● 08.25.17

● Links 25/8/2017: Linux Turns 26 Years Old, QupZilla is Now Falkon, Introduction of Sailfish X, Go 1.9

Posted in News Roundup at 6:35 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• A hulking great 15.6-inch laptop with the power to match. On paper, I’m impressed at how well the Entroware Zeus manages to balance top tier performance and yet retain the benefits of portability.

• The sleek aluminium chassis measures just 18.6mm thick, and the whole laptop weighs in at just 1.9KG — surprisingly light for a portable workstation.

• Remember when you first started out with Linux? Depending on the environment you’re coming from, the learning curve can be somewhat challenging. Take, for instance, the number of commands found in /usr/bin alone. On my current Elementary OS system, that number is 1,944. Of course, not all of those are actual commands (or commands I would use), but the number is significant.

Desktop

• There have been various controversies with Windows 10, from issues with privacy and telemetry, to ads and forced upgrades. Following a court case, Microsoft has vowed to never force upgrade files onto users again.

• Windows users in Germany were particularly unimpressed when Microsoft forcibly downloaded many gigabytes of files to upgrade from Windows 7 and 8 to Windows 10. Having held out for 18 months, and losing its case twice, Microsoft has finally agreed to stop its nefarious tactics.

• During the ‘free upgrade’ period of Microsoft’s Windows 10 rollout and subsequent updates, the company was heavily criticised for downloading large amounts of data to users’ machines without permission, or even an acknowledgement that the upgrade was wanted.

Kernel Space

• I first installed Linux in 1993. I ran MS-DOS at the time, but I really liked the Unix systems in our campus computer lab, where I spent much of my time as an undergraduate university student. When I heard about Linux, a free version of Unix that I could run on my 386 computer at home, I immediately wanted to try it out. My first Linux distribution was Softlanding Linux System (SLS) 1.03, with Linux kernel 0.99 alpha patch level 11. That required a whopping 2MB of RAM, or 4MB if you wanted to compile programs, and 8MB to run X windows.

• Happy 26th birthday Linux! Yes, it’s that time of the year once again, the day which most open-source enthusiasts consider to be the famous kernel’s formal founding. It was on this day 26 years ago that a plucky Fin named Linus Torvalds punched out a small announcement about his ‘hobby’ operating system and shared it with the Minix newsgroup.

• Today is the day most commonly associated as the birthday of Linux. Happy 26th birthday Linux!

Graphics Stack

• Self-appointed OpenChrome project maintainer Kevin Brace who for the past year or so has been single-handedly managing the open-source VIA “OpenChrome” graphics driver code-base, is still working towards getting the work-in-progress Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver working on newer builds of the Linux kernel.

Benchmarks

• Yesterday along with the completely Linux-trouble-free Ryzen 7 (it indeed went overnight without any issues coming up via the kill-ryzen script), I finally got my hands on the AMD Threadripper. In particular, the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X that features sixteen physical cores yielding 32 threads via SMT, 3.4GHz base frequency, 4.0GHz boost clock frequency, and quad-channel DDR4 support. This Threadripper 1950X is a beast but will set you back $999 USD and has a 180 Watt TDP. I’ll have my much more thorough AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Linux review next week including many more benchmarks, performance-per-dollar, and system power use / performance-per-Watt metrics, but here are some very early results for those anxious to see this HEDT PC on Linux.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• It seems an ex-Valve writer has written up a blog post detailing what could have been the story for Half-Life 2: Episode 3. The writer, Marc Laidlaw, joined Valve in 1997 where he helped write and design Half-Life, Half-Life 2 and the episodes that continue after.

• Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order announce Green Cities, a new expansion for popular city-builder Cities: Skylines.

• The Green Cities add-on will allow mayors to rid their creations of that ever-present brown stain, and make pollution a thing of the past with a range of all new sustainable buildings and items.

• The expansion adds 350 new assets to the core game, including eco-friendly buildings, organics stores, and electric vehicles. New in-game services are also included, as well as revisions to the noise and environmental pollution models.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The final 5.10.5 bugfix update of the Plasma 5.10 series is now available for users of Kubuntu Zesty Zapus 17.04 to install via our backports PPA.

• KDE Frameworks is also updated to the latest version 5.37

• The QupZilla open-source web-browser built using Qt WebEngine and in development for the past seven years is now part of the KDE project and has renamed itself to Falkon.

