● 05.24.18

● Links 24/5/2018: RIP Robin “Roblimo” Miller, Qt 5.11 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 3:20 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux Journal has learned fellow journalist and long-time voice of the Linux community Robin “Roblimo” Miller has passed away. Miller was perhaps best known by the community for his roll as Editor in Chief of Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned Slashdot, SourceForge.net, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, and ThinkGeek from 2000 to 2008. He went on to write and do video interviews for FOSS Force, penned articles for several publications, and authored three books, The Online Rules of Successful Companies, Point & Click Linux!, and Point & Click OpenOffice.org, all published by Prentice Hall.

• CERN really needs no introduction. Among other things, the European Organization for Nuclear Research created the World Wide Web and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, which was used in discovery of the Higgs boson. Tim Bell, who is responsible for the organization’s IT Operating Systems and Infrastructure group, says the goal of his team is “to provide the compute facility for 13,000 physicists around the world to analyze those collisions, understand what the universe is made of and how it works.”

Server

• ETSI is pleased to announce the availability of OSM Release FOUR. Bringing a large set of new features and enhancements, this version is the most ambitious and innovative OSM Release to date and constitutes a huge leap forward in terms of functionality, user experience and maturity.

• This new Release brings substantial progress thanks to a number of architectural improvements, which result in a more efficient behaviour and much leaner footprint – up to 75% less RAM consumption. Additionally, its new northbound interface, aligned with ETSI NFV work, and the brand-new cloud-native setup, facilitate OSM’s installation and operation, while making OSM more open and simpler to integrate with pluggable modules and external systems, such as the existing OSS.

• In monitoring, ETSI says OSM Release FOUR’s alarm and metric settings are easier to use, and a new policy manager adds push notifications and reactive policy configuration, which the standards body says “opens the door to closed-loop operations”.

• The monitoring module uses Apache Kafka as its message passing bus, and the module also implements a flexible plugin model so sysadmins can BYO monitoring environment.

Audiocasts/Shows

• It’s Tuesday, and it’s time for Cooking With Linux (without a net) where I do some live Linuxy and open source stuff, live, on camera, and without the benefit of post video editing therefore providing a high probability of falling flat on my face. Today, it’s teeny tiny Linux time where I’ll show you some of the smallest fully graphical distributions out there, play some old abandoned games, DOS emulation, and visit browser based Linux. Basically, a grab bag of Linux and open source goodies. Oh, and wine.

• It’s Season 11 Episode 12 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.

Kernel Space

• In a filesystem track session at the 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM), Darrick Wong talked about the online scrubbing and repair features he has been working on. His target has mostly been XFS, but he has concurrently been working on scrubbing for ext4. Part of what he wanted to discuss was the possibility of standardizing some of these interfaces across different filesystem types.

• Filesystem scrubbing is typically an ongoing activity to try to find corrupted data by periodically reading the data on the disk. Online repair attempts to fix the problems found by using redundant information (or metadata that can be calculated from other information) stored elsewhere in the filesystem. As described in Wong’s patch series, both scrubbing and repair are largely concerned with filesystem metadata, though scrubbing data extents (and repairing them if possible) is also supported. Wong said that XFS now has online scrubbing support, but does not quite have the online repair piece yet.

• In a combined filesystem and storage session at the 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM), Tim Walker asked for help in designing the interface to some new storage hardware. He wanted some feedback on how a multi-actuator drive should present itself to the system. These drives have two (or, eventually, more) sets of read/write heads and other hardware that can all operate in parallel.

• He noted that his employer, Seagate, had invested in a few different technologies, including host-aware shingled magnetic recording (SMR) devices, that did not pan out. Instead of repeating those missteps, Seagate wants to get early feedback before the interfaces are set in stone. He was not necessarily looking for immediate feedback in the session (though he got plenty), but wanted to introduce the topic before discussing it on the mailing lists. Basically, Seagate would like to ensure that what it does with these devices works well for its customers, who mostly use Linux.

• Much has been written on LWN about dynamically instrumenting kernel code. These features are also available to user-space code with a special kind of probe known as a User Statically-Defined Tracing (USDT) probe. These probes provide a low-overhead way of instrumenting user-space code and provide a convenient way to debug applications running in production. In this final article of the BPF and BCC series we’ll look at where USDT probes come from and how you can use them to understand the behavior of your own applications.

• The origins of USDT probes can be found in Sun’s DTrace utility. While DTrace can’t claim to have invented static tracepoints (various implementations are described in the “related work” section of the original DTrace paper), it certainly made them much more popular. With the emergence of DTrace, many applications began adding USDT probes to important functions to aid with tracing and diagnosing run-time behavior. Given that, it’s perhaps not surprising that these probes are usually enabled (as part of configuring the build) with the –enable-dtrace switch.

• Adding to the list of changes coming to Linux 4.18 are updates to CPUFreq’s “Schedutil” CPU frequency scaling governor.

• Schedutil is the newest CPUFreq governor introduced back during Linux 4.7 as an alternative to ondemand, performance, and others. What makes Schedutil different and interesting is that it makes use of CPU scheduler utilization data for its decisions about CPU frequency control.

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the addition of 22 Silver members and 4 Associate members. Linux Foundation members help support development of the shared technology resources, while accelerating their own innovation through open source leadership and participation. Linux Foundation member contributions help provide the infrastructure and resources that enable the world’s largest open collaboration communities.

Graphics Stack

• For those wanting to use the open-source ROCm Radeon Open Compute stack on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, it will be supported by the next release.

• The ROCm compute stack with OpenCL support will officially support Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the upcoming ROCm 1.9 release. Gregory Stoner of AMD’s compute team c

• Just over one month after there were 2,000 Vulkan-mentioning projects on GitHub, the 2,100 project milestone has been breached.

• If you have been experiencing rendering issues with the Vulkan-over-Direct3D “DXVK” layer while playing games on Wine and are using the RADV Vulkan driver, you may want to upgrade to the latest Git.

• Within the libinput world, the 1.11 development cycle has been going on long with Libinput 1.10 having debuted in January. But this long development cycle is bringing with it many changes.

• Peter Hutterer of Red Hat who started the libinput project today announced the first release candidate of the upcoming libinput 1.11.

• While Mesa 18.1 just officially shipped last week, Mesa 18.2 as next quarter’s open-source 3D OpenGL/Vulkan graphics driver stack update is scheduled for release in mid-August.

• The tentative Mesa 18.2 release schedule puts the official Mesa 18.2.0 release for 10 August or potentially 17 August depending upon if a fourth release candidate is needed or any other release delays.

• While the recently released X.Org Server 1.20 has initial support for XWayland with EGLStreams so X11 applications/games on Wayland can still benefit from hardware acceleration, in its current state it doesn’t integrate too well with Wayland desktop compositors wishing to support it. That’s changing with a new patch series.

• Based off the Gallium3D “mesa_glthread” work for threaded OpenGL that can provide a measurable win in some scenarios, the Intel i965 Mesa driver has implemented this support now too.

• Following the work squared away last year led in the RadeonSI driver, the Intel i965 OpenGL driver supports threaded OpenGL when the mesa_glthread=true environment variable is set.

• With the recent Mesa 18.1 release there is OpenGL 3.1 support with the ARB_compatibility context for the key Gallium3D drivers, but Marek Olšák at AMD continues working on extending that functionality under the OpenGL compatibility context mode.

• Following the news from earlier this month that FreeDesktop.org would move its infrastructure to Gitlab, the Mesa3D project has begun the process of adopting this Git-centered software.

Applications

• Discourse is a free, open source, modern, feature-rich and remarkable community-oriented forum software. It’s a powerful, reliable, and flexible platform that comes with a wide range of tools for community discussions.

• It is designed for building community discussion platforms, mailing list or chat room for your team, customers, fans, patrons, audience, users, advocates, supporters, or friends and most importantly, it seamlessly integrates with the rest of your established online platforms.

• Imagine you’ve been tapped to give a presentation. As you’re preparing your talk, you think, “I should whip up a few slides.”

• Maybe you prefer the simplicity of plain text, or maybe you think software like LibreOffice Writer is overkill for what you need to do. Or perhaps you just want to embrace your inner geek.

• It’s easy to turn files formatted with Markdown into attractive presentation slides. Here are four tools that can do help you do the job.

• FLAC and Ogg now have faster audio encoding and decoding capabilities thanks to recent code improvements.

• Robert Kausch of the fre:ac audio converter project wrote in to inform us about recent changes he made to FLAC and Ogg for yielding faster performance. Kausch updated the CRC checks within FLAC and Ogg to a faster algorithm and those patches have now been accepted upstream.

Instructionals/Technical

• I wrote a program that takes these words and first canonicalizes them a bit: Removing attributes like [ugs.] [regional], {f}, the to in front of verbs and other embellishment.

• Learn to use one of the most powerful commands of the Unix toolbox: sed, the stream editor with practical examples of SED commands.

• Thanks to the Linux deployment team now the great wall separating android users from kali has weakened and fallen. It has been a long journey integrating Linux system on advanced RISC machine devices. It started with Ubuntu and now we have a Kali version that can run on your android device. Isn’t that great? Great indeed.

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine project has announced the release of VKD3D 1.0, the first official release of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan layer primarily developed at CodeWeavers. VKD3D is the approach Wine is pursuing for getting Direct3D 12 games from Windows working on Wine under Linux or also under macOS when paired with MoltenVK.

• For the VKD3D 1.0 release there are D3D12 demos now working but features are known to be missing and bugs are expected. Geometry and tessellation shaders are among the big ticket items still left to be implemented in future releases.

• While VKD3D 1.0 is out today for Direct3D 12 mapped over Vulkan, the DXVK project for running Direct3D 11 over Vulkan is also out with a new release today.

• Most prominent to the new DXVK 0.52 release is initial support for DXGI 1.2, the updated Microsoft DirectX Graphics Infrastructure that brings various updates for drivers. The initial DXGI 1.2 support in the process fixes at least Bioshock 2 Remastered as well as Frostpunk.

• This is the first release of vkd3d. A lot of Direct3D 12 features are still missing and bugs are expected. The current version was tested mainly with demo applications. A number of features that are being worked on have been deferred to the next development cycle. This includes in particular geometry and tessellation shaders support, various shader translation improvements, as well as various improvements for core Direct3D 12 methods.

