● 08.14.17

● Links 14/8/2017: Linux 4.13-RC5, PostgreSQL 10 Beta 3, GCC 7.2

Posted in News Roundup at 5:49 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• When I first thought about writing an article on Windows vs. Ubuntu, I decided pretty quickly that I would avoid trying to get people to switch operating systems. The fact is, that’s a deeply personal decision that I simply don’t need to influence.

• Instead, this article is written for someone who is considering switching from Windows to Ubuntu, doesn’t mind exploring the unknown corners of an operating system they’re unfamiliar with and won’t give up at the first sign of trouble. This may sound harsh, but this simply isn’t an article targeting those who are simply “window shopping” – no pun intended.

• If you are looking for an alternative to Windows, look no further. In this article, I’m going to share with you why Linux Mint can be a good alternative to Windows users. Linux Mint 18.2 is the latest release and its familiar for Windows users whether they are coming from Windows XP, Vista,7, 8 or Windows 10. With a smaller footprint and also the familiarity of Windows, your experience will be equal or better for the most part of it. I am not saying Linux Mint is better than Windows or any other desktop OS, but for some Windows users, it just might be a better option. Let me show you why.

Server

• SpaceX and HPE (Hewlett-Packard Enterprise) have done the groundwork for almost a year to see if commercial supercomputers can survive in space and help humans explore the universe more efficiently.

• A supercomputer is about to make its way into space. On August 14, the Dragon Spacecraft from Elon Musk’s high-flying SpaceX will be carrying some very precious cargo. It’s a Hewlett Packard Enterprise supercomputer called the Spaceborne Computer that just may pave the way for further technology in space.

• Historically, the harsh conditions of outer space have been tough on computers. Laptops have to be replaced every few months, and off-the-shelf computers have historically fared not so well once leaving Earth’s surface. But the hope is that the supercomputer will do a bit better. After all, if scientists can’t figure out how to get this tech to work beyond Earth’s orbit, it would be difficult for us to actually move beyond our planet in any permanent capacity.

• While it is not likely we will see large supercomputers on the International Space Station (ISS) anytime soon, HPE is getting a head start on providing more advanced on-board computing capabilities via a pair of its aptly-named “Apollo” water-cooled servers in orbit.

• The two-socket machines, connected with Infiniband will put Broadwell computing capabilities on the ISS, mostly running benchmarks, including High Performance Linpack (HPL), the metric that determines the Top 500 supercomputer rankings. These tests, in addition to the more data movement-centric HPCG benchmark and NASA’s own NAS parallel benchmark will determine what performance changes, if any, are to be expected when bringing more compute to bear in space.

• The Spaceborne Computer runs a specialized Linux operating system and uses a specially designed water-cooling system, but it has not been “ruggedized” to withstand solar radiation. Instead, it will be a sacrificial lamb to see how systems are impacted by the rigors of space, so engineers can address it in future systems.

• Software performance and scalability are frequent topics when we talk about application development. A big reason for that is an application’s performance and scalability directly affect its success in the market. An application, no matter how good its user interface, won’t claim market share if its response time is sluggish.

• This is why we spend so much time improving an application’s performance and scalability as its user base grows.

Kernel Space

• Those using the Reiser4 file-system in some capacity can now safely upgrade to the Linux 4.12 kernel.

• Edward Shishkin has updated this out-of-tree file-system for the Linux 4.12 kernel so it can be built with the latest mainline stable release.

• Things are progressing pretty normally. rc5 is smaller than rc4 was, and nothing looks particularly scary for this release window.

• Let’s hope it stays that way.

• The diffstat looks normal too, with just over 40% driver updates, and just under 40% arch updates. Although the reason the arch updates show up that highly is actually largely a single MIPS BPF JIT file that had gotten lost (somebody forgot to “git add” it, methinks), and that got fix up here.

• Outside of drivers and architecture, it’s the usual random stuff: networking, core VM, header files and some scripting. And various misc one-liners.

• Shortlog appended, you can get something of an idea of what’s been going on from it – lots of small details being fixed up.

• Go forth and test, and everything says that we’ll get 4.13 out in our usual timely manner.

• Linus

• Linus Torvalds has just announced the fifth weekly release candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.13 kernel.

• It’s Sunday evening here in the US, which means that Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of yet another RC (Release Candidate) development snapshot of the upcoming Linux 4.13 kernel series.

• Last week’s RC4 release was bigger than usual, but it looks like the RC5 milestone is smaller, and things appear to progress pretty normally for the development cycle of Linux kernel 4.13. According to Linus Torvalds, the final release of the Linux 4.13 kernel series should not suffer any delays.

• Linux kernel 4.13 is due out in September 2017, with the sixth and seventh Release Candidate snapshots set to launch on 20 and 27 August respectively.

Graphics Stack

• AMD today released a new update to its proprietary graphics driver for Linux-based operating systems, AMDGPU-PRO 17.30, which brings support for Canonical’s recently announced Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.

• David Airlie has managed to figure out some crucial fixes for improving the support of Radeon GCN 1.0 “Southern Islands” and GCN 1.1 “Sea Islands” hardware with this open-source Vulkan driver.

• Airlie made two GCN 1.1 fixes as tested on an R7 360 while also making a change for derivative calculations. With that work, the GCN 1.1 support is now on par to the Volcanic Islands and Polaris Vulkan support.

• So, what remained to be done since the last time I posted? Not much. Workspace management had lot of X11 specifics, such as getting workspace layout, names and such from X11 atoms. It was easily fixed by splitting X11 specific code to meta-x11-display.c and making that code run when or after MetaX11Display was created, either in meta_x11_display_new (), or using special signal handlers which notify that something workspace related was changed. Similar work was done about StackTracker, which at startup synchronized stack with X server.

Applications

• This is a difficult announcement to write. The summary is if you use Obnam you should switch to another backup program in the coming months.

• A pair of text editors popular among Linux users have seen new updates.

• Github’s Atom text editor and Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VS Code) both have updated versions available to download.

• In this post we give a condensed run down of the major changes and improvements available in each.

Proprietary

• Promising the world’s best office experience for the Linux community, WPS Software presents WPS Office 2016 for Linux: a high-performing yet considerably more affordable alternative to Microsoft Office that is fully compatible with and comparable to the constituent PowerPoint, Excel and Word applications. The WPS Office suite, with more than 1.2 billion installs across all platforms, is a complete office suite, including Writer, Presentation, Spreadsheets and a built-in PDF reader. Linux, Windows, Android and iOS versions are available.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Soon you might be able to live the life of a Wolf, as the developer of WolfQuest [Steam, Official Site] has made significant progress on the Linux beta.

• Planar Conquest [Official Site, Steam], a 4X turn-based strategy game inspired by Master of Magic recently pushed out a new patch that includes Linux support.