• Earlier this month the QupZilla developers announced they would be moving under the KDE umbrella and in the process rename itself. Today they made it known their new name for this KDE web-browser is Falkon.

• QupZilla, currently at version 2.1.2, is a free software Web browser using the new and very fast QtWebEngine browser. It aims to be a lightweight Web browser available through all major platforms. This project was originally started only for educational purposes by a lone developer, David Rosca, and since then, QupZilla has grown into a feature-rich browser. QupZilla has all of the standard functions you expect from a Web browser. It includes bookmarks, history (including a sidebar view), and tabs. Above that, it has ad-blocking enabled by default with a built-in plugin. Over time, this one-man project has grown to include numerous contributors.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• I guess we all kind of enjoy breaking things and them fixing them up. It might be one of the reasons we want to be programmers. Find a bug, patch it up, test it, break something with what seemed like a good idea, rollback to an earlier version, fix again… etc. It just never ends. And believe it or not, sometimes it really is fun. Sometimes. Unfortunately for me, what follows is a description of one of the other situations, when you really wouldn’t want your precious build to go nuts, but it does. Spoiler: it does have a happy ending, no worries :).

• It’s summer and it’s GUADEC time! This year’s GUADEC took place in Manchester, England. It was surprisingly less bad for that location The organisers deserve a big round of applause for having pulled the event off. After having organised last year’s GUADEC I have first hands experience running such an event. So a big “thank you” to the team from England

• Its been almost three months that I embarked on GSoC journey with GNOME. And its time to wrap it up. So here it goes ..

Distributions

Red Hat Family

Finance

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Will Cooke of Canonical is out with another weekly update on the latest happenings for the Ubuntu 17.10 desktop as the “Artful Aardvark” release continues getting closer.

• There’s been continued work on captive portal detection for Ubuntu 17.10, QPDF/CUPS package upgrades, and a lot of theming work happening this past week for the next Ubuntu release, which has transitioned from the Unity 7 desktop to GNOME Shell. And yes, Wayland still plans to be the default.

• Didier has written a series of blog posts detailing how we’ve set up the Ubuntu GNOME Shell session in Artful to co-exist with the default GNOME Shell experience and still give us the flexibility we need to shape the experience as we would like. You can start at day one here. We worked with the Dash to Dock developer to land our Ubuntu branch upstream, read more here.

• A short blog post today to tease a little bit about our future theme changes that are going to land in Ubuntu Artful as we are transforming our default session. For more background on this, you can refer back to our decisions regarding our default session experience as discussed in my blog post.

Devices/Embedded

• The open spec, 60 x 45mm “Orange Pi R1” runs Linux or Android on a quad -A7 Allwinner H2 and features WiFi, USB OTG, and dual 10/100 Ethernet ports.

• Shenzhen Xunlong appears to be increasingly focusing its Orange Pi line of open spec development boards on small-footprint SBCs aimed more at IoT than multimedia applications. Shortly after revealing its quad Cortex-A53, Allwinner H5 based Orange Pi Zero Plus, featuring the standard 48 x 46mm footprint of its Zero-branded boards, it has released an Orange Pi R1 model with a quad -A7 Allwinner H2 for only a dollar less. With its somewhat larger 60 x 45mm footprint, the R1 lacks the Zero branding, but it shares the same Allwinner H2 SoC as the original Orange Pi Zero.

• Asus published their first beta Android release (version 13.11.0.2) for the Tinker Board back in April. It was an important step for this single board computer, as Android is a hugely popular operating system with a phenomenal range of open source and proprietary software available. While the initial release was withdrawn from Asus’s support website, Asus followed up the initial release with some minor updates (versions 13.11.0.3 and 13.11.0.4) boasting some fairly modest improvements.

• Today it’s our pleasure to announce all the details for Sailfish X, aka Sailfish OS for Sony Xperia X! We are coming very close to the sales start, which is now only a few weeks away. We have now all the details planned, and we want to share them with all of you Sailfish OS fans and followers.

• After Nokia pulled the plug on the MeeGo operating system, a group of former Nokia executives formed a startup called Jolla to keep the dream of a GNU/Linux-based alternative to Android alive.

• The company’s had a mixed track record over the past few years. On the one hand, Sailfish OS is a real thing, and there are community-based ports that you can use to replace Android on a number of phones.

