● 08.09.17

● Links 9/8/2017: Wine Staging 2.14, Brooklyn 0.2

Posted in News Roundup at 12:16 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• SDxCentral recently conducted a survey as part of our 2017 Container and Cloud Orchestration report, and found a spike in container usage. In fact, it appears that containers could surpass virtual machines (VMs) as the application development platform of choice.

Audiocasts/Shows

• As part of an ongoing series about re-taking control of our digital media, this first installment will address how to serve and organize your scanned comic book collection files by running Ubooquity Comic Book Server on Ubuntu.

• We discuss just how hard, or not, responsible disclosure really is, share some sad news about the status of BTRFS on RHEL, a few more reasons to use ZFS.

Kernel Space

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has established a mission which centres around what it calls ‘sustaining and integrating’ open source technologies to orchestrate containers as part of a microservices architecture.

• A while back at the awesome maintainerati I chatted with a few great fellow maintainers about how to scale really big open source projects, and how github forces projects into a certain way of scaling. The linux kernel has an entirely different model, which maintainers hosting their projects on github don’t understand, and I think it’s worth explaining why and how it works, and how it’s different.

• Another motivation to finally get around to typing this all up is the HN discussion on my “Maintainers Don’t Scale” talk, where the top comment boils down to “… why don’t these dinosaurs use modern dev tooling?”. A few top kernel maintainers vigorously defend mailing lists and patch submissions over something like github pull requests, but at least some folks from the graphics subsystem would love more modern tooling which would be much easier to script. The problem is that github doesn’t support the way the linux kernel scales out to a huge number of contributors, and therefore we can’t simply move, not even just a few subsystems. And this isn’t about just hosting the git data, that part obviously works, but how pull requests, issues and forks work on github.

Graphics Stack

• Bryce Harrington has just tagged the Wayland 1.14 update that is joined by the Weston 3.0 reference compositor release, which is seeing another major version bump due to API/ABI breakage compared to the previous Weston 2.0 release cycle.

• Wayland 1.14 this release cycle is fairly small and not really exciting for end-users. This update has some test changes, adds in the FreeDesktop.org Contributor Covenant, and other small changes and fixes.

Benchmarks/Hardware

• Last week were the benchmark results showing how the open-source Radeon Linux driver is becoming increasingly competitive with NVIDIA’s driver and is very competitive OpenGL-wise with the Radeon Software Windows driver. Here are some more NVIDIA and Radeon benchmarks today under Linux with each vendor’s latest drivers using sixteen different graphics cards.

• While the June launch of Intel’s X-Series processors took the attention with the top-end Core i9 7900X Skylake-X and Core i7 7740X Kabylake-X processors, coming in several hundred dollars less than the i9-7900X is the i7-7820X, which still packs a very hard punch. We have now received a Core i7 7820X for Linux testing at Phoronix and are beginning with a round of benchmarks on Ubuntu.

• Here are my latest Ethereum Ethminer benchmarks for those interested in mining this cryptocurrency using OpenCL on AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs.

• These are my latest Ethereum mining benchmarks that just finished up this morning. Radeon tests were done using the latest ROCm binaries on Ubuntu 16.04. The Radeon cards tested were the R9 290, RX 480, RX 560, RX 580, and R9 Fury. Yes, there will be Ethereum benchmarks on the Radeon RX Vega on launch day when that time comes. On the NVIDIA side was their 384.59 driver on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with the GeForce GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1050, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1080, and GTX 1080 Ti.

Applications

• One of the things that people like to hate on about GNU/Linux is that a lot of programs and applications are not compatible with it.

• And it’s true, as a long-time user there have been many times I have said to myself, “Oh, I need X!” but then have found out that X is not compatible, and had to use some other alternative.

• QOwnNotes is a free, open source, and cross-platform note taking and to-do list application with support for Markdown editing and ownCloud integration. It features several panels with all the text entry and editing options all note-taking apps have to offer and even more.

• You can place all the panels wherever you want, get notified about external modifications of your current note, and connect to your ownCloud or Nextcloud server for additional features like versioning and trash, among other things.

• Oracle’s Director of Product Management Simon Coter recently announced the availability of the first Beta release of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.2 major version of the open-source and cross-platform virtualization software.

• VirtualBox 5.2 looks to be a great release that should allow users to export virtual machines to the Oracle Public Cloud so that they can easily use them on other machines without all the hustle of exporting VMs to external drives and then import them to another VirtualBox installation.

• Another interesting change coming to VirtualBox 5.2 later this year is automatic, unattended guest OS installation, similar to the “Easy Install” feature found on the commercial VMware Workstation 6.5 and 7 virtualization software. Additionally, VirtualBox 5.2 will improve the Virtual Machine selector GUI.

• A new version of the Linux screen recorder, Green Recorder has been released. Green Recorder 3.0 which is built using Python, FFmpeg and GTK+3 comes along with many new features and updates.

• Remember that Mac-inspired Notes app we mentioned well over a year ago? Well it just received a big ol’ update, and we reckon some of you will want to know about it.

• By analogy, José is to JOSE what GPG is to OpenPGP and OpenSSL is to X.509.

• Messages in GxsTrans groups are encrypted using the public key of their destination, and are signed by the sender. The encrypted packet only contains a symmetric AES128 key encrypted using the public key of the destination ID without header. Consequently there is no way to know who can decrypt this plain 16-bytes key and peers need to try their own keys to check whether they are the destination or not. A hint system however allows to limit the cost of trying all possible keys without fully disclosing the destination. We’re currently working on a way to implement Perfect Forward Secrecy within this system.

• Nuvola Player runs a web-based interface of cloud music services in its own window and provides integration with a Linux desktop (multimedia keys, system tray, media player applets, dock menu, notifications and more) offers more native user experience and integration with Linux desktop environments than usual web browsers can offer. .Nuvola Player is an open-source project licensed under GNU GPL 3 and written mainly in Vala (the core) and JavaScript (service integrations). It tries to feel and look like a native application as possible. However, it cannot overcome common drawbacks of web-based music streaming: some music streaming services require Flash plugin and web apps usually have higher memory usage than native apps.

• There are so many different text editors out there, some have a GUI, some are terminal based; and so many people prefer different ones for different reasons.

• With all that said, there are times when I stumble upon new piece of software that seems to stand out above the rest, and in the case of text editors; Atom has done just that.

• Atom is a hackable text editor, meaning that it can be customized almost to an extreme, but yet, is perfectly usable and awesome even just with its default setup.

• It’s also available for Windows and MacOS X, but truth be told I’ve only really encountered people using it on GNU/Linux. Not to say there aren’t people using it on other platforms, just my own observations.

Instructionals/Technical

• MQTT stands for Message Queue Telemetry Transport. As its name suggests, it’s a protocol for transporting messages between two points. Sure, we’ve got Messenger and Skype for that; but what makes MQTT so special is its super lightweight architecture, which is ideal for scenarios where bandwidth is not optimal.

• The old saying is if your data isn’t backed up at least twice, it’s not backed up at all. For those not wise enough to heed this adage, there are a number of options available to you if you wish your data to be recovered. Assuming the drive itself is just corrupted somehow (maybe a malicious attack, maybe a user error) and not damaged beyond physical repair, the first step is to connect the drive to another computer. If that fails, it might be time to break out the computer forensics skills.

Wine or Emulation

• WINE is a tool that allows Linux users to run select Windows applications without the need for a Windows installation. Yet historically, even with this tool, running Windows software with WINE on Linux has been very hit and miss.

