● 06.10.18

● Links 10/6/2018: Devuan ASCII 2.0.0 and Tails 3.7.1

Posted in News Roundup at 1:49 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The Chromium developers have been very busy as of late bringing life to the Crostini Project that will give users the ability to run Linux apps “natively” on Chrome OS. While Linux on Chromebooks isn’t a new trick, the Crostini UI presents a clean, hack-free method to launch Linux apps from the terminal app that will eventually live in Chrome OS’s app drawer when enabled.

• Initially birthed in Google’s own Pixelbook, Linux apps on Chrome OS has now spread to ARM in the form of the Samsung Chromebook Plus. Although it’s still in its infancy, it’s becoming clear that developers are pushing to make the Crostini project a stable part of the Chromebook ecosystem.

• Being lazy, I wanted a way to automate that when using my new Librem laptop. Again, I could look into a power/charging threshold for the Librem. But for less than $20, I picked up a power strip that had a timer (Century 8 Outlet Surge Protector with Mechanical Timer). Four outlets on the strip are always on, and four are connected to a built-in timer. That allows me to plug in my monitor and LED desk light to an always-on outlet, and my laptop to a timed outlet. I still turn the power strip off when I’m not using the computer, but that’s a habit I’ve had for ages, so that’s not a big deal.

• The power needs for a laptop aren’t that big, so I’m not worried about over-taxing the power strip. This thing is built to run high-load devices like an aquarium water pump and light, or a heat lamp for a terrarium. The Librem runs a pretty light load in comparison: about 60-80W when charging the battery, according to user “Derriell” on the Purism forum.

• I’m still tweaking the duty cycle. My goal is to exercise the battery somewhere between 20% and 80%. The Librem 13 will run on battery for roughly seven to nine hours, and it takes upwards of four hours to fully recharge, so right now I have the power strip timer set at five hours “off” and three hours “on.” So if I only have the power strip turned on when I’m using the computer, the laptop is running from battery for five hours, then it charges for three hours, then it’s back to battery. I have to keep the total (eight hours) evenly divisible by twenty-four hours.

• Maybe I’m overthinking it, but this seems a good solution to me. How do you manage the battery on your laptop? If there’s a more elegant way, let me know in the comments.

Server

• Plenty of people around the world got new gadgets Friday, but one in Eastern Tennessee stands out. Summit, a new supercomputer unveiled at Oak Ridge National Lab is, unofficially for now, the most powerful calculating machine on the planet. It was designed in part to scale up the artificial intelligence techniques that power some of the recent tricks in your smartphone.

• America hasn’t possessed the world’s most powerful supercomputer since June 2013, when a Chinese machine first claimed the title. Summit is expected to end that run when the official ranking of supercomputers, from an organization called Top500, is updated later this month.

• [...]

• Summit has nearly 28,000 graphics processors made by Nvidia, alongside more than 9,000 conventional processors from IBM. Such heavy use of graphic chips is unusual for a supercomputer, and it should enable breakthroughs in deploying machine learning on tough scientific problems, says Thomas Zacharia, director of Oak Ridge National Lab. “We set out to build the world’s most powerful supercomputer,” he says, “but it’s also the world’s smartest supercomputer.”

• IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) today unveiled Summit, the department’s newest supercomputer. IBM claims that Summit is currently the world’s “most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer” with a peak performance of a whopping 200,000 trillion calculations per second. That performance should put it comfortably at the top of the Top 500 supercomputer ranking when the new list is published later this month. That would also mark the first time since 2012 that a U.S.-based supercomputer holds the top spot on that list.

• [...]

• IBM was the general contractor for Summit and the company collaborated with Nvidia, RedHat and InfiniBand networking specialists Mellanox on delivering the new machine.

• Supercomputers and scientific research tend to go hand-in-hand. Designed for solving fundamental scientific problems, such as finding a cure for cancer and harnessing fusion energy, supercomputers recently have increasingly become more open in terms of global collaboration and information exchange among researchers. Contrast this with the fact that, in the past, supercomputer designs and implementations were relatively closed, often built by a single vendor from their inventory of components. Today, this model is evolving: as science becomes more accessible by a global community, supercomputers are becoming much more open via vendor collaboration.

• Summit servers are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• The U.S. is once again home to the most powerful computer in the world. The U.S. Department of Energy on June 8 showed off the new IBM-built Summit supercomputer, boasting 200 petaflops of computational power.

• For almost five years, China’s Sunway TaihuLight has been the supreme leader in the supercomputing world. But things have changed with the arrival of Summit – a new supercomputer unveiled by the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Kernel Space

• Ezequiel Garcia, who recently joined our team, fixed some rockchip ASoC issues. Tomeu Vizoso continued taking care and sending patches of any bug or improvement he founds, that includes a fix for the virtio driver and another for the USB DWC2 controller.

• Gustavo Padovan sent a patch to fix a link for the media documentation. And finally, Sebastian upstreamed a patch to enable secure register access for Bx50v3 devices that Peter Senna did whilst employed at Collabora.

• A big draw to selecting Collabora as my employer was the opportunity to work on open source software. I had previously spent the summer of 2017 working on my first contributions to open source projects such as Rust and Firefox. Initially, it was an excuse for me to write and learn more Rust, but with time I grew to really enjoy the process. I certainly do have to commend Mozilla for their exceptional work in introducing newcomers to their projects. As someone who did not have prior professional working experience, getting to work, contribute, and follow real-world software development processes thrilled me.

• Red Hat’s Richard Hughes shares word on work he’s done with Wacom engineers to support Wacom’s custom update protocol on Linux.

• At present, Wacom advise their customers to upgrade firmware on their graphics tablets using a dedicated desktop app which is only available for Windows and macOS.

• But no longer will open source creatives need to keep a dual-boot handy for this purpose.

• We are about half-way through the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window, so here is a look at the most interesting work that’s been merged so far for this next kernel release that should debut as stable around mid-August.

• In the first week of the Linux 4.18 merge window, highlights include:

• - The big platter of DRM graphics driver updates always has us most excited and it’s no different with Linux 4.18 from AMDGPU improvements to Intel Icelake work to NVIDIA Volta open-source enablement.

• There are a lot of staging changes for the busy Linux 4.18 kernel merge window.

• The staging area of the kernel where premature/incomplete kernel code goes has seen over one thousand patches this cycle that amount to 168 thousand lines of new code and 227 thousand lines of code removed. In part for the staging area coming in lighter is the Lustre file-system has been removed.

• Linux 4.17 landed the initial Spectre V4 mitigation as “Speculative Store Bypass Disable” (SSBD) while primarily focused on Intel CPUs and for Linux 4.18 the SSBD code has been updated for AMD processors.

• The in-development Linux 4.18 kernel will receive the patches for making use of the SPEC_CTRL / VIRT_SPEC MSRs to be provided by future AMD CPUs / firmware updates. The AMD SSBD work done by Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk of Oracle was previously covered here. The AMD SSBD whitepaper can be read here.

• Adding to the list of new features for Linux 4.18 is the long-in-development work on the restartable sequences system call.

• The new RSEQ system call allows for faster user-space operations on per-CPU data by providing a shared data structure ABI between each user-space thread and the kernel. This allows update operations on per-CPU data without needing expensive atomic operations. The restartable sequences ABI can make faster querying the current CPU number, incrementing per-CPU counters, modifying data protected by per-CPU spinlocks, writing/reading per-CPU ring buffers, and more.

Linux Foundation

Graphics Stack

• The ATI Rage 128 series was introduced in 1998 while now twenty years later a renewed DDX driver and potentially DRM/KMS kernel driver is going to be attempted for these AGP/PCI graphics cards from the days of OpenGL 1.2.

• The ATI RAGE 128 family was great back in 1998 when it was going up against the Voodoo 3 and RIVA TNT while now for those Linux users who are fans of vintage hardware, there’s going to be a renewed driver push. That’s hardware back from the days when GPUs could have less than 10 million transistors, were manufactured on a 250nm process, and just over 100MHz clock speeds with SDR memory.

• NVIDIA has rounded out their supported Linux drivers with X.Org Server 1.20 support.

• NVIDIA’s latest 396 driver series has supported the X.Org Server 1.20 ABI since before xorg-server 1.20.0 was released and since then has been brought to the 390 long-term driver series earlier this week and now the NVIDIA 340 legacy driver series. The 340 driver series is what’s providing the maintenance-only support for the GeForce 8 and GeForce 9 series.

• For those relying upon DXVK for running Direct3D 11 games over Vulkan with Wine, the RADV Vulkan driver from Mesa Git should now be working out much better for this fast-developing graphics translation layer.

• DXVK continues making great strides for delivering a performant D3D11-over-Vulkan implementation for Wine games/applications. For those using the open-source Radeon Vulkan “RADV” driver in Mesa 17.2-dev, the experience should be much more pleasant.

• Red Hat’s Adam Jackson has announced the X.Org plans for the GitLab migration. X.Org will make use of GitLab for the Git repositories and bug tracking, as a replacement to Cgit and Bugzilla.

• The AMD Radeon driver developers maintaining the open-source AMDVLK Vulkan Linux driver have pushed out their latest week’s worth of changes.

• On Friday was their usual push of the latest LLVM/XGL/PAL code-bases making up this Radeon Vulkan open-source driver that is an alternative to the Mesa-based RADV driver.

Benchmarks

• This week have been various unique and extra articles and benchmarks for commemorating the Phoronix 14th birthday. The latest of these fun articles is taking a look back at how various CPUs over the years compare to today’s Intel Core and AMD Ryzen offerings.

Applications

• Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax created by John Gruber in 2004. It’s designed to be easy-to-read and easy-to-write.

• Readability is at the very heart of Markdown. It offers the advantages of plain text, provides a convenient format for writing for the web, but it’s not intended to be a replacement for HTML. Markdown is a writing format, not a publishing format. You control the display of the document; formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown. Mostly, Markdown is just regular text with a few non-alphabetic characters included, such as # or *.

• For obvious reasons, Linux tends to attract users who are more tech savvy and privacy aware than most Windows or macOS users, which makes a VPN a pretty natural fit for the operating system.

• Unfortunately, only a few VPN providers actually offer dedicated software clients for Linux, and if you don’t opt for one of them you’ll be stuck fiddling around in the system console (not that that’s anything new to Linux users, of course…). With that in mind we’ve rounded up the best VPNs for Linux with a dedicated app, along with a few that don’t.

• Today, we are going to take a quick look at little editor built with Python that I recently became aware of.

• When required, it can trade compression speed for stronger compression ratios (compression speed vs compression ratio trade-off can be configured by small increments), vice versa. It has a special mode for small data compression, known as dictionary compression, and can build dictionaries from any sample set provided. It comes with a command line utility for creating and decoding .zst, .gz, .xz and .lz4 files.

• [...]

• Importantly, Zstandard has a rich collection of APIs, supports almost all popular programming languages including Python, Java, JavaScript, Nodejs, Perl, Ruby, C#, Go, Rust, PHP, Switft, and lots more.

Proprietary

• The Codelobster free web language editor has been available for quite some time and has attracted many fans. It allows you to edit PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, and it highlights the syntax and provides hints for tags, functions and their parameters. This editor deals with files that contain mixed content easily as well.

Instructionals/Technical

• TL;DR: Choose a RAID-Z stripe width based on your IOPS needs and the amount of space you are willing to devote to parity information. If you need more IOPS, use fewer disks per stripe. If you need more usable space, use more disks per stripe. Trying to optimize your RAID-Z stripe width based on exact numbers is irrelevant in nearly all cases.

• On Kubuntu 16.04 and 18.04, you can insert a custom MAC Address into a certain Wifi Hotspot connection right within the NetworkManager tray. For example, if you always connected to –let’s call it– @wifi.id hotspot on the wifi.id public places, you want to connect with a custom MAC address, then this tutorial is for you. This article discusses the tactic to make you able to use MAC as an account (“seamless” service) on public wifi places. The goal is for you to not manually change MAC every time you connect to that hotspot. Just configure once, use forever. Happy connecting!

Games

• This week Mac/Linux game porting company released the Linux port of A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA, just two months after this game was released for Windows. With the Linux port of this strategy game the Vulkan API is being used for graphics rendering, which makes it interesting for benchmarking. Here is our extensive look at the performance of this major Linux game port when testing twenty-five different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards to see how this game is performing on Ubuntu Linux.

• It’s completely free as well, no micro-transactions or any of that rubbish. They said they couldn’t test the Linux version themselves, but in my testing it seemed to work great! If you use a Steam Controller, you will need to set the right pad into Joystick Camera to allow for constant shooting (how it’s supposed to be).

• That’s quite a title for an article isn’t it! Membrane, currently crowdfunding on IndieGoGo is a GZDoom-powered 90′s inspired FPS that will support Linux.