• Today, the Wine developers officially announced that vkd3d for translating Direct3D 12 to Vulkan in Wine has reached 1.0.

• DXVK [GitHub], the exciting Wine project to run Direct3D 11 games and applications with Vulkan was updated yesterday.

• Wine’s Direct3D to OpenGL translation layer will now default to using OpenGL 4.4 contexts rather than legacy OpenGL contexts.

Games

• For the next day or so you can grab Hacknet – Deluxe absolutely free as the Humble Store is doing a Spring Sale Encore.

• Always nice to grab a free game, especially when it will give you a Steam key and a DRM free build as well!

• Full Metal Furies, the cooperative action RPG from Cellar Door Games is damn fun, but the initial Linux release did have performance issues which now seem to be solved.

• The open-source RPCS3 PlayStation 3 emulator will now offer faster performance on modern Intel systems.

• With the recent release of the Progressive Web Apps core guides on MDN, it’s easier than ever to make your website look and feel as responsive as native on mobile devices. But how about games?

• In this article, we’ll explore the concept of Progressive Web Games to see if the concept is practical and viable in a modern web development environment, using PWA features built with Web APIs.

• Let’s look at the Enclave Phaser Template (EPT) — a free, open sourced mobile boilerplate for HTML5 games that I created using the Phaser game engine. I’m using it myself to build all my Enclave Games projects.

• If you like your city builders to be a little different and challenging, Poly Towns might be worth a look. It just had a major update yesterday, with tons of tweaks and upgrades and along with that the developer decided to release a Linux version too.

• Rifter is promising some tough-as-nails acrobatic platforming that’s utterly drenched in neon and it will come with an intense 80’s synthwave soundtrack.

• A reader emailed in to show off that they’ve been able to get the PSVR headset working on Linux with Steam using OpenHMD and OpenHMD-SteamVR.

• For those who simply can’t get enough of your turn-based strategy antics, fantasy game Exorder [Steam] recently added Linux support and it has a demo available.

• Rise to Ruins continues to be one of my favourite indie games, the dedication the developer has shown is incredible. The latest few updates have improved it dramatically.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• For starters, all of LXQt’s components are now ready to be built against the recently released Qt 5.11 application framework, and out-of-source-builds are now mandatory. LXQt 0.13.0 also disabled the menu-cached functionality, making it optional from now on in both the panel and runner, thus preventing memory leaks and avoiding any issues that may occur when shutting down or restarting LXQt.

• The LXQt team is proud to announce the release of LXQt 0.13.0, the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment.

• The LXQt team is working hard towards LXQt 1.0.0. Want to help us? Found any bugs? Please file bug reports and pull requests on our GitHub tracker!

• The developers working on the combined Razor-qt and LXDE desktop effort, LXQt, have rolled out their newest feature release.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Slightly ahead of our planned schedule, we have released Qt 5.11 today. As always, Qt 5.11 comes with quite a few new features as well as many bug fixes to existing functionality. Let’s have a look at some of the cool new features.

• The Qt Company has managed to release Qt 5.11 one week ahead of schedule compared to its original road-map, which is quite a feat considering some of the past Qt5 release delays. Beyond that, Qt 5.11.0 is offering a big slab of improvements.

• We do try to keep breakages to a minimum, even in the major releases, but the changes do add up. This raises the question: How hard would it be to port a Qt application from Qt 1.0 to 5.11?

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Thanks to the work of Christoph Reiter, GLib has had continuous integration builds on Windows (using MinGW32/MSYS2) for a week or two now. Furthermore, he’s added code coverage support, so we can easily see how our code coverage is changing over time. Thanks Christoph!

• Automatically shutting down daemons when not in use is in vogue, and a good way of saving resources quite easily (if the service’s startup/shutdown costs are low).

• For the past couple of weeks, Builder from git-master has come with a new gnome-builder-clang subprocess. Instead of including libclang in the UI process, we now proxy all of that work to the subprocess. This should have very positive effect on memory usage within the UI process. It will also simplify the process of using valgrind/ASAN and obtaining useful results. In the future, we’ll teach the subprocess supervisor to recycle subprocesses if they consume too much memory.

• Thunderbolt allows for peer-to-peer network connections by connecting two computers directly via a thunderbolt cable. Mika from Intel added support for this to the 4.15 kernel. Recently, Thomas Haller from NetworkManager and I worked together to figure out what needs to be done in userspace to make it work. As it turns out, it was not that hard and the pull-request was merged swiftly.

Distributions

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• openSUSE Leap 15 will be released on the 25th of May 2018! A new openSUSE release is always an exciting event. This means that I get to play with all kinds of new and improved software packages.

• I am aware that I can simply install openSUSE Tumbleweed and have a new release 4 or 5 times a week. But when using openSUSE Tumbleweed some time ago, I noticed that I was installing Gigabytes of new software packages multiple times per week. The reason for that is that I have the complete opposite of a minimum install. I always install a lot of applications to play / experiment with (including a lot of open source games). I am using openSUSE since 2009 and it covers all of my needs and then some. I am already happy with the available software, so there is no real reason for me to move with the speed of a rolling release. Therefore I prefer to move with the slower pace of the Leap releases.

Red Hat Family

• Since the beginning of the rpkg project, it was known as a client tool for DistGit. Times changed and a new era for rpkg is here. It was enhanced with project management features, so we can safely label it as a tito alternative.

• A features review, pros and cons and user guide is a theme for a whole new article. In this short post, I, as a long-time tito user, want to show rpkg alternatives for the tito commands, that I frequently use.

• Pure Storage® is excited to announce a reference architecture for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, using both Pure Storage FlashArray and FlashBlade™ to provide all the underlying storage requirements.

• The Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 release was officially announced here on May 21, bringing along with it new features and expanded support for the open-source cloud platform.

• In a video interview with eWEEK, Mark McLoughlin, senior director of engineering for OpenStack at Red Hat, details what’s new in the release and what is set to come in the next release. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 is based on the upstream OpenStack Queens release that first became generally available on Feb. 28.

• “The key thing for the OpenStack Platform 13 release is that it is a long life release,” McLoughlin said.

• Today, Pure Storage is excited to announce Pure Service Orchestrator. It is now possible to deliver container storage-as-a-service to empower your developers to build and deploy scale-out, microservices applications. The agility that your developers expect they could only get from the public cloud is now possible, on premise!

• In this blog, we’ll discuss why the adoption of containers is exploding, how the the lack of persistent storage threatens to slow adoption, and why a newer, smarter approach to storage delivery for containerized application environments is needed.

• With a Red Hat subscription, you get the latest enterprise-ready software, expert knowledge, product security and technical support from trusted engineers making software the open source way. Red Hat Support makes sure our enterprise technology works in your environment, and helps you minimize the impact to your business if an issue occurs. If you need to open a support case, it will be routed to engineers that are specialized in the product that you use, so your issue can be efficiently resolved by experts.

• Red Hat has introduced Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud, an integrated solution for customers seeking to co-locate compute and storage functions in OpenStack environments. The new offering combines Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 in a single user experience, supported by a common lifecycle for greater operational and organizational efficiency.

• The firm recently celebrated 25 years in business, and according to Miles, Red Hat is as strong as ever. Four years into his tenure at the company here in the Middle East, he has been “pleasantly surprised” and “very impressed” that regional organisations are already pursuing strong strategies in open source.

• Red Hat launched a new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform for telcos and enterprises that combines OpenStack compute with its Ceph storage.

• Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud is an open, integrated platform for customers seeking to co-locate compute and storage functions in OpenStack environments.

• Announced Tuesday at the OpenStack Summit, the new platform blends Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 into a single user experience for hyperconvergence in the hybrid cloud. Red Hat said it was the biggest contributor to both open source projects.

Finance

Fedora

• Unlike a virtual machine, which includes an entire operating system, a container is meant to hold only the software needed to run an application. Therefore, to run a container efficiently and securely, you need an operating system that provides secure container services and acts as a foundation for running containers. One operating system developed for that task is Atomic Host.

• Think of Atomic Host as a secure, specialized version of Fedora, CentOS, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Its best use is to provide a reliable and easily upgradable operating system for running containers. Different formats of Atomic Host are available to run on anything from bare metal to a variety of cloud environments. With an Atomic Host system installed, you can use the docker command as you would on other container-enabled systems. However, Atomic Host also comes with an additional command called atomic, which expands what you can do with containers.

• Can you spot what that is?

Debian Family

• More demos of vnlog and feedgnuplot usage! This is pretty pointless, but should be a decent demo of the tools at least. This is a demo, not documentation; so for usage details consult the normal docs.

• Each Wednesday night I join a group bike ride. This is an organized affair, and each week an email precedes the ride, very roughly describing the route. The two organizers alternate leading the ride each week, and consequently the emails alternate also. I was getting the feeling that some of the announcements show up in my mailbxo more punctually than others, and after a recent 20-minutes-before-the ride email, I decided this just had to be quantified.

• The emails all go to a google-group email. The google-groups people are a wheel-reinventing bunch, so talking to the archive can’t be done with normal tools (NNTP? mbox files? No?). A brief search revealed somebody’s home-grown tool to programmatically grab the archive:

• To whom it may concern, this is my report over the first few weeks of gsoc under the umbrella of the Debian project. I’m writing this on my way back from the minidebconf in Hamburg, which was a nice experience, maybe there will be another post about that

• So, the goal of my GSOC project is to design and implement a new SSO solution for Debian. But that only touches one part of the projects deliveries. As you can read in the description Alexander Wirth originally posted in the Debian Wiki, the project consists of two parts, where the first one is the design and coding of a new backend and self-service interface for Debian guest users (this includes the accounts of Debian Maintainers).

Derivatives

• Compared to its previous releases, Debian-based Parrot 4.0 ethical hacking distro has arrived with a lot more changes. The development team has called it an important milestone in the history of the project.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The current 2-year term of the Technical Board is over, and it’s time for electing a new one. For the next two weeks (until 6 June 2018) we are collecting nominations, then our SABDFL will shortlist the candidates and confirm their candidacy with them, and finally the shortlist will be put to a vote by ~ubuntu-dev.

• Anyone from the Ubuntu community can nominate someone.

