● 08.17.17

● Links 17/8/2017: Krita 3.2.0, New Raspbian GNU/Linux OS

Posted in News Roundup at 6:41 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• You might be aware the new stealth destroyer USS Zumwalt has two 155-millimeter howitzers, 80 vertical launch missile silos, and a pair of rapid-fire 30-millimeter cannon. But did you know it has its own server farm, some of the most advanced power generation equipment in existence, and runs on Linux?

Server

• Oracle’s Exadata Cloud Service price list for non-metered services currently starts at a list price of $55,000 a month. For that price, organizations get the Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service with a quarter-rack bare-metal Exadata X6 system.

• CoreOS on Thursday announced the general availability of the Kubernetes container management Tectonic platform on Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

• The Tectonic platform enables enterprises to run Kubernetes on a single platform across various cloud and bare metal environments. Prior to this release, the Tectonic platform was available on Amazon Web Services and bare metal servers.

• Container management vendor CoreOS today released the latest update of its Tectonic platform, bringing the open-source Kubernetes based system to Microsoft’s Azure cloud. The Tectonic 1.7 release is based on the upstream Kubernetes 1.7 project update that debuted at the end of June.

• Kubernetes started off as a Google open-source effort and became the cornerstone project of the Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in July 2015. Kubernetes like other container technologies initially started off as a Linux-only platform but is now finding its way to Microsoft Azure thanks to the efforts of organizations like CoreOS. Microsoft’s own Azure Container Service (ACS) added support for Kubernetes in February.

Kernel Space

• This open source platform-as-a-service cloud platform bridges the gap between legacy applications and cloud services.

• For all the talk about the cloud, many applications continue to run on traditional servers. Hybrid architectures are sometimes the right option, but if you want to move corporate applications onto the Internet, you don’t want to start from scratch. Cloud Foundry, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud platform, enables enterprises to move older software to the cloud and build new cloud-centric programs using familiar tools and programming languages.

• Jerome Glisse of Red Hat has published his 25th revision to the Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) patch series. HMM is about allowing a process address space to be mirrored and for system memory to be transparently used by any device process.

• With HMM v25, there are more code comments and documentations, fixes to the code, merging the HMM-CDM patches into this patch series, and other improvements.

• Stable kernels 4.12.8, 4.9.44, 4.4.83, and 3.18.66 have been released. Each contains important fixes throughout the tree and users should upgrade.

Graphics Stack

• It’s fairly rare these days seeing improvements to the xf86-video-ati DDX: the driver for those running a pre-AMDGPU (GCN 1.2) graphics card with this driver paired with Radeon DRM and not using the generic xf86-video-modesetting driver instead. But if you are using xf86-video-ati and use the “TearFree” feature to try to avoid screen tearing, a number of patches landed today.

• Michel Dänzer of AMD landed a handful of patches to the xf86-video-ati Git repository today for the Radeon DDX. Notably the patches make for always allowing DRI2 page-flipping to be used with TearFree and the same goes for DRI Present page-flipping with the TearFree option. Long story short, page-flipping should now always work in the TearFree mode.

• NVIDIA’s driver team has today released new Vulkan beta drivers for both Windows and Linux.

• The new NVIDIA Linux Vulkan beta is versioned at 381.26.13, so still not yet re-based to the current 384 series, but these changes should end up being merged for their next feature series to mainline.

• NVIDIA is working on a new OpenGL memory usage reporting extension, NV_query_resource. Before anyone jumps though to bash NVIDIA over coming up with yet-another-memory-reporting extension for OpenGL, this one is aimed at reporting the usage at an object-level rather than just overall amounts.

Benchmarks

• Noticing I had an AMD Athlon II X3 425 system still racked up and hadn’t been powered on in a long time, I decided to decomission it, but not before running some final benchmarks on that system. Having the recent AMD Ryzen 3 1200 / 1300X CPUs I decided it would make for an interesting comparison how the old Athlon II X3 compares to AMD’s low-end CPU of today, the Ryzen 3 processors based on Zen. Here are those benchmarks that also include performance-per-Watt and overall AC system power consumption numbers.

Applications

• Third, there is a belief that Linux apps are still too primitive to get anything productive done. Besides (whiny voice), “I tried Linux in 2005, and it was just too ha-r-r-d.”

• Sorry. A lot of those objections are no longer valid. Linux is solid, stable, free for the most part and has become as easy to navigate as Windows. And those old apps are all grown up now.

• You may have skipped over previous Linux articles we’ve run, but don’t skip this one. We’re not going to crow about Linux like it’s something brand new, because we both know it has been on your radar screen for 20+ years. This time, we’d rather you read about what you can do with it at your station — and primarily in your production studio — right now.

• Oracle’s Director of Product Management Simon Coter was pleased to announce on Wednesday the release and immediate availability for download of the second VirtualBox 5.2 Beta.

• VirtualBox 5.2 is currently under heavy development, and a first Beta release was published a week ago, giving users a glimpse at the major new features coming to the open-source and cross-platform virtualization software from Oracle.

• Focusing on improvements and regression fixes for the first Beta, VirtualBox 5.2 Beta 2 is here today to introduce support for the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 operating system in the Linux Additions component.

• Calamares, the open-source project trying to be the universal installer framework used by Linux distributions, is working towards their big v3.2 update.

• Numerous independently-developed GNU/Linux distributions are relying these days on the Calamares universal installer framework to provide their users with a decent, modern, and up-to-date graphical installer.

• If you installed well-known distros like OpenMandriva, KDE Neon, Sabayon, KaOS, Siduction, Netrunner, Apricity OS, Chakra GNU/Linux, GeckoLinux, Pisi Linux, Tanglu Linux, or Manjaro before, chances are you already interacted with the Calamares installer.

• The latest version of the installer is Calamares 3.1.1, a release that fixed a password weakness issue, and to which all the above GNU/Linux distributions should upgrade. But it looks like Calamares is getting ready for the next-generation Wayland display server, which offers improved security over X11.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• A Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game is a time-based game which typically focuses on finding resources, managing resources, and building an empire. You can engage other players and make alliances, and find different ways to conquer foes. This type of game puts you in control of a personal army. There are no turns to take, everything takes place continuously, with players issuing commands at any time.

• RTS games have a large fan base since their inception. This game genre requires cunning, creativity, and the ability to devise innovative strategies to usurp your opponents. Some of the best known proprietary RTS series are Warcraft, Starcraft, Command & Conquer, and Age of Empires.

• spaceBOUND [Steam, Official Site] recently released on Steam in Early Access, but it needs a wee bit of work before we can see what we think. Shame, because it sounds like it’s quite interesting.

• Want to run your own business? Well, now you can! Startup Company [Steam] recently released into Early Access and it looks good so far.

• I discovered Dead Maze [Steam] recently and decided to wait to see what the current status of it was, it turns out the developers are planning Linux support of this MMO.

• ASTROKILL [Steam] is a game focused on combat without compromising realism and it looks graphically amazing. If you have a beefy computer, the developer is seeking testers.

• Steam will continue to support Linux as we’ve seen on previous occasions, but other hardware companies should also lend a helping hand. This will include the likes of Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and others which control the driver stack.

• If it took decades for Linux to improve heavily, then we should not ruin your expectations a tad bit because it will take several more years to further reduce that performance gap between Windows 10 and the latter. However, the fact that Linux is getting there should mean that Microsoft has something to worry.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.4 RC!

• For the details on what is new in Qt Creator 4.4, please refer to the Beta blog post. As usual we have been busy with bug fixes and improvements since then, and now would be a good time for you to go get it, and provide final feedback.

• Later than planned, here’s Krita 3.2.0! With the new G’Mic-qt plugin integration, the smart patch tool, finger painting on touch screens, new brush presets and a lot of bug fixes. Read the full release notes for more information!. Here’s GDQuest’s video introducing 3.2.0:

• The Krita project has today announced version 3.2 is ready of their open-source, cross-platform digital painting program.