• The developers have already worked on it for years, but they’re now wanting to have a bigger push and work on it full time. They’re seeking $4K from their crowdfunding campaign, although it’s using a flexible goal so they will receive any funds pledged even if they do not hit their goal.

• Welcome to the second review in the PIN (Play It NOW) series. We’re going to be looking at quite a recent title called MidBoss by the awesome Kitsune Games and ported by the excellent Ethan Lee. A game full of superlatives then, and now here’s my PIN, urging you to take a look.

• Out now in Early Access with Linux support, Robothorium sees you lead your very own robot uprising. Developed by Goblinz Studio, the same team behind Dungeon Rushers.

• With Stoneshard currently going through crowdfunding, the developers have finally released the Stoneshard: Prologue alpha demo on Linux.

• The Kickstarter is currently doing very well, with only 6 days to go they’ve managed to reach well over their initial goal. They’ve got around $65K in funding, which means they hit their first stretch goal to include new dungeons and enemies.

• Indivisible [Official Site] looks really quite good, a nice colourful action-RPG from the creator of Skullgirls, due next year with Linux support and it has a new trailer.

• The Endless Mission sounds like a confusing mash-up of many genres in a story-based game that allows you to change the rules.

• As it stands right now the most competitive graphics card battle on the Linux gaming front is the Radeon RX 580 against the GeForce GTX 1060. NVIDIA continues with their first-rate performant drivers while the Polaris hardware on the open-source RADV/RadeonSI drivers is mature enough now that it’s competing with the GTX 1060 like it should be and in some cases even performing much better than the NVIDIA Pascal part. With this week’s release of Thrones of Britannia and powered by Vulkan, here is an extensive look at the two competing GPUs and their performance.

• This splendid city building simulation is no stranger to Dedoimedo. I’ve talked about the game at length, covering both the original release and the combined After Dark and Snowfall expansions, and recently also covered the relatively new Mass Transit DLC. But that’s not all. We have also talked about traffic management. A lot.

• Like most urban simulators, the game places heavy focus on the road infrastructure – let’s face it, a city cannot function without transportation, and everything else is a derivative of the tarmac grid, even if you do not really use grids in your games, ha ha. I’ve shed some personal advice on how to handle smooth flowing traffic against organic city growth, and the use of underground tunnels to achieve extra throughput and better aesthetics in your cities. Now, with Mass Transit offering a whole new range of additional transport technologies, I wanted to compile a complete guide on making your traffic perfect. Let us.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.47.0.

• KDE Frameworks are 70 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the Frameworks 5.0 release announcement.

• This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

• The latest monthly update is now available to the KDE Frameworks that complements the capabilities of the Qt5 tool-kit.

• This has been another strong week for KDE’s Usability and Productivity initiative!

• Dead desktops are never a pretty sight. Irrecoverable desktops even more so. I really wonder what can go so horribly wrong that even if you fully reinstall and move away all the desktop-related settings, things are still awfully bad. No matter, in this tutorial, I’ve shown you how you can regain control over your Plasma desktop even if things are seemingly lost.

• True, you can always boot into any which live CD session and copy your data or install a different desktop environment. But what if your home rests on the same partition and you cannot afford formats? Or if you actually want to continue using Plasma? Well, it comes down to managing the login session, and then creating a new user that will take over the fiasco. Technically, we cheated, but then, if you date twins, and you can’t tell them apart, is it your fault for using the wrong name? Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that no matter how seemingly bad things are, it’s never a lost cause. And remember, always have backups. Take care.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• So you want to record your Ubuntu desktop, but you don’t know which desktop screen recorder to use?

• Well, have you considered not using one at all?

• Don’t look at me strangely: I promise this makes sense.

• You’ve likely seen videos on YouTube where people share a screencast of their Linux desktops. Perhaps you want to join the fun. Well, you can, and you don’t need any special tools or separate screen recorder apps to do it.

• Since my initial announcement of Builder at GUADEC in 2014, I’ve had a vision in the back of my mind about how I’d like completion to work in Builder. However, there have been more important issues to solve and I’m just one person. So it was largely put on the back burner because after a few upstream patches, the GtkSourceView design was good enough.

• However, as we start to integrate more external tooling into Builder, the demands and design of what those completion layers expect of the application have changed. And some of that is in conflict with the API/ABI we have in the long-term stable versions of GtkSourceView.

Distributions

New Releases

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• The GeckoLinux project is pleased to release updated spins of both ROLLING and STATIC editions. GeckoLinux spins are based on the openSUSE distribution, with a focus on polish and out-of-the-box usability on the desktop. A large variety of customized desktop options are available in STATIC (based on openSUSE Leap) and ROLLING (based on openSUSE Tumbleweed) editions. After installation to the hard disk, a GeckoLinux system will continue to receive updates from the openSUSE and Packman infrastructures. An installed system can even be upgraded smoothly to future openSUSE releases while at the same time retaining its unique GeckoLinux configuration.

Red Hat Family

• When Red Hat acquired application container specialist CoreOS in January, it was looking to leverage the startup’s energetic development team churning out open-source tools for agile cloud computing.

• Those efforts appear to be bearing fruit with the release of several “operator” tools designed for container-based application development and for monitoring cloud consumption.

• The Red Hat unit recently released to the open source community an “Operator Framework” for building applications with Kubernetes. This week, it launched an “Operator Metering” tool for tracking cloud usage and costs. The entire tool kit is intended to help operators manage and scale Kubernetes operations without breaking the bank.

• In today’s world of digital era, enterprises are increasingly turning to open source to accelerate their digital transformation efforts. They realise the benefits of building and collaborating on open source rather than developing new software from the ground up. Today it is at the core of many emerging technologies including cloud computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain and machine learning.

Finance

Fedora

• The latest feature plan for Fedora 29 is to finally have Wayland remote desktop support in place.

• This Wayland Remote Desktop goal would be to have the same features and support as Fedora currently offers under X11 sessions for desktop sharing/remote access. This would allow Fedora Workstation sessions on Wayland to be accessible via VNC with authentication/authorization/encryption support. This VNC support would be catered around the GNOME Remote Desktop support and make use of PipeWire. The focus around GNOME is of little surprise considering that is the default desktop environment of Fedora Workstation and currently offers the best Wayland support.

Debian Family

• About a month ago I attended the RISC-V workshop (conference, congress) co-organised by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).

• There I presented a talk with the (unimaginative) name of “Debian GNU/Linux Port for RISC-V 64-bit”, talking about the same topic as many other posts of this blog.

• There are 2-3 such RISC-V Workshop events per year, one somewhere in Silicon Valley (initially at UC Berkeley, its birthplace) and the others spread around the world.

• The demographics of this gathering are quite different to those of planet-debian; the people attending usually know a lot about hardware and often Linux, GNU toolchains and other FOSS, but sometimes very little about the inner workings of FOSS organisations such as Debian. My talk had these demographics as target, so a lot of its content will not teach anything new for most readers of planet-debian.

• I was assigned 15 hours of work by Freexian’s Debian LTS initiative and worked all those hours.

Derivatives

• This release fixes many security issues and users should upgrade as soon as possible.

• Dear Init Freedom Lovers

• Once again the Veteran Unix Admins salute you!

• We are happy to announce that Devuan GNU+Linux 2.0 ASCII Stable is finally available.

• Devuan is a GNU+Linux distribution committed to providing a universal, stable, dependable, free software operating system that uses and promotes alternatives to systemd and its components.

• Devuan 2.0 ASCII runs on several architectures. Installer CD and DVD ISOs, as well as desktop-live and minimal-live ISOs, are available for i386 and amd64. Ready-to-use images can be downloaded for a number of ARM platforms and SOCs, including Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, OrangePi, BananaPi, OLinuXino, Cubieboard, Nokia and Motorola mobile phones, and several Chromebooks, as well as for Virtualbox/QEMU/Vagrant.

• The Devuan 2.0 ASCII installer ISOs offer a variety of Desktop Environments including Xfce, KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQt, with others available post-install. The expert install mode now offers a choice of either SysVinit or OpenRC as init system. In addition, there are options for “Console productivity” with hundreds of CLI and TUI utils, as well as a minimal base system ideal for servers. The minimal-live image provides a full-featured console-based system with a particular focus on accessibility.

• Back in late 2014, a team of “Veteran Unix Admins” announced their plans to release a systemd-free fork of Debian GNU+Linux; it was named Devuan. In mid-2017, the first Devuan 1.0 release arrived. Following the same, Devuan 2.0 has just been shipped by the developers as a stable release to provide an alternative to systemd and its components.

• Devuan 2.0 has now been released as stable, the downstream of Debian GNU/Linux that aims for “init freedom” by decoupling the packages from being dependent upon systemd.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Because Flatpak comes in two types, regular release (0.11.x) and “Stable” (=LTS, 0.10.x), the latest Stable release counts as well. With Flatpak 0.11.8’s hotfix only released 4 hours ago, it could not have passed the QA of any serious distribution, so 0.11.7 counts as latest for now.

• Green means the latest version is in an official repository. Yellow means that either the latest version is in an add-on repo or the package is in an official repository but with some problems. Red means either not available at all or in some barely maintained (or even abandoned) add-on repository.

• KDE developer Markus Slopianka has looked at the state of Flatpak and Snap application deployment/sandboxing technologies across the state of several Linux distributions.

Devices/Embedded

• E-con’s “e-CAM120_TRICUTX2” is a camera system powered by a Linux-driven Jetson TX1 or TX2 module that features three 13-megapixel, [email protected] cameras via 4-lane MIPI-CSI-2 interfaces.

• Last September, E-con Systems launched an e-CAM30_HEXCUTX2 system with six 3.4-megapixel, HD cameras. Now it has followed up with an e-CAM120_TRICUTX2 camera rig with only three cameras but each with higher [email protected] resolution via 13-megapixel technology.

• Built entirely on GNU/Linux technologies, AsteroidOS offers a very basic, spartan experience. It features notification mirroring and a few apps like a calendar, calculator, and weather to get you by. In its current state, it’s a neat project, but the best I can say for real-world use is that it works. When compared to watchOS, Wear OS, and Tizen, it has a very, very long way to go. Luckily, the developer knows this and has a few additions planned for future updates.

• I’ve spent the better part of two weeks with AsteroidOS on my LG Watch Urbane as my primary smartwatch — the absolutely horrendous LG Watch Style battery life and being unable to pair my Gear S3 with my Pixel 2 XL on Android P DP2 certainly helped this period not feel so bad (no, I haven’t tried DP3 yet). I don’t mean to imply that AsteroidOS is a negative experience; it’s just that it feels like several large steps backwards after what I’ve grown accustomed to in recent years.

Android

• Wow, so it has been one full year since the public announcement of postmarketOS, and what a year it has been! During this time the project has grown beyond our wildest dreams; dozens of contributors making a wide variety of contributions, friendships made, bragging rights established (and lost, and re-established), Doom running on things it probably shouldn’t, and we’re ultimately just getting started. This post is also a celebration of all the hard work that has gone into postmarketOS in the last year, it’s first year!

• Before we begin with our list of changes since the last post in December and other exciting news, a quick intro for folks just now learning of this project for the first time: postmarketOS aims to be a sustainable operating system that empowers users to safely use their devices for as long as possible (ideally until they physically fall apart). The system is designed to share as many packages as possible between supported devices, with the ability to make exceptions for a few device-specific packages as appropriate/needed. This is in contrast to systems like Android, where the many device-specific changes are required to support any particular device.

• At this point, postmarketOS is only meant to be used by developers. In most instances, phone calls, SMS, bluetooth or the mainline kernel won’t work on your device, and there’s the firmware problem.

Free Software/Open Source

• George Hotz, the hacker-turned-founder of an open-source self-driving startup, has a different philosophy of autonomy.

Events

• OpenSouthCode is a general purpose FOSS event, very popular among students and local hackers. Last year I talked about the FOSS automotive platforms developed by AGL and GENIVI. This year I provided an overview of CIP, the work that we are currently doing and near future plans. Check the slides for more information.

• OpenSouthCode in a two days event. The first one, on a Friday, is all about workshops, meetup and training activities while the second one, on a Saturday, is reserved for talks in Spanish.

• If you live in the South of Spain or happen to be around when this event takes place, I totally recommend it.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google has promoted the upcoming Chrome 68 web browser to the Chrome Beta channel on Thursday for Chrome OS, Linux, Android, Chrome OS, macOS, and Windows platforms.

• Chrome 68 promises to be yet another incremental update that introduces new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for developers, namely the Payment Handler API and the Page Lifecycle API, as well as an improved “add to home screen” behavior for PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) that allows users to add them to the home screen on their Android devices.

• Crashing pages, slow performance, or just not being able to find that one tab you need to get back to—you’ve probably felt the effects of tab overload. If you use Chrome, though, there are some great extensions to help you manage all those tabs.