• However now that WINE 2.14 is available, I believe we may finally see the year of WINE on Linux. In order for WINE to be of any value to an individual or company, it must run legacy applications not otherwise available for Linux users. With WINE 2.14, I think we may finally be approaching that hard corner where we can claim that this is happening. Let me share some examples.

• The Wine Staging release 2.14 is now available.

• Building off last week’s Wine 2.14 feature update is now a re-based version of Wine-Staging that also tacks on a few extra features.

• Most prominent to Wine-Staging 2.14 is a basic User Access Control (UAC) implementation that Windows uses for limiting or granting user/administrative rights. In Wine’s context this UAC implementation doesn’t mean much but is mostly there for appeasing Windows programs expecting certain security rights be setup for their environment, not that Wine’s security is going to be any different.

• PPSSPP is a PSP emulator (PPSSPP an acronym for “PlayStation Portable Simulator Suitable for Playing Portably”), PPSSPP is an open source project and cross platform available for Linux, Windows and Mac (The source code also unofficially supports a wide variety of operating systems and platforms, including Raspberry Pi, Loongson, Maemo, Meego Harmattan and Pandora). it is licensed under the GNU GPL-v2 and written in C++ language, it translates PSP CPU instructions directly into optimized x86, x64 and ARM machine code, using JIT recompilers (dynarecs). It lets you run PSP games on PC in full HD resolution but you may not get perfect results. It can even upscale textures that would otherwise be too blurry as they were made for the small screen of the original PSP.

• ​PPSSPP Emulator is an application that supports installing and playing of PlayStation Portable games on Linux and other desktop operating systems such windows, MAC OS X among others. Just like other emulators, it is meant to improve the quality of PSP games on PCs as they are normally designed for low graphics and small screens. Using PPSSPP on your PC provides several options for improving the quality of graphics by allowing a user to customize; FPS, Screenplay size by upscaling graphics that would otherwise be blur. As a result, those who enjoy playing PSP games can enjoy them on PCs, Apple, and even Android devices. They benefit from improved graphics at least.

Games

• An id Software programmer is expected to soon release his port of Doom 3 BFG to the Vulkan renderer rather than OpenGL.

• Dustin Land of id Software has been working on “vkneo”, his unofficial/personal project to port Doom 3 to using Vulkan rather than OpenGL. This isn’t an official id Software project but is along similar lines to id’s Axel Gneiting working on vkQuake, the port of Quake to Vulkan.

• Sadly, Artifact’s reveal was not followed with anything in the way of screenshots or gameplay. Instead, Plott described having played test versions of the game already, and his brief description hinted at a one-on-one digital card-battling game, like Hearthstone, only with a Dota-themed three-lane system and other Dota-like tweaks.

• Valve dropped a teaser overnight on finally a new, original game… Artifact. They describe it as a “Dota card game” for those interested.

• Artifact is drawing mixed responses so far on YouTube and Reddit from those that were hoping Valve’s next game would be another installment of Half Life, Portal, or Left 4 Dead rather than a digital card game themed around Dota. Details on Artifact are still very limited, but that it will be released in 2018.

• Artifact, a new card game based on the Dota 2 universe has been announced by Valve as the latest kick in the balls for everyone waiting on Half-Life 3.

• Gangs of Space [Steam, Official Site], a free to play MMO the developers are calling a ‘Rogue Shmup’ will release into Early Access on August 10th, it will include Linux support.

• A new DLC ‘mini-expansion’ has been announced for Cities: Skylines that will allow you to put on concerts in your city. The DLC is aptly named Cities: Skylines – Concerts DLC [Official Site].

• Slime Rancher [Official Site], easily one of the sweetest releases lately has a post-launch update, which features a long awaited mapping system. No longer will you feel lost constantly, as you can now activate map nodes in each zone.

• Virtual Programming also listed “A Hat in Time” [Official Site] as coming to Linux & Switch…

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Victory Gtk theme is not new and the initial release was way back in April, 2010. The development was stopped then creator started working again on this theme a while ago. The entire theme is recreated as a vibrant, elegant, bright and flat using minimalistic approach. From day one this theme is targeting Xfce and Lxde desktops but now it does work in Gnome and Cinnamon desktops as well without any issue, and Openbox desktop also supported by this theme. It is available for Gtk 3.18/3.22/2.24 that means you can install it in Ubuntu 17.10/17.04/16.04 and Linux Mint 18, as well as other related Ubuntu derivatives. There is also Victory icon theme available by the same creator which we did share in past and below you can find the commands to install those icons as well. If you find any kind of bug or problem with the theme then report it creator and hopefully it will get fixed in the next update.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Akademy 2017 was held in Almeria, Spain for a week full of discussion around the Plasma project. Our VDG team was represented by Jens Reutenberg (jensreu) and Andy Betts (anditosan). Our aim at the event was to provide help to many of the developers who gathered at the event and needed help in designing new applications using guidelines or just coming up with design ideas.

• Akademy is the oldest yearly meeting of KDE programmers. This year I attended for the tenth time.

• Dublin in 2006 was my first Akademy. I will never forget it. It was my first time meeting the people from whom I learned so much.

• The GSoC student developer working on “Brooklyn”, the protocol-independent chat bridge for KDE systems and written in Java, has declared his project a success. In ending out the GSoC summer work, he has released Brooklyn v0.2 and has deemed it ready for production use.

• The Brooklyn chat program for KDE as of version 0.2 supports the Telegram, IRC, and Rocket Chat services.

• For Debian 9 users who want to use it without too many configurations, there is an Ansible config ready to be used.

• Randa 2015 was about bringing touch to KDE apps and interfaces. At Randa 2016, developers worked on building frameworks that would allow KDE apps to work on a wider range of operating systems, like Windows, MacOS and Android.

• Randa Meetings 2017 will be all about accessibility.

• At KDE, we understand that using an application – be it an email client, a video editor, or even educational games aimed at children – is not always easy. Different conditions and abilities require different ways of interacting with apps. The same app design will not work equally well for somebody with 20/20 vision and for somebody visually impaired. You cannot expect somebody with reduced mobility to be able to nimbly click around your dialogue boxes.

• This year we want to focus on things that have had a tendency to fall by the wayside; on solving the problems that are annoying, even deal-breaking for some, but not for everyone.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• It’s not often that I get to write about a new desktop shell — especially one I’ve never heard of! So when a reader mailed me this ask to ask exactly that, I had to say yes.

• The desktop shell in question is Manokwari. It’s built for GNOME 3 using GTK+ and HTML5 and is, I’m told, an evolution of an earlier project called blankon-panel. That project didn’t ring any bells with me, but it may for you as blankon-panel, now Manokwari, is the desktop used by the BlankOn Linux distribution.

• I attended my first GUADEC this year which was held at Manchester, UK. One of the reason I started contributing to GNOME was becasue of the family like community it has. Being a newcomer at GNOME, I felt so welcomed and part of this huge family at GUADEC!

• One week ago attended this years GUADEC (Gnome User And Developer European Conference) taking place at the MMU Birley Fields Campus in Manchester, UK.

• Unfortunately I could not attend the first half of Day 1 so I missed some nice talks, but I just arrived in time to present my work on the cloud provider API for the Google Summer of Code at the Interns lightning talks. You can find my slides here. It was really amazing to hear about all the other interesting project going on and also meeting people to talk about the stuff they were doing. I also got a lot of positive feedback on my own GSoC project which was really motivating to me.