• Privacy-focused hardware maker Purism is here with its Librem 5 smartphone. It runs PureOS (an open source Debian GNU/Linux derivative) and other Linux-based operating systems. The phone puts an extra emphasis on providing an encrypted and open experience to users. Purism has launched a crowdfunding campaign to gather support and funds for Librem 5.

Tizen

Android

• When Google radically redesigned Android Wear with version 2.0, it partnered with LG to show off the changes with LG Watch and Watch Sport. The latter was the more powerful model, with a heart rate sensor, GPS, and LTE capability. Still, it was met with somewhat mixed reviews thanks to some early bugs and performance quirks and its $350 price. But several months after launch, bugs fixed and street price lowered, it’s closer to achieving its original promise.

Free Software/Open Source

• As more and more enterprises embrace cloud-native applications and microservices, some argue that there is a need for a reimagined software stack. For cloud-native applications, there are new networking abstractions that engineers have to layer on (writing on new logic) to achieve reliability between services.

• A group of leading companies across the global food supply chain today announced a major blockchain collaboration with IBM intended to further strengthen consumer confidence in the global food system. The consortium includes Dole, Driscoll’s, Golden State Foods, Kroger, McCormick and Company, McLane Company, Nestlé, Tyson Foods, Unilever and Walmart, who will work with IBM to identify new areas where the global supply chain can benefit from blockchain. Together they will help identify and prioritize new areas where blockchain can benefit food ecosystems and inform new IBM solutions. This work will draw on multiple IBM pilots and production networks in related areas that successfully demonstrate ways in which blockchain can positively impact global food traceability.

• The Linux Foundation is host to more than 100 open source projects, but only a handful are foundations unto themselves. Cloud Foundry Foundation is unique in its standing as a Linux Foundation project: a nonprofit foundation and an open source project that came to the table fully formed. Incepted at VMware in 2010, Cloud Foundry was transferred to Pivotal in 2013 before being open sourced, at which point the Cloud Foundry Foundation was established.

Events

• Docker will be at Open Source Summit in Los Angeles, CA from September 11-14th to highlight new development with the Moby Project and it’s various components: containerd, LinuxKit, InfraKit, Notary, etc.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google Chrome is currently the most popular browser on desktop PCs. It has over 54% of desktop users usually in the Windows world choosing it over the other browsers. Here in the Linux world, Google Chrome is not the most popular as most distros prefer to ship other web browsers. The most popular of these is Firefox whilst others prefer Chromium. Chromium for all intents and purposes is very identical to Google Chrome. They share everything from looks to extensions, engine, and features. So why don’t they (Linux distros) just ship with Google Chrome? What are the differences between Google Chrome and Chromium?

Mozilla

• Mozilla had several student developers contributing to their next-gen Servo engine via this year’s Google Summer of Code. Overall the work appears to be a big success and boost for Servo.

• For those interested in Servo’s GSoC 2017 successes, there was work done for supporting custom elements in Servo. Servo now has initial support for Custom Elements for allowing web developers to create reusable web components with “first-class support” in the browser. You can basically specify your own custom HTML tags and their behavior.

CMS

• August is synonymous with celebration for the Moodleverse. At midnight on August 20th, 2002, Moodle 1.0, the first official, definitive (no betas) release, saw the light of day.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• The CPU on this machine is a dual-core Cavium Octeon CN50xx (MIPS64 ISA) which can run in both BE and LE modes. OpenBSD runs in big-endian mode on this architecture.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• LaternaMagica is the image viewing and exporting tool of the GNUstep Application Project. Quickly create a list of images and export it by converting the file type and resizing the images to a uniform size, to prepare your next slide show, a folder of thumbnails or the folder to give your local printer and print out pictures.

• New releases which combine many improvements collected in the past three years!

• GNUMail and Pantomime found a home in the past years in the “GNUstep non-FSF” project on GNA. However, GNA shut down and the project was moved to https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/gnustep-nonfsf. This move was time consuming, left the repository unavailable for weeks, but we were able to recover the repository with full history. The code is on savannah.nongnu.org on SVN.

• During the move, Copyrights, Headers and Licenses were cleaned up. The X-Face code had no clear license and was removed. It is quite an obsolete feature anyway, I haven’t seen it used since long time.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Architect Carlo Ratti has revealed plans to transform a former 19th-century military complex in Turin, Italy, into a campus where students, workers and makers can set up their own labs and studios.

• Carlo Ratti Associati will transform the 20,000 square-metre Caserma Lamarmora barracks into “a testing ground for an open-source approach to architecture”.

