● 05.31.18

● Links 31/5/2018: Many Stable Kernels, Cutelyst 2.4.0, Cockpit 169, MAAS 2.4.0, Rust 1.26.1

Posted in News Roundup at 5:50 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• ​This article helps you learn about some key features of Linux operating systems so that you are able to choose Linux for your environment. The year 2018 is a crucial year for Linux especially in the high-level segment of the company and consumers/home users. As a Linux user, I can see that operating systems have come a long way. We can certainly expect more exciting times with new flavors.

• “All the best people in life seem to like LINUX”. This is what Steve Wozniak thinks about the open source software operating system. So, when an expert is saying something, we must listen to it. And, if the wise words are from someone like Steve Wozniak, it requires special attention.

• libinput 1.11 is just around the corner and one of the new features added are the libinput-record and libinput-replay tools. These are largely independent of libinput itself (libinput-replay is a python script) and replace the evemu-record and evemu-replay tools. The functionality is roughly the same with a few handy new features. Note that this is a debugging tool, if you’re “just” a user, you may never have to use either tool. But for any bug report expect me to ask for a libinput-record output, same as I currently ask everyone for an evemu recording.

• I am very happy to see that Benjamin Tissoires work to enable the Dell Canvas and Totem has started to land in the upstream kernel. This work is the result of a collaboration between ourselves at Red Hat and Dell to bring this exciting device to Linux users.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Today on “Cooking with Linux without a Net”, I cover (and install) @RocketChat , show you another Linux distribution you’ve never heard of (Nitrux Linux), and hunt rootkits and perform security audits. Oh, and I crash and burn too. Much fun was had, so watch and enjoy.

Kernel Space

• Linux manages hardware peripherals using kernel modules. Here’s how that works.

• A running Linux kernel is one of those things you don’t want to upset. After all, the kernel is the software that drives everything your computer does. Considering how many details have to be simultaneously managed on a live system, it’s better to leave the kernel to do its job with as few distractions as possible. But if it’s impossible to make even small changes to the compute environment without rebooting the whole system, then plugging in a new webcam or printer could cause a painful disruption to your workflow. Having to reboot each time you add a device to get the system to recognize it is hardly efficient.

• To create an effective balance between the opposing virtues of stability and usability, Linux isolates the kernel, but lets you add specific functionality on the fly through loadable kernel modules (LKMs). As shown in the figure below, you can think of a module as a piece of software that tells the kernel where to find a device and what to do with it. In turn, the kernel makes the device available to users and processes and oversees its operation.

• The bcachefs filesystem has been under development for a number of years now; according to lead developer Kent Overstreet, it is time to start talking about getting the code upstream. He came to the 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM) to discuss that in a combined filesystem and storage session. Bcachefs grew out of bcache, which is a block layer cache that was merged into Linux 3.10 in mid-2013.

• Five or six years ago, when he was still at Google, creating bcachefs from bcache seemed like it would take a year and 15,000 lines of code, Overstreet said. Now, six years and 50,000 lines of code later, it is a real filesystem. It “turned out really well”, he said.

• Case-insensitive file name lookups are a feature that is fairly frequently raised at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM). At the 2018 summit, Gabriel Krisman Bertazi proposed a new way to support the feature, though it met with a rather skeptical reception—with one notable exception. Ted Ts’o seemed favorably disposed to the idea, in part because it would potentially be a way to get rid of some longstanding Android ugliness: wrapfs.

• Krisman noted that proposals for case-insensitive lookups show up on the Linux kernel mailing list periodically. He has incorporated some of that work into his proposal, including some SGI patches from 2014 that implemented Unicode support and case-folding for XFS. His patches would add support to the VFS layer with filesystem-specific hooks to actually do the insensitive hashes and lookups.

• At the 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit, Andiry Xu presented the NOVA filesystem, which he is trying to get into the upstream kernel. Unlike existing kernel filesystems, NOVA exclusively targets non-volatile main memory (NVMM) rather than traditional block devices (disks or SSDs). In fact, it does not use the kernel’s block layer at all and instead uses persistent memory mapped directly into the kernel address space.

• Xu compared NOVA to versions of the ext4 and XFS filesystems with support for the DAX direct-access mechanism. With those, only the filesystem data bypasses the page cache; the metadata still goes through the page cache. In addition, those filesystems have a much higher latency for append operations. There is also a write amplification effect. All of that makes for high journaling overhead, he said.

• In a filesystem-track session at the 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM), Ronnie Sahlberg talked about some changes he has made to add support for compounding to the SMB/CIFS implementation in Linux. Compounding is a way to combine multiple operations into a single request that can help reduce network round-trips.

• At the 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM), Steve French led a discussion of various problem areas for network filesystems. Unlike previous sessions (in 2016 and 2017), there was some good news to report because the long-awaited statx() system call was released in Linux 4.11. But there is still plenty of work to be done to better support network filesystems in Linux.

• French said that statx() was a great addition that would help multiple filesystems that do not use local block devices for their storage; that includes Samba using SMB 3.1.1 and NFS 4.2. The “birth time” (or creation time) attribute is “super important” for Samba, he said. The next step is to get more of the Windows attribute bits supported in statx() and also in the FS_IOC_[GS]ETFLAGS ioctl() commands.

• In April, LWN looked at the new API for zero-copy reception of TCP data that had been merged into the net-next tree for the 4.18 development cycle. After that article was written, a couple of issues came to the fore that required some changes to the API for this feature. Those changes have been made and merged; read on for the details.

• This API is intended to make it possible to read data from a TCP connection without the need to copy the data between the kernel and user space. The original version was based entirely on the mmap() system call; once a socket had been marked for zero-copy reception, an mmap() call would create a mapping containing the available data — in some circumstances, anyway. The application would use munmap() to release that data once processing was complete; see the article linked above for the details.

• Two problems with this interface came to light after the feature had been merged. One was that this use of mmap() was somewhat strange; an mmap() call does not normally have side effects like consuming data from a socket. The author of this patch (Eric Dumazet) was comfortable with that aspect of the interface, but he had a harder time dealing with the locking problems that came with it. Calling network-layer operations from within mmap() inverts the normal locking order around mmap_sem; there was no easy way to fix that without separating the networking operations from the mmap() code.

• I’ve committed to enable power-saving feature on laptops in Linux 4.17 in Debian package and it has entered in experimental repository. Please try it (and give a report if you get any trouble with it).

• Adding to the list of new features coming for Linux 4.18 is BPFILTER.

• The new BPFILTER capability is a BPF-based packet filtering framework. In its stage for Linux 4.18 this framework is deemed experimental but is striving to provide a Netfilter-compatible implementation by making use of BPF (the Berkeley Packet Filter). Yep, BPF continues getting more powerful.

• Along with the BPFILTER framework itself is also an embedded user-mode helper for loading of modules from user-space.

Linux Foundation

• Contributing code is just one aspect of creating a successful open source project. The open source culture is fundamentally collaborative, and active involvement in shaping a project’s direction is equally important. The path toward leadership is not always straightforward, however, so the latest Open Source Guide for the Enterprise from The TODO Group provides practical advice for building leadership in open source projects and communities.

• Being a good leader and earning trust within a community takes time and effort, and this free guide discusses various aspects of leadership within a project, including matters of governance, compliance, and culture. Building Leadership in an Open Source Community, featuring contributions from Gil Yehuda of Oath and Guy Martin of Autodesk, looks at how decisions are made, how to attract talent, when to join vs. when to create an open source project, and it offers specific approaches to becoming a good leader in open source communities.

• Earlier this month, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon held its largest-ever event in Copenhagen, with 4,300 attendees. This week, we opened the call for proposals (CFP) for both Shanghai (Nov. 14-15) and Seattle (Dec. 11-13).

Graphics Stack

• AMD’s Boyuan Zhang has sent out an initial set of 18 patches adding JPEG handling to the AMDGPU kernel driver for VCN “Video Core Next” as the new media encode/decode block found with Raven Ridge APUs for media decode/encode.

• The 18 patches are out there with setting up AMDGPU for VCN JPEG ring handling. As of writing there hasn’t been any (M)JPEG patches on the Mesa side, but that might be squared away already with the existing Gallium3D state trackers, but we’ll see.

• While the recently released X.Org Server 1.20 has initial EGLStreams for XWayland support to allow X11 on Wayland client application support for use with the NVIDIA proprietary driver, the support isn’t automatically available when needed. Fortunately, that’s being corrected for a future point release.

• As it stands with xorg-server 1.20.0, the EGLStreams support is only activated if passed a -eglstream argument to the X.Org Server for XWayland to know to use the EGL back-end rather than the default GBM-based approach used by the open-source GPU drivers.

• Wayland’s Weston reference has now received its new touchscreen calibrator within Weston Git.

• Collabora developers have been working on this new touchscreen calibrator as well as a new Wayland protocol extension for touchscreen calibration. The new tool allows picking a physical touch device for calibration, ensuring touch events are from a particular device, mapping to the correct output with the right coordinates, and various other improvements. This new touch calibrator also integrates nicer with libinput’s design.

• Marek Olšák of AMD has landed the recently noted updates to the OpenGL compatibility profile support in Mesa 18.2.

• Last week I wrote of Marek working on geometry and tessellation shader support for the compatibility mode of Mesa and already that work is now queued in Git master for Mesa 18.2-dev.

• The HGX-2 is an impressive beast, but will cost an incredible amount too.

• NVIDIA has introduced the HGX-2 as their newest and most advanced cloud server platform intended for HPC and API workloads. The HGX-2 offers an incredible sixteen V100 (Volta) GPUs connected via NVLink yielding 2 PetaFLOPS worth of tensor cores, 512GB of video memory, and 2,400GB/s of bisection bandwidth. This more than doubles the performance capabilities of the previous HGX-1 server platform.

Benchmarks

• With Bcachefs on its trek towards the mainline Linux kernel, this week I conducted some benchmarks using the very latest Bcachefs file-system code and compared its performance to the mainline Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-system competitors on both rotating and solid-state storage.

• With the Linux 4.17 kernel soon to be released, I’ve been running some fresh file-system and I/O scheduler tests — among other benchmarks — of this late stage kernel code. For your viewing pleasure today are tests of a high performance Intel Optane 900p NVMe SSD with different I/O scheduler options available with Linux 4.17.

• From this high-performance solid-state drive the schedulers tested were none. mq-deadline, BFQ, BFQ low_latency, and Kyber.

Applications

• Looking for a simple file sharing app to transfer files from PC to PC using Wi-Fi? If so, we’ve got you covered.

• LAN Share is a free, open-source and cross-platform tool that enables you to quickly send files between computers that run Windows and/or Ubuntu Linux.

• File transfers happens direct, PC to PC, over your local network or Wi-Fi. No complicated set-up or configurations are required, and you won’t need to fuss around with obscure settings and permissions.

• How many DJ software have you come across for Linux over the years and how many of them have been beautiful? No, the built-in mixing feature in your MP3 player (or player extension) does not count; and that’s why it is with joy that I introduce to you my new favorite DJ software – DJ Mixxx.

• DJ Mixxx is a free, open source, and cross-platform music software for Disk Jockeys. It features a beautiful modern dark-themed UI that is skin-customizable and virtually any function that comes to your mind for a DJs to use.

• It is also compatible with most DJ hardware tools and offers a big community that welcomes both beginner and advanced users alike.

• A while ago, we have written a guide that described how to display the summary of any Wikipedia article in Terminal using a command line utility named “Wikit”. Using this utility, we can get the wikipedia summary of the given text right from the terminal window. Today, we are going to discuss about a similar utility named “Qikipedia”. It is a google browser extension that allows you to highlight text from any website, and shows you a summary of the corresponding Wikipedia article, if one exists.

• Vim (short for Vi Improved) is a free, open source, powerful, highly configurable and extensible text editor. It has a large and dedicated community of users that are constantly creating useful new scripts and updates to the text editor. Vim supports hundreds of programming languages and file formats making it one of the best cross-platform code editor.

• Cutelyst, the C++/Qt web framework got another up.

• Many of us use Python Selenium to do functional testing of our websites or web applications. We generally test against Firefox and Google Chrome browser on the desktop. But, there is also a lot of people who uses Tor Browser (from Tor Project) to browse the internet and access the web applications.

• In this post we will see how can we use the Tor Browser along with Selenium for our testing.

• Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 169.

Proprietary

• Google has promoted today the Chrome 67 web browser for Linux, Mac, and Windows platforms to the stable channel, a release that will be available to users in coming days or weeks.

• Chrome 67 has been released, and it includes several security fixes as well as default support for WebAuthn, which provides “a way to sign up to websites using biometrics like fingerprints or facial images stored in a smartphone, or USB hardware like Yubikey’s authentication device”, ZDNet reports. Chrome 67 also features new APIs for augmented and virtual reality.

Instructionals/Technical

• Bootstrap has been ruling the charts when it comes to the best responsive frameworks for designing front-end for websites. However, there are some other names that you may not have heard of but are equally good. So here is a list of the best alternatives to the bootstrap framework.

Games

• For those interested to know, the former Linux dev lead at Feral Interactive is now working at Unity.

• I noticed earlier this week, as Marc posted a hint about it on his personal Twitter (I need to get me one of those sweet Unity tops to add to my collection). Now I’ve had a chance to personally speak to him, it’s all very much confirmed.

• Earlier this month Feral’s Linux team lead left the company after a triumphant five years at the company leading the Linux game porting team through titles such as HITMAN, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and Rise of the Tomb Raider. It turns out he’s now working for Unity Technologies.

• As Linux users, we can sometimes feel like we miss out on the latest tech and games. Finding games that work well within this OS can be tricky at times. If you fancy playing on some casino games, then we have you covered with this guide.

• SEGA Mega Drive & Genesis Classics is out now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows and (drum roll) Linux. The £25/$30 compilation includes 53 games ripped straight from my childhood summers. So, put down those pogs, pour yourself a glass of Sunny Delight, and prepare to take a trip back to the 1990s.

• The day has finally arrived, the Linux-powered Atari VCS games console can now be pre-ordered and they finally have the specifications up too. As I was hoping, they’ve released a lot of the hidden details, so it seems they were saving it to make a big splash.

• Valentin Breiz’s PS4 Linux Loader, the tool that makes it possible to hack your PlayStation 4 gaming console to install a Linux-based operating system, has been updated to work with newer firmware.

• Previously designed to work only with PlayStation 4 firmware 4.55 and then with firmware 5.50, Valentin Breiz updated its PS4 Linux Loader utility to also support PlayStation 4 models that run the firmware 5.01 or 5.05. In addition, it would appear that the PS4 Linux Loader tool also supports PlayStation 4 Pro models.

• xpadneo [GitHub] seems like an interesting project for those of you who own the Xbox One S wireless gamepad, allowing you to connect it Bluetooth with other fun features.

• Turns out I missed the fact that developer Bit Kid announced that Chasm will finally release this summer complete with Linux support.

• Chasm was funded on Kickstarter years ago back in May of 2013, with $191K in funds from nearly seven thousand backers. Originally going under the name of Discord Games, they later changed to Bit Kid in 2016 (likey due to the rise of Discord’s own popularity). Naturally, some have questioned why it has taken so long, but when you compare indie games trying to get funding to much larger AAA projects the latter are usually announced when they’re quite far into development.

• Moonlighter [Official Site], the action RPG with rogue-lite elements from Digital Sun and 11bit Studios has seen a bit of a delay with no Linux release yet. The developer is clear that it’s still coming!

• Hex Empire 3 [Official Site] looks like quite a nice strategy game for those who like Risk and it’s now available on Linux.

• Currently in Early Access, with a fully playable skirmish mode and map editor. It will also gain a campaign and multiplayer, which are still in development. What’s interesting, is that there’s nothing random about it, so performing an action will do exactly what it says it will.

• Sci-fi puzzle platformer Transmogrify from Odyssey Entertainment has you turning aliens into useful objects to help solve puzzles.

• The idea came as a result of a Ludum Dare 32 game jam, which had a theme of “An Unconventional Weapon”. They say that someone messaged them with the idea to make a weapon that doesn’t kill, so they ran with the idea.

• I’m all for more RTS games on Linux, especially when they look as good as Re-Legion which plans to come to Linux at release later this year. Specifically, we’re being told sometime this “Fall”.

• This is a good deal for those who want to test out the experimental Linux beta of Arma 3, as Humble Bundle have unleashed the Humble ARMA 2018 Bundle.

• Running With Scissors let us know via Twitter tonight that they’ve officially added Linux support to POSTAL Redux, the revamp of the classic brutal shooter.

• Sega has announced a slew of announcements for Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics. The PC version has received a major update on Steam that not only adds Mac and Linux support, but also drops the price to $29.99/€29.99/£24.99.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• One reason that I appreciate KDE is that I am always discovering new applications. In fact, I make a point of regularly searching for them. My most recent discovery is Kile, a graphic editor for LaTeX. Kile is not the first of its kind, but, unlike the better known LyX, whose interface resembles a word processor, it makes no attempt to hide the structure that shapes the output. Instead, like the Bluefish editor, it is what I think of as a semi-automatic editor. Instead, users add markup from a list of options in a display in which tags are visible. With this approach, Kile eliminates the drudgery of typing markup while making both troubleshooting and the learning of LaTeX easier.

• LaTeX, of course, is one of free software’s legendary applications, with a history that predates Linux. Before the code for OpenOffice.org was released, it was the most sophisticated tool on Linux for complex formatting of text. It remains popular today in academia, largely because of its ability to layout formulas. Despite the fact that the principle behind it is similar to any markup language like XML or HTML,X has a reputation for being difficult to learn. The main difficulty, though, is not so much in the basic concept, or even the fact that tags are not in pairs so much as finding the right markup or extension libraries among the dozens that are available. One advantage of Kile is that it displays a thorough (although possibly not exhaustive) list of tags that are always available in the interface, so that users do not have to remember all the available choices.

• There are way to many changes to put here in one post for these two projects since my last update. I will very quickly just go over some changes. With AtCore we now detect plugins better. Provide a more flexible deployment configuration and and have a Homebrew script for Mac in the KDE-mac tap. (log) AtCore is getting ready for a new release v2.0 this will be required to build Atelier. This will be the topic of my next post. Where plan to cover the journey and changes from AtCore 1.0 to AtCore 2.0.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• I’m planning to do a day trip to go scuba diving at GUADEC this year. If you’d like to join me, drop me an email or find me on IRC. There’s a few of us interested in going, so the more, the better! This is not an official GUADEC event.

• I have been working on the redesign of the room directory since I finished my first task. In this article, I will talk about the room directory (how it works and which improvements was needed), what I have done to improve it and some of the issues that are yet to be solved.

• Matrix is a protocol for decentralized instant messaging that has recently grown in popularity. Matrix can be used for a wide range of communication tasks, such as group chats, video chats, sharing files, and bridging to existing IRC rooms. One of the easiest ways to use Matrix is the RiotIM web client or desktop application. However, Fractal is a Matrix desktop application designed for GNOME, so it arguably feels a lot more at home on Fedora Workstation, as seen here:

• The simplest algorithm that comes to mind for generating a thumbnail for a video is to randomly pick a frame in the video (even simpler could be to just pick the first frame of the video). While the algorithm is very intuitive and looks good at first glance, it has one problem – it can pick a monotonous frame, like an all black frame, which obviously is not a good thumbnail because it doesn’t convey any information regarding the video.

• A good heuristic algorithm (referred from this stackoverflow post) to tackle this problem is to select a few random frames (let say, 5) in the video and pick the frame that has largest file size as video thumbnail – the idea being that the JPEG of a monotonous frame will compress into much smaller file than that of an interesting frame (one with lots of objects and colors).

• Within just a few days, I fell in love with the simplicity of the code and the very supportive community of GNOME. My mentors, Ardien Plazas and Abhinav Singh were especially helpful and helped me get on track, by closely watching them handle the code with utmost care and simplicity, it quickly began apparent to me that more than developing a software, they were developing an art. I promptly began to understand the codebase and fix bugs as fast as I could. Encouraged by my friend, Sagar and already in love with GNOME Games, I applied for GSoC.

Distributions

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Last Friday the openSUSE community released openSUSE Leap 15 as their newest stable release of openSUSE built from the same sources as SUSE Linux Enterprise 15. Back when this non-rolling-release openSUSE update entered beta at the start of the year we rolled out some preliminary test figures while for your viewing pleasure today are some initial benchmarks with openSUSE Leap 15.0 compared to the former Leap 42.3 and the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed too.

• This is a quick list of essential things to do after installing openSUSE Leap 15. The steps mentioned here aims at helping beginners in setting up their desktop for a smooth and better experience.

• On the 25th May 2018, openSUSE Leap 15 was released for download. Over the last few days I have upgraded both of my systems to this new release. Although this was a big release for openSUSE, the media attention for this release was surprisingly low. The reason why this is a big release, is that the underlying software packages are all new.

• openSUSE Leap 42 has a shared core with SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 (SLE 12). For instance Leap 42.2 shares a lot of software packages with Service Pack 2 (SLE 12 SP2). And Leap 42.3 shares a lot of packages with SLE 12 SP3. The shared core was on average 20% of the total number of packages. Because of that shared core, some of the packages were starting to show their age.

• openSUSE Leap 15 shares a lot of software packages with SUSE Linux Enterprise 15, which in itself is based on a 2017 fork of openSUSE Tumbleweed. That means that all of the underlying packages in SLE 15 have been updated to a more current version in comparison to SLE 12 SP3. The shared core for openSUSE Leap 15 is (according to a FOSDEM 2018 presentation) about 27% of the total number of packages. And the remaining packages are originating from (an even more recent fork from) openSUSE Tumbleweed. Which means that we get a lot of improvements in openSUSE Leap 15.

• A good example (to get an idea about the progress that has been made) is the underlying Linux kernel, which has been updated from version 4.4 to 4.12. Linux kernel 4.4 was released in January 2016 and Linux kernel 4.12 was released in July 2017. You cannot simply assume that the SLE kernel is identical to the upstream Linux kernel, because SUSE includes a lot of back-ports of security fixes and of hardware drivers in their kernels. However, you can assume that most of the newly introduced features in more recent Linux kernels are not being back-ported. So the upgrade from SLE 12 to SLE 15 means that we get 1,5 years of new features from the Linux kernel community.

Slackware Family

• Something had been nagging me for a long time, and I finally had enough of that itch and decided to deal with it.

• As you know, there’s a private and a public side to Slackware’s development. The discussions and decisions are handled internally among the members of ‘the team’ and are not shared with the public at large until an update is done to the ‘slackware-current’ tree which can be found on every Internet mirror. Thus you have access to the latest state of development always. But for some people it is a compelling idea to be able to access the development updates in a public repository like git – where you can track the changes over time.

Red Hat Family

• David Egts, chief technologist for Red Hat’s (NYSE: RHT) North American public sector business, has said containers work well when combined with agile development and DevOps processes and could help information technology departments enhance efficiency, ExecutiveBiz reported May 23.

• Egts said agencies, by using DevOps and agile principles on a container platform, can boost production faster than provisioning virtual machines, adding that containers can also cut almost 80 percent of IT budgets for operations and maintenance, GCN reported May 22.

• Cathay Pacific is using Red Hat solutions and services to transform its legacy infrastructure into a modern hybrid cloud architecture.

• Based in Hong Kong, Cathay Pacific is an international airline offering passenger and cargo services to 200 destinations in 52 countries and territories worldwide. Digital capabilities are a critical function of the company’s business strategy for growth, with the heart of this initiative emphasizing a responsive and adaptable customer experience.

• However, Cathay Pacific’s legacy infrastructure and development process posed a challenge, making it difficult for the airline to maintain a high level of performance from its internal systems and customer-facing applications.

• Its existing systems were inflexible and time consuming to modify, forcing the company to handle an increasing level of technical debt dedicated to system maintenance and “keeping the lights on.”

• Carahsoft Technology Corp., The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider™, today announced that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has named Carahsoft as a facilitating partner for an enterprise-wide blanket purchasing agreement (BPA) through the U.S. military’s Enterprise Software Initiative (ESI). Under the agreement, Carahsoft will serve as a distributor for software and services from Red Hat, Inc., providing government customers and reseller partners with the world’s leading open source solutions.

• Ascend Money has selected Red Hat to help enable and accelerate electronic payments across Southeast Asia.

• Red Hat, an open source solutions specialist, will provide its OpenShift Container Platform, Ansible Automation and Satellite offerings, to Ascend Money.

• Ascend Money will use the vendor’s technology to scale and better enable the rapid delivery of application services across the region.

• On moving to open source technology, Jason Jackson, group chief technology officer, Ascend Money, said, “On our road to digital transformation, it was critical for us to move to open source and take advantage of innovative technologies like Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Ansible Automation to host and scale applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.”

• As part of the integration between the product lines of the company that put containerized Linux on the map and the most powerful name in all of enterprise Linux, Red Hat has said it will adopt the “CoreOS” name for its forthcoming edition of its own Linux for containers. Yet although “Red Hat CoreOS” will adopt the self-updating technology that made CoreOS Inc.’s products competitive, a Red Hat official told The New Stack, the kernel will remain essentially compatible with the Fedora/Atomic/RHEL base it has already produced, for reasons the official said mainly concerned maintaining the certification of systems running on that kernel.

• So while Red Hat makes plans for what to do with the CoreOS Container Linux, others are also eyeing the code base which after all, continues to be an open source project licensed under Apache 2.0. During the last KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen, attendees were re-introduced to Kinvolk, a Berlin-based group of open source contributors, including Chris Kühl, who were early contributors to the rkt container runtime devised at CoreOS and since donated to the CNCF. Now, Kühl and his colleagues have committed to producing and maintaining a fork of CoreOS Container Linux. Called Flatcar Linux, its immediate goal is to maintain its container-agnostic architecture, and maybe later try resuming its own development path.

Finance

Fedora

• The Fedora Project announced that it would end support for the Fedora 26 Linux operating system beginning June 1, 2018, urging users to update to a more recent release, such as Fedora 27 or Fedora 28.

• Released eleven months ago, on July 11, 2017, the Fedora 26 Linux operating system brought the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, the DNF 2.5 package manager, a brand-new partitioning tool in the Anaconda installer for expert setups, as well as the Python Classroom Lab spin designed for educators and students.

• Almost 10,000 updated packages were published for the Fedora 26 Linux release during its lifetime, which will end this Friday, June 1, 2018. After this date, Fedora 26 users will no longer receive security patches and bug fixes, nor enhancement updates and new packages to its software repositories.

• This is Status Report for Fedora App filled by participants on a weekly basis.

• Lynis is a lightweight and easy open source auditing tool to evaluate current system security.

Debian Family

• We’re excited to announce that Debian has selected twenty-six interns to work with us during the next months: one person for Outreachy, and twenty-five for the Google Summer of Code.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I’m happy to announce that MAAS 2.4.0 (final) is now available! This new MAAS release introduces a set of exciting features and improvements that improve performance, stability and usability of MAAS. MAAS 2.4.0 will be immediately available in the PPA, but it is in the process of being SRU’d into Ubuntu Bionic.

• It would appear that Canonical has updated the release schedule of its recently released Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system to inform users on the release date of the first point release.

• The first point release for the Bionic Beaver series, which is a long-term supported Ubuntu release that will receive security and software updates for five years, until April 2023, will be Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, expected to hit the streets this summer on July 26.

• However, don’t expect Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS to incorporate any major changes or new features because it’s only a bugfix release shipping with updated components. Most probably, Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS will include all the updates that have been released through the main software repositories until July 26, 2018.

• Canonical released the first kernel live patch for its recently released, yet long-term supported Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system to address various security vulnerabilities.

• Published last week on May 25, the kernel live patch is available for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS systems running the Linux 4.15 kernel, as well as for Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS and Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS systems running the Linux 4.4 kernel. It patches a total of four security vulnerabilities discovered by various security researchers.

• Among these, we can mention a branch-pruning logic issue (CVE-2017-17862) with Linux kernel’s Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) implementation that could allow a local attacker to cause a denial of service, and a memory leak (CVE-2018-8087) in the hwsim_new_radio_nl function that could let local users to cause a denial of service (memory consumption).

• The world of money is constantly changing. Artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things have helped us extract more value from data and utilise it to provide a better service for customers. Leveraging the powerful blockchain technology has resulted in the creation of new financial ecosystems.

• Stu Miniman and John Boyer of theCUBE interviewed Mark Shuttleworth at the OpenStack Summit following the Canonical founder’s keynote in Vancouver. Read on for the full interview, and to hear more on the economics of cloud.

• Rethinking the data centre to make it fully automated from the ground up was the opportunity presented to architects at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. That is something that Canonical thinks very carefully about so that anybody can consume it at a reasonable price.

• Cost may not be the most popular subject to ever be discussed at an OpenStack Summit, but it matters to those that want to adopt an open infrastructure without a cost burden.

• Sometimes running and operating OpenStack in-house isn’t always the best solution, sometimes having a company like Canonical put it on rails is the way forward. Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical founder and CEO, told theCUBE: “It’s better for us actually to take it to people as a solution, explain your requirements to us then let us architect that cloud with you, build that cloud then let us operate that cloud. Until it’s all stable and the economics are good, then you can take over.”

• Ubuntu Budgie 18.04 LTS and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS are the latest versions of Ubuntu Linux distribution featuring different desktop environments, keeping the software base the same for both of these flavors.

• In this article, I am going to talk about the differences between Ubuntu Budgie 18.04 LTS and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, the advantages of each of them, the disadvantages of each of them. Let’s get started.

Flavours and Variants

• While Mythbuntu as a separate Ubuntu flavor ceases to exist. Many people continue to use our packaging and have asked questions about 18.04. This page attempts to answer some of these questions.

Devices/Embedded

• Shenzhen Xunlong’s open-spec, $25 “Orange Pi 3G-IOT” SBC runs Android 4.4 on a dual Cortex-A7 MediaTek MT6572, and supplies WiFi, BT, GPS, FM, and 3G, along with 40-pin GPIO.

• If you want a cellular connected hacker board, but don’t have access to or want 2G service and don’t have or can’t afford 4G LTE, Shenzhen Xunlong’s new Orange Pi 3G-IOT may be the “just right” compromise between the Orange Pi 2G-IOT and Orange Pi 4G-IOT. All three boards have different dimensions, processors, and features, but stand out with their built-in cellular connections.

Android

• Google is known for hiding easter eggs, and secret features buried deep in its Android OS. However, a weird glitch has appeared on Android which honestly seems more like a bug than an easter egg.

• The glitch shows your text messages in search results by using the Google cards assistant feature. It was reported in a Reddit post which says that typing “the1975..com” into the Google search bar will display all your text messages on the screen.

Free Software/Open Source

• I’m willing to bet that you do some (probably more than some) reading in a web browser. That reading might include everything from blog posts, articles, and essays to long forum posts and more.

• The problem with reading in a browser window is that it’s full of distractions. Elements like navigation tools, headers and footers, ads, link boxes, and more can slow your reading and cause frustration.

• Let’s take a look at four open source tools that can get rid of those distractions.

• Identity is big, really big, especially when it is customer-facing. There are a lot of moving parts to build, pieces to hook up, and external functionality to integrate. The whole makes the identity ecosystem which was once a dream of a few but is fast becoming a reality for many.

• Part of this movement towards a more all-encompassing and task-driven identity data system is the use of an API-approach to identity. These core functional API components are then augmented using open source code to add the bells and whistles. This extends the functionality of the service, quickly, cost-effectively, and easily.

• The thing is, as usual, with the swings come roundabouts. Identity data is a powerful engine that will drive our online transactions to new heights of usability and assurance. However, it comes with a serious price tag. Identity theft is at an all-time high. According to figures from Javelin, 2017 was a record year for stolen identity. In the U.S 16.7 million people had their identity stolen and fraudsters are becoming ever more sophisticated. One of the reasons for this is the increasing use of online identity, used for high value transactions, that has software vulnerability issues.

• If pressed, I will admit to thinking that, if NIS was good enough for Charles Babbage, it’s good enough for me. I am therefore not a huge fan of LDAP; I feel I can detect in it the heavy hand of the ITU, which seems to wish to apply X.500 to everything. Nevertheless, for secure, distributed, multi-platform identity management it’s quite hard to beat. If you decide to run an LDAP server on Unix, one of the major free implementations is slapd, the core engine of the OpenLDAP project. Howard Chu is the chief architect of the project, and spoke at FLOSS 2018 about the upcoming 2.5 release. Any rumors that he might have passed the time while the room filled up by giving a short but nicely rendered fiddle recital are completely true.

• OpenLDAP, which will be twenty years old this August, is produced by a core team of three members, and a “random number” of additional contributors. Development has perhaps slowed down a little recently, but they still manage a feature release every 12-18 months, with maintenance releases as needed. OpenLDAP version 2.4, which was first released in 2007, is still the production release; it is theoretically feature-frozen, having had only three releases in the past two years, but the commit rate is still fairly high and fixes, particularly in documentation, continue. Chu noted that despite it being feature-frozen, 2.4.47 will have some minor new features, but this is definitely the last time this will happen and 2.4 is now “absolutely, for-sure, frozen”. Probably.

• Microsoft this month announced a preview of the ability to log into a Linux-based virtual machine (VM) running on its Azure public cloud service using Azure Active Directory credentials.

• Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an increasingly attractive option for organizations looking to automate more of their data center operations. However, SDN deployments typically accompany vendor lock-in, as hardware manufacturers such as Cisco provide proprietary software solutions to go with bundles of network hardware. Similarly, turn-key software defined data center (SDDC) solutions often rely on top-down vendor integration, or have similar limitations for using products from qualified vendors.

• One team is working to change that. Japanese software firm axsh is developing an open-\ source software stack—code named LiquidMetal—that combines their existing OpenVNet SDN software, with OpenVDC VM orchestration software.

Events

• We didn’t discuss this at the time, for obvious reasons, but the strategy behind that decision was damage control. In the event that the conference proved to be a disaster, which seemed like a real possibility, a small disaster would be preferable to a large one.

• Fortunately for everyone involved, the event was not a disaster, and we’ve been lucky enough to follow the original up with six more events with an eighth scheduled this fall. Having had some small success with the events, we get asked every year about the capacity: specifically, when we’re going to scale them up, make them bigger. In truth, the event today is bigger than it was that first time, but at a maximum headcount of 150 by any measure the Monktoberfest remains a tiny conference. Because some of the attendees seem to enjoy the experience, they ask us why that is.

• There are many answers to that question, the most obvious being logistics. We’re an industry analyst firm with no ambitions to be an event production company. The events that we run are very much labors of love, labors that we undertake on top of our day jobs on behalf of our community. Running dramatically larger events would alter that dynamic, inevitably.

• But that’s not the real answer. The truth is that the Monktoberfest is not much larger today because of a conversation I had in the wake of the first, deliberately small event. In discussing the experience, one of the attendees told me that he’d met more people at the Monktoberfest than at any event he’d previously attended, ever. And he meant it.

• Which floored me, frankly. How could that even be possible, given the tiny population? Next to the largest conferences in our industry, the Monktobefest’s attendance numbers are a rounding error, the kind of ticket allotment that a Platinum sponsor might get to a larger event by itself. At an OpenStack Summit several years back, HP sent five times as many employees to that event as we admitted in total to our own conference.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• If you have the task to create automated tests for websites you will most likely make use of Selenium when it comes to testing UI interactions. To execute the tests for the various browsers out there each browser vendor offers a so called driver package which has to be used by Selenium to run each of the commands. In case of Firefox this will be geckodriver.

• Within the last months we got a couple of issues reported for geckodriver that Firefox sometimes crashes while the tests are running. This feedback is great, and we always appreciate because it helps us to make Firefox more stable and secure for our users. But to actually being able to fix the crash we would need some more data, which was a bit hard to retrieve in the past.

• Neutrino is my preferred tool to kickstart a React app and Netlify is my preferred SPA deployment service.

• Netlify makes it very easy to deploy your static sites, however, it needs some initial configuration.

• You won’t find Neutrino as one of the tools listed in their docs, thus, adding some docs in here. We’ll see if my instructions are right and maybe ask them to include them in their docs.

• Hello, Internet! Here we are with yet another Firefox Performance Update for your consumption. Hold onto your hats – we’re going in!

• It’s looking increasingly likely that Firefox will, in the not-too-distant future, build with a single C++ compiler across the four major platforms we support. I’m uneasy with this, but I think I’ve made my peace with it, partly as a result of writing the piece below.

• Firefox currently builds with three major C++ compilers across four platforms: Microsoft’s Visual C++ compiler (MSVC), GCC, and Clang. A fair amount of work has been done to deal with peculiar bugs in all three compilers: you can go search the source code and/or Bugzilla to find hacks that were needed for one reason or another. A fair amount of work has also been stalled or shelved because one or two compilers don’t quite measure up in some required area (e.g. standards support). As you might imagine, many a Firefox engineer has bemoaned the need for cross-compiler compatibility.

• In February 2018, the French regulator, ARCEP, published a report on how device, browser, and OS level restrictions (under the broad label of “devices”) could be the ‘missing link’ towards achieving an open internet. In March 2018, the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) also published a report on how devices can impact user choice, where it noted the possible incentives for providers with sufficient market power to allow for a “less open use of the internet.”

• It should not be possible for device, OS, and app store providers to leverage their gatekeeping power to distort the level playing field for content, to unfairly favour their own content or demote that of competitors. This could be done in a variety of ways, and the report highlights some of these: restricting device and API functions, unfairly discouraging the use of alternative app stores, or non-transparency in app store rankings. In this blog, we put forth a principles-based response to these concerns, and potential policy solutions put forth by ARCEP.

Databases

• For users of the Redis in-memory key-value database, the Redis 5.0 release candidate is out today for testing.

• This very popular NoSQL database has been working on many features for its Redis 5.0 release, the biggest of which is the Streams data type implementation. Redis Streams is modeled on a log data structure and intended to be an append-only data structure for purposes like logs. Details on this new Redis data type can be found on the Streams documentation.

• Computer Weekly Open Source Insider talks to Patrick McFadin in his role as vice president for developer relations at DataStax.

• DataStax is a distributed cloud database built on Apache Cassandra – the firm is a key contributor to the Cassandra project and describes its technology as an always-on data platform.

• Services on the new contract include IBM Db2 database software for Linux, UNIX and Windows, including versions of Db2 Developer Edition, Db2 Enterprise Server Edition and Db2 Advanced Enterprise Server Edition. The software, according to IBM, helps users manage databases across a variety of platforms, languages and data types.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• As part of the 20th anniversary of open source software and the Open Source Initiative , the OSI is reaching out to our community of individual and affiliate members, sponsors, current and past board directors, and supporters to share their success stories. We want to hear from those who’ve succeeded in, and with, open source software, development, and communities. This time, we’re hearing from OSI Premium Sponsor Cumulus Networks.

• When I learned that our new sister company, Private Internet Access (PIA), was opening its source code, I immediately wanted to know the backstory, especially since privacy is the theme of this month’s Linux Journal. So I contacted Andrew Lee, who founded PIA, and an interview ensued. Here it is.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This is the third device from Minifree Ltd to receive RYF certification. The Libreboot X200 Tablet is a fully free laptop/tablet hybrid that comes with Trisquel and Libreboot pre-installed. The device is similar to the previously certified Libreboot X200 laptop, but with a built-in tablet that enables users to draw, sign documents, or make handwritten notes. Like all devices from Minifree Ltd., purchasing the Libreboot X200 Tablet helps to fund development of Libreboot, the free boot firmware that currently runs on all RYF-certified laptops. It may be purchased at https://minifree.org/product/libreboot-x200-tablet/, and comes with free technical support included.

• Longtime GNU toolchain developer at Red Hat, David Malcolm, has announced the work he is pursuing on compiler-assisted performance analysis with GCC.

• David Malcom is hoping to make the GNU Compiler Collection produce more useful information about how the compiler optimizes code for GCC developers and advanced end-users. This would provide details about how an optimization could be improved or bugs fixed within GCC as well as for developers/end-users to understand what command-line flags are being used and how they could potentially rework their code for greater performance.

• One of our servers, winston.parabola.nu, is currently offline for hardware reasons. It has been offline since 2018-05-30 00:15 UTC. Hang tight, it should be back online soon.

• Help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. Every Friday we meet on IRC in the #fsf channel on irc.freenode.org.

• Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to discover free software. Each entry in the Directory contains a wealth of useful information, from basic category and descriptions, to providing detailed info about version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing info that has been carefully checked by FSF staff and trained volunteers.

• When a user comes to the Directory, they know that everything in it is free software, has only free dependencies, and runs on a free OS. With over 16,000 entries, it is a massive repository of information about free software.

• While the Directory has been and continues to be a great resource to the world for many years now, it has the potential to be a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help! And since it’s a MediaWiki instance, it’s easy for anyone to edit and contribute to the Directory.

• Every week, free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on irc.freenode.org to help improve the Free Software Directory. We had an exciting month working on the Directory with our wonderful stable of volunteers. These folks show up week in and week out to improve the Directory. It’s also important to note the valiant efforts of those volunteers who can’t make an appearance at the meeting proper, but still plug away at Directory entries during the week.

Public Services/Government

• The Louisville Metro Government recently recreated its traffic data warehouse in the cloud and open-sourced the code so any city can build the infrastructure nearly for free.

• Last year, Kentucky’s largest city won an Amazon Web Services grant to merge its traffic data with Google-owned Waze’s and then run predictive analytics in the cloud to better time traffic signals to manage flow.

• With the initial work complete, the city turned to local developer Slingshot to roll out a roadmap of new features.

Licensing/Legal

• Tesla is still a long way from fully releasing its cars’ full open-source programs and Linux operating system code, but it’s on its way.

• [...]

• Tesla has been slowly working with the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) to release its code according to strictures of Linux’s Gnu General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). SFC leaders Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler wrote: “Conservancy has been engaging with Tesla on its GPL compliance since June 2013, when we advised Tesla that we had received multiple reports of a GPL violation regarding Tesla’s Model S. Customers who purchased Tesla’s Model S received on-board system(s) that contained BusyBox and Linux, but did not receive any source code, nor an offer for the source.”

• The SFC, and other open-source licensing groups, have been working with Tesla to convince its upstream software providers, NVIDIA and Parrot, to disclose complete, corresponding source (CCS) releases for all GPL’d binaries found in Tesla’s Model S.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Open innovation processes promise to enhance creative output, yet we have heard little about successful launches of new technologies, products, or services arising from these approaches. Certainly, crowdsourcing platforms (among other open innovation methods) have yielded striking solutions to hard scientific and technological problems—prominent examples being the Netflix predictive recommendation algorithm and the approach to reducing the weight of GE jet engine brackets. But most R&D organizations are still struggling to reap the very real rewards of open innovation. We believe we’ve hit on an important hidden factor for this failure and that it holds the key to a successful integration and execution of open innovation methods.

Programming/Development

• As computer networks get bigger, it becomes increasingly hard to keep track of the flow of data over this network. How do you route data, making sure that the data is spread to all parts of the network? You use an algorithm called the spanning tree protocol — just one of the contributions to computer science of a remarkable engineer, Dr. Radia Perlman. But before she created this fundamental Internet protocol, she also worked on LOGO, the first programming language for children, creating a dialect for toddlers.

• Born in 1952, Perlman was a prodigy who excelled in math and science, and in her own words, “Every time there was a new subject or a quiz I would be very excited at the opportunity to solve all sorts of puzzles”. She graduated from MIT in 1973 and got her Masters degree in 1976.

• Progress has announced the release of NativeScript 4.0, an open source framework for delivering cross-platform, native iOS and Android apps.

• NativeScript apps are built using JavaScript, or by using any language that ‘transpiles’ to JavaScript, such as TypeScript.

• The Python release cycle has an 18-month cadence; a new major release (e.g. Python 3.7) is made roughly on that schedule. But Łukasz Langa, who is the release manager for Python 3.8 and 3.9, would like to see things move more quickly—perhaps on a yearly cadence. In the first session after lunch at the 2018 Python Language Summit, Langa wanted to discuss that idea.

• Before he got started, though, he noticed his name in Larry Hastings’s schedule-display application started with the dreaded ▯ rather than Ł. That, he said with a grin, is the story of his life. Hastings dryly suggested that the font he was using predates the addition of the Ł character to Unicode, which elicited a fair bit of laughter.

• In a 2018 Python Language Summit talk that was initially billed as “Mariatta’s Topic of Mystery”, Mariatta Wijaya described her reasoning for advocating moving Python away from its current bug tracker to GitHub Issues. She wanted to surprise her co-attendees with the talk topic at least partly because it is somewhat controversial. But it would complete Python’s journey to GitHub that started a ways back.

• Other Python projects are using GitHub Issues, she said, as are many popular open-source projects. Many people already have a GitHub account. When they run into a Python problem, they can immediately file a GitHub Issue, but might have to create a bugs.python.org (b.p.o) account before filing one there.

• Today (May 15, 2018) is the 30 year anniversary of CHI’88 (May 15–19, 1988), where Jack Callahan, Ben Shneiderman, Mark Weiser and I (Don Hopkins) presented our paper “An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus”. We found pie menus to be about 15% faster and with a significantly lower error rate than linear menus!

• Sometimes, development efforts align such that new use cases can be enabled with modest extra effort. The QtBase dev branch (which will become Qt 5.12) now has experimental Vulkan support, courtesy of MoltenVK and prior work in Qt. Let’s take a look at what has happened.

• The latest project making use of the recently open-sourced MoltenVK that maps Vulkan atop Apple’s Metal graphics API for execution on macOS/iOS is now the Qt5 tool-kit.

• The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.26.1. Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.

• There are several great object systems for Perl, and Moose is one of them. But Moose comes with a compile-time penalty that smaller applications may not be willing to pay, particularly for certain CGI or command-line scripts. Moose is incredibly feature-rich, and you may not need all of those features all the time.

• Mouse to the rescue! Mouse is a lightweight object system with a subset of Moose’s features. The goal throughout its development has been to make it syntactically consistent with Moose so if you later need to switch to the heavier-duty Moose, you can just substitute ‘Moose’ for ‘Mouse’ everywhere in your codebase, and things should just work.

• At Wallaroo Labs, where I’m the VP of engineering, we’re are building a high-performance, distributed stream processor written in the Pony programming language. Most people haven’t heard of Pony, but it has been an excellent choice for Wallaroo, and it might be an excellent choice for your next project, too.

• Sometimes the right tool for the job is a command-line application. A command-line application is a program that you interact with and run from something like your shell or Terminal. Git and Curl are examples of command-line applications that you might already be familiar with.

• Command-line apps are useful when you have a bit of code you want to run several times in a row or on a regular basis. Django developers run commands like ./manage.py runserver to start their web servers; Docker developers run docker-compose up to spin up their containers. The reasons you might want to write a command-line app are as varied as the reasons you might want to write code in the first place.

Leftovers

Science

• How often are you diverted from a task by the seductive lure of your mobile phone? And does it matter? In a landmark book, James Williams argues we’re losing the power to concentrate

• When Mount Vesuvius erupted way back in the year AD 79, it was one of the most catastrophic events that humans had ever experienced up to that point. The city of Pompeii was utterly devastated by the eruption, and the total death toll still remains unknown to this day. The countless deaths were the result of a number of different factors, including the molten rock being spewed into the air and the pyroclastic flow produced by the volcano.

Hardware

• A handful of Apple employees apparently have their hands on these devices for testing, though we have yet to get our peepers on any leaked pics. We’re guessing Apple gave them to trustworthy testers who can keep the mouths shut and avoid posting pics to Twitter.

• We have been following information about the Star project for a few months, with sources in the supply chain. It is currently in prototype stage, with prototypes being manufactured by Pegatron, Apple’s partner in China which also manufactures other Apple iOS devices. A small number of units have been shipped to Cupertino for testing by Apple employees. These prototypes have been in production since at least January 2018.

Health/Nutrition

• The New York Police Department regularly faces criticism over the disproportionate number of Black and brown people who are arrested for marijuana possession. The department’s constant refrain has been that officers go where they are called. They respond to complaints to the city’s 311 assistance line or calls to 911. Arrests, they say, flow naturally from those calls to action.

• But a New York Times analysis published this month threw that contention into serious doubt. As the paper reported, “among neighborhoods where people called about marijuana at the same rate, the police almost always made arrests at a higher rate in the area with more black residents.” An analysis by Politico New York in March also reached a similar conclusion. These reports have energized the campaign to legalize marijuana in the state.

• The disproportionate impact that marijuana arrests have on communities of color in New York City, the state, and the rest of the country is profound — and exceptionally well-documented. Nationwide, Black people are almost four times more likely than their white neighbors to be arrested for marijuana possession, despite similar rates of consumption across racial and ethnic groups. In New York state, which has some of the harshest enforcement practices in the country, more than 80 percent of people arrested for marijuana possession were Black or Latino.

• People like to say, “The devil is in the details.” For its account of the Trump administration’s proposed changes to rules around family planning programs, the New York Times headline “Trump Rule Would Bar Some Abortion Advice at Federally Funded Clinics” suggests details might be where it’s at; it’s just some advice at some clinics. Even more so, the headline chosen by the Washington Post: “Is It a Gag Rule After All? A Closer Look at Changes to Title X Funding Regarding Abortion.”

• [...]

• Coverage focused too hard on branch—the Post gives credulous attention to supposed distinctions between abortion “counseling” and “referral”—leaves untested certain unspoken premises: that abortion is not healthcare, and so it’s reasonable to segregate it; that women’s bodies, and especially poor women’s bodies, are ultimately socially owned, and so it’s reasonable for others to debate and decide what happens to them; and that, even though nearly one in four women in the US will have an abortion, it’s OK to leave the subject shrouded in stigma, suffering and misinformation.

• The changes around federal family planning funding offer as good as chance as any to recenter the conversation around reproductive rights. We’re joined now by Kinsey Hasstedt, a senior policy manager in the Guttmacher Institute‘s Washington, DC, office. She joins us by phone from DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Kinsey Hasstedt.

Security

• The other security fix is CVE-2018-11233 that could lead to reading random pieces of memory when running on an NTFS file-system.

• ARM has updated their set of Linux kernel patches providing mitigation for last week’s disclosure of Spectre Variant Four.

• ARM is providing an ARM64 implementation of Speculative Store Bypass Disable (SSBD) for mitigating Spectre V4. Last week they posted the initial ARM64 SSBD patches for this Speculative Store Bypass vulnerability that could lead to unauthorized information disclosure.

• The Intel/AMD CPU mitigation for Spectre V4 was merged last week while some loose ends remained to tidy the code up for 64-bit ARM. The revised patches have various fixes and other minor work, but overall it looks like soon it could be ready for merging. But it remains to be seen if this work will be merged ahead of Linux 4.17.0, which is expected for release next weekend, or held off until the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window and then potentially back-ported to existing stable series.

• The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has warned hackers may have compromised hundreds of thousands of routers and other home network devices the world over with malware. Perhaps predictably, the Russians are said to be behind the ploy – but past experience suggests the true source may lie closer to home.

• In an official statement, the FBI said the virus — ‘VPNFilter’ — was being used to launch attacks on infrastructure and render electronic devices useless. Anyone possessing a router is strongly urged by the Bureau to reset their device — the malware works in three stages, and rebooting the router prevents the implementation of the latter two stages.

• “Owners are advised to consider disabling remote management settings on devices and secure with strong passwords and encryption when enabled. Network devices should be upgraded to the latest available versions of firmware,” the Bureau suggested.

• The question of container trust hardly seems resolved at all; the available solutions are complex and would be difficult to deploy for Kubernetes rookies like me. However, it seems that Kubernetes could make small improvements to improve security and auditability, the first of which is probably setting the image pull policy to a more reasonable default. In his talk, Mouat also said it should be easier to make Kubernetes fetch images only from a trusted registry instead of allowing any arbitrary registry by default.

• Beyond that, cluster operators wishing to have better control over their deployments should start looking into setting up Notary with an admission controller, maybe Portieris if they can figure out how to make it play with their own Notary servers. Considering the apparent complexity of Grafeas and in-toto, I would assume that those would probably be reserved only to larger “enterprise” deployments but who knows; Kubernetes may be complex enough as it is that people won’t mind adding a service or two in there to improve its security. Keep in mind that complexity is an enemy of security, so operators should be careful when deploying solutions unless they have a good grasp of the trade-offs involved.

• [...]

• Zephyr doesn’t use the Linux kernel. Its kernel comes from Wind River’s VxWorks Microkernel Profile for VxWorks. The first version of Zephyr, which was launched some two years ago, came out with a kernel, an IP stack, L2 stack, and few services. Then Intel decided to open source it. They took a saw to it and cleaned the code, then they started talking to industry leaders, especially The Linux Foundation. The project was launched with Intel, NXP, and Synopsis as launch members.

• Independent report into WannaCry virus

• An unsuspecting contractor was blamed for introducing the virus into Victoria’s speed camera network sometime in early June 2017. The malware was first detected on 6 June 2017 when 20 cameras crashed along the Hume Highway and remained offline overnight.

• The infected cameras ran on Windows 7. Another company who used Unix-based cameras still suffered thanks to Windows operating system powered site control units. It wasn’t until 14 June that the true cause of the outages was found and over the next two days, engineers worked on a patch to secure the system. Finally, by 22 June, cameras were fully operational and virus-free again.

• Zephyr doesn’t use the Linux kernel. Its kernel comes from Wind River’s VxWorks Microkernel Profile for VxWorks. The first version of Zephyr, which was launched some two years ago, came out with a kernel, an IP stack, L2 stack, and few services. Then Intel decided to open source it. They took a saw to it and cleaned the code, then they started talking to industry leaders, especially The Linux Foundation. The project was launched with Intel, NXP, and Synopsis as launch members.

• [...]

• Fragmentation has been a big problem for IoT since the beginning. Companies were doing their own workarounds, there were no standardizations, and there was no collaborative platform that everyone could work on together. Various open source projects are working to solve this problem, but many factors contribute to the woes of IoT devices. Anas Nashif, Technical Steering Committee (TSC) Chair of the Zephyr project believes that software licensing can help.

• Nashif admits that there are already many open source projects trying to address the domain of embedded devices and microcontrollers. “But none of these projects offered a complete solution in terms of being truly open source or being compatible in terms of having an attractive license that would encourage you actually to use it in your product. Some of these projects are controlled by a single vendor and, as such, don’t have an acceptable governance model that breeds confidence within users,” said Nashif.

• The notion of edge computing is a relatively nascent one in modern IT. While end user, data center and cloud computing are well understood, Edge computing is still struggling to define itself – and come to terms with some significant security challenges.

• When the Meltdown and Spectre CPU security vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed on Jan. 3, they set off a flurry of activity among IT users and cloud operators around the world. In a panel moderated by eWEEK at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, B.C., on May 24, operators detailed how they dealt with patching for Meltdown and why it was a time-consuming process.

• When it comes to OpenStack, no operator in the world is larger than CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and an OpenStack cloud infrastructure that has approximately 300,000 compute cores. Arne Wiebalck is responsible for the overall operations of CERN’s OpenStack cloud, and when vulnerabilities like Meltdown and Spectre appear, it’s his responsibility to react and deploy the corresponding fixes.

• Previously, EFF recommended to PGP users that, because of new attacks revealed by researchers from Münster University of Applied Sciences, Ruhr University Bochum, and NXP Semiconductors, they should disable the PGP plugins in their email clients for now. You can read more detailed rationale for this advice in our FAQ on the topic, but undoubtedly the most frequently asked question has been: how long is for now? When will it be safe to use PGP for email again?

• The TL;DR (although you really should read the rest of this article): coders and researchers across the PGP email ecosystem have been hard at work addressing the problems highlighted by the paper—and after their sterling efforts, we believe some parts are now safe for use, with sufficient precautions.

• Do you own a OnePlus 6 or planning to buy one? If yes, you might want to read this one. So apparently, the OnePlus 6’s face unlock method can be tricked by a photograph. A video posted by a Twitter user, shows the phone getting unlocked by a cutout picture of his face.

Defence/Aggression

• In France, reactions to the U.S. war in Vietnam, a former French colony, were viscerally linked to the war in Algeria, which was fresh in people’s memories. For those who had supported Algerian independence from France, achieved only six years earlier, the Vietnamese people’s struggle for independence was a natural follow-on.

• [...]

• Within a week the entire Latin Quarter was in a state of siege. May 10 was the “night of the barricades”. I happened to be there, in the streets near the Pantheon, and was struck by what seemed to me a certain mimesis.

• All night, students around the Pantheon calmly built barricades, passing the paving stones from hand to hand with the same gestures they had seen in the 16-millimeter films of Vietnamese peasant women rebuilding bombed dikes.

• The next day, the streets were cluttered with debris from the police charge. The Latin Quarter was occupied by rows of armed CRS, and students who had been apolitical a few days before wandered in a new landscape, transformed into an oppressed people with an occupation army to overthrow. Was there some latent desire to be like the Vietnamese, who at the time were the object of widespread sympathy and admiration – even adoration?

• In between my library research and my part-time work for a movie dubbing studio, I followed those events unroll as closely as I could. I was present at many of the key happenings, the major skirmishes in the Latin Quarter, the orations at the Odéon theatre, the night of the barricades, the big marches, the speech at the Sorbonne of the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit on his triumphant return after being expelled to Germany. I rushed to buy every edition of the daily “Action.” Yes, I was there.

• A new U.S. intelligence assessment has concluded that North Korea does not intend to give up its nuclear weapons any time soon, three U.S. officials told NBC News — a finding that conflicts with recent statements by President Donald Trump that Pyongyang intends to do so in the future.

• President Trump is continuing to pursue a nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un even though the CIA analysis, which is consistent with other expert opinion, casts doubt on the viability of Trump’s stated goal for the negotiations, the elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons stockpile.

• After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration created a secret “kill list” to step up the targeting of alleged terrorists for assassination. The criteria for inclusion on the list have apparently morphed over three presidential administrations, yet they remain elusive.

• Last year, two journalists filed a federal lawsuit against Donald Trump and other high government officials, asking to be removed from the kill list until they have a meaningful opportunity to challenge their inclusion. Both men claim to have no association with al-Qaeda or the Taliban, to have no connection to the 9/11 attacks, and to pose no threat to the United States, its citizens, residents or national security.

• Kareem and Zaidan Try to Get Off Kill List

• Bilal Abdul Kareem, a US citizen and freelance journalist, has survived five attempts on his life from targeted air-strikes. A Turkish intelligence official told Kareem that the US government is trying to kill him.

• Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, a citizen of Syria and Pakistan, is a senior journalist with Al Jazeera. He interviewed Osama bin Laden twice before the 9/11 attacks. Zaidan learned about his inclusion on the kill list from National Security Agency (NSA) documents leaked by Edward Snowden and published by The Intercept.

• In 1978, a JFK assassination hoax emerged that continues to fuel conspiracy theories and accusations against the Central Intelligence Agency. Two news stories began to circulate claiming that the House Select Committee on Assassinations had obtained an alleged 1966 CIA memo placing Howard Hunt, of Watergate infamy, in Dallas on the day of President John Kennedy’s assassination. Some conspiracy enthusiasts have tried to use the two articles to corroborate each other, unaware that they shared the same source. A review of over 1,000 pages of documents and testimony gives the story of – and dismantles – the HSCA memo hoax.

• For almost 20 years, U.S. drone warfare was largely one-sided. Unlike Afghans and Yemenis, Iraqis and Somalis, Americans never had to worry about lethal robots hovering overhead and raining down missiles. Until, that is, one appeared in the skies above Florida.

• But that’s a story for later. For now, let’s focus on a 2017 executive order issued by Pres. Donald Trump, part of his second attempt at a travel ban directed primarily at citizens of Muslim-majority nations. It begins: “It is the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks.”

• That sentence would be repeated in a January report from the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” Meant to strengthen the president’s case for the travel ban, it was panned for its methodological flaws, pilloried for its inaccuracies, and would even spur a lawsuit by the civil rights organization, Muslim Advocates and the watchdog group, Democracy Forward Foundation.

• n Tuesday, Russian dissident journalist Arkady Babchenko strolled into a Ukrainian press conference to prove that he is, in fact, still alive.

• Put another way, Babchenko proved that he was not in fact killed on Tuesday evening while returning to his Kiev apartment, as had been previously reported. News that Babchenko had been assassinated went viral across the world on Tuesday after Ukrainian authorities declared that he had been found dead. Now the Ukrainian authorities say that faking Babchenko’s death was necessary to draw out Russian assassins who had been ordered by the Kremlin to kill him. Those responsible for the plot are supposedly now in custody.

• This might appear like a cool spy game, but it is already looking like a pretty stupid gambit by the Ukrainians.

• By lying to its own people and to the world, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has damaged its credibility. Every statement that the SBU makes in the future, whether in relation to Russian threats on Ukrainian soil or other national concerns, will now be judged skeptically by those who hear it. This credibility deficit will also make it harder for the SBU to recruit sources in that those prospective sources will be unsure whether their SBU handlers are telling them the truth.

• Time was, the countries of the Middle East relied on the United States for patronage, protection, and guidance. Suez taught Israel, Britain, and France that without Washington’s acquiescence, their policies could not succeed. Egypt’s defection showed Russia the limits of its ability to compete for clients in the region. It was U.S. leadership that enabled Israel, Egypt, and Jordan to end the state of war between them.

• The standing of the United States in the region derived in part from its centrality to diplomacy aimed at finding a formula for peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians and acceptance of Israel’s legitimacy by its Arab neighbors. Except on issues related to Israel, many Arab governments followed America wherever it led. The collapse of the Soviet Union erased Russian influence in the Middle East, as it did elsewhere.

• To recall this history is to underscore the extent of the geopolitical changes that have occurred so far this century. The United States no longer enjoys primacy in the Middle East. The former colonial powers need American military support to intervene in the region, but the countries of the region itself now act independently, confident that they can gain American backing for whatever they do. They do not seem to be wrong about this, judging from U.S. backing for Israel’s wars on its neighbors, Gulf Arab efforts to topple the Asad government in Syria, and the ongoing devastation of Yemen by Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Emmy Butlin is part of a group that has maintained a solidarity vigil in defence of Julian Assange for six years outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The WikiLeaks editor was forced to take asylum there in June 2012. On June 19, the Julian Assange Defence Committee is holding a vigil to mark the sixth anniversary of the date Assange entered the building.

• The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party is backing the vigil and working to secure maximum attendance. Emmy spoke to WSWS reporter Robert Stevens about the work of the group and the Julian Assange case.

• For nearly six years, Julian Assange, who exposed the crimes of the US military and intelligence apparatus, has been imprisoned in London, trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy under increasingly onerous and precarious conditions. For more than two months, he has been denied any contact with the outside world, unable to receive visitors, make phone calls or access the Internet.

• The perpetrators of this crime are not the governments routinely denounced as “rogue regimes” by imperialist powers and targeted for military aggression, but the imperialist powers themselves—principally the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States.

• Now, the Ecuadorean government of Lenin Moreno is in active negotiations with the UK to push Assange out. Following last year’s elections, Moreno has moved to seek a rapprochement with the US, which would involve handing the journalist over to the torturers and war criminals in Washington.

• Today on Flashpoints: We bring you an update on the Julian Assange case. First up we’ll speak with Flashpoints correspondent and Live On The Fly hose, Randy Credico. And then, we feature an extended interview with filmmaker and activist, John Pilger.

• President Lenin Moreno said granting the Ecuadorean citizenship to Assange was the foreign minister’s idea.

• Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno says his country will respect Julian Assange’s right to asylum but only if the Wikileaks founder “respects the conditions” his government has put in place for him to continue his stay at their London Embassy.

• Special counsel Robert Mueller asked a London-based American academic and self-described “Donald Trump defender” about his connection to Roger Stone, ABC News reports.

• Malloch was detained by federal investigators at Boston’s Logan Airport in March. He told ABC News Mueller’s team spent an hour asking about Stone.

• Malloch, a contributor to InfoWars and close ally of UK Independence Part founder Nigel Farage, is the author to a new book, “The Plot to Destroy Trump: How the Deep State Fabricated the Russian Dossier to Subvert the President.” In it, Malloch alleges the U.S. intelligence community is trying to undermine Trump’s presidency.

• So how come “the puppet” gets a visa with an outstanding arrest warrant against her, yet Julian Assange has to be holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy?

• Speaking in an interview Ecuador President Lenin Moreno said that Julian Assange’s actions were a cause of concern for the government

• Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno says his country will respect Julian Assange‘s right to asylum but only if the Wikileaks founder “respects the conditions” his government has put in place for him to continue his stay at their London Embassy.

• Speaking in an interview with German Broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Moreno said Assange’s actions were a cause of concern for the government of the South American country, but his asylum was not under immediate threat if he complied.

• WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange is at risk of being removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has taken refuge for nearly six years, CNN reports. If he is forced out of the embassy, Assange could face arrest by British authorities and extradition to the United States. The Ecuadorian government cut off Assange’s internet in March. Former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa told The Intercept that the government has also blocked Assange from receiving visitors, calling the tactic “torture.” Correa said that Ecuador was not maintaining “normal sovereign relations with the American government—just submission.” In other Assange news, last month the Democratic National Committee sued WikiLeaks for its role in publishing hacked materials relating to the 2016 election. We speak with Glenn Greenwald in Rio de Janeiro, who wrote last month for The Intercept that “the DNC’S lawsuit against WikiLeaks poses a serious threat to press freedom.”

• Citing the concerns expressed by numerous First Amendment experts and journalists, CPJ’s Avi Asher-Schapiro contends that the DNC’s suit—which accuses WikiLeaks of conspiring with Russia and the Trump campaign to tilt the 2016 election by publishing a trove of hacked DNC emails—”goes against press freedom precedents going back to the Pentagon Papers and contains arguments that could make it more difficult for reporters to do their jobs.”

• “What the language in this suit is calling ‘conspiracy’ is the same thing journalists do all the time—report on leaked or stolen documents. Imagine if Trump had the power to go after ‘leakers’ for ‘conspiracy,’” Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote in a series of tweets highlighting CPJ’s “blistering” report on Tuesday. “This case has potentially enormous consequences for the press as a whole.”

• “This precedent threatens all journalists,” added Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept.

• [...]

• As Common Dreams at the time, free speech advocates raised alarm about the DNC’s suit when it was filed last month, arguing that it is both riddled with legal holes and full of dangerous implications.

• “I think that this civil suit goes well beyond what the First Amendment permits,” Barry Pollack, former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, who represents WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in criminal cases. “We have seen in DOJs under both parties, a willingness to at least bump right up against the line of pursuing journalists criminally. And that’s dangerous.”

• The CIA has turned over 139 documents to settle a lawsuit brought by the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights.

• [...]

• The settlement, reached last week in U.S. District Court in Seattle, brought the release of documents related to former El Salvadoran Col. Sigifredo Ochoa Pérez and his potential ties to the U.S. Some of the documents were formerly designated top secret, and some have never before been seen outside the agency.

• The Center for Human Rights’ director, Angelina Snodgrass Godoy, said she was pleased with the settlement.

Finance

• The European commissioner should have been applauded, not scolded, for speaking out on the crisis in Italy.

• [...]

• After months of chest-beating by Yanis Varoufakis, the country’s Marxist finance minister, Greece’s already-dire economic situation worsened. Five months after the leftists took over, market pressure forced them to shutter the stock market, close the banks and implement capital controls.

• In an attempt to save face, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called a referendum over whether Greece should accept the bailout terms. The No vote won with over 60 percent.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Joseph Mifsud, director of the now-defunct London Academy of Diplomacy, has been a key figure in Russiagate, accused of having high-level connections to the Russian government and helping connect the Trump team with the Russians. A new report by Elizabeth Voz turns that allegation on its head, saying Mifsud is more likely to be a UK asset.

• Voz, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Disobedient Media, joined Fault Lines on Radio Sputnik to discuss.

• [...]

• Mifsud has denied the claim he was associated with Russian intelligence and insisted instead that he’s a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Clinton Foundation. Casting even more doubt on the claim, Mifsud was photographed next to Claire Smith in 2012 at a training program on international security organized by the London Academy of Diplomacy, where Mifsud was director. Smith belongs to the UK Joint Intelligence Committee, which oversees the UK’s spying agencies.

• “Even to reach the lake, there are few stairs but the couple and their daughter didn’t go down them and offered the prayers from the one of the stairs. …Whatever is in circulation on social media is fake news,” Surendra Rajguru, priest at the Pushkar lake told The Wire.

• Now, Roseanne admitted to similar insanity and claimed it was the effect of Ambien, a common sedative… Well, if Trump takes a dose to go to sleep and has been for many years, he might just be into the hallucinatory side-effects regime… So, now we have a conspiracy theory of our own explaining the irrational Tweets. It does not explain the doubling down on the nightmares of the previous night but that might be just laid at the feet of habitually refusing to apologize or to explain. Perfect, eh?

• A top House Republican has defended the FBI against a series of attacks by President Trump, who’s claimed without evidence that the bureau planted a spy in his 2016 presidential campaign. Rep. Trey Gowdy, chair of the powerful House Oversight Committee, said Tuesday that the FBI was acting properly when it deployed a confidential informant—Stefan Halper—to investigate Russian attempts to interfere in the election. We talk to Glenn Greenwald about Halper’s involvement in the CIA and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.

• Since hedge fund Alden Global Capital has taken control of the Denver Post, the paper has seen rounds of layoffs. The newsroom has gone from 200 or so people to more like 70, with 30 more jobs slated to be cut this summer. Journalists have been moved to the printing plant to further cut costs for Alden, whose founder, Randall Smith, describes himself as investing in “distress.”

• Denver Post workers protesting the unceremonious gutting of their newspaper were joined recently by journalists from some of the other 90-odd papers Alden controls, via ownership of Digital First Media, at a rally at the vulture fund’s HQ in New York City. In a New York Times account, the Denver Post’s Elizabeth Hernandez says, as reporters do, that she doesn’t like being the story, but, she adds, “If we don’t tell our own story now, I don’t know how long we’ll be able to tell our community’s.”

• A few months ago I suggested that calling Facebook a bull in a china shop might not be fair to bulls. I fear the suggestion remains apt, as Facebook throws its considerable weight around in ways that, while potentially well-meaning, leaves all sorts of chaos in its wake. The latest evidence of this tendency relates to its recent announcement of policies designed to limit who can place political ads on Facebook.

• The problem is, that’s what it’s done: limit who can place ads on Facebook. But according to the Verge, all it’s done is limit the ability for SOME people to post political ads. As in, only SOME of the candidates in any particular race.

• The Verge article notes that the Mississippi primary is set for June 5. But in one particular race for Congress, only the incumbent’s authentication paperwork is in order, so only he is able to buy ads. As the day of the election draws near, his challenger finds himself locked out of being able to advertise through the medium.

• Plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit have expanded the scope of their action, alleging that Facebook and other major employers violated federal and state anti-age bias laws by excluding older job seekers from seeing online employment ads.

• The Communications Workers of America and three older workers are suing on behalf of union members and others, who they claim missed employment opportunities because they never saw job postings after employers used Facebook-provided targeting tools and algorithms to direct ads to younger potential applicants.

• The original complaint was filed at the same time as a December ProPublica–New York Times report that raised concerns about online job ads discriminating against later-career workers. Facebook subsequently limited job advertisers’ ability to exclude users in some demographic groups — but not groups defined by age.

• In an amended complaint filed Tuesday with the federal district court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, CWA and the law firm added claims to those they made in December. Beyond enabling exclusionary ads, the new complaint alleges that Facebook lets employers craft ads for “lookalike audiences” that are demographically narrow or similar to people already working for the employers placing the ads, a move that the plaintiffs say marginalizes older workers.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Free speech is too important for us to allow it to be consistently warped and slandered by both left and right. Free speech is about allowing a free and unhindered exchange of ideas. But, at the same time, we must recognise that the reason Robinson has a career is that we have become overly sensitive as a society to the kind of arguments he makes. He is a product not of too much free speech, but of too little. His arrest is not symbolic of a state conspiracy to shut him up. But it is at least connected to our continuing discomfort with discussing certain ideas.

• In addition to being ineffectual, FOSTA-SESTA has dangerous consequences for Internet freedom: it marks an end to Section 230’s true “safe harbor” that saw the rise of today’s Internet. Though it may be difficult to prosecute, as the Department of Justice makes clear, it nonetheless creates legal uncertainty for sites that rely on Section 230 to operate. Though Facebook and Google may be able to afford the uncertainty associated with a weakened Section 230, small websites and startups cannot. As a result, FOSTA-SESTA will only help to engrain the current Internet monopolies.

• More and more Kenyans are connecting to the internet, most frequently from mobile devices like phones and tablets.

• There are, of course, big benefits to increased connectivity. These include the rise of mobile money transactions and access to loans. But there are downsides, too. The country has been targeted by hackers in several major attacks.

• In May 2018 the Kenyan government responded to these and other high profile cyber attacks by signing the Computer and Cyber Crime Act into law. This seems a strange decision, since legislation already exists that deals with these issues.

• Last Spring Quarter, I wrote a column arguing that hate speech should not be free speech. I received a litany of nasty emails and comments calling me a fascist and saying that I didn’t deserve free speech if I opposed it for others. I’ll admit that the piece could’ve been worded better and that it didn’t represent the full scope and nuance of my argument. But I found it interesting that most people who contacted me addressed me as if I had single-handedly ripped the First Amendment from the pages of the Bill of Rights, as if I had shoved my column down their throats and forced them to read it. It was amusing and concerning to me that they felt my opinions were so significant and consequential that they warranted a response.

• Canada “does not censor” what it posts to Chinese social media, a Foreign Affairs official said, after a report raised questions about how countries communicate on the tightly controlled Chinese internet.

• Authorities in China routinely delete and otherwise restrict communications made by foreign embassies on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo, whose reach to large numbers of Chinese people has made it a desired location for “weiplomacy.”

• But a report this week that documented the censorship taking place also pointed out countries whose Weibo posts are not being aggressively censored, including Canada, calling into question whether they are redacting themselves.

• “Time and time again, we’ve seen cases of brave human rights defenders in repressive countries being subjected to censorship.” So says Kate Allen, the director of Amnesty International UK. She’s explaining the reason behind 50/50, a collaboration with global marketplace Everpress, exploring censorship. Consisting of 50 limited t-shirts, designed and produced by 50 different creatives, the project showcases independent artistry through highlighting some of the most intense manifestations of censorship across the globe. Over the years, Amnesty has protested against increased censorship, while also advising people to fight back against it online.

• As the media in Bangladesh wades through a quagmire of overt and covert censorship, journalists are often ‘accused’ of praticising self-censorship. It is with censure that they are said to ‘play safe’ and censor their own work. In fact, many journalists themselves ‘admit’ to self-censorship or, to put it bluntly, ‘saving their own skins’.

• But if truth be told, would any truly professional journalist practice self-censorship?

• It’s a reality. But the question is – is this actually self-censorship or just censorship, plain and simple?

• “Censorship keeps our newspaper from covering all the issues that matter to us,” Copy Editor Isabella Abraham said in a press statement released on Thursday. “Just because the opinion is ‘inconvenient’ for the school, doesn’t mean we don’t have a right to voice it.”

• Named the 2009 National Journalism Education Association Adviser of the Year, Lori Oglesbee-Petter has led the student journalists to earn over 100 awards for their reporting. Yet, Prosper High principal John Burdett has reportedly opted to end Oglesbee-Petter’s contract in a move the students fear signals the end of the journalism program.

• In 1969 Australian government censors claimed a Swedish film playing at the Sydney film festival included an actual sex scene involving a heavily pregnant woman. The film could only play, they said, if the offending copulation were deleted. But the scene in question involved no sex whatsoever. The censors apparently couldn’t distinguish between an embrace and penetrative sex – and weren’t prepared to admit they were wrong.

• This wasn’t the first time the Australian government had tried to cut scenes from films showing in Australian cinemas – they had been secretly banning films and slicing out scenes as they came through customs for years. But the uproar over this particular film became the catalyst for reforming the censorship laws at the dawn of the 1970s.

• The Prime Minister, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, has reminded that in a modern world there is no scope for any censorship.

• “Such measures may bring temporary benefits, but they are never in the interest of a country and the nation in the long run,” the prime minister said while addressing 28th award ceremony of the All Pakistan Newspapers Society (APNS) here Wednesday at the Prime Minister Office (PMO). The ceremony was also addressed by Dawn Media Group CEO and APNS President Hameed Haroon, Secretary General Sarmad Ali and federal information and broadcasting Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb.

• Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi on Wednesday said that the social media has rendered censorship in the media redundant and urged the media organisations to ensure responsible reporting by exercising due diligence in verifying facts.

• Addressing an awards ceremony at All Pakistan Newspapers Society (APNS) in Islamabad, the prime minister said the social media has transformed the media landscape by making all information available to anyone.

• “Media censorship may render short-term advantages but it is never in national interests, especially in the modern age,” he said.

• On May 12, Dawn, Pakistan’s oldest and most prestigious English daily, published an interview with former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, in which Sharif uttered four relatively oblique sentences: “Militant organizations are active. Call them non-state actors, should we allow them to cross the border and kill 150 people in Mumbai? Explain it to me. Why can’t we complete the trial?” He was referring, ostensibly, to Lashkar-e-Taiba’s involvement in the 2008 Mumbai attack. Lashkar and its leader, Hafiz Saeed, have not been held accountable, and the trial has stalled in an anti-terrorism court in Pakistan.

• [...]

• No one doubts the military’s involvement in this censorship. It is the latest example of a steadily accumulating set of suppressive measures it seems to be taking against the media in recent months, to various ends: to control its own narrative and maintain its hold on the country, to control Pakistan’s global image, to weaken Sharif, and to try to meddle in the upcoming general election this July.

• Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi on Wednesday said that his government did not believe in resorting to media censorship but urged the media to adopt a mechanism for self-regulation.

• Speaking at the All Pakistan Newspapers Society (APNS) Awards ceremony in Islamabad, the prime minister said media censorship was not possible in today’s age of social media and the internet.

• Even in the past, he said, all efforts to censor the media did not prove to be fruitful.

• “You may achieve short-term gains by imposing censorship on media, but it never goes in the country’s interests,” he stressed.

• Communications Minister Sam Basil said that the shutdown would enable the department and National Research Institute to conduct further research on how the social network was being used by users.

• Analysts will explore how fake news and pornography spreads, and assess whether country needs its own version of the platform

• Mike Adams, the founder of Natural News, a science-based natural health advocacy organization, is demanding that the government regulate Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter “to halt malicious censorship and create a fair platform for public debate.”

• On May 10, 1933, 40,000 pro-Nazi Germans gathered in Berlin to stage a gigantic book-burning bonfire. Exactly 85 years later, on May 10, 2018, philosopher and author Gilad Atzmon was barred from the Wil-Mar Community Center in Madison, Wisc. on the grounds that he was a supposed “Holocaust denier.”

• Spotify has been forced into something of a rethink regarding its hate speech policy. Spotify announced it was removing music from playlists of artists that do not meet its new policy regarding hate speech and hateful behaviour. R.Kelly, who faces allegations of sexual abuseand XXXTentacion, who is charged with battering a pregnant woman, were two artists that found their music removed. Now Spotify is softening its stance following push back externally and internally, including from Troy Carter who made it known that he was willing to walk away from the company if the policy remained unchanged. Spotify had good intentions but did not execute well. However, this forms part of a much bigger issue of the changing of the guard of media’s gatekeepers.

Privacy/Surveillance

• One day, you’re a carefree blogger. The next, you’re suddenly dealing with this big, looming thing called GDPR. The EU has introduced a new privacy-focused regulation, GDPR, and it dictates important privacy, security and data transparency requirements for websites handling personal data. You’re asking yourself, does this affect me? And you’re worried. Today, this article will help you better understand who, what, when and how, and hopefully give you both the knowledge and the tools to become a carefree blogger once again AND be merrily compliant.

• Now, the one extra question that you maybe asking yourselves is: why are publishing this only now, AFTER the regulation came into effect? Well, the answer is, believe or not, most tools and services out there released GDPR-compliant updates only in the past week or so, and that finally allowed me to put this guide together. Let’s see what gives.

• EFF and 54 civil liberties organizations joined comments this week written by the Brennan Center for Justice and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) standing up against the U.S. government’s plans to collect social media information from foreigners entering the United States. This is the fifth time we’ve fought this battle in the past two years.

• The U.S. State Department’s recent proposal is to collect social media identifiers, phone numbers, and email addresses used in the last five years from all visa applicants. This plan would apply to applicants seeking both immigrant and non-immigrant visas to the United States.

• EFF opposed the plan in April 2018 when it was first revealed. As we wrote then, “This questioning invades the free speech and privacy rights of foreign visitors to the U.S., as well as the rights of their American friends, families, and professional associates.” We also expressed concerns about the breadth of the program, which would affect 710,000 immigrant visa applicants and 14 million non-immigrant visa applicants, according to the State Department.

• Law firms are using geofencing in hospital emergency rooms to target advertisements to patients’ mobile devices as they seek medical care, according to Philadelphia public radio station WHYY. Geofencing can essentially create a digital perimeter around certain locations and target location-aware devices within the borders of those locations. Patients who unwittingly jump that digital fence may see targeted ads for more than a month, and on multiple devices, the outlet notes.

• A trial is under way for a former CIA case officer accused of giving top-secret documents to the Chinese.

• Kevin Mallory of Leesburg, Virginia, was charged last year under federal espionage statutes with delivering defense information to a foreign government.

• Prosecutors say they caught Mallory last year after he returned to the U.S. on a flight from Shanghai with more than $16,000 in undeclared cash.

• The information commissioner is to launch an investigation after a complaint by a campaign group that forces at the US’s largest eavesdropping centre in Britain are breaking the law.

• Reprieve said US forces at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire were failing to comply with the provisions of the UK Data Protection Act by collecting and processing personal data without registering with the information watchdog.

• Drawing on reports about how US surveillance operations identified targets for drone strikes, the charity said personnel at the base operated programmes that monitored and located communications, including mobile phone calls and wifi traffic.

• In a letter to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), Reprieve detailed the experience of the al-Manthari family in Yemen, who were caught up in a March 2018 US drone strike. While the US claimed the strike had killed members of al-Qaida, Reprieve alleges that its investigations revealed all the victims were civilians.

• That being said, there’s a lot of detail in the report that isn’t found in transparency reports by other tech companies. The whole thing is worth reading, if only to marvel at the massive amount of data demands being made by US law enforcement. And it appears the FBI (and other federal agencies) still prefer writing their own paperwork, rather than subject themselves to the minimal judicial scrutiny subpoenas require. National Security Letters are, by far, the most popular way for the government to seek subscriber/customer data. Apple received more than 16,000 NSLs targeting ~8,000 accounts in the last six months of 2017 alone.

• The Email Privacy Act is back. We hope it can stay.

• The House of Representatives passed a bill this week called the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which authorizes the nation’s military and defense programs. Earlier in the week, scores of Representatives offered amendments to this must-pass bill in hopes of ensuring that their ideas get a chance to become law.

• Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-KS) used this opportunity to include as an amendment the Email Privacy Act, a piece of legislation long-favored by EFF. The Email Privacy Act would codify the rule announced by the Sixth Circuit—and now followed by providers nationwide—that requires government agents to first obtain a probable cause warrant when seeking the content of communications stored by companies like Google, Facebook, Slack, Dropbox, and Microsoft.

• On Thursday night, the House approved the NDAA–including the amendment with the Email Privacy Act—in a 351-66 vote. We applaud the House’s inclusion of this important statutory language in the must-pass NDAA.

• Rep. Yoder’s amendment, which you can read here, is identical to the Email Privacy Act (H.R. 387) that EFF supported in 2017. The amendment is also a revival of the Email Privacy Act (H.R. 699) that EFF likewise supported in 2016. That bill received unanimous support from the House of Representatives in a 419-0 vote.

• This is a battle we’ve fought for years. Rep. Yoder’s amendment is the latest chance for Congress to get it right.

• Civil liberties and child advocacy organizations are calling on Walmart, Target, and Amazon to halt sales of CloudPets, stuffed toys that allow the recording and sharing of voice messages, until the manufacturer addresses known security breaches and vulnerabilities—including a critical flaw that allows someone within bluetooth range to eavesdrop on, and send messages to, users of the toy.

• CloudPets may sound benign: stuffed unicorns, bears, monkeys, and other animals that double as voice messaging platforms, allowing children, parents, or friends of children to send recorded messages to and from each other via the toys. But the manufacturer, Spiral Toys, has a track record of failing to protect consumers—and those most likely to fall victim to these vulnerabilities, children. Researchers and others have contacted the toymaker about several flaws, but many of these concerns have gone unheeded.

• Read the letter from the coalition asking retailers to halt sales of CloudPets.

• The European Commission’s chief negotiator on Brexit, Michel Barnier, has shot down the ICO’s suggestion that the UK have a seat at the decision-making table after the country leaves the Union.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Amnesty International has accused the Nicaraguan government of colluding with paramilitary groups to suppress weeks of student-led demonstrations against President Daniel Ortega.

• Teen sexting may be unwise, but it should not be grounds to ruin young people’s lives.

• Oftentimes, when lawmakers don’t know how to make sense of something, or it scares them, they criminalize it.

• Exhibit A: sexting.

• Sexting is very common among teens, frequently referenced in pop-culture, and perhaps a mystery to people who didn’t grow up with a cellphone. Some may call it “unwise.” Friends may steer friends away from doing it. But one thing is for sure, sexting should not be criminal.

• After all, if teenagers decide to engage in some racy sexting, is it really the government’s place to punish them? If a photo or text conversation goes viral, sometimes the young person whose privacy was violated is punished in the court of law, which is just plain wrong. And all parties in these situations are young people who may not have the judgment to make the best decisions — so should they have the rest of their life ruined because of a bad decision?

• The answer should be no.

• Enter Ohio lawmakers, a group of (mostly) angry older white guys who are shaking their fists and bemoaning kids today while doing little, if anything, to understand the millennial generation. On May 22, members of the Ohio House Criminal Justice Committee passed a “teen sexting ban.” This misguided and over-the-top legislation proposes to “ban sexting” for anyone under the age of 19. The full House is expected to vote on this bill soon.

• A 1975 memo from Henry Kissinger uncovered in the Central Intelligence Agency archives details the then-Secretary of State’s talking points for an upcoming Oval Office meeting with Edson Arantes do Nascimento, the Brazilian soccer phenom better known as Pelé.

• If a government employee suspects you might be carrying drugs, be prepared to engage in a nonconsensual, highly-intimate relationship with the feds and their helpers. A New Mexico resident suspected of carrying drugs was subjected to multiple anal probings and enemas before law enforcement finally decided he wasn’t actually carrying any drugs on him (or in him). An 18-year-old Arizona woman was subjected to vaginal and anal probing when attempting to return from a short trip to Nogales, Mexico. Again, no drugs were found but the helpful medical “professional” decided to go from CBP accusation to painful probing, bypassing less intrusive options (x-rays, etc.) in his earnest desire to save America from illicit substances.

• Another incident with lots of probing and violations but zero drugs has landed in the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court. Gloria Bustillos (an American citizen) was attempting to return to El Paso, Texas after a visit to Juarez, Mexico when CBP agents decided she must be trafficking drugs. The indignities began immediately.

• The CIA spent years trying to probe the mind of Abu Zubaydah, the first terror suspect it subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the aftermath of 9/11. The cables and reports that document the agency’s interrogations of Zubaydah fill thousands of pages; scores of those pages have since been made public in redacted form. Diaries that Zubaydah kept before his capture in Pakistan in 2002 have also been released, as have excerpts from a first-person account of his brutal treatment at the hands of CIA interrogators.

• Another glimpse into the mind of Zubaydah now emerges from a series of drawings he made during his years in U.S. custody. They are by turns haunted and bizarre, ranging in subject matter from graphic depictions of his abuse to creatures drawn from some indistinct mythology. The drawings were released to ProPublica in partial response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School.

• Racial bias continues to render death sentences unreliable and deny defendants equal justice.

• Johnny Lee Gates, a Black man convicted in 1977 by an all-white jury of murdering a white woman in Muscogee County, Georgia, is currently fighting for his right to a retrial free from racial discrimination.

• Despite strong evidence of racial bias in jury selection during the original trial, whether he will be granted a retrial is far from certain. New evidence from his decades-old case — evidence that was only turned over to Gates’ attorneys in March of this year — unquestionably reveals the racism guiding the juror selection process. The prosecution’s notes, for example, contain jury-selection notations of “W” next to white prospective jurors and “N” next to Black prospective jurors.

• These notes are reprehensible. They also illustrate exactly the kind of racial discrimination in capital jury selection that the U.S. Supreme Court addressed and correctly deemed unconstitutional in Foster v. Chatman in 2016.

• The Supreme Court has a long history of condemning racial bias in capital jury selection. In 1880, for example, it outlawed the categorical exclusion of Black people from juries in Strauder v. West Virginia. Yet that decision did not usher in an age of racial equality in jury selection. Today, 138 years later, discrimination against and exclusion of jurors of color continue in full force in courtrooms across America, including in the gravest of contexts: trials to determine if someone lives or dies.

• Weeding out jurors of color can impact the outcome of a trial, whether by robbing the jury of valuable perceptions on identifications across racial lines and policing, or by playing into the immeasurable other ways that implicit biases pervade our justice system.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• ESPN has long personified the cable and broadcast industry’s tone deafness to cord cutting and TV market evolution. The company not only spent years downplaying the trend as something only poor people do, it sued companies that attempted to offer consumers greater flexibility in how video content was consumed. ESPN execs clearly believed cord cutting was little more than a fad that would simply stop once Millennials started procreating, and ignored surveys showing how 56% of consumers would ditch ESPN in a heartbeat if it meant saving the $8 per month subscribers pay for the channel.

• As the data began to indicate the cord cutting trend was very real, insiders say ESPN was caught flat footed by the trend. Instead of adapting for the streaming era, the company spent years doubling down on bloated sports licensing deals and SportsCenter set redesigns.

• These decisions ultimately came back to haunt the “worldwide leader in sports,” resulting in ESPN losing 16 million subscribers over seven years (and an estimated 17,000 defecting viewers per day). As the accountability hammer began to fall, ESPN execs tried to pretend they saw this coming all along. ESPN subsequently decided the only solution was to fire hundreds of longstanding sports journalists and support personnel, but not the executives like John Skipper (since resigned) whose myopia made ESPN’s problems that much worse.

• At least half of respondents said they watch TV at least an hour a day, but media consumption habits in Finland appear to be splintering.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Much has been made about Donald Trump walking back sanctions placed on ZTE, a partly state-owned Chinese cellphone manufacturer, for selling products to Iran and North Korea. (Fun fact: our law enforcement agencies still do business with tech companies that sell to blacklisted countries.) The company has already paid millions of dollars in fines to the US for these violations, even if the working theory is the company paid zero dollars and the Chinese government picked up the tab.

• The actual badness of ZTE is somewhere between the extremes resulting in sanctions and the trade war victim it tries to present itself as. Trump is a fan of trade wars, even if Pyrhhic stalemates are still considered righteous wins in the Trade War Game. Trump has decided to lift the US government boot from ZTE’s mostly-unbruised neck as a gesture of goodwill or something after slapping the world’s largest exporter of consumer goods with a bunch of tariffs that seem to be doing more harm than good on the home front.

• And, because it’s Trump lifting the sanctions, lots of people are claiming it’s unilaterally a bad thing for him to do. This has resulted in some really bad arguments for maintaining sanctions and there’s one being made at TechCrunch. It begins with a horrendous attempt to quantify the “terribleness” of ZTE by using an incredibly meaningless stat.

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• Apple has been sued for patent infringement 296 times over the same period. It must be at least twice the egregious IP violator ZTE is, and no one (outside of the IPWatchdog staff) believes the US government should sanction it.

• The dying embers of the smartphone wars were back in the headlines last week as Samsung found itself on the wrong end of a $539 million jury verdict for infringing several of Apple’s patents. The decision was the latest twist in the long-running litigation saga between the two giant device manufacturers who have become the undoubted leaders of the smartphone age. Although the jury ruled against Samsung, as Joff Wild made clear on this blog over the weekend there’s a very strong case to be made that the South Korean company has emerged as the overall victor in the dispute.

• On March 28, 2018, the Beijing High Court issued its decision for Iwncomm v. Sony, a high profile case concerning infringement of a standard essential patent (SEP). The appellate court amended the trial judgment on some key findings, but still upheld a permanent injunction and damages of about CNY 9 million (USD 1.3 million). This case has received widespread attention and sparked discussion of both IP professionals and the telecommunication industry. The Beijing High Court’s reasoning and conclusions will be likely to impact on SEP licensing negotiations generally.

• Beijing High Court issues a final judgment in March 2018 on a high profile SEP infringement case IWNCOMM v. Sony (（2017）Beijing Civil Final No.454). The judgment of first instance is made by Beijing IP Court in March 2017, attracting extensive attention in the whole IP field. Some legal issues in this case are rather controversial and pioneering, with few precedent cases. Although this final judgment affirms injunction and damages determined by the first instance judgment, opinions of Beijing High Court on some legal issues are different from those of Beijing IP Court.

• As most readers will know, yesterday the European Commission published a proposal to amend Regulation 469/2009 concerning the supplementary protection certificate for medicinal products (the “SPC Regulation”) aimed at introducing a so-called “manufacturing exemption for export purposes” (in short, a “manufacturing waiver”). The rationale behind it is that the introduction of this new exemption to the rights conferred by supplementary protection certificates (“SPCs”) would allegedly boost the European generics and biosimilars industry. It would bring all sorts of benefits to Europe. Thousands of jobs would be created. Europe would become the pharmaceutical industry’s paradise. There are even rumours that Real Madrid would no longer win the Champion’s League (by the way, congratulations to Real Madrid supporters). No such comparable benefits can be traced back in history since the time when Noah devised his famous Ark.

• China extends drug patent exclusivity to 25 yearsOn May 11th, the office of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb issued a press release discussing aspects of President Donald Trump’s plans to lower the prices of drugs prescribed to United States citizens. Commissioner Gottlieb noted that the agency was increasing its efforts to implement the Drug Competition Action Plan by removing market barriers to generic pharmaceuticals. The press release also indicated that the agency would be calling out the actions of specific companies it believes are abusing the system “to reduce gaming of statutory and regulatory requirements to help ensure that drug companies don’t use anticompetitive strategies to delay development and approval of important generic drugs.”

• On 28 May, 2018, the European Commission published its proposal to amend Regulation (EC) No 469/2009 concerning supplementary protection certificate for medicinal products. Urged by the European Parliament, the Commission introduces a so-called manufacturing exemption for export purposes, also known as a “manufacturing waiver” to the protection conferred by the certificate.

• The European Commission has proposed a “targeted adjustment” to intellectual property law with a view to reducing the restrictions on EU-based manufacturers of pharmaceuticals seeking to compete in global markets.

• The European Commission has proposed to introduce an ‘export manufacturing waiver’ to Supplementary Protection Certificates (SPCs) to ‘help Europe’s pharmaceutical companies tap into fast-growing global markets and foster jobs, growth and investments in the EU’.

• According to a press release of 28 May 2018, ‘Supplementary Protection Certificates extend patent protection for medicinal products which must undergo lengthy testing and clinical trials prior to obtaining regulatory marketing approval. Thanks to the waiver, in the future EU-based companies will be entitled to manufacture a generic or biosimilar version of an SPC-protected medicine during the term of the certificate, if done exclusively for the purpose of exporting to a non-EU market where protection has expired or never existed.’

Trademarks

• It’s a bad idea to come after romance authors’ favorite double entendres. Unfortunately, Faleena Hopkins, holder of a trademark on the word “cocky” and a shaky understanding of trademark law, fired a bunch of shots and not only missed the mark, but managed to turn her entire industry against her.

• Hopkins is the author of a series of romance novels about the “Cocker Brothers” which she has named “The Cocky Series.” Hopkins obtained a trademark for the word “cocky” on April 17, 2018. On May 7, 2018, Kevin Kneupper filed a challenge [pdf] to the trademark. That’s only three weeks, but a lot happened in that time.

• Hopkins filed for two trademarks. One is for the word “cocky” in a specific font. The second is just for using the word in a series of books, downloadable and regular, “in the field of romance.” Once Hopkins had that mark, things spiraled.

• Authors T.L. Smith and Melissa Jane were contacted by Audible about their upcoming book Cocky Fiancé, telling them they had received a notice that their title was infringing. They then got an email from Hopkins, followed very quickly, they told Vox, by a notice from Amazon about infringement. Seeing that Hopkins did have a registered mark, the two changed their book title to Arrogant Fiancé and ate the cost of the merchandise with Cocky Fiancé printed on it.

Copyrights

• Just last week we wrote about how the big record labels have a hilariously long history of failing to grasp the importance of providing a good underlying technology service for music online and how they always overvalue the content, and assume that the technology and services are a commodity that is effectively worthless. And, yet again, that approach has failed them. The latest is the collapse and capitulation of Vevo, the service put together by a few of the major record labels to try to “take on” YouTube (even while using some of YouTube’s underlying technology). Earlier this week, Vevo announced that it was shutting down its own site and app, which basically no one used anyway. Instead, it’ll just focus on using YouTube, which was where everyone watched Vevo videos in the first place.

• Google has now filed an en banc rehearing petition in its dispute with Oracle over copyrightability of the naming system for an application programming interface — namely Oracle’s Java API that Google copied. [Oracle Am. v. Google LLC Rehearing Petition]

• The basic issue here stems from Google’s program interface for Android App development. Rather than creating its own set of functions and methods, Google decided to mimic the method-calls of Java. At the time, Google’s third-party app marketplace was lagging far behind Apple’s, and the Java-API mimic was seen as a strategy to facilitate more rapid development of apps since the programming language was already so popular.

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• Although Java was available for licensing, Google refused. Although Java’s originator Sun Microsystems was known for its lack of IP enforcement, that all changed when Oracle acquired the company.

• In the most recent iteration of the case, the jury found that Google’s use was a “fair use” and thus not an infringement. On appeal, however, the Federal Circuit reversed — finding the API the proper subject of copyright protection and not subject to a fair use defense in this case. As Jason Rantanan wrote: “the court’s analysis all but says (expressly so!) that fair use can never apply.”

• You may recall five years ago how WIPO — the World Intellectual Property Organization, a UN body that is famous for its maximalist and expansionary approach to intellectual property — delayed and then rejected the Pirate Parties International request to become an “observer.” As we noted, the “observer” process is more or less a formality, and it’s pretty common to see everyone who applies get approved. So it was a bit odd that WIPO rejected the Pirates.

• And it’s even odder when you consider just who WIPO allowed in this year. As noted by Intellectual Property Watch, one of the organizations whose application was rubber-stamped this year to become a WIPO observer is that of the generically named “IP Centre.”

• Korean game developer PUBG, a subsidiary of Bluehole, has filed a copyright violation lawsuit against U.S.-based Epic Games, asking a court to determine whether the latter’s “Fortnite” was copied from the former’s “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.”

• A PUBG official said Friday that the firm filed an injunction, alleging copyright infringement, with the Seoul Central District Court against Epic Games Korea.

• “We filed the suit to protect our copyright in January,” said the official.

• he makers of PUBG have filed a lawsuit against Epic Game’s Fortnite on the ground of copyright infringement.

• Last year, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds gained massive popularity by introducing the battle royale shooter genre for the players. Seeing it gain traction, Fortnite came up with its own battle royale mode and now it stands as the most popular game on the planet.

• Over the years, Techdirt has written about some pretty bad stuff happening in South Africa on the copyright front. For example, there was the Business Software Alliance using made-up figures in an attempt to revise copyright law in its favor. The South African music rights organization tried to put public domain works under copyright. And — most insane of all — the South African recording industry association ran a stupid “anti-piracy” campaign called “Shoot the Pirate”, which resulted in actual violence. So it makes a pleasant change to report on some good news from the country. A new organization of creators has been formed to press for a more balanced copyright system in South Africa. They call themselves ReCreate…

• It is claimed that some committee members have been told of “possible repercussions” if they fail to support the proposal.

• They have allegedly been told that to “stay away” from the meeting if they intend to reject the new law, with substitute members, who are more sympathetic to the plans, lined up to vote instead.

• Here’s the headline finding: “This artificial removal of copyright barriers led to a 25% decline in prices, and a 67% increase in citations. These results suggest that restrictive copyright policies slow down the progress of science considerably.”

• Copyrights grant publishers exclusive rights to content for almost a century. In science, this can involve substantial social costs by limiting who can access existing research. This column uses a unique WWII-era programme in the US, which allowed US publishers to reprint exact copies of German-owned science books, to explore how copyrights affect follow-on science. This artificial removal of copyright barriers led to a 25% decline in prices, and a 67% increase in citations. These results suggest that restrictive copyright policies slow down the progress of science considerably.

• With digitisation, the costs of distributing new research, textbooks, and other types of knowledge has become negligible. In principle, people across the world could now have access to a new research paper within minutes of its publication. Yet copyrights, which grant publishers exclusive rights to content for nearly 100 years, create enormous access costs. These costs are high enough to prevent people outside of universities and wealthy institutions from accessing new research. If the creation of new science and innovation depends on access to existing science, as Scotchmer (1991) has argued, the social costs of increased access costs through copyrights may be immense.

• Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, part of the FCC’s Republican majority, wrote a letter to the Amazon and eBay CEOs asking them to crack down on set-top boxes that violate FCC rules.

• FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly has written to the heads of Amazon and eBay with a request to eliminate sales of pirate media boxes which illegally display the FCC compliance logo. In a letter to Devin Wenig and Jeff Bezos, O’Rielly seeks the total removal of such devices, noting that their fraudulent labeling is exacerbated by the effect they have on the entertainment industries.

• On May 25 and 26, Hong Kong Customs carried out a series of raids against four retail outlets suspected of selling “fully loaded” set-top boxes which provided unauthorized access to movies and TV shows. Seven men and one woman were arrested and charged with copyright infringement offenses. Officials have warned that offenders could be imprisoned for up to four years.

• PUBG and Fortnite are two of the hottest games of the moment. While the games share some similarities, thus far they have managed to coexist without significant trouble. However, that is no longer the case since PUBG has taken Epic Games to court in South Korea over alleged copyright infringement.

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