Mozilla

• Mozilla Firefox Test Pilot program is intended to provide a new experimental features on the latest release of Mozilla Firefox. Here’s a new highly demanded feature many users have been waiting for is now available on Test Pilot program for Mozilla Firefox, It’s Mozilla Firefox Side View which allows you to browse websites side by side.

• Back in January of 2014, I wrote a blog post called Hacking a Pellet Stove to Work with Nest. It was a narrative about trying to use the advanced features of the Nest learning thermostat to control a pellet stove in the volatile temperature environment of a yurt.

• [...]

• Once this software was complete and tested, I installed it on a dedicated Raspberry Pi, set the jumpers for controlling the relay board, wired the 24VAC thermostat relay and then wired the pellet stove components. It started working immediately. It doesn’t need the Things Gateway to run in its basic mode.

• My Things Gateway doesn’t run in the yurt, it lives in my office in the old original farm house. Fortunately, ten years ago, I trenched in gigabit Ethernet between all my buildings. So, while standing in the yurt, I opened the Things Gateway in Firefox running on my Android tablet. I added the Pellet Stove thing, and it all worked correctly.

• There appears to be a minor bug here. Only the “low_linger_minutes” and “medium_linger_minutes” are settable by the user. However, the Things Gateway is allowing all the other fields to be settable, too – even though setting them doesn’t actually do anything. I’ve not yet figured out if this is a bug in my code or in the Things-URL adapter.

• Next week, the team will be in San Francisco for an all-Mozilla company meeting.

• I did the work to built my own Firefox primarily to fix a couple of serious regressions that couldn’t be fixed any other way. I’ll start with the one that’s probably more common (at least, there are many people complaining about it in many different web forums): the fact that Firefox won’t play sound on Linux machines that don’t use PulseAudio.

• There’s a bug with a long discussion of the problem, Bug 1345661 – PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems; and the discussion in the bug links to another discussion of the Firefox/PulseAudio problem). Some comments in those discussions suggest that some near-future version of Firefox may restore ALSA sound for non-Pulse systems; but most of those comments are six months old, yet it’s still not fixed in the version Mozilla is distributing now.

• WebExtensions (there is no XUL) took over with a thud seven months ago, which was felt as a great disturbance in the Force by most of us who wrote Firefox add-ons that, you know, actually did stuff. Many promises were made for APIs to allow us to do the stuff we did before. Some of these promises were kept and these APIs have actually been implemented, and credit where credit is due. But there are many that have not (that metabug is not exhaustive). More to the point, there are many for which people have offered to write code and are motivated to write code, but we have no parameters for what would be acceptable, possibly because any spec would end up stuck in a “boil the ocean” problem, possibly because it’s low priority, or possibly because someone gave other someones the impression such an API would be acceptable and hasn’t actually told them it isn’t. The best way to get contribution is to allow people to scratch their own itches, but the urgency to overcome the (largely unintentional) institutional roadblocks has faded now that there is somewhat less outrage, and we are still left with a disordered collection of APIs that extends Firefox relatively little and a very slow road to do otherwise.

• Or perhaps we don’t have to actually rely on what’s in Firefox to scratch our itch, at least in many cases. In a potentially strategically unwise decision, WebExtensions allows native code execution in the form of “native messaging” — that is, you can write a native component, tell Firefox about it and who can talk to it, and then have that native component do what Firefox don’t. At that point, the problem then becomes more one of packaging. If the functionality you require isn’t primarily limited by the browser UI, then this might be a way around the La Brea triage tarpit.

• Content scripts ordinarily reload for each new page visited but, on GitHub, they don’t. This is because links on GitHub mutate the DOM and use the history.pushState API instead of loading pages the standard way, which would create an entirely new DOM per page.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• It’s too late for the upcoming LibreOffice 6.1, but LibreOffice 6.2 will feature PDF importing improvements.

• Ashod Nakashian of Collabora landed a number of PDF importing improvements this week into the open-source office suite. This includes support for importing PDF images, importing PDF text, and a wide variety of work related to that. Some of that heavy lifting with PDF is being done using PDFium, the library for PDF rendering that Google developed for Chrome, which has been bundled in LibreOffice since last year.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• Today I will write about silent fanless FreeBSD desktop or server computer … or NAS … or you name it, it can have multiple purposes. It also very low power solution, which also means that it will not overheat. Silent means no fans at all, even for the PSU. The format of the system should also be brought to minimum, so Mini-ITX seems best solution here.

• This guide will walk through the set up of an IKEv2 VPN using OpenIKED on OpenBSD. It will detail a “road warrior” configuration, and use a PSK (pre-shared-key) for authentication. I’m sure it can be easily adapted to work on any other platforms that OpenIKED is available on, but keep in mind my steps are specifically for OpenBSD.

• The second RC build of the 11.2-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

• The second release candidate of FreeBSD 11.2 is now available for testing.

• FreeBSD 11.2 has been baking Spectre and Meltdown protection, various kernel improvements, and a wide variety of minor driver updates over 2017′s FreeBSD 11.1 release. The bulk of the development work though has been heading into FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT for release next year or so.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Have you ever seen something and instantly knew it was something you wanted, even though you weren’t aware it existed a few seconds ago? That’s how we felt when we received a tip about Zynthian, a fully open source (hardware and software) synthesizer. You can buy the kit online directly from the developers, or build your own from scratch using their documentation and source code. With a multitude of filters, effects, engines, and essentially unlimited upgrade potential, they’re calling it a “Swiss Army Knife of Synthesis”. We’re inclined to agree.

Programming/Development

• There is a growing concern that Microsoft may seek to bloat the service with add-ons, feature creep, and integrations with their own services, like Azure and LinkedIn.

• Is that likely?

• Although GitHub is the most used platform for storing open source projects on the Internet but being acquired by Microsoft, the open source community may like to prefer the alternatives. So we have other very interesting options that we recommend to know in order to decide which one to publish and store your own creations and adaptations in the cloud.

• But, as someone who believes in the value of reinvention and innovation among the tech industry, it’s not necessarily great to see successful mid-tier companies just gobbled up by giants. It happens — and perhaps it clears the field for something fresh and new. Perhaps it even clears the field for that utopic git-driven world that Ford envisions. But, in the present-tense, it’s at least a bit deflating to think that a very different, and very powerful, approach to the way people collaborate and code… ends up in Microsoft’s universe.

• And, as a final note on these three pieces: this is why we should seek out and promote people who actually understand technology and business in understanding what is happening in the technology world. The Guardian piece is laughable, because it appears to be written by someone with such a surface-level understanding of open source of free software that it comes off as utter nonsense. But the pieces by Ford and Thompson actually help add to our understanding of the news, while providing insightful takes on it. The Guardian (and others) should learn from that.

• The alternative method is the developer mailing list. It arose in the late eighties to early nineties, and predates the popularity of the web browser. But far from being a mere historical curiosity, the discussion list is still the primary method of development in many important open source projects, from databases to operating systems to web browsers.

• In this article I’ll carefully compare the use of mailing lists with code collaboration web sites such as Github. I’ll do my best to present the pros and cons of each, so that projects assessing the two can make an informed decision.

• Eclipse Che 6.6 is here!

• Rust Qt Binding Generator (Logo by Alessandro Longo)

• Rust Qt Binding Generator lets you combine Rust code with a Qt1 graphical application. A previous blog shows how to make a simple clock. It’s a good idea to read that post before reading this more advanced post, because in this post we are getting serious.

• This blog post shows how to write a to-do application. The data model is a list of to-do items. The source code for this example is available in the folder examples/todos in the Rust Qt Binding Generator repository.

• Here is a screenshot of the finished application. The to-do application shows the steps to implement the to-do application. This application was the subject of a presentation on Rust Qt Binding Generator.

• Another maintenance release, now at version 0.1.6, of our RcppDE package is now on CRAN. It follows the most recent (unblogged, my bad) 0.1.5 release in January 2016 and the 0.1.4 release in September 2015.

• RcppDE is a “port” of DEoptim, a popular package for derivative-free optimisation using differential evolution optimization, to C++. By using RcppArmadillo, the code becomes a lot shorter and more legible. Our other main contribution is to leverage some of the excellence we get for free from using Rcpp, in particular the ability to optimise user-supplied compiled objective functions which can make things a lot faster than repeatedly evaluating interpreted objective functions as DEoptim (and, in fairness, just like most other optimisers) does.

• A maintenance release RcppClassic 0.9.9 is now at CRAN. This package provides a maintained version of the otherwise deprecated first Rcpp API; no new projects should use it.

Leftovers

• In 2018 I’ve faced some hard decisions in my personal life, where I have to make choices every week for how I’m going to live and what I’m going to do. These choices affect others around me as well.

• At some point I have to stop gathering data. I don’t have the resources to do the exhaustive research I daydream about for every decision. And even if I did, it’s pure fantasy to think I can avoid pain and suffering in this life.

• It’s been close to 2 years now that I’ve been working from home. Home-office is something that’s viewed differently in tech circles. Some people like it, some don’t.

• I for one, absolutely love it. Since starting home office, I’ve felt more productive at work, I’ve started a bunch of open source projects (which never in my entire life I thought I would have the time and energy for), and I’ve saved so much time not commuting, it sometimes feels like cheating. All in all, highly recommended.

• So now that we know that this post is absolutely not biased, here’s my take on home office.

Science

• Phase-change memory is based on materials that can form two different structures, or phases, depending on how quickly they cool from a liquid. As the conductance of these phases differ, it’s possible to use this to store bits. It’s also possible to control the temperature such that the bit enters a state with intermediate conductance. In addition to storing bits, this can be used to perform calculations, as a bunch of sub-threshold phase changes can gradually add up to a bit flip.

Hardware

• While there are the VIA/Centaur-based Zhaoxin desktop CPUs targeted for the Chinese market, it turns out there is another x86 Chinese CPU effort but this time is a collaboration with AMD.

• Chengdu Haiguang IC Design Co is a new x86 CPU vendor that is a joint venture between AMD and Haiguang Information Technology Co. This joint venture is aiming to make x86 CPUs for the Chinese server market. This deal was announced back in May and paid out $293 million to AMD for using their intellectual property.

• The first Hygon CPU offerings is the “Dhyana” family that is based upon AMD technology and is derived from the AMD Family 17h “Zen” micro-architecture.

Health/Nutrition

• The Department of Energy said it would seek new leadership for Los Alamos National Laboratory. But the University of California is still there, even after mismanagement caused it to lose its contract to run the lab — twice.

• CNN began with the slogan, articulated by its founder Ted Turner: “The news is the star.”

• That has long since ceased to be a reflection of what CNN does. Despite promoting itself with its dubious “facts first” slogan, the network endlessly touts its celebrity pundits and anchors: Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, Christiane Amanpour, Fareed Zakaria, et al. The view of the world that they depict is what the viewer needs to understand—not the world itself.

• Anthony Bourdain didn’t join CNN until 2013, didn’t do “news” per se, and his own personality was certainly a major part of his show, Parts Unknown, but the lens was largely on the places Bourdain went, whether Armenia or West Virginia, and the people he met there. This work was more mini-doc than anything else typically found on CNN.

• At his best, to Bourdain, the world was the star. The people, the cultures, the varied beliefs, the booze, the music, the rivers, the cities, the ethnic groups, what they share and their tensions. He’d often at least indicate class distinctions in his shows, at times gender dynamics as well. He spoke up in defense of the many immigrants in the restaurant industry, and was an ally of the #MeToo movement.

• [...]

• Bourdain’s death—and the improbability that CNN will again offer anything like it—should be a wake up call to a range of people, from documentary filmmakers to independent media outfits wanting to use the internet in creative ways: There’s a hunger among regular people in the US for the unvarnished realities of the rest of the world, and major media are serving up precious little to feed it.

Security

• Cyptojacking is the latest buzzword in the cybersecurity world. The notorious cybercriminals have taken the advantage of the growing cryptocurrency craze. Prior to that, ransomware like WannaCry didn’t leave any stone unturned in ruining the digital lives of many people.

• The ARM64 (64-bit ARM / AArch64) architecture updates have been submitted today for the Linux 4.18 kernel.

• Arguably the most notable addition for ARM64 in Linux 4.18 is now having Spectre Variant Four mitigation after the ARM patches had been floating around in recent weeks. The ARM64 mitigation follows the x86 approach in Speculative Store Bypass Disable (SSBD) for addressing this recent CPU vulnerability. The ARM64 SSBD support relies upon an SMC firmware call to set a hardware chicken bit.

• The ARM64 pull also includes ACPI Processor Properties Topology Table (PPTT) support, which exposes processor and cache topology as part of the ACPI 6.2 specification. The ACPI PPTT ARM64 patches have been floating around since last year while now are merged.