• Krita 3.2 features new G’Mic-qt plugin integration, a smart patch tool, finger painting on touch screens, new brush presets, a variety of fixes, and other minor improvements.

• Kdenlive 17.08 is released bringing minor fixes and improvements. Some of the highlights include fixing the Freeze effect and resolving inconsistent checkbox displays in the effects pannel. Downloaded transition Lumas now appear in the interface. Now it is possible to assign a keyboard shortcut for the Extract Frame feature also a name is now suggested based on the frame number. Navigation of clip markers in the timeline behave as expected upon opening the project. Audio clicks issues are resolved although this requires building MLT from git or wait for a release. In this cycle we’ve also bumped the Windows version from Alpha to Beta.

• August 17, 2017. KDE Applications 17.08 is here. We have worked to make both the applications and the underlying libraries more stable and easier to use. By ironing out wrinkles and listening to your feedback, we have made the KDE Applications suite less prone to glitches and much friendlier. Enjoy your new apps!

• Out today is the latest four-month update to the KDE Applications collection of desktop packages.

• With KDE Applications 17.08 being the last cycle where kdelibs4-based packages are allowed before being dropped if not ported to KDE Frameworks 5, there was more porting this cycle in transitioning these packages to using the modern KDE libraries.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Let’s continue on our journey on transforming the current default session in Ubuntu Artful with a small change today. For more background on this, you can refer back to our decisions regarding our default session experience as discussed in my blog post.

• Way back in 1999 I did the unthinkable, I migrated away from my favorite window manager, AfterStep, to begin a journey with GNOME, a desktop that was born two years prior and was finally ready for the public. That was GNOME 1 and it was something special. I remember the excitement at having a desktop that could, finally, stand toe to toe with Windows. Yes, I had grown accustomed to the highly flexible AfterStep interface. I loved being able to have window transparencies across the board and special effects that blew away the minds of every Windows user I knew. However, all of those window managers I’d worked with to that point were missing something—a level of professionalism that would allow others to take the desktop seriously.

• I arrived to Manchester on July 27 at 12:20 p.m. and the weather surprised me with a strong rain. It may be more surprising when you live in a city were it does not rain. Then I had to go to the Manchester Metropolitan University where many of the GNOME contributors would be hosted. When the bus stopped on the Manchester Metropolitan University I went to the first building of it I see and asked how to get to the Birley Fields, our accomodations. A man told me the directions and gave me a map. After some minutes walking I got the office that assigns the rooms to the new residents. I met there Mario, a guy from GNOME who is involved in Flatpak. It was interesting to talk with him in English when at the end we realized that we both could speak in Spanish. After leaving my stuff on my room, I left the room to walk outside and I found David King. It was incredible because it was almost three years we didn’t see to each other. In that day, I also met hadess (Bastien Nocera). He helped me to get a traveler adapter. This was also the day of pre-registration in a bar called KROBAR. I got joined to the GStreamer folks who I met before in GUADEC 2014. Some of the guys came up with the idea that the GNOME logo needs a new design. I talked about it before on the #gnome-design channel. I also met ystreet00 (Matthew Waters) who helped once to create a GStreamer plugin with OpenGL.

• With GUADEC 2017 and the unconference days over, I wanted to share a few conference and post-conference notes with a broader audience.

• First of all, as others have reported, at this year’s GUADEC, it was great to see an actual increase in numbers of attendees compared to previous years. This shows us that 20 years later, the community as a whole is still healthy and doing well.

• This year is my second one attending GUADEC, this time around, in Manchester. It was a great experience this time too, because I got to meet again with the friends I made last year, but also I got to make new friends as well.

• During the core days I attended a lot of great talks and I got to learn cool new things. Among these, I could mention learning about technologies that I didn’t know they existed, like Emeus, improve my view about how a good design should look like or discover more about the history of GNOME. Since this year I am a GSoC student again, I also had a lightning talk and I’m happy to say that this year I was slightly less nervous about talking in front of a lot of people.

Distributions

New Releases

• This is an updated build mainly to address the recently fixed glibc getaddrinfo stack-based buffer overflow as described at security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2015-7547 in more detail. Also includes all official updates released for Debian/Jessie at the time of building these ISO images. As an additional benefit, the included 3rd party programs have been updated to their most current release versions.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• Tuesday, 2017-08-17, is the DNF 2.0 Test Day! As part of this planned Change for Fedora 26, we need your help to test LxQT!

• All the instructions are on the wiki page, so please read through and come help us test! As always, the event will be in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC.

Debian Family

• Okay, so I have been slack with my blogging again. I have been travelling around Europe with work quite a bit, had a short holiday over Easter in Denmark, and also had 3 weeks of Summer Holiday in Germany.

• Today is Debian’s 24th anniversary. If you are close to any of the cities celebrating Debian Day 2017, you’re very welcome to join the party!

• If not, there’s still time for you to organize a little celebration or contribution to Debian. For example, spread the word about Debian Day with this nice piece of artwork created by Debian Developer Daniel Lenharo de Souza and Valessio Brito, taking inspiration from the desktop themes Lines and softWaves by Juliette Belin:

• Debian Project’s W. Martin Borgert reports today that work on making the famous and widely-used Debian GNU/Linux operating system run on various mobile devices continues these days.

• During the DebConf17 Debian Conference event that took place from August 6 to August 12, 2017, in Montréal, Canada, more than 50 Debian contributors and developers gathered to discuss the future of the open source operating system on mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and even handheld computers.

• “Work on Debian for mobile devices, i.e. telephones, tablets, and handheld computers, continues. During the recent DebConf17 in Montréal, Canada, more than 50 people had a meeting to reconsider opportunities and challenges for Debian on mobile devices,” said W. Martin Borgert in a blog post published earlier today.

• Work on Debian for mobile devices, i.e. telephones, tablets, and handheld computers, continues. During the recent DebConf17 in Montréal, Canada, more than 50 people had a meeting to reconsider opportunities and challenges for Debian on mobile devices.

Derivatives

• As of Wednesday, August 16, 2017, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has released new installation images of its Debian-based Raspbian Linux operating system rebased on Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” series.

• On the heels of the Debian 9 Stretch release, Raspberry Pi’s Debian-based Raspbian OS has been updated and is now available for download.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu 17.10, the next major release of the widely-used Ubuntu Linux OS, will be transitioning to the GNOME Shell user interface by default instead of the Unity desktop environment that was used until now.

• Earlier this month, on August 3, Canonical published multiple security advisories to inform Ubuntu users about the availability of new kernel releases for all supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems.

• The second UbuCon Europe event, a conference dedicated to the European Ubuntu community, is taking place next month, between September 8 and September 10, in Paris, France.

• This newsletter is to provide a status update from the Ubuntu Foundations Team. There will also be highlights provided for any interesting subjects the team may be working on. If you would like to reach the Foundations team, you can find us at the #ubuntu-devel channel on freenode.

• Canonical, the makers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has started to release details of the upcoming desktop environment shift in Ubuntu 17.10. Months after the decision to drop its own Unity desktop was announced, the new GNOME look is taking shape.

• The bug reporting infrastructure around an open-source project generally isn’t the best place to fish for a debate — especially when that debate poses questions of a rather existential nature!

Devices/Embedded

• Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) is making waves amid Toyota’s announcement that its 2018 Camry will run AGL software in its infotainment system. Moreover, AGL software platform is adding a virtualization solution via a hypervisor in order to move beyond infotainment.

• Arbor unveiled an Ubuntu-ready “EmETXe-i90U0” Type 6 Compact module with 7th Gen U-series Core CPUs, triple displays, and -40 to 85°C support.

• Last month, Arbor Technology announced a 125 x 95mm COM Express Type 6 Basic module called the EmETXe-i90M0 that features Intel 7th Generation “Kaby Lake” EQ processors. Now, Arbor has followed up with a 95 x 95mm Type 7 Compact EmETXe-i90U0 module that instead uses lower-power, dual-core U-series Kaby Lake chips.