• [...]

• The first talk was done by Jonathan Blandford who gave an entertaining overview of the history of the GNOME project and how it evolved from having 5 different clocks to a user experience focused desktop environment just by removing more and more features. In the second one by Neil McGovern, the current GNOME Foundation Executive Director, was more a overall look at the near future and how free software and a free desktop system could have an influence on that.

• I attended my first GUADEC this year, held in beautiful city of Manchester. I am in general not very enthusiastic about social meetings but GUADEC was something I always wished to attend and I am glad I did.

• Most of the time when you’re distributing firmware you have permission from the OEM or ODM to redistribute the non-free parts of the system firmware, e.g. Dell can re-distribute the proprietary Intel Management Engine as part as the firmware capsule that gets flashed onto the hardware. In some cases that’s not possible, for example for smaller vendors or people selling OpenHardware. In this case I’m trying to help Purism distribute firmware updates for their hardware, and they’re only able to redistribute the Free Software coreboot part of the firmware. For reasons (IFD, FMAP and CBFS…) you need to actually build the target firmware on the system you’re deploying onto, where build means executing random low-level tools to push random blobs of specific sizes into specific unnecessarily complex partition formats rather than actually compiling .c into executable code. The current solution is a manually updated interactive bash script which isn’t awesome from a user-experience or security point of view. The other things vendors have asked for in the past is a way to “dd” a few bytes of randomness into the target image at a specific offset and also to copy the old network MAC address into the new firmware. I figured fwupd should probably handle this somewhat better than a random bash script running as root on your live system.

• When I first got involved in GNOME, one of the things that struck me was how principled it was. The members of the project had a strong set of values, both about what they were doing and why they were doing it. It was inspiring to see this and it’s one of the things that really made me want to get more involved.

• Over the years that I’ve participated in the project, I’ve been able to get a better sense of GNOME’s principles and the role that they play in the project. They are the subject of this post.

• The principles that the members of the GNOME project hold in common play an important practical role. They make problem-solving more efficient, by providing a basis on which decisions can be made. They also help to coordinate activities across the project.

Distributions

New Releases

• This release of GParted includes enhancements, bug fixes and language translation updates.

• GParted, the widely-used GNOME/GTK Partition Editor for Linux systems, is out with a new release and is joined by an updated GParted Live, the live CD/USB Linux distribution for editing your partitions/file-systems.

Gentoo Family

• I am happy to announce that my work on packaging ScyllaDB for Gentoo Linux is complete!

• Happy or curious users are very welcome to share their thoughts and ping me to get it into portage (which will very likely happen).

Arch Family

• A new month, a new ISO snapshot of the popular and lightweight Arch Linux operating system surfaces, bringing us fresh packages and all of last month’s security patches for easy deployment on new computers.

• Arch Linux 2017.08.01 has been released, and it’s now available for download if you want to reinstall your Arch Linux OS for various reasons or deploy the GNU/Linux distribution on new PCs without going through all the hustle of download hundreds of updates from the official repositories after the installation.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• The Linux best project openSUSE Project releases its latest & most powerful Linux based operating system openSUSE Leap 42.3 brings the community version aligned with its core of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12.

• The Linux users, administrators & developers use the newest chameleon distribution with the support of mutual packages of both Leap & SLE distributions. The leap 42.3 new release has SUSE adopters including server OS so as to deploy IT in physical, virtual & cloud environments.

• openSUSE Leap 42.3 is the Leap’s 3rd edition which has more than 10,000 packages and offers better stability for the Linux users with a new refresh hardware enables release.The release is powered by Linux 4.4 Long-Term-Support (LTS) kernel. Leap 42.3 supports KDE’s Long-Term-Support LTS release 5.8 as the default desktop selection. It also offers GNOME 3.20 as well as SUSE Linux Enterprise support.

Red Hat Family

• Slow growth in Latin American countries in recent years has stood open source software giant RedHat in good stead as companies seek to reduce costs and innovate to create new business models.

• “Often what is a limitation to certain companies during an economic downturn, like budget cuts, is favorable for us. We’re not so exposed to economic fluctuations. We’re counter cyclical,” Adrián Cambareri (pictured) Latin America region manager for Red hat’s infrastructure business group, told BNamericas, speaking on the sidelines of the RedHat Forum in Santiago, Chile.

• Red Hat issued its quarterly update to the OpenShift platform today, adding among other things, a Service Catalog that enables IT or third-party vendors to create connections to internal or external services.

• OpenShift is RedHat’s Platform as a Service, based on Kubernetes, the open source container management platform, which was originally developed by Google. It also supports Docker, a popular container platform, and adheres to the Open Container Initiative, a set of industry standards for containers, according to the company.

• As companies make the shift from virtual machines to containers, there is an increasing need for platforms like OpenShift, and Red Hat is seeing massive interest from companies as varying as Deutsche Bank, Volvo and United Health.

Finance

Fedora

• We recently interviewed William Beauford and Bryan Rhodes on how they use Fedora. This is part of a series on the Fedora Magazine. The series profiles Fedora users and how they use Fedora to get things done. Contact us on the feedback form to express your interest in becoming a interviewee.

• Ankur Sinha (“FranciscoD”) is a Free Software supporter and has been with the Fedora community for the better part of a decade now. Rahul Sundaram mentored him as font package maintainer in his early days with Fedora. Ankur has since branched out to acquaint himself with many other teams and SIGs.

• He is a Fedora Workstation user, and prefers to use the terminal as much as possible. Currently, he is working on his PhD in computational neuroscience in the UK. When he does have time to spare, he focuses on the Fedora Join SIG and on maintaining his packages.

Debian Family

• Due to some technical issues, it took a slight bit longer than I’d originally expected; but the first four videos of the currently running DebConf 17 conference are available. Filenames are based on the talk title, so that should be reasonably easy to understand. I will probably add an RSS feed (like we’ve done for DebConf 16) to that place some time soon as well, but code for that still needs to be written.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• We like the way Canonical keeps the community behind its popular Ubuntu Linux operating system up-to-date with what’s going on behind closed doors, and a new newsletter from Ubuntu Foundations Team is out now.

• The Ubuntu Foundations Team newsletters highlight some of the biggest things happing behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system, and we’d like to inform the reader about some of them, too, in particular those affecting the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) release.

• For over four years now, the Ubuntu Community Portal has been the ‘welcome mat’ for new people seeking to get involved in Ubuntu. In that time the site had seen some valuable but minor incremental changes; no major updates have occurred recently. I’d like us to fix this. We can also use this as an opportunity to improve our whole onboarding process.

• On August 14th, at the Javits Convention Center in midtown Manhattan, Canonical will be participating in the AWS Summit. Ubuntu has long been popular with users of AWS due to its stability, regular cadence of releases, and scale-out-friendly usage model. Canonical optimizes, builds, and regularly publishes the latest Ubuntu images to the EC2 Quickstart and AWS Marketplace, which ensures the best Ubuntu experience for developers using AWS’s cloud services. And in April, we even launched an AWS-tuned kernel, which provides up to 30% faster boot speeds, on a 15% smaller kernel package, as well as many other features.

• A world of change is headed to Ubuntu as the distro switches from Unity to GNOME Shell. Long time Unity users accustomed to the workflow, feature set and quirks of Ubuntu’s incumbent releases will need to adapt to different ways of doing familiar things in its upcoming ones.

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #515 for the week of August 1 – 7, 2017, and the full version is available here.