• I know, I know, quality over quantity! Still, I can’t help but feel excited by the amount of good quality games that are now available on Linux.

• The current count is at around 3529 on Steam, give or take a few that still show up in the list that haven’t actually released yet. It might be slightly different depending on the country you’re in too.

• Rusted Warfare [Steam] is quite a fantastic little RTS game with clear inspiration from older RTS titles like Total Annihilation and it just got a huge update.

• Bounty Battle [Fig, Official Site] looks extremely fun, with a cast taken from other popular indie games and it’s now been fully funded on Fig. They also announced some new character’s coming.

• On Fig, the game now has $35K+ funded against their original goal of $30K. It’s worth noting that $24K is given by Fig itself, with $11K from backers.

• If you’re in the mood for an RPG that can be played in single-player as well as online then you might want to take a look at Shroud of the Avatar [Official Site, Steam], as it has a free trial going once again.

• The release of “Total War: Warhammer 2″ is drawing closer, but the original game continues to get updates — the latest of which is the Norsca downloadable content (DLC).

• The expansion was released last August 10 and is already enjoying rave reviews on Steam. For those who have yet to pick it up, SEGA is offering a way to get the DLC for free.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Xfce 4.14 is still running behind schedule but at least progress is being made on this lightweight, GTK-based desktop environment.

• Today marks the Xfce4-Panel 4.13.1 released as another development package towards v4.14. With xfce4-panel 4.13.1, this Xfce desktop component has been ported to using GDBus. This release now also allows the system tray to support ordering of items and with the tacklist it makes styling by themes easier. There are also a number of bug fixes affecting drag-n-drop, GTK3 fixes, and other work.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE on Sunday announced the release and general availability of the monthly maintenance update of the KDE Frameworks collection of over 70 add-on libraries for Qt, versioned 5.37.0.

• Ending out the weekend, the KDE crew has released Frameworks 5.37 as the collection of complementary components to Qt5.

• The QupZilla web browser is hunting for a new name. Development is to move under the KDE project umbrella and it may replace Konquerer.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• A few moments ago, GNOME Project’s Michael Catanzaro announced via an email announcement that the upcoming GNOME 3.26 desktop environment has officially entered Beta stages of development.

• GNOME’s annual developer conference, GUADEC, wrapped up earlier this month in Manchester. The videos are now available for those that were unable to attend this Linux desktop event.

• Last year, I presented the GNOME 3.22 core applications: a recommendation for which GNOME applications have sufficiently-high general appeal that they should be installed out-of-the-box by operating systems that wish to ship the GNOME desktop the way that upstream intends. We received some complaints that various applications were missing from the list, but I was pretty satisfied with the end result. After all, not every high-quality application is going to have wide general appeal, and not every application with general appeal is going to meet our stringent design standards. It was entirely intentional there was not any email client (none met our standards) or chat application (IRC does not have general appeal) included, nor any developer tools (most people aren’t software developers). Our classification was, necessarily, highly-opinionated.

• With this approach, after a key has been selected, the Bluetooh name will be changed to the key fingerprint. This is like how Avahi works because we create a local server with the name of the fingerprint.

• In the receiving side the user needs to enter the fingerprint, then a Bluetooth discovery will start searching for the right device.

• We need to start a discovery because in order to establish a Bluetooth connection we need to know the MAC address of the device to connect to.

• One of the many successful Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects this year by student developers is the work done on Piper, the new GTK3 user-interface for configuring gaming mice under Linux via libratbag.

• Let’s start with the ground work and differentiate our two “ubuntu” and “gnome” sessions. Until today, they were pixel by pixel identical.

• Now are migrating some GNOME Session changes as well as some GNOME Shell ones in Artful.

• During past weeks, I have been into researching about unit testing as I am now currently working on my third task for GSoC , which is, writing a test suite for GNOME Logs. I would like to give you a brief background about the previous work already done on testing for Logs.

• The previous work done is mostly based on testing the Logs frontend using dogtail and behave automated python testing frameworks. You can see more about it here. In my task, I will mostly be working on testing the existing backend functionality in Logs.

Distributions

New Releases

• 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki‏ is informing us today about the release and immediate availability for download of the Antivirus Live CD 23.0-0.99.2 distribution.

• As its version number suggests, Antivirus Live CD 23.0-0.99.2 relies on the Clam AntiVirus (ClamAV) open-source and cross-platform antivirus engine capable of detecting viruses, trojans, malware, as well as other malicious threats on Linux, Windows, and Mac operating systems, and the 4MLinux 23.0 distribution.

Red Hat Family

• Now wrapping up summer #2 as a Red Hat intern, the 2017 Intern Expo was a relatively familiar environment. This event this year for the Boston/Westford interns was held in the Westford office on August 17th, in the same “classic middle school science fair” manner as 2016. This year, though, I came prepared with visuals, visuals, and yes, more visuals (I’m a graphic designer, it’s in my blood)! I created a site, from scratch, that I had been working on in small bits and pieces throughout the course of the summer consisting of tutorials for getting involved in the Fedora Design-Team and Fedora-Badges groups, Fedora style basics, and a library of my entire summer of work. My original hope was to create the site using Fedora Bootstrap, but because of time constraints the static-HTML-to-Bootstrap conversion didn’t happen. Because I don’t have hosting for this site and cannot attach zip folders here, I’ve attached screenshots of the site!

• Red Hat has acquired the assets and technology of Permabit Technology, a provider of software for data deduplication, compression and thin provisioning.

Finance

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical’s Sergio Schvezov was pleased to announce the release of Snapcraft 2.33, a new major update of the tool that application developers can use to package their apps as Snaps for Ubuntu Linux and supported OSes.

• We reported last week that Ubuntu is creating a fork of Dash to Dock, the popular GNOME extension, for use on the Ubuntu 17.10 desktop — but we didn’t know a lot about it.

Devices/Embedded

• Axiomtek’s rugged, Linux-friendly “CEM311” Type 10 Mini “Apollo Lake” module offers optional 64GB, up to 4x PCIe, and wide temperature and input ranges.

• The CEM311 joins other 84 x 55mm COM Express Type 10 Mini modules based on Intel’s Apollo Lake system-on-chips, including Adlink’s nanoX-AL, Congatec’s Conga-MA5, and MSC’s MSC C10M-AL. While those COMs support all five Apollo Lake options, including the three Atom models, the CEM311 limits you to the quad-core Pentium N4200 and dual-core Celeron N3350 with 1.1GHz base speed and 2.5GHz and 2.4GHz burst, respectively.

Tizen

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• A small project to automate a web developer’s invoicing process morphed into a full-fledged open source gig management system.

• Open source software startup Docker Inc. is currently working on raising $75m as its software business grows, according to sources.

