● 06.11.18

● Links 11/6/2018: Qt 5.9.6 and Weblate 3.0.1 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 4:11 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory today unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer.

• With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops, Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops. Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI), among other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.

• The United States has taken the shrink-wrap off Summit, its all-new $200 million supercomputer.

• And boy is it quick.

• Summit is now the fastest supercomputer in the America and the fastest supercomputer in the world, toppling¹ China’s ‘Sunway TaihuLight‘ system from the apex of petaflop achievement.

• But it gets even better.

• The US now has the world’s fastest supercomputer, named Summit, reclaiming its “speediest computer on earth” title from China and its Sunway TaihuLight system, OMG Ubuntu reports. And of course, the Summit, which boasts 200 petaflops at peak performance, runs Linux—RHEL to be exact. See the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s post for more details.

Kernel Space

• Honestly, I do not blame him. The staging tree is primarily intended for unstable and less than mature code, which ideally should move to the mainline within a short time of further development. It’s a temporary (that is, staging) location. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the Lustre filesystem. In fact, I once wrote about it for Linux Journal in the past.

• For those who are less familiar with this filesystem: Lustre (or Linux Cluster) is a distributed filesystem typically deployed in large-scale cluster computing environments. Lustre is designed to be both performant and to scale to tens of thousands of nodes and to petabytes of storage. And as what may have just been alluded to already, a distributed filesystem allows access to files from multiple hosts sharing a computer network.

Graphics Stack

• The VirGL stack for offering OpenGL hardware acceleration to guest virtual machines with KVM is now capable of utilizing OpenGL 4.1.

• David Airlie who has been leading the VirGL cause the past few years for OpenGL support within VMs has got the code to the stage of OpenGL 4.1 support. The last big ticket item was supporting ARB_gpu_shader_fp64.

• Kicking off a new week is the Vulkan 1.1.77 specification update.

Benchmarks

• This month marks one year since AMD returned to delivering high-performance server CPUs with the debut of their EPYC 7000 series processor line-up. It’s been a triumphant period for AMD with the successes over the past year of their EPYC family. Over the past year, the Linux support has continued to improve with several EPYC/Zen CPU optimizations, ongoing Zen compiler tuning, CPU temperature monitoring support within the k10temp driver, and general improvements to the Linux kernel that have also helped out EPYC. In this article is a comparison of a “2017″ Linux software stack as was common last year to the performance now possible if using the bleeding-edge software components. These Linux benchmarks were done with the EPYC 7351P, 7401P, and 7601 processors.

Applications

• Have you ever faced the situation where you perform a long-running task on a remote machine and suddenly your connection drops, the SSH session is terminated and your work is lost. Well it has happened to all of us at some point, hasn’t it? Luckily, there is a utility called screen that allows us to the resume our sessions.

• OnionShare is a free, open source file sharing application that can used to share files or folders of any size securely and anonymously over Internet. It works along with Tor browser which is used to securely and anonymously browse Internet. OnionShare will generate an unguessable and random-looking URL for the files or folders you want to share with others. It doesn’t need any centralized web server or any third party services. All operations will be done within TOR network and nobody can track what you’re going to share or download, except the recipient of course.

• Cryptomator is a free and open source software tool that provides client-side encryption for your cloud storage files, available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.

• The tool, which is very easy to use, supports any cloud storage provider that synchronizes with a local directory, so it works with Dropbox, Google Drive (Google Backup and Sync or whatever Google calls it nowadays), OneDrive, ownCloud, and so on.

• Weblate 3.0 has been released today. It contains several bug fixes, most importantly possible migration issue on users when migrating from 2.20. There was no data corruption, just some of the foreign keys were possibly not properly migrated. Upgrading from 3.0 to 3.0.1 will fix this as well as going directly from 2.20 to 3.0.1.