• Last week, much of the IoT industry descended on Santa Clara, California, for the annual IoT World trade show. One of the exhibitors present were Rigado who Canonical partnered with earlier this year to deploy Ubuntu Core on their IoT gateways primarily targeted at commercial applications such as smart lighting and asset tracking. Rigado used IoT World as an opportunity to discuss the launch of Cascade, their new ‘Edge as a Service’ proposition, for commercial IoT.

• Cascade, which is offered as a simple monthly subscription, enables companies to focus on their business and what generates revenue rather than expending effort and resource dedicated to managing the infrastructure behind it. With many organisations looking at ways they can benefit from adopting IoT while removing perceived barriers, Cascade offers a low-risk, low-cost entry which in turn enables project teams to benefit from reduced development, support and no upfront hardware costs. The end result is a quicker path to IoT deployment and resulting ROI.

• Comment Ubuntu 18.04, launched last month, included a new Welcome application that runs the first time you boot into your new install. The Welcome app does several things, including offering to opt you out of Canonical’s new data collection tool.

• The tool also provides a quick overview of the new GNOME interface, and offers to set up Livepatch (for kernel patching without a reboot).

• In my review I called the opt-out a ham-fisted decision, but did note that if Canonical wanted to actually gather data, opt-out was probably the best choice.

• The UBports team have put out their latest batch of answers to common questions around this project that’s still working to maintain the Ubuntu Touch software stack.

• Among the project’s recent work has included getting QtWebEngine working on Mir and before their Ubuntu 16.04 LTS based release they still need to figure out Chromium crashes and to resolve that as well as updating the browser. For their first release of UBports derived from Ubuntu 16.04 “Xenial” they are still going to rely upon Oxide while later on should migrate to a new browser.

Flavours and Variants

• During the last few weeks of the 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) cycle, we had 2 people drop by in our development channel trying to respond to the call for testers from the Development and QA Teams.

• It quickly became apparent to me that I was having to repeat myself in order to make it “basic” enough for someone who had never tested for us, to understand what I was trying to put across.

• After pointing to the various resources we have, and other flavours use – it transpired that they both would have preferred something a bit easier to start with.

• So I asked them to write it for us all.

• Creating Linux distro spins is relatively easy. A few string replacements, some branding, and you’re done. Creating unique, independent and self-sufficient projects, that’s another matter entirely. The latter category is reserved to only a small number of distros that manage to balance their parenthood and individual identity while still providing users with a sensible and meaningful setup for work and fun. Linux Mint is one of such rare examples.

• For many years, Mint has successfully paddles its gray-green look and feel, topped with good and easy access to everyday needs. This hasn’t always been easy, as Ubuntu changes a lot, and this has often affected Mint in unpredictable ways. Still, overall, it managed to retain an edge of worth that goes beyond being yet another bland clone. Staying with the LTS releases as the baseline is one such manifest. A set of unique tools is another. We explore.

• Kubuntu 18.04 LTS has been released and we take it for a test drive in this detailed review of Kubuntu 18.04.

Devices/Embedded

• FriendlyElec has launched a 100 x 64mm, $129 “NanoPC-T4” SBC that runs Android or Linux on a Rockchip RK3399 with 4G DDR4, native GbE, WiFi-ac, DP, HDMI 2.0, 0 to 80℃ support, and M.2 and 40-pin expansion.

• FriendlyElec has released its most powerful and priciest hacker board to date, which it promotes as being the smallest RK3399-based SBC on the market. The 100 x 64mm NanoPC-T4 opens with a $129 discount price with the default 4GB DDR4 and 16GB eMMC. Although that will likely rise in the coming months, it’s still priced in the middle range of open spec RK3399 SBCs.

• Ibase’s Linux-compatible, 3.5-inch “IB818” SBC provides a dual- or quad-core Apollo Lake SoC, plus 2x GbE, 4x USB 3.0, 2x SATA, 2x mini-PCIe, triple display support, wide-range power, and -40 to 85°C support.

• The open source, Linux based “AsteroidOS” alternative to Wear OS arrives in a stable 1.0 release, and Block spins off some of its Android smartwatch stack as an open source OpenWatch Project.

• The AsteroidOS project has released version 1.0 of its open source, Linux-based smartwatch distribution. Designed for after-market installation on “Wear OS by Google” (formerly Android Wear) watches, AsteroidOS can now be dual booted on seven different models. The release follows the late March announcement of an OpenWatch Project for building Android based open source custom ROMs on Wear OS watches.

• Purism has published their nearly final specifications on their limited-run Librem 5 Dev Kit. The cutoff for ordering a developer kit is next week as they are placing their hardware order and planning on only this single, limited run of the developer kit prior to the phones becoming available next year.

• Their deadline for ordering a developer kit is the end of the month and the kit price has raised to $399 USD. In the process, Purism believes they are still on track for their January 2019 for coming up with having the phone’s actual hardware ready.

• I’m pleased to announce that a non-profit organization has been incorporated to support the project: e Foundation.

• “e Foundation” will host core eelo assets and fuel the development of eelo software.

• This non-profit organization will be able to receive private and public grants, as well as donations from individuals, from anywhere in the world. We’re also working to add a legal way so that donations could benefit from tax cuts, as it’s often possible when donating to “in the public interest” organizations.

• As soon as a bank account will be ready for “e Foundation”, we will move there all donations and our “in demand” crowdfunding campaign.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• If you think Zuul is the Gatekeeper, demigod, and minion of the ancient Hittite god Gozer, then you’re a Ghostbusters fan, too. But, if you’re interested in continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and not “human sacrifice, dogs, and cats living together… mass hysteria,” then you want Zuul, OpenStack’s open-source CI/CD platform.

• Zuul originally was developed for OpenStack CI testing. For years, OpenStack, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, got all the attention. Over time, people began to realize that as impressive as OpenStack was, the CI system behind it, which enabled contributors and users across many different organizations to work and develop quickly together across multiple projects, was impressive in its own right.

• The Computer History Museum, based in California, has announced the publication of the source code for one of the first successful mainstream email clients: Eudora.

• Developed by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign programmer Steve Dorner in 1988, Eudora launched as an Apple Macintosh-exclusive client for the new-fangled electronic mail technology that was taking the world by storm at the time. Its original incarnation was just 50,000 lines of C code, but as Eudora’s popularity grew so did the code base: By 1991 it had become successful enough to attract the interest of Qualcomm, which licensed the software and took over development while launching it in 1993 as a paid-for commercial package for both Apple Macs and IBM PC compatibles.

• Before email was something you could access on the web, on your phone, or via Outlook, there were a handful or primarily text-based email applications such as Elm and Pine.

• One of the first popular email utilities to feature a graphical user interface was Eudora, created for Mac computers by Steve Dorner in 1988.

Events

• Here’s a presentation video from the very recent OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2018. The topic repeats what Dan Walsh was saying a couple of years ago. Again, this is talking about application containers using traditional kernel features like namespaces and cgroups… because as we all know, in the Linux kernel, containers are NOT a REAL thing.

• Just to be clear, OpenVZ… which is a mature out-of-tree patch for system containers that has been around and maintained for well over 13 years… does contain… but the hype is all around application containers like Docker and its work-alikes.

• At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2018, several talks explored the topic of container isolation and security. The last year saw the release of Kata Containers which, combined with the CRI-O project, provided strong isolation guarantees for containers using a hypervisor. During the conference, Google released its own hypervisor called gVisor, adding yet another possible solution for this problem. Those new developments prompted the community to work on integrating the concept of “secure containers” (or “sandboxed containers”) deeper into Kubernetes. This work is now coming to fruition; it prompts us to look again at how Kubernetes tries to keep the bad guys from wreaking havoc once they break into a container.

• Technologies like containers, clusters, and Kubernetes offer the prospect of rapidly scaling the available computing resources to match variable demands placed on the system. Actually implementing that scaling can be a challenge, though. During KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2018, Frederic Branczyk from CoreOS (now part of Red Hat) held a packed session to introduce a standard and officially recommended way to scale workloads automatically in Kubernetes clusters.

• Kubernetes has had an autoscaler since the early days, but only recently did the community implement a more flexible and extensible mechanism to make decisions on when to add more resources to fulfill workload requirements. The new API integrates not only the Prometheus project, which is popular in Kubernetes deployments, but also any arbitrary monitoring system that implements the standardized APIs.

• A few years ago, I was asked to put temperature monitoring in a customer’s server room and to integrate it with their existing monitoring and notification software. We ended up buying a rack-mountable temperature monitor, for nearly £200, that ran its own web server for propagating temperature data. Although the device ostensibly published data in XML, that turned out to be so painful to parse that we ended up screen-scraping the human-readable web pages to get the data. Temperature sensors are fairly cheap, but by the time you’ve wrapped them in a case with a power supply, an Ethernet port, a web server, enough of an OS to drive the above, and volatile and non-volatile storage for the same, they get expensive. I was sure that somewhere there must be physically-lightweight sensors with simple power, simple networking, and a lightweight protocol that allowed them to squirt their data down the network with a minimum of overhead. So my interest was piqued when Jan-Piet Mens spoke at FLOSS UK’s Spring Conference on “Small Things for Monitoring”. Once he started passing working demonstration systems around the room without interrupting the demonstration, it was clear that this was what I’d been looking for.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• We are only a few days away from May 25th, when the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will go into full effect. Since we were founded, Mozilla has always stood for and practiced a set of data privacy principles that are at the heart of privacy laws like the GDPR. And we have applied those principles, not just to Europe, but to all our users worldwide. We feel like the rest of the world is catching up to where we have been all along.

• It’s been nearly a year since we launched Firefox Focus for Android, and it has become one of the most popular privacy browsers for mobile around the world. In light of recent events, more and more consumers have growing awareness for privacy and secure products. The upcoming implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe later this month reflects this and, at the same time, highlights how important privacy is for all users.

• Almost a couple of years ago I started working on a concept called string tiers. The goal was twofold: on one side help locales, especially those starting from scratch, to prioritize their work on a project as large as Firefox, with currently over 11 thousand strings. On the other hand, give project managers a better understanding of the current status of localization.

• Given the growth in complexity and update frequency of Developer Tools within Firefox (currently almost 2,600 strings), finding a solution to this problem became more urgent. For example, is a locale in bad shape because it misses thousands of strings? The answer would not automatically be ”yes”, since the missing strings might have a low priority.