Open Hardware/Modding

• If you would rather build your very own electric longboard rather than purchase one of the numerous different styles and variations currently available for over and above $500.

• You may be interested in a new open source electric longboard design which uses 3D printer parts and can be constructed for under $400. Depending on your skill levels the project can take anywhere from four hours to one we tend to construct and is capable of providing users with a theoretical top speed of 35 km an hour and the theoretical range of up to 25 km.

• Practically since the invention of the automobile, people have been customizing their vehicles. From the fade-away fenders of the 1930s, to the hot rods and muscle cars of the 1950s and 1970s, and on to the “Pimp My Ride” era of the 2000s, people have always expressed their individualism through their cars.

• Now that computers are literally driving automobiles, programmers have gotten in on the action. People like Craig Smith, founder of OpenGarages, are working to support open source car hacking tools that both help automobile enthusiasts fine-tune their cars and contribute to the overall security of modern vehicles.

• Smith has long been an advocate for open standards and was an early Linux adopter. He’s written multiple Linux kernel modules for his own use (personally or for his employer), but he’s focused his public contributions at the “application level around security or game development.”

• The team behind the Turtle Rover started in 2012 working on Mars rover prototypes at the Wroclaw University of Technology. After working on the FREDE and DREAM projects for space missions the group decided to develop an open source project for makers. The Turtle Rover is their project, an open source remote control rover designed for Earth exploration.

Programming/Development

• Companies and individual tech teams must tailor their approaches to meeting customer needs by using open source practices and assuming an agile warrior mindset…

• Today the Go team is happy to announce the release of Go 1.9. You can get it from the download page. There are many changes to the language, standard library, runtime, and tooling. This post covers the most significant visible ones. Most of the engineering effort put into this release went to improvements of the runtime and tooling, which makes for a less exciting announcement, but nonetheless a great release.

• Version 1.9 of Google’s Go programming language is now available for developers.

• Go 1.9 features a variety of changes, including on the language front where there is now support for type aliases. Exciting me a lot about Go 1.9 is that it now supports compiling functions for a package in parallel. The concurrent compilation of functions should really speed up the build process and is enabled by default although there is an option to disable it if you so choose.

• One sunny summer morning this month, a group of 20 teenage girls gathered in a conference room in the sleek offices of a tech company in Manhattan. It was their fifth week of coding camp, and they were huddled around laptops, brainstorming designs for their final projects. One group was building a computer game that simulates the experience of going through life with depression and anxiety, while others were drafting plans for websites that track diversity at companies and help connect newly arrived immigrants with local community groups.

• They were working intently when Reshma Saujani, the founder and chief executive of the nonprofit organization Girls Who Code, dropped in to offer some encouragement.

Leftovers

Science

• A lost and unique collection of letters and correspondence from the late Alan Turing has been found in an old filing cabinet in a storeroom at the University of Manchester.

• The file’s content, which potentially hasn’t seen the light of day for at least 30 years, dates from early 1949 until Turing’s death in June 1954.

• Altogether there are 148 documents, including a letter from GCHQ, a handwritten draft BBC radio programme about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and offers to lecture from some of America’s most famous universities, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Health/Nutrition

• For being the industry that provides us with both life-saving drugs and boner pills, Big Pharma sure gets a lot of hate. But it turns out they’re even better at sucking than we thought, filling their day-to-day lives with lots of little acts of douchebaggery to keep us miserable through all of our waking moments. For example …

• In late July, a short article was published in a Malawian newspaper: “Press Release on Organization of Seed Fairs.” Issued by the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation, and Water Development, in conjunction with the Seed Traders Association of Malawi, the short statement advised the public that “only quality certified seed suppliers registered with Government to produce and/or market seed should be allowed to display seed at such events.” The release was signed by Bright Kumwembe for the Agriculture Ministry.

• Applications are due by 4 September for an all-expenses-paid Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) Advanced International Training Programme aimed at building capacity in intellectual property and genetic resources in support of innovation.

• The programme is open for applicants from the following countries: Cambodia, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Philippines, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

Security

Defence/Aggression

• Despite the chaos and ugliness of the past seven months, President Trump has finally begun to turn U.S. foreign policy away from the neoconservative approach of endless war against an ever-expanding roster of enemies.