Devices/Embedded

• iWave’s ARM-based “OBD II” car computer features 4G LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, an IMU, and an OBD II connector to onboard telematics.

• iWave’s “Connected Car Device – OBD II” is an OEM-focused automotive device for fleet management, driving behavior, insurance company monitoring, cab aggregators, remote diagnostics, two-wheeler applications, and “immobilization,” which may refer to breathalyzer connected gear.

• Back in the old days, if you wanted to record guitar music at home (or, stereotypically, in your garage), you got an electric guitar (or another instrument capable of making noise, such as a synthesizer), an amp to produce the sound, some effect pedals to customize the sound, and a multi-track recorder such as a 4-track or 8-track recorder. You would plug the guitar into the effects pedals, the pedals into the amp, and the amp into the recorder (or you might mic the amp and record that).

Tizen

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Increased use of open source software could fortify U.S. election system security, according to an op-ed published last week in The New York Times.

• Former CIA head R. James Woolsey and Bash creator Brian J. Fox made their case for open source elections software after security researchers demonstrated how easy it was to crack some election machines in the Voting Machine Hacking Village staged at the recent DefCon hacking conference in Las Vegas.

• If you have decided that open source is right for your business, then there’s a plethora to choose from these days. It may take some trial and error, but once you find the right program, you will be good to go and can start watching your savings grow. For a comprehensive office suite, Apache OpenOffice is a highly-rated substitute for Microsoft Office that runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. For finance and accounting programs like Quicken, a great open source option is GnuCash, which also runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. Lastly, for an alternative to large, expensive ERPs, the popular ADempiere, which runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and Unix, can help your small business with things like material management, project management, as well as finance and human resources.

• Former CIA director R. James Woolsey and legendary free software creator Brian “bash” Fox took to the New York Times’s op-ed page to explain that proprietary software and voting machines don’t mix, because unless anyone who wants to can audit the software that powers the nation’s elections, exploitable bugs will lurk in them, ready to be used by bad guys to screw up the vote-count.

• Inocybe Technologies is banking on the continued growth of open source-based software-defined networking (SDN) controllers. The company is expanding the physical reach of its operations and depth of its leadership team.

• I thought my mind was through getting blown until I heard in mid-June 2017 that Brave raised $35 million in less than 30 seconds, though an ICO (Initial Coin Offering). I did know ICOs were hot stuff. I also knew Brave’s ICO was about to happen, because Brendan Eich, the company CEO, said so over breakfast two days earlier. So my seat belt was fastened, but the acceleration of the ICO still left my mental ass on the pavement two counties back.

• Since then, I’ve hyper-focused on cryptocurrencies, tokens, distributed ledgers, ICOs and the rest of it for two reasons. One is that there is a craze going on. See Figure 1.

• Everyone wants to hop onthe bandwagon of Open Source application development for the most obvious reason, eliminating commercial software licensing costs. However, an organization’s decision-makers need to consider a much more complicated set of Open Source advantages and disadvantages before making a commitment on its development strategy.

• At the start, it seems there are more questions than answers. What are the constraints local government agencies have in embracing the Open Source culture? How do you prepare an organization to move from proprietary, vendor-supported software development practices to a non-commercial, community-based environment? Why should a municipal government agency invest in a new technology practice that manyconsider risky, and that needs significant upfront investment in new computing environments and training? What are the right Open Source frameworks, code, and systems supported by a robust development community?

• This discussiontries to answer these questions by describing one initiative undertaken by the New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT). We successfully ventured into Open Source development practices for a major IT system replacement moving from mainframe to web.

• This is the second episode from the series, “The Faces of Open Source Law,” by Shane Martin Coughlan. The series puts a face to the vibrant open source community, and the fascinating discussions happening within it, through a series of interviews that we’ll be sharing here. This first “season” focuses on issues related to law (copyright, licensing, patents, foundations, governance, etc.) and includes interviews with several current and former OSI Board Directors.

• In addition, Shane has graciously offered his own insights from the interviews, which we’ve included below.

• Clearly, Kubernetes is an elegant solution to an important problem. Kubernetes allows us to run containerized applications at scale without drowning in the details of balancing loads, networking containers, ensuring high availability for apps, or managing updates or rollbacks. So much complexity is hidden safely away.

• But using Kubernetes is not without its challenges. Getting up and running with Kubernetes takes some work, and many of the management and maintenance tasks around Kubernetes are downright thorny.

• As active as Kubernetes development is, we can’t expect the main project to solve every problem immediately. Fortunately, the community around Kubernetes is finding solutions to those problems that, for one reason or another, the Kubernetes team hasn’t zeroed in on.

• Open source software has come a long way since the turn of the century. Every year, more and more people are embracing open source technology and development models. Not just people, though—corporations and governments are exploring open source solutions, too. From the White House to the Italian army, open source is appearing more frequently in the public sector. One of the newest additions to the list is the municipality of Tirana, Albania.

• Mobile telephone service provider Vodafone Group has joined Prpl Foundation an open-source consortium with a focus on enabling the security and interoperability of embedded devices.

• With such an array of data types, sizes and uses, Bierweiler advocates for state and local agencies to embrace enterprise open source platforms to address users’ many needs.

• The boldly named Essentials for Kubernetes product is the firm’s first commercial packaged platform. The product is specifically targeted at management of the container networking space, which includes a set of interfaces for adding and removing containers from a network.

• [...]

• Tigera is targeting a handful of connectivity platforms, including Container Networking Interface (CNI), its own Calico offer, Flannel, and Istio.

• Tigera has been a proponent of CNI, with Tipirneni explaining the firm’s history of contributing to the standard.

• CNI was initially proposed by CoreOS to define a common interface between network plugins and container execution. It has limited responsibility over network connectivity of containers, and it removes allocated resources when the container is deleted.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• It’s not yet official, but the Firefox 55.0 open-source and cross-platform web browser is now available for download on GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

• Mozilla will make the release of Firefox 55 official on August 8, 2017, but you can get an early taste right now by downloading the binary or source packages for supported OSes from Mozilla’s FTP servers if you can’t wait to update your Firefox web browser through OTA updates.

• And it just happens that we got our hands on the preliminary release notes that were seeded on the Beta channel since Firefox 55 entered development on June 14, 2017. Thirteen RCs later and the final release of Firefox 55.0 is now ready to be savored on your favorite operating system.

• Firefox 55 features a number of welcome improvements in memory usage and startup time, and offers ‘search suggestions’ in the URL bar.

• Perhaps you’re starting to see a pattern – we’re working furiously to make Firefox faster and better than ever. And today we’re shipping a new release that’s our best yet, one that introduces exciting, empowering new technologies for creators as well as improves the everyday experience for all Firefox users.

• [...]

• Are you a tab hoarder? As part of our Quantum Flow project to improve performance, we’ve significantly reduced the time it takes to start Firefox when restoring tabs from a previous session. Just how much faster are things now? Mozillian Dietrich Ayala ran an interesting experiment, comparing how long it takes to start various versions of Firefox with a whopping 1,691 tabs open. The end result? What used to take nearly eight minutes, now takes just 15 seconds.

• Today, we are announcing the Mozilla Information Trust Initiative (MITI)—a comprehensive effort to keep the Internet credible and healthy. Mozilla is developing products, research, and communities to battle information pollution and so-called ‘fake news’ online. And we’re seeking partners and allies to help us do so.