• Please pull the arm64 updates for 4.18 below. Apart from the core arm64 and perf changes, the Spectre v4 mitigation touches the arm KVM code and the ACPI PPTT support touches drivers/ (acpi and cacheinfo). I should have the maintainers’ acks in place.

• Citing 2 unnamed U.S. officials, Politico says White House officials have narrowed down the time and likely location of the hack [sic]: President Donald Trump’s Washington transition headquarters, in late 2016.

• “Spend months and $100k+ fighting this case, then they go and reset the clock by adding even more bullshit charges like ‘lying to the FBI,’” Hutchins wrote on his Twitter, calling for donations by adding a quote from Starcraft video game: “We require more minerals.”

• According to DHS and other US government documents obtained by Motherboard, the DHS is continuing to investigate how insecure commercial aircraft are to cyber attacks, with one research lab saying hacking a plane may lead to a “catastrophic disaster.”

• On Thursday, Adobe published a patch for the critical vulnerability, indexed as CVE-2018-5002. The stack-based buffer overflow was being triggered in an Office document that embedded a link to a Flash file stored on people.dohabayt.com. Once executed, the malicious file then downloaded a malicious payload from the same domain. That’s according to researchers from security firms Icebrg and Qihoo 360, which independently discovered the attacks and privately reported them to Adobe and wrote about it here and here.

• In an 8-2 majority, justices on Wednesday sided with government arguments that the paper trails posed a risk to ballot secrecy, Brazil’s Folha De S.Paulo newspaper reported on Thursday. In so doing, the justices suspended a requirement that 5 percent of Brazil’s ballot boxes this year use paper. That requirement, by Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court, already represented a major weakening of an election reform bill passed in 2015.

• The open-source Snort intrusion detection and prevention system (IPS/IDS) is gearing up for a major update that will influence the future of Cisco’s next generation security appliances.

• In a video interview with eWEEK, Marty Roesch vice-president and Chief Architect of Cisco’s Security Business Group discusses the current state of the Snort 3.0 project. Roesch is the original author of Snort, which became the foundation of his company Sourcefire, that Cisco acquired for $2.7 billion in October 2013. Work on Snort 3 has been ongoing since at least December 2014, and since the effort got underway has been viewed as a re-thinking of how IPS/IDS works. Roesch said that Snort 3 is largely feature complete at this point and is now going though its beta development cycle.

• The company later found that the data of over 150,000 customers had been breached, with 15,656 bank account numbers and sort codes stolen.

Defence/Aggression

• Remarkably, these photos were only declassified in 2013, just a year shy of the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings. If the CIA had its way, they would have remained buried in a computer kiosk in suburban Maryland.

• In October 2017, four American commandos were killed in a ferocious battle in a country with which the US was not at war, thousands of miles away from the Middle East and South Asian bases of the terrorist organisations America had spent the previous 16 years fighting. The Niger incident was a particularly dramatic example of a trend which is starting to cause concern among US policymakers: the military engagements unleashed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks have become ever deeper, more geographically dispersed and murkier.

• The global war on terror has been through different iterations since President George W. Bush ordered the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. As US troops became bogged down in messy insurgencies in those countries, Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama, sought to pursue what was presented as a more precise way of targeting enemies, whilst simultaneously seeking to withdraw ground troops. Commandos hunted insurgent leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan, while secret CIA drones unleashed missiles on the latter’s allies across the border in Pakistan. Drone strikes also crept up in Yemen and Somalia and the Bureau produced an award-winning body of work documenting this covert war’s unacknowledged human cost.

• Earlier this week, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on the Preventing Emerging Threats Act of 2018 (S. 2836), which would give the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security sweeping new authority to counter malicious drones. Officials from both those agencies as well as the Federal Aviation Administration were present to discuss the government’s current response to drones, and how it would like to be able to respond. Interestingly, both the Senators and the witnesses seem to agree that there are some large, unresolved constitutional questions in this bill. In light of those questions, EFF strongly opposes this bill.

• Among other things, the bill would authorize DOJ and DHS to “track,” “disrupt,” “control,” “seize or otherwise confiscate,” or even “destroy” unmanned aircraft that pose a “threat” to certain facilities or areas in the U.S. The bill also authorizes the government to “intercept” or acquire communications around the drone for these purposes, which could be read to include capturing video footage sent from the drone. Most concerning, many of the bill’s key terms are undefined, but it is clear that it provides extremely broad authority, exempting officials from following procedures that ordinarily govern electronic surveillance and hacking, such as the Wiretap Act, Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

• Given the breadth of these proposed new powers, you would expect officials to have a strong case for passing the bill. But even after the hearing, it’s not clear why DHS and DOJ need any expanded authority to go after “malicious” drones. For example, the FAA already has the ability to impose public flight restrictions for non-military aircraft, including drones. S. 2836 would expand those restrictions to any “covered facility or asset,” but does not narrowly define what is covered. Instead, the Secretary of Homeland Security or the Attorney General can make that determination, on their own, without public input and without public notice. While Committeeairman Ron Johnson claimed that the new authority would not give DHS the authority to “knock down drones flying around your backyard,” that’s not exactly true.

• This week, researchers at the M.I.T. Media Lab, who’ve used artificial intelligence to do things like write horror stories and induce empathy, unveiled a new, skin-crawling exploration into the unsettling possibilities of A.I. Norman, a “psychopath A.I.,” is a “case study on the dangers of artificial intelligence gone wrong when biased data is used in machine-learning algorithms.” The M.I.T. team fed Norman data from a subreddit known for its graphic imagery of death, and then asked him to interpret Rorschach inkblots. The results were alarming: Where a standard A.I. saw a “close-up of a wedding cake on a table,” Norman saw a “man killed by speeding driver.” Where a standard A.I. saw “a group of birds sitting on top of a tree branch,” Norman saw “a man [that] is electrocuted and catches to death.”

• Earlier this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai described artificial intelligence as more profound to humanity than fire. Thursday, after protests from thousands of Google employees over a Pentagon project, Pichai offered guidelines for how Google will—and won’t—use the technology. One thing Pichai says Google won’t do: work on AI for weapons. But the guidelines leave much to the discretion of company executives and allow Google to continue to work for the military.

• The ground rules are a response to more than 4,500 Googlers signing a letter protesting the company’s involvement in a Pentagon project called Maven that uses machine learning to interpret drone surveillance video.

• America’s use of armed drones is increasing under President Donald Trump, according to a study released Thursday.

• The report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center think tank looks back at Trump’s drone actions during his first year in office, when he moved quickly to loosen some of the constraints put in place by his predecessor Barack Obama, AFP reported.

• Eyewitnesses said Israeli soldiers fired tear gas at journalists and TV crew in eastern Gaza. Palestinian demonstrators brought down an Israeli drone carrying a camera used to film demonstrators in eastern Gaza City.

• Five journalists were injured, including AFP photographer Mohamed al-Baba, who was shot in his right foot, and a cameraman working for the al-Aqsa Radio of Hamas, who was hit with a tear gas canister in his back, the Health Ministry in Gaza said.

• The ministry also accused Israeli soldiers of firing tear gas at the medical workers who were treating the injured protesters.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Julian Assange through his work as editor of WikiLeaks has made major strides toward democratizing the media by creating a vehicle for whistleblowers to share the truth and correct the misinformation of the mass corporate media. Assange and WikiLeaks have given people a precious tool—access to the undeniable truth about what governments and big business are doing. This is a tool we can all use to educate each other about what is really going on around us.

• Assange is being persecuted because a democratized media threatens the monopoly over media control of the elites. A democratized media makes it more difficult for them to misinform, mislead and propagandize.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been visited by officials from the Australian High Commission.

• Two officials went to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where Mr Assange has been living for almost six years.

• His internet and phone connections were cut off by the Ecuadorian government six weeks ago and he was denied visitors.

• Pam says it would be “the smartest move” — not sure if she meant her visiting Trump, or Trump pardoning Assange.

• In addition, according to the report, Lamo was found with “multiple drugs” in his system, including “esoteric drugs such as flubromazepam… It should also be noted that the esoteric nature of some of these drugs suggests the possibility that other rare drugs not tested for may have been used/abused.”

• Although the phrase Zeitgeist refers to the spirit of an age, it seems appropriate to use it to describe the shift in consciousness that can take place in a moment.

• As the sixth anniversary of Julian Assange’s asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy approaches, public awareness is rapidly shifting in Assange’s favor. The ongoing isolation of Julian Assange by the Ecuadorian government appears to have bolstered sympathy for the Wikileaks Editor-In-Chief worldwide, instead of relegating him to the detritus of a fast-moving news cycle.

• Disobedient Media recently reported on last week’s Unity4J online vigil, which ran over 24 hours in an effort to raise awareness and to bring an end to Julian Assange’s isolation. As this writer noted during the vigil itself, attending and viewing such events are far from the only way to make a tangible difference in support of Assange.

• Readers and viewers must understand that efforts to help do not end at the period finishing the last sentence of this article, or the last guest at a vigil. Rather, readers and viewers must take up their own actions, because it is truly up to the public to fight for Assange, when a unified but unelected power structure is set on destroying him and the work of the organization he leads.

• As Ciaron O’Reilly puts it: “He is fighting for us in there, so we have to fight for him out here.” And that fight does not necessarily have to take the form of physical or online vigils, writing, or speaking. There are a multitude of equally powerful actions that supporters can take to act for Julian Assange’s very real benefit.

• Despite recent escalations in public demonstrations of support for Julian Assange and the revelation that many of WikiLeaks’ Twitter detractors may largely come from Twitter botnets, the question for some remains: “How can I help Julian Assange and Wikileaks at this critical time?”

• In a recent communication between Randy Credico, an Assange supporter, comic and radio producer, and Adam Schiff, the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, Assange’s fear of arrest and extradition to the US was confirmed by the leader of the Russia-gate frenzy.

• Credico received the following response from Schiff after meeting the the Congressman’s staff, in which Credico was trying to connect Assange with Schiff: “Our committee would be willing to interview Assange when he is in U.S. Custody and not before.”

• Dennis Bernstein spoke with John Pilger, a close friend and supporter of Assange on May 29. The interview began with the statement Bernstein delivered for Pilger at the Left Forum last weekend in New York on a panel devoted to Assange entitled, “Russia-gate and WikiLeaks”.

• Access to internet, which was his only connection to the outside world amid what is almost solitary confinement, was suspended by the Ecuadorian government on March 28, ostensibly because Assange criticized the arrest of a Catalan separatist politician. This, according to the government, violated the agreement he had with it of not “intervening in internal politics of third-party countries”.

• Contesting the legality of this action, International Human Rights lawyer and a member Assange’s legal team, Renata Avila, told Newsclick, “Assange is now an Ecuadorian citizen. Ecuador has the duty to protect him and to apply the Ecuadorian constitution to him. That is the current status. Only a judicial order from Ecuador could legally limit his speech, not a Presidential order or a Ministerial order.”

• Western countries speak of the need for democracy and free speech around the world while restricting citizens’ access to information and silencing the messengers.

• Nowadays the media is a form of education for many, especially when it comes to understanding politics. Therefore, people believe what they see and hear even if it’s only half the truth. I have always stated that the media is the fourth branch of government because it moves public opinion and every day we see more proof of that. US society, as well as British society, has made choices about which kinds of speech to permit and which to forbid in an attempt to silence discussion on specific topics.

• In 2010 Hillary Clinton cited President Obama during her speech stating that “the more freely information flows, the stronger societies become”. She then went on to say that “information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”

• Julian Assange met with diplomats from his native Australia on Thursday as the WikiLeaks publisher approaches his sixth year in self-exile at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

• Mr. Assange was visited at the embassy by two officials from Australia’s High Commission, the nation’s diplomatic mission in the U.K., marking what is believed to be the first time Australian officials have met with the WikiLeaks chief since he sought asylum there in June 2012, the U.K.’s Press Association first reported Thursday.

• Jennifer Robinson, a member of Mr. Assange’s legal team, confirmed the meeting to The Washington Times.

• “Julian Assange is in a very serious situation,” Ms. Robinson said in a statement. “He remains in the embassy because of the risk of extradition to the U.S. That risk is undeniable after numerous statements by Trump administration officials including the director of the CIA and the U.S. attorney-general.”

• Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been paid a mysterious visit by officials from the Australian government in a sign that the six year stalemate may come to an end.

• Two officials from Australia’s High Commission went to the Ecuadorian embassy where Mr Assange is living.

• It is the first time Australian consular officials have visited Assange at the embassy.

• On Thursday, two Australian consular officials met with WikiLeaks’ editor and Australian citizen Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he sought political asylum on June 19, 2012. The officials were accompanied by Assange’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson.

• The visit is the first made by Australian government representatives to the courageous journalist in the six years since he was effectively imprisoned inside the embassy, faced with the threat of extradition to the United States to face trial on espionage and other charges.