• The string tiers concept assigns priority to strings based on their target – who is meant to see them – and their visibility. The idea is quite simple: a string warning the user about an error, or requiring an action from them, is more important than one targeting developers or website owners, and buried in the Error Console of the browser.

SaaS/Back End

• Last week Cask Data, known for its open source Cask Data Application Platform (CDAP), announced that it’s being acquired by Google — specifically Google’s cloud division.

• “We are thrilled to announce that Cask Data, Inc. will be joining Google Cloud!” the company’s founders, Jonathan Gray and Nitin Motgi, said in its online announcement of the purchase.

• “With Kubernetes-as-a-Service, we are providing the industry’s simplest Kubernetes consumption model by delivering it fully configured, tested and validated at enterprise scale with the managed cluster services customers need to effectively run their applications,” Scott Crenshaw, executive vice president of private clouds at Rackspace, stated.

• “Rackspace’s combination of operational experience and open source expertise, coupled with the security, improved economics and a fully managed Kubernetes offering available on leading public and private cloud technologies, helps companies accelerate their digital transformation,” Crenshaw continued.

• The OpenStack Foundation is no longer interested in only its own cloud platform, but also in enabling the broader ecosystem of open infrastructure

• In a session at the OpenStack Summit, Thierry Carrez, VP of Engineering at the OpenStack Foundation, outlined the steps the foundation are taking to create what he referred to as a better-defined OpenStack. The key theme of the redefinition is that OpenStack is no longer just about the OpenStack cloud platform project.

• The OpenStack Foundation announced on May 22 the Kata Containers 1.0 release which is designed to bolster container security.

• The Kata Containers project provides a virtualization isolation layer to help run multi-tenant container deployments in a more secure manner than running containers natively on bare-metal. The effort provides a micro-virtual machine (VM) layer that can run container workloads.

• The OpenStack Rocky release is currently scheduled to become generally available on August 30th, and it’s expected to add a host of new and enhanced capabilities to the open-source cloud platform.

• At the OpenStack Summit here, Anne Bertucio, marketing manager at the OpenStack Foundation, and Pete Chadwick, director of product management at SUSE, outlined some of the features currently on the Rocky roadmap.

• Bertucio began the session by warning the audience that the roadmap is not prescriptive, but rather is intended to provide a general idea of the direction the next OpenStack release is taking.

Databases

• PostgreSQL 11 is the next major feature release of this open-source database SQL server due out later in 2018. While it’s not out yet, their release notes were recently updated for providing an overview of what’s coming as part of this next major update.

• To little surprise, performance improvements remain a big focus for PostgreSQL 11 with various optimizations as well as continued parallelization work and also the recently introduced just-in-time (JIT) compilation support.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• The Kaspersky Labs report issued on May 10th, 2018 has garnered a lot of media attention based on its claim of having identified 17 security issues in some OPC UA implementations. A detailed description of the 17 issues can be found at https://opcfoundation.org/security/.

• In a recent blog post, Intel and Wind River have announced their intent to make open source some of the components from the Wind River Titanium Cloud portfolio. The code is now being upstreamed in a new open source project called StarlingX, hosted by the OpenStack Foundation.

• Wind River Titanium Cloud was built on open source components, which are then extended and targeted to be hardened to address critical infrastructure requirements: high availability, fault management, and performance management needed for continuous 24/7 operation. Wind River Titanium Cloud also includes the low latency, high performance, scalability, and security needed for edge and IoT workloads.

• WhiteSource on Tuesday launched its next-generation software composition analysis (SCA) technology, dubbed “Effective Usage Analysis,” with the promise that it can reduce open source vulnerability alerts by 70 percent.

• The newly developed technology provides details beyond which components are present in the application. It provides actionable insights into how components are being used. It also evaluates their impact on the security of the application.

• The new solution shows which vulnerabilities are effective. For instance, it can identify which vulnerabilities get calls from the proprietary code.

Funding

• Tidelift, a Boston, MA-based open source software startup, secured $15m in Series A funding.

BSD

• When you think of It’s FOSS you probably think mainly of Linux. It’s true that we cover mostly Linux-related news and tutorials. But today we are going to do something different.We are going to look at TrueOS BSD distribution.

• Linux and BSD, both fall into Unix-like operating system domain. The main difference lies at the core i.e. the kernel as both Linux and BSD have their own kernel implementation.

• Per my 2018 schedule, it’s time to start writing FreeBSD Mastery: Jails. I’ve been idly assembling the parts over the last couple of months.

Licensing/Legal

• Tesla, a technology company, and the independent automaker are well known for offering the safest, quickest electric cars. The company uses a lot of open source software to build its operating system and features, such as Linux Kernel, Buildroot, Busybox, QT, etc also they have always been taciturn about the finer details and tech of its popular artefacts, such as Model S, Model X, but now Elon Musk’s company has just released some of its automotive tech source code into the open source community.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Mozilla is seriously into open-source. So seriously, in fact, that developer doesn’t just want to see it restricted to software. In its eyes, just about anything can go open-source. Even beer.

• To prove it, Mozilla teamed up with Widmer Brothers, a brewery based in Portland, Oregon. The companies crafted a survey for community input on the style, hops, and any special additions drinkers might want to see. Responses were tabulated, weighed, and turned into a recipe by the brewers at Widmer.

Open Hardware/Modding

• One way to design an underwater monitoring device is to take inspiration from nature and emulate an underwater creature. [Michael Barton-Sweeney] is making devices in the shape of, and functioning somewhat like, clams for his open source underwater distributed sensor network.

Programming/Development

• As a programmer, you will often find yourself as a permanent visitor of some websites. These can be tutorial, reference or forums websites. So here in this article let us have a look at the best websites for programmers.

• Over the past three years, LWN and its readers have gotten a yearly treat in the form of coverage of the Python Language Summit; this year is no exception. The summit is a yearly gathering of around 40 or 50 developers from CPython, other Python implementations, and related projects. It is held on the first day of PyCon, which is two days before the main PyCon talk tracks begin. This year, the summit was held on May 9 in Cleveland, Ohio.

• In a rather short session at the 2018 Python Language Summit, Larry Hastings updated attendees on the status of his Gilectomy project. The aim of that effort is to remove the global interpreter lock (GIL) from CPython. Since his status report at last year’s summit, little has happened, which is part of why the session was so short. He hasn’t given up on the overall idea, but it needs a new approach.

• Gilectomy has been “untouched for a year”, Hastings said. He worked on it at the PyCon sprints after last year’s summit, but got tired of it at that point. He is “out of bullets” at least with that approach. With his complicated buffered-reference-count approach he was able to get his “gilectomized” interpreter to reach performance parity with CPython—except that his interpreter was running on around seven cores to keep up with CPython on one.

• At the 2018 Python Language Summit, Carl Shapiro described some of the experiments that he and others at Instagram did to look at ways to improve the performance of the CPython interpreter. The talk was somewhat academic in tone and built on what has been learned in other dynamic languages over the years. By modifying the Python object model fairly substantially, they were able to roughly double the performance of the “classic” Richards benchmark.

• Shapiro said that Instagram is a big user of Python and has been looking for ways to improve the performance of the CPython interpreter for its workloads. So the company started looking at the representation of data in the interpreter to see if there were gains to be made there. It wanted to stick with CPython in order to preserve the existing API, ecosystem, and developer experience

• Eric Snow kicked off the 2018 edition of the Python Language Summit with a look at getting a better story for multicore Python by way of subinterpreters. Back in 2015, we looked at his efforts at that point; things have been progressing since. There is more to do, of course, so he is hoping to attract more developers to work on the project.

• Snow has been a core developer since 2012 and has “seen some interesting stuff” over that time. He has been working on the subinterpreters scheme for four years or so.

• GitLab 10.8 was released this week with the open sourcing of a highly requested feature. The company announced its push mirroring capability is now open sourced.

• Push mirroring was originally introduced as a paid feature, but GitLab says it is one of the most frequently requested to be moved into the open-source codebase.

• This move will add a few new use cases for GitLab Core users, such as freelance developers being able to mirror client repos and users migrating to GitLab being able to use push mirroring to ease the migration path.

• Enhancing the relationships between security and engineering is crucial for improving software security. These six steps will bring your teams together.

• There’s always been a troublesome rift between enterprise security teams and software developers. While the friction is understandable, it’s also a shame, because the chasm between these teams makes it all the more challenging to build quality applications that are both great to use and safe.

• Can energy usage data tell us anything about the quality of our programming languages?

• Last year a team of six researchers in Portugal from three different universities decided to investigate this question, ultimately releasing a paper titled “Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages.” They ran the solutions to 10 programming problems written in 27 different languages, while carefully monitoring how much electricity each one used — as well as its speed and memory usage.

• The title of this post may seem strange, but if you look a bit into Java EE’s recent history, it will make sense.

• Originally, Sun started and ran Java Enterprise Edition, and later Oracle took over after it acquired Sun. Specifications were driven by a Sun/Oracle-governed process. At more or less regular intervals, they made a new version of the specification available, which was implemented by the server vendors. Those vendors had to license the technology compatibility kits (TCKs) and brand from Oracle.

• Let’s fast-forward a bit. In 2013, Java EE 7 was released, and Oracle began work on EE8, but it did not progress quickly. Meanwhile, new technologies like Docker and Kubernetes came along and changed the way applications run. Instead of running a single fat server process on a big machine, the software is now split into smaller, independent services that run in a (usually) Docker container orchestrated by Kubernetes.

Leftovers

Science

• Seymour Papert is credited as saying that tools to support learning should have “high ceilings” and “low floors.” The phrase is meant to suggest that tools should allow learners to do complex and intellectually sophisticated things but should also be easy to begin using quickly. Mitchel Resnick extended the metaphor to argue that learning toolkits should also have “wide walls” in that they should appeal to diverse groups of learners and allow for a broad variety of creative outcomes. In a new paper, Benjamin Mako Hill and I attempted to provide the first empirical test of Resnick’s wide walls theory. Using a natural experiment in the Scratch online community, we found causal evidence that “widening walls” can, as Resnick suggested, increase both engagement and learning.