• The current phase of the decades-long U.S.-North Korea standoff began this past July 4, when North Korea launched its first genuine intercontinental ballistic missile. In a statement, North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un called it “a gift for the American bastards.”

• Then, on August 8, President Trump terrifyingly declared that “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Two days later he said, “maybe that statement wasn’t tough enough,” and tweeted that “military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded.”

• The next day, the leader of the FARC met for several hours with the Central High Command of the guerrilla. At the meeting they discussed, above all, the name of the political party. On August 15, ‘Iván Márquez’ had told the media that the name of that community “will surely be called Fuerza Alternativa Revolucionara de Colombia (Alternative Revolutionary Front of Colombia). We do not want to break ties with our past, we have been and will continue to be a revolutionary front.”

• Donald Trump is finally “presidential” again, pundits insist, now that he is ratcheting up another US war.

• In a speech on August 21, the far-right US president did an about-face, announcing a surge in the 16th year of the war in Afghanistan, which he had previously harshly condemned. Trump did not reveal many specifics, but reports suggest his administration will deploy 4,000 more soldiers to the country (Fox News, 8/21/17), in addition to the roughly 8,400 US troops and 5,000 other NATO forces already there.

• For her part, Warren largely echoed McCain’s bellicose banter that Trump needs to double down militarily to finish off the Taliban, the impossible dream. No real surprise here. To the extent that she’s advanced any foreign policy positions during her stint in the senate, Warren has been a dutiful supplicant to the demands of AIPAC and the Council on Foreign Relations, rarely diverging from the neocon playbook for the global war on Islam. Warren’s Afghan junket is a sure sign of her swelling presidential ambitions. These days “national security” experience is measured almost exclusively by how much blood you are willing to spill in countries you know almost nothing about. It didn’t take long for Warren to matriculate to the company position.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Julian Assange, the founder of whistleblowing platform WikiLeaks, has spoken out against a passing US Senate bill which aims to officially label his organisation as a “non-state hostile intelligence service” that is “abetted by state actors and should be treated as such”.

• It used to be easy to cheer on WikiLeaks. But since 2010, many (myself included) have watched with dismay as WikiLeaks slid from the outlet courageous enough to host Chelsea Manning’s data dump to a murky melange of bad-faith propagandizing and newsworthy disclosures. At a time when WikiLeaks and its founder are willing to help push Pizzagate, and unable to tweet about sunglasses sans conspiracy-think, it’s not unfair to view Assange as being motivated as much by his various axes to grind as by a zeal for transparency. But even the harshest WikiLeaks critics should resist the Senate’s attempt to brand the website a “non-state hostile intelligence service” in the 2018 intelligence authorization bill.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• We present an empirical document-by-document textual content analysis and comparison of 187 climate change communications from ExxonMobil, including peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed publications, internal company documents, and paid, editorial-style advertisements (‘advertorials’) in The New York Times.

• [...]

• Available documents show a discrepancy between what ExxonMobil’s scientists and executives discussed about climate change privately and in academic circles and what it presented to the general public.

• The Trump administration plans to sharply reduce the government’s estimate of how much each ton of carbon emissions harms the planet. It hasn’t done so yet, and that delay is slowing Trump’s effort to expand coal mining and gas pipelines.

• As evacuations are underway for Hurricane Harvey, the Border Patrol is continuing to operate its immigration checkpoints, forcing undocumented immigrants to choose between staying put — and trying to withstand a hurricane — or risking deportation.

• The hurricane is expected be the most powerful storm to land in 12 years, and counties near the southern coast in Texas have ordered thousands of residents to leave, according to NBC.

• Jim Burns, a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, told The Intercept that “U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints in the path of Hurricane Harvey in Texas will close as state highways close.” So in other words, as long as the highways are functional for evacuation, the Border Patrol will operate checkpoints.

Finance

• But like almost everything with Trump, he was just blowing hot air: Yesterday, his Federal Trade Commission handed Amazon its biggest victory yet. The First Amendment has been spared, but consumers, workers, and small businesses have not. The decision will have dreadful long-term effects, and the FTC did it with all the seriousness of an intern scheduling a lunch meeting.

• Amazon, which acquired Whole Foods in June, will begin a wave of price cuts on Monday following Walmart’s new focus on developing its online retail efforts

• The next big idea was a cash register Kameyama developed that looked like a tablet computer. He gave it to customers for free, in exchange for their sales records [...]

• Figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that 122,000 Europeans left the UK in the year to March, with the unprecedented exodus driving a drop in net migration.