Proprietary

• DesignEvo logo maker is an okay piece of software. It’s easy and fun to use, although you need a bit of artistic flair to achieve good results. The app combines simplicity with power features in a good way, and the available catalog of shapes and fonts is quite impressive. A great starting pointing for online logo creation.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• For those watching any of the E3 livestreams, you might have noticed that We Happy Few [Official Site] developer Compulsion Games has joined Microsoft as a Microsoft Studio. Thankfully, We Happy Few is still coming to Linux.

• Well known (and basically a legend) Linux game porter Ryan ‘Icculus’ Gordon is looking for new titles to port to Linux.

• For those who love their local co-op experiences, Flat Heroes looks absolutely mental and it’s releasing in full on July 5th. Of course, will full Linux support.

• Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass [Official Site] from Croteam has me rather excited, it also has more information out and some fresh screenshots.

• Pack your bags as you’re going to Mexico in the first DLC for Railway Empire, which is out now with Linux support. A big free patch was also released, which sounds fantastic.

• In Master Pyrox Wizard Smackdown, you face off against up to eight other wizards in small arenas. It has support for single-player against the AI, local co-op and online play too. Note: Key provided by the developer.

• The developer, Denis Comtesse, got in touch about it to mention that the majority of it was made on Linux using the Godot Engine. Comtesse actually co-developed the rather good Deep Sixed with Little Red Dog Games.

• Want to play some RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 on a modern game engine that supports Linux? OpenRCT2 [Official Site, GitHub] is what you need and it’s been updated.

• For those who love your Visual Novels and want something a little extra, Planet Stronghold 2 with RPG elements along with map exploration might be a good fit.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I am pleased to announce that Qt 5.9.6 is released today. As a patch release Qt 5.9.6 does not add any new functionality, but provides important bug fixes and other improvements.

• With Qt 5.9.6 we are also adding binary installers for QNX 7. Qt 5.9 has supported QNX 7 from the very beginning, but since we have only offered binaries for QNX 6.6, there have been some confusion if QNX 7 is supported or not. Now there are binaries for both QNX 7 and QNX 6.6, which both are also fully supported with Qt 5.9. For Qt 5.9.6 the QNX binaries are available as offline installers for those holding a valid commercial license.

• Compared to Qt 5.9.5, the new Qt 5.9.6 contains 33 bug fixes. In total there are around 195 changes in Qt 5.9.6 compared to Qt 5.9.5. For details of the most important changes, please check the Change files of Qt 5.9.6.

• I had heard it mentioned a couple of times, then I posted a painting on reddit and a user recommended Krita to me, I was a bit uncertain because I was used to my setup, my brushes and so on… But the seed was planted, in the span of a few months I was using Krita exclusively and I never went back.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• There is ongoing work on content-specific user interfaces that can work with Tracker to access local content, so for photos for example you can use GNOME Photos to view and organize your whole photo collection. However, there isn’t a content-agnostic tool available that might let you view and organize all the content on your computer… other than Nautilus which is limited to files and folders.

• I’m interested in organizing content using tags, which are nothing but freeform textual category labels. On the web, tags are a very common way of categorizing content. (The name hashtags is probably more widely understood than tags among web users, but hashtag has connotations to social media and sharing which don’t necessarily apply when talking about desktop content so I will call them tags here.) Despite the popularity on the web, desktop support is low: Tagspaces seems to be the only option and the free edition is very limited in what it can do. Within GNOME, we have had support for storing tags in the Tracker database for many years but I don’t know of any applications that allow viewing or editing file tags.

• Around the time of GUADEC 2017 I read Alexandru’s blog post about tags in Nautilus, in which he announced that Nautilus wasn’t going to get support for organizing files using tags because it would conflict to much with the existing organization principle in Nautilus of putting files into folders. I agree with that logic there, but it leaves open a question: when will GNOME get an interface that allows me to organize files using tags?