• Seymour Papert is credited as saying that tools to support learning should have “high ceilings” and “low floors.” The phrase is meant to suggest that tools should allow learners to do complex and intellectually sophisticated things but should also be easy to begin using quickly. Mitchel Resnick extended the metaphor to argue that learning toolkits should also have “wide walls” in that they should appeal to diverse groups of learners and allow for a broad variety of creative outcomes. In a new paper, Sayamindu Dasgupta and I attempted to provide an empirical test of Resnick’s wide walls theory. Using a natural experiment in the Scratch online community, we found causal evidence that “widening walls” can, as Resnick suggested, increase both engagement and learning.

Health/Nutrition

• There’s a story Bud Frazier tells often. It was around 1966, and Frazier, now one of the world’s most celebrated heart surgeons, was a medical student at Baylor College of Medicine.

• An Italian teenager had come to Houston for an aortic valve replacement, but at some point during or after the surgery, the teen’s heart stopped. Doctors told Frazier to reach in and start pumping the failed organ by hand.

• As he did so, the teen lifted a hand to Frazier’s face, and in that moment, just before the patient died, he says he realized his life’s calling.

• “As long as I was massaging that kid’s heart, he would wake up,” Frazier, now 78, said last year. “I thought then, and I’ve often returned to this: If my hand can keep this kid alive, why couldn’t we make a device to do the same?”

Security

• Following the Intel/AMD Spectre Variant 4 mitigation landing yesterday with “Speculative Store Bypass Disable” (SSBD) and then the POWER CPU mitigation landing today, ARM developers have posted their set of patches for 64-bit ARM CPUs to mitigate against this latest Spectre vulnerability around speculative execution.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman has today released the Linux 4.9.102, 4.14.43, and 4.16.11 kernels. Most notable about these stable release updates is Spectre Variant Four mitigation.

• Today’s 4.9/4.14/4.16 point releases carry the Intel/AMD mitigation for Spectre V4 albeit the Intel support is dependent upon to-be-released microcode updates and is vulnerable by default while for AMD processors there is SSB disabled via prctl and seccomp.

• Yesterday the latest Spectre vulnerability was disclosed as Spectre Variant 4 also known as “Speculative Store Bypass” as well as the less talked about Spectre Variant 3A “Rogue System Register Read”. Here are my initial tests of a patched Linux kernel on AMD hardware for Spectre V4.

• Landing yesterday into Linux 4.17 Git was Speculative Store Bypass Disable (SSBD) as the Linux-based mitigation on Intel/AMD x86 CPUs. Since then has also been the POWER CPU SSBD implementation and pending patches for ARM64 CPUs.

• FBI agents armed with a court order have seized control of a key server in the Kremlin’s global botnet of 500,000 hacked routers, The Daily Beast has learned. The move positions the bureau to build a comprehensive list of victims of the attack, and short-circuits Moscow’s ability to reinfect its targets.

• The FBI counter-operation goes after “VPN Filter,” a piece of sophisticated malware linked to the same Russian hacking group, known as Fancy Bear, that breached the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign during the 2016 election. On Wednesday security researchers at Cisco and Symantec separately provided new details on the malware, which has turned up in 54 countries including the United States.

• Mozilla began offering two-step authentication for Firefox this week. If you enable it, you’ll need to use an additional security code to log in. Mozilla is using the authentication standard TOTP (Time-based One-Time Password) to implement this feature. If you don’t see a “Two-step authentication” panel in your Preferences, see this page for further instructions on how to enable it.

• Mozilla is rolling out two factor authentication for Firefox accounts and if you sync passwords using Firefox Sync you should enable it immediately.

• The option for two factor authentication should show up in your Firefox account settings in a few weeks, but you can skip the wait by clicking this link. Do that and you should see the option for two-factor authentication, as shown above.

• It seems that tech giants, finally, are gearing up to make portals more secure. In an announcement made yesterday, Mozilla has announced two-factor authentication for Firefox accounts. It is an optional security feature that will require inserting authentication code after signing in your Firefox account with your credentials.

• The newly introduced two-step verification feature is based on the commonly used Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP)-based standard. Currently, the feature is available with Duo, Google Authenticator, and Authy. Users will need to install these apps to receive the authentication code.

• SJ Technologies partnered with Sonatype for the DevSecOps Community 2018 Survey. The survey was wildly popular, receiving answers from more than 2,000 respondents representing a wide range of industries, development practices, and responsibilities. One-third of respondents (33%) came from the technology industry, and banking and financial services was the second most represented group (15%). 70% of all respondents were using a container registry. With so many respondents utilizing containers, a deeper dive into container security is in order.

• There’s a new type of malware called VPNFilter, which has “has infected at least half a million home and small business routers including those sold by Netgear, TP-Link, Linksys, MicroTik, and QNAP network storage devices”. This code is intended to “serve as a multipurpose spy tool, and also creates a network of hijacked routers that serve as unwitting VPNs, potentially hiding the attackers’ origin as they carry out other malicious activities”. See the story on Wired for all the details.

• A compromised password can’t protect you. PassProtect is a Chrome extension that notifies you whenever a password you enter is exposed, giving you the chance to change it.

• Data breaches happen all the time, and the result is usually a bunch of usernames and password floating around the web. Attackers use these lists to access accounts, so it’s important to change your passwords after a breach. Most users can’t keep track of it all, however.

• Which is where PassProtect come in. Using data from Have I Been Pwned, Troy Hunt’s database of compromised passwords, PassProtect lets you know when a password you use was part of a recent breach.

• Data breaches happen all the time. When they do, it’s invariably bad, with countless people ensnared. The MySpace breach, for example, impacted nearly 360 million. LinkedIn impacted 165 million more. One tool helping to mitigate the aftermath is Okta’s new Chrome plugin, PassProtect.

• This week’s edition was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Levente Polyak and Mattia Rizzolo & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Defence/Aggression

• Americans ought to be more honest about U.S. military interventionism. There ought to be a serious debate about it. Instead there seems to be three, entrenched foreign policy camps who never talk to each other.

• The first is made up of avowed imperialists. They are easy to recognize, because they happen to be in power. They are the people for whom there is no such thing as a bad war. They have likely committed the United States to regime change in Iran. And they are currently spearheading an overly aggressive approach in attempting to defuse tensions with a nuclear-armed North Korea—an approach that will probably backfire in the end. This camp would also be the strongest to deny that there is any such thing as U.S. imperialism.

• Then there are people who totally reject imperialism in any form, committed by any country, as a grave error. These are the people who recognize that there must be other values that bind relationships between nations—shared values premised on international law, human rights, Individual and spiritual freedom, and the rule of law.

• Now that the Trump administration has derailed the Iran nuclear deal, the old issue of regime change in Iran is back again. National Security Advisor John Bolton is obviously the chief regime-change advocate in the administration, and there is every reason to believe he has begun to push that policy with Donald Trump in his first month in the White House.

• Bolton was part of the powerful neoconservative faction of national security officials in the George W. Bush administration that had a plan for supporting regime change in Iran, not much different from the one Bolton is reportedly pushing now. But it was a crackbrained scheme that involved the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) exiled terrorist organisation that never had Bush’s support.

• Bolton may find history repeating itself, with Trump resisting his plan for regime change, just as Bush did in 2003.

• It was happy to see Yulia alive and looking reasonably well yesterday, if understandably stressed. Notably, and in sharp contrast to Litvinenko, she leveled no accusations at Russia or anybody else for her poisoning. In Russian she spoke quite naturally. Of the Russian Embassy she said very simply “I am not ready, I do not want their help”. Strangely this is again translated in the Reuters subtitles by the strangulated officialese of “I do not wish to avail myself of their services”, as originally stated in the unnatural Metropolitan Police statement issued on her behalf weeks ago.

• “I do not wish to avail myself of their services” is simply not a translation of what she says in Russian and totally misses the “I am not ready” opening phrase of that sentence. My conclusion is that Yulia’s statement was written by a British official and then translated to Russian for her to speak, rather than the other way round. Also that rather than translate what she said in Russian themselves for the subtitles, Reuters have subtitled using a British government script they have been given.

• It would of course have been much more convincing had Sergei also been present. Duress cannot be ruled out when he is held by the British authorities. I remain extremely suspicious that, at the very first chance she got in hospital, Yulia managed to get hold of a telephone (we don’t know how, it was not her own and she has not had access to one since) and phone her cousin Viktoria, yet since then the Skripals have made no attempt to contact their family in Russia. That includes no contact to Sergei’s aged mum, Yulia’s grandmother, who Viktoria cares for. Sergei normally calles his mother – who is 89 – regularly. This lack of contact is a worrying sign that the Skripals may be prevented from free communication to the outside world. Yulia’s controlled and scripted performance makes that more rather than less likely.

• Luis Posada Carriles, considered a hero among members of the Cuban exile community for his role in the Bay of Pigs invasion and for his attempts to overthrow the late Fidel Castro, died Wednesday.

• The Cuban exile militant and CIA agent was 90.

• Here are some details on the life and times of Posada Carriles who was considered a terrorist by both the Cuban government and the United States’ FBI.

• ▪ He was born in Cinfuegos, Cuba, on Feb. 15, 1928.

• ▪ Posada Carriles studied medicine and chemistry at the University of Havana, where he first ran into a young Fidel Castro, and then worked as a supervisor for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company.

• Former CIA operative and militant Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles, who was accused of organizing a string of 1997 Havana hotel bombings and a 1976 Cuban airline bombing that killed 73 people, has died. He was 90.

• Posada, who had been diagnosed with throat cancer about five years ago, died Wednesday at a care home for elderly veterans in Broward Country, north of Miami, according to Arturo Hernandez, a lawyer for the hardline exile.

• Luis Posada Carriles should have died in a cell at Leavenworth. He was an anti-Castro terrorist on the CIA payroll. He was accused of committing atrocities in our name, and on our dime, throughout Central America and the Caribbean – including, it was alleged, being intimately involved with the 1976 bombing of a Cubana Airlines plane just after takeoff from Barbados in which 73 people were killed including the entire Cuban fencing team.

• Former CIA operative and militant Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles, who was accused of organizing a string of 1997 Havana hotel bombings and a 1976 Cuban airline bombing that killed 73 people, has died. He was 90.

• Posada, who had been diagnosed with throat cancer about five years ago, died Wednesday at a care home for elderly veterans in Broward Country, according to Arturo Hernandez, a lawyer for the hard-line exile.

• Former Central Intelligence Agency operative and militant Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles, who was accused of organizing a string of 1997 Havana hotel bombings and a 1976 Cuban airline bombing that killed 73 people, has died. He was 90.