• Business groups have raised mounting concerns over “brain drain” from vital industries, while organisations representing EU migrants have urged the Government to offer solid guarantees over their status following Brexit.

• Lukasz, who did not want his second name published, moved to London as a young child when his mother was offered a better job in the capital.

• Earlier this year, a leaked Department of Health study revealed that a hard Brexit would leave the NHS short of 40,000 nurses by 2026. This led me to write to Brexit secretary, David Davis, demanding the government urgently disclose any other findings into the potential impacts of the hard Brexit path it is pursuing.

• The response from the Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) revealed that they have conducted analysis of over 50 sectors of the economy, but no indication was given as to the findings from these studies. So potentially more than 50 secret papers fill the shelves at DExEU offices.

• Attempted reassurances in the letter that the DExEU has “travelled up and down the country to listen to the hopes and concerns of businesses, civil society and of course the general public”, won’t wash. The government is sitting on crucial information that ought to be in the public domain. It could help determine future policy on key issues such as membership of the single market and customs union, freedom of movement and the rights of EU nationals.

• Yellen correctly and courageously rejects the deconstruction of key financial safeguards supported by many on Trump’s team of Wall Street-sourced bank regulators.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Wow. Check out this latest cover of German magazine Stern, that depicts Trump draped in the American flag, giving a Nazi salute.

• Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said Thursday he’s asking President Trump to shrink “a handful” of national monuments that previous presidents designated to protect land and water.

• In a formal report he’s sending to Trump on Thursday, Zinke will not ask the president to eliminate any of the 27 protected areas that were under review since an April executive order, he told The Associated Press.

• He did not specify the changes he is recommending in the AP interview. But he said any areas removed from national monuments would remain under federal control and public access would either stay the same or improve.

• When former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper questioned President Donald Trump’s “fitness to be in this office” after the President’s wild speech in Phoenix Tuesday night, it was likely only a matter of time before the President aimed his Twitter ire at the retired general.

• Indeed, Thursday morning came the tweet from the President: “James Clapper, who famously got caught lying to Congress, is now an authority on Donald Trump. Will he show you his beautiful letter to me?”

• President Trump has repeatedly argued that he’s done more than any other recent president. That’s not true, as measured by the amount of legislation he’s been able to sign. It is true, though, that Trump has undone a lot of things that were put into place by his predecessors, including President Barack Obama.

• Since Jan. 20, Trump’s administration has enthusiastically and systematically undone or uprooted rules, policies and tools that predated his time in office. Below, a list of those changes, roughly organized by subject area.

• “She’s partway through the primaries already and she’s saying, ‘I don’t understand what this populist uprising is,’” says Allen. He and Parnes were “dumbstruck” when sources first told them this, long before Election Day.

• Hear about these surprises and more on The Breakthrough, the ProPublica podcast where investigative reporters reveal how they nailed their biggest stories.

• Shortly after the 2016 election, Columbia University historian Mark Lilla published an op-ed in The New York Times lamenting that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.”

• He attacked “identity politics” as atomizing the American public and losing elections — contrasting it with a holistic variation of liberalism that powered the New Deal Coalition — Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, which focused not so much on who individual Americans were, but what rights they all needed. The column went viral, sparking countless hot takes, and he quickly padded out the argument into enough words to call it a book. Let the hot takes resume.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A nude blogger whose self-described “body positive” Instagram page was shut down for violating the social-media network’s nudity policy has celebrated her return to the site by posting a nude photo of herself partially obscured by a placard reading: “F*ck you Instagram.”

• A Queensland nude blogger is back on Instagram after her popular account was shut down without warning by the social media platform.

• YouTube isn’t removing the selected videos, but is instead setting new restrictions on viewing, sharing and making money on them. A note detailing the changes will go to producers of the affected videos on Thursday, according to a spokeswoman for the Alphabet Inc. company.

• All of this was uncovered through the use of software called ooniprobe, which is designed to measure networks and detect Internet censorship. Ooniprobe was developed more than five years ago by the Tor-supported Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), with which I work, in order to boost transparency, accountability, and oversight of Internet censorship. The software is free and open source, meaning that anyone can use it. And, indeed, tens of thousands of ooniprobe users from more than 190 countries have already done just that.

• A piece of software that detects internet censorship is a critical tool for safeguarding human rights on the internet and beyond, writes Maria Xynou.

