with much love. The game play consists of reviving a lost area by stepping on towers, finding buttons, and making more towers appear through this.

• Mesa Git is usually relatively sane for Linux gamers wanting the bleeding-edge open-source driver experience for best OpenGL/Vulkan features and performance, but at the moment it’s a bit of a headache with what in effect are two blocker bugs for Mesa 17.2.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• First thing I did, of course, was boot it with my FreeBSD 11.0 SD card, to see if it works with my favorite operating system (with Plasma 5 desktop, of course). Nope: 11.0 hangs after finding acpi_ec0, so I will write about that later this week.

• Second thing I did was boot KDE Neon (pre-installed) on it, to see how it works out-of-the-box. I collected a bunch of tiny-little-irritations, papercuts if you will, from the basic installation — which have disappeared after an update and reboot.

• During the first day at the Akademy, everything went according to plan and nearly everything was on time. Kudos to the organisers.

• The weather was balmy at the beginning of the day and, although Aleix Pol said it was not hotter than a hot day in Barcelona, many of the Scandinavian and Scottish attendees were visibly wilting under the sun. Fortunately for them, the venue is equipped with air-conditioning.

• Little known fact about Almería: it is situated in the biggest desert in Europe, the Desert of Tabernas. A better known fact is that that same desert has been used as a location for many spaghetti westerns, including the seminal Sergio Leone movies “For A Fistful of Dollars” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. What is more interesting for some KDE members is that Tabernas has also been used in the filming of at least one Doctor Who episode (“A Town Called Mercy”). Unsurprisingly, the whovians amongst us quickly got busy and organised a trip to the place of the shoot for later in the week.

• On the 20th and 21st of July, KDE España held, with the invaluable help of UNIA, HackLab Almería and the University of Almería, and with the sponsorship of Opentia, its 12th annual gathering: Akademy-es 2017.

• As it always happens when Akademy takes place in Spain, Akademy-es 2017 became a prelude of the international event and many well-known KDE developers attended.

• Throughout two days, talks were offered covering many different topics, including Plasma, programming (C++, Qt, mobile), exciting projects like Kirigami, proposals for the future such as KDE on automobile, encouragement to use KDE software and contribute to KDE, and information about KDE España.

• Every year at Akademy we celebrate some of our hardest working achievers in the community. The prizes are selected and awarded by the previous year’s winners.

• Plasma Mobile, the convergent KDE smartphone OS, is on show at the annual Akademy summit for KDE developers and enthusiasts.

• Yesterday I picked up my new KDE Slimbook. It comes with KDE Neon pre-installed. Of course it also works well with openSUSE, and Manjaro, and Netrunner Linux (some things I’ve at least booted the Live CD for). But for me, “will it run FreeBSD” is actually the most important bit.

• Yes. Yes it does, and it does so beautifully.

• In the previous episode we presented how to uncover 32 Qt best practices at compile time with clazy. Today it’s time to show 5 more and other new goodies present in the freshly released clazy v1.2.

• With Akademy 2017 happening this week, Qt consulting firm KDAB has released version 1.2 of Clazy, its Clang-based static analyzer geared for showing Qt coding mistakes and inefficiencies.

• Clazy 1.2 picks up support for a number of new checks, clazy-standalone that works similarly to clang-tidy, support for the AST Matchers API, pre-built Windows binaries, and other improvements.

• We never forget where we belong: that’s why we remind you that during this week Akademy2017 is taking place in Almeria! Akademy is the annual conference of the KDE community. WikiToLearn was born under the KDE umbrella and still today we fell part of the KDE family. This year WikiToLearn is represented at Akademy by Vasudha, a GSoC student of ours working on Ruqola. Today we remember Akademy with extreme pleasure: two years ago, during Akademy2015 our project was officially born!

• In Krita, we cannot delete the bundle created just like that. The Bundles created are saved as the KisResource in a QList. We have to remove it from that list, then obviously, we have to remove it from the list widget where this bundle is shown. Then we have to BlackList the file. Then from there, we can remove the blacklisted bundles as we empty a recycle bin ;).

• Chakra GNU/Linux contributor Neofytos Kolokotronis announced the immediate availability of the latest KDE technologies in the stable software repositories of the independently-developed Chakra GNU/Linux operating system.

• With your next system upgrade, you will receive all the latest versions of KDE’s Plasma, Applications and Frameworks series, as nearly 700 packages have been updated and are now available to you (that’s 17% of the packages in our repositories!). These are all stability updates and as usual include mostly bug fixes, translation updates and other minor improvements.

• The last month was not easy. Some things had to be re-written because they were not very well written. For example, I wrote a system of “sensors”, the logic of which was laid in the destructors of objects. This is a non-obvious logic of work, it had to be rewritten.

• In this post I intend to report the whereabouts of my project. First of all me not posting any updates about my project was due to two problems that showed up when I was two weeks into the coding period. One, which I had anticipated, was to decide from where to show a warning dialog during the brief period of time when privileges are elevated. The problem was that showing the prompt from KIO::Slave resulted in repetition and to show it from KIO::JobUiDelegate permissions of destination folder was needed beforehand which required additional computation. So for this I decided to add a signal in KIO::Slave and all the necessary code for additional prompts in KIO::Job. This way the KIO slave emits the signal whenever it encounters ACCESS DENIED error and then job decides whether or not to show the prompt. The other problem was to figure out how to modify files created by a privileged process by an underprivileged one. By the way the latter was completely uncalled-for and it took me around two weeks to decide on a solution. To send data between processes I tried every possible IPC mechanism involving shared memory, pipes and sockets. At last I decided on sharing file descriptor between the privileged and under-privileged process and to accomplish that I used Unix local domain sockets.

• It allows you to have an arbitrary amount of cursors and selections in KTextEditor. They all mirror what you do with the primary one — text input, text removal, navigation, text selection, …

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The Mutter composite and window manager of the widely-used GNOME desktop environment was updated recently both on the stable and devel channels with a bunch of new features and improvements.

• Mutter 3.24.4 is now the latest stable build of the application, and it’s here to add a few important changes for tablets, including improved stability of tablet plugs and unplugs, working window moving and resizing via tablet tools, as well as the implementation of tablet rings/strips configuration.

• In addition, Mutter now no longer throttles motion events on tablet tools, it’s capable of handling the left-handed mode on pen/eraser devices, and adds support for tablet wheel events when running under the Wayland display server. Talking about Wayland, the Wacom cursor offset should now work as expected in Mutter 3.24.4.

• The GNOME Builder IDE (Integrated Development Environment) open-source tool designed to help aspiring application developers create modern apps for the GNOME/GTK+ ecosystem will get a major revamp for the GNOME 3.26 desktop release.

• Development of GNOME Builder 3.26 kicked off back in April with the first snapshot, and, since then, the software application received no less than five snapshots in total, which switch the tool to the Meson build system, a major change that will be implemented in all the apps from the GNOME Stack will do as part of the upcoming GNOME 3.26 desktop environment.

• Oomox is a GUI tool with which you can generate several color variations of Numix (GTK2 / GTK3) themes, as well as Gnome-Colors and Archdroid icon themes. It ships with support for GNOME, Unity, Xfce4 and Openbox desktop environments, and a plethora of built-in presets which can be customized further.

• It is virtually the easiest way to create your own GTK 3.20 theme and thanks to one of the app’s users, Spatry, you can check out Oomox in action in the video below:

• While Ubuntu’s switch to GNOME doesn’t render all of those methods redundant it does unlock some additional opportunities (like unified lock screen and desktop background) — something that the GNOME extensions framework dramatically simplifies.

Distributions

• There are billions of users out there who don’t have high-speed or even decent speed internet. Linux can serve those user. And do you know how BIG is that market? 3 BILLION USERS! You heard it right! Now can we stop chasing ‘Windows market’ and start catering to those users who really need Linux.

Reviews

• All in all, the Qubes OS team did an awesome job on integrating all this things so far. The security of the App VMs is not better than the security of the corresponding Template operating systems. However, if a App VM gets an issue, it does not affect the others. If you plan to do weird things, you can use a disposable VM where all changes gets discarded afterwards. It is very easy for anybody to create App VMs without network for example. And this is something I would like to use ever since I stumbled over Firejail which provides app-specific sandboxing.

• In general, the documentation of Cubes OS is awesome. I learned a lot and I had to. Cubes OS is nothing to set-up by aunt Martha. You have to have deeper technical understanding to set-up the system. Afterwards, anyone is able to use it with a short introduction to the basic guidelines.

• Of course, I found some usability issues and some bugs here or there. But overall, Cubes OS is a valid option for a security purist or a privacy-aware person.

• When Qubes OS meets my personal requirements, it complicates things though. For example the file server/client architecture adds complexity you don’t have to maintain within a personal computer.

• Accessing USB devices, network printers and so forth is cumbersome as well.

• You have to set your priorities.

• Will I install it on my notebook or desktop and use it on a daily basis? My notebook would be cool since it is in potential harmful environments such as WiFi networks I don’t control. On the other side, I do need USB flash drive access with good usability and need to connect to projectors.

• My home server/computer runs 24/7 and could profit from Cubes OS since I got many different things running on this machine. I could separate those domains. Working in offline VMs with applications that don’t need network is also a very nice thing to have. The USB flash drive thing is also a big thing here. Restricting to LAN access only would be fine. System crash resulting in an encrypted system that does not boot any more is a no go.

• Well, I am not convinced yet. Probably I stick to Debian 9 or I do find the urge to come around the issues and find a Qubes OS setup which serves me well.

New Releases

• 4MLinux 23.0 BETA is ready for testing. Basically, at this stage of development, 4MLinux BETA has the same features as 4MLinux STABLE, but it provides a huge number of updated packages, including a major change in the core of the system, which now uses the GNU C Library 2.25.

Gentoo Family

• Calculate Linux is a Gentoo-based distribution. The project’s slogan is “Easy Linux from the source,” which refers to the fact that Calculate is relatively easy to use but still benefits from Gentoo’s powerful and flexible source-based Portage package manager.

• Calculate recently celebrated its tenth birthday and released Calculate Linux 17.6. The distro comes in four flavours; apart from a desktop and server edition there’s Calculate Scratch (“for those who want to build a customized system that works for them”) and Calculate Media Center (“for your home multimedia center”). Each version is available for the x86_64 and i686 architectures and uses SysV init rather than systemd. The desktop edition has ISOs for the KDE, Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce desktop environments – GNOME is presumably not available because of its dependency on systemd. I opted for the 64-bit KDE version, which is just over 2GB in size.

Red Hat Family

• Investment in open source technologies is growing more than twice as fast as technology spending as a whole, according to a report released last by IDC and sponsored by Red Hat.

• Expertise to handle the growing open source environment need to grow as fast.

• With this in mind, Red Hat, a renowned name in enterprise open source technologies, is keen to expand training initiatives in open source in the region.

• Object storage has consistently offered distinct benefits and advantages over traditional storage protocols. Much of this was illustrated in the May 2016 article in Red Hat Perspectives, Using Object Storage To Deliver The Agility Today’s Big Data Apps Require.

• In recent years, features have been added to make object storage more than just a single protocol solution. In fact, object storage offerings are now capable of serving as the storage platform for vast data center workloads across different protocols and workloads. Object storage has progressed beyond cheap and deep archives and applications born in the cloud to a de facto common storage platform for multiple data center use cases.

• Red Hat’s Ceph and Gluster storage roadmaps reflect an increasing level of focus on hyper-converged infrastructure, containers and big data in tandem with the usual performance and feature improvements.

Finance

• US Bancorp DE boosted its stake in shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) by 1.0% during the second quarter, Holdings Channel reports. The firm owned 84,508 shares of the open-source software company’s stock after buying an additional 870 shares during the period. US Bancorp DE’s holdings in Red Hat were worth $8,091,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

Fedora

• Review Fedora 26, released recently, is a welcome update on the already very nice 25.

• As with Fedora’s last couple of releases, there are three major ways to get Fedora 26 – Workstation, Server and Atomic Host. The Workstation release is aimed at desktop users and, by default, will install the GNOME desktop. Server and Atomic Host target, yes, servers and container-based deployments respectively.

• Today was part 2 of the preparing sessions for the Fedora Release Party at PNC on Saturday the 29th of July. So I did spent again the day at this school, I remember a discussion I had at Flock in Prague about the motivation of Asians. There was a saying that you have to motivate them to doing things, I did not agree at that time and I still have this opinion. Whenever I did work with the young people here they allways doing it with lot of passion, yes they are take longer to understand complex things and it is harder for them but they allways if they do something they do it with a lot of motivation. Like today, the first class did still work as the second class was already waiting before the door and the second class did not stop me, so we did overdraw the time for more as 1.5 hours and they still did work as I left them.

Debian Family

• As we reported the other day, the Debian Project unveiled the first point release of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system, but no installation or live ISOs were made available to download.

• That changes today, July 23, 2017, as the Debian CD team lead by Steve McIntyre has prepared the new installation images of Debian GNU/Linux 9.1 “Stretch” for 64-bit (amd64), 32-bit (i386), PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64el), ARM64 (AArch64), ARMhf, Armel, MIPS, MIPS 64-bit Little Endian (mips64el), MIPSEL, and IBM System z (s390x) hardware architectures.

• Multi-arch images supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit (i386 and amd64) PCs are also available for download, along with a set of twelve source ISO images. On the other hand, the Debian GNU/Linux 9.1 “Stretch” Live ISOs come in the usual flavors with the GNOME, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, MATE, and Cinnamon desktop environments, supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

• Debian 9.1 GNU/Linux has been released as the first point release of Debian 9 Stretch stable. This version brings numerous updates and security fixes. If you’re already running a continuously updated Debian machine, you don’t need to perform the upgrade or reinstall.

• In a few days, I’ll be attending DebCamp17 in Montréal, Canada.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• If you’re running Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak, released on October 13 2016, Ubuntu developer Canonical warns that now is the time to upgrade to Ubuntu 17.04, known as Zesty Zapus. If you’re running a Linux distribution which is a version of Ubuntu with a different desktop environment, such as Kubuntu or Xubuntu, the same applies to you.

• Support for Yakkety Yak ceased on July 20, which means that version of Ubuntu will no longer receive security patches. However, if you’re running Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus, you’ll still receive functionality and security patches until April 2021. That’s because it’s a long term support (LTS) release. Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus will be supported until January 2018.

• I’ve often wondered why Ubuntu ships with several different terminal apps installed by default.

• It’s a minor little quirk, granted, and something few people will notice. But a query that has, from time to time, confused me.

• Naturally I presume there to be some differences between GNOME Terminal, Xterm and UXTerm. But those differences are, to my end-user eyes at least, not especially self-evident.

• Back in 2014, I published some information and tooling on using git for Ubuntu development, even though most Ubuntu development wasn’t done with git at the time.

• Three years on, this work has expanded significantly. Most of the server team is using git for daily work when touching Ubuntu packaging. We have expanded our tooling. With the significant interest we’ve received, we’re now interested in developing this work to make git become the way of working with Ubuntu’s source code. Our plan is to do this with no disruption to existing developer workflows.

• Canonical’s Ubuntu Desktop Director Will Cooke reports today on the latest developments done by his team for the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux has long been one of the most popular Linux desktop distributions. Now, its leadership is looking to its users for help to decide the default desktop applications in the next long-term support version of the operating system: Ubuntu 18.04.

• This release, scheduled for April 2018, follows October’s Ubuntu 17.10, Artful Aardvark. Ubuntu 18.04 will already include several major changes. The biggest of these is Ubuntu is abandoning its Unity 8 interface to go back to the GNOME 3.x desktop.

Flavours and Variants

• A little over two weeks ago, I made the decision on what Linux distribution to install and use full-time on my personal laptop. I chose Linux Mint 18.2 “Sonya” MATE, because I felt that while it could do a bit better for total newbies in terms of usability (as some usability features have regressed since a couple of years ago), it has been a reliable and known quantity for me, and I figured that if I could generally use the live session without much hassle, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch (no pun intended) to imagine that the installed session would likely be workable. As I’ve covered most of the experiences of installing and using programs and getting around the desktop in my review of the live session, this post will be relatively short, covering only the salient points of the installation and some of the changes I made after the installation. Follow the jump to see more.

• If you’re looking for an Ubuntu-based ethical hacking and penetration testing operating system, BackBox Linux can fulfill your needs. BackBox Linux 5 has been just released after 7 months of development. It comes with Linux kernel 4.8, updated hacking tools, and a new logo.

Devices/Embedded

• KTC, one of the main and established end product manufacturers in China, today announced the integration of SERAPHIC’s TV browser into its Linux powered smart TVs targeting at European markets. With SERAPHIC’s TV browser, viewers have an easy and immediate access to thousands of global TV apps from mainstream TV portal providers and can choose any content or program they like.

• SERAPHIC is a leading digital TV browser provider. Its competitive product offering includes browser for Freeview Play, HbbTV, YouTube TV, TV Portal, Open Browser, etc.

• In the fast evolving market, Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) like KTC have always been seeking out to enhance their competitive advantages and provide differentiating services for their customers.

• Onion announced two surface-mount spin-offs of the WiFi-enabled Omega2 module, which runs Linux on a MediaTek MT7688 SoC, and unveiled a new dev board.

• A year after launching its second-gen Omega2 computer-on-module, which advanced from a 400MHz Atheros AR9331 to a similarly MIPS-driven 580MHz MediaTek MT7688, Onion Corp. has revised the Omega2 with two surface mount packaged versions with the same 802.11n-equipped MT7688 SoC. The Omega2S and Omega2S+ are designed for “high volume commercial and industrial OEMs,” says Onion.

• Last week I used every Raspberry Pi that I had to build a six-node HexaPi computing cluster.

• Since then I have been asked a number of times: what is it good for? So I’m going to take a look at the last bit of the Raspberry Pi Projects – Build an OctaPi, and add a simple example of my own as well.

• Oh, and I added one more Raspberry Pi server to the cluster, while still respecting my rule of ‘no two servers alike’, so it is actually now a HeptaPi seven-server cluster. At the end of this post I will add a description of some of the new hardware I acquired and used for this project.

• For the 10th anniversary since the legendary OpenMoko announcement at the „Open Source in Mobile“ (7th of November 2006 in Amsterdam), I’ve been meaning to write an anthology or – as Paul Fertser suggested on #openmoko-cdevel – an obituary. I’ve been thinking about objectively describing the motivation, the momentum, how it all began and – sadly – ended. I did even plan to include interviews with Sean, Harald, Werner, and some of the other veterans. But as with oh so many projects of (too) wide scope this would probably never be completed.

• As November 2016 passed without any progress, I decided to do something different instead. Something way more limited in scope, but something I can actually finish. My subjective view of the project, my participation, and what I think is left behind: My story, as OpenMoko employee #2. On top of that you will see a bunch of previously unreleased photos (bear with me, I’m not a good photographer and the camera sucked as well).

• In April, The Linux Foundation launched the open source EdgeX Foundry project to develop a standardized interoperability framework for Internet of Things (IoT) edge computing. Recently, EdgeX Foundry announced eight new members, bringing the total membership to 58.

• The new members are Absolute, IoT Impact LABS, inwinSTACK, Parallel Machines, Queen’s University Belfast, RIOT, Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation, and Tulip Interfaces. They join a roster that includes AMD, Analog Devices, Canonical/Ubuntu, Cloud Foundry, Dell, Linaro, Mocana, NetFoundry, Opto 22, RFMicron, and VMWare, among others.

• EdgeX Foundry is built around Dell’s early stage, Apache 2.0 licensed FUSE IoT middleware framework, which offers more than a dozen microservices comprising over 125,000 lines of code. The Linux Foundation worked with Dell to launch the EdgeX Foundry after the FUSE project merged with a similar AllJoyn-compliant IoTX project led by current EdgeX members Two Bulls and Beechwood.

Tizen

Android

• Google has just announced the availability of the fourth and final Android O Developer Preview. As usual, the preview is available for the Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel C, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus Player, and the Android Emulator.

• Like the third preview, we’re not expecting much in the way of UI changes in this release. It will take some time to find out, but hopefully this preview is a little more stable and performant than the third release. Right now, our Pixel XL test device has a super-slow camera, frequent crashes, and lots of bluetooth issues running the third preview.

• How could Microsoft’s Windows Phone licensing business model stand a chance against Google’s Free and Open Android? None of the Redmond giant’s complicated countermeasures worked, its smartphone platform is dead. And yet, inexplicably, Microsoft failed to use a very simple move, one we’ll explore today. Just back from three weeks in the Country of Good Sin’s heartland, I see Microsoft’s fresh and well-received Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2017 Results. The numbers acknowledge what was already notorious: Windows Phone is dead.

• More progress is being made in the area of i.MX6, etnaviv and Android.

Free Software/Open Source

• We start your weekend off with a review of the stories we couldn’t cover with a look at what what going on in the world of APIs. We start off with news that Yandex, the Russian search engine company, has announced that they are open-sourcing CatBoost, a machine learning library. The library is based on gradient boosting, a machine learning technique described by TechCrunch as being “designed to help “teach” systems when you have a very sparse amount of data, and especially when the data may not all be sensorial (such as audio, text or imagery), but includes transactional or historical data, too.” Yandex is freely releasing CatBoost for anyone to use under an Apache License. This move is similar to what we saw from Google when they open sourced TensorFlow in late 2015. As the demand for artificial intelligence solutions backed by machine learning platforms continues to grow, moves like this serve to help a wide range of developers take advantage of the technology.

• “Open source”, in the world of IT, is program code that is meant for collaboration and open contribution. Intended to be modified and shared, because by design and spirit, it is meant for the public at large. It’s been said that “”open source” intimates a broader set of values—what we call “the open source way.” Open source projects, products, or initiatives embrace and celebrate principles of open exchange, collaborative participation, rapid prototyping, transparency, meritocracy, and community-oriented development.” So it is a natural conclusion that in this age of open and transparent government, that the government IT manager or technician would be one of the first to want to embrace this new role of collaborative team member within a larger community.

• Additionally, as organizations, especially government, continue to emerge from the technology funding embargo of the Great (2008) Recession – an economic force that froze IT purchases and programs and forced many into strict “keep the lights on” operational mode, IT managers and CIO’s are carefully expending their still relatively measly budgets.

• [...]

• For IT organizations, especially government, with limited budgets and long procurement processes, time and increased experience with open source products will lead to a growing understanding and acceptance. And as this understanding progresses and becomes more accepted, open source will become a “go to” option to keep up with the fast moving technical environment, and perhaps eventually, as a standard first option, realizing the broader set of open source values by relying on the collective work and minds of a virtual community of IT “hackers”, “geeks” and “nerds”, working globally, 24×7/365 to explore, develop and showcase whatever tech that sparks their individual interest.

• Given the paradigmatic shifts that a true revolution in machine learning could bring, it’s important to maintain tech’s devotion to open-source. These kinds of scientific advancement don’t belong to any one company or corporation, but to the whole world. Making ML open and evenly distributed means everyone can join in this revolution.

• Recently I read the fascinating book Empower: What Happens When Students Own Their Own Learning, by John Spencer and A.J. Juliani. The book led me to think more deeply about my teaching methods and how I like to learn. I think learning should be exciting, and I’m happiest when I’m actively engaged in what I’m doing. Why wouldn’t students in our schools want anything different than that? And why aren’t we doing more to give that experience to them?

• While many schools today have a 1:1 ratio of computers/tablets to students, most of them use platforms and software that allow little (if any) modification. Students can’t tinker with the software or hardware. Yet tinkering and experimenting are at the heart of learning. The authors of Empower say that students in environments that foster “making” take ownership of their learning more readily and tend to be deeper thinkers who are more at home with frustration. Ultimately, they wrote, “makers are better equipped for life.”

• Is a $4 million venture capital-funded startup stealthily taking over popular coding tools and injecting ads and spyware into them?

• That’s what some programmers fear may be happening. It is one of the most troubling scandals to hit the open-source community — a robust network of programmers who work on shared tools for free — in recent memory.

• Open source works because everyone benefits: individuals and corporations, both for-profit and not. Countless dollars have been made off things built on top of open-source software, while the existence of free high-quality tools makes it possible to build a product that exists solely for the benefit of the commons. But that balance only works when people stick to the community’s basic decorum of transparency, and that’s where a young San Francisco company called Kite seems to have gone wrong.

• One of the most challenging components of building a community is how to (a) determine what to measure, (b) measure it effectively, and (c) interpret those measurements in a way that drives improvements.

• The move to open source development tools — already unstoppable — continues to gain momentum. Years ago, open source was looked upon as a way to save money. Today, a key driver is the clear fact that, with tens of thousands of contributors sharing their expertise and the ever-widening availability of high-quality code, resistance is futile.

Events

• Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) have announced the first release of an open source computer graphics exchange library and will discuss its potential this week during Siggraph.

• Akademy has had its first full day of BoFs, group sessions discussing our plans for the next year. The wrapup session has just finished so watch the video to find out about what Plasma devs are working on, what tutorials happened and how we avoided a fist fight to the finish.

• This year I participated again in the security track of the largest French open source conference, Libre Software Meeting (RMLL). “Participated” as I did not only give a talk on syslog-ng there, but also sat in to most of the presentations and had very good discussions both with visitors and fellow speakers. The organizers brought together talks from diverse IT security related fields, a very good opportunity for cross-pollination of ideas.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Firefox Focus launched on Google’s Android mobile platform only a month ago, and it looks like it already passed the one million downloads mark, so Mozilla wants to celebrate this milestone by launching three new user-requested features.

• One million downloads in less than a month is a huge milestone for the Firefox Focus for Android app, which Mozilla designed from the ground up to be fast, easy to use, simple, free of any visual clutter that might get in your way when surfing the Web on your mobile device, and always private by shipping built-in with an ad blocker that promises to block annoying ads.

• Firefox 55, due for release at the start of August, will feature a series of improvements to the browser’s responsiveness when multiple tabs are open.

• This work is part of something called Quantum Flow, a Mozilla engineering project to fine-tune and tweak the browser’s overall performance.

• I’ve got a Firefox profile with 1691 tabs.

• I started trying to write down why, but gave up for now. It was becoming an overly long exploration of product design and the future of the web.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• In a previous article we highlighted the digital competitiveness of 60 countries. At a more fundamental level, energy is required to fuel digital connectivity, and is essential for economic growth and environmental sustainability. The World Bank says it is the ‘the golden thread’ connecting economic growth, social equity and environmental sustainability.

• However, with over 1 billion people without access to electricity, a new online open source tool will help governments and planners estimate the optimal way to provide them with energy access.

• Energy poverty stymies development. Modern energy services can help improve the quality of life for millions worldwide and underpin progress in all areas of development. According to the World Bank’s Global Tracking Framework (GTF) released in April 2017, 1.06 billion people live without electricity – only a slight improvement since 2012. At this rate, the world will only reach 92% electrification by 2030. Another three billion rely on wood or other biomass for cooking and heating, resulting in indoor and outdoor air pollution that causes about 4.3 million deaths each year.

• A new open-source web-based application has been launched to support the efforts of governments, investors, companies, development organizations, and others planning to bring electricity to more households and to accelerate affordable, reliable, sustainable energy for all. The open data and analytics resource called ENERGYDATA.INFO was developed by the World Bank, Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP) and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

BSD

• Today I released version 0.3 of TinySegmenter, a Japanese Tokenizer in pure Python (released in New BSD license), with a single minor fix for proper install on systems not-using UTF-8 (apparently that still exists! :P). Thanks to Mišo Belica for the patch. Apparently some of his Japanese users are using it for Sumy, his software to extract summary from texts.

• BSDTW 2017 will be held on the 11th and 12th of November 2017 (Sat/Sun), in Taipei. We are now requesting proposals for talks. We do not require academic or formal papers. If you wish to submit a formal paper, you are welcome to, but it is not required.

• The talks should be written with strong technical content. Presentations on the use of BSD in products and companies are strongly encouraged but marketing proposals are not appropriate for this venue.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The old-standby, old-favorite open-source image editor, GIMP hews much closer to Photoshop than it does to Paint, and as such the learning curve is much steeper. If you’re willing to learn, this is definitely a major upgrade.

• Since I have to prepare new material and slides to upcoming conferences, I couldn’t help doing some effects, I have seen on GIMP, with myself and the two Linux projects I belong.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Using wood panels as the principal building material reduced the project’s overall cost and footprint because the wooden beams and wall panels were cut and varnished in a nearby workshop. Prefabricated concrete was used to embed the support beams, which were then clad in wooden panels. In fact, wood covers just about everything in the home, from the walls and flooring to the ceiling and partitions. Sustainable materials such as cellulose wadding and wood fibers were even used to insulate the home.

Programming/Development

• The Boost C++ libraries is planning for a new build system, but they aren’t going for Meson that’s been the recent trend among open-source projects.

• The quick pitch for Rogue Wave Software’s Zend Studio, recently updated to version 13.6, is “the PHP IDE for smarter development”. Zend Studio 13.6, says Rogue Wave, offers 3X faster performance in indexing, validation and searching of PHP code, and it allows users to code faster, debug more easily and leverage the massive performance gains in PHP 7. It is the next-generation PHP IDE designed to create high-quality PHP apps while boosting developer productivity. The platform automatically scales according to the DPI settings of the underlying operating system and supports HiDPI monitors.

• If a JavaScript developer was frozen in 2005 and miraculously thawed in our present world of 2017, the thing that would likely amaze them is the massive proliferation of JavaScript packages. The video below gives us a fascinating visual representation of the package explosion over time.

• While the default IEEE Spectrum ranking in the Top Programming Languages interactive gives a good aggregate signal of language popularity, here we are taking a deep dive into the metrics related to job demand. Two of our data sources, Dice and CareerBuilder, measure job openings for the languages included in the interactive, and consequently we have a preset for “Jobs” that weighs the rankings heavily toward those metrics. So, if you want to build up your tech chops before looking for a programming job, what languages should you focus on?

• [...]

• This article wouldn’t be complete without mentioning some of the losers in the programming language jobs calculus. Once a dominant Web programming language, Ruby is still used widely but it is slipping; the number of job openings for Ruby shrank by a full third since 2016, to about 1,600. We aren’t the first to report the slump in popularity of Ruby, and it’s far from dead, but this will be one to keep an eye on in the future as coders may already be shifting to alternatives like Python and Go. Demand for other languages like Clojure, Haskell, and Visual Basic is also on the wane. When we started the rankings in 2014, ActionScript still clocked 87 job openings, but in 2017 it continues the downward spiral, with only 20 openings, and it’s unlikely to make the Top Programming Languages at all next year. RIP, ActionScript.

• David Malcom of Red Hat today published an interesting patch series that includes an implementation of Microsoft’s Language Server Protocol (LSP).

Leftovers

Hardware

• The last update to UPower — what was formerly known as DeviceKit-Power for serving as an abstraction library to battery/power devices — was in February of 2016 but that finally changed today.

Health/Nutrition

• Ever since they classified the world’s most widely used herbicide as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” a team of international scientists at the World Health Organization’s cancer research group have been under withering attack by the agrichemical industry and its surrogates.

• In a front-page series titled “The Monsanto Papers,” the French newspaper Le Monde (6/1/17) described the attacks as “the pesticide giant’s war on science,” and reported, “To save glyphosate, the firm [Monsanto] undertook to harm the United Nations agency against cancer by all means.”

• One unheralded reason for Trumpcare’s many difficulties was a sea change in public opinion. A new Associated Press poll finds that 62 percent now agree the federal government has a responsibility to provide health coverage to all Americans, up from 52 percent in March. Republicans looking to take away coverage ran headlong into this wave of support for a bigger governmental role in health care.

• “Once you get something for pre-existing conditions, etc., etc. — once you get something, it’s awfully tough to take it away,” President Trump concluded.

• Indeed, when Kansas Republican Jerry Moran issued the statement that effectively killed the bill’s hopes, his opposition was described in the press as having come from a conservative direction. And while it was cloaked in right-wing rhetoric around choice, the politics of the statement leaned decidedly left. “We must now start fresh with an open legislative process to develop innovative solutions that provide greater personal choice, protections for pre-existing conditions, increased access and lower overall costs for Kansans,” said Moran, fully aware that protections for pre-existing conditions, couples with lower overall costs, require a robust government intervention in health care.

• Brenda Fitzgerald, the newly appointed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will consider allowing Coca-Cola to once again help fund the agency’s anti-obesity campaigns, according to e-mailed comments reported by the New York Times over the weekend.

• Though it would be a turnabout for the agency—which ditched Coke funding in 2013—Fitzgerald’s position shouldn’t be surprising, as she has a controversial history of accepting funding from Coca-Cola. As health commissioner of Georgia from 2011 to this year, she accepted $1 million from the soda giant to fund an exercise program aimed at cutting the state’s childhood obesity rate—one of the highest in the country.

• A range of speakers, including top health officials from both a developed and developing country, last week laid out the case for why the world’s leaders must now launch a shift in the way medicines all populations need are developed and priced. The need for global collaboration is clear, speakers said, but who will lead?

• 20 July 2017 was the fourth anniversary of the death of 15-year-old Martha Fernback. Martha died of an accidental ecstasy overdose in 2013. Deaths like Martha’s are preventable, and the families losing loved ones deserve better. We urgently need a new approach to drugs. We need to legalise and regulate.

• Ron Johnson has compared people with pre-existing health conditions to cars that have been in accidents.

• “We’ve done something with our health care system that you never even think about doing, for example, with auto insurance, where you’d require auto insurance companies to sell a policy to somebody after they crashed their car,” said Johnson.

• Remember that horrible list of pre-existing conditions that circulated in early May when Republicans in Congress were considering their proposals for rolling back protections for people who have them?

• In a last-ditch effort to save their bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Senate leaders are reportedly offering $200 billion to win the votes of senators from states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA. This new fund would presumably supplement private coverage for those who gained Medicaid coverage under the expansion but would lose it under the Senate bill. No senator should fall for it. While $200 billion seems like a lot of money, it’s only 17 percent of the bill’s $1.2 trillion in cuts: $756 billion from Medicaid and $427 billion from subsidies to help low- and moderate-income people buy coverage in the individual market, according to the latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates (see first chart). It wouldn’t even fill the federal funding gap left by repealing the Medicaid expansion — let alone prevent the harm from the bill’s per capita cap on federal funding for all of Medicaid and the loss of subsidies and erosion of market reforms for people with individual market coverage.

• [...]

• The fact that Republican leaders are adding another fund — on top of their $45 billion to address the opioid epidemic, unrealistic promises of federal waivers to use Medicaid funds to help cover people losing Medicaid coverage under the bill, and inadequate, poorly designed stabilization funds — is more evidence that the Senate bill can’t be fixed. Throwing more money into a patchwork of poorly targeted funds that perpetuate the inequities in coverage between expansion and non-expansion states is no substitute for the Medicaid expansion, which has been highly successful in increasing coverage and access to care, including treatment for opioid addiction.

• Beginning this weekend, the anti-abortion group Operation Save America will descend on Louisville, Kentucky, in an attempt to shut down the last abortion clinic in the state, EMW Women’s Surgical Center. The group has targeted EMW, whom the ACLU represents, before. In May, 10 of its members were arrested when they linked hands to block the entrance of the clinic and refused to move when asked to do so by law enforcement. Abortion protesters have the First Amendment right to protest outside a clinic on public property, but they do not have the right to interfere with anyone’s access to the clinic.

• Four Democratic senators held a press conference on June 15 to highlight what the passage of the American Health Care Act (aka Trumpcare) would do for the opiate crisis. The conference came just days after a report showed overdoses are now the leading cause of death among Americans under 50 (New York Times, 6/5/17), and days before GOP senators released their secretly crafted version of health reform (Washington Post, 6/22/17) that will make it worse in countless ways. Under these dire circumstances, one would hope the room would have been filled with reporters.

• [...]

• Now that addiction has “a white face,” as Ekow Yankah (New York Times, 2/9/16) put it, the tone has shifted, toward a supposedly more humane approach. But even as reporters display more sympathy (New York Times, 10/30/15), media are still failing to help solve the crisis. Overdoses continue to rise (New York Times, 6/5/17), racial disparities in the criminal justice system are still rampant (Slate, 8/9/15), and dominant media often treat the opiate crisis as fodder for anecdotal, often sensationalized stories about a sad phenomenon, not a massive health emergency begging for serious and urgent policy reforms. Further, studies show most reports covering opiate abuse still portray it as a criminal issue, as opposed to the health crisis that it is.

Security

• DNS hijacking is a real thing happening on the Internet ○ We found several RIPE Atlas probes with hijacked DNS resolver ○ Some countries have >25% chances of DNS being hijacked

• The Swedish administration is leaking its secret intranet and databases to Russia, via its Transport Agency, via the IBM cloud, via IBM’s subcontractor NCR (formerly AT&T) in Serbia, which is a close Russian military ally. Giving staff in Serbia administrative access to these networks practically guarantees that Russia also has access to the network. The European Union’s secure STESTA network is also connected to the leaked intranet. But this is not about geopolitics and who’s allied with whom, but about how an administration tries to quiet down and gloss over an apocalyptically stupid and monstrously damaging data leak.

• We had two reports of an ongoing situation in Sweden where confidential information held by the government has been compromised

• Since then, we have made considerable progress which has been reported during DebConf 15 and 16 talks as well as other conferences around the world. However, for the sake of information preservation and clear communication we felt the need to write a newer report here.

• Debian’s reproducible builds project has posted an update of what it has accomplished over the last few years.

• A few Penguinistas spent a weekend working out why they can’t get through to Netflix from their Linux machines, because when they tried, their DNS lookups failed.

• The issue emerged July 22, when Gentoo user Dennis Schridde submitted this bug report to the Systemd project. Essentially, he described a failure within systemd-resolve, a Systemd component that turns human-readable domain names into IP addresses for software, like web browsers, to connect to. It’s the thing that converts, say, theregister.co.uk into 159.100.131.165.

• Eight months after three critical vulnerabilities were fixed in the memcached open source caching software, there are over 70,000 caching servers directly exposed on the internet that have yet to be patched. Hackers could execute malicious code on them or steal potentially sensitive data from their caches, security researchers warn.

• Memcached is a software package that implements a high performance caching server for storing chunks of data obtained from database and API calls in RAM. This helps speed up dynamic web applications, making it well suited for large websites and big-data projects.

• Facebook, the Ford Foundation and GitHub have donated $100,000 (£76,663) each to the Internet Bug Bounty (IBB), a not-for-profit bug bounty program for core Internet infrastructure and open source software.

• The money will be used to reward hackers who are deemed to have made the Internet more secure, allowing the IBB to expand the scope and impact of its bug bounty program.

• Mobile devices are becoming an increasingly privacy-sensitive platform. Nowadays, devices process a wide range of personal and private information of a sensitive nature, such as biometric identifiers, payment data and cryptographic keys. Additionally, modern content protection schemes demand a high degree of confidentiality, requiring stricter guarantees than those offered by the “regular” operating system.

• In response to these use-cases and more, mobile device manufacturers have opted for the creation of a “Trusted Execution Environment” (TEE), which can be used to safeguard the information processed within it.

Defence/Aggression

• Afghanistan has been a disaster for U.S. policymakers since Presidents Carter and Reagan started funding Islamists almost four decades ago and then the U.S. began fighting them post-9/11, a failure that needs ending, says Alon Ben-Meir.

• It’s not always clear if the hunters are having a real impact beyond whack-a-mole account takedowns, although some groups have claimed credit for thwarting serious terror threats.

• Here’s the background: On May 10, 1940, the so-called “phony war” in which neither side fired a shot finally ended as the German Wehrmacht invaded France. Most British and American military experts regarded the French army as the strongest in the world. The assumption was that with France’s and Belgium’s armies and the addition of the 300,000-plus British Expeditionary Forces (BEF), the strength of the Western nations was at least equal to that of the Germans.

• The assumption, too, was that the French were in a strong defensive position with the heavily fortified Maginot Line on the French-German border. The 100-mile front of the Ardennes Forest in southeast Belgium was thought to be impenetrable, at least by tanks, and was therefore lightly defended by the French.

• The people of Colfax, as a result, long ago stopped being startled in the way I had been. The explosions — “Like World War III or the Fourth of July,” said one resident — are simply the soundtrack to life in a town of some resolve, considerable poverty and lots of resignation.

• Earlier this week, human rights group Amnesty International issued a lengthy report accusing US-backed forces of “repeated violations of international humanitarian law, some of which may amount to war crimes,” in Mosul, Iraq, causing the deaths of at least 3,700 civilians. Neither this report, nor the broader issue of the civilian toll in the US war against ISIS, has come close to penetrating US corporate media.

• During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump touted his nationalist “America First” foreign policy, which implied that he wanted to stay out of foreign brushfire wars. Even before that, he tweeted his disapproval of American involvement of the Afghan War.

• The Trump administration on Friday officially announced that Anthony Scaramucci—a former Goldman Sachs executive who describes himself simply as an “American entrepeneur”—will be the new White House communications director.

• At an afternoon briefing, Scaramucci spoke with reporters for the first time and announced that Sarah Huckabee Sanders will be taking over as White House press secretary in the wake of Sean Spicer’s resignation earlier in the day. Spicer, according to reports, resigned from his post at least partially due to Trump’s decision to bring Scaramucci on board to lead the communication’s team.

• Not widely known, here are at least a few things you should know about Scaramucci, including a few highlights from Friday’s briefing.

• In response to the initial rumors and eventual “revelation” about this meeting, the Trumps responded in a predictable pattern. First, there were denials that any such meeting took place. Then the narrative shifted to suggest that the meeting took place but the topics discussed were innocuous and trivial. The lies would develop to now emphasize that a meeting did take place between Trump Jr. and Russian representatives but that nothing came of it. Consequently, no harm (or crime) was committed. As more details emerged — including how senior members of Trump’s campaign were present including Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner (both of whom are under investigation for their highly suspect connections to Russian interests) — the lies evolved again to focus on how collusion with a foreign power to win an American election is somehow not illegal. Now it is known that this previously secret meeting was also attended by a former Russian spy as well as a Russia-connected financier who has been investigated regarding his involvement with money laundering.

• The bloodless war narrative’s solution to the dead is a policy of don’t look, don’t tell.

• Dick Cheney, as Secretary of Defense for George H. W. Bush, helped decide in 1991 the first Iraq War would play better if Americans did not see their fallen return home. He recalled the images of coffins from the 1989 invasion of Panama on television, transposed against the president speaking of victory, and banned media from Dover Air Force Base, where deceased American personnel would arrive from the Persian Gulf.

• The ban at Dover lasted 18 years, past George Bush 2.0 and Iraq War 2.0, overturned only in 2009, well after the casualty counts dropped off. Even then, allowing cameras at Dover was left at the discretion of the families, except of course when the president needed a blood-stirring photo op. Obama took one just before ordering the surge in Afghanistan.

• Death, when it is reluctantly acknowledged, must still follow the bloodless narrative as closely as possible. Death must be for a good cause, freedom if possible, “for his buddies” later when public opinion weakens.

• There is no defensive purpose to an aircraft carrier. Its entire purpose is to move aircraft to a position where they can attack other countries. As soon as they are equipped with attack aircraft, these carriers will spend most of their time around the Middle East, including at the UK’s brand new naval base in the vicious despotism of Bahrain. Having spent £7 billion on these behemoths, politicians will seek to enhance their prestige and demonstrate that they control a nation which is a “major power”, by using them. The very fact of their existence will make bombing attacks such as those we saw on Syria, Libya and Iraq more likely.

• Estimates of civilian deaths from airstrikes range from the hundreds to the tens of thousands. Although the U.S. government says that it has killed 603 civilians in airstrikes since the start of military operations in 2014, the monitoring group Airwars estimates that airstrikes have killed at least 4,500 civilians, including nearly 1,000 children.

• If it’s a secret, it’s surely one of the worst kept secrets in the world. Although the U.S. government has tried for more than a decade to shroud its use of drones to conduct targeted killings abroad in official secrecy, its latest effort is extraordinary.

• Even as President Donald Trump faces ever-intensifying investigations into the alleged connections between his top aides and family members and powerful Russian figures, he serves as commander in chief over a U.S. military that is killing an astonishing and growing number of civilians. Under Trump, the U.S. is re-escalating its war in Afghanistan, expanding its operations in Iraq and Syria, conducting covert raids in Somalia and Yemen, and openly facilitating the Saudi’s genocidal military destruction of Yemen.

• Meanwhile, China has quietly and rapidly expanded its influence without deploying its military on foreign soil.

• A new book by the famed historian Alfred McCoy predicts that China is set to surpass the influence of the U.S. globally, both militarily and economically, by the year 2030. At that point, McCoy asserts the United States Empire as we know it will be no more. He sees the Trump presidency as one of the clearest byproducts of the erosion of U.S. global dominance, but not its root cause. At the same time, he also believes Trump may accelerate the empire’s decline.

• McCoy argues that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the beginning of the end. McCoy is not some chicken little. He is a serious academic. And he has guts.

• During the Vietnam war, McCoy was ambushed by CIA-backed paramilitaries as he investigated the swelling heroin trade. The CIA tried to stop the publication of his now classic book, “The Politics of Heroin.” His phone was tapped, he was audited by the IRS and he was investigated and spied on by the FBI. McCoy also wrote one of the earliest and most prescient books on the post 9-11 CIA torture program and he is one of the world’s foremost experts on U.S. covert action. His new book, which will be released in September, is called “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.”

• The U.S. military burns millions of pounds of munitions in a tiny, African-American corner of Louisiana. The town’s residents say they’re forgotten in the plume.

• Troops in the West African nation of Cameroon have tortured prisoners at a remote military base that is also used by U.S. personnel and private contractors for drone surveillance and training missions.

• As the U.S. military has fortified the Cameroonian site, known as Salak, and supported the elite local troops based there, the outpost has become the scene of illegal imprisonment, brutal torture, and even killings, according to a new investigation by The Intercept and the Goldsmiths, University of London-based research firm Forensic Architecture, based on extensive research by Amnesty International. Nearly 60 victims held at Salak described to Amnesty International how they were subjected to water torture, beaten with electric cables and boards, or tied and suspended with ropes, among other abuses.

• The corrections, belated as they were, minimized the defamation of the original articles in a lawyerly manner, conceding only that “it has not been established that Iran sponsored the attacks.” It has also not been established that Israel or Saudi Arabia or the Bush administration sponsored 9/11, but imagine the New York Times framing allegations against those actors this way. It’s unthinkable but, because Iran is an Official Enemy of the United States, it is not subject to the same editorial standards as those in good standing with the US State Department. [...]

• Per the North Korea Law of Journalism—which states that “editorial standards are inversely proportional to a country’s enemy status”—the Times can casually smear Iran as sponsoring the deadliest act of terror on US soil, and it’s not taken seriously by anyone. Just thrown into an article, forgotten about and only corrected—with no special note by the paper—almost four years later.

• One would be curious what the New York Times public editor would say about such a glaring error but the paper eliminated the position a month ago (FAIR.org, 6/1/17). Perhaps the Times’ in-house media analyst, Jim Rutenberg, who spends much of his time hand-wringing over “fake news” and RT, could spare a column on how this happened. This is unlikely, since with an Official Enemy, no amount of libel—no matter how egregious—merits a meaningful response from the paper of record.

• The catastrophic number of civilian casualties in Mosul is receiving little attention internationally from politicians and journalists. This is in sharp contrast to the outrage expressed worldwide over the bombardment of east Aleppo by Syrian government and Russian forces at the end of 2016.

• Hoshyar Zebari, the Kurdish leader and former Iraqi finance and foreign minister, told me in an interview last week: “Kurdish intelligence believes that over 40,000 civilians have been killed as a result of massive firepower used against them, especially by the Federal Police, air strikes and Isis itself.”

• Shortly after dawn most weekdays, a warning siren rips across the flat, swift water of the New River running alongside the Radford Army Ammunition Plant. Red lights warning away boaters and fishermen flash from the plant, the nation’s largest supplier of propellant for artillery and the source of explosives for almost every American bullet fired overseas.

• The top Democrat on the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee is demanding answers about a report that the Pentagon wasted $28 million buying uniforms with a forest camouflage pattern for the Afghan army — even though forests only cover 2 percent of the country.

• Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., sent a letter to the Department of Defense asking for information about how it is investigating the waste internally and how the Pentagon plans to ensure its uniform choices are cost-effective in the future. What’s more, McCaskill questioned whether the process by which the uniforms were procured followed the laws governing the procedure.

• “These failures raise the question of whether or not DOD properly abided by federal procurement law,” McCaskill wrote in her letter, referring to the Pentagon’s inability to justify the wasted expenditure to a congressionally mandated oversight body.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The failed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was a lesson in what happens when trade agreements are negotiated in secret. Powerful corporations can lobby for dangerous, restrictive measures, and the public can’t effectively bring balance to the process. Now, some members of Congress are seeking to make sure that future trade agreements, such as the renegotiated version of NAFTA, are no longer written behind closed doors. We urge you to write your representative and ask them to demand transparency in trade.

• Nondisparagement clauses have become so common that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces federal discrimination laws, and the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency that protects workers’ rights, have been studying whether they are having a chilling effect on workers speaking up about wrongdoing or filing lawsuits, said Orly Lobel, a law professor at the University of San Diego.

• The Justice Department is seeking to impose extreme secrecy rules in the trial of alleged Intercept source and whistleblower Reality Winner that could prevent her defense team from citing countless publicly available news articles in appearances before the court — and even prevent Winner herself from seeing evidence relevant to her defense.

• On July 20, Winner’s defense lawyers moved to challenge those arguments, accusing the government in a court filing of attempting to use the pre-trial discovery process to unfairly gag them from discussing issues both vital to the case and the public at large.

• In addition to investigating Sessions for allegedly perjuring himself during his Senate confirmation hearing and possibly having a role in obstructing justice in the firing of FBI Director James Comey, special counsel Robert Mueller will also have to investigate Sessions for any crimes in making a false statement in his security clearance application.

• Newsweek has settled a libel complaint with a former Sputnik writer that included allegations of Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald using bribery and threats to buy the editor’s silence over a false story regarding Russia, President Trump and WikiLeaks that was later deleted.

• Sputnik writer Bill Moran had written a piece that included a misattributed quote that Trump, then a presidential candidate, used in a speech that same day.

• After examining metadata from the “Guccifer 2.0” July 5, 2016 intrusion into the DNC server, independent cyber investigators have concluded that an insider copied DNC data onto an external storage device, and that “telltale signs” implicating Russia were then inserted.

• Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Of equal importance, the forensics show that the copying and doctoring were performed on the East coast of the U.S. Thus far, mainstream media have ignored the findings of these independent studies [see here and here].

• Independent analyst Skip Folden, a retired IBM Program Manager for Information Technology US, who examined the recent forensic findings, is a co-author of this Memorandum. He has drafted a more detailed technical report titled “Cyber-Forensic Investigation of ‘Russian Hack’ and Missing Intelligence Community Disclaimers,” and sent it to the offices of the Special Counsel and the Attorney General. VIPS member William Binney, a former Technical Director at the National Security Agency, and other senior NSA “alumni” in VIPS attest to the professionalism of the independent forensic findings.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Beneath the surface, the new confidence and supply deal poses a number of threats to environmental justice.

• When British prime ministers go into negotiations with the DUP, they find themselves giving undue consideration to some very skewed priorities. Back in 2006, Tony Blair was brokering the deal between DUP and Sinn Fein that would become the St Andrew’s agreement. The DUP brought him what would become known as a “shopping list” of demands that they wanted to see implemented if they were to go into government with their former enemies.

• Last year was the deadliest on record for environmental activists, according to new figures released by the UK NGO Global Witness.

• The organisation’s latest report documents a “crisis” spreading globally as the number of countries in which killings were recorded countries shot up from 16 to 24. 60% of deaths occurred in Latin America, which means that the region remains the most dangerous one in the world in which to oppose environmental degradation.

• Yet again, Brazil, which has witnessed particularly bloody land conflicts in recent months, ranks first with 49 murders. Nicaragua has the highest rate of killings per capita: 11. And in Colombia, figures hit an all-time high: 37.

• Across the globe, invasive species have caused no end of trouble. Their populations can explode because they have no natural predators. Or they are predators themselves who push native species to the brink of extinction. They can upset ecosystems that had evolved a fine balance.

• But, according to a new study published this week in PNAS, not every invasive species is a negative. In some cases where we’ve wiped out a key component of the local ecosystem, an invasive species can take its place. The study’s example? An invasive algae can restore lost habitat to coastal ecosystems, providing a nursery for species like crab and shrimp.

• The work that led to this conclusion took place in tidal flats on the coast of North Carolina. Normally, this type of geography is broken up by distinct habitats provided by different organisms: coral reefs, beds of sea grass, and oyster reefs. The habitats formed by these species provide shelter for other species, allowing entire ecosystems to develop. But, over the last century or so, many of these habitats have been wiped out, leaving bare sediment behind.

• Now that the Great Acceleration dictates the biosphere with ever more intensity, sudden changes in the ecosystem are causing climate scientists to stop and ponder what’s happening to our planet, like never before… hmm!

• The Great Acceleration: “Only after 1945 did human actions become genuine driving forces behind crucial Earth systems,” (J.R.McNeill/Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London, 2014, pg. 208).

• Abrupt changes outside the boundaries of natural variability are signs of climate fatigue, Mother Nature overwhelmed, defeated, breaking down. It’s happening fast and faster yet mostly on the fringes of the ecosystem with fewest people, other than, on occasion, a handful of scientists.

• Two Norwegian companies are teaming together to construct a short-range, all-electric coastal container ship that will eventually operate autonomously—eliminating up to 40,000 diesel truck trips per year. The ship, the Yara Birkeland, will begin operations in 2018 with a crew, but it’s expected to operate largely autonomously (and crewless) by 2020 (regulatory clearance permitting, of course).

Finance

• A recent Washington Post and ABC poll finds that just 37 percent of Americans think that the Democratic Party “stands for something.” Fifty two percent say it’s about nothing more than opposing Trump.

• The 37 percent is right. The Democratic Party stands for something, alright. It stands for the socio-pathological system of class rule and environmental ruin called capitalism – and for capitalism’s evil Siamese twin imperialism.

• So does the far more openly right-wing Republican Party, of course, but that’s fairly common knowledge. It’s more complicated with the Democrats, who like to pose as being “on the left” while carrying water for Big Business.

• “Immigration is a great economic policy opportunity and it’s important to document the impact of that,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist who served on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in both Bush administrations. He agreed with the basic conclusions of Moody’s analysis, and said that 1.15 percent was a reasonable estimate of the effect of immigration on GDP.

• “You can’t just flip a switch and make the U.S. a richer place,” said Ozimek, the economist at Moody’s Analytics who worked on the analysis. “But with immigration, you can flip a switch and massively grow the size of the country.” And while other policy changes may have subtle, indirect effects on the economy, there is a very straightforward relationship between growing the size of the country and growing the GDP (we’re referring to overall GDP, not per-capita GDP, which the analysis does not address).

• Debipriya Chatterjee, an economist with the city’s Independent Budget Office reports that, “At the very top, it’s the top 0.1 percent who own 24 percent of the city’s income,” She told the website Gothamist, “We all know that the city is very unequal. What I did not anticipate seeing in the data is that the share of the bottom 50 percent has actually fallen.”

• The latest financial institution making plans to relocate jobs away from the UK is Morgan Stanley, which has announced that Frankfurt will become its post-Brexit EU hub, a move that could shift an initial 200 jobs to Germany.

• [...]

• The key for banks is regulation. The moment it was announced that the UK would leave the single market, the die was cast. Even if Brexit goes smoothly from a regulatory standpoint, which is wishful thinking, certain financial institutions that cater to Europe would need to move onshore, since conducting business would be more expensive otherwise. In some cases, it is mandatory from a compliance perspective that transactions are onshore. The beginning of a flight to Europe is not necessarily a hedge against uncertainty. In many instances, there is no choice.

• Not long ago the threat of bankers leaving London en masse – often deployed by financial institutions such as HSBC – was considered an idle one. Leave London, with its favourable regulation and amenable political class, its convenient red-eye flights to New York and thriving cultural scene? Sure, the option was there if the climate ever became too hostile, but few really expected it to do so.

• In his first public defense of his meetings with Russian officials during Donald Trump’s campaign and transition, Jared Kushner on Monday presented his encounters with those operatives as innocent interactions, according to testimony submitted to Senate investigators.

• In an 11-page opening statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is part of the ongoing investigation into possible collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign, Kushner — now a senior White House adviser — attempted to exonerate himself, writing: “I did not collude, nor know of anyone else in the campaign who colluded, with any foreign government.”

• Instead, the powerful son-in-law painted a picture of himself as a loyal, overworked, under-experienced senior adviser to his father-in-law during a novice campaign that was never staffed up to win.

• They say eighty people died, but others have claimed that in one flat alone forty charred remains were found huddled together. They say everyone has been offered rehousing in the London area, but there are rumors some residents were sent as far as Preston in Lancashire. They say everyone affected has been given 5,500 pounds to help start their lives again – 500 in cash, and 5k in a bank account – but is this everyone who was registered as living in a flat? Everyone who was documented? Everyone who was ‘legal’? Everyone who owns a bank account? Everyone who can understand English?

• Greenfell Tower happened over a month ago now, and the image of that ugly, concrete box burning people alive will never leave me. Many, many times I’ve been past those buildings in Kensington, glanced up at the enormous, gray, ugly stark architecture and wondered what the hell would happen if it went up in smoke and I was asleep on the top floor. Apparently the residents wondered that too. They wondered where the fire alarms and water sprinklers and fire escapes were. They wondered if one staircase would be sufficient for the residents of 129 flats spread over 24 floors. They demanded answers. They were ignored.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• In a fawning editorial Saturday (7/22/17), pillar of the national security establishment Washington Post fell over itself to commend a John McCain that never existed, instead lavishing praise on a well-curated PR facsimile developed over decades.

• After praising McCain for issuing a “toughly worded criticism” on Twitter of Donald Trump for allegedly ending an entirely pointless, destructive and likely illegal CIA program supporting unnamed “rebels” in Syria (the highest act of moral courage for the Post is gunrunning to CIA proxies), the Fred Hiatt–run editorial board proceeds to paint McCain as the antidote to the problem of “partisan warfare, where politicians will say just about anything at all, true or untrue, to gain an advantage.”

• This is clearly meant to be an opaque shot at Trump, but the Post is too cowardly to say so outright, much like McCain was too cowardly to actually vote against any of Trump’s cabinet—aside from the OMB director who McCain only opposed because he believed he would cut defense budgets.

• Donald Trump’s ideological vacuum, the more he is isolated and attacked, is being filled by the Christian right. This Christianized fascism, with its network of megachurches, schools, universities and law schools and its vast radio and television empire, is a potent ally for a beleaguered White House. The Christian right has been organizing and preparing to take power for decades. If the nation suffers another economic collapse, which is probably inevitable, another catastrophic domestic terrorist attack or a new war, President Trump’s ability to force the Christian right’s agenda on the public and shut down dissent will be dramatically enhanced. In the presidential election, Trump had 81 percent of white evangelicals behind him.

• Trump’s moves to restrict abortion, defund Planned Parenthood, permit discrimination against LGBT people in the name of “religious liberty” and allow churches to become active in politics by gutting the Johnson Amendment, along with his nominations of judges championed by the Federalist Society and his call for a ban on Muslim immigrants, have endeared him to the Christian right. He has rolled back civil rights legislation and business and environmental regulations. He has elevated several stalwarts of the Christian right into power—Mike Pence to the vice presidency, Jeff Sessions to the Justice Department, Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, Betsy DeVos to the Department of Education, Tom Price to Health and Human Services and Ben Carson to Housing and Urban Development. He embraces the white supremacy, bigotry, American chauvinism, greed, religious intolerance, anger and racism that define the Christian right.

• Where are Charlie and Dave, Mrs. Koch’s two mischievous boys?While the Koch brothers have stayed out of the national limelight since the White House was acquired by Trump and Company, that doesn’t mean the two right-wing billionaire brats are any less active in trying to supplant American democracy with their little laissez-fairyland plutocracy. In fact, in late June, you could’ve found them in one of their favorite hideaways with about 400 other uber-wealthy rascals, plotting some political hijinks for next year’s elections.

• Gather round, boys and girls! The New York Times has a fairy tale it wants to tell you—about the magical land of Centrism and how it needs to be saved from the sinister Lefties….

• Oh, you’ve heard this story before? Yes, it’s true—the Times has been telling this same story for years, always with the same thrilling leaps of logic (Extra! Update, 6/04; Extra!, 7–8/06; FAIR.org, 1/11/11, 5/27/15, 5/23/16).

• This time (New York Times op-ed, 7/6/17), it’s told by Mark Penn—identified as a “pollster and senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton,” not as a PR consultant for corporations like Microsoft, Merck, Verizon, BP and McDonald’s—and Andrew Stein, identified as a “former Manhattan borough president and New York City Council president,” rather than as a Trump supporter and convicted tax cheat.

• The New York Times is featuring a piece stating Iran is the big winner of the U.S.-Iraq wars, 1991-2017.

• So what does winning in Iraq look like, asks the Times? About like this:

• A Shia-dominated government is in Baghdad, beholden to Tehran for its security post-ISIS. Shia thug militias, an anti-Sunni and Kurd force in waiting, are fully integrated into the otherwise-failed national Iraqi military. There are robust and growing economic ties between the two nations. An Iraqi security structure will never threaten Iran again. A corridor between Iran and Syria will allow arms and fighters to flow westward in support of greater Iranian geopolitical aims in the Middle East. And after one trillion in U.S. taxpayer dollars spent, and 4,500 Americans killed in hopes of making Iraq the cornerstone of a Western-facing Middle East, American influence in Iraq limited.

• It seems the Times is surprised by the conclusion; it’s “news” for some apparently. The newspaper ran the story on its hometown edition front page.

• But sorry, it wasn’t news to me. I tried writing basically the same story in 2010 as a formal reporting cable for the State Department. Nobody wanted to hear it.

• The Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist oversees more than 1,000 scientists in 100 research facilities: Trump’s pick to run the agency is Sam Clovis, a climate-denying talk-radio host who not only lacks any kind of scientific degrees — he didn’t take a single science course at university.

• As part of his “not running for president” cross-country tour, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a trip to Montana’s rapidly melting Glacier National Park last weekend.

• But a few days before his visit, according to a report in Mic, the Interior Department canceled his plans to chat climate change with Daniel Fagre, a research ecologist and climate specialist at the United States Geological Survey.

• But with the park a ground zero of sorts for the unmistakable signs that warming and melting of glaciers is speeding up, the decision to keep a visitor — and a celebrity at that — from meeting with a scientist-in-residence, first reported by Mic, struck some observers as a deliberate effort by the Trump administration to minimize climate issues.

• Two years ago, I crossed the world’s most fortified border from North to South Korea with 30 women peacemakers from 15 countries, calling for a peace treaty to end the six-decade Korean War. On July 13, I was denied entry into South Korea from the United States as retribution for my peace activism, including the 2015 women’s peace march.

• As I checked in for my Asiana Airlines flight to Shanghai at San Francisco International Airport, the ticket agent at the counter informed me that I would not be boarding the plane headed first to Seoul Incheon International. The supervisor handed me back my passport and informed me that she had just gotten off the phone with a South Korean government official who had told her I was “denied entry” into the country.

• Today, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and increase regulation of campaign contributions and spending. In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision struck down decades of restrictions on corporate campaign spending and allowed corporations to spend unlimited funds to run campaign advertisements.

• The White House has banned live audio and video coverage at every press briefing since June 29.

• The time to resign was on January 21, when the president demanded he tell an outrageous lie.

• Trump discovered something bigger online: he doesn’t really need much from journalists. Social media for Trump is not simply a display board to pin policy statements on, as others use it. Social media allows Trump to bypass everything and speak to individual citizens, and then force the traditional media to amplify what he says as part of its thirst for “content.” There really isn’t any news anymore when Trump has it on Twitter as his own scoop.

• The media is playing defense!

• Anthony Scaramucci is nothing if not a visionary.

• The brash former hedge fund manager was named communications director for the White House on Friday, but he’s been sharing his thoughts about politics for a long time now.

• And Scaramucci has donated enormous amounts of money to a wide panoply of politicians. He was national finance co-chair for the 2016 Scott Walker presidential campaign, raised money for Jeb Bush, and then personally maxed out to Trump’s campaign and gave $100,000 to Rebuilding America Now, a pro-Trump Super PAC. His hedge fund, Skybridge Capital, also donated $75,000 to a Mitt Romney Super PAC in 2012 and $100,000 to Karl Rove’s Super PAC in 2013.

• The Guardian/Observer remains the house journal of the Blairites, and while they have temporarily turned down the volume on the Corbyn hate, it is a good place to assess how the right wing forces in Labour are planning to reassert themselves. And the answer is in part that they are clutching at racism like a drowning man clutching at a straw. Andrew Rawnsley, the epitome of the Blairite journalist who exudes overpaid entitlement, quotes with endorsement Gordon Brown protégé Natascha Engel, defeated Labour ex-MP for NE Derbyshire, who states “what we need to do is reconnect with our white working class voters”.

• A dominant issue at the Green Party 2017 Annual National Meeting was inclusion of and leadership by oppressed communities. The Green Party began as a party of primarily white environmentalists, but that has been changing over the past decade. In the current corporate kleptocracy, there is a dire need for a party of and by marginalized communities that builds effective political power for transformational change in our society. The Green Party might be that vehicle, but undergoing that change will result in conflict and growing pains as we struggle to practice our values.

• Following the election of the new Steering Committee at the Annual National Meeting, outrage was expressed that the three African American candidates lost. The Black Caucus and other caucuses protested, and steps are now being taken to write a proposal to address their legitimate concerns. That will be presented to the Steering Committee and National Committee for debate and consideration.

• [...]

• Out of this there are two things needed. First, we need to get the full story on the extent of Stein-Cobb interference in elections. Did they have any involvement in the negative smears against Mérida? Did they pressure members of the Green Party of Colorado to attack Mérida? Was there any involvement between them and a false, smear letter about Mérida at Standing Rock? Why didn’t Stein and Cobb publicly endorse what came to be considered their slate? Why were they making calls in private instead of being public? Delegates are supposed to represent their state, so was the Stein-Cobb interference a violation of Green ethics? What role did they have with the Black Caucus’ action?

• Long before Donald Trump’s election ushered in an era of resurgent white nationalism, a disaffected Republican named William H. Regnery II was brooding about the demographic plight of white people and plotting their rescue.

• Like Trump more than 20 years later, Regnery, the wealthy scion of a famous GOP family, had an increasingly dark view of a changing America: As he wrote, the U.S. had become a crime-ridden society with bad schools, high taxes, an intrusive government and a penchant for political correctness that was “morphing into an intellectual tyranny.”

• Worse, “a flood of immigrants were changing the look of America from a palette of prime colors to a third-world monochrome,” he wrote in a rant that would be at home on the bookshelf of Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon. “Instead of a lingua franca, the country clanged with many foreign tongues.”

• By 1999, he had come to believe that the only future for white people in North America was a reconfigured continent with a white-only homeland carved out of the former United States.

• He began consorting with Ku Klux Klan apologists, Holocaust deniers, eugenics boosters and immigration foes. He set up two white nationalist nonprofits and steered money into them. He published fringe-right journals and books.

• Through his family’s famed conservative publishing house, Regnery had been on a first-name basis with the cream of the Republican establishment. But by 2006, his public views on race left him ostracized from the GOP.

• Just when you think Donald Trump’s presidency can’t get any stranger, it does.

• After the partial transcript of his odd interview with The New York Times was released Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that Trump is discussing with lawyers the possibility of pardoning himself, his family and close aides in order to undercut special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into allegations that the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election—an investigation that Trump has long called “a witch hunt.”

• Liu’s appeal for a more democratic China can be traced back to the Beijing 1989 protests. He joined the movement in Tiananmen Square, which resulted in a two-year jail sentence. But the government could never silence him. His calling to change the status quo remained as strong as ever as he continued to voice his concerns over the state of repression in the country. The regime tried to keep him at bay by detaining and sentencing him to 11 years in prison. Yet even there, his struggle was not forgotten. The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize in 2010.

• With all eyes on Donald Trump’s fixation on the Justice Department Russia probe, the administration looks set to put a fossil fuel industry loyalist at the head of the agency’s environmental protection division.

• Jeffrey Clark, a longtime lawyer for energy companies and an environmental prosecutor under the George W. Bush administration, will be considered for the job next week by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

• The selection to lead the Environment and Natural Resources Division saw his nomination delayed on Thursday by Democrats on the panel. The lawmakers exercised their right to “holdover” considerations of executive nominees.

• Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) hit out at Clark, noting that the Republican has not ruled out the possibility of presiding over cases that involve a controversial former client: BP.

• Michael Dourson, President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, founded and ran a toxicology consulting firm whose work enabled DuPont to avoid providing clean water to people in West Virginia after the company contaminated the area around one of its plants with a dangerous industrial chemical.

• In 2000, DuPont was seeking a consulting company to guide the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection in a delicate project. DuPont had used PFOA to make Teflon and other products and allowed the chemical to seep into water near the plant. The assignment was to help the state set safety levels for PFOA that would determine when DuPont had to provide clean water to residents.

• Tens of thousands poured into the streets in Poland Thursday night, condemning proposed laws that would dramatically weaken the nation’s judicial system, just two weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump visited the country and praised its commitment to freedom and democracy, speaking to “an audience of close to 15,000 enthusiastic, flag-waving Poles—many of them bused in by Poland’s ruling right-wing” party.

• The pending judicial reform is just the latest in a series of anti-democratic measures adopted in Poland since the far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) came to power in 2015. As the New York Times noted, the party has “increased government control over the news media, cracked down on public gatherings, and restricted the activities of nongovernmental organizations.” It has also limited female reproductive rights.

Censorship/Free Speech

• “I have indeed strongly condemned the misogyny, homophobia, and violence of Islamism, of which Muslims — particularly Muslim women — are the prime victims. I make no apologies for denouncing those oppressive cruelties, and I will continue to do so.”

• Facebook is continuing to censor Conservative websites critical of Islam.

• Steve Amundson, founder of Counter Jihad Coalition, told Church Militant that Facebook has been locking him out of his page, Counter Jihad Coalition, since July 11.

• Amundson uses his Facebook page and website CounterJihadcoalition.org to “educate people on political Islam, the threat of sharia and the violence that’s in political Islam.”

• Earlier this week, the ACLU sent a letter to members of Congress opposing the Israel Anti-Boycott Act. The bill would amend existing law to prohibit people in the United States from supporting boycotts targeting Israel — making it a felony to choose not to engage in commerce with companies doing business in Israel and its settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. Violations would be punishable by a civil penalty that could reach $250,000 and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison.

• The demonstration – between Pushkinskaya subway station and Sakharov Prospekt – was staged on Sunday against online censorship and demanded the “exoneration of Russians prosecuted for posting content online.”

• Demonstrators shouted: “No to censorship, no to dictatorship!” and “Down with the police state!” Some adapted a popular slogan from opposition rallies against President Vladimir Putin’s rule, shouting “Russia without Putin and censorship!”

• Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of Moscow on July 23 to protest Internet censorship and demand the resignation of the head of Russia’s state media regulator.

• The protest came amid a broad crackdown on online speech in recent years that rights activists say is targeting legitimate dissent under the pretext of battling extremism.

• A bill backed by 43 senators and 247 House members seeks to effectively criminalize support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which calls for economic pressure to force Israel to ends its human rights abuses against the Palestinians.

• The Israel Anti-Boycott Act, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, would levy penalties of up to 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine — leading many to claim, such as the ACLU did, that it is a serious threat to free speech.

• But the bill has an unlikely opponent.

• The news agency RBC refused to publish an investigative story by journalist Ilya Rozhdestvensky about a “secret prison” allegedly operated outside Moscow by Russia’s Federal Security Service because the report had not been properly verified, says Elizaveta Golikova, one of the agency’s editorial board managers.

• Responding to criticisms that the news agency is censoring its reporting, Golikova stated in a Facebook post that RBC “doesn’t just reprint anyone’s complaints in full,” explaining that all published stories need to stand up to “professional analysis.” Golikova says RBC’s editorial board rejected Rozhdestvensky’s investigative report because it relied too heavily on the “opinions of one side.”

• Can an independent filmmaker’s documentary on how the activities of aerated drinks and bottled water companies harm the environment and livelihoods be denied certification on the grounds of being defamatory, politically motivated and misleading?

• A popular animation, comic and game (ACG) website said on Sunday that its recent removal of TV series and films was a result of the website’s self-censorship and strategic adjustment on content.

• “China had listed some requirements to standardize online films and programs. Bilibili has grown to a certain scale and has to inspect its content,” Chen Rui, executive director of Bilibili, was quoted by the news site thepaper.cn as saying on Sunday.

• Bilibili, one of the most visited ACG websites in China, removed most of its TV series and films on July 12, which the company said later was to ensure that contents on its website are in compliance with laws and regulations.

• The removed content were mainly Japanese televisions programs and films, said thepaper.cn, adding that some films from the US and European countries are also affected, together with those produced in the mainland.

Privacy/Surveillance

• That buzzing noise that never seems to leave the Intelligence Community’s ears is Sen. Ron Wyden. Wyden’s questions — often unanswered — are dog whistles for privacy advocates but ear-bleeding tinnitus for agency officials. Persistence is key in Congressional oversight and few are better at it than Wyden is.

• For years, Wyden has been asking how many Americans have been hauled in by the NSA’s Section 702 dragnet. And for years, the NSA and ODNI have sidestepped the question. The surveillance bosses got close to returning an answer — right before they announced they were shutting down the collection that netted the most Americans.

• According to the New Zealand Herald, a New Zealand High Court judge revealed on Friday that the country’s signals intelligence agency, known as the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) illegally spied on Kim Dotcom for two months longer than previously admitted.

• Then-Prime Minister John Key apologized to the Megaupload founder back in 2012 for the operation. Under the law at the time, permanent residents like Dotcom were not to be subjected to surveillance by the country’s foreign-looking agency. If the revelation is borne out, it would mean that GCSB continued to spy on Dotcom even after the agency was made aware that the surveillance was illegal. Prime Minister Bill English has not responded to media requests for comment.

• The Roomba is generally regarded as a cute little robot friend that no one but dogs would consider to be a potential menace. But for the last couple of years, the robovacs have been quietly mapping homes to maximize efficiency. Now, the device’s makers plan to sell that data to smart home device manufacturers, turning the friendly robot into a creeping, creepy little spy.

• One big promise of the connected car revolution has been the potential to help clear up traffic problems. When every vehicle and traffic signal is connected to the cloud, municipalities and local governments should be able to have a constant view of the traffic on their streets, aware of any problems almost instantly. The catch? It’s going to take a long time before there are sufficient vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) or even vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V)-equipped cars on our roads. But the city of Aarhus in Denmark has shown you don’t need to wait for V2x to finally penetrate the market to start doing that; all you need are outdoor Bluetooth sensors.

• For some time, Aarhus has been using Bluetooth sensors to collect traffic pattern information. As people drive around, emitting Bluetooth signals, the sensors log their movements around the city. In doing so, their traffic patterns can flag and reveal problems that the city needs to fix.

• In Xinjiang, China, citizens are being forced to install a targeted surveillance mobile app called Jingwang. Additionally, the government has set up random checkpoints on the streets to check whether the spyware is properly installed on your smartphone.

• Open Rights Group has responded to the announcement that the Government has initiated plans for the age verification of porn websites.

• Today, a nine-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court continued hearing arguments on the existence of a fundamental right to privacy, in connection with the matter of Justice K.S. Puttaswamy and Ors. v. Union of India and Ors. [W.P.(C). No. 494/2012] that challenged various aspects of the Aadhaar scheme.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Donald Trump’s Justice Department revived a federal program on Wednesday that gives state and local law enforcement more power to seize property from people who haven’t been charged, let alone convicted, of a crime.

• The practice — known as “civil asset forfeiture” — became widespread as part of the drug crackdown in the 1980s, after Congress passed a law in 1984 that allowed the Department of Justice to keep the property it seized. At the time, forfeiture was billed as a way to undermine the resources of large criminal enterprises, but law enforcement saw it as a way to underwrite their budgets, and have overwhelmingly gone after people without the means to challenge the seizures in court.

• The practice has become so widespread that in 2014, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than all home and office burglaries combined.

• On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the Justice Department plans to “develop policies to increase forfeitures.” And today he did just that by reversing a 2015 policy then-Attorney General Eric Holder issued that prohibited local law enforcement from circumventing more restrictive state civil forfeiture laws by partnering with the feds. When signaling this policy reversal, Sessions proclaimed “no criminal should be allowed to keep the proceeds of their crime.” The only problem is that we are not talking about criminals.

• We are talking about Americans who have had their homes, cars, money, and other property taken through civil forfeiture, a practice that requires only mere suspicion that property is connected to a crime. That’s right — people can have their property taken by the government without a criminal charge being filed, much less a conviction secured. More often than not, the police who seize the property get to keep it or sell it off and keep the proceeds, which only incentivizes the corrupt practice.

• When McMansion Hell blogger Kate Wagner received Zillow’s letter last month demanding that she take down her architecture parody blog, she was scared. So scared that she temporarily disabled access to her blog via McMansionHell.com until she could find an attorney. We’re happy she found us at EFF.

• While all of the claims Zillow made were highly dubious, one stuck out to us as especially egregious and scary: the claim that McMansion Hell violated a notorious vague criminal statute called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA. That Zillow’s lawyers thought it was proper to include this threat shows how strongly we need some sanity brought to the CFAA.

• With one devastating flourish of the presidential pen, worldwide progress on family planning, population growth and reproductive rights was swept away. Now some of the world’s poorest women must count the cost.

• In February 2003, the largest demonstration in Britain’s history saw two million people march across London to protest the approaching Iraq War. Dozens of other cities across the world saw similar events, and yet.

• Why did politicians feel safe ignoring the millions who participated in those marches—yet stand down after the protests against the proposed intellectual property laws SOPA and PIPA? Why did Occupy apparently vanish while the Tea Party has embedded itself into US national electoral politics? How much did Facebook really have to do with the Arab Spring? How—and this is the central question technosociologist Zeynep Tufecki considers in her new book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest—do digital media change the reality and effectiveness of social protest?

• Over the quarter-century since the Internet went mainstream, much has been written and argued about digital technologies’ ability to transform disparate individuals into a movement. Dismissives argue that social media-fueled movements are too fragile and their participants too uncommitted to achieve much. (Writing in Slate, Tufecki found that tone in Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion, despite broad agreement that oppressive governments are sufficiently smart and motivated to harness these technologies for self-preservation.) Online-protest optimists saw the Arab Spring as evidence that these enabling tools create democratic change. And there are those who presume that governments will never be digitally literate or quick enough to take advantage, an early example being John Perry Barlow’s 1996 essay A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

• A recent visit to Hong Kong by Chinese President Xi Jinping was marked by a powerful display of military might and arrests of radical protesters, but his seemingly softer approach in a major speech surprised the democratic opposition in the former British colony.

• In an address celebrating the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule, Xi warned against efforts to “challenge the power” of Beijing, but recognized the territory as a “plural society.” Beijing was willing to talk to “anyone who loves the country, loves Hong Kong,” Xi said, regardless of their political views — a rare remark interpreted by some moderate democrats as offering an olive branch.

• It’s well known many confidential informants are criminals. Acting as informants is supposed to keep their criminal acts to a minimum while providing access to bigger criminal fish. The same goes for undercover officers and agents. Some illegality is presumed but those running CIs are expected to be making the world a better place, not ignoring vast amounts of criminal activity simply because the informant is now on their side. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

• The DEA’s informant program is being run with almost no oversight, according to an Inspector General’s report. Money flowed to informants who were still under federal investigation and no one up top seemed too concerned about the program’s bang/buck ratio. The FBI made abusable programs worse by hiding payments to informants and giving them a cut of forfeited property.

• On November 7, 1993, Daniel Yock, an 18-year-old Aboriginal dancer died there. Or at least he was picked up there, by police.

• Daniel probably died in the back of a police wagon, like some cattle do on their way to a slaughterhouse. In any event, he was certainly dead by the time he reached the police watchhouse, just a few kilometres from the scene of his arrest.

• [...]

• This week, Aboriginal Australia has another name to add to a lengthy catalogue of deaths spanning decades – and longer. Deaths which clearly have had little to no impact on a justice system that has always been stacked against them.

• That name is Elijah Doughty (pictured at the top of this article).

• In a welcome break from tradition, on this occasion the deceased was not killed at the hands of police. Elijah Doughty was killed by a citizen, a 56-year old Kalgoorlie-Boulder man.

• As is now well known, on August 29, 2016, Elijah was riding a stolen motorbike on the outskirts of town. There is no evidence that Elijah stole it, nor that he even knew it was stolen.

• The agent’s decision to allow me to write about our conversations came after learning that ice was making a push, beginning this week, to arrest young undocumented immigrants who were part of a large wave of unaccompanied minors who crossed the border in recent years and who, until now, had been allowed to live in the U.S. Rather than detaining these young people, the government had placed them in the care of families around the country. Most of them are trying to lead new lives as American transplants, going to school and working. ice now plans to pursue those who have turned eighteen since crossing the border, and who, as a result, qualify for detention as legal adults. “I don’t see the point in it,” the agent said. “The plan is to take them back into custody, and then figure it out. I don’t understand it. We’re doing it because we can, and it bothers the hell out of me.”

• As threatened during comments to an association of district attorneys, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is bringing back asset forfeiture. Specifically, Sessions is loosening the restrictions placed on federal adoption of local seizures by Eric Holder during the last years of the Obama presidency. Holder’s directive prevented local agencies from routing cash or vehicle seizures through the feds to dodge local rules. That’s all over now. An order [PDF] and directive [PDF] issued by the DOJ are welcoming local law enforcement agencies to once again skirt restrictive state forfeiture laws by asking the DOJ to “adopt” their seizures.

• If you’re not a US military or police buff, you probably have never heard of the 1033 Program. It essentially provides a bureaucratic means to transfer excess military grade weapons to local law enforcement agencies. Sure, you may not like local police departments having all types of military gear, such as grenade launchers, helicopters, boats, M14s, M16s, and so on.

• Don’t worry Comic-Con fans, you don’t have to remove your comic books from your checked luggage, despite what a Sunday photo circulated on Twitter suggests.

• [...]

• Lorie Dankers, a TSA spokeswoman, told Ars on Monday morning that she was mystified as to how United could get this policy wrong. “I don’t know how United went ahead and stated a TSA policy incorrectly,” she said. “I can say that TSA has advised in the past that if people bring several of the same type of item, it can alarm the checked baggage screening, but there is no prohibition on bringing things that are not a security threat. In this case, comic books are not a security threat and we encourage travelers to bring them if they so choose.”

• Dankers was referring to a 2016 blog post (and a more recent post, too) noting that stacks of comics “often [cause] alarms leading to bag searches which can cause a significant slowdown in the screening process leading to delays and bags possibly missing their flights.” But she clarified that this was a recommendation, not a requirement.

• So that’s all bizarre enough. I mean, there has been talk about restricting electronics on flights, as well as some talk of sifting through reading materials, but comic books? From San Diego Comic Con? Many people were left wondering what the hell the TSA could be thinking… and that included the TSA. When asked about all of this by reporters, the TSA appeared to be just as confused as everyone else and insisted there was no such restriction…

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Senate and House Democratic leaders today proposed new antitrust laws that could prevent many of the biggest mergers and break up monopolies in broadband and other industries.

• “Right now our antitrust laws are designed to allow huge corporations to merge, padding the pockets of investors but sending costs skyrocketing for everything from cable bills and airline tickets to food and health care,” US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wrote in a New York Times opinion piece. “We are going to fight to allow regulators to break up big companies if they’re hurting consumers and to make it harder for companies to merge if it reduces competition.”

• Yet, somehow the FCC could not produce a single document from the day the cyberattack is said to have occurred. It released one email from a reporter asking for a comment about Schatz and Wyden’s letter. Another short one concerning the same letter between two FCC staffers was entirely redacted, because its disclosure would, the agency said, expose its “decision making process in such a way as to discourage candid discussion within the agency and thereby undermine the agency’s ability to perform its functions.”

• So for years Verizon Wireless refused to compete on price, insisting that the company’s network was just so incredible, it didn’t have to. Then came increased competition from T-Mobile, which forced the company to not only start competing a little more seriously on price, but to bring back unlimited data plans Verizon had spent years telling customers they didn’t need. And while Wall Street cries about this rise in competition hurting earnings at least once a week, it has generally been a good thing for consumers.

• But there’s two things waiting just over the horizon that could ruin everybody’s good time. One is a looming merger between Sprint and T-Mobile, which would significantly reduce competition in the wireless sector, eliminating much of the pressure on mobile providers to compete. The other is the impending death of net neutrality protections at the FCC, which currently keep these carriers from abusing this lack of competition to drive up costs and hamper content competitors.

• For decades now, broadband ISPs have abused the lack of meaningful competition in the telecom market by not only refusing to shore up historically awful customer service, but by raising rates hand over fist. This usually involves leaving the advertised price largely the same, but pummeling customers with all manner of misleading fees and surcharges that drive up the actual price paid post sale. And by and large regulators from both major political parties have been perfectly ok with this practice, despite it effectively being false advertising.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Google is no longer highlighting the “best torrent sites” in its search results. Following an investigation, the search engine decided to pull the prominent torrent sites ‘carousel’ from its search results. Various streaming sites remain highlighted, but the ‘pirate’ sources have been removed there as well.

• Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has published a report on its activities for the first six months of 2017. The headline figures are the takedown of more than 230 ‘pirate’ sites alongside the targeting of more than a dozen major uploaders, but it was BREIN’s successes in key legal battles that will have the broadest implications.

• Last month, we discussed a strange spate of DMCA notices going out from Alex Mauer, a video game music composer. Through her DMCA blitz, she managed to get a game removed from Steam, as well as getting several DMCA strikes against several YouTubers that had covered that game, all apparently as a result of a contract dispute she had with Imagos Softworks and her general inability to understand contractual language and copyright law. The tone of that post was justifiably critical, but some are now concerned that there is a well-being issue at hand. For starters, Mauer has now targeted a second game via DMCA takedown and has managed to get Steam to remove the game from its listings.

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