• Posada, who had been diagnosed with throat cancer about five years ago, died Wednesday at a care home for elderly veterans in Broward Country, north of Miami, according to Arturo Hernandez, a lawyer for the hardline exile.

• “An extraordinary life has ended,” Hernandez told The Associated Press. “It’s a very sad morning for me, to say farewell to such a great man.”

• Winston Churchill stated in 1939 that Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Today, as then, Russian actions and intentions remain the subject of intense scrutiny in the West. To examine the state of American analysis of Russia, the Center for the National Interest convened a high-level panel of former veteran CIA officials on May 22. The speakers included George Beebe (Director for Intelligence and National Security at the Center for the National Interest, former director of the CIA’s Russia analysis and a former Special Advisor to Vice President Cheney), Milton Bearden (a former CIA officer who was a station chief in Pakistan where he played a central role in training and arming the Afghan mujahideen to battle the Soviet military) and Peter Clement (the former Deputy Director for Analytic Programs at the CIA and a professor at Columbia University). The meeting was moderated by Paul J. Saunders, the executive director of the Center for the National Interest and a former Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs in the George W. Bush administration.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange received praise Wednesday from Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican, during an interview in which the congressman recalled their meeting last summer inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.

• “He’s a very honorable man,” Mr. Rohrabacher, 70, told CNN.

• “Deep staters believe that he’s a bad guy and an evil person,” the congressman continued. “I don’t.”

• Mr. Assange, 46, was granted asylum from Ecuador in 2012 in lieu of being extradited abroad and potentially charged by U.S. prosecutors in connection with publishing classified documents released through his WikiLeaks website. Mr. Assange risks being arrested if he leaves the Ecuadorean Embassy, however, and has remained on the property ever since.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• But the latest controversy is one the agency’s own making. This morning, Pruitt was speaking at a workshop convened to discuss the handling of specific chemical contaminants that have been found in water supplies. The EPA was already under fire for what appeared to be an attempt to stall a report that suggests these chemicals were more toxic than previously thought, so the workshop provided an opportunity to show that the agency took the risks seriously. Instead, the EPA started a brand-new controversy by specifically excluding CNN and the AP from Pruitt’s speech and by having security physically escort a reporter out of the building.

• The Obama administration was terrible when it came to how it treated journalists, acting vindictively against many journalists, and opening up investigations that created massive chilling effects on journalism. While some supporters of our previous President insisted that these actions were necessary due to the journalists “leaking” or revealing sensitive information, that’s a ridiculous claim. A journalist’s job is to report on things, including revealing the kind of information a government would prefer be kept secret. And, more importantly, normalizing a government at war with the journalists who cover it was bound to be abused even more going forward.

• And that brings us to the current administration, whose attacks on journalists have been frequent as well, though of a different, more clumsy nature. While the last administration focused on keeping secrets and launching chilling investigations, this one seems focused on name calling and hamfisted attempts at shutting out the media in the most obvious and petty of ways. Neither approach is good, but the current administration’s attacks on journalists are so blatant and so stupid, it just makes people wonder what they’re so afraid of.

• Scott Pruitt sure is busy these days. The climate change-denying head of the Environmental Protection Agency has been renting out a DC condo on the cheap from an energy lobbyist; installing a $43,000 soundproof booth for his telephone calls; passing out improper pay raises to aides; jet-setting around the world on first-class flights; hitting up Disneyland and the Rose Bowl with his oversized $3 million, 20-person security detail; receiving police escorts to trendy DC restaurant Le Diplomate; and even having a fancy dinner in Rome with Vatican treasurer, climate denier and recently charged child sexual abuser George Pell.

• What’s more, Pruitt’s staffers at the EPA have continued to cover up for their boss: Pruitt’s lavish travel schedule is only released after the fact, and he holds few press conferences compared to his predecessors. All told, he is under 12 different federal investigations, and has been grilled by members of both Senate and House committees. In Pruitt’s Senate hearing, New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall remarked that “your scandals are a mere sideshow distracting us from the long-lasting devastating your leadership is making on human health and the environment.”

• Indeed, while Pruitt seems to have adjusted well to the culture of gratuitous and unprecedented graft and corruption inside the Trump cabinet, the media’s focus on Pruitt’s dizzying array of personal scandals obscures his absolute contempt for his agency’s stated mission: environmental protection. Pruitt, along with President Trump, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, has quietly been dismantling a multitude of environmental regulations while pushing a number of fossil fuel-friendly policies that will certainly have disastrous long-term effects on the environment and public health.

Finance

• Bitcoin uses as much electricity as all of Ireland. And everyone else is starting to notice — and they’re not happy.

• U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday railed against Mexico and Canada’s efforts in renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), saying both neighbours have been “very difficult.”

• “NAFTA is very difficult. Mexico has been very difficult to deal with. Canada has been very difficult to deal with … but I will tell you that in the end we win,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We will win, and we’ll win big.

• “We’ll get along with Mexico, we’ll get along with Canada. But I will tell you, they have been very difficult to deal with. They’re very spoiled — because nobody has done this. But I will tell you that what they ask for is not fair.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Imagine this scenario: In November’s elections for the U.S. House, Democrats win the national House vote by a few percentage points and gain nearly 20 additional House seats, by both winning open seats and defeating some longtime GOP incumbents. In the Senate, Democrats pick up Nevada; win races in states President Trump carried in 2016, including in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and West Virginia; and only narrowly lose in the GOP strongholds of Indiana, Missouri and Tennessee.

• National and state GOP officials conspired to redraw Ohio’s map to exclude Democratic voters.

• We all know how representative democracy is supposed to work — each election cycle, citizens vote to determine which elected officials will represent them in Congress. That’s not what’s happening in Ohio, where Republicans designed the state’s redistricting map to keep their party in office in violation of voters’ constitutional rights.

• Today, the ACLU filed a lawsuit seeking to replace Ohio’s gerrymandered map with one that reflects the will of voters and complies with the Constitution before the 2020 elections.

• How did Ohio become one of the most egregious examples of partisan gerrymandering in modern history? It’s a sordid tale involving high-level Republican operatives, a secret “bunker,” a rushed vote, and enormous consequences for our democracy.

• Here’s what you need to know.

• Nicolás Maduro was successfully re-elected president of Venezuela on Sunday, receiving 5.8 million of the 8.6 million ballots cast, on a turnout of 46 percent. His nearest challenger, Henri Falcon, received 1.8 million votes. The process was watched over by 150 international observers from over 30 countries, among them former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who said (Telesur, 5/20/18): “I do not have any doubt about the voting process. It is an advanced automatic voting system.”

• [...]

• Apart from spelling the president’s name wrong, the only source that could be an “independent” observer quoted was the Washington-based, State Department–funded conservative group Freedom House, a rather questionable example of an “independent observer.”

• [...]

• The extraordinary similarity and negative tone across Western media should not surprise anyone. As I detailed in Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting, there have been enormous cuts to foreign reporting, leading to a situation where only a tiny cadre of journalists create the news we hear from other countries. Media copy and paste from news organizations like Reuters and Associated Press, which themselves employ many cheaper local journalists.

• In Venezuela, these journalists are not neutral actors, but come from the highly partisan local media, affiliated with the opposition, leading to a situation where Western newsrooms see themselves as an ideological spearhead against Maduro, “the resistance” to the government.

• In February, we wrote about how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks, has yet to stand trial — 17 years after the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center’s twin towers and the Pentagon.

• The reason for the delay, Mohammed’s attorney David Nevin asserts, is the government’s desire to hide the details of the torture and rendition program his client and many others were subjected to in the early years of the “war on terror.”

• [...]

• The CIA’s record of torture is front and center in the media again. This time because President Donald Trump’s new CIA Director, Gina Haspel, played a key role in the agency’s program of “enhanced interrogation” (i.e., torture). Haspel was head of station in at least one of the CIA’s black sites in Thailand where torture took place, and also held multiple senior roles at the CIA Counterterrorism Center, which oversaw the torture program.

• She was also involved in the destruction of the video recordings of the torture sessions and was less than forthcoming recently with members of Congress who asked about her role in that action.

• Nevertheless, the Senate confirmed her. The fact that Haspel, who played a key role in the CIA torture program, made it through the confirmation process fairly easily, signals, at the very least, that the agency should have no problem continuing to shield itself from any outside scrutiny of its treatment of terror suspects in the years after 9/11.

• Ominously, president Trump who has said he would “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” said Monday that “America is reasserting its strength” by putting Haspel in charge of the agency.

• In his comments on Gina Haspel (“At the CIA, Immorality Is Part of the Job,” op-ed, May 17), Fay Vincent suggests that morality is at best tangentially related to the rule of law. The great tradition of Western jurisprudence would strongly disagree. Moses and Jeremiah, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr.—all uniformly affirmed that justice, morality and positive law are intimately connected in any good society. Statecraft, certainly no less than war, must be conducted within the confines of legal norms connected to…

• Although Gina Haspel’s nomination received the fewest supporting votes of any previous CIA director nominee, on Monday morning she was sworn in to head the agency. Introducing Haspel, Trump stated that “instead of apologizing for our nation, we are standing up for our nation.” He spoke these words knowing that Haspel oversaw the CIA’s first black site in the “war on terror,” where two Muslim prisoners were waterboarded repeatedly. Why? Because torture is American.

• Prior to her confirmation, there seemed to be three common mainstream responses to Haspel’s nomination: 1) The torture she oversaw wasn’t torture/was acceptable under the circumstances; 2) Those who were tortured provided valuable intelligence, therefore justifying this abuse; and 3) Torture is “un-American” because it is morally and legally impermissible.

• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday that he “does not believe there is a deep state” at the State Department or the CIA — contradicting President Donald Trump’s repeated assertion that there are forces within the government conspiring against him.

• US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday said that there was no “deep state” in either the CIA or the State Department.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Lawsuit Against President Trump Brought by Twitter Users He Blocked

• New York, New York—President Donald Trump’s blocking of people on Twitter because they criticize him violates the First Amendment, a federal judge in New York ruled today in a resounding victory for freedom of speech and the public’s right to communicate opposing political views directly to elected officials and government agencies.