• Last year, during a wave of deadly political protests in Ethiopia, the government blocked more than 15 media websites and the smartphone chat application WhatsApp.

• Sites promoting freedom of expression and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as those offering censorship-circumvention tools, such as Tor and Psiphon, were also suppressed.

• All of this was uncovered through the use of software called ooniprobe, which is designed to measure networks and detect internet censorship.

• On 11 August, the Malaysian government wrongfully censored a documentary film on the human trafficking of Rohingya girls to Malaysia and banned a documentary on refugees in Kenya.

• “This censorship is unconstitutional and violates the rights of the filmmakers,” said Amy Smith, executive director of Fortify Rights. “Malaysia’s censorship law is inconsistent with human rights law and Malaysia’s own constitution, suppressing free speech and expression — the bedrocks of a free society. These films are in the public interest and deserve a wide audience.”

• Both China and India have been found to block websites sometimes. Don’t feel smug if you live outside of Asia, the American government may block websites in the future. The UK government has already talked about blocking websites that feature pornography of consenting adults, unless an adult Briton specifically asks to be able to access it.

• Researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Georgetown University Law Center, University of Michigan, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have found a way to circumvent web censorship, but ISPs worldwide would need to implement their technology. Their refraction networking system is called TapDance.

• The Trump era requires greater resistance against government’s power to restrict First Amendment rights.

• Does the First Amendment need a rewrite in the era of Donald Trump? Should the rise of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups lead us to cut back the protection afforded to speech that expresses hatred and advocates violence, or otherwise undermines equality? If free speech exacerbates inequality, why doesn’t equality, also protected by the Constitution, take precedence?

• After the tragic violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, these questions take on renewed urgency. Many have asked in particular why the ACLU, of which I am national legal director, represented Jason Kessler, the organizer of the rally, in challenging Charlottesville’s last-minute effort to revoke his permit. The city proposed to move his rally a mile from its originally approved site—Emancipation Park, the location of the Robert E. Lee monument whose removal Kessler sought to protest—but offered no reason why the protest would be any easier to manage a mile away. As ACLU offices across the country have done for thousands of marchers for almost a century, the ACLU of Virginia gave Kessler legal help to preserve his permit. Should the fatal violence that followed prompt recalibration of the scope of free speech?

Privacy/Surveillance

• District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Robert Morin ruled today that DreamHost must comply with federal prosecutors’ narrowed warrant seeking communications and records about an Inauguration Day protest website: disruptj20.org; but they will have to present the court with a “minimization plan” that includes the names of all government investigators who will have access to the data and a list of all the methods that they will be using to search the evidence. This is an important step in ensuring judicial oversight of the government’s digital search.

• The suspect in the National Security Agency leak investigation will be allowed to see classified information used as evidence in her trial under an order recently issued by a federal judge in Augusta.

• In his six-page ruling this month, U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Epps said Reality Winner, 25, will be permitted to inspect the sensitive records in a secure area, so long as she signs a memorandum of understanding barring unauthorized disclosure of them.

• WikiLeaks claims the program has been used against numerous US agencies, including the FBI, NSA and Department of Homeland Security.

• Anti-secrecy organization Wikileaks published Thursday another trove of files purported to be from the United States Central Intelligence Agency. While the documents have historically shown the agency’s capabilities to spy on individuals and targets, the latest release shows how the CIA spied on other intelligence agencies.

• The release focuses on a CIA program called ExpressLane, which can collect data from other intel organizations without their knowledge. Wikileaks suggests those partners may include the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and National Security Agency (NSA), though the documentation for the program does not name targets.

• WikiLeaks has released details of a CIA project known as ExpressLane which enabled the agency to steal biometric data from its liaison services such as the NSA, Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI.

• The release was part of its ongoing Vault 7 document dump which was kicked off on 7 March. The tool only works on computers running Windows.

• After a dispute over the scope of a warrant, a judge today ordered hosting service DreamHost to turn over records related to an anti-Trump website.

• The idea that “an honest person has nothing to hide” is often repeated by those for whom the concept of privacy only impedes their ability to track their fellow citizens. But you also hear it from people who clearly do have something to hide, despite the fact that they are not doing anything to violate the law. In 2016, the Agora International Human Rights Group produced its first report, revealing several hundred identified cases of politically motivated surveillance of Russian activists, journalists and NGOs — when police officers photographed and fingerprinted people detained during protests, for example. Human rights defenders moving around the country regularly encounter increased attention from law enforcement agencies — they are detained, searched and questioned about why they’re travelling. State and pro-state media broadcast the results of wiretaps and video surveillance of opposition politicians, which have been clearly passed to them by the security services, as well as compromising stories they have fabricated themselves. Internet services periodically warn their users that “state-sponsored hackers” are trying to get access to their accounts.