Tizen

Android

• Samsung may be the number one smartphone company in the world in terms of market shares but that is just one of the tech giant’s multiple sources of revenue. The Korean company has reportedly renewed its license payment contract with Google for the use of Google’s search bar as the default search engine on its smartphones.

• The Google Feed, Google’s revamp and rebrand of its “Google Now” card feed inside of the Google app, is rolling out to Android users. The Feed is mostly a new coat of paint for features that already existed, but let’s cover what’s here.

• Finnish company HMD Global today, August 16, 2017, unveiled the Nokia 8, its first Nokia-branded flagship smartphone powered by Google’s Android mobile operating system.

• After so many rumors, the Nokia 8 smartphone is finally here, unveiled by HMD Global earlier today in a live event that took place in London, United Kingdom. The smartphone comes with all the latest features that one would expect from a flagship device, yet it has a pretty high price tag.

• According to HMD Global, the Nokia 8 is powered by a Qualcomm MSM8998 Snapdragon 835 Octa-core (4×2.45 GHz Kryo & 4×1.9 GHz Kryo) processor and an Adreno 540 GPU, has a 5.3-inch display with a 1440×2560 resolution and approximately 554 PPI pixel density.

• The folks behind postmarketOS want to go even further: they’re developing a Linux-based alternative to Android with the goal of providing up to 10 years of support for old smartphones.

• That’s the goal anyway. Right now the developers have only taken the first steps.

Free Software/Open Source

• Do you spend a lot of time thinking about Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons? Unless you run a retail store, probably not. But if you do run a store (or stores) along with an e-commerce operation, BLE is a hot new thing you are either using already or thinking about using before long.

• Why? Because the graffiti is on the wall, and it says, “Sales in physical stores are going down every year, and most retailers aren’t seeing enough online sales gains to take up the slack.” BLE may help stop the retail sales slide or at least slow it down. It’s cheap enough, especially with open source beacons, that it’s certainly worth a try.

• In the past decade, adoption of open source software at the enterprise level has flourished, as more businesses discover the considerable advantages open source solutions hold over their proprietary counterparts, and as the enterprise mentality around open source continues to shift.

• Enterprises looking to make smart use of open source software will find plenty of great reasons to do so. Here are just some of them.

• Kubernetes, an open source orchestration platform for Docker containers, is an increasingly important part of computing environments.

• But managed Kubernetes services are difficult to find — which creates an opportunity for MSPs.

• A container orchestrator is a tool that automates the provisioning and management of containers.

• In any collaborative environment, it’s important to have good tools for communication. What tools work best for you depends a bit on your situation, but might include anything from mailing lists for email communication, Git or Subversion for version control, a wiki or Etherpad for collaborative authoring, a shared task list for organizing workflow, or even a full fledged project management suite.

• Runtime, open source IoT software provider, announced it was awarded the ‘Outstanding Contributor Award’ for its open source implementation of OIC Core Specification v1.1.0 from the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF). Runtime’s open source, modern environment allows development using open APIs, running applications on sensors that require small footprints and low power requirements, like many IoT and IIoT applications require.

• “The growth and massive deployment of smart cities, agriculture, and other IoT applications require an open, platform agnostic, small footprint software,” said Runtime CEO and co-founder James Pace. “We’re proud to get the recognition of this award and look forward to continuing our work to support the IoT industry.”

Events

• I joined COSCUP2017 which is held in Taipei from August 5 to 6. ‘COSCUP’ means Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters, is an annual conference held by Taiwanese Open source community participants since 2006. It’s a major force of Free software movement advocacy in Taiwan.

• The ONOS (Open Network Operating System) community is growing fast in different geographies around the world and it’s time to bring everyone together. In collaboration with the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), Samsung is hosting ONOS Build 2017 at its R&D Campus in Seoul, Korea, on September 20-22.

• The 2nd annual event is poised to unite more than 200 developers and contributors to share, learn, align, plan and hack together. There will be keynote and panel presentations by ONOS influencers, Community Showcase previews where people can present information about their work, an SDN Science Fair for demo presentations and a hackathon.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Canonical’s Olivier Tilloy has put out a call for testing for what it would appear to be the very first Chromium Snap package for Ubuntu Linux and other Snappy-enabled distros.

• Snap is a universal binary format created by Canonical to allow for easy distribution of third-party, proprietary apps across all supported Ubuntu releases, as well as other GNU/Linux distributions. It also enables users to have the latest version of an app installed on their computers.

CMS

• An official release at moodle.com, following Moodle HQ’s mobile lead Juan Leyva announcement at the Moodle forums, confirms that Moodle Desktop, a native, browser-free version of the open source LMS, is now available across desktop and mobile devices running the most popular commercial and free operating systems available.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Today, software development is built around APIs. Instead of embedding a vendor’s product into their application, developers can call an API to consume services from a vendor. The developers don’t need to know what’s responding to their calls on the backend; they simply need to know what the vendor’s API expects from their code and what they can expect to receive back from the API. It is, in many senses, wonderfully non-intimate.

• This is an inversion of the traditional open core model behind many commercial open source strategies for enterprise application layer products. In open core, the product’s core is open source, and in the enterprise edition, vendors provide and support proprietary enhancements. Using the API approach, the product’s core is often not visible in the cloud, and the only way in and out of the product is through the API.

• Because of APIs, we are seeing the differentiation, enhancement, and value in enterprise editions migrating to the perimeter via tools, widgets, and components. These can be closed source and/or open source, but we should see more open source in the perimeter, because many vendors can make money by supporting their core and charging for API calls or transactions. The two best examples of this are Twilio and Stripe.

Funding

Public Services/Government

• The Dutch National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has published its Privacy Enhanced Filter (PEF) as open source software. The PEF tool is a research prototype that removes privacy-sensitive information from captured internet traffic as much as possible, allowing for threat detection and prevention without compromising privacy. It was developed in collaboration with the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) and the NCTV (National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism) Safety Through Innovation Program.

Programming/Development

• The PyBay 2017 conference, held in San Francisco over the weekend, began with a keynote about concurrency.

• Though hardly a draw for a general interest audience, the topic – an examination of multithreaded and multiprocess programming techniques – turns out to be central to the future of Python.

• Since 2008, the Python community has tried to reconcile incompatibility between Python 2 and newly introduced Python 3.

• For years, adoption of Python 3 was slow and some even dared to suggest Python didn’t have a future. As late as last year, Zed Shaw, an accomplished developer and author of the popular Learn Python the Hard Way, even ventured to opine, “There is a high probability that Python 3 is such a failure it will kill Python.”

• Despite these unsubstantiated odds, Shaw – a polarizing figure for some Pythonistas – this year released a version of his book for Python 3.

• A regex is useful for validating simple patterns and for finding patterns in text. For anything beyond that it’s almost certainly a terrible choice.

Leftovers

• Should Apple retail workers in California be paid for time spent having their purses, backpacks and other belongings checked to make sure they didn’t steal any of Cupertino’s goods—after they have punched out?

• Ruling in a class-action lawsuit brought by Apple retail workers, a federal judge answered “no”—California law doesn’t require Apple to pay for that time, even though it’s mandatory that employees who bring purses or other bags to work get them searched while they’re off the clock.

Science

• The problem is that we don’t get to pick and choose what scientific facts or consensuses are controversial, and which are not. The same strict laws of science are everywhere.

• Writing in MIT Tech Review, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne points out the secret and, in retrospect, obvious driving force behind tech: it reduces the often awkward and unreliable process of dealing with people, so you can buy music without asking friends for recommendations, take a cab without talking to a dispatcher, buy your groceries without speaking with a clerk, and get your money out of the bank without seeing a teller.

• I have a theory that much recent tech development and innovation over the last decade or so has an unspoken overarching agenda. It has been about creating the possibility of a world with less human interaction. This tendency is, I suspect, not a bug—it’s a feature.