• The ruling comes in a lawsuit filed by the Knight First Amendment Institute alleging the president and his communications team violated the First Amendment by blocking seven people from the @realDonaldTrump Twitter account because they criticized the president or his policies. The seven individuals include a university professor, a surgeon, a comedy writer, a community organizer, an author, a legal analyst, and a police officer.

• The plaintiffs were blocked by Trump on Twitter shortly after they posted tweets to the @realDonaldTrump account that were critical. President Trump and the other defendants conceded that they did so because they disliked the viewpoints the plaintiffs expressed in their tweets. U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled that such viewpoint-based exclusion is “impermissible under the First Amendment.” The ruling is a win for the public’s right to speak out to public officials and engage with other members of the public on social media.

• In an amicus brief filed on behalf of the plaintiffs, EFF argued governmental use of social media platforms to communicate to and with the public, and allow the public to communication with each other, is now the rule of democratic engagement, not the exception. As a result, First Amendment rights of both access to those accounts and the ability to speak in them must apply in full force.

• Germany’s new hate speech law — and its intersection with social media platforms — has been a disaster. Subjecting platforms to millions of Euros in fines for each violation, the push to cleanse the (German) internet of hate speech has resulted in plenty of predictive content policing. When not nuking legal criticism or satire mocking intolerant speech, the new law is creating a moderating nightmare for Facebook and other social media services.

• The German wing of Facebook’s moderation employs 1,200 moderators who forward anything borderline to Facebook’s legal team, who then forward close calls they can’t make to another outsourced team of lawyers well-versed in German law. That’s a lot of money spent to avoid 50 million euro fines, but likely necessary given the law’s demand illegal content be removed within 24 hours. Facebook may have to the money to do this, but other platforms simply don’t have the resources. Compliance will result in Germans being given fewer services to choose from, all in the name of “protecting” Germans from hateful speech.

• But is the law really serving the German people? Or is it a legislative feel-good effort of marginal utility with the possibility of collecting massive fines the ribbon on top? Linda Kinstler’s long article on Facebook’s proactive moderation efforts in Germany suggests the general public doesn’t need these extra protections as much as the government seems to think they do.

• The second day of an EPA summit in Washington, D.C. on water contamination is hitting home here in the Capital Region.

• On Tuesday, the mayor of Hoosick Falls was sitting in on the summit but others were barred.

• There was some censorship concerns have come to the forefront surrounding the need for more information on water contamination.

• A report by the EPA is not being released and many people affected by contamination were not granted seats at that summit. There have even been reports of the media being barred from the meetings.

• The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which oversees telecommunications like radio, TV, and the internet in the U.S., doesn’t regulate content on online platforms like YouTube. But that hasn’t stopped people from sending complaints about the video site to the federal agency—and they’re every bit as unhinged as you’d expect.

• Gizmodo submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all complaints that the FCC has received about YouTube. We received 81 pages of grievances featuring everyone from PizzaGate conspiracy theorists to anti-nudity crusaders. YouTube, which is owned by Google, has cracked down on extremist content in recent months, doing everything from removing ISIS propaganda videos to demonetizing conspiracy theory channels. YouTube has even banned neo-Nazi channels like Atomwaffen altogether.

• At the end of a week in which the House of Commons defeated Labour’s draconian plans to regulate the press, the Tories revealed their own draconian plans to regulate the internet. The culture secretary, Matt Hancock, has pledged to make Britain ‘the safest place in the world’ to be online. But when the world’s ‘safest’ internet is currently found in China, where access is heavily restricted and censored by the state, it becomes clear how terrifying the government’s safety agenda really could be.

• Digital secretary Margot James told Sky News the government would order social-media firms to take down any ‘abusive’ content immediately. Fines for non-compliance could run up to four per cent of a firm’s global turnover, which could mean up to £1 billion for the largest firms. Just as clampdowns on press freedom are often justified with tough talk against the press barons, the war on social media is presented as a fight against the new social-media oligarchs. But, in truth, clampdowns on big tech are really just a proxy for clampdowns on us, the users. After all, it is we, the public, who actually produce all the supposedly vile, offensive and abusive content that social-media companies will be ordered to censor.

Privacy/Surveillance

• This Privacy Statement is intended to describe this web site’s privacy practices and provide information about the choices you have regarding the ways in which information collected by this web site is used and disclosed.

• Today is Privmas Eve: the day before Privmas, aka GDPR Day: the one marked red on the calendars of every company in the world holding an asset the GDPR has suddenly made toxic: personal data. The same day—25 May—should be marked green for everyone who has hated the simple fact that harvesting personal data from everybody on the internet has been too damned easy for too damned long for too damned many companies, and governments too.

• Whether you like the GDPR or not (and there are reasons for both, which we’ll get into shortly), one thing it has done for sure is turn privacy into Very Big Deal. This is good, because we’ve had damned little of it on the internet and now we’re going to get a lot more. That’s worth celebrating, everybody. Merry Privmas!

• the program still requires users to share nudes with a group of reviewers on Facebook….

• If you’ve had a nude photo taken, you might be nervous about where it could end up.

• Your phone may be hacked or a relationship turn sour, meaning the “revenge porn” picture could be made public without your say so.

• On the heels of the fifth anniversary of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosure of classified National Security Agency (NSA) documents to journalists, one state legislature has recently taken steps to hold the government agency accountable for its warrantless surveillance programs by making it illegal for state and local governments, including law enforcement and public utilities, to support the NSA’s warrantless spying on American citizens.

• In the months following the appearance of the Snowden leaks, several state legislatures attempted stiff arm snooping feds by introducing bills prohibiting collect-it-all programs from being deployed against Americans by the NSA. Most targeted the NSA’s warrantless collection of metadata, creating a warrant requirement for the collection of data within the state’s borders.

• Others were a bit more creative, forbidding state law enforcement from participating in federal surveillance efforts or, in the case of Utah, where a new NSA data center was being built, forbidding the state’s water supply from being used in data collection efforts (to cool the agency’s many, many servers).

• In Michigan, one of these laws is actually being enacted. As the Washington Examiner reports, the effective date of the Fourth Amendment Rights Protection Act is nearly five years to the day from the first Snowden leak.

• The awe-inspiring internet has its nightmares for the ones who get stalked and harassed in the digital world. They can’t get away from the predicament; one possible recourse is to go anonymous while using the internet with the help of various tools available. Name it, VPN, TOR, or you can use a proxy server for your anonymity needs.

• Apart from all these available options, TOR stands out first in the line when we compare the level of anonymity provided by various tools. The Onion Router project is regarded as the best cloak for those people who want to hide on the internet.

• As we careen wildly into a post-GDPR world at the end of this week, you’ve probably already been inundated with tons upon tons of emails from various companies where you either have an account or have been signed up for their mailing list. Some of these emails likely note that they want you to confirm that you want to remain on their list because of the GDPR. Others pretend they’re just checking in with you for the hell of it. According to an expert in EU regulation, many of these emails probably violate another EU regulation, one designed to make spamming illegal. As for the others? They’re almost certainly not necessary under the GDPR and appear to be people misunderstanding the GDPR “out of an abundance of caution.”

• However, as government surveillance is emerging as a growing threat – especially in surveillance states like China or Iran – the long-term data storage enacted by all of the top tech companies is a dream come true for any current or future authoritarian state.

• And it’s not just Republicans who have taken advantage of Facebook’s invasive features. Far from it: During the 2012 campaign, President Barack Obama’s reelection team built an app that extracted the same types of data in the same fashion as the Cambridge Analytica data in question, with one critical difference: Obama’s team extracted nearly five times the information.

• According to Carol Davidsen, a member of Obama’s data team, “Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.” [...]

• Social Credit will ensure that “discredited people become bankrupt,” said Hou Yunchun, former deputy director of the development research center of the State Council, according to Global Times.

• [...]

• By the end of April the scheme which is expected to be fully rolled out by 2020 is said to have prevented 11.14m flights being taken and 4.25m high-speed train journeys were refused.

• After four years of deliberation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was officially adopted by the European Union in 2016. The regulation gave companies a two-year runway to get compliant, which is theoretically plenty of time to get shipshape. The reality is messier. Like term papers and tax returns, there are people who get it done early, and then there’s the rest of us.

• The result, for anyone who has been paying attention to the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, was a strong sense of déjà vu. In response to questions about data privacy, Zuckerberg said Facebook was reviewing thousands of apps that once had broad access to user information, and the process would take months to complete. Terrorism? Nearly all posts promoting al-Qaeda and ISIS are removed automatically through systems powered by machine learning. Disinformation? Facebook is working to remove the economic incentives for publishing fake news, which addresses the majority of people posting it. And monopoly power? The average person uses eight different apps to communicate, Zuckerberg said — without noting, as usual, that Facebook owns three of them.

• The service, which Amazon markets under the name Rekognition, can recognize as many as 100 people in a single image and can compare images against databases containing tens of millions of faces. Company executives describe deployment by law enforcement agencies as common use case.

• At a hearing in the European Parliament in Brussels, legislators sought explanations about the growing number of false Facebook accounts and whether Facebook will comply with new EU privacy rules, but many were left frustrated by Zuckerberg’s lack of answers.

• Mr Zuckerberg spent 22 minutes going through the huge number of questions put to him during the session and was able to pick and choose which to give answers to.

• Several of the politicians expressed frustration at this, and one accused Mr Zuckerberg of having “asked for this format for a reason”.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The ACLU and the International Human Rights Clinic have obtained disturbing documents detailing Border Patrol abuses.

• On a December morning, Border Patrol agents confronted a 15-year-old high school student named Jahveel Ocampo at a rest stop in California while she and her friends were on their way to the mountains to see the winter’s first snow. Jahveel was a young child when she came to the United States from Mexico with her parents, and she grew up undocumented in southern California. She was a mother to a 2-year-old child, who was a U.S. citizen.

• An agent in a blue jacket asked whether Jahveel was an “illegal.” He handcuffed her and drove her to a Border Patrol station in the border town of Campo. There, he slapped her twice on the buttocks and ordered her into a cell. He and another male agent told her to sign an “order of voluntary departure,” a deportation order. She refused.

• Then the threats began. One agent said, in Spanish, according to the complaint she filed later, “Right now, we close the door, we rape you and f*** you. If you cooperate with us, we can deport you to Mexico. Otherwise, we will take you to jail and deport your entire family.” They told her that her child would end up in foster care.