• People familiar with the matter told Bloomberg the round is expected to close by the end of this month, which will push the company’s valuation to $1.3bn, up from $1bn in 2015.

• One of the people said the raised cash will be invested in expanding Docker Inc.’s sales and marketing teams for corporate clients.

• According to Silicon Angle, the latest investment will help fuel the company’s newest push in the computing market. The company plans to use the fresh capital to beef up its sales and marketing muscles.

• The funding news follows a massive management shuffle, which reportedly involved former CEO of Concur Technologies Steve Singh and Docker’s co-founder Solomon Hykes.

• In a paper published in the EBioMedicine scientific journal this month, a group of scientists have revealed how leukaemia cells prevent themselves from being attacked by the human immune system. This discovery, they believe, could be an important step in the fight to develop new types of drugs for patients with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), a kind of blood cancer that can often be fatal because of the shortcomings of current treatment strategies.

• That the scientists were able to uncover exactly how AML cells evade attack by the immune cells that patrol our bodies owes much to work they conducted with the help of Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron.

• Describing itself as the framework for ‘web artisans’, Laravel has been around since 2011 and today hosts its source code on GitHub under the MIT license.

• A new age of digital economy is here! The modern digital industry these days is not limited only to robotics or virtual design media. New technologies like blockchain change the style of business and dramatically enhances its capabilities making business processes transparent and efficient. These changes are the opportunity to expand and create new markets and even more – the new economy. However, the growing markets require more legal and financial control to ensure the gradual growth and adoption by large business institutions.

• The new blockchain breakthrough technology allows even today to create trustable and scalable solutions for international financial transactions, startup crowdfunding and manage new business investments. The Russian startup DARFChain (Distributed Accounting, Resource and Financial system in blockChain) recently reported the test results confirming successful synchronization for the distributed ERP system based on the blockchain technology (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIFDO9mxaY4) The solution was built using the components of the blockchain platform Waves, ERP system ODOO and BigchainDB database. System available for testing on project’s Github. Soon have plans to connect to other blockchains system, Ethereum first.

• Tu Jiashum, CTO of SDN/NFV at ZTE, outlines the importance of Open Source software development for his company. ZTE, he says, is investing a lot of its resources into Open Source and, having shared its contribution, is confident that it receives a lot back. It has participated in 240 commercial proofs of concept (PoCs) worldwide and has developed an end-to-end SDNFV solution called Elastic Net.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The end of legacy Firefox plugins is drawing closer, with Mozilla’s Jorge Villalobos saying they’ll be disabled in an upcoming nightly build of the browser’s 57th edition.

• While he didn’t specify just how soon the dread date will arrive, Villalobos writes: “There should be no expectation of legacy add-on support on this or later versions”.

Databases

• The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces today that the third beta release of PostgreSQL 10 is available for download. This release contains previews of all of the features which will be available in the final release of version 10, including fixes to many of the issues found in the second beta. Users are encouraged to begin testing their applications against 10 beta3.

• Those wishing to do some database testing this weekend can try out PostgreSQL 10′s third beta update, which was released earlier this week.

• Postgre developers are hoping those making use of this SQL database system will try their workloads against PostgreSQL 10 Beta 3. It has all the features to be found in this next stable release and has many bug fixes over the prior versions.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GCC 7.2.

• This release is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 7.1 relative to previous releases of GCC.

• Richard Biener of SUSE has just announced the release of the GNU Compiler Collection 7.2.

• GCC 7.2 is available this morning and is a point release to this year’s GCC 7 stable release. This is the first point release since the GCC 7.1 release earlier this year, which was the first stable version of GCC 7.

• Would you like to give Linux a boost by contributing your coding skills in the service of a GNU project? Here’s a partial list of some projects that are looking for a little help.

Public Services/Government

• To stop losing control over its digital assets, the Portuguese government should make a sincere move to free and open source software, the country’s open source trade group ESOP says. The business association is not convinced that Portugal’s new ICT strategy, published in July, will help.

Leftovers

• A certain portion of the internet is freaking out over a change to an important list used by ad blockers that facilitates their function. Popular coding repository GitHub received a DMCA request (the same tool copyright holders use to remove links to pirated music and movies online) to remove a domain name from the ad blocking list and consented. That set off a firestorm of speculation about copyright laws being used to prevent ad blocking. But that’s not exactly what’s going on here. In a blog post, AdGuard — which claims to be “the world’s most advanced ad blocker” — first drew widespread attention to this particular case. The blog explains that EasyList, the most popular list of domain names used by adblockers, removed the domain name “functionalclam.com” due to a DMCA removal request that was sent to GitHub. But the Digital Millennium Copyright Act only protects copyrighted works like movies and music, not domain names, right? Not exactly.

• First of all, ad blockers work by filtering out servers that deliver ads to the page you’re viewing. So, if an ad network delivers ads through “functionalclam.com” to the home page of The New York Times, that domain goes on a list and gets filtered by the ad blocker. Most ad blocking software is configurable by the user, and anyone can whitelist a site they support or blacklist a site that isn’t on the default list.

• Firefighters in Sicily have been accused of starting fires for money.

• The captain of a 15-person volunteer firefighter squad based in southern Italy was arrested on Monday on suspicion of fraud against the state and arson. The other 14 are also under investigation.

• According to a police report, members of the squad are suspected to have set multiple fires or reported fake fires between 2013 and 2015.

Science

• What first enthralled me about historian Gerald Horne was reading his book Black and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920, where he tells the story of the boxer Jack Johnson, who was denied food in Mexico City by a US store owner thinking he could uphold Jim Crow laws. Jack left the store and returned later with three or four generals who revoked the store owner’s license, made him apologize and told him that Mexico was no “white man’s country.”

• These are histories of resistance seldom heard to which Horne gives a voice. While there should be no illusions about the Obama presidency, the age of Trump is a caravan of injustices. Horne’s analysis of the legacy of white supremacy and the refusal of mainstream US history and education to acknowledge colonialism shows us how the age of Trump came about.

• While teaching political science in the community college circuit in Colorado, I was faced with preassigned textbooks that presented history from a Eurocentric male perspective, devoid of a critique of capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism.

• Today, getting a smartphone is a rite of passage for American tweens and teens. It’s arguably more important to them than having a driver’s license or voting (50 percent of eligible Americans between ages 18 and 29 voted in November 2016, while 98 percent of people in the US between 18 and 24 own smartphones).

• Silicon Valley is draining away the economy’s most precious resource for its own benefit.

• OK, I’d better explain that.

• The economy’s most precious resource is human attention — specifically, the attention people pay to their work. No matter what kind of company you own, run or work for, the employees of that company are paid for not only their skill, experience and work, but also for their attention and creativity.

• When, say, Facebook and Google grab user attention, they’re taking that attention away from other things. One of those things is the work you’re paying employees to do.