• One of the extraordinary features of the microelectronics revolution is its ability to scale, a featured captured by Moore’s Law. That has led to a rapid and massive increase in computing capacity—today’s top-of-the-range smartphones have the computing power equivalent to the world’s most powerful supercomputers from the early 1990s. Tomorrow’s smartphones will be even more powerful.

Health/Nutrition

• Every March, doctors across the United States and the world eagerly await “Match Day” — the day they find out what residency, internship, or fellowship program they’ve been matched with. By that point, residency candidates have completed medical school and passed a series of rigorous qualifying exams. For those who are not American — about a quarter of all doctors in the U.S. are foreign-born — there’s one additional step: securing a J-1 visa, a nonimmigrant exchange visa conditioned on an individual’s return to their home country for at least two years at the conclusion of the program.

• In the weeks following the March 17 match, dozens of Pakistani physicians had their J-1 applications denied in Islamabad and Karachi, said Shahzad Iqbal, a Pakistani-American physician in New York.

• Jan Pederson has spent the last 30 years of her legal career representing foreign-born physicians coming to the U.S. for residency or fellowship programs. It’s an unheralded but essential line of work, because without foreign doctors, the U.S. healthcare system would simply collapse, with the pain felt most acutely in rural areas. U.S. medical schools don’t produce anywhere near enough graduates to meet the needs of the country, particularly in places where people are reluctant to move to.

• A year and a half ago, the authorities in Abkhazia banned abortions in nearly all circumstances. These women have paid the price.

• In recent months, mothers who nearly died in the hours and days after giving birth have repeatedly told ProPublica and NPR that their doctors and nurses were often slow to recognize the warning signs that their bodies weren’t healing properly. Now, an eye-opening new study substantiates some of these concerns.

• The nationwide survey of 372 postpartum nurses, published Tuesday in the MCN/American Journal of Maternal/Child Nursing, found that many of them were ill-informed about the dangers new mothers face. Needing more education themselves, they were unable to fulfill their critical role of educating moms about symptoms like painful swelling, headaches, heavy bleeding and breathing problems that could indicate potentially life-threatening complications.

• The Food and Drug Administration sent a sharp letter this month to a Canadian-based homeopathic pharmaceutical manufacturer named Homeolab USA. The letter warned of “significant violations” the agency found during a recent inspection and poor quality control of the company’s infant teething products that contain the deadly poison belladonna, aka deadly nightshade.

Security

• Researchers have determined a weakness in some cars’ internal networking system that could allow an attacker with physical access to knock components offline, including critical safety features.

• The severity of the attack varies depending on how the CAN is implemented on a system and how easily an input port (typically OBD-II) can be accessed by a potential attacker. This attack differs from previously reported frame-based attacks, which are typically detected by IDS/IPS systems. The exploit focuses on recessive and dominant bits to cause malfunctions in CAN nodes rather than complete frames.

• A security researcher says code has been discovered that was written by British hacker Marcus Hutchins that was apparently “borrowed” by the creator of the banking trojan Kronos.

• The container shipping company A.P. Moller–Maersk Group expects that a Windows ransomware attack it suffered in June will cost it between US$200 million and US$300 million.

• Google has awarded $10,000 to a high school student for the discovery of a bug in Google’s App Engine server which could lead to information disclosure.

• A researcher has uncovered an elaborate bank-fraud scam that’s using a malicious extension in Google’s Chrome Web Store to steal targets’ passwords.

• Once installed, the Interface Online extension, uploaded at least twice in the past 17 days, surreptitiously monitors all connections made with the Chrome browser. When users visit specific pages programmed into the code, the extension activates a JavaScript routine that logs the user name and password entered into the form. The extension then uploads them to a server controlled by the attackers. This entry in the Google-owned Virus Total service reports the extension was not detected by any of the 58 most widely used anti-malware products at the time this post was going live.

• Today’s cars are as much defined by the power of their software as the power of their engines. Almost any car feature you can name is now digitized to provide drivers with easier operation and better information. Technological innovation is accelerating, enabling automobiles to monitor and adjust their position on the highway, alerting drivers if they’re drifting out of their lane, even automatically slowing down when they get too close to another car.

• The security coprocessor was introduced alongside the iPhone 5s and Touch ID. It performs secure services for the rest of the SOC and prevents the main processor from getting direct access to sensitive data. It runs its own operating system (SEPOS) which includes a kernel, drivers, services, and applications.

Defence/Aggression

• The former head of global counter-terrorism at MI6 has criticised an assessment that living conditions in Manchester have plummeted as a result of the terror attack in May, calling it unfair and counterproductive.

• The Economist intelligence unit (EIU) published its 2017 ranking of living conditions in 140 cities around the world on Wednesday, with Manchester the fastest-falling. It dropped eight places to 51st, putting it just 0.3% above London in 53rd.

• But with the EIU directly attributing the fall to an increased threat of terrorism in the city following the bombing of the Manchester Arena on 22 May – in which 22 children and adults were killed and more than 250 were injured – questions are being asked over the fairness of the criteria.

• Regimes that crave U.S. support in their regional rivalries are apt to strike two different postures that may seem contradictory but really aren’t. They publicly play up the supposed threatening nature and incorrigibility of the rival, to keep Americans thinking that the United States should take sides against the rival. But they also realize that unending hostility and tension are not in their own best interests.

• In the fall of 2015, the United Arab Emirates’s ambassador to the United States, Yousef Al Otaiba, sent a concerned email to a group of high-level officials in his government. The war in Yemen, he said, was becoming a public-relations nightmare.

• The Obama administration, he told leadership back home, remained reluctantly supportive, but the ongoing Saudi-led campaign was harming the U.S.’s reputation and thus putting his own country, an active and eager participant in the war, in a delicate position.

• The September 2015 memo documenting Otaiba’s concerns was sent to a wide set of UAE decision makers. It was originally emailed to Assistant Secretary-General of the Supreme National Security Council Ali Al Shamsi, Crown Prince Court Undersecretary Mohamed Mubarak Al Mazrouei, and Syed Basar Shueb, a Pal Technology executive.

• The confrontation between the U.S. and North Korea has cooled off slightly with Kim Jong-un’s announcement that, at least for the time being, he will not attack Guam with an “enveloping fire.”

• So since we have a small breather before Armageddon, let’s take the time to understand what this conflict is all about.

• A good place to start is with the repeated comparisons U.S. politicians have made between the situation with North Korea and the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962.

• For instance, Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, recently said, “This is analogous to the Cuban missile crisis.”

• The United Arab Emirates created a “slush fund” using money meant for domestic economic development projects and funneled it to a high-profile think tank in the United States, emails obtained by The Intercept show.

• Last week, The Intercept reported that the UAE gave a $20 million grant to the Middle East Institute, flooding a well-regarded D.C. think tank with a monetary grant larger than its annual budget. According to an email from Richard Clarke, MEI’s chairman of the board, the UAE got the money from offset investments — development investments by international companies that are made as part of trade agreements.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• As the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange has released thousands of secret documents about the world’s Governments.

• But his crusade has made him a wanted man.

• Living in fear of arrest and extradition following a rape allegation in Sweden, he took the extraordinary decision, five years ago, to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

• He has not set foot outside since.

• The 46-year-old has relied on the outside world to bring him food, clothes, technology to communicate, books for entertainment and visitors for company.

• [...]

• ““It’s like living in a space shuttle.

• “Out of concerns about security, and also perhaps because paparazzi occasionally wait for him on the street, he rarely parts the curtains in the daytime, or stands at the balcony.

• “He lives in a continuous state of hypervigilance, believing that the Embassy could be stormed at any moment.”

• That hypervigilance applies to every element of his life.

• Julian Assange told a U.S. congressman on Tuesday he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents he published during last year’s election did not come from Russia and promised additional helpful information about the leaks in the near future.

• Other authors at Lawfare examined the claim in detail, finding that when people extradited to America to face charges were excluded from the count, the ratio of foreign-born terrorism convicts dropped to 18-21% of the total — not anywhere near a “vast majority.”

• Beyond that, there’s likely zero data available to support Trump’s claim. Wittes notes the DOJ doesn’t actually track where convicts are born, and certainly doesn’t do so when foreigners are booted from the country by immigration enforcement, only to be dragged back to face criminal charges.

• Wittes filed a FOIA request for the numbers the DOJ supposedly “provided” to the president. So far, he’s heard nothing back. His requests have been acknowledged but no further processing has been done, not even a determination as to whether he’d qualify for a fee waiver. Now, he’s suing [PDF].

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Antarctic ice cores have recorded an impressive span of climatic history for us, covering the last 800,000 years. But scientists are greedy, always looking to go back just a little further. Climate records based on things like seafloor sediment cores already take us much further back, but ice cores can reveal unique details. Groups are currently searching for locations to drill new ice cores that might provide a contiguous record back to over the million-year mark.

• But another group has been cheating, and this has allowed them to take a big leap past everyone else. Instead of looking at places where the ice at the bottom might be oldest, they’ve been looking at places where that oldest ice has been squeezed up to the surface against high points of bedrock. A few years ago, they published data from samples of ice that came back at right about 1 million years old. At a conference on Wednesday, the researchers revealed the fruits of their second attempt—ice as old as 2.7 million years, blowing away their previous record.

• Wind and solar energy are obviously essential in reducing carbon emissions, but they also have a remarkable side effect: saving lives. As they edge out fossil fuels, renewables are reducing not just carbon emissions, but also other air pollutants. And the result is an improvement in air quality, with a corresponding drop in premature deaths.

• A paper in Nature Energy this week dives into the weeds by trying to estimate the economic benefits of wind and solar power across the whole of the US. Berkeley environmental engineer Dev Millstein and his colleagues estimate that between 3,000 and 12,700 premature deaths have been averted because of air quality benefits over the last decade or so, creating a total economic benefit between $30 billion and $113 billion. The benefits from wind work out to be more than 7¢ per kilowatt-hour, which is more than unsubsidized wind energy generally costs.

Finance

• “Despite successfully producing over 50 tonnes of salad per day for its array of customers, the company faced an unprecedented pressure on cash flow in the immediate aftermath of last summer’s EU referendum vote.

• Until last June there was nothing to observe on the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland except a change in the colour of markings on the verge of the road from yellow to white. But 14 months after the UK voted to leave the European Union, giant billboards calling for “no EU frontier in Ireland” and “no hard border” mark the divide between the countries.

• The concern on both sides of the open 310-mile (499km) border is whether the signs represent just the beginning, a change made worse by an air of mistrust of all politicians.

• Hugh Morgan, who has a dairy farm that straddles both sides of the border in Carrickarnon but also runs a fuel business for hauliers in 16 countries, complained that people like him were ignored.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Yet at a news conference three days after a similar episode in Charlottesville, where an alleged Nazi sympathizer drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring 19, the president would not definitely assign the same label.

• “Was this terrorism?” a journalist asked on Tuesday.

• “Well, I think the driver of the car is a disgrace to himself, his family and this country,” Trump replied, “and that is — you can call it terrorism, you can call it murder, you can call it whatever you want.”

• Returning to the anti-Muslim bigotry that was a hallmark of his campaign, U.S. President Donald Trump once again endorsed a fictional U.S. massacre of Muslim terrorists, with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood, as an example of how to deter terrorism.

• It would be extraordinary even if the story were true: the president of the United States advocating extrajudicial killing, involving explicit religious animus, as an anti-terror tactic.

• But the story is fake. The president was asking the world to “study” an online hoax.

• “Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Thursday afternoon. “There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!”

• Rep. Steve Cohen (D), a Tennessee liberal, announced Thursday that he will introduce articles of impeachment against President Trump based on his defense of the white supremacists who participated in a deadly rally in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend.

• “Instead of unequivocally condemning hateful actions by neo-Nazis, white nationalists and Klansmen following a national tragedy, the President said ‘there were very fine people on both sides.’ There are no good Nazis. There are no good Klansmen,” Cohen said in a statement.

• As white supremacists converged on a Charlottesville park for their violent “Unite the Right” rally, some of them menaced the city’s historic Beth Israel synagogue during Shabbat services, standing across from the building with semi-automatic weapons in their hands.

• “Had they tried to enter, I don’t know what I could have done to stop them, but I couldn’t take my eyes off them, either,” wrote Alan Zimmerman, the president of the Reform congregation, about the three neo-Nazis he stared down as congregants prayed inside.

• Zimmerman, in an essay published on ReformJudaism.org, said that neo-Nazis marching past the building shouted hateful slogans like “Seig Heil,” the Third Reich’s “Hail Victory” shout. He added that the synagogue had retained an armed guard, after the Charlottesville police department failed to provide the synagogue with security on Saturday.

• The synagogue took other precautionary measures, due to calls on far-right Web sites for the building to be burned. Zimmerman said that he and the rabbis decided to remove the congregation’s Torah scrolls to a more secure location.

• It was a strange moment of triumph against racism: The gun-slinging white supremacist Craig Cobb, dressed up for daytime TV in a dark suit and red tie, hearing that his DNA testing revealed his ancestry to be only “86 percent European, and … 14 percent Sub-Saharan African.” The studio audience whooped and laughed and cheered. And Cobb — who was, in 2013, charged with terrorizing people while trying to create an all-white enclave in North Dakota — reacted like a sore loser in the schoolyard.

• “Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on, just wait a minute,” he said, trying to put on an all-knowing smile. “This is called statistical noise.”

• Business leaders disbanded two CEO councils created by the White House, a move they said was protesting Donald Trump’s failure to sufficiently condemn racism, marking a dramatic break between U.S. companies and a president who has sought close ties with them.​

• In the hours that followed Mr. Trump’s combative news conference Tuesday—during which he appeared to apportion blame equally between white supremacist groups and counterprotesters for lethal violence in Charlottesville, Va.—executives on two prominent advisory councils started calling each other to discuss whether to stay on.

• Some of America’s top CEOs were preparing to issue a statement criticizing the president — so he effectively fired them from a White House council first.

• President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced he was ending two business advisory councils amid a stampede of defections and after one of the groups had decided to disband over the president’s much-criticized response to the weekend’s violence in Charlottesville, Va.

• A person close to Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum said the group had already told the White House it had resolved to disband and condemn the president’s Tuesday claims that “both sides” were responsible for violence at a white supremacist and neo-Nazi gathering and that some “very fine people” were among the marchers defending a Confederate statue.

• On Tuesday night, while Gary Cohn was fuming about President Trump’s latest comments, Steve Bannon was excitedly telling friends and associates that the “globalists” were in mass freakout mode.

• Brexit threatens to deal a hefty blow to the U.K.’s lucrative legal profession — and create huge uncertainty for courts across the rest of Europe.

• That’s if Brexit negotiators don’t secure a deal that ensures Britain remains in a decades-old system that allows civil and commercial court rulings in one EU country to be recognized and enforced in another.

• America’s closest allies condemned U.S. President Donald Trump in unusually strong and personal terms on Wednesday after he put part of the blame for violent clashes in the state of Virginia on those marching against gun-brandishing neo-Nazis.

• British Prime Minister Theresa May, widely criticised at home for cultivating close ties to Trump during his first half year in office, spoke out after the president repeated his view that the white nationalists and counter-protesters were both to blame.

• President Trump’s embattled chief strategist Steve Bannon lashed out at his rivals in the administration in a rare interview with the American Prospect, which was published Wednesday.

• Bannon told progressive American Prospect writer Robert Kuttner about his plan to neutralize his opponents, which include top officials and advisers to President Trump.

• “They’re wetting themselves,” he said of his adversaries in the administration who disagree with him on trade and economic policies.

• Bannon proceeded to relay how he wants to create an outside group of trade hawks with factions from both the left and the right wings of the political spectrum. Bannon told Kuttner he’s “changing out people at East Asian Defense,” and getting Susan Thornton, the acting head of East Asian and Pacific Affairs for the State Department, “out at State.”

• “That’s a fight I fight every day here,” he said. “We’re still fighting. There’s Treasury and [National Economic Council chair] Gary Cohn and Goldman Sachs lobbying.”

• Moreover, the number of those favoring impeachment has shot up. “Currently, four in ten (40%) Americans believe Trump deserves to be impeached, up 10 percentage points from 30% who expressed support for this action in February. A majority (53%) of Americans do not believe Trump should be impeached and removed from office, a view held by 65% of the public in February.” And this is before we have any report from the special prosecutor or congressional committees. In addition, “Approximately half (49%) of the public believes Trump has violated the Constitution, while nearly as many (43%) disagree.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• As I’ve mentioned before, Google will sometimes deindex material — essentially hide it from online searches — when it sees a court order that finds the material to be defamatory. This leads some people to submit forged court orders instead of real ones (and engage in other similar shenanigans).

• Eugene Volokh (along with Public Citizen’s Paul Levy) has made a cottage industry of sniffing out bogus/fraudulently-obtained court orders demanding the delisting of unflattering content. Much of this seemed to be the work of desperate reputation management “gurus,” who had over-promised and under-delivered in the past. Abusing the DMCA process only goes so far. Sometimes you need to lie to judges to get things done.

• Sometimes you just need to pretend you’re the judge. Convicted sex offender Abraham Motamedi forged a court order awarding himself legal fees and the delisting of content indicating he was a convicted sex offender. When called on it, Motamedi claimed he had nothing to do with it while also claiming the order was legit. These two viewpoints cannot be resolved logically. If it was legit, Motamedi would have had to appear in court to obtain them. If it wasn’t legit, then assertions otherwise won’t suddenly make a nonexistent case appear on a Michigan court’s docket.

• Now the Russians have nixed the Daily Stormer’s new online home, citing the country’s laws against hate speech. According to Radio Free Europe, the Russian company responsible for registering the Daily Stormer’s Russian domain received a letter from Russian authorities asking it “to look into the possibility of register suspension due to extremist content of this domain. So we decided to suspend [the] domain Dailystormer.ru.”

• A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a long series of questionable DMCA notices I thought had been issued by online onanism portal Chaturbate. The takedown requests appeared to have been generated by a faulty algorithm with no human vetting involved. Many of those I examined appeared to target names of Chaturbate broadcasters, but without any of the precision one normally associates with the word “target.” Sites named for delisting included geographical research, an Amazon page for a book about the Hadron Collider, track meet records collections, and even Chaturbate itself.

• After some discussion with Chaturbate, it was determined someone is filing notices in Chaturbate’s name, but without Chaturbate’s official blessing. The scattershot, extremely prolific approach was now harming Chaturbate’s reputation, tying it to bogus DMCA notices targeting all sort of non-infringing content. (I have since updated the original post to reflect the my conversations with Chaturbate and offer my apologies for naming the wrong party in the original post.)

• It really was just last week that we were discussing the problems of telling platforms like YouTube to remove videos concerning “violent extremism” because it’s often tough to tell the difference between videos that many people think are okay and ones that those same people think are not. But in that post, we also linked back to a story from 2013 in which — after getting pressure from then Senator Joe Lieberman — YouTube started removing “terrorist” videos, and in the process deleted a channel of people documenting atrocities in Syria.

• When the Chinese government wanted to keep its users off Facebook and Google, it blocked the entire country’s access to the U.S. companies’ apps and sites. And when citizens started using third-party workarounds — like Tor, proxies and VPNs — to get around those blocks, it moved to quash those, too.

• So a handful of researchers came up with a crazy idea: What if circumventing censorship didn’t rely on some app or service provider that would eventually get blocked but was built into the very core of the internet itself? What if the routers and servers that underpin the internet — infrastructure so important that it would be impractical to block — could also double as one big anti-censorship tool?

• It turns out, the idea isn’t as crazy as it might seem. After six years in development, three research groups have joined forces to conduct real-world tests of an experimental new technique called “refraction networking.” They call their particular implementation TapDance, and it’s designed to sit within the internet’s core.

• In the wake of last week’s “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia—as well as the vehicular murder of a woman by (probably) a neo-Nazi connected to the event—the quest to identify and out those who marched with white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups last Friday and Saturday is in full swing.

• Some tech companies that provide hosting, domain, and CDN services to many of the most prominent hate groups are now re-evaluating those decisions in the wake of recent far-right violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. However, other firms are holding their course in the name of free speech principles.

• Squarespace, a hosting company, told Ars on Wednesday that it would soon be booting some of its current customers. The company currently hosts numerous extremist sites, including freedomfront.org, identityevropa.com, and npiamerica.org, among others.

• And in an internal company email obtained by Gizmodo, Prince acknowledged that the decision was exactly as arbitrary as it seemed.

• “This was my decision, I don’t think it’s CloudFlare’s policy and I think it’s an extremely dangerous decision in a lot of ways,” Prince said. “I think that we as the internet need to have a conversation about where the right place for content restriction is…but there was no way we could have that conversation until we resolved this particular issue.”

• It’s about halfway through the fifth season of “Orange Is the New Black” when Elizabeth Rodriguez’s recently un-incarcerated, always opinionated Aleida sums up the plight of female-forward broadcast television writers everywhere with one simple, well-crafted exchange.

• “Can I say ‘bitches?’” she asks a local newscaster and then, when she gets the green light, immediately and involuntarily exclaims, “s—.” The journalist, played by Thea McCartan, responds she can’t say that, to which Aleida replies, “What kind of f—ing bulls— rule is that?”

• FORTIFY RIGHTS has echoed calls from local rights groups for the Malaysian government to repeal the country’s Film Censorship Act, after several films about refugees were censored including one about Rohingya child brides in Malaysia.

• Activists say the Film Censorship Board (LPF) officials came to the Refugee Festival in Kuala Lumpur late last week, subsequently demanding the partial censorship of Bou, a film about trafficked brides from Burma (Myanmar), and total ban on Kakuma Can Dance about refugee hip hop dancers in Kenya.

• The Communist Party of India (Marxist) on Wednesday accused the Narendra Modi government at the Centre of imposing the worst kind of censorship. It said the Agartala centres of Doordarshan and All India Radio (AIR) blacked out Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar’s Independence Day address to the people of the state.

• The CPI (M) also furnished an internal letter of AIR as evidence that the state broadcasters were unwilling to broadcast the speech unless the “CM agrees to reshape the content (of his speech) making it suitable to the solemnity of the occasion and sentiments of the people of India at large”.

• “I wouldn’t be much of a free speech advocate if I refused to debate with someone whose views I disagree with,” she said.

Privacy/Surveillance

• When border officials learned about the incident by taking Chelsea’s phone and reading her email to her doctor, they informed her that she was being issued a lifetime ban from entering the US.

• This past Monday, Dreamhost unveiled details about their ongoing legal battle with the United States government to protect the IP addresses and therefore identities of the 1.3 million website visitors. Dreamhost first received the search warrant in July and has been fighting vehemently against the government request using the First and Fourth Amendment.

• The revelation comes from the annual Attorney-General’s Department report on the operation of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act that gives Australian law enforcement agencies powers to access the call records and other metadata of every Australian telephone and internet account without a warrant.

• Australian has signed a mutual assistance treaty with China that obliges Australia to hand over “documents, records and articles of evidence” in relation to criminal matters. Similar treaties all over the world help law enforcement authorities share information to help catch criminals in their own country, but it appears that during the 2015-2016 financial year was the first time Australia had ever reported that China had been provided metadata under this scheme.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The intolerable events in Charlottesville bring new urgency to an old debate: Should we allow neo-Nazis a public platform? Every aspect of the Unite the Right rally—not only its bloody denouement—stands as grounds for a resounding “no.” With torches, swastikas, metal poles crashing into a black man’s skull, and a Dodge Charger plowing into defenseless bodies, the far right has made undeniable what was already clear: They are enemies, not political interlocutors. This makes it all the more crucial to delineate what we do or do not mean when we demand an end to according space for speech and assembly to far-right racists.

• In the last year of Trump-emboldened white nationalism, the debate, largely shaped by the far right, has rested on a fulcrum of First Amendment rights. The right of anyone to speak publicly, the neo-fascists say, is the very freedom that actual fascism would see decimated. And it is a line that has found a comfortable home with the liberal commentariat. This view finds its best iteration in that old quote so regularly misattributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” (It was actually written by British Voltaire biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall.)

• This video of the January 12, 1999 broadcast of Nightline is really quite remarkable. It shares clips of voice recordings made in the mid-twentieth century of black people born into U.S. slavery.

• That’s right, it features the voices of real (former) slaves.

• To get these interviews, folklorists traveled the South in the 1930s and 1940s carrying around 200 lb. “portable” 78 RPM disc recorders.

• The technology to clean up and digitize the scratchy memory-filled discs only became available in the 1990s.

• As of today, the mother of the murder suspect who killed at least one person in Charlottesville Virginia during a white supremacist rally, told reporters that all she knew the last time she talked to her son, is that he was going to an “Alt-Right” rally. She had no idea her son was a racist — or did she?

• A Chicago pastor has asked the Emanuel administration to remove the names of two presidents who owned slaves from parks on the South Side, saying the city should not honor slave owners in black communities.

• A bronze statue of George Washington on horseback stands at the corner of 51st and King Drive, at the northwest entrance to Washington Park.

• Over the next few weeks, EFF and our allies will enter our final push to pass legislation out of the California legislature that would defend and promote civil liberties. With a Democratic super-majority eager to push back against the federal government, our chances have seldom been better to move the ball forward on the state level. We have also seen bipartisan support emerge around issues such as transparency and youth access to technology.

• But we need all Californians who value digital rights to flood their state lawmakers with communications demanding they send these key reforms to the governor’s desk. We’ve set up five simple action pages, covering issues such as police surveillance, broadband privacy, and youth computer rights. Please lend your voice to ensure California is at the forefront of the battle for our rights.

• As an attorney representing victims of torture, one of the most inspiring things I have ever seen is the sheer determination of survivors standing up and publicly confronting those responsible. That’s why I’m so elated that our clients Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and Obaidullah have surmounted so many obstacles in their long pursuit of justice.

• Last week, almost two years after filing their lawsuit, our clients prevailed over the final attempt to keep their claims out of court. And today, these brave men secured a settlement from James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, the two psychologists who designed and implemented the CIA torture program that ensnared two of them and killed a relative of the third.

• Two victims of the CIA’s torture program have reached a historic legal settlement with the contract psychologists who designed and helped implement it. The U.S. government has never publicly compensated any of the men tortured in CIA custody, and this legal settlement — the terms of which are confidential — is the first of its kind.

• Under former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the Justice Department repeatedly moved to block lawsuits at their early stages, arguing that court cases about government torture in clandestine prisons would reveal state secrets. In 2015, however, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the two psychologists the CIA paid to create torture techniques.

• Heavily armed neo-Nazis and Ku-Klux-Klanners descended on Charlottesville,Virginia, last weekend to intimidate the community into reversing a decision to remove a Confederate statue. The violence included one right-wing extremist plowing his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring at least 19 others, the same kind of attack that has occurred in Europe and drawn denunciations as terrorism.

• I spoke with Ai-jen Poo, Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, about the recent violence and how the surge in racism is affecting the people whom she represents. Ai-jen Poo was named as one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2012, and a MacArthur Genius Fellow in 2016.

• When President Donald Trump let loose at his Tuesday press conference, equating anti-racism protesters with neo-Nazis, it was a big hit with the men who’d taken part in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

• But Trump wasn’t just playing to the kind of racist crowd that marches around carrying Tiki torches and waving swastika flags in the streets. He was also sending a signal to those in the executive suites.

• Racism has always permeated this country up and down the income scale. And in our era of extreme concentration of economic and political power, emboldening just a few men at the top can be tremendously dangerous.

• We are living in deeply troubling times. Our democracy is eroding, wealth and income inequality has skyrocketed, and tragedy and violence seemingly erupt daily around the world. The recent events in Charlottesville, VA are just the latest reminder of the disturbing place we find ourselves in. Yes that incident was about race and hate, but it also connects to something much deeper. Anyone who pays attention to current events should be starting to connect the dots between the myriad problems plaguing our society.

• While we categorize and silo these problems as distinct and separate issues, they are actually interconnected as they arise out of a single dominant worldview that values profit and power over people and planet.

• This extractive, neoliberal, patriarchal, and supremacist world order is literally killing us and killing the biosphere that sustains us. That is the inconvenient truth we must face. It is not enough to make incremental reforms and to push for changes that are politically expedient. We must come to realize the imperative of transforming our system of political economy and our cultural values.

• By abandoning the revolutionary left—anarchist, antifascist, antiracist, antiwar, autonomist, ecosocialist, Marxist, or other—the opportunistic and disgruntled leftists of the last few decades have played a significant role in suffocating viable leftist opposition against the empire of late capital. Regardless of their intentions, they’ve enabled the almost complete subjugation of those the empire deems to be barbaric, which would be 90-plus percent of the human species.

• We were all in the dark, on the edge of the wooded park known as Wyman Dell, opposite the Baltimore Museum of Art. It was 2 a.m. Wednesday, and despite the presence of a couple of dozen workers in hardhats, a huge crane, a flatbed truck and a couple of other pieces of heavy machinery, the work site, surrounded by police tape, was remarkably still.

• All of us — the workers, the cops, the mayor, scattered reporters and onlookers — watched the focus of the work, an imposing sculpture of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, each on his horse. The crane lowered a big harness dangling from a red metal hook. One worker clambered up on a ladder to fit the harness around the prodigious girth of the generals’ steeds. There was much adjustment and anticipation.

• Suddenly, with a lurch, up Lee and Jackson went, wrenched loose from the stone base where they had rested for nearly 70 years. They dangled a bit and then came the big swing up into the trees, making their horses look like nothing so much like flying twin Pegasuses with warriors mounted on their backs. And then they dropped to the ground, where, off of their stone base and in the shadow of the trees, the generals really did look awfully life-like, as if they might still be trotting across the battlefield at Chancellorsville.

• Out of 370 reported incidents, 221 have publicly available reports and news coverage. You can see the news coverage CAIR’s public incident data is based on below. You can see the public reports provided by CAIR below.

• Look, the Charlottsville march of Nazis (they had the swastika and the salute, they’re not alt-right) showed very clearly the difference between how Nazis and left-wingers are treated. Left-wingers march, and the riot police are in their faces. Nazis march, and the police don’t even intervene while they are beating up counter-protestors.

• Then, of course, we have the Nazi who drove his car into the crowd, and much of the media calling it a “clash with counteprotestors” (no) and saying things like “amid violence” rather than “in an act of terrorism.”

• The center, which includes what is laughably called the “center left,” may condemn Nazis, but they certainly prefer them to left-wingers. They can do business with Nazis. The people they hate are those they call the “alt-left” in an attempt to pretend that wanting universal healthcare and cops to not kill blacks is the same thing as being a Nazi.

• What is the character of racist right-wing politics today? Is it the crazed white supremacist who plows into an anti-fascist demonstration in Charlottesville, VA or can it also be the assurance by Lindsay Graham that an attack against North Korea would result in thousands of lives lost…. but those lives will be “over there”? What about the recent unanimous resolution by both houses of Congress in support of Israel and criticism of the United Nations for its alleged anti-Israeli bias? Would that qualify as racist and right-wing, since it appears that the ongoing suffering of the Palestinians is of no concern? And what about the vote by the U.S. House of Representatives to go even beyond the obscene proposal of the Trump administration to increase the military budget by $54 billion dollars and instead add a whopping $74 billion to the Pentagon budget?

• [...]

• The white supremacy that some of us see as more insidious is not reflected in the simple, stereotypical images of the angry, Nazi-saluting alt-righter or even Donald Trump. Instead, it is the normalized and thus invisible white supremacist ideology inculcated into cultural and educational institutions and the policies that stem from those ideas. That process doesn’t just produce the storm troopers of the armed and crazed radical right but also such covert true believers as Robert Ruben from Goldman Sachs, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Tony Blair and Nancy Pelosi – “decent” individuals who have never questioned for a moment the superiority of Western civilization, who believe completely in the White West’s right and responsibility to determine which nations should have sovereignty and who should be the leaders of “lesser” nations. And who believe that there is no alternative to the wonders of global capitalism even if it means that billions of human beings are consigned permanently to what Fanon called the “zone of non-being.”

• Obviously angered that he had been pressed earlier to place blame for the violence where it squarely belonged, on the side of the racist alt-right, Trump lashed out at the “alt-left”: “You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit and they were very, very violent….There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You have just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.”

• Trump’s remarks were a firehose of gasoline gushed onto a political firestorm. Almost giddy with the easy political points to score, Democrats rhetorically lashed Trump to the Klansmen and Nazis he defended. Nearly the entire Republican leadership took to Twitter to denounce bigotry, even Senator Orrin Hatch, who had earlier said Trump was “not a racist,” after Trump attacked federal judge Gonzalo P. Curiel’s fairness because of his Mexican heritage, tweeted, “We should never hesitate to call out hate. Whenever and wherever we see it.”

• Life After Hate is a Chicago-based nonprofit that does path-breaking work. Founded by former white supremacist leaders in 2011, it studies the forces that draw people to hate and helps those who are willing to disengage from radical extremist movements.

• In June, the Department of Homeland Security revoked a grant to the nonprofit, telling The Huffington Post that it wants to focus on funding groups that work with law enforcement.

• This comes at a time when government agencies have warned about rising membership in far-right organizations, and the nation reels from the tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia.

• The Intercept interviewed Life After Hate executive director Sammy Rangel about his organization’s work and the approach they take that has successfully convinced dozens of white nationalists to leave the movement.

• A court has overturned the earlier sentences of young Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong and two other student leaders and sentenced them to prison in connection with huge pro-democracy protests in 2014.

• Last year Wong and student leader and disqualified lawmaker Nathan Law were sentenced to community service for leading or encouraging an illegal rally in September 2014. A third activist, Alex Chow, was given a suspended three-week prison sentence.

• A three-judge panel on Thursday decided to stiffen those sentences and send all three to prison. Law was sentenced to eight months, Chow to seven and Wong to six.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Earlier this year you might recall that lawmakers voted along party lines to kill consumer broadband privacy protections. The rules, which large ISPs whined incessantly about, were relatively basic; simply ensuring that ISPs couldn’t collect or sell your personal data without being transparent about it and providing working opt out tools. The rules were only proposed after ISPs repeatedly showed they weren’t able to self regulate on this front in the face of limited competition, from AT&T’s plan to charge more for privacy, to Verizon getting busted for covertly modifying wireless packets to track users without consent.

• Among other things, Pai’s FCC rolled back broadcast TV station ownership limits, which could help Sinclair complete an acquisition of Tribune Media Company that would let Sinclair reach 72 percent of TV-owning households in the US. The Democrats’ letter focused on that and several other actions taken since Pai became chairman in January. [...]

• In February 2011, ICANN held an official ceremony marking the handover of the last IPv4 address blocks to the five global Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). It took four and a half more years until ARIN (American Registry of Internet Numbers) announced that it had exhausted the last of its free pool of IPv4 addresses.

• Many consumers are still reeling from a Charter, Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable merger that left users with slower speeds, worse service, and higher prices. Other broadband consumers are still struggling with a bungled Frontier acquisition of Verizon assets that left users with prolonged outages and even worse customer service than the shitshow they already enjoyed. As we’ve seen for decades, this kind of mindless consolidation traditionally only benefits the companies involved, particularly in a market where real competition is in short supply.

• This growth for growth’s sake is one of the major reasons Comcast — and its horrible customer service (which didn’t scale with the company’s expansion because that would have cost money) — exists. And Wall Street’s relentless thirst for growth at all costs is a major reason these companies can’t simply focus on being the best “dumb pipes” possible, instead focusing their attentions on expanding into markets they have little expertise in (see Verizon’s ingenious plan to hoover up failed 90s brands and pander to Millennials). When they can’t succeed because they’re out of their depth, they try to tilt the playing field (killing net neutrality).

• When last we checked in with former FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth, he was rather grotesquely using the Manchester bombing to try and launch a completely bizarre attack on net neutrality over at the Forbes op-ed pages. Furchtgott-Roth, who served as an FCC Commissioner from 1997 through 2001, now works at the Hudson Institute, which not-coincidentally takes money from large incumbent broadband providers. The Hill, Forbes and other similar outlets then publish not-so-objective “analysis” from such individuals without really disclosing the money or motives driving the rhetoric.

• AT&T has lost a court case in which it tried to stall construction by Google Fiber in Louisville, Kentucky.

• AT&T sued the local government in Louisville and Jefferson County in February 2016 to stop a One Touch Make Ready Ordinance designed to give Google Fiber and other new ISPs quicker access to utility poles. But yesterday, US District Court Judge David Hale dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, saying AT&T’s claims that the ordinance is invalid are false.

• “We are currently reviewing the decision and our next steps,” AT&T said when contacted by Ars today.

• One Touch Make Ready rules let ISPs make all of the necessary wire adjustments on utility poles themselves instead of having to wait for other providers like AT&T to send work crews to move their own wires. Without One Touch Make Ready rules, the pole attachment process can cause delays of months before new ISPs can install service to homes.

• Google Fiber has continued construction in Louisville despite the lawsuit and staff cuts that affected deployments in other cities.

• Two Democratic members of Congress today called for an independent investigation into the Federal Communications Commission’s claim that it suffered DDoS attacks on May 8, when the net neutrality public comments system went offline.

• “While the FCC and the FBI have responded to Congressional inquiries into these DDoS attacks, they have not released any records or documentation that would allow for confirmation that an attack occurred, that it was effectively dealt with, and that the FCC has begun to institute measures to thwart future attacks and ensure the security of its systems,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) today. “As a result, questions remain about the attack itself and more generally about the state of cybersecurity at the FCC—questions that warrant an independent review.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Until fairly recently, freedom of panorama within Article 5(3)(h) of the InfoSoc Directive was a relatively little-known copyright exception within those available to Member States under EU law.

• With proposals that would make this exception mandatory for EU Member States to adopt and recent national legislative reforms (eg in Belgium and France), this is no longer the case.

• So for years we’ve examined how executives at ESPN completely whiffed at seeing the cord cutting revolution coming, and personified the industry’s denial that a massive market (r)evolution was taking place. As viewers were beginning to drift away from traditional cable and erode revenues, ESPN executives were busy doubling down on bloated sports contracts and expensive Sportscenter set redesigns. Only once ESPN lost 10 million viewers in just a few years did executives finally acknowledge that cord cutting was a problem, though they subsequently have tried to downplay the threat at every opportunity.

• For years, years, the MPAA’s public fight against piracy has chiefly consisted of a moral argument against it. Proclamations of the end of movies, the downtrodden future of filmmakers, and claims about piracy being equatable to outright theft were the tools of a Hollywood lobbier that itself exhibited the most underhanded sort of tactics in its attempts to get the internet to stop being the internet. It seems facile to state that this moral argument failed to find any purchase with the public, as filesharing went mainstream anyway. The reasons for this should be rather obvious: the arguments the MPAA made and the dooms it foresaw for itself and its industry were provably false. File sharing and piracy are a thing, yet movies still make gobs of money, allowing the MPAA to pay its executives the sort of handsome sums reserved for successful agencies. Still, Hollywood kept to its talking points. Piracy is wrong. Morally wrong.

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