• Terrified and alone, Jahveel signed.

• Earlier this month Ars Technica reported on the arrest of the alleged operators of Mugshots.com, a website that does what it says on the tin: hosts mugshots. The issue is, the site operators didn’t just host mugshots; they also charged people to have their mugshots removed from the site through a companion site, Unpublisharrest.com.

• Assuming the arrest warrant is fairly stating things, the site’s operators may not have had the best of intentions in running their site the way they did. According to the facts alleged they were more interested in making money by charging people to have their pictures removed from their site than in serving as any sort of public records archive.

• [...]

• Taken together, the arrest warrant concludes, the site operators are guilty of extortion and conspiracy to commit extortion. But to prove extortion prosecutors must show that the accused threatened a victim either with violence, the accusation of a crime, or the exposure of a secret, if they didn’t pay the accused. Yet the defendants are accused of none of these things. Not only is there no issue of threatened violence, but what the site operators are alleged to have done in no way involves revealing a secret or accusing another of a crime. Instead it is the state that has already accused the site operators’ purported “victims” of a crime, and its having done so is no secret. The state’s accusation against these people became public when it originally released the mugshots, meaning there is nothing that the site operators could have been threatening to reveal that wasn’t already revealed.

• This apparently sloppy reading of the extortion statute, compounded with the 2015 statutory language giving mugshots a sort of magical status that prevents them from being treated as an ordinary public record, represents a chilling incursion on protected First Amendment activity. It’s one thing to impose liability for publishing content that isn’t lawful, perhaps because it’s defamatory, infringing, or somehow intrinsically wrongful unto itself. But it’s another thing entirely to impose liability for publishing content that is entirely lawful – especially, as in this case, when it is not only lawful but a public record.

• The South Dakota measure is certain to provide fresh material for the online mug shot business racket. These questionable sites post mug shots, often in a bid to embarrass people in hopes of getting them to pay hundreds of dollars to have their photos removed. The exposé I did on this for Wired found that some mug shot site operators had a symbiotic relationship with reputation management firms that charge for mug shot removals.

• That said, South Dakota’s attorney general, Marty Jackley, hailed the legislation, which was supported by the South Dakota Newspaper Association.

• “The release of criminal booking photographs to the public will result in greater transparency in the criminal process, enhance public safety, and will further assist the media and the public in the proper identification of individuals in the criminal process,” he said.

• Attorney General Jeff Sessions is an old-school law and order man. He wants asset forfeiture returned to its former glory — no longer questioned by all and sundry for its ability to enrich law enforcement agencies without making much of a dent in criminal activity. He wants drug sellers jailed for as long as possible, suggesting the last time he read a policy paper was sometime during the mid-1980s. And he thinks people questioning law enforcement efforts should be ashamed of themselves, what with the dangers faced occasionally by officers whose workplace can’t even crack the Top 10 Deadliest Jobs in America list.

• [...]

• Second, Sessions shows he doesn’t care about police misconduct or public accountability by maligning those who demand accountability as “radicals.” This suggests Sessions is more interested in a docile nation than upholding his duties as Attorney General, which (used to) include investigating and prosecuting officers who abuse their power.

• Finally, his portrayal of the rise in violence in Chicago as the direct result of a consent decree is both dishonest and ugly. The consent decree dealt with the Chicago PD’s stop-and-frisk tactics. The PD agreed to revamp its policies after a 2015 report by the ACLU found the program disproportionately targeted black residents. In other words, Sessions is claiming requiring cops to behave Constitutionally results in increased criminal activity.

• Nor did MBS’s biggest court stenographer, Thomas Friedman, find room in his latest column in his latest column (5/22/18) to note the crackdown. Given Times opinion page editor James Bennet was clear his paper was axiomatically “pro-capitalism” (3/1/18), one wonders whether he views Latin American socialists as uniquely worthy of condemnation, whereas Middle East petrol dictatorships that invest in American corporations and hosts glossy tech conferences deserve nuance and mild “reform” childing. We have to “get rid of” the former, and the latter simply need “guidance” from the US—their respective human rights records a total non-factor.

• CBS ran a 50-second story on the “emancipating” MBS’s crackdown on its web-only news network, CBSN (5/21/18), and an AP story on its website (5/19/18), but CBS News has thus far aired nothing on the flagrant human rights violation on any of the news programs on its actual network, and certainly nothing in the ballpark of its most-watched prime time program, 60 Minutes.

• If influential outlets like the Times opinion section and CBS News are going to help build up bin Salman’s image as a “reformer” and a champion of women’s rights, don’t they have a unique obligation to inform their readers and viewers when the image they built up is so severely undermined? Shouldn’t Bennet’s editorial board and Friedman—who did so much to lend legitimacy to the Saudi ruler’s PR strategy—be particularly outraged when he does a 180 and starts arresting prominent women’s rights advocates? Will 60 Minutes do a comparable 27-minute segment detailing these arrests and their chilling effect on activism?

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• We’ve noted repeatedly how broadband ISPs aren’t just trying to kill net neutrality, they’re trying to kill nearly all state and federal oversight over giant telecom monopolies entirely. From language buried in the net neutrality repeal aimed at preventing states from protecting consumers, to attempts to neuter the FCC and shovel all remaining oversight to an FTC ill-suited to police telecom operators, the end goal really is little to no real oversight of some of the least liked, least competitive companies in any industry.

• While this is all being portrayed as “regulatory modernization” by ISPs and their armies of consultants and allies, former FCC Boss Tom Wheeler has gone so far as to call the effort a “fraud.” Wheeler was quick to note that not only does the FTC lack rule-making authority, it can only act against an ISP if it can be very clearly shown that the ISP’s actions were “unfair or deceptive.” That’s tricky to do in the net neutrality era where anti-competitive behavior is often disguised as “reasonable network management.”

• The botmasters who ran the anti-Net Neutrality campaign went so far as to steal the identities of two sitting US Senators, Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Pat Toomey (R-PA), who have written to the FCC demanding to know exactly what the fuck the Commission is going to do about it.

• Throughout 2017, an unidentified culprit easily abused a lack of basic protections at the FCC website to flood the net neutrality proceeding with fake comments. In some instances the scammers used the identities of real people (like myself) to support the unpopular effort. In other instances, the names of dead people were hijacked for the same purpose.

Intellectual Monopolies

• In its 2018 budget, the Government of Canada pledged CDN$85.3 million over five years to support an ambitious new intellectual property (IP) strategy, including CDN$30 million for the formation of a Canadian “Patent Collective.” This paper explores the possible structure and goals of such a collective, as well as potential risks and challenges of each. It concludes that appreciable technology development by Canadian firms is not likely to be achieved through the proposed patent collective, but that such a collective could assist Canadian firms by facilitating their participation in existing international defensive patent networks. The paper recommends that the proposed Canadian patent collective avoid the acquisition and aggregation of patents, and instead focus its limited resources on three supportive functions for Canadian industry: assisting Canadian firms, through subsidies or other resource commitments, to participate in existing international defensive patent networks; encouraging Canadian universities and research institutions to focus on commercially relevant “translational” research; and assessing the potential benefits of facilitating patent sharing or pooling arrangements in select Canadian industries, and offering administrative and infrastructural support for such efforts.

• Current efforts at patent reform, through vehicles such as legislation, regulation, and appellate caselaw, are often met with advocacy advancing competing concerns reflecting the interests of discrete and separate groups of market participants. These viewpoints may not necessarily align with the policy goal of promoting consumer welfare. Historically, competition advocacy by competition authorities has been one mechanism for advocating for reforms that advance consumer welfare. Competition authorities such as the Federal Trade Commission have a lengthy history of empirical research and policy advocacy regarding the patent system. This paper reviews that advocacy and examines the circumstances under which competition advocacy has been employed. It observes that advocacy has been directed to two markets in which the patent system impacts competition: patents influence competition in the market for goods that embody them and patents are also themselves articles traded in technology markets. Regarding the latter form of competition, advocacy has been used to address legal doctrines that give rise to transaction costs and market failures in the market for the trade and license of patent rights.

• Lets face it, going to the gym may be good for our health, but the amount of perspiration that we produce while exercising can bring a host of challenges at times. No one enjoys the feeling of sweat dripping into our eyes and too much moisture can make it difficult to grip kettlebells, weightlifting bars, or other exercise equipment, let alone interact with touchscreen devices. Thankfully, Nike is looking for ways to alleviate these challenges by potentially creating a new line of workout clothes designed to perform at a high level, while also offering athletes a way to wipe away excess sweat too.

• OK, so Rampell tells us that we should not be concerned about a trade deficit that costs in the neighborhood of 2 million manufacturing jobs. Instead, we should be concerned that China is not as protectionist as she wants it to be when it comes to the intellectual property claims of our software and pharmaceutical companies.

• And why exactly should those of us who don’t own lots of stock in Microsoft and Pfizer care if China doesn’t pay them licensing fees and royalties? If we think through the economics here, this means that other things being equal, lower payments to these companies mean a lower-valued dollar, which would improve our trade balance on manufactured goods. What’s the problem here?

• Actually, the story gets even better. Suppose that China doesn’t honor the patents of Pfizer and other drug companies, so that it produces generic version of new drugs that sell for hundreds of dollars for a course of treatment, instead of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that these companies demand for the patent-protected product (equivalent to tariffs of tens of thousands of percent). Suppose it sells these generic versions to people in the United States, or just lets them come to China for their treatment.

• This would save patients in the United States enormous amounts of money, and possibly save lives. This is what free trade is all about.

Trademarks

• In July 2017 the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a new Exam Guide to address the basis for rejecting a US trademark application known as ‘merely informational matter’. The timing coincided roughly with that of President Donald Trump’s now-infamous “covfefe” tweet and the dozens of trademark applications for COVEFE that followed within hours, for everything from beer to investment advice. Shortly after the USPTO issued the new Exam Guide, Twitter debuted a longer character limit (from 140 to 280 characters) and hashtags such as #MeToo and #TakeAKnee covered many a social media feed.

Copyrights

• In response to alleged failures by Ukraine in the fight against online piracy, last year the MPAA, RIAA and other groups asked the U.S. Government to impose sanctions while the European Commission warned that Ukraine risks damaging relations with the EU. But according to the head of Ukraine’s cyber-police unit, complaints received by him are few in number and are actually going down.

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