Distributions

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• For those unfamiliar with GeckoLinux, it’s a GNU/Linux distribution based on the OpenSuSE operating system and with target on desktop users, providing them a polished, out-of-the-box experience. GeckoLinux is available in two main editions, Static, based on openSUSE Leap, and Rolling, based on openSUSE Tumbleweed, in multiple flavors with various popular desktop environments.

• “GeckoLinux STATIC spins are based on the enterprise-grade slower moving openSUSE Leap distribution, with the inclusion of proprietary packages from the Packman project,” reads the announcement. “GeckoLinux ROLLING spins are based on the extremely well tested and reliable openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution, with the inclusion of proprietary packages from the Packman project.”

• Software centers have become very important. Linux was the first place where you could install and update all software in one place, by using package managers. In openSUSE that central place is the YaST Software Manager. Other distributions, such as Ubuntu, used applications like the Synaptic package manager. The user experience of these package managers is not very user friendly, as they show many technical packages / details, which most users will not understand.

• In 2008, Apple introduced the iOS App Store. This changed the public perception on how software centers should work. Everything was now in one place, neatly organized into categories. The screenshots, descriptions and ratings made it easy to learn about new software. And installation was a breeze. Google followed this trend by announcing Android Market later in 2008. Apple introduced the App Store for Mac OSX in 2010. Google re-branded the Android Market in 2012 to Google Play store. And in the same year, Microsoft introduced the Windows Store for Windows 8. This store was re-branded in 2017 to the Microsoft Store.

Red Hat Family

• Jenna Slawson started her career at Red Hat as a production designer who often worked on projects requiring resizing of the company’s old Shadowman logo. Five years later, she is an art director who is helping to update the renowned mark.

• Jenna is part of a group of 12 Red Hatters working with Pentagram’s Paula Scher, one of the nation’s most accomplished graphic designers, on the Red Hat Corporate logo redesign.

Finance

Fedora

• Khaled Monsoor was born and raised in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. After graduating with a degree in computer science and engineering, he worked in several different business sectors. Monsoor started a masters in Bioinformatics, but decided to not pursue it.

• Monsoor currently works at Augmedix Inc., a Silicon Valley medicare startup, as a research engineer. started using Linux in 2002 and got involved with the Fedora Project in 2005. He believes balancing the demands of a full-time job and family is the biggest challenge to contributing to open source projects.

• The 2018 May cycle of Elections is in full swing. Voting officially began on Thursday, June 7th, and ends on Wednesday, June 13th at 23:59 UTC. Voting takes place on the Voting application website. As part of the Elections coverage on the Community Blog, the candidates running for seats published their interviews and established their platforms here. Are you getting ready to vote and looking for this information? You can find the full list of candidates and links to their interviews below.

Debian Family

• Coming to the third week of GSoC felt like it was part of the daily schedule since ever. Daily updates to mentors, reviews, and evaluations on merge/pull requests and constant learning process kept my schedule full of adrenalin. Here’s what I worked on!

Derivatives

• I dared to download and play around with the files, only to get shocked how incompetent Microsoft is in packaging.

• Tails is a Debian based Linux distributions aims to provide a secure, private and anonymity user experience while using the internet. Tails team just announced the new maintenance release Tails 3.7.1. Check the release notes and download options down below.

• Tails 3.7.1 comes with several application updates which fixes some Security vulnerabilities for Tor Browser, cURL, Thunderbird, wget, Git, Wavpack, GnuPG and more. Check the full list of the recent security updates in Tails 3.7.1.

Devices/Embedded

• Android-x86 is a project which I think is interesting for its goal of getting Android onto more platforms and I can certainly see how it would be appealing for people who want to test Android applications across several types of devices. Unfortunately, Android is geared toward small, mobile devices and its interface, controls, applications and hardware support just do not translate well to larger personal computers. To me, trying to use Android on a laptop computer feels out of place, much like trying to use a word processor or virtual terminal feels out of place on a small, mobile device. It’s possible to use, but not ideal and not entirely practical.