Hardware

• Microsoft dismissed Consumer Reports’ Surface reliability ratings last week, but a new internal memo sheds some light on the issues that the software maker has faced. Consumer Reports surveyed 90,000 tablet and laptop owners and found roughly 25 percent of Surface users have encountered issues by the end of the second year of ownership. Paul Thurrott has obtained an internal memo about Microsoft’s response to Consumer Reports, and it appears to suggest that high Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book return rates could have impacted Consumer Reports’ findings.

• [...]

• While Microsoft struggled with the power management of Intel’s new Skylake chipsets at the time, other OEMs also suffered some minors problems but were able to quickly remedy them with firmware fixes. Thurrott reports that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with Lenovo last year and quizzed the company over how it was responding to Skylake problems. “Lenovo was confused,” claims Thurrott. “No one was having any issues.” It appears Microsoft’s own problems were the result of the company’s unique approach to the Surface Book, with custom firmware and drivers. While other, more experienced, hardware makers were able to respond quickly, Microsoft’s delay impacted reliability.

Health/Nutrition

• Efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare have been suspended for the time being, and many Americans are breathing a sigh of relief. But Obamacare is far from safe, and the same is true for one of the key programs – Medicaid – that the law used to expand health care coverage for millions of Americans.

• While many people may think of Medicaid as a government program that helps only the nation’s poor, that is not accurate. Medicaid helps pay for – and is indeed part of estate planning strategies for – nursing home care and other forms of long-term care. Since all Americans live in communities with elderly people, will grow old themselves or have aging parents, long-term care and how to pay for it is a matter that affects us all, even if we do not realize it.

• A secret “fire sale” of hospital land – including dozens of properties still being used for medical care – is planned to bail out the cash-strapped NHS, new documents show.

• The Department of Health has quietly doubled the amount of land it intends to dispose of, triggering accusations of desperate measures to plug a big hole in NHS finances.

• Details of more than half of the 1,300 hectares now up for sale have been kept under wraps because of “sensitivity” – raising suspicions that many other sites also have clinical uses.

Security

• Insignary unveiled TruthIsIntheBinary, a free, cloud-based version of its Clarity binary code scanning software aimed at open source Linux IoT code.

• Normally, we board-heads shy away from security software, but Insignary’s latest offering pushed all our buttons: Linux, free, open source, and “IoT security ticking time-bomb.” We were also slapped silly by the oracular sounding name.

Defence/Aggression

• Today you occupy nearly one-third of our island, and station bombers and nuclear powered submarines here to flex your might to our neighbors. You play endless war games emitting fumes and dumping waste into our air, water, soil, bodies. We breathe in the fallout when you test your bombs on our sister islands upwind—those clouds make their way down here. We eat fish from the waters you bomb around us. Grieve the beached whales who rot at the shore, led astray by your sonar testing. We are being made to sacrifice—with no consent (and for many of us, against our will)—access to sacred ancient villages and a thousand acres of a lush limestone forest habitat that you want to destroy to build a firing range for your Marines. You fly bombers over my home at ungodly hours. Come on, America, I am raising babies here. Little ones, who notice when your flag is flown above theirs, and don’t like it. Who hide under the slide at their playground and tell their friends to duck when your blaring B-1s, B-2s, be everything in their safe zone. There is a sign on the road that reads, “Slow down, children at play.”

• Amnesty International calls on the Indonesian authorities to immediately order an impartial and effective investigation into allegations that police used lethal force arbitrarily leading to the death of one man and injuries to at least ten other Papuans, including children in Papua province. The investigation should be carried out by a body independent of the police. The findings must be made public and those suspected of criminal responsibility, including those with command responsibility, must be brought to justice in fair proceedings and victims granted adequate reparations. The government must also put an end to the climate of impunity for perpetrators of such abuses.

• President Donald Trump’s national security adviser on Sunday minced no words and clearly labeled Saturday’s deadly car attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, as terrorism.

• “Certainly I think we can confidently call it a form of terrorism,” the adviser, Lt. Gen H.R. McMaster, said on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

• “What terrorism is is the use of violence to incite terror and fear, and of course it was terrorism.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• But as he works to roll back regulations, close offices and eliminate staff at the agency charged with protecting the nation’s environment and public health, Mr. Pruitt is taking extraordinary measures to conceal his actions, according to interviews with more than 20 current and former agency employees.

• [...]

• While federal records laws prohibit senior officials from destroying records, they could evade public scrutiny of their decision-making by simply not creating them in the first place.

• “The mere fact they are telling people not to write things down shows they are trying to keep things hidden,” said Jeffrey Lubbers, a professor of administrative law at American University.

• As a scientist working for decades on national and global water and climate challenges, I must speak out against what I see as an assault on America’s water resources.

• I grew up in New York in the 1960s hearing about massive Polychlorinated Biphenyl – a toxic chemical used as a coolant – contamination in the Hudson River and the threatened extinction of bald eagles and ospreys from eating contaminated fish.

• I remember watching on television Ohio’s Cuyahoga River burning. I remember scientists warning about the death of the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay from uncontrolled industrial pollution. I remember not being able to swim at beaches polluted with raw sewage.

• Pacific bluefin tuna has unique worldwide status as one of the most awe-inspiring remarkable creatures on the planet. They grow to 12 feet and 1,500 pounds and live up to 35 years whilst swimming super-fast, crossing the entire ocean in 21 days. They are the essence of nature’s wonderful creativity and beauty.

• Unequivocally, the bluefin’s days are numbered, almost guaranteed to go extinct, prompting the question: Is bluefin tuna a metaphor for global warming’s impact on civilization? And if so, how so? It’s a fair question as the impact of the Great Acceleration (BGNG 1940s) increasingly interjects humans into the finer workings of the ecosystem, which is rapidly morphing into “Humanature,” an embryonic field of scientific study that is not yet acknowledged.

• Overfishing, greedy uncivilized thoughtless arrogance, bluster and audacity (sounds like the ‘neoliberal’ brand of capitalism) have chopped up physically destroyed the stock of bluefin tuna. “The stock is down over 97 percent from pre-fishing levels, so there is no doubt the species needs to have some protection put in place,” according to Duke University research scientist Andre Boustany. (Source: Alastair Bland, Should Pacific Bluefin Tuna Be Listed As An Endangered Species? National Public Radio, June 29, 2016).

Finance

• People openly live on the streets of the world’s major urban centers – from Cairo to Washington, DC – a disconcerting reminder of homelessness. While some maintain homelessness is a solvable problem, others conclude that the condition is an enduring feature of modern urban landscapes.

• Homelessness was once considerably less visible. In 1950, for example, 70 percent of the world’s population of 2.5 billion was spread out across rural areas. Housing problems, far removed from urban centers, were largely unnoticed. Today, most of the world’s population of 7.6 billion, 55 percent, is concentrated in urban centers, in close proximity to the politically influential and economically well-to-do.

• The future of unions is precarious. Union membership has been in steady decline. The stridently anti-union stance of the Trump administration, Congressional Republicans and state government Republicans, as well as a hostile Supreme Court, pose a substantive threat to union existence.

• Westminster’s empty, Theresa May’s off hiking and Don’t Tell the Bride’s embroiled in a faking scandal.

• But that doesn’t mean government has completely shut down.

• There’s been a slow drip-feed of good news coming from Whitehall.

• From banning rip-off card charges to protecting package holidays, these positive announcements have made some easy headlines for the government.

• There’s just one hitch – they all have strong roots in policies from the supposedly terrible EU, which we’re trying to leave.

• Theresa May is accused of trying to break parliamentary rules in order to ram through controversial law changes after Brexit.

• The Conservatives are demanding to pack a crucial decision-making committee with their own MPs, despite losing their Commons majority at the election, The Independent can reveal.

• Now Opposition parties plan to join forces to derail the attempted fix, in what threatens to be the first autumn Parliamentary clash over leaving the EU.

• Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., which created China’s largest online bazaar but has scant brick-and-mortar experience, spent $8 billion investing in a string of retailers including Suning Commerce Group Co. to prove it can transform old-school shopping. Tencent Holdings Ltd. is extending a gaming empire built around social phenomenon WeChat, buying studios and creating content to evolve into an entertainment powerhouse. Those multibillion-dollar bets come under the microscope when both report earnings this week.

• The Brexiteers have lost the economic argument and deep down they know it.

• Week after week the statistics and the day-to-day experience of ordinary people are demonstrating that the promise that Brexit would be good for the economy, or at least do no harm, has proved false.

• The slump in the pound is driving up prices for all imported goods, and households are feeling it in their pockets. It was argued that a weaker pound would boost the competitiveness of UK exports.

• Although any sort of negotiation can be stressful, negotiating compensation for a new job—especially when you have the opportunity to get paid to work on open source software—can be especially intimidating. Because of this, many people, particularly women and minorities, choose not to negotiate at all. Unfortunately, this choice may come with a $500,000 penalty. That’s how much money the average person loses throughout their lifetime by choosing not to negotiate their wages.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• I spent the better part of a decade training as an historian. I’m definitely pro-history. But in context, this is an explicit call-out to the white supremacist and neo-Confederate forces at the march whose calling card is celebrating Southern ‘heritage’ and America’s history as a white country. Zero ambiguity or question about that. And they heard the message. White supremacist leaders cheered Trump’s refusal to denounce them and his valorization of their movement.

• Where does this come from? Who knows who wrote this text for Trump. But many of Trump’s most important speeches were written by white nationalist aide Stephen Miller, who came from Jeff Sessions’ senate office. Miller literally worked with Alt-Right leader (he coined the phrase) Richard Spencer on racist political activism when he was in college at Duke (Spencer was a grad student at the time). This isn’t some vague guilt by association. He’s one of them.

• The president arrived to a lectern assembled at his New Jersey golf club on Saturday afternoon shortly after at least one person was killed and 19 others were injured when a car sped into counterprotestors opposing a Charlottesville, Virginia, demonstration by white nationalists and other far-right activists. He’d been scheduled to speak about Veterans Affairs, but first, he said, he wanted to discuss the violence he was “closely following” several hundred miles south.

• What came next was not a condemnation of white nationalism or white supremacism or Nazism or racism or any other synonym for the ideology of the primarily white men wielding torches to express their opposition to Charlottesville’s decision to remove Confederate symbols from the town. Instead, he said, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, on many sides.”

• The White House has not responded to a request to explain why the president — who for many years lanced political leaders who declined to use the term, “radical Islamic terror” — couldn’t put a name to the hate groups visible in Virginia.

• In response to a weekend gathering of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia—during which one anti-racist demonstrator was murdered and many others injured on Saturday during an act which many characterized as domestic terrorism—progressive and civil rights groups are sponsoring hundreds of rallies nationwide on Sunday to speak out against hate and racism.

• While President Donald Trump—who said blame for murderous attack had “many sides”—is being roundly criticized from across the political spectrum for not speaking out forcefully to condemn the white supremacist factions who promoted and fomented violence this weekend, the coalition says the outpouring of support for vigils and impromptu solidarity rallies was intense.

• In the case of Charlottesville, media outlets are being careless with words, whitewashing the intentions and the actions of White nationalist protestors. The “Unite the Right rally” stopped being a rally sometime Friday night when a stream of torch carrying White supremacists arrived at night to the University of Virginia campus chanting “blood and soil.” They used those torches as weapons in fights with counter-protesters.

• Most pundits see it something like this: The Democrats lost because Trump appealed to the angry white voter, and he used a demagogic mixture of xenophobia, racism, fear and hate to accomplish this.

• Mr. Zakaria, the mainstream pundits and even the Democratic Party have also finally recognized what Thomas Frank warned about prior to the election – the fact that the Party’s abandonment of middle class and working Americans who formed the base of the New Deal for a strategy designed to appeal to the economically and educationally “elite,” set it up for the loss. In the words of Zakaria, “The election of Donald Trump is really a kind of class rebellion against people like us, educated professionals who live in cities, who have cosmopolitan views about things.”

• Things that have many sides: a Rubik’s cube, a baseball diamond, a complex personality. Things that don’t: the racism and hate seen in Charlottesville this weekend.

• Alas, our president doesn’t seem to know the difference. No, that’s too generous. He must know, but he does not care. Or worse, he would rather allow the confusion than endanger his base of support.

• On Friday night and Saturday morning, Ku Klux Klan members, would-be Nazis and open white supremacists marched under President Trump’s name. Former Klan leader David Duke, speaking at the rally that sparked this wretched affair, crowed that the marchers were going to “fulfill the promises of Donald Trump” to “take our country back.” His friends and followers spewed repugnant rhetoric and fought with counter-protesters. Three people are dead. But rather than swiftly condemning the instigators of this violence, as a president should, Trump kept silent. And when he finally did break from his golf vacation, his statements were a disgrace.

• Though there is much more to learn about the lone victim—identified by family and friends on Sunday as Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal from Virginia—who lost her life in the vicious attack in Charlottesville on a group of anti-racist demonstrators, the last public message she left behind offered at least a semblance of what inspired her to march against hate on Saturday: “If you not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

• Over the past 18 months, Trump’s naked appeals to a constellation of racial grievances against blacks, immigrants, and Muslims helped to fuel his rise to the nation’s highest office in the most improbable election victory in American history. Trump’s appeal, as both candidate and president, rests on his ability to empathize with the roiling pain and grief felt by tens of millions of white Americans who feel abandoned by this nation’s great promise. Unwilling or unable to believe that the president represented the very group of wealthy entrepreneurs and business leaders who search for tax cuts, dividend shares, and larger profits that had endangered the remnants of America’s postwar middle class, robust numbers of white men and women, of all class and educational backgrounds, voted for Trump.

• The white supremacist forces arrayed in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend — the largest gathering of its sort in at least a generation — represented a new incarnation of the white supremacy movement. Old-guard groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations and the Nazi skinheads, which had long stood at the center of racist politics in America, were largely absent.

• [...]

• Those who actually marched included many new to the right-wing cause. The victory of Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election has energized a whole wave of young people who were previously apathetic or apolitical, rally organizer Eli Mosley told ProPublica. The president has served as “megaphone” for far-right ideas, he said.

• Mosley and his comrades are seeking to draw in as many of these newly politicized young people as possible. “We’re winning,” he said. “We’re targeting the youth and making a movement that appeals to the youth.”

• Some of those who’ve gravitated to the extreme right milieu are former liberals — like Mosley’s fellow rally organizer Jason Kessler — and supporters of Bernie Sanders. Many are ex-Libertarians.

• “I was a libertarian,” said Mosley, as white supremacists chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!” in the background. “I looked around and noticed that most Libertarians were white men. I decided that the left was winning with identity politics, so I wanted to play identity politics too. I’m fascinated by leftist tactics, I read Saul Alinsky, Martin Luther King … This is our ’60s movement.”

• The second probe, called “Case 2,000,” focuses on recordings the police obtained after confiscating Harow’s personal computer and phone. Capturing conversations between Netanyahu and Arnon Mozes, the publisher of the Israeli daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth and the popular Ynet News website, the recordings reveal that just before the 2015 Israeli elections, Mozes offered to help Netanyahu stay in power “for as long as [he] want[s].” In a quid pro quo deal, the publisher requested that Netanyahu pass legislation limiting the ability of Yedioth Ahronoth’s main competitor, the pro-Netanyahu Israel HaYom newspaper, to distribute papers for free.

• According to the transcripts, the two went so far as to discuss which pro-Netanyahu columnists Yedioth Ahronoth would hire. Netanyahu then said he would discuss the legislation with the “redhead” — referring to Israel HaYom’s publisher, the American billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who is also a Republican kingmaker and known contributor to Trump’s presidential campaign. In fact, during a recent police interrogation, Adelson confirmed that Netanyahu had asked him to consider cancelling the paper’s weekend edition.

• To be sure, the concept of white privilege must seem far-fetched to working-class whites who come from generations of cyclical poverty. They constantly are told that African-Americans are the primary recipients of welfare and social benefits, and that policies like affirmative action are greatly detrimental to all whites. By controlling key aspects of the economy, especially education, politics and the media, the white elite often very easily manipulate less affluent whites.

• Here is the car, stopped along Monticello Avenue in Charlottesville, Virginia. It has clearly been involved in a high-speed incident. Video shows this same car — allegedly driven by one James Alex Fields Jr. of Ohio — plowing into a crowd of peaceful anti-fascist protesters at high speed. When it reversed to escape, the damaged fender swung wide, and a shoe clearly bounced out of the grille. The roar of the engine fades, leaving in its wake screams and curses.

• According to everything we have heard from the federal government about vehicles being used as weapons worldwide, everything we have heard from the White House and Homeland Security on the issue, everything we have heard in the news media after London and Paris, this was an ISIS-style terrorist attack deliberately perpetrated against a crowd of innocent people to lethal effect.

• This was terrorism. By the book. Someone should probably tell the president. He doesn’t seem to get it.

• The violence in Charlottesville, Virginia today is a national calamity. It is a product of white supremacists and home grown terrorists.

• Donald Trump responded by condemning hatred “on many sides.” His refusal to call it what it is, and condemn the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and KKK members who perpetrated this violence, is a dangerous lie that fuels more hatred and violence.

• Kudos to the Republican senators who are now calling on Trump to denounce the white supremacists that incited this tragedy. More must join the call. The country needs all our leaders – Republican and Democrat – to stand united against hatred and bigotry.

• Remember that Donald Trump froze funds that were supposed to go to groups fighting neo-Nazi violence. Remember that the Department of Justice recently announced that its civil rights division will be focusing its energies not on the precipitous rise in anti-black and anti-Muslim hate crimes that followed Trump’s election, but on “affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants.” Remember that the man who heads the Department of Justice was denied a federal judgeship 30 years ago for being too racist and once told a black lawyer he was totally cool with the Ku Klux Klan “until [he] found out they smoked pot.” Remember that David Duke, a former Imperial Wizard of the Klan who in 1990 won enough votes to become a Louisiana state representative, said “we voted for Donald Trump because he said he’s going to take our country back.” Remember that what happened in Charlottesville was not the unforeseen fallout from the 2016 presidential election, but exactly what Trump promised and what 63 million people voted for.

• Trump now stands not between the parties, or above the parties, but beyond the parties—in some strange political twilight zone where neo-Nazis are seen as a constituency not to be insulted. As events shift Trump to that bizarre place, even his one authentic achievement as president—the steep reduction in illegal immigration—risks becoming an anti-achievement. Trump and his white-nationalist advisers seem determined to corroborate their critics’ accusation that enforcement is concerned not with protecting the wages and working conditions of legal residents of the United States—part of a pro-worker agenda that also could include a big investment in construction, trust-busting of college tuition, and a defense of existing social-insurance programs —but instead as a component of a white-nationalist agenda that also includes attacks on minority voting rights, a rollback of affirmative action, and compliments to authoritarian leaders worldwide.

• We have seen a great number of false equivalencies in the past two years, and the most recent Presidential election was defined by them. Yet it remains striking to hear Trump imply that Nazis and the interracial group of demonstrators who gathered to oppose them were, in essence, equally wrong.

• During the night, I thought about the presidents in office during my lifetime. As a little girl, I recall sitting by the family radio and listening to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who spoke eloquently of our ideals and values as our troops fought around the globe in World War II. Then there was scrappy Harry S Truman, who protected struggling labor unions and pressed legislation to advance better living conditions. Then Dwight D. Eisenhower, not eloquent but a hero, who ultimately sent federal troops to Little Rock to safeguard the black children integrating the schools. Then John F. Kennedy, whom I met a few times, a man who understood the power of language to lift our spirits. You can pick it up from that point. Even the much-vilified Richard Nixon opened relations with China, launched affirmative action, and created the Environmental Protection Agency.

• Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James Risen, who spent seven years fighting off government efforts to force him to reveal a confidential source, will continue to advocate for the First Amendment as director of the First Look Press Freedom Defense Fund, HuffPost has learned.

• Risen will also join The Intercept, the First Look Media news organization launched in 2014 by journalists Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras and backed by billionaire eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar.

• At the Intercept, Risen will serve as senior national security correspondent, writing a column based on his own reporting, and help steer the site’s investigative work.

• “I am incredibly excited by this amazing and unique opportunity to combine my journalism with efforts to defend press freedom,” Risen said in a statement. “I am honored to help lead the fund as both America and the world face unprecedented threats to freedom of the press, while also writing and reporting and helping [Intercept editor-in-chief] Betsy Reed and her incredible team continue to turn The Intercept into one of the most important investigative reporting outlets in the nation.”

• Trump’s firm barely vetted its foreign partners. Was this a lapse—or a strategy?

• On Monday, President Trump will again address the deadly violence sparked by a rally of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, a White House aide tells CNN. It remains an open question whether he will denounce white supremacy by name, which he failed to do in his original comments on Saturday, or whether he will label the killing of a young woman protesting the rallies as domestic terrorism.

• In Charlottesville on Saturday, I witnessed a brutal, calculated act of terror. A young man fueled by hatred drove into a crowd of people peacefully protesting the white supremacist groups that marched through our streets carrying lit torches and armed with assault weapons. As one life has been taken, and many more injured, I am grappling with the fact that the violence was deeply familiar—and should not have been surprising.

• I spent most of the past 15 years representing the United States as a foreign service officer, primarily in conflict zones of Africa. I have been in dangerous situations before, and I have felt the eeriness of a usually peaceful city succumbing to racial violence.

• Nothing I experienced overseas, however, prepared me to witness it happen in Virginia. I grew up in Lexington, a small town about an hour away from Saturday’s protests, attended the University of Virginia, and I now live in Charlottesville. When I was in the foreign service, I would return to my Virginia home and joke that it was “back to the Shire after adventures in Mordor.”

• Five highly-paid civil servants have had bonuses of up to £20,000 – and even pay rises – for devising a new benefit system causing hardship and misery for thousands.

• Many people claiming the new Universal Credit have had no money for up to six weeks because of computer issues and slow helplines in trial areas.

• A national roll-out of the benefit – meant to replace Jobseeker’s Allowance, Housing Benefit, Income Support, Child and Working Tax Credit, and some ­disability benefits – is behind schedule.

• But bosses at the Department for Work and Pensions got bonuses for “top performance” and “leadership” – sparking fury from Labour MPs.

• Partisan reporting devolved into partisan facts; for example, though the basics are black and white in how the government’s document classification system works, the mass of media allowed itself for over a year to believe that Clinton had no classified material on her email server because someone retyped things without the SECRET headers, then spent months telling everyone even if she did that did not matter, even after it did. There are plenty of other examples. For example, a large number of Americans now believe, based on no real evidence presented yet so far, that our government is literally controlled from Moscow. But mention the idea of a Deep State and you’re labeled a nut case conspiracy theorist. Sure.

• [...]

• The final straw for me is the attack on free speech from the left, the growing sense that the use of violence is an acceptable tool to silence offensive speech as long as you can say without irony your violence is the anti-fascist kind. Progressives, if you can’t see the wrong in using fascist techniques to fight fascism, I can’t help you. But God help all of us.

• So anyway America, enjoy. I’ll be over here in the corner with a water glass of tequila, watching as we tear ourselves apart, and wondering how long 300 million people can keep the lights on with a near-complete lack of civil discourse. Then again, I always was a big Mad Max fan.

Censorship/Free Speech

• China’s cyber regulator on Friday said it was investigating the country’s top social media sites over failing to comply with strict laws that ban content which is violent, obscene or deemed offensive to the Communist Party.

• Each time horrific political violence is perpetrated that is deemed to be terrorism, a search is immediately conducted for culprits to blame other than those who actually perpetrated the violence or endorsed the group responsible for it. It’s usually only a matter of hours before the attack is exploited to declare one’s own political views vindicated, and to depict one’s political adversaries as responsible for, if not complicit in, the violence. Often accompanying this search for villains is a list of core civil liberties that we’re told ought to be curtailed in the name of preventing similar acts of violence in the future.

• All of this typically happens before much of anything is known about the killer, his actual inspirations, his mental health, or his associations. In the aftermath of the widespread horror such violence naturally produces, the easiest target for these guilt-by-association tactics are those who have advocated for the legal rights of the group of which the individual attacker is a member and/or those who have defended the legal right to express the opinions in the name of which the attack was carried out.

• The Daily Stormer has been called the “top hate site in America.” Soon it’s going to be without domain.

• The site, which was involved in organising the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, has been told by GoDaddy to move its domain or have it cancelled.

• GoDaddy is the website’s domain provider, directing internet users and search engines to its URL. GoDaddy doesn’t, however, host The Daily Stormer’s content.

• “We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service,” the company said in a tweet, adding in an emailed statement, “If no action is taken after 24 hours, we will cancel the service.”

• Google has canceled the domain registration for The Daily Stormer, a company spokesperson confirmed Monday.

• “We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service,” the spokesperson told Business Insider.

• During this week’s edition of his lecture series exploring the psychological significance of the stories in the Old Testament, Canadian professor and free speech advocate Dr. Jordan Peterson discusses the importance of speaking truth to power.

• Florida. It’s always Florida. Last time it was the city of Tamarac, Florida making bogus trademark claims to try to silence a blogger. And this time, it’s the city of Coral Gables (basically a part of Miami). Apparently the powers that be in Coral Gables are not fans of free speech if it involves people disagreeing with their decisions. And thus, they’re willing to send completely bogus threat letters to Facebook to silence anonymous critics, followed up by filing a lawsuit against Facebook to identify them.

• I first came across this story thanks to Alfred Spellman, who pointed me to an article by Jessica Lipscomb about the city suing Facebook, and there have been similar stories in the Miami Herald as well. Reading those stories still left me scratching my head a bit, and part of the issue (again!) is Florida. So I’ve tracked down the full complaint and also emailed the city attorney filing the lawsuit with questions, as I discuss below.

• Can a president be suspended from Twitter for threatening to attack another country?

• That’s what some Twitter users, including actor and former Barack Obama aide Kal Penn, are demanding, after President Trump tweeted Friday morning that U.S. “military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely.”

• Shahak Shapira reported hundreds of racist, sexist, abusive or otherwise hateful Tweets.

• Twitter didn’t delete them, so he sprayed them on the pavement outside the company’s offices in Germany.

• Google shouldn’t feel lonely in its attacks on free thought. Amazon engages in book censorship – when the author is Israeli, and the book, A History of the Palestinian People by Assaf Voll (pictured), is a blank book, a satire on Palestinian claims to be the indigenous people with an ancient history in the Holy Land.

Privacy/Surveillance

• In this blogpost, we analysed email addresses and passwords that were leaked as we wanted to find out what are people’s habits when it comes to password reuse and strength in general. Nevertheless, we did a brief analysis of the email addresses as well.

• A new law proposed to protect the privacy of British internet users could end up criminalising the only people working to uncover abuses of personal data, a leading privacy researcher has warned.

Civil Rights/Policing

• We can’t blame it on residual sexism that prevented women from ever getting into the field; the number of women working with computers has actually gone down over time. And I find it hard to blame it on current sexism. No one told that guy to go home and build a fiber-channel network in his basement; no one told me I couldn’t. It’s just that I would never in a million years have chosen to waste a weekend that way.

• Difference has never been the problem; how we respond to it has long been.

• That’s the message getting lost in the latest pique of outrage, this time aimed at a man named James Demore.

• Uber’s long-term licence comes up for renewal by TfL at the end of September.

• Yet despite accomplishments like these, Pakistani women generally get bad press because society is assessed on the basis of the average. The statistics present such a dismal picture, which is undoubtedly distressing. It is against this backdrop that we also need to evaluate the contribution of the change-makers. They give us hope.

• Russian civil society received July’s news happily: the case against Valentina Cherevatenko, the first person to face criminal charges under Russia’s Foreign Agent law, was dropped. In June 2017, Cherevatenko, head of the Women of the Don human rights organisation, faced court proceedings for “maliciously evading the requirements of a Foreign Agent”. The Rostov-based rights defender faced not only a fine and community work, but a potential prison sentence of up to two years. She was accused of trying to circumvent Russia’s Foreign Agents law and “having a criminal intention” in registering a non-commercial foundation under the same name. The case against Cherevatenko was eventually curtailed due to “lack of evidence of a crime”.

• If we unpack the legal details of this case, then it becomes clear that Women of the Don did, in fact, create a new foundation under the same name. There were concrete reasons for this: in 2013, as the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office conducted a wave of inspections at over 300 NGOs across the country, they found signs of “political activity” in the activities of Women of the Don. Although Women of the Don did not receive any foreign funding (the second condition that ensures any non-commercial organisation is placed on the register of Foreign Agents), the General Prosecutor’s Office requested the immediate inclusion of Women of the Don on the register for their “political activity”.

• These actions are the latest salvos in the renewed culture wars. Promoted by Trump, the campaign is overseen by VP Mike Pence, a born-again evangelical who – as he declared – was a Christian first. It is being implemented by key Cabinet officials — notably Attorney General, Jeff Sessions; Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price; and Secretary of Education, Elisabeth “Betsy” DeVos — and aggressively promoted by the Republican-controlled Congress.

• One of Trump’s first actions upon taking office in January was to issue an executive order reinstating the global ban on the discussion of abortion by individuals and organizations receiving federal funding for overseas medical projects. He followed with the nomination of Neil Gorsuch, a conservative in the mold of former Justice Antonia Scalia, to the Supreme Court.

• The trouble with ignoring them is that, just like in smaller communitiest, they have a tendency to fester. They take over large chunks of influential Internet surface area like 4chan and Reddit; they help get an inept buffoon elected; and then they start to have torch-bearing rallies and run people over with cars.

• A neo-Nazi plowed his car into protesters who had gathered to oppose a white supremacist rally in a Virginia college town on Saturday, killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring at least 19 others.

• The bloody day in Charlottesville turned even more tragic in the evening when a Virginia State Police helicopter monitoring the melees crashed miles away — killing two officers, officials said.

• Mike Signer, the mayor of Charlottesville, said Sunday that he sees a “direct line” between President Donald Trump’s campaign playing “on our worst prejudices” and the white supremacist rally that turned fatal in his Virginia town on Saturday.

• “I don’t want to make this too much about Donald Trump,” Signer told John Dickerson on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “We have a lot of grieving, a lot of work to do as a city and as a country. But he should look in the mirror. I mean, he made a choice in his presidential campaign, the folks around with him, to, you know, go right to the gutter, to play on our worst prejudices.”

• American presidents run for office with a set of promises, visions, and ideas of what they’d like to do if they win. For John Kennedy, it was “get America moving again.” For (my one-time employer) Jimmy Carter, it was creating “a government as good as its people.” For Ronald Reagan, it was (no joke) “let’s make America great again.” For Bill Clinton, it was the economy, stupid. For Barack Obama, hope.

• Then life intervenes. And while campaign promises and concepts have some bearing on what a president actually does, events that campaign strategists never anticipated often play a larger role in how effective a president can be, and in history’s assessment of him. Kennedy didn’t know that he’d be responsible for the Bay of Pigs invasion three months after taking office, or the Cuban Missile Crisis barely 18 months later. Lyndon Johnson didn’t know that he’d end up as president, nor Ronald Reagan that he’d be shot, nor George W. Bush about the events that began in September 11, 2001, nor any other president about the surprises, usually bad, that the world’s unplannable variety suddenly presents them with.

• The Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum on Monday condemned this weekend’s neo-Nazi rally in Virginia, saying that the ideology on display there was identical to that which led to the murder of six million Jews.

• The name “Palantir” bespeaks mystery. Its original meaning is the powerful artefact in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” that allows direct communications with distant lands. It is now also the name of a secretive company, Palantir Technologies, founded in 2004 by a number of Silicon Valley luminaries, chief among them Peter Thiel. At heart, Palantir is a data analysis company, “focused on creating the world’s best user experience for working with data, one that empowers people to ask and answer complex questions without requiring them to master querying languages, statistical modeling, or the command line.”

• Its Web site details two main products, Palantir Gotham and Palantir Metropolis. It deploys these in a wide range of markets, including disaster preparedness, healthcare delivery, insurance analytics, crisis response, defense, disease response and pharma R&D. One sector likely to be of particular interest to readers of this blog is Palantir’s work in providing data analysis tools for law enforcement. A striking feature of a corporate white paper on the subject is its constant emphasis on protecting privacy through what it calls “civil liberties engineering“:

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is reinterpreting a key law to consider relaxing constraints on telecoms giants.

• Republican Chair Ajit Pai this week invoked Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act to argue that smartphones alone could help broadband providers meet statutory requirements on access and deployment.

• “We propose to incorporate both fixed and mobile advanced telecommunications services into our Section 706 inquiry,” agency filings said on Tuesday, in a notice of inquiry. The FCC will accept comments on the proposal for two weeks starting on September 7.

• Democratic Commissioner Mignon Clyburn criticized the inquiry, describing mobile and home broadband as “complements, not substitutes.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The latest MPAA tax filing shows that the revenue generated by the anti-piracy group has stabilized after a few rocky years. The group’s main income sources are major Hollywood studios, which contribute $65 million a year. The filing further reveals that MPAA boss and former Senator Chris Dodd earned an income of more than $3.5 million.

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