• Assange’s health has seriously deteriorated over the past six years. Throughout this time, he has been living in conditions that a United Nations working group condemned in December 2015 as “arbitrary detention,” a “deprivation of liberty” and a violation of his human rights.

• In a radio interview yesterday, Andrew Hastie, who chairs the Australian Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, pointed to the real driving forces behind a new bipartisan push for the rapid passage of proposed “foreign interference” laws.

• Hastie, a member of the Liberal-National Coalition government and former SAS officer, said Australia’s role in the US-led Five Eyes intelligence alliance made the country a “soft underbelly” for authoritarian regimes “seeking to get secrets from the United States.”

• The Five Eyes network links Australia’s spy and electronic surveillance agencies to the US National Security Agency and its counterparts in Britain, Canada and New Zealand.

• WikiLeaks, an organization that first gained attention for publishing leaked classified information, just sniped at a reporter who is now at the center of a federal investigation into leaks of classified information.

• The New York Times reported late Thursday that prosecutors had obtained years worth of email and phone data belonging to the reporter, Ali Watkins, as part of the Justice Department inquiry. Watkins works for The Times. She was also previously in a three-year romantic relationship with James Wolfe, the former security director of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Wolfe, who worked as the panel’s security director for three decades, was arrested Thursday night on charges of lying to the FBI as part of the leak investigation.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• For much of this decade, organizations seeking to protect wildlife have attempted to use emerging technology as a conservation tool, allowing small numbers of people to monitor and manage data from animals over a wide area. Nowhere is that effort more focused—and more desperate—than in the regions of Africa where illegal animal trade is threatening to wipe out endangered animals such as rhinos, elephants, pangolins, and lions. Here, several organizations are applying Internet of Things (IoT) technology to protect animals, providing rangers with data that helps them intercept poachers before they can get to their quarry.

• Many conservation efforts elsewhere use IoT to try to track the location of animals, such as Vodafone’s IoT tagging of Scottish harbor seals and tracking of endangered dugongs in Philippines. But in Africa, the task of protecting rhinos is slightly different—it’s about tracking people, specifically the poachers who hunt down the rhinos for their tusks.

• Rhinos, of course, aren’t unique in needing such intervention. Based on data from the Great Elephant Census (GEC), a continent-wide survey conducted by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc., Africa’s savanna elephant population declined by 30 percent between 2007 and 2014 for instance. That’s a loss of 144,000 elephants. Current data shows the rate of decline of the elephant population is now eight percent per year, and ivory poachers are the main reason for that decline.

• It’s World Oceans Day, and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – one of the world’s seven natural wonders – is dying fast.

• Catastrophic mass bleaching caused by climate change in the past few years has decimated the coral. Now scientists are looking for ways to save what’s left of the reef.

• But after all the damage, can it be saved?

• “This is the beginning of a planetary catastrophe,” said Charlie Veron, a marine biologist.

• Vernon is the world’s leading authority on the Great Barrier Reef, where living coral – some of it centuries old – provides shelter and food for countless species of marine life.

• The Environmental Protection Agency made news recently for excluding reporters from a “summit” meeting on chemical contamination in drinking water. Episodes like this are symptoms of a larger problem: an ongoing, broad-scale takeover of the agency by industries it regulates.

• We are social scientists with interests in environmental health, environmental justice and inequality and democracy. We recently published a study, conducted under the auspices of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative and based on interviews with 45 current and retired EPA employees, which concludes that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and the Trump administration have steered the agency to the verge of what scholars call “regulatory capture.”

• By this we mean that they are aggressively reorganizing the EPA to promote interests of regulated industries, at the expense of its official mission to “protect human health and the environment.”

• For the last several years, CleanTechnica has covered renewable energy development in India quite closely. Several years ago, India set what seemed like a lofty target of 175 gigawatts of wind and solar energy by March 2022. Few believed that was a practical target, but then India plowed forward and happily impressed the world. This week that goal was increased to 227 gigawatts!

• Currently, India has added a little more than 70 gigawatts of that goal. Assessing the progress to date on a linear scale, the trend would seem to indicate the country is behind. However, renewable energy growth is not linear.

Finance

• The funding makes Ant the world’s largest fintech firm and equips it with enormous resources for expansion. The affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is already China’s biggest online payments service and controls the world’s largest money market fund as it moves deeper into areas from consumer lending to credit scoring. Ant Financial posted a 65 percent jump in pretax profit, rising to 9.18 billion yuan in fiscal 2018 ended in March.

• Both companies design custom chips known as application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs. These are particularly good for the brute-force number crunching required by cryptocurrency miners, who verify virtual currency transactions and earn crypto-denominated rewards by solving complex math problems. ASICs are also useful for the heavy workloads associated with some forms of AI, such as machine learning.

• The email and other documents were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by American Oversight, a nonprofit set up to investigate the Trump administration. The documents, which include emails to the United States trade representative, cover the period from February 2017, when many of the agency’s top staff members had yet to be appointed, through November, when the United States had shared its primary negotiating goals for Nafta with Canada and Mexico.

• Earlier this year, President Donald Trump seethed on Twitter that the United States Postal Service had become Amazon’s “Delivery Boy.” “P.O. leaders don’t have a clue (or do they?)!” he fumed, vowing that “THEY LOSE A FORTUNE, and this will be changed.”

• After reportedly dwelling on the issue for weeks, Trump ordered the creation of a task force to review the agency’s finances, declaring that “the USPS is on an unsustainable financial path and must be restructured.” The task force will be led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, two of the Trump administration’s biggest proponents of private industry.

• It is recognized that these data are historical rather than current, for a number of reasons connected with the research requirements of the study. Still, keep in mind that convict labor continues to be a wide-spread phenomenon, with data for 2006 showing that the prisoner labor system in the United States employed nearly 4.4 million convicts, 0.6 million of whom worked in the manufacturing sector, constituting 4.2% of total manufacturing employment in the U.S. Who were the beneficiaries of such employment? Poyker mentions Wal-Mart, AT&T, Victoria’s Secret and Whole Foods Market (now part of Amazon) as companies employing convict labor, paying typically at between $0 to $4.90 per hour to the prisoners in state prisons.

• Given the lower rates of compensation paid to the prisoners, it is readily seen that such prison labor can undercut the labor costs for similarly placed companies not making use of such labor. Accordingly, findings related to the depressive effect that prison labor can have on (especially local) employment patterns is hardly surprising. One can roughly view it as a labor shock, in the same way that the “China price”, i.e., the cost of manufacturing in China, constituted a labor shock for various U.S. industries over the past two decades. But what does this have to do with rates of patenting and an increase in innovation activities?

• Poyker explains as follows. First, a distinction is made between lower-end and higher-end products. The labor shock from prisoner labor was more felt in lower-end, as opposed to higher products, given the nature of the work being performed by the prisoners. Regarding such lower-end industries, while some companies moved to higher-end products, others remained with the lower-end products, but at the same time they sought to invest in machinery that would make them less labor-intensive, thereby enabling them to better complete on the basis of price and perhaps also on quality. As summarized by Poyker, “convict labor boosted technology adoption by forcing firms to invent or adopt new technologies that could make them more competitive”

• It’s not yet clear how mega the EC’s fine will be, but the FT notes that the watchdog can impose a penalty of up to $11bn (around £8.2bn), which is 10 per cent of Alphabet’s global turnover.

• The EU has also floated the idea of breaking up Google into a number of smaller units, with the EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager saying the political bloc harbours “grave suspicions” about the firm’s dominance of the search market.

• The EU competition enforcer will also tell Google to stop its anti-competitive practices such as licensing deals which prevent smartphone makers from promoting alternatives to apps such as Google Search and Maps.

• Controversial think tank influential amongst pro-Brexit ministers did not provide “balanced, neutral evidence and analysis” and was “not consistent” with the charity’s objectives.

• Brexit is a glorious example of the folly of fantasy. It was entirely conducted along the lines of a fantasy Britain. A fantasy Britain that never existed. I don’t know when this honeymoon period people talk about in Britain that we’re trying to get back to was; there’s certainly a degree of fantasy on the side of the Brexiters. Where disappointment comes in is that if we don’t talk about our fantasies and try to uncover what they are…they’re a cover story for something. Fantasy is a cover story. If we simply try and fulfil our fantasies we will always be disappointed. We simply will.

• It’s not possible to deliver the Brexit dream—because it is a fantasy. It was set up for disappointment as soon as it was articulated. And you know, the conversation that I believe should have happened is: What is this fantasy of a ‘white Britain’ or an ‘everybody-at-work Britain’ telling us about how Britain is constructed today? Do we actually have to have a conversation about immigration? Do we have to realise that there are swathes of people who are living in poverty and don’t have jobs? They are the conversations that drove the fantasy and yet it’s rare you see them being taken out and really articulated in a way that’s meaningful for people.

• The other thing about politics and disappointment is that we’re always going to be perpetually disappointed in politicians as we hold them to a higher standard. I think this is the joy of Donald Trump, who is doing exactly what he said he would do, which most politicians don’t when they get elected. We have this fantasy idea of how politicians should behave, unlike how normal human beings behave. The real work goes on behind the scenes and we don’t see it. If politicians were to be honest about the work, they might not get re-elected. We want the fantasy of the ideal leader, the ideal politician.

• The first clause of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty states:

• “Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.”

• But as has become apparent, in the case of the UK, nobody really knows what those requirements actually are and a significant amount of energy has been consumed over the last two years in disputes over what the respective roles, responsibilities and powers of Parliament and the executive are, what the precise status of the referendum is and who, if anyone, is responsible for interpreting it. The Miller case exposed confusion and uncertainty even over who had the power to begin the process. There is no clear constitutional guidance, either, on how or by whom it should be executed, scrutinised or concluded and, crucially, how and by whom the outcomes should be approved or legitimised.

• This messiness reflects the UK’s famously uncodified constitution, which means its basic rules are not systematically laid out in a single, document which governs the relationships of key elements of the political system. This means that the UK constitution is very flexible which has served it well in some respects, not least in adapting to European Union membership. But it means, above all, that the constitution is political. Above all, sovereignty and power in the British constitution has not been a matter for the courts, as in many codified systems, but has rather been established and maintained by political struggle, which is why the resolution of the question of who should trigger Article 50 by the courts is somewhat problematic in the UK context.

• A key principle of the British constitution is the notion of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ – that Parliament has the sole right to make or unmake law in its territory. For many Eurosceptics, it is this that made the British system incompatible with EU membership, which (as confirmed by the Factortame Case in 1991) instituted a higher body of law over that of statute. But this was merely a qualification of Parliamentary sovereignty, and one which Parliament imposed upon itself and (as Brexit perhaps proves) can also remove.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A group of protesters found out where DeVos would be and waited for her to exit the building. But as time went on, and there was no sign of DeVos, they started heading home. Not long after that, four large black vehicles drove up to the back of the building; Page said it seemed like the cars were trying to get as close to the exit as possible, foiling the proteseors’ attempt to get a clear photo of DeVos with the signs in the shot.

• What a nauseating spectacle — the language police at CNN and MSNBC castigating Samantha Bee for calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt!”

• Their producers should have told them that if truth isn’t a defense, it ought to be, and that prissiness über alles is for self-righteous prigs.

• She said “feckless,” not, as was sometimes reported, “fucking.” Part of the confusion may be that on those liberal (actually centrist) networks, “the f-word,” like “the c-word,” is routinely spelled out when mentioned at all.

• I wonder whether this is because the network bosses are worried that c-h-i-l-d-r-e-n might be watching.

• Yes, He’s Awful

• Much of what liberals say about Donald Trump and the chilling political moment the Trump presidency represents is true enough.

• Trump really is the arch-authoritarian malignant narcissist that liberals say he is. Trump thinks he deserves to rule the nation like an absolute monarch or some ridiculous Banana Republic dictator. He believes he’s above all the law, consistent with Louis XIV’s dictum L’etat, C’est Moi (“the state is me”). The notion that Trump can pardon himself from any crime really is the height of imperial arrogance.

• Trump really does value nothing but the advancement of his own wealth and image. There is no person, no principle, no higher loyalty he is not willing to sacrifice on the altar of self.

• Trump really is the almost perfect embodiment of venal malevolence that liberals say he is. The idiotic military parade Trump has scheduled for the next Veterans Day is an exercise in proto-fascistic, Mussolini-like imperial-presidential self-adulation.

• This racist and sexist beast befouls the nation and world with his ghastly, eco-cidal presence. The sooner he draws his last undeserved breath, the better for all living things (or maybe not: Mike Pence could be worse).

• But voters might face several hurdles when they go to register or cast a ballot. The past decade has seen a number of laws that restrict the right to vote.

Censorship/Free Speech

• In the 1950s, the United States freaked out big time over comics books. There were Senate hearings and comic book burnings. In the end, careers were ruined, companies went out of business, and comics fell under a strict censorship regime for decades.