• I think the Android-x86 team deserves a great deal of credit for getting Android working as well as it does – the system does boot, run and can launch several applications on my laptop. But the regular notifications of crashes, short battery life and limited number of applications make this operating system unappealing for daily use. I think Android-x86 is a good test platform for trying out Android and its apps on different sized screens and hardware, but it’s not great for common desktop tasks.

• TLW’s little Odroid C2 was getting a little confused so I thought to upgrade the software. In particular FireFox was an old version and rather obnoxious at times, pausing and being unresponsive. So I checked it out and found that others just replaced “jessie” with “stretch” in a few places in /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list and were good to go. I gave it a try and three hours later it was ready to reboot. It took so long not because of the CPU which was idling but the slow SD card I have in it.

• Our sever was up, running and configured. Now, we needed a client to listen to this server we kind of have a TV but that TV is not smart enough so we used a Raspberry Pi 3 and attached it to the TV using the HDMI port.

• We installed OSMC on the Raspberry Pi and configured it to use Emby and listen to the Emby server once we booted it up it was very straight forward. This made our TV look good and also a little smart and it opened our ways for 1000s of movies, music and podcast. Although I don’t know if setting up this system was more fun or watching those movies will be.

Tizen

• The rumors revolving around Samsung’s next smartwatch, the Gear S4 (which may not be its final name after all) don’t seem to be slowing down at the moment. The main agenda here is whether the watch would run Samsung’s Tizen OS, or will Samsung turn to Wear OS now.

• Late in May, popular leakster, Evan Blass, claimed of seeing Wear OS-powered Samsung smartwatches on the wrists of its employees. Considering Blass’ track record with leaks, we’re bound to believe that Samsung indeed has turned to Wear OS for its next smartwatch. Samsung trademarking the Galaxy Watch moniker also added to the excitement.

Android

• A network worm has surfaced on Android devices that exploits Android Debug Bridge (ADB) feature of the mobile OS – a feature that is enabled by default by phone manufacturers.

• Security researcher Kevin Beaumont revealed this issue in a blog post stating that ADB is completely unauthenticated and thousands of Android devices connected to the internet are currently being exploited through this vulnerability.

• Android has a feature called Android Debug Bridge (ADB for short) which allows developers to communicate with a device remotely, to execute commands and fully control the device.

• The security community raised the alarm regarding a serious issue last week —that of Android devices shipping with their debug port open to remote connections.

• The issue is not new, being first spotted by the team at Qihoo 360 Netlab in February, this year, when they detected an Android worm that was spreading from Android device to Android device, infecting them with a cryptocurrency miner named ADB.Miner.

• The ADB.Miner worm exploited the Android Debug Bridge (ADB), a feature of the Android OS used for troubleshooting faulty devices.

Free Software/Open Source

• Twenty years ago, the Open Source framework was published, delivering what would be the most significant trend in software development since that time. Whether you want to call it “free software” or “open source”, ultimately, it’s all about making application and system source codes widely available and putting the software under a license that favors user autonomy.

• According to Ovum, open source is already the default option across several big data categories ranging from storage, analytics and applications to machine learning.

• In the latest Black Duck Software and North Bridge’s survey, 90% of respondents reported they rely on open source “for improved efficiency, innovation and interoperability,” most commonly because of “freedom from vendor lock-in; competitive features and technical capabilities; ability to customize; and overall quality.”

• There are now thousands of successful open source projects that companies must strategically choose from to stay competitive.

• While every company must develop its own strategy, and choose the open source projects it feels will fuel its desired business outcomes, there are some projects that we feel are worth strong consideration.

• You wouldn’t be wrong to wonder whether the smartphone, that modern jack-of-all-trades, is taking over photography. While that might be valid in the point-and-shoot camera market, there are a sizeable number of photography professionals and hobbyists who recognize that a camera that fits in your pocket can never replace a high-end DSLR camera and the depth, clarity, and realism of its photos.