BSD

• There’s a new facility in DragonFly: kcollect(8). It holds automatically-collected kernel data for about the last day, and can output to gnuplot. Note the automatic collection part; your system will always be able to tell you about weirdness – assuming that weirdness extends to one of the features kcollect tracks.

Licensing/Legal

• At the upcoming Open Source Summit in Los Angeles, Lars Kurth, director of Open Source Solutions at Citrix and chair of the Advisory Board of the Xen Project at The Linux Foundation, will be delivering a wealth of practical advice in two conference talks.

• The first talk is “Mixed License FOSS Projects: Unintended Consequences, Worked Examples, Best Practices” and the second talk is “Live Patching, Virtual Machine Introspection and Vulnerability Management: A Primer and Practical Guide.”

• Here, Kurth explains more about what he will be covering in these presentations.

• While we await the Mir 1.0 release with its new target of supporting Wayland clients directly, we noticed there was a re-licensing change this week for the Mir code-base.

• Previously the Mir code was licensed under the GPLv3 for the Mir server and LGPLv3 for the client code. The license has now been updated to reflect GPLv2 or GPLv3 for the Mir server code and LGPLv2 or LGPLv3 for the Mir client code.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• Maps have been helping humans find their way since the beginning of recorded time, but in the modern era of data, who owns the map you use, and what effect does that have on how you can use it?

• OpenStreetMap (OSM) was founded to provide a way for the global community to construct a map of the world which is available for anyone to use, for any purpose they see fit, under a free and open license.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Before answering this, let’s consider the broader issue of whether open standards automatically mean open source. Open standards are widespread in technology. The communication protocols TCP/IP have been an open standard for decades. In wireless communication, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are open standards with multiple versions. In IC design, Verilog is an open standard maintained by the IEEE, and a widely used hardware description language. Verilog is used by a variety of commercial and open source simulators. Incisive, Questa, and VCS are examples of well-known commercial simulators supporting Verilog, however Cver is an example of an open source Verilog simulator. Generally, the commercial Verilog simulators are recognized for their high quality and performance.

Programming/Development

• Google’s fabled internal build system Blaze, has been copied into a few open source technologies over the years. Most notable are Buck from Facebook and Bazel from Google. Pants by Twitter, Foursquare and Square. Blaze inside Google navigates a single directed graph across their entire monorepo. Blaze has a mechanism of direct association of test to production code. That mechanism is a fine grained directory tree of production sources and associated test sources. It has explicit dependency declarations via BUILD files that were checked in too. Those BUILD files could be maintained and evolved by the developers, but could also be verified as correct or incorrect by automated tooling. That process repeated over time goes a long way to make the directed graphs correct and efficient.

• Just released data from a survey of more than 150 managers by CA Technologies underscores that fact — only 12% say their entire organization is on a path to achieving an Agile development model, even while 70% say they know it’s the process that can help them be organized and respond faster.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• In this series, Sharon Lerner exposes DuPont’s multi-decade cover-up of the severe harms to health associated with a chemical known as PFOA, or C8, and associated compounds such as PFOS and GenX.

• After years of litigation over PFOA, an industrial toxin used to make Teflon and other non-stick and stain-resistant products, in 2009 DuPont introduced GenX. Now the slippery substitute has followed the path of the molecule it replaced, contaminating water near plants in West Virginia and North Carolina and attracting its own intense legal interest.

• The lawsuits over PFOA exposed the chemical’s links to several diseases, including kidney and testicular cancer. Like PFOA, also known as C8, GenX is a perfluorinated compound, and as with PFOA, GenX was the subject of internal DuPont research showing it poses many of the same health concerns as the original chemical. Also like PFOA, GenX persists indefinitely in the environment.

• For the plant-based “Impossible Burger” that bleeds like real meat, venture capitalists have forked over millions, and high-profile chefs have called in orders for their swanky eateries. But the Food and Drug Administration, it seems, has chewed it up and spit out safety concerns.

• The agency informed Impossible Foods, the company behind the famous faux burger, that it has not proven the safety of the food additive being used to simulate blood and meat-like taste—a protein from the roots of soybean plants called soy leghemoglobin. The protein has not been used in foods before and may be an allergen, the agency said. The concern was revealed in documents obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request filed by environmental and consumer groups, including the ETC Group. The documents were then reviewed by The New York Times.

Security

• Serverless applications by their nature are heavily decomposed into a variety of services, such as autonomous functions, object storage, authentication services, document databases, and pub/sub message queues. The interfaces between these services are typically HTTPS. When you’re using the AWS SDK to call an AWS services, the interface it’s calling under the hood is an HTTPS interface. This is true for the majority of cloud platforms, with some alternative protocols occasionally being used (WebSockets and MQTT) in specific use cases.

• For today’s system administrators, gaining competencies that move them up the technology stack and broaden their skillsets is increasingly important. However, core skills like networking remain just as crucial. Previously in this series, we’ve provided an overview of essentials and looked at evolving network skills. In this part, we focus on another core skill: security.

• With ever more impactful security threats emerging, the demand for fluency with network security tools and practices is increasing for sysadmins. That means understanding everything from the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model to devices and protocols that facilitate communication across a network.

• While fighting botnets like Mirai and BrickerBot with another botnet, Hajime, may help prevent denial-of-service attacks on the IoT, the best defense is a basic system security-hardening plan.

• Software development relies heavily on trust, especially when it comes to open source components. JavaScript developers recently got a reminder just how fragile the trust model is with the news that 39 malicious packages were removed from npm, the Node.js package management registry.

• The fines will be seen as a “last resort” and only apply if the organisation is deemed to have not taken appropriate security measures. Organisations that have “assessed the risks adequately, taken appropriate security measures, and engaged with competent authorities but still suffered an attack” will not face the fines.

• Beginner Linux administrators and users should know that even though the operating system is deemed secure, there are many pitfalls and details to consider. Linux security may be there by default but the various distributions may opt to enable certain “user-friendly” features and programs that can potentially expose the machines to risks.

• It must be repeated over and over: people who discover security flaws and report them are not the enemy. And yet, company after company after company treat security researchers and concerned users like criminals, threatening them with lawsuits and arrests rather than thanking them for bringing the issue to their attention.

Defence/Aggression

• With recent cable news appearances, Prince appears to be trying to grab the ear of the president, but it may be something he’s had for quite some time already.

• The foreign minister of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), Ri Hong-Yo, said on Monday that his country has no intention to use nuclear weapons against any other country except the United States.

• Ri, in Manila to attend the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), said DPRK “is a responsible nuclear power and ICBM state,” referring to the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.

• “We have no intention to use nuclear weapons or threaten with nuclear weapons against any other country except the U.S., unless it joins action of the U.S. against DPRK,” Ri said in a statement to the ARF.

• North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, U.S. intelligence officials have concluded in a confidential assessment.

• Let’s start with the obvious. A war on the Korean peninsula benefits no one and is really, really bad for everyone (we’ll get to the irrational madman theory in a moment.)

• Any conflict means the end of North Korea, and the end of the Kim dynasty. The U.S. will win any fight, nuclear or not, and Kim and everyone with any power or money in the North knows that. North Korea has no reason to start a war that will end in its own destruction. The people there with power and money do not want to give those things up.

• August 6 usually doesn’t make headlines in America. But mark the day by what absence demonstrates: on the 72nd anniversary of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and some 140,000 non-combatants, there is no call for reflection in the United States.

• In an era where pundits routinely worry about America’s loss of moral standing because of an offish, ill-mannered president, the only nation in history to employ a weapon of mass destruction on an epic scale, against an undefended civilian population, otherwise shrugs off the significance of an act of immorality.

• But it is August 6, and so let us talk about Hiroshima.

• Beyond the destruction lies the myth of the atomic bombings, the post-war creation of a mass memory of things that did not happen. This myth has become the underpinning of American war policy ever since, and carries forward the horrors of Hiroshima as generations of August 6’s pass.

• The only indication in Tokyo that any war at all took place is tucked away in the Yushukan War Memorial Museum. Attached to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where the souls of Japan’s war dead reside (including some who committed war crimes), Yushukan is in its own way a marker of things cleaned up and things buried. The building houses carefully curated artifacts from the war. The choices speak of things almost no Japanese person, and few Japanese textbooks, will otherwise talk about.

• [...]

• But no matter how many truly genuine smiles or how many Big Macs, you can’t get away. Hiroshima is an imperfect place, and one which will not easily allow you to forget the terrible things that preceeded its day of infamy.

• Outside of Japan, most people feel the Japanese government has yet to fully acknowledge its aggressiveness in plunging East Asia into war. Indeed, the museum inside the Peace Park has been chastised as focusing almost exclusively on a single day, out of a war that began over a decade earlier and claimed millions of innocent lives before the bomb fell on August 6, 1945. The criticism is particularly sharp, given the rise in militarism occurring under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Now, as in decades past, China watches to see what Japan will do with its armed forces.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• During the campaign, it was easy to scoff at President Donald Trump’s promise to build a “big, beautiful” concrete wall along the US-Mexico border. It sounded, well, preposterous.

• But now the prospect of a border wall is quite real. Trump has requested $1.6 billion for fiscal year 2018 to build three segments totaling 74 miles. The Department of Homeland Security is planning to construct four to eight border wall prototypes in San Diego this summer.

• In 1990, during the presidency of the first George Bush, Congress passed the Global Change Research Act. Along with reorganizing government-funded climate research, the Act stipulates that, every four years, the federal agencies involved provide an update on the state of climate science.

• It has been four years, and the next report’s draft has been completed and has undergone scientific vetting.

• The draft paints a grim picture of how the US is already dealing with a variety of issues related to climate change and how much worse most of those issues will get during the coming decades. And the report places the blame squarely on humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.

• This message won’t go over well with the administration of President Donald Trump, which has a number of members who are openly hostile to the scientific community’s conclusions. As a result, a lot of people are worried that the report will never be formally published or its conclusions will be watered down by further edits. These are the fears that undoubtedly prompted someone to leak the draft to The New York Times.

Finance

• According to a report by white-collar union federation Akava, an increasing number of experts and executives have a non-compete clause in their contracts. Akava says this makes it unnecessarily hard for employees to switch jobs. Industrial employers lobbyist EK says the clauses are necessary.

• In a BBC interview this week, the president of the United Kingdom supreme court posed an apparently simple question. After Brexit, Lord Neuberger asked, should the UK judges take into account the rulings of the European court of justice or not? Britain’s most senior judge, who steps down next month, was very clear about his own answer: “If the UK parliament says we should take into account decisions of the ECJ then we will do so. If it says we shouldn’t then we won’t.”

• Constitutionally, this was an impeccable answer to his own question. Parliament makes laws; judges interpret them. Yet politically, and even legally, it leaves many profound questions unresolved. The starting point of Lord Neuberger’s unease may well be the current drafting of clause 6 of the government’s EU withdrawal bill, which says that the UK court “need not have regard” to the ECJ’s rulings after Brexit day, while adding that it “may do so if it considers it appropriate to do so”. In essence, this means the decision to take account of the ECJ is up to the UK courts.

• We are plausibly living through the endgame of a neoliberalism that has drastically over-reached itself. The great value of Corbynism is its recognition of this reality. It is why I voted for Jeremy Corbyn to lead Labour twice, and also why I was not entirely surprised by the election result.

• Labour suffered a precipitous decline in support after the mid-2000s because of an absence of a convincing narrative, and an unwillingness to decisively challenge the decaying neoliberal ‘consensus’. The party’s fortunes have changed now that it has offered something different. We can of course argue about whether Corbynism is really a radical departure or not, something Matt Bolton has done very eloquently. Regardless, there is no doubt that in June, for the first time since 2001, millions of people voted enthusiastically for Labour, rather than grudgingly against the alternatives.

• Whenever reality enters the Brexit debate, its supporters in parliament go beserk. They’re not used to it. Throughout the referendum campaign and the year that followed, the topic was covered like some sort of fairytale. Leading Brexiters could say whatever they liked without anyone challenging them.

• Then the negotiations began and objective reality invaded our daydream. A report in the Sunday Telegraph cited Whitehall figures suggesting they would offer a divorce bill of £36bn to move talks on to future trade arrangements. The EU side is reported to be expecting something around the €75bn (£66bn) mark.

• Citing headline figures is unhelpful. The talks will take place by agreeing broad principles on assets and liabilities and then seeing what kinds of numbers they produce. There are two main calculations: the financial framework liability and pensions.

• EU financial frameworks work in seven-year cycles, with the current one agreed in 2013. Member states decide in advance how much they will spend for the years ahead, covering everything from academic research grants in Romania to decommissioning nuclear power stations in France. The EU is likely to argue that we’re on the hook until the end of 2020, when the existing period ends.

• This hurts. This almost makes me despair of politics. Why invest such emotion, such hope in what a well-intentioned new government can do, only to see it all torn from the roots and trashed at the next roll of the electoral dice?

• [...]

• And under this government? The Institute for Fiscal Studies expects a million more children in poverty by 2020. Severe benefit cuts have stripped away the tax credits that powered Labour’s child poverty reduction. Incomes stagnate or fall, with far worse to come as universal credit rolls out. The latest Eurostat figures show nine out of the 10 poorest regions in northern Europe are here in Britain – and so is the EU’s richest place, London.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Trump’s painful public gaffes, they warn, indicate that he’s not reading, retaining, or listening to his Presidential briefings.

• Months after he left office to become Trump’s running mate, former Indiana governor Mike Pence is finally releasing emails from his personal AOL accounts. This sort of thing would normally be reserved for only the wonkiest of public records wonks, but the Trump campaign spent a great deal of time deriding Hillary Clinton for using a personal email account to handle official State Department email.

• It’s slightly more of a big deal, thanks to Pence’s efforts to keep these emails from becoming public. He went to court late last year to protect the content of certain emails from being released. Pence’s lawyer actually argued the court had no business telling the governor’s office what can and can’t be redacted. So much for the idea of checks and balances.

• We have requested records on any coordination on DACA between state officials and members of the Trump administration.

• The ACLU filed public records requests today in 10 states that have launched a legal attack on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The requests seek to uncover any coordination by state officials and members of the Trump administration to take down the DACA program.

• We’ve filed these requests because the Trump administration continues to speak out of both sides of its mouth on DACA, leaving the future of the program in doubt. President Trump has described Dreamers as “absolutely incredible kids” who have “worked here” and “gone to school here,” assuring them that they “should rest easy” about being allowed to stay in the country. At the same time, other administration officials have long opposed DACA — including Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

• This matters now because DACA is under attack. In late June, 10 states — led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — wrote Sessions demanding that the Trump administration agree to end the program. If the administration refuses to fall in line by September 5, the states will seek to amend a lawsuit pending in the federal district court in Brownsville, Texas, to stop the program.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Egyptian authorities have continued to block websites, this time targeting the site of a human rights group as well as a columnist’s blog.