• China isn’t limited to just censoring content-generating platforms within the country. Pinduoduo, the social e-commerce upstart, launched a cleanup campaign to remove all the products that are related to violence or pornography, local media is reporting.

• The purge follows an investigation published by state-backed legal media, which reveals that lots of violent and pornographic products are on sale on the platform, such as lethal knives, pseudo base stations, erotic games, and sex dolls.

• Russia’s State Duma has adopted a bill that will see search engines fined for offering links to VPNs and other anonymizers that have been banned in the country. Fines will also be handed out to search engines that fail to connect to a resource offering up-to-date information on what domains should be rendered inaccessible.

• Sadly, it seems many of today’s students no longer consider adulthood and autonomy to be worth striving for, and instead want universities to focus on better caring for them. In 2015, students from Goldsmiths University occupied Deptford Town Hall in south-east London. First on their list of demands was for the university to ‘recruit more counsellors’. They wanted the ‘standard six-session cap’ on counselling sessions to be removed and ‘a permanent additional CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy] therapist’. It is hardly surprising that students make such demands: the perception of 18- to 25-year-olds as vulnerable not-quite-adults, in need of colouring books to cope with exams and discount fares to cope with the cost of commuting, is promoted by schoolteachers, academics and politicians – it has come to be seen as common sense.

• Years ago, in the case of West Virginia v. Barnette, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public schoolchildren cannot be legally compelled to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance. As Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.”

• Recently, the National Football League instituted a policy requiring players to either stand during the singing of the national anthem or remain in the locker room. The NFL’s authority to create this policy is based largely on the fact that, as a private entity, it is not subject to the Barnette precedent.

• This was remarkable on several levels. Facebook has been almost continuously inaccessible in China since 2009, as some of Zuckerberg’s followers were quick to point out — practically speaking, how did he post that update? Others remarked on the conspicuous cloud of smog hanging in the background.

• But several netizens seized on the particulars of this seemingly harmless act of jogging through Beijing. Tiananmen Square, they noted, is no ordinary public plaza. In the comment field beside the post, an argument broke out between users — much of it written in Chinese — about exactly what happened 29 years ago in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

• One user wrote that on that date, 29 years ago this week, 6,400 peacefully demonstrating students were shot and killed by police. Another retorted that only students who attacked police were shot at. Users offered vastly different estimates of how many students died that day.

• Whether or not the Mong Kok pedestrian precinct should be closed has recently provoked heated discussion online, especially after the Yau Tsim Mong district council voted to open Sai Yeung Choi Street South up to traffic again (“Mong Kok street performers get the chop”, May 24).

• Amid the controversy, some believe that the Hong Kong government should regulate street performers by issuing licenses. Similar measures are taken by the Australian government. Local governments in Australia issue licenses to buskers and street performers. The permit of those street performers who receive noise complaints are liable to be revoked.

• In Brisbane, such licenses remain in effect for a period of three months. Auditions are held to ensure the quality of the performances. Hong Kong, however, has yet to decide on an official mechanism to manage street performers.

• French MPs debated the government’s plan to fight fake news into the early hours of Friday morning as opposition MPs expressed fears that the measure could lead to online censorship.

• As the European Union works on a code of practice for social media companies, the French government has joined Britain and Italy in trying to limit the spread of fake news.

• France, like the US, has seen accusations of Russian meddling in its presidential election campaign last year.

• On Thursday, the National Assembly began debating French President Emmanuel Macron’s draconian bill empowering the state to censor the Internet during the three months prior to any national election. The bill marks a vast new attack on freedom of speech, amid a wave of threats to Internet freedom worldwide based on the pretext of fighting “fake news.”

• The bill would allow candidates and political parties to take articles and Internet statements to court, where judges could force Internet service providers to censor material by declaring that they believed it to be “fake news.” Due to the French president’s broad powers to name and control the promotion of top magistrates, the French judiciary is widely acknowledged to be dependent on the executive. The bill thus places enormous power over the Internet in the hands of the president.

• The bill defines “fake news” not as information that is false, but as “any allegation or implying of a fact without providing verifiable information that makes it plausible.”

• French lawmakers have accused the government of attempting to legalise censorship during a stormy debate over a bill designed to fight so-called fake news during election campaigns.

• President Emmanuel Macron launched a crusade against misinformation after being targeted during his 2017 campaign by online rumours that he was gay and had a secret bank account in the Bahamas.

• Opposition and critics have lambasted President Macron’s anti-fake news draft law for violating free speech and targeting alternative media. France’s lower house of parliament began discussing the controversial legislation.

• The draft was proposed by Emmanuel Macron himself after he claimed he was the victim of a barrage of fake news stories during the 2017 presidential election, including allegations that he had a gay affair. Presented as a law aimed to battle “manipulation of information,” the draft is being debated in the National Assembly, the lower house of the French Parliament, on June 7-8.

• If passed, the bill would allow French judges to block the publication of any information deemed to be false ahead of elections. The legislation says that it mainly targets “those media controlled by foreign states,” as well as “digital platforms.”

• “This law is intended … to protect fundamental freedoms (freedom of expression, protection of the sources of journalists),” the statement reads. But critics fear it is a possible means to restrict free speech.

• The French government was accused by right and leftwing opponents of trying to create a form of “thought police” and institute censorship, as parliament began debating Emmanuel Macron’s proposed law to ban fake news on the internet during election campaigns.

• The draft law — designed to stop what the government calls “manipulation of information” in the runup to elections — would allow political parties to complain about widely spread assertions deemed to be false or “implausible” and a French judge could immediately move to stop their publication.

• The centrist President Macron, who beat the far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, in 2017, has personally backed the reform after he complained his presidential campaign was targeted by online fake news rumours, including that he was gay and that he had a secret bank account in the Bahamas. He has said a law was needed against the spread of fake news “in order to protect democracy”.

• Renowned Australian playwright David Williamson said Tuesday that he is disappointed Chinese censors have canceled a production of his play “The Removalists” for the official reason that it contains bad language and violence.

• The 76-year-old said some involved in the production suspect the true reason the classic Australian play was banned was its depiction of police abusing their authority — a sensitive issue in China.

• The play was axed during a period of intense diplomatic tensions between China and Australia over Australian policies including a proposed ban on foreign interference in domestic politics.

• Australian beef and wine producers complain that their exports have fallen victim to China’s approach of punishing businesses and individuals to send a message to a country’s government.

• The St. Petersburg City High Court reversed the decision of the district court to block crypto Website Bitcoininfo.ru in what hopes to be the beginning of positive steps towards crypto acceptance and adaptation.

• In the late morning of Monday earlier this week, The Supreme Court of St. Petersburg ordered the district court to reverse its decision to censor bitconinfo.ru 1 of upwards of 100 crypto media sites in Russia that have been censored without appeal since 2016. The reason…the court claimed “that cryptocurrencies do not have certain consumer protections or lend themselves to state control but instead promote the growth of the shadow economy.” Fortunately, the Supreme Court has ordered the lower court to reconsider its position, which is a massive step forward in helping remove the FUD surrounding cryptocurrencies.

• Early one morning in February 2014, Malaysiakini journalists arrived at the Kuala Lumpur headquarters of the independent news site to find walls splashed with red paint and a suspicious box.

• Delivered anonymously in the dead of night, the box contained the photo of an opposition politician recently charged with sedition over a satirical video clip posted online; a bag of rice and needles; plus a live duck in a shocked condition.

• The ruling Chinese Communist Party has expelled its party secretary at the Qinghai Daily News newspaper in the northwestern province of Qinghai for “disciplinary violations,” the party’s disciplinary arm announced on Wednesday.

• Zhang Wei, the former party secretary at the newspaper, was found after a recent internal investigation to have “violated political discipline” and lied to the provincial party committee, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) said in a statement.

• “He opposed censorship and illegally kept secret party work documents in his possession,” the CCDI said. “He also violated discipline in his personal life, carrying on a long-term, inappropriate relationship with another person while he was still married.”

• Zhang’s case has now been transferred to police for criminal investigation, after party investigators found evidence of “large-scale bribe-taking,” the statement said.

• A world-renowned photographer has accused Woolworths of censorship after they banned him from staging a mass nude photo shoot at its Prahran car park.

• Internet censors have a new strategy in their bid to block applications and websites: pressuring the large cloud providers that host them. These providers have concerns that are much broader than the targets of censorship efforts, so they have the choice of either standing up to the censors or capitulating in order to maximize their business. Today’s internet largely reflects the dominance of a handful of companies behind the cloud services, search engines and mobile platforms that underpin the technology landscape. This new centralization radically tips the balance between those who want to censor parts of the internet and those trying to evade censorship. When the profitable answer is for a software giant to acquiesce to censors’ demands, how long can internet freedom last?

• The recent battle between the Russian government and the Telegram messaging app illustrates one way this might play out. Russia has been trying to block Telegram since April, when a Moscow court banned it after the company refused to give Russian authorities access to user messages. Telegram, which is widely used in Russia, works on both iPhone and Android, and there are Windows and Mac desktop versions available. The app offers optional end-to-end encryption, meaning that all messages are encrypted on the sender’s phone and decrypted on the receiver’s phone; no part of the network can eavesdrop on the messages.

• Censorship by the government with their corporate partners isn’t the only problem the past several years. People don’t trust the media and for a good reason. The trust in media dropped below 20% years ago, and I expect it only to get worse as will our confidence in government – local, state and federal.

• Both our political system and media/entertainment complex are coopted and ran behind the curtains and doors by the American Aristocracy. Call it an oligarchy or plutocracy, but don’t call it a democracy or representative republic because that should insult everyone’s intelligence.

• [...]

• In Bloomberg, you get a chart showing near full employment with title lines reading, “The Economy is Booming.”

• [...]

• The distortion creates the disconnect created by the purveyors of propaganda…they tell us our country is doing fantastic and we’re an economic powerhouse so keep buying, buying, buying. However, the once thriving working-class don’t have those choices to make. It’s more like, “Which utility bill can we skip this month?”

• The Censorship office is on a nationwide drive to instill a positive mindset into students on the use of internet and social media.

• A team is now in Kimbe conducting their awareness in primary and secondary schools based on the theme censorship starts at home.

• Acting manager for awareness and publicity and team leader Delly Moropa said the Censorship office is advocating for a positive mindset in how the young people use all medium of communication including the main stream media and internet and the social media.

• Ms Moropa said the internet and social media is here to stay because we are living in a changing society and Censorship is advocating for their positive use.

• She said they are targeting students so as they grow up they train themselves to have a positive mindset.

• In a time when free speech advocates are sounding the alarm that a growing movement to silence opinions and speakers on colleges and universities is hindering First Amendment rights, one state recently took action to stop that trend.

• Louisiana lawmakers passed SB364, a bill which protects freedom of speech on public college campuses, and Gov. John Bel Edwards signed it into law earlier this month.

• Congressman Marsha Blackburn visited the Natchez Trace Parkway on Saturday in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the National Trails Act of 1968, which paved the way for national trails all over the country. Greeting hikers and children at the national park, Blackburn also answered some questions pertaining to the issue of political censorship on social media.

• Representing Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District on the House of Representatives, Blackburn announced her intentions to run for the Senate last year, following Republican Senator Bob Corker’s announcement that he would not seek re-election.

• It was the moment Lulabel Seitz spent four years working to achieve. The Petaluma High School senior became the first in her family to graduate Saturday, and as valedictorian she used her commencement speech as a platform to underscore the value of perseverance to fellow seniors — that is, until her mic was disconnected.

• The microphone cut off four minutes into her speech after she deviated from the script she previously submitted.

• Clad in a white graduation gown with a colorful lei draped around her neck, she stepped around the podium to finish her speech as some students cheered and chanted “let her speak.”

• When a person in South Korea tries to visit a porn site, they discover the government’s National Police Agency Cyber Bureau has blocked it.

• In this Asian Boss video of street interviews, people explain how they route around this censorship, using P2P networks, social media, and redirecting IP addresses. As one woman says, “according to our male friends, they search for porn using some code. They all have their ways of downloading it.”

• China is clamping down on the portrayal of all kinds of “obscene” behaviors online, according to a report from The Globe and Mail.

• A number of sources told The Globe and Mail that a directive, titled “Management requirements for live service information and content,” is being used to guide censorship decisions at some of China’s most-popular video-streaming sites.

• The behaviors in videos being censored include tattoos, gambling, drinking, smoking, “flirtatious” dancing, being shirtless. Scenes that use “a bed or sofa as a prop or background” are also on the no-no list.

• Despite President Xi Jingping’s renewed focus on the environment, discussing issues caused by smog or soil pollution is banned. So, too, is attacking political leaders and government policies. There’s even an explicit prohibition on using the names or photographs of political leaders.

• The Parents Television Council, a censorship advocacy group that typically puts pressure on broadcasters for showing explicit or violent content that is inappropriate for children, is turning up the heat on Netflix.

• The organization said on Thursday it is launching an online petition to persuade the streaming giant to drop “13 Reasons Why,” the controversial teen drama centered on a girl who takes her own life by slitting her wrists.

• Netflix just renewed the show for a third season.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The government helped shape the Internet, so it should come as no surprise that it is also game to invest in the companies working to bring it to new heights. In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the CIA, has invested in 172 known startups (more than 20 of which Crunchbase News has reached out to for comment), according to Crunchbase.

• But like with any other VC firm, exits matter. And a handful of In-Q-Tel-backed startups have found themselves in the shopping carts of the most well-known tech companies in the world.

• It’s been 5 years since Edward Snowden leaked confidential documents to The Guardian and Washington Post before going on the run and eventually entering Russian territory. Ken Spinner, VP at Varonis commented below.

• [...]

• Organizations have gotten sloppy when it comes to protecting their secrets. All it takes is one motivated individual to take whatever they can get their hands on. In many cases that can mean thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of sensitive documents when files are unprotected and open to every single person in the organization. It’s a smash-and-grab without the smash.

• Another interesting point is that people remember the likes of big names like Snowden, Julian Assange, and others. The problem is bigger than any one insider or leaker. The last five years have resulted in massive numbers of breaches, yet attribution seems to be becoming an afterthought. Anyone know the names Vladimir Drinkman or Dmitriy Smilianets? Both were sentenced to prison for crimes targeting credit card processors, banks, retailers, and other corporate victims.”

• Edward Snowden was accused of “very damaging” leaks after handing tens of thousands of top secret documents to journalists in 2013.

• The very first story based on those documents was published five years ago. It revealed a secret court order allowing the US National Security Agency (NSA) to collect the data of more than 120 million phone calls between ordinary Americans.

• More surveillance revelations based on top secret documents were published in the days and weeks which followed, all sourced through material which Mr Snowden had taken from the NSA while working as a contractor.

• We thought we were living in the free world, until Edward Snowden began to reveal top secret documents about mass surveillance in 2013.

• The first story based on those documents was published five years ago, showing how the US National Security Agency (NSA) amassed the data of 120 million phone calls between ordinary Americans.

• Subsequent reportage, all based on material which Mr Snowden had taken from the NSA while working as a contractor, revealed a sprawling surveillance infrastructure – with the UK’s signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, among its foremost players.

• Five years on, Sky News is looking at how significant those documents were in proving that the government was spying on British citizens as well as foreigners.

• This month marks five years since the revelation that the NSA and other security agencies were engaging in mass surveillance rocked the world. Currently living in exile in Russia, Edward Snowden is now a household name after igniting the debate on the balance between national security and data privacy. However, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, how much has changed in those five years?

• In 2013, National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified NSA data revealing that the agency, along with others including British intelligence and security organisation GCHQ, was conducting numerous global surveillance programmes.

• Hackers [sic] stole 614 gigabytes of data from the contractor, relating to a project called Sea Dragon, a secret project that the Defense Department explained as a new “disruptive offensive capability” being integrated onto “an existing weapons system with an existing Navy platform.” The Post describes the project as a “supersonic anti-ship missile” to be used aboard submarines. The project began in 2012, and was to begin testing in September 2018. The Post notes that in addition to information about Sea Dragon, hackers [sic] stole “signals and sensor data, submarine radio room information relating to cryptographic systems, and the Navy submarine development unit’s electronic warfare library.”

• Long before it was at the centre of a huge spying scandal, the US National Security Agency had the communist threat to deal with – and wanted to make sure its staff did not spill secrets.

• Techdirt is in the throes of a two-part revelation: 1. the US government’s works are public domain and can be freely commercialized, and; 2. many of the weird things that spy agencies make can be turned into ironic, cool, and sometimes fun and/or beautiful objects of commerce.

• Since the Snowden revelations, there has been an aggressive campaign to pry loose the cultural artifacts of America’s vast, secretive, paranoid spy agencies (euphemistically called the “intelligence community” by progressives who forgive these COINTELPRO-happy, unaccountable authoritarians so long as they’re wrongfooting Donald Trump). And wherever a wonderful, weird artifact emerges from leaks of Freedom of Information Act requests, Techdirt is there to productize it.

• Five years ago this week, Edward Snowden handed over a vast cache of close to ten thousand highly classified documents to reporters, revealing the scope and scale of the US government’s mass surveillance effort — and of its many global intelligence-gathering partners.

• First, the world learned that the National Security Agency (NSA) had been collecting the daily phone records of millions of Americans. Then, Silicon Valley was accused of willful participation in the PRISM data collection program. And the disclosures kept coming.

• Facebook maintained secret deals with a handful of companies, allowing them to gain “special access to user records,” long after it cut off most developers’ access to such user data back in 2015, according to a new Friday report by the Wall Street Journal, citing court documents it did not publish and other unnamed sources.

• The device, described in the patent as “a low-profile blood pressure measurement system”, and its drawings could be Apple’s first proper health product. This – unlike the Apple Watch and its heart rate monitor – would require regulatory approval from the FDA before going on sale.

• A bipartisan group of lawmakers is renewing a push for legislation to block states from mandating that technology companies build “backdoors” into devices they produce in order to allow law enforcement access to them.

• This time the social networking giant has been accused of granting special access to user’s data to some selected companies. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook came into agreement with certain companies including Royal Bank of Canada and Nissan Motors under a group of similar agreements which is known by the name of “Whitelists.” Under whitelists, Facebook shared information including their mobile number and information about their friends.

• Facebook Inc. struck customized data-sharing deals that gave select companies special access to user records well after the point in 2015 that the social network has said it walled off that information, according to court documents, company officials and people familiar with the matter.

Civil Rights/Policing

• If airlines (along with their allies in Congress and the Transportation Department) get their way, you would no longer see the total cost of your tickets upfront, and bait-and-switch advertising could make a comeback. Your ability to comparison shop at online travel sites might be curtailed. And you would lose some of the meager consumer protections you have, including 24 hours to cancel or change a reservation for free.

• As a massive airline measure moves through Congress, and the Trump administration seeks to repeal regulations across government, airlines have their best chance in years to kill or water down key consumer protections.

• Since its first stirrings in 2015, the Chinese social credit schemes have sprouted a confusing and frightening garden of strange growths, from spraying and shaming jaywalkers to blacklisting millions from flying or using high-speed rail, including journalists and other critics of the Chinese state.

• China’s social credit system was launched in 2014 and is supposed to be nationwide by 2020. As well as tracking and rating individuals, it also encompasses businesses and government officials. When it is complete, every Chinese citizen will have a searchable file of amalgamated data from public and private sources tracking their social credit. Currently, the system is still under development and authorities are trying to centralise local databases.

• Standing here at the base of the Grecian columns on the south side of the Lincoln Memorial there will be a very striking view of the funeral procession of Senator Robert Kennedy.

• The first sight of the procession will be through the trees as it turns off Constitution Avenue onto Henry Bacon Drive…a short tree lined street. It will then be in full view as it turns into the circle around the Lincoln Memorial. It will pass directly below me between the monuments honouring two great Americans, Washington and Lincoln.

• Sens. Corker and Kaine’s new AUMF would cede Congress’ constitutional duty to declare war to the executive branch.

• [...]

• The Corker-Kaine AUMF would authorize force, without operational limitations, against eight groups in six countries. The president could then add to both lists, as long as the president reports the expansion to Congress. To be clear — the president would have unilateral authority to add additional countries — including the United States itself — to the list of countries where Congress is authorizing war. And the president would have unilateral authority to add additional enemies, including groups in the United States itself and even individual Americans, under its new authority for the president to designate “persons” as enemies.

• Their proposal also contains a sleeper provision with the innocuous title, “Sec. 10 Conforming Amendment,” that would create a new legal basis for the military to capture and imprison individuals in indefinite detention without charge or trial. This greatly expands the scope of the infamous indefinite detention provision in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Like the NDAA, the Corker-Kaine AUMF has no statutory prohibition against locking up American citizens or anyone picked up in the United States itself. While we continue to believe it would still be unlawful for a president to try indefinite detention of an American citizen in the United States (again), there is no reason for Congress to risk it.

• In what now appears to be an annual ritual, a bad right of publicity law is being rushed through at the end of the legislative session in New York. Assembly Bill 8155-B (and its counterpart Senate Bill 5857-B) would dramatically expand New York’s right of publicity, making it a property right that can be passed on to your heirs – even if you aren’t a New York resident. EFF has sent a memorandum [PDF] to members of the New York State Legislature urging them not to support the bill.

• The right of publicity is an offshoot of state privacy law that gives a person the right to limit the public use of her name, likeness, or identity for commercial purposes. A limited version of this right makes sense—for example, allowing you to stop a company falsely claiming that you endorse its products. But the right of publicity has been expanded in recent years thanks to misguided legislation and court decisions. In some states, the right covers just about any speech that even “evokes” a person’s identity. Celebrities have brought right of publicity cases against movies, rap lyrics, magazine features, and computer games. The right of publicity has even been invoked to silence criticism of celebrities. Since the right of publicity can impact a huge range of speech, any changes to the law should be considered carefully.

• The DOJ may have violated its own policies in seizing the email and phone records of a New York Times reporter.

• It emerged late Thursday that the Justice Department had secretly seized years of email and phone records of a New York Times reporter in connection with a leak investigation. This marks a clear escalation of the Trump administration’s attempts to intimidate journalists and their sources. In doing so, it seems that the Justice Department may have violated its own policies for obtaining reporters’ communications — strict standards that are in place because of the importance the Constitution places on freedom of the press.

• News of the invasive search came with the indictment of James Wolfe, who recently retired from his long tenure as a nonpartisan employee of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Wolfe is accused of lying to federal investigators about his contacts with three reporters. One of them is Ali Watkins, who has worked for The New York Times since December covering national security.

• The First Amendment’s protection of a free press is central to the public’s ability to hold government officials accountable for their actions. The Obama administration didn’t do journalists any favors by pursuing them in leak investigations more than any administration before it. But the Trump administration is accelerating this kind of attack on the public’s right to know, with Attorney General Jeff Sessions saying that he had tripled the Department of Justice’s leak investigations — one of them apparently ensnaring Watkins in the process.

• If the lifelines of millions of poor and elderly were going to crumble in less than a generation, this would be major news indeed. But they’re not really. Or, at least, we have no objective reason to believe they will, since the authors of the report was not “the government,” as it’s generally understood—the Congressional Budget Office, or some other ostensibly bipartisan “commission” sanctioned by “both parties”—but the not-so-reliable Trump White House. The same White House that has a long, documented track record of venality, lying and corruption, and leads a Republican Party that has been quite explicit in its desire to “reform” Social Security and Medicare through slashing and privatizing.

• The report was commissioned by the US Social Security Trustees, a benign-sounding but overtly partisan group of people all appointed by Donald J. Trump. Of the seven slots, two are vacant and the other five—Steven T. Mnuchin, secretary of the Treasury; R. Alexander Acosta, secretary of Labor; Alex M. Azar II, secretary of Health and Human Services; Nancy A. Berryhill, acting commissioner of Social Security; and Mark J. Warshawsky, deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy—were all put on the commission by the White House.

• The war on unofficial transparency continues — this time ensnaring a reporter. The indictment [PDF] shows Wolfe was in regular contact with four unnamed reporters and the classified info leaked apparently related to the investigation of Carter Page. (The indictment refers only to MALE-1.).

• Despite all the dots connected by the Justice Dept. after hoovering up email and phone records of four reporters, none of the charges brought against Wolfe involved mishandling classified info. All three charges listed are for lying to the FBI, not exposing secret info. While the info obtained may have been necessary to prove Wolfe lied to investigators, it does seem like a serious breach first amendment boundaries for nothing but vanilla “lied to the feds” charges. Those charges are mostly there for the government to punish people when it thinks it can’t nail down more serious charges.

• Reality Winner’s home in Augusta is no longer a minimalist yoga haven.

• There’s a TV in the living room, baby pictures framed around an open space and other signs that the house is now home to a family.

• It’s a rental property for a new family friend and a place for the alleged National Security Agency leaker’s mother to stay whenever she makes one of her frequent treks from Texas to Georgia.

• [...]

• “I don’t know why her story is not newsworthy,” said Billie Winner-Davis, Reality’s mother.

• ounterterrorism policies targeting Muslim communities may actually be contributing to radicalization, according to a study of pro-ISIS and anti-Islamic internet search queries from 2014 to 2016 in more than 3,000 counties in America, the vast majority of the country.

• Researchers Christopher A. Bail, Friedolin Merhout, and Peng Ding examined the search queries to learn about how radicalization happens at the community level.