• All of that power comes with a small price in terms of convenience; like negatives from traditional film cameras, the raw image files produced by DSLRs must be processed before they can be edited or printed. For this, a digital image processing application is indispensable, and the go-to application has been Adobe Lightroom. But for many reasons—including its expensive, subscription-based pricing model and its proprietary license—there’s a lot of interest in open source and other alternatives.

• For this book list, I reached out to our writer community to ask which fiction books they would recommend to their peers. What I love about this question and the answers that follow is this list gives us a deeper look into their personalities. Fiction favorites are unlike non-fiction recommendations in that your technical skills and interests may have an influence on what you like to read read, but it’s much more about your personality and life experiences that draw you to pick out, and love, a particular fiction book.

• These people are your people. I hope you find something interesting to add to your reading list.

• The word “serverless” is a beguiling buzzword if there ever was one because servers are kind of pain. All of those patches for those security holes that are described in a bazillion words in a million emails sitting in your inbox? If you could get rid of a server, you could forget about those patches. All of those ports on the firewalls that you’ve got to remember to keep closed? They won’t be your worry anymore either. The serverless world will set you free. At least that’s what the word seems to promise.

• The serverless world looks relaxed and full of time to devote to your one true mission: whatever your suits tell you it should be. But don’t be fooled. You’ll pay for this freedom from worry by sacrificing your freedom to wander or change. The serverless platforms in the Amazon, Microsoft, and Google clouds deliver their magic through a proprietary interface and every time you offload some of your worries into their waiting arms, you become addicted. Absorbed by the Borg. “Owned” is much too strong a word, but you may find it just as hard to escape.

• San Francisco headquartered Databricks that provides a unified analytics platform released MLflow, a new open source project that strives to provide some standardization to the complex processes that machine learning engineers face during the course of building, testing, and deploying machine learning models. Announcing the release of the open source platform, CTO Matei Zaharia, also the creator of Apache Spark noted that even though there are a number of open source tools that cover each and every phase of the machine learning ifecycle, such as data preparation and model training, it is hard to track experiments and reproduce the results.

Events

• The 2018 Linux Audio Conference has just concluded in Berlin. A substantial set of videos of talks from the event has already been published, with the rest slated to appear in the near future.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Over the last three months, Mozilla has been a vocal critic of Facebook’s practices with respect to its lack of user transparency. Throughout this time we’ve engaged with Facebook directly about this and have continued to comment publicly as the story about Facebook’s data practices evolves.

• Mozilla Corporation recently received two termination notices from Facebook about work that we did with them in the past. These appear to be part of Facebook’s broader effort to clean up its third-party developer ecosystem. This is good – we suspect that we weren’t the only ones receiving these notices. Still, the notices, and recent reporting of Facebook data sharing with device makers, prompted us to take a closer look at our past relationships with the company and we think it is important to talk about what we found.

• Today, from across the world, Mozillians are gathering in San Francisco for our six-monthly All Hands.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• The open source community is a huge collection of often inter-related projects and initiatives, so how can telcos and their vendor partners best engage and benefit? In addition to his Ericsson role, Chris Price is also a Board Member of both the Linux Foundation and the OpenStack Foundation, so is ideally placed to offer advice.

• After the bombing in the media about the sounded purchase, in GitLab they began to receive more than 10 times the normal amount of repositories that they usually receive. From their Twitter account, they commented how they work to try to deal with the new traffic and invite to monitor the progress of the work.

• Some open-source adherents weren’t happy about Microsoft snapping up GitHub, the world’s most popular code-hosting repository, but the Linux Foundation reckons it’s a win for open source.

• “This is pretty good news for the world of open source, and we should celebrate Microsoft’s smart move,” wrote Jim Zemlin, the executive director at the Linux Foundation.

• Zemlin has taken potshots at Microsoft over the years for its past attacks on Linux and the open-source community. He acknowledged that there are still “small pockets of deep mistrust” of Microsoft but encouraged the community to get with the times.

• As the Internet of Things has grown in scale, IoT developers are increasingly expected to support a range of hardware resources, operating systems, and software tools/applications. This is a challenge given many connected devices are size-constrained. Virtualization can help meet these broad needs, but existing options don’t offer the right mix of size, flexibility, and functionality for IoT development.

• AchieveDE, an integrator and software distributor in Houston, created all of the SiVArc rules, tested them and then added them to the library for others to utilize this powerful feature. Now an engineer can start with the Siemens Open Library, utilize tested function blocks for control of many standard objects in industry, as well as automatically generate HMI icons and faceplates that have been properly mapped to the PLC code.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The MIPS P6600 processor was announced in 2015 as one of the Warrior Processors based upon MIPS64 Release 6. The P6600 is based on a 28nm process, clock speeds up to 2.0GHz, and is the fastest performing of the MIPS Warrior cores. Only now has MIPS posted an enablement patch for the MIPS P6600 with GCC.

• At the start of June a MIPS Technologies engineer posted the GCC patch for bringing up the P6600 and allowing -march=p6600. But even though this patch is here three years later, at this point it’s not going to be accepted.

• Unifont 11.0.01 was released on 5 June 2018, coinciding with the formal release of Unicode 11.0.0 by The Unicode Consortium.

• I wanted to check over this release before recommending that GNU/Linux distributions incorporate it. So far there only appears to be one new bug added: U+1C90 has an extra vertical line added to it, making the character double-width instead of single-width. This will be fixed in the next release. Unifont 10.0.x went through 7 updates in about half a year. I felt that was not stable enough for those trying to maintain GNU/Linux distributions, so I did not keep recommending that each update, with minor changes from one to the next, be propagated. I plan to have more stability in Unifont 11.0.x.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• Open source has won. The fact that free software now dominates practically every sector of computing (with the main exception of the desktop) is proof of that. But there is something even more important than the victory of open source itself, and that is the wider success of the underlying approach it embodies. People often forget just how radical the idea of open, collaborative development seemed when it appeared in the 1990s. Although it is true that this philosophy was the norm in the very earliest days of the field, that culture was soon forgotten with the rapid rise of commercial computing, which swept everything before it in the pursuit of handsome profits. There, a premium was placed on maintaining trade secrets and of excluding competitors. But the appearance of GNU and Linux, along with the other open software projects that followed, provided repeated proof that the older approach was better for reasons that are obvious upon reflection.

Open Hardware/Modding

• To mark the 10th Anniversary of RepRap, 3D Printing Industry is interviewing early pioneers from the RepRap project and others who continue to share their work through Open Source licenses.

• Steve Wygant is the founder and CEO of SeeMeCNC. The Indiana based company designs and builds a variety of Delta 3D printers including the ARTEMIS and Rostock Max v3.

• Visitors to 3D printing shows, such as the Midwest RepRap Festival, may have also seen the Partdaddy – a large format Delta 3D printer capable of extruding 2 – 4lbs of pelletized feedstock and creating prints over 9 feet (3 meters) tall.

Programming/Development

• Released this week was the first alpha of PHP 7.3 and I decided to take it for a spin with some benchmarks. While not as dramatic as going from PHP5 to PHP 7.0, the performance of PHP7 continues getting better.

• PHP 7.3 so far introduces several new functions, finally drops support for BeOS, updates the bundled SQLite version, expands WebP support, improves PHP garbage collection, and other enhancements. PHP 7.3 is tentatively planned for release at the end of November while over the months ahead are more alphas/betas/RCs.

• This week we analyze more data from the Node.js Foundation‘s user survey. Almost three-quarters (73 percent) of survey respondents said they use a package manager. NPM was used by 60 percent and Yarn cited by 13 percent. Since Yarn sits on top of NPM, in reality these respondents are referring to an interface or tool they actually use day-to-day. Yarn’s use rose 44 percent compared to last year’s study.

• A maintenance release 0.1.5 of RcppZiggurat is now on the CRAN network for R.

• A maintenance update 0.3.6 of RcppGSL is now on CRAN. The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL using the Rcpp package.

• Programming Language Theory (PLT) is an extremely rich subject with a relatively high bar to entry. Most of the literature is written for a reader already well versed in the subject; it’s hard to find a tractable introduction. This post will take you through the construction of a simplistic toy programming language (and an interpreter for it) from first principles. I assume no knowledge on your part, aside from general programming experience.

Leftovers

Security

• The first part of the malware we are looking at is a wrapper DLL, compiled with the Free Pascal Compiler. From our telemetry, we have observed that this DLL is placed in the Windows folder, masquerading as a legitimate mpr.dll library file with a forged version info resource.

• The working of this spyware can be explained using its modular architecture. The very first module is a wrapper DLL that makes the malware look like legitimate DLL file. The malware can be launched by hijacking a DLL and loading the wrapper module during the Windows startup process instead of the legitimate DLL.

• Day in and day out, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the smart home revolution simply isn’t all that smart.

• Security analysts like Bruce Schneier have been sounding the alarm bells for years now about the lax to nonexistent security and privacy standards inherent in the internet of broken things space. From refrigerators that leak your Gmail credentials to Barbie dolls that can be easily hacked to spy on kids, it’s increasingly clear that dumber technology is often the smarter solution. Not only do many of these devices actually make us less secure, their lack of real security has resulted in their use in historically large DDoS attacks.

• Study after study shows it’s a problem that’s not really getting better. For example, despite a decade of reports about the lack of real security and privacy standards in smart TVs, Consumer Reports recently found that most smart TVs remain impressively open to attack and abuse. And a new study out of the UK by Which? studied 19 different smart gadgets and found a “staggering level of corporate surveillance of your home” by devices that routinely hoovered up consumer data, then funneled it out to dozens of partner companies — often without clear consumer permission…

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• June 19 marks six years since Julian Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Kellie Tranter weighs back in.

• Media reports that Australian government officials have visited Julian Assange in his Ecuadorian embassy refuge in London is welcome news. But the Turnbull Government still won’t say whether or not it agrees with the 2016 findings of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

• Wikileaks founder Julian Assange marks the sixth anniversary of his enforced sojourn at the Ecuador Embassy in London as a wanted man and facing a new headache from across the Atlantic.

• Journalist Julian Assange, who exposed US government war crimes, CIA conspiracies and rampant political corruption, has had all his connections with the outside world severed for ten weeks.

• Assange has been effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorian Embassy for nearly six years, forced to flee trumped-up allegations of rape, which have since been dropped, and the threats of the US government to extradite and prosecute him on equally false espionage charges.

• In addition to being denied visitors and adequate medical care, the Ecuadorian embassy has severed his internet access and jammed all his electronic communications, leaving him cut off from the outside world.

• With one of the world’s most famous political prisoners facing such intolerable conditions, and confronted with such imminent danger, one would expect that all political organizations that consider themselves left-wing would rush to his defense.

• However, despite initially voicing opposition to Assange’s hounding by US authorities, the entire gamut of the middle-class “left” has either ignored, downplayed or supported Assange’s persecution.

• The Turnbull government must act now to secure WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange’s right to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London and return to Australia, with guaranteed protection from extradition to the US.

• A demonstration will be held on Sunday, June 17 at 1:00 p.m. in Sydney Town Hall Square. Journalist John Pilger and Socialist Equality Party (SEP) national secretary James Cogan will demand that the Australian government meet its obligations to protect Assange, as it did for Al Jazeera journalist Peter Greste.

• James Cogan will be available at a press conference on Wednesday, June 13, at 11:00 a.m. in central Sydney, to answer questions.

• On December 15, 2010, Australian media editors and journalists issued a statement condemning US threats to charