● 08.02.17

● Links 2/8/2017: DragonFly 4.8.1 Released, Bassel Khartabil Dies

Posted in News Roundup at 10:40 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• You might be tired of the constant security problems that you are finding on Windows today. Hackers will try hard to steal your personal and financial information if you run Windows. So what can you do? Install a version of Linux on your PC right away. We will let you know more about installing a version of Linux here.

Server

• Yesterday was Sysadmin Appreciation Day. There was a lot of chatter about what the future of Operations will look like, a recurrent theme being that in this day and age, Operations is “everyone’s job” or that “everyone is Ops”.

• While I think people who believe this have their hearts in the right place, it’s a tad simplistic or opportunistic view. The reality on the ground happens to be more nuanced, and the problems facing most organizations are highly unlikely to be solved by idealistic chants of “everyone is Ops”.

• [...]

• Operations is a pretty varied field. I find it rather strange that on the one hand we’re perfectly capable of distinguishing between frontend engineering and API development or iOS development and “data science”, but on the other, when we talk about “Operations” we treat it as if it were a monolithic discipline and treat anyone and everyone working in Operations as “sysadmins” or “DevOps engineers”.

• From a hardware perspective, DEF CON makes extensive use of Aruba gear, including an Aruba controller and Aruba access points.

• In this series, we’re looking at some important considerations for sysadmins who want to expand their skills and advance their careers. The previous article provided an introduction to the concepts we’ll be covering, and this article focuses on one of the fundamental skills that every sysadmin needs to master: networking.

Kernel Space

• Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open platform for the connected car, has released the latest version of the AGL infotainment platform, Unified Code Base (UCB) 4.0, which includes support for SmartDeviceLink integration, Speech Recognition APIs, secure Over-the-Air Updates (SOTA) and improvements to the App Framework and Software Development Kit (SDK).

Graphics Stack

• Bryce Harrington at Samsung has announced the release candidates for Wayland 1.14 and the Weston 3.0 reference compositor.

• It’s always wonderful waking up to some hearty commits in Mesa Git and this morning was one of those days.

• Intel’s upcoming Gemini Lake hardware will offer better VP9 video decoding support.

Benchmarks

• In the past few days I have posted benchmarks showing how AMD’s latest open-source Radeon Linux driver code is faster than their hybrid/proprietary driver for OpenGL and perhaps most excitingly is finally how AMD Radeon GPUs are beginning to really compete with NVIDIA GPUs on Linux and in some cases performing better against the GeForce competition than they do under Windows. This comes after years of work on their open-source driver stack and especially a lot of work done over the past year not only by AMD but also Valve and other open-source contributors to Mesa, their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, their AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end continues to be refined for compute and graphics, and the AMDGPU kernel driver. So here are the latest Windows vs. Linux gaming benchmarks on the Radeon side to see where things stand now with this latest code.

Applications

• There are countless tools that claim to optimize your Windows system, but not nearly as many for GNU/Linux. Now, many GNU/Linux power users will likely say something like, “If you’re using Linux you should be able to do all of these things on your own anyway, try using commands like X or Y,” however, with popularity in GNU/Linux growing, there are likely many users out there with less experience who could make use of software like this. That’s where Stacer comes into play.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• I was recently sent an interesting little script that will compare a downloaded list of your Steam games, with the Wine AppDB to show you a list of what you can expect to be able to play with Wine.

Games

• Tacoma [GOG, Steam, Official Site], the sci-fi narrative adventure from the developer of Gone Home has officially launched. It includes day-1 Linux support so I took a look.

• Nintendo’s announcement follows a retail fiasco last week in which Walmart mistakenly offered Super NES Classic systems for pre-order then was forced to cancel those pre-orders. “We know this is incredibly disappointing to those customers and we apologize for the mistake,” the retailer said in a statement. The mistaken listing sold out within minutes late on a Friday night.

• It’s been a long time since I’ve done this, but here’s part 5 in the series of me talking to developers about how their games have been selling on Linux.

• The Darkside Detective [GOG, Steam], a supernatural point & click adventure recently released with day-1 Linux support and it looks good.

• Keith Packard who has been working on some low-level driver/X improvements for SteamVR on Linux on contract for Valve has published updated patches.

• With a new month comes the latest numbers from Valve’s controversial Steam Survey.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Right after the first day’s keynote (slides), Marco Martin and Sebastian Kügler caught the general audience up in their presentation “Plasma: State of the Union”. Sebas talked about how the architecture around Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 worked out very well, and how the 5.8 LTS release was received positively, especially by the users who value stability and predictability.

• Marco then presented a number of new features that have been added to Plasma since last year’s Akademy and that are planned for the upcoming 5.11 release. There is the improved integration for web browsers, better support for touchscreens, enhancements in the taskbar, return of the App Menu (Global Menu), encrypted volumes through Plasma Vault, more elegant artwork, a redesign of the System Settings user interface, and many more.

• The KDE Store has gained a lot of traction since its relaunch at Akademy 2016, and now even allows its contributors to receive donations directly from happy users. (Full disclosure: Your editor was able to buy a pizza last week from donations coming through this new feature in the KDE Store).

• Last week was KDE’s annual Akademy conference where developers and enthusiasts came together to recap the past year of KDE software development as well as some of what’s ahead.

• Longtime KDE developer Sebastian Kügler has provided a recap of the KDE Plasma activities from Akademy 2017. Those interested in the state of Plasma can read Sebastian’s post at dot.kde.org. Below are some of the highlights.

Distributions

New Releases

• We hope you’re having a great Summer break. OSMC’s July update is ready with a few improvements to keep your device running in tip-top shape. The Vero 4K also sees a large number of improvements, particularly with regards to HDR and 10-bit content. We would like to thank everyone who tested these improvements in our forums and ensured they got included in OSMC quickly.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Inc. has made the next major update to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform generally available, sporting new features focused on boosting performance and security.

• The RHEL 7.4 release has been in beta since May. The new features include enhanced audit and forensic capabilities that are necessary for companies using the platform to protect themselves against evolving threats and vulnerabilities, Red Hat officials said.

• Hyderabad, Aug 2 () Telangana Academy for Skill and Knowledge (TASK) today said it entered into an MoU with Red Hat Inc, a provider of open source solutions, to offer training and certification programmes to engineering students in the state.

• Engineering students in Telangana will soon be offered training and certification programs by a joint collaboration of Telangana Academy for Skill and Knowledge (TASK) and Red Hat, a leading provider of open source solutions, announced a senior government official.

• As part of the memorandum of understanding (MoU), all TASK partner colleges will receive no-cost instructor training and support, Red Hat Technology for use in the lab environments at the colleges and printed, digital or online textbooks.

• Yesterday at Phoronix we were the first to broadcast about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 deprecating Btrfs and since then it’s become more clear what their “next-gen” Linux storage focus has become.

• I’ve been able to confirm from multiple Red Hat developers that Btrfs is indeed on its way out in RHEL, unlike the earlier deprecation in RHEL6. Red Hat is no longer betting on Btrfs as the future of Linux file-systems/storage.

• While many of you over the past day hoped that somehow ZFS was being magically re-licensed or somehow becoming used by RHEL/Fedora, that is sadly not the case either. But for driving next-gen Linux storage they are currently working on the Stratis Project.

• We’re pleased to announce that Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host 7.4 is now generally available. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host is a lightweight, container-optimized version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host couples the flexible, modular capabilities of Linux containers with the reliability and security of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a reduced footprint, to decrease the attack surface and provide only the packages needed to light up hardware and run containers. Here’s a look at some of the major changes in 7.4.

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

• Back in November, Michael Stapelberg blogged about running (pure) Debian on the Raspberry Pi 3. This is pretty exciting because Raspbian still provide 32 bit packages, so this means you can run a true ARM64 OS on the Pi. Unfortunately, one of the major missing pieces with Debian on the Pi3 at this time is broken video support.

• A helpful person known as “SandPox” wrote to me in June to explain that they had working video for a custom kernel build on top of pure Debian on the Pi, and they achieved this simply by enabling CONFIG_FB_SIMPLE in the kernel configuration. On request, this has since been enabled for official Debian kernel builds.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

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

• This milestone features images for Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Mate, Ubuntu Budgie and Ubuntu Kylin.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint is the distribution that tops the Distrowatch rating year after year. Its release cycle was following the Ubuntu releases for many years, including the non-LTS versions. But since the version 17 back in 2014 they only release Linux Mint based on Ubuntu LTS versions, currently Ubuntu 16.04, and then refresh the distribution every 6 months with newer packages.

Devices/Embedded

• TI’s Linux-driven “DLP LightCrafter Display 2000 EVM” integrates a 0.2-inch “DLP2000” chipset that drives 640 x 360 displays, and plugs into the BB Black.

• Texas Instruments invented DLP (digital light processing) pico projection technology, and has offered Linux-driven evaluation modules since the original circa-2012 DLP LightCrafter EVM. While the original LightCrafter was a fully formed SBC, the new DLP LightCrafter Display 2000 EVM is a daughter-board designed to work with any SBC with I2C and a GPIO-driven video interface that supports 24-bit RGB. The module, which can drive up to a 640 x 360-pixel, 30-lumens projected display, offers built-in support for the BeagleBone Black or BeagleBone Green, and includes Linux-based software drivers and code examples for developing pico projector devices.

• For original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and their customers, the features and flexibility of Linux distributions like Yocto, Android, and Ubuntu Core outweigh the limitations of their footprint in embedded and Internet of Things (IoT) system designs.

• The “free” one. For development projects, this has always been a big advantage of using a Linux operating system (OS). It’s also open source, stable, and a bunch of other things you already know.

Tizen

Android

• Announced back in February, the first Android phones from Nokia are finally with us. Well, almost.

• The entry-level model, the Nokia 3, is on sale now. The next step-up is the Nokia 5, which goes on sale in some countries, including the UK, on August 16. The Nokia 6 is the highest-specced of the lot and is on sale this week.

• All are keenly priced, and none is the flagship that is coming. That’s almost certainly to be revealed on August 16 [LINK] though there are some leaks already [LINK].

Free Software/Open Source

• It can be tough to start a new open source project. You have an awesome idea in your head, but it takes work to turn it into a productive, healthy, engaging community. Sadly (as seems to be the case in practically anything), the same mistakes are made over and over again by new projects.

• Last week we heard the good news that Adobe is officially killing Flash in 2020. Most people liked the demise of Adobe Flash. But it seems that Adobe Flash has still some fans left and they want to keep it alive as an open source project.

• Open source has entered the limelight at work. Not only is it frequently being used in businesses – but it’s helping people build their professional reputations, according to the recently released 2017 GitHub Open Source Survey.

• Notably, half of the 5,500 survey GitHub contributors say that their open source work was somewhat or very important in getting their current role.

• The survey found nearly all (94 percent) employed respondents use open source at least sometimes professionally (81 percent use it frequently), and 65 percent of those who contribute back do so as part of their work duties.

• It is no secret that insurance and insurers, as we traditionally know them, have been facing many challenges. This is due to the emergence of the new-age disruptive technologies that are altering the landscape.

• Given the age-old philosophy of survival of the fittest, it is companies that manage to adapt themselves in the face emerging technology, which will be frontrunners. The ever-changing Initiatives such as Omni-channel customer experience and digital capabilities need to be at the forefront. However, the basic underlying question is – how can legacy systems and internal IT Architecture respond to the new business models.

• You have a great idea for an IoT initiative. Maybe improving your insight into your business operations. Maybe increasing the productivity and satisfaction of your workforce. Maybe building customer loyalty with exceptional experiences. Maybe getting a leg up on the competition with a new digital business model. In any case, selecting your IoT platform is an important choice with long-term ramifications.

Events

• Tonight, the FSFE team Netherlands will arrive at SHA2017 and set up a village for FSFE. SHA-camp is a non-profit hacker-camp in the the Netherlands, similar to the CCCamps in Germany. During 5 days the FSFE will offer a public space for and by our members, friends and supporters to discuss, meet, hack and organise.

• Open Source Summit Europe is not far away! This year’s event — held Oct. 23-26 in Prague, Czech Republic — will feature a wide array of speakers, including open source community expert Jono Bacon, 11-year-old hacker Reuben Paul, and Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

• LinuxCon, ContainerCon and CloudOpen combine with the new Open Community Conference and Diversity Empowerment Summit under one umbrella name in 2017 – the Open Source Summit. At Open Source Summit Europe, attendees will collaborate, share information and learn across a wide variety of topics, with 2,000 technologists and community members.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• DragonFly version 4.8.1 is a bugfix release for 4.8, and also includes improved Intel video support and support for the virtio_scsi driver.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• As part of its Working Together for Free Software Fund, the FSF provides fiscal sponsorship for a number of important free software and GNU technical projects, such as the GNU Toolchain and Replicant. Today, SeaGL becomes the first event to receive this sponsorship.

• SeaGL is a grassroots technical conference dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about the GNU/Linux community, free software, and freedom-respecting hardware. Their interest in free software extends to how they manage the conference, using tools like Jekyll and OSEM, and making sure that nonfree software is not required for attendee registration. In 2016, SeaGL had an attendance of more than 300.

• The GNU C Library is used as *the* C library in the GNU system and in GNU/Linux systems, as well as many other systems that use Linux as the kernel.

• The GNU C Library is primarily designed to be a portable and high performance C library. It follows all relevant standards including ISO C11 and POSIX.1-2008. It is also internationalized and has one of the most complete internationalization interfaces known.

• There are also other glibc 2.26 features including Unicode 10.0 support, glibc tunables enabled by default, wrappers for new Linux system calls, 128-bit floating point support in the math library, the DNS stub resolver is in better shape, various bug fixes, and a hand full of CVE security fixes.

Licensing/Legal

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• We are deeply saddened and completely outraged to learn today that our friend and colleague Bassel Khartabil has been executed by the Syrian regime.

• Bassel was Creative Commons’ Syrian project lead, an open source software programmer, teacher, Wikipedia contributor, and free culture advocate. He was also a devoted son and husband, and a great friend to many people in the open knowledge community around the world. The projects and communities he helped to build live on across the globe, and will remain a tribute to his leadership.

• In March of 2012, Bassel was taken from the street in Damascus amid a wave of military arrests. He was jailed for several years, during which time he was allowed to infrequently communicate with family members. Then, in October 2015, he was abruptly transferred to an undisclosed location. At that time, all communications between Bassel and the outside world ceased. The Creative Commons board publicly called for Bassel’s immediate release, and the MIT Media Lab offered Bassel a research position in its Center for Civic Media. His family and friends prayed for his safe return, and are heartbroken today to learn the awful and terrifying news of his execution.

• Over the past several years, a variety of human rights groups called for Bassel’s release. Amnesty International launched a campaign through its Urgent Action network that encouraged the public to write letters to Syrian authorities and urge them to grant Bassel access to his family, a lawyer, and medical attention. The US State Department singled him out on International Human Rights Day in 2015 as a “prisoner of conscience.”

• Bassel Khartabil, a Syrian-Palestinian open-source developer credited with helping to bring a free internet to Syria, was confirmed dead today by Creative Commons, the open internet non-profit Khartabil volunteered with. He was 36.

• Bassel Khartabil, the Syrian open source developer, blogger, entrepreneur, hackerspace founder, and free culture advocate, has been executed by the Syrian authorities. Noura Ghazi Safadi, his wife, received confirmation of her husband’s death by the Assad-led Syrian government yesterday. The execution took place in secret in November 2015. It has taken the Syrian government nearly two years to officially communicate that fact to his friends and family.

• Bassel had been imprisoned by the Syrian authorities since his abduction from the streets of Damascus on March 15, 2012. He was originally taken, interrogated and tortured in secret in a facility controlled by the country’s General Intelligence Directorate. After a worldwide campaign by international human rights groups, together with Bassel’s many colleagues in the open Internet and free culture communities, he was moved to Adra’s civilian prison, from where he was able to communicate with his family and friends.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Makers, electronics enthusiasts and developers searching for an open source voice platform may be interested in a new piece of hardware which has been created by MATRIX Labs based in San Francisco, California.

• A new open source minicomputer has been launched by Kickstarter this week looking to raise $500,000 over the next 28 days to help take the OSConnect mini PC and to manufacture.

• The OSConnect mini PC is fitted with an open sourced motherboard complete with expandable Micro SD on board and solid-state hard drive. Together with connectivity via Bluetooth 4.0, wi-fi b/g/n/ac and Windows 10 with Linux and Android dual boot support. Unfortunately no specific hardware specifications have been listed as yet.

Programming/Development

• You’ve probably heard the claim that coding, or computer programming, is as crucial a skill in the 21st century as reading and math were in the previous century. I’ll go one step further: Teaching a young person to code could be the single most life-changing skill you can give them. And it’s not just a career-enhancer. Coding is about problem-solving, it’s about creativity, and more importantly, it’s about empowerment.

Standards/Consortia

• This month marks the 35th anniversary of the sign-off of RFC 821, the first definition of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, that everyday staple of email comms.

• Although the original spec has long been superseded, with the latest version of SMTP being contained in RFC 5321, RFC 821 laid the foundations for the billions of messages that zip through the intertubes every day.

• An American consultancy estimated (PDF) that there are around 2.7 billion users of email today, and reckons that half the planet will be using email by the year 2020.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• The bill Britain must pay for moving the European Medicines Agency (EMA) from London after Brexit has soared to a staggering £520m, it has emerged.

• The Liberal Democrats said the huge sum for relocating the agency – considered a jewel in the EU‘s crown, because it attracts businesses and experts – was among the most “crazy” aspects of withdrawal.

• “One of the ludicrous ironies of Brexit is we could end up having to pay large amounts of money to lose highly skilled jobs and research capacity from the UK,” said Brexit spokesman Tom Brake.

Security

• A 32-year-old Seattle man is behind bars while awaiting a federal hacking trial for launching a DDoS attack. He is being held without bail on allegations that he attacked a US-based legal services website to force it to remove a link to a case citation about his past criminal conduct. The authorities also say the suspect launched distributed denial of service attacks on various overseas media outlets for not removing stories about his credit-card scam and other crimes.

• The FBI says that the day after a DDoS attack in January, 2015, the suspect sent an e-mail to Leagle.com pretending to be the hacking group Anonymous. The e-mail explained that the DDoS attack was launched because the defendant, Kamyar Jahanrakhshan, “is being unjustly victimised by you” for not abiding by his numerous requests to remove the link and even pay $100 in cash to get the job done.

• The hackers behind the dump of Democratic Party emails in the midst of last year’s presidential race left apparent evidence of their identity — a breadcrumb trail winding from the stolen files back to the Russian government, according to assessments from the U.S. intelligence community. Some of this evidence was there from the beginning, embedded inside the first documents to hit the web, raising a niggling question: Why would diabolically skilled Russian operatives operate so sloppily?

• This question has persisted, and last week the White House seized upon it, promulgating the idea that if the Russian government were really behind the attacks, its online agents wouldn’t have left any fingerprints. Russia quickly repeated this claim through its UK embassy.

• But a 2011 presentation to the NSA and its foreign partners by Canada’s signals intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment, undermines the notion of a foreign hacker so skilled that a victim would never know their identity. The document calls Russian hackers “morons” for routinely compromising the security of a “really well designed” system intended to cover their tracks; for example, the hackers logged into their personal social and email accounts through the same anonymizing system used to attack their targets, comparable to getting an anonymous burner phone for illicit use and then placing calls to your girlfriend, parents, and roommate.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The police department of the largest city in the US often tops the list of public records villains. According to FOIA requesters, the NYPD manages to out-stonewall notoriously recalcitrant entities like the NSA, FBI, and CIA. Not far behind the NYPD, however, is the entire state of Massachusetts.

• This state has the worst public records laws in the nation, with 19 pages of exemptions — almost one-third of its 60-page public records statute. Various state entities have done things like withhold documents on a 63-year-old murder case, citing the “ongoing” nature of an investigation with zero leads and several dead suspects. Officials have also claimed the state’s SWAT teams are private entities, out of the reach of public records requests. The state’s lawyers have previously argued the state laws — as crippled as they are — hand over too much power to constituents.

Finance

• Bitcoin cash has a maximum block size of 8MB, compared to 1MB in the bitcoin blockchain, which will allow for faster transaction processing speeds. Bitcoin itself will proceed with a different incompatible scalability strategy called Segregated Witness or SegWit.

• On Tuesday, a faction of the Bitcoin community launched an audacious experiment: a new version of Bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash that’s incompatible with the standard version. As a result, the Bitcoin network split into two mutually incompatible networks that will operate side-by-side.

• The confusing result is that if you owned one bitcoin before the split you own two bitcoins now: one coin on the original Bitcoin network, and a second coin on the new Bitcoin Cash network. The two coins have the same cryptographic credentials, but they have very different values if you sell them for old-fashioned dollars. On Wednesday morning, one standard Bitcoin was worth about $2,700, while—on paper at least—a unit of Bitcoin Cash was worth around $600.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The controversial practice allows groups to hone their messages to match the personality types of their targets during political campaigning, and is being used by firms including Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ to better target voters with political advertising with so-called “dark ads”.

• Donald Trump’s presidency is “failing”, and there is little sign that he is learning from his mistakes, according to the executive director of Australia’s respected foreign policy thinktank, the Lowy Institute.

• Michael Fullilove took the opportunity of a speech to the National Press Club in Canberra to provide a swingeing assessment of the American president’s performance, casting Trump as the “lord of misrule” presiding over a White House entourage “animated by egomania and narcissism and marked by coarseness and ill-discipline”.

• The Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan project backed by the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), has launched a Web tool to keep tabs on Russia’s ongoing efforts to influence public opinion in the United States and abroad. Called Hamilton 68—named for the 68th edition of the Federalist Papers, in which Alexander Hamilton discussed how to prevent foreign meddling and influence in America’s electoral process—the Web dashboard tracks 600 Twitter accounts “linked to Russian influence activities online.” That’s according to a blog post by the Alliance’s senior fellow and director Laura Rosenberger and non-resident fellow J.M. Berger.

Censorship/Free Speech

• During today’s quarter three earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook clarified that the removal of Virtual Private Network (VPN) apps in China late last week was due to a stronger enforcement of the law by the local Chinese government.

• So it is now official. The ghetto walls are up and the gates are closed. The adult-Tumblr community is no longer part of the open web. The #pornocalypse has claimed another social media victim.

• Human rights activist Peter Tatchell told Middle East Eye: “It would not seem consistent with the Independent’s record of championing liberal values for a Saudi sultan to have a significant share in the ownership of this media outlet.

• Martian is an extension of the May 35th approach, but with additional elements, including fairly random ones. That makes it hard for the automated censorship systems to spot forbidden topics, since the Martian elements have to be decoded first. Naturally, though, the human censors eventually work out what the Martian terms mean, and add them to the blacklists for automatic blocking. However, according to the Quartz article, China’s censorship system is not monolithic, and just because a post written in Martian is blocked on one service doesn’t mean it will be blocked on another.

• Amazon also was in the spotlight Wednesday after disclosures that the company’s Chinese partner, Beijing Sinnet Technology, sent emails to clients advising them to delete tools used to circumvent censorship. The news was first reported by the New York Times.

• An employee told The Washington Post that Sinnet sent clients emails last Friday and again on Monday warning they must eliminate any content that violates Chinese telecom laws. The instructions came from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the employee said.

• On Wednesday, calls to Amazon Web Services’ China office went unanswered. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Post.)

• So we fully expected the ongoing to lawsuit filed by coal boss Bob Murray against comedian John Oliver to lead to some truly captivating moments (it already has!), but the West Virginia chapter of the ACLU has leapt into the case with wild abandon and made sure that people were paying attention. If you somehow missed it, Oliver did a segment on coal jobs a month and a half ago, with a particular focus on the head of Murray Energy, a character named Bob Murray. Part of the reason for the focus on Murray was that Murray’s lawyers threatened to sue Oliver… and then followed through on the threat with an actual lawsuit that was even sillier than we expected. Last we’d written about it, the two sides were wrangling over Murray demanding a gag order on Oliver, while Oliver tried to remove the case to federal court, rather than state court. As we predicted, Murray’s lawyers have now been trying to move the case back to state court and papers have been flying back and forth about both that and Murray Energy’s renewed desire for a gag order (the original had been filed in state court, and then again in the federal court). We didn’t think any of those filings were interesting enough to write about yet.

• Better detection and faster removal driven by machine learning: We’ve always used a mix of technology and human review to address the ever-changing challenges around controversial content on YouTube.

• Jewish and social media lit up last month over an advertisement published in the Flatbush Jewish Journal, a Brooklyn weekly.

• The ad was placed by social media personality Adina Miles, famous for her rabble-rousing Instagram account “Flatbush Girl,” and was meant to show appreciation to City Councilman Chaim Deutsch for helping her in a local graffiti clean-up effort. When the Flatbush Jewish Journal refused to run the ad because it contained a picture of a woman and the word “girl,” Miles placed an emoji over her face and changed her name to “Flatbush Boy.” The advertisement ran.

• Egyptian rock band Cairokee did not give up when the General Authority for Censorship of Works of Art on July 2 banned the sale of their new album “A Drop of White.” Why would they, when there is an alternative outlet in the form of YouTube? The YouTube launch of their 11-song album on July 11 was a resounding success. One song, “Al-Kayf,” (“Fix”) has been viewed over 6 million times since its internet launch.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The unmasking rules House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes has been (somewhat disingenuously) complaining about have been around for a few years now. Normally, US persons’ identities are minimized before government officials can view intel gathered by the NSA. But in cases where it might be necessary to provide context, the White House can ask for the identities to be unmasked.

• This has turned into a mini-firestorm on Capitol Hill, with Nunes striking most of the matches. The problem is Nunes should be aware of these rules, as he’s in charge of the intelligence oversight committee. He apparently doesn’t, or at least wasn’t aware how many people can actually ask for US persons to be unmasked.

• Data privacy regulation in the U.S. has been a thorny issue with provisions such as the National Security Letters (NSLs) allowing unfettered access to law enforcement agencies into citizens’ communications.

• The power endowed on the government by laws such as the Stored Communications Act has made accessing citizens’ email and other communications fairly easy in the post-2001 period for agencies such as the CIA and the FBI.

• A Senate Democrat on the Intelligence Committee is pressing the nation’s top spy chief to clarify whether FISA Section 702, an expiring law used by the National Security Agency to conduct broad international surveillance, can be used to domestically target Americans.

• Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden asked Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats in June if “the government [can] use FISA Act Section 702 to collect communications it knows are entirely domestic.”

• Having set up her straw app user, Rudd moves towards her conclusion… which is severely lacking in anything cohesive or coherent. The “opportunities” lie in persuading tech companies to provide users with less secure communications platforms. Should be an easy sale, especially if the average user doesn’t care about security. But maybe the company does and doesn’t want to give bad people an easy way to access the communications of others. Hence encryption. Hence end-to-end, so even if the provider is breached, there’s still nothing to access.

• What Rudd is looking for can’t be called a trade-off. The government has nothing tech companies want. All they can offer is platitudes about fighting crime and national security. The government, meanwhile, wants tech companies to write software the way the government wants it, rather than how the company or its users want it. That’s not a trade-off. That’s a one-way street where every internet communication platform becomes a proxy government agency.

• With just a few minutes of hands-on time, a hacker could turn an Echo into a personal eavesdropping microphone without leaving any physical trace.

• In what is the latest attempt by a politician to argue against the use of encrypted apps by the general public, UK home secretary Amber Rudd has penned an article in which she says that “real people” do not need end-to-end encryption.

• The phone numbers, email addresses, national insurance numbers and home addresses of about 500 trainee doctors were posted on a spreadsheet linked to the website of the Trust, which runs St Helens and Whiston hospitals.

• Amazon said it’s suspending sales of Android phones made by Blu following a presentation last week that said that three of the manufacturer’s models sent sensitive personal information to third parties in China.

• I don’t remember this being discussed back in 2013.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Jenni Monet, one of a half-dozen journalists arrested this year covering the Standing Rock pipeline protests in North Dakota, recalled being verbally abused by police during her 30-hour detention, including hours in a freezing garage.

• Monet’s ordeal received some coverage at the time, but less than anti-press incidents in media-saturated cities or on the presidential campaign trail. And it’s been tough to sustain attention, even though the freelance journalist’s story is far from over. Monet, who spoke via video chat to reporters last week in the Committee to Protect Journalists’ office, is scheduled to go to trial next year, charged with trespassing and rioting.

• His pick for Attorney General has backed this up, stating the DOJ will no longer be investigating civil rights violations by local police departments and announced a return to the good old days of harsh sentencing and unrestricted civil asset forfeiture.

• The speech given by Trump shows a man completely enthralled by people in uniforms. It also shows his general disdain for anyone law enforcement officers might run across. First, Trump stated he was going to let law enforcement agencies have all the war gear they want.

• Baltimore Police Department Commissioner Kevin Davis ordered street officers not to “recreate” body cam footage in a Tuesday memo that follows a turbulent two weeks for the agency in which at least two body cam tapes have come to light showing officers staging crime scenes.

• “In the event your body worn camera is not activated during the recovery of evidence, under no circumstances shall you attempt to recreate the recovery of evidence after re-activating your body worn camera,” Davis’ memo (PDF) said. “If you must deactivate your body worn camera during an incident, merely explain the reasoning on camera (e.g., to protect the identity of a witness who wishes to remain anonymous, etc.).”

• Because someone had to, a former DOJ prosecutor has stepped up to defend the grand reopening of federal civil asset forfeiture abuse. George J. Terwilliger III has been given space at the Wall Street Journal to tell everyone why they’re wrong about civil forfeiture. (Non-paywalled version here.)

• As part of the new president’s “law and order” focus, Attorney General Jeff Sessions opened up the federal outlet for forfeiture, allowing state and local law enforcement agencies to route around local restrictions by asking for federal “adoption” of their forfeitures. This reversed the policy put in place by Sessions’ predecessor, which limited adoptions and forced local agencies to adhere to local rules.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

Intellectual Monopolies

• It has not been a bad year for Nokia, despite appearances, and the firm has just welcomed a €1.7bn cash payment from Apple for some intellectual property {sic} hoo-hah.

• You may recall that several months ago, we discussed Donald de la Haye, kicker for UCF and a very good YouTube personality to boot. After racking up thousands of subscribers and millions of views at his YouTube channel, where de la Haye discusses all manner of things, including his football career, the NCAA came a-calling. The organization first informed him that he would have to shutter his channel completely, arguing that the advertising revenue it generated violated NCAA rules, which are designed to make sure that all student athlete activity that generates revenue does so only in the direction of the NCAA. Then, after the backlash, the NCAA reportedly offered to let de la Haye keep his YouTube channel, but only if he agreed to essentially never reference who he is or what one of his primary life activities is: football. It was a deal devoid of sense, as his football playing career is among the primary motivators for people to check his channel out to begin with. It’s also a strange stance coming from an organization purportedly in the business of supporting student athletes as they become full-fledged adults, limiting his creative expression over a concern of YouTube revenue from his own fans.

• A new book with contributions from key thinkers on the subject details the long history and intensive negotiations of the World Intellectual Property Organization committee on genetic resources, traditional knowledge and folklore, making a case for conclusion of binding international agreements in these areas as a way to close important gaps in intellectual property policy.

Copyrights

• NSA unlawfully surveilled Kim Dotcom in New Zealand – report | 01 Aug 2017 | The National Security Agency (NSA) illegally used technology to spy on Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, according to new documents from New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). The New Zealand Herald first reported that the GCSB told the nation’s high court that it ceased all surveillance of Dotcom in early 2012, but that “limited” amounts of communications from Dotcom were later intercepted by its technology without the bureau’s knowledge. Dotcom was surveilled by the NSA and the GCSB in a joint intelligence operation named Operation Debut. According to the Herald, that surveillance was scheduled to end in January 2012, but the United States continued to use New Zealand’s technology.

• Kim Dotcom has been of interest to the US government and law enforcement agencies for some time, and it was ruled that the Mega and Megaupload founder could be extracted to the US. But now it seems that the NSA was spying on the internet entrepreneur after surveillance was supposed to have stopped.

• New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) had been working with the NSA on a joint surveillance operation called Operation Debut. While surveillance was supposed to have stopped in January 2012, it has emerged that the NSA continued to use GCSB’s technology without its knowledge.

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