• Their findings, published in the open-access journal Science Advances, suggest that Muslims living in neighborhoods hostile to their presence are much more vulnerable to extremism than Muslims living in diverse neighborhoods.

• Convinced that a flawed algorithm marked them for death by U.S. killer drones, a pair of journalists have spent the last year fighting in Washington for unprecedented court relief.

• On June 22, 1977, Aleksandr Ogorodnik killed himself with a CIA-supplied suicide pill after the KGB arrested him based on information initially provided by a mole within the Agency. Just over three weeks later, CIA officer Martha (Marti) Peterson — unaware of Aleksandr’s death — was seized in a KGB ambush while servicing a dead drop in Moscow.

• The streets of Moscow were one of the most important, and dangerous, battlefields of the Cold War. American intelligence officers like Marti worked with assets like Aleksandr in the shadows to collect Soviet secrets. The Soviets, in turn, closely watched all foreign nationals and their own citizens for signs of espionage.

• Was Jerry Chun Shing Lee (aka Zheng Cheng Li) a recruited asset of China’s Ministry for State Security (MSS), or was he a financially strapped former CIA case officer who volunteered his services to commit espionage on behalf of the MSS?

• It’s a bit like the question concerning the chicken and the egg, as Lee has been indicted for one count of conspiracy to gather and deliver defense information to aid a foreign government and two counts of unlawful retention of national defense information. Sticklers for detail will note that Lee was not charged with espionage. That charge may come in a superseding indictment or may never be put into play. From a purely counterintelligence optic, Lee’s engagement with the Chinese MSS has been neutralized and he is no longer able to do their bidding in a clandestine manner. We’ve written in the past about China’s nation state espionage activity and targeting of the United States. The Lee case is a prime example of the MSS successful actions.

• Former U.S. intelligence officer Kevin Mallory was months behind on his mortgage, $30,000 in debt, and getting financial help from his church, when Chinese agents approached him in 2017 to work for them…

• Had FBI agents overlooked a crumpled ball of tinfoil tossed haphazardly in former CIA contractor Kevin Mallory’s junk drawer during a raid of his home last June, he may never have faced espionage charges in federal court.

• “We overlooked it twice,” FBI agent Melinda Capitano told jurors as Mallory’s week-long trial which concluded Thursday.

• A single reference buried deep within hundreds of pages of court filings in the case of convicted CIA turncoat Kevin Mallory reveals the name of a Shanghai-based “executive search firm” that bears the hallmarks of a classic espionage front, former intelligence operatives from the U.S. and Russia tell The Daily Beast.

• The U.S. government’s evidence against Mallory, who was found guilty Friday of espionage-related charges, included a photograph of a business card belonging to alleged Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) agent Richard Yang, who presented himself as a corporate headhunter. Prosecutors said he was one of Mallory’s handlers. According to court documents, the picture was taken at Darren & Associates, a supposed corporate recruiter with no listed phone number or executives and an address that traces back to a rent-by-the-hour space on Shanghai’s Hubin Road.

• ormer CIA officer Kevin Mallory faces a life sentence for selling secrets to Chinese intelligence officers, after a court case that offered a rare glimpse into how espionage assets are recruited ended in conviction.

• Most cases end in plea deals. Governments prefer to compromise rather than risk secrets being be exposed during a trial, and defendants’ are keen to negotiate down potentially brutal sentences.

• A former CIA officer was found guilty of espionage, on behalf of China, and lying to the FBI about communication with Chinese officials, the New York Times reports. The officer, Kevin Mallory, faces life in prison following the verdict.

• A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer faces life in prison after he was convicted of betraying his country to spy on behalf of China.

• Kevin Mallory, 61, of Leesburg, Virginia, was found guilty on Friday of espionage charges and lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about his contacts with Chinese intelligence.

• A former C.I.A. case officer faces life in prison after he was convicted on Friday of betraying his country to spy on behalf of China.

• Kevin Mallory, 61, of Leesburg, Va., was found guilty of espionage charges and lying to the F.B.I. about his contacts with Chinese intelligence.

• A former CIA officer was convicted Friday on charges he spied for China by providing top secret information in exchange for $25,000, the AP reports. Kevin Mallory, 61, of Leesburg, Virginia, faces up to life in prison, although federal sentences are often less than the maximum. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Sept. 21. Mallory was charged under the Espionage Act last year after he was discovered with more than $16,000 in undeclared cash on a return flight from Shanghai. Prosecutors said he was desperate for cash and transmitted classified information to a Chinese handler. His acts were far from isolated as China actively tries to gather classified US information, federal prosecutors said immediately after his espionage conviction.

• The ways that China has been monitoring and ranking its citizens, secretly imprisoning ethnic minorities, and ignoring its LGBT community have been widely documented in the West.

• But citizens in China itself may have no idea that any of these things are going on.

• Beijing has a rich playbook of tactics to keep its 1.4 billion citizens from learning about the country’s repression and abuse of human rights. They include paying people to flood the internet with pro-government social media posts, setting up police surveillance points to watch over ethnic communities, and banning content criticising the Chinese government.

• Here are the four most commonly used tricks in Beijing’s playbook.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• In 1996, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act in order to inject competition into the telephone market and set the stage for a nascent commercial Internet. Last month, US Telecom, the trade association of AT&T and Verizon, filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to repeal one of the central requirements of the ’96 Act that has promoted competition. That requirement being that incumbent telephone companies share their copper line infrastructure at regulated rates with to lower the barrier of entering an incumbent’s market. If granted, incumbent wireline telephone companies will be free to raise prices or simply disconnect competitors’ access to their infrastructure and potentially jeopardize what the small amount of remaining competition that exists in high-speed broadband.

• While copper wire infrastructure may strike people as the infrastructure of yesterday, its existence and the legal rights to access it remain essential for competitive entry into the high-speed broadband market. This is because it is one of the only remaining ways a new company can gain customers to then leverage to finance fiber optic deployment. Should the FCC grant the petition, the growing monopolization of high-speed broadband above 25 Mbps where more than half of Americans have only one choice will likely become worse.

• In the Senate, the entire Democratic Caucus and three Republicans voted in favor of restoring net neutrality rules. The vote was 52-47. Republicans hold a 235-193 advantage in the House.

• When contacted by Ars, a spokesperson for Speaker Ryan declined to comment. The House’s Republican leadership doesn’t appear likely to seek a vote of the full House.

• All 49 Senate Democrats signed a letter to Ryan sent Thursday asking him to schedule a vote for the bill, which passed the Senate last month.

• In Washington today, U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan received a letter signed by 47 Senate Democrats and two independents calling on him to schedule a vote to keep Net Neutrality rules active.

• But to retain the net neutrality rules, the U.S. House must vote in line with the Senate, and President Donald Trump would also have to sign the measure.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Close to 50% of all US patents are owned by a group of just 346 entities, research conducted by ktMINE has revealed. Published in issue 90 of IAM, which is now available to subscribers, the IAM/ktMINE US Patent 1000 Club consists of every company, NPE and institution that owns 1,000 or more active US patents.

• Between them the members of the club control 1.6 million assets – of which 928,328 are held by non-US organisations. However, not surprisingly, the US is the country that is most represented in the list, with 168 entities. Asian companies make up 30%, with Japanese businesses dominating within this group. Meanwhile, European entities fill 18% slots, controlling over 214,000 granted patents between them. There are no representatives from Latin America, Oceania or Africa.

• [...]

• Non-traditional patent owners also feature. These include RPX, Rambus and Intellectual Ventures. As larger companies spin off portfolios, license technologies and leverage other mechanisms to monetise their patent portfolios, this group is likely to grow.

• At the start of discovery, Huang agreed to a protective order, including a designation for “attorney’s eyes only.” Huawei then used that “attorneys eyes only” designation when it disclosed the technical information for its accused chips. Since he had no attorney, Huang was unable to look at the disclosures. When Huawei later motioned for summary judgment of non-infringement, Huang responded with a number of previously undisclosed reverse-engineering figures and declarations from undisclosed witnesses.

• Secretary Mnuchin confirmed that the US was suspending its plans to impose substantial tariff increases on Chinese goods intended to pressure China into modifying its practices. The announcement of an apparent agreement in principle did not expressly address major issues identified in the United States Trade Representative’s (USTR) Section 301 findings regarding China’s intellectual property and transfer of technology practices. Given that the next step in resolving the current impasse involves the dispatch of a high-level US delegation to China to work out the details, the contours of the ultimate resolution (if any) of the relevant issues remains uncertain. Nonetheless, at least for the moment, pressures on the multilateral trading system appear to be diminished.

• This “episode” in the long-running drama involving China and the US, with the European Union, Japan, and others in supporting roles, illustrates that political and economic diplomacy outside the strict confines of the World Trade Organization (WTO) remains important. The WTO legal system is not so comprehensive as to encompass the entire field of international trade, and it addresses international investment only in a limited way. Moreover, the current political dynamic in the US is one of immediacy and mutability, neither of which are characteristics of the WTO process. Multilateral solutions are complex, time-consuming, and generally expected to endure. Yet even within the presently chaotic international environment, we should discourage bilateralism from re-emerging as the “new normal,” mainly because experience does not recommend a more fragmented global trading system. Those countries with lesser political and economic bargaining power may be the most vulnerable in a fragmented world trading system.

• The creation of the Saudi Intellectual Property Authority is an important move by the Kingdom to recognise the interconnection between these key IP rights and it will allow the registration of these rights to be managed in a more effective and streamlined manner. One of the stated functions of the Authority is “promoting the benefit of intellectual property to build an advanced economy based on knowledge”. This resonates with the very changes that we are seeing in the dynamic economy of Saudi Arabia.

• Though the conjectures of late May have been unclear, an article back in February from the Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun suggested that the loosening of restrictions would be to allow a working invention without a foreign corresponding application. This would not make much difference for foreign venture applicants, so if this is the change the result may be negligible to overseas applicants. Rather, the move by the JPO (if as hinted) may be to give small-sized Japanese companies a competitive edge in getting fast results domestically for new technologies.

• It is simplest to file a Voluntary Amendment with or before the Request for Examination of a patent application in Japan. However, you may also file Voluntary Amendments after the Request for Examination is filed, as long as substantive examination by the Japan Patent Office (JPO) has not commenced. Within that time frame, you are free to amend as you wish as long as amendments are grounded on the original claims, specification, or drawings.

• Please be aware that once a JPO examiner has begun the substantive examination process, even if you submit a Voluntary Amendment, it might not be considered. It is possible to have a Japanese patent agent check with the JPO for its estimated (but non-binding) examination commencement period (not precise date) for a particular case. If there is still time before the examination will begin, you might want to file a Voluntary Amendment even after submitting the Request for Examination. Note that any change in subject matter must take place before examination.

Copyrights

• Google maintains a rapidly growing list of copyright-infringing URLs which they haven’t indexed yet. This blacklist ensures that these links are never added to the search engine. Thanks to a new update in the transparency report, we now know how many non-indexed links every takedown notice includes, which is surprisingly high in some cases.

• Chuck Palahniuk has long been a personal hero of mine. Back when I fancied myself a fiction writer, I gobbled up his books, engrossed in the characters he was able to create. It was only years later, then writing for Techdirt, that a chip in my impression of Palahniuk emerged when he started his habit of blaming his finances on the piracy of his works. Palahniuk claimed that piracy was responsible for his “dwindling income.” This, despite selling a ton of books and movie options, sounded strange — especially given that book piracy is much more limited than things like music, movies or software. Where was he getting it from?

• Well, Palahniuk himself answers that question in a recent blog post on his site. It turns out the idea that piracy was to blame for his money troubles came from the accountant in charge of his royalties at his literary agency. That same accountant, it turns out, has now been charged with defauding the agency out of millions of dollars. Palahniuk now says he knows exactly what dwindled his income and it wasn’t piracy.

• A controversial phishing campaign where scammers used fake piracy settlements to extort cash was brought to the forefront again recently. ISP Grande Communications wants to use it as evidence in their repeat infringer case against the RIAA, but the music group sees this effort as a pointless fishing expedition.

• In an initial order, a court in Vienna, Austria, has ruled that YouTube can be held directly liable for users’ copyright infringements. The video service is not seen as a neutral intermediary and should do more to prevent infringing uploads. The ruling, which is not yet legally binding, is a win for local television channel Puls 4 but YouTube indicates that, if it stands, the company will likely appeal.

• A Finnish court has ordered seven Internet providers to block access to the popular torrent sites RARBG and YIFY. According to the court, it is clear that the operators of the sites generate substantial revenue by illegally sharing copyright-infringing content. The ISPs are required to use both DNS and IP-address blocking to make the sites unavailable.

• In the EU, everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life. But should that right be used to prevent copyright holders from enforcing their rights when someone from a household shares copyrighted content without permission? A just-published opinion from EU Advocate General Szpunar says it should not.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.