• Over the weekend of August 5, the government blocked the website of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), which documents and reports on human rights violations in Egypt and across the Arab region.

• As you are likely aware, we are currently facing a First Amendment fight for our life. I’ve spoken about the chilling effects the lawsuit has been having on our reporting — but also have noted that we are trying to be inspired by this situation to focus more of our reporting efforts on attacks on free speech online, and to tell the stories of those who they’re impacting most. As you may recall, we have already launched the crowdfunding site ISupportJournalism.com to support our ability to continue reporting on these issues, and I’m happy to announce today that we’ve further partnered with the Freedom of the Press Foundation and a group of other companies and organizations to fund more free speech reporting, which will now be included under a new “free speech” tab on the site. Attacks on free speech have been growing, not shrinking, and we need to shine much more light on these attacks, and we’re thrilled to be able to do as much as we can.

• With its independent editorial voice, Al Jazeera (a media outlet where I have contributed articles) is the only major media outlet in the Gulf state region committed to watching and reporting on atrocities, and the persistent threats to human rights and democratic freedom of expression. Al Jazeera has stepped in when others — including the US and Europe — have remained silent. In exchange for silence, American and European interests have preserved and extended lucrative relationships in business as well as defense contracts.

• Should a Canadian court be able to prevent U.S.-based Internet users from viewing search results based on an alleged violation of Canadian law, even if those search results are legal in the United States?

• We don’t think so. That’s why on Monday EFF asked a federal trial court in California to consider the First Amendment rights of Internet users and block enforcement of a Canadian court’s global de-listing order in the United States.

• Our brief comes as part as the latest development in a Canadian dispute that led to an order requiring Google to remove U.S.-based search results worldwide. Google had fought the attempt to remove search results from users worldwide, but in June 2017, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Google could be forced to remove search results that allegedly violated Canadian law.

• Chris Butler, Office Manager at the Internet Archive, responding to a query from MediaNama, saying that their attempts to contact the Indian Department of Telecom (DoT) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) but their queries have been left unanswered.

• India has cut off access to the Internet Archive, a San-Francisco-based website that hosts the popular Wayback Machine service. Its a twenty-year old digital archive of the world’s publicly accessible web pages.

• Users who tried reaching the archiving service last night encountered an error message: “Your requested URL has been blocked as per directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India” – a notice that has been used in the past when high courts across India ordered the blocking of a particular webpage.

• The Wayback Machine has over the last decade become a useful tool to get around media and government censorship as it allows users to view archived or deleted web pages. Authoritarian countries often seek to remove contentious online content or rapidly change existing webpages, which is when internet users turn to the Wayback Machine for help.

• As part of a project on increasing prevention of cybercrime until 2030, a censorship system including software that identifies, blocks, collects and processes misleading information on the Internet will soon be launched in Vietnam.

• Software that prevents personal computers from accessing websites containing misleading information, and an investigation system that analyzes methods used by cyber criminals to conduct cybercrime will also be developed, Vietnam News Agency reported on Tuesday.

• Liberals immediately raised the specter of censorship, worrying that schools would purge information about sex, evolution and climate change.

• But we should applaud rather than resist the popular scrutiny of textbooks, which has been a force for social justice and equality in other key moments in our past.

• If you think otherwise, I’ve got three words for you: “Little Black Sambo.”

• Remember Sambo? He was the jolly, ostensibly “Indian” figure who dotted the pages of elementary school readers and spellers for much of American history.

• Similarly, Taslima Nazreen, who openly claimed that she was an apostate, wrote books insulting Islam. She was given asylum in India, where she was hero-worshipped and now lives in exile holding Swedish citizenship.

• She writes about Islam to earn a living. Bangladesh and other Muslim nations banned her book.

• In India, a book about Hinduism by Wendy Doniger, was banned by the Supreme Court, as the Hindus felt it insulted their faith.

• I remember, Sri Lanka and Myanmar banned an issue of Time magazine which published The Buddhist Terror, an article about the activities of a Myanmar Buddhist monk named Wirathu. As we can see, most nations ban books for various reasons, not just Malaysia.

• With no details given of what the job offer entails, the Twitter rant seems more like an excuse for Assange to revisit a favorite topic of his and sound off at the expense of Google. As for Damore — from whom little has been heard — the chances are he will not be short of job offers.

• The ACLU of Maine originally sent a formal complaint letter to Gov. LePage on July 24th, but did not hear a response before filing today’s lawsuit in the state’s US district court. The plaintiffs claim the governor’s Facebook page is used as an official social media venue for sharing information and conducting state business, which should be used as a public forum for receiving public comments from Maine constituents.

• According to the ACLU, the governor uses the page in his official capacity to perform government business, and blocking people from the page who disagree with the governor constitutes viewpoint discrimination and government censorship in violation of the U.S. and Maine constitutions.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Lawyers representing a man convicted of six robberies in the Detroit area have now filed their opening brief at the Supreme Court in one of the most important digital privacy cases in recent years.

• This case, Carpenter v. United States, asks a simple question: is it OK for police to seize and search 127 days of cell-site location information (CSLI) without a warrant?

• Previously, lower courts have said that such practices are compatible with current law. But the fact that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case suggests that at least four justices feel that perhaps the law should be changed.

• Searches of mobile phones, laptops, and other digital devices by federal agents at international airports and U.S. land borders are highly intrusive forays into travelers’ private information that require a warrant, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in a court filing yesterday.

• EFF urged the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to require law enforcement officers at the border to obtain a warrant before performing manual or forensic searches of digital devices. Warrantless border searches of backpacks, purses, or luggage are allowed under an exception to the Fourth Amendment for routine immigration and customs enforcement. Yet EFF argues that, since digital devices can provide so much highly personal, private information—our contacts, our email conversations, our work documents, our schedules—agents should be required to show they have probable cause to believe that the device contains evidence of a violation of the immigration or customs laws. Only after a judge has signed off on a search warrant should border agents be allowed to rifle through the contents of cell phones, laptops, or tablets.

• This summer, two of the west coast’s largest metropolitan areas—Seattle and Los Angeles County—took major steps to curtail secret, unilateral surveillance by local police. These victories for transparency and community control lend momentum toward sweeping reforms pending across California, as well as congressional efforts to curtail unchecked surveillance by federal authorities.

• On July 31, the Seattle City Council adopted an ordinance requiring public participation when local police departments acquire surveillance technologies. Days before, a Los Angeles County oversight body rejected a proposed use policy governing the sheriff’s department’s use of surveillance drones, with a majority of commissioners expressing a preference for deputies not to use drones at all.

• The Wi-Fi Alliance, the non-profit organization that certifies Wi-Fi enabled products, is ready to usher in a new era of the smart homes.

• Traditionally, there have been no set standards for integrating a wireless network directly into home blueprints, unlike other essential utilities, such as plumbing and electricity. But as our houses continue to be filled with IoT appliances that depend on the internet, a strong network signal is becoming increasingly important.

• Yes, the NSA wanted children to go snooping through trash, which seems almost too on the nose to be true.

• A secret spy plane operated by the US Marshals hunted drug cartel kingpins in Mexico. A military contractor that tracks terrorists in Africa is also flying surveillance aircraft over US cities. In two stories published last week, BuzzFeed News revealed the activities of aircraft that their operators didn’t want to discuss.

• These discoveries came not from tip-offs from anonymous sources, but by training a computer to recognize known spy planes, then setting it loose on large quantities of flight-tracking data compiled by the website Flightradar24.

• Here’s how we did it.

• The Australian government should not force technology companies to weaken the security of their products or to subvert encryption, Human Rights Watch said last week in a letter to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. That strategy would undermine cybersecurity for all users and would not stop determined criminals from using encryption.

• The booby-trapped video revealed the public IP address Hernandez allegedly used. Agents then subpoenaed his ISP address.

Civil Rights/Policing

• “This is an attempt from Erdogan to extend his power outside of the country’s borders. He wants to show that he can reach critical voices even if they do not exist in the country. It’s an abuse of international police cooperation that risks having major consequences,” RSF Sweden president Jonathan Lundqvist said in a statement.

• Attorney General Jeff Sessions has announced that the FBI has formed a new team focused on investigating potential leaks to the press. During a press conference on Friday, Sessions said that leak investigations have tripled since President Donald Trump took office. Civil liberties groups criticized Sessions’s remarks. Ben Wizner of the ACLU said, “A crackdown on leaks is a crackdown on the free press and on democracy as a whole.” We speak with John Kiriakou, the former CIA analyst who exposed the Bush-era torture program and became the only official jailed in connection with it.

• treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).

• However, Damore says that before he was fired, he filed a complaint, formally known as a charge, with the National Labor Relations Board, which administers some aspects of federal labor law. Under the National Labor Relations Act, it’s against federal law to fire someone in retaliation for filing a complaint to the board, lawyers say.

• [...] Google’s liberal leanings and emphasis on training around “unconscious bias” have created an ideological echo chamber that makes it difficult to discuss these issues openly inside the company.

• Lost in the controversy is the fact that the memo raises complicated and interesting questions about what factors should be considered in creating diversity programs.

• Before posting or sharing a vigilante style post on a social media platform, please stop and think of the damage you are doing to a potentially innocent person and also the damage you may be doing to the efforts of the police and the judiciary system in convicting someone who is guilty.

• If you represent a tech company, please consider signing our letter to Congress from tech companies about concerns regarding the latest attempt to dismantle Section 230 of the CDA in a manner that will be completely counterproductive to the stated goals of the bill. Sex trafficking is an incredibly serious issue, and we support efforts by law enforcement and various groups to fight it — but we are greatly concerned that the approach being put forth here will actually be counterproductive to that goal, and create numerous other problems.

• As we’ve discussed over the past week, Congress has launched a highly questionable attempt to modify Section 230 of the CDA, ostensibly as an effort to takedown Backpage (ignoring (1) that they already passed another law two years ago targeting Backpage and then never used it (2) that the DOJ is already able to go after Backpage if it broke the law and may be investigating the company as we speak and (3) that Backpage has already shut down its adult section), but which will actually create havoc for basically the entire internet. It will do a variety of damaging things, including opening up every tech platform to frivolous lawsuits from individuals and fishing expeditions from states Attorneys General, if anyone uses any part of a platform in a manner that touches on sex trafficking. We’ve already discussed how the bill could kill Airbnb, for example.

• People awaiting trial have been forced to pay exorbitant fees to a private company under the threat incarceration.

• Imagine being arrested. You haven’t been convicted of a crime, but you are told you have to pay bail to be released. If you don’t have enough money to pay the full bail amount, you could pay a bail bondsman, who will keep 10 percent of your bail fee as profit. Either way, if you cannot afford to purchase your freedom, you stay in jail.

• President Trump continues to applaud a Pentagon program that outfits American peace officers with weapons of war.

• Tomorrow marks the third anniversary of the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. It was this shooting that woke this country up to the epidemic of police violence.

• We as a nation have watched dozens of fatal police shootings, often of unarmed boys and men of color since August 9, 2014.

• We’ve seen almost no police accountability for these fatalities over the last few years. In 2014 and 2015, zero officers were convicted of murder or manslaughter, while in 2016 there have been just a few convictions. And we’ve witnessed the outrage and protest around these unjustified shootings being met with militarized policing.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• A Federal Communications Commission decision to eliminate price caps in much of the business broadband market can remain in place after a federal judge denied a petition to halt the FCC order.

• The FCC’s Republican majority in April imposed a new standard that deems certain local markets competitive even when they have only one broadband provider. In those markets, incumbent phone companies like AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink will be able to charge higher prices for business data services that are delivered over copper-based TDM networks.

• At this point, more than sixteen million comments have been filed in response to the FCC’s myopic plan to kill net neutrality protections, the majority of them in fierce opposition to the idea. We’ve also noted how more than 900 startups, countless engineers, and a wave of large companies and websites have similarly urged Ajit Pai to stop, pause, and actually listen to what the majority of the country is saying. And what they’re saying is that they want Title II and net neutrality protections to remain in place to protect them from giant telecom duopolies with long histories of fiercely-anti-competitive behavior.

• Unfortunately. there’s no indication that the Ajit-Pai lead FCC much cares. Pai’s FCC has made every effort to comically try to downplay this massive wave of opposition, and dress up the agency’s blatant giant gift to Comcast, AT&T and Verizon as an ingenious attempt to somehow restore “freedom” to the internet (yeah, big fucking citation needed).

DRM

• Starting in 2019, Disney will operate its own paid video-streaming service. This news came about as Disney announced on Tuesday that it would acquire a majority stake in a video-streaming company called BAM Tech. (Following a 2016 stock purchase, Disney had previously owned a 33-percent stake in BAM Tech.)

• Below you’ll find a list of what else you’ll be able to watch before these two companies go their separate ways.

Intellectual Monopolies

• At the time, there was no confirmation of when next Cabinet would see the document.

Trademarks

• will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas (and solo) has a registered mark on his professional name, but is now seeking a mark of more biblical proportions: “I AM.”

• Actually, his company i.am.symbolic already has registered the mark “I AM” for all sorts of clothing in class 25, but is now seeking to register the mark in other classes including cosmetics, sunglasses, and jewelry. The problem for will.i.am is not the Talmud, but instead the “I am” mark owned by beeline group that sells sunglasses, jewelry as well as registrations owned by others.

Copyrights

• For years, we’ve expressed general bewilderment at the practice in British Commonwealth countries to effectively allow private search warrants, which are given to non-government private parties, engaged in civil infringement cases, to effectively break down other people’s doors and dig through their stuff. We’ve discussed such “Anton Piller” orders in Australia and the UK. And, apparently they apply in Canada too.

• And that leads us to the craziest damn story you’ll ever read about a bunch of private companies losing their freaking minds over something they believe is infringing. In this case, it’s the site TVAddons, which is a site that links to various Kodi software add-ons. Kodi, if you’re unaware, is open source home theater software (it was originally the Xbox Media Center, XBMC, but has expanded since then). It’s quite popular and an easy way to use a device with Kodi to turn your TV into a smart TV. There are tons of perfectly legitimate and non-infringing uses for Kodi, and a variety of sources of “Kodi boxes” that allow people to make use of the features and to install a variety of useful apps — such as adding YouTube or Netflix to your TV. Admittedly, there are some add-ons that allow users to access infringing content, though even those add-ons are just really linking to content stored openly and available online.

• The RIAA wants the court to keep an order in place that opens the door to widespread site blocking efforts. The order applies to CDN provider Cloudflare, which previously argued that the targeted domains are no longer using its services. However, according to the RIAA, Cloudflare is misdirecting the court because it doesn’t like the legal consequences of the ruling.

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