• A nine-member bench of India’s Supreme Court announced the ruling in a major setback for the Narendra Modi-led government, which argued that privacy was not a fundamental right protected by the constitution.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In the uproar following the violence in Charlottesville earlier this month, one of America’s leading neo-Nazi websites, The Daily Stormer, was all but chased off the internet, thwarted even by Russian authorities within hours of its attempt to register a new .ru domain.

• But Moscow’s swift move came with a striking irony: American and European right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis have in recent years flocked to Russia’s biggest social network site, VK.

• VK, Russia’s most-trafficked website, has emerged as a social media hub for high-profile American far-right groups like the National Socialist Movement — which the Southern Poverty Law Center has called “notable for its violent anti-Jewish rhetoric” — despite the fact that pro-Nazi propaganda is illegal in Russia.

• Cecillia Wang is deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. She was one of the attorneys who litigated the civil rights case against former Maricopa County, Ariz., sheriff Joe Arpaio brought by the ACLU and partner organizations.

• President Trump rallied his crowd in Phoenix on Tuesday night by invoking the name of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. The reaction was exactly as expected.

• “Do the people in this room like Sheriff Joe?” Trump asked the crowd to thunderous applause. “I’ll make a prediction: I think he’s going to be just fine.”

• The new film Detroit by director Katherine Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal is about an event that took place in 1967. But with what has happened in America over the past couple of years, it could not be more timely, particularly the fatal police shootings of male African-Americans, such as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, and Philando Castile in St. Paul. In all three cases, the officer involved was either acquitted, or no charges were filed.

• In last year’s presidential election, 45,000 California voters were unknowingly disenfranchised. Their right to vote wasn’t curtailed because anyone questioned their eligibility or registration. They weren’t late sending in their ballot. They weren’t accused of doing anything wrong.

• Rather their vote didn’t count because an election official thought the voter’s signature on the mail-in ballot envelope didn’t match the voter’s signature on file. Officials make this determination without expertise in handwriting analysis.

• The second-highest ranking member of the Florida Senate pledged a legislative review of a state law that has allowed injured undocumented workers to be arrested and potentially deported rather than paid workers’ compensation benefits.

• “Legitimate injuries shouldn’t be denied just because the person was an undocumented immigrant,” said Republican Sen. Anitere Flores, the president pro tempore of the state Senate and chair of the Banking and Insurance Committee.

• “One needs to balance the going after fraudulent claims,” she said, “with not overcompensating and then denying claims to those individuals who have actually been injured.”

• The United States, where median Black household wealth is less than 7 cents on the white household dollar and where the mild slogan “Black lives matter” is considered controversial, is still very much a racist nation. Grasping the nature of this national racism in 21st century means looking at the different levels on which race operates here. One level is at the nation’s discursive and symbolic surface. It is about language, imagery, signs, the color of elite personnel, representation, and, well, symbols.

• This week, Ivan Nepomnyashchikh was released from Yaroslavl Prison Colony No 1. In December 2015, Nepomnyashchikh was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for participating in mass unrest as part of the Bolotnaya Square case. Three days before he was released, the prison administration once again placed him in a punishment cell. Nepomnyashchikh had been in solitary confinement on numerous occasions, especially after he, along with a number of other prisoners, complained of being beaten by prison guards. During his sentence, he spent a total of 58 days in solitary confinement.

• This means that, as of 24 August 2017, no one convicted in connection with the May 2012 protest on Bolotnaya Square is in prison. Approximately one month before Nepomnyashchikh, Dmitry Ishevsky was released from the same prison colony. However, the prosecution of Dmitry Buchenkov (who was not on Bolotnaya Square the day of the demonstration) continues. He is currently under house arrest. In addition, Maxim Panfilov, who was charged with taking part in the events on Bolotnaya Square and found by a court to be unfit to stand trial, remains in a psychiatric hospital in Astrakhan.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• In May, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the phrase “Google it” was not genericide – but now the plaintiffs in the case are asking the Supreme Court to take another look at the issues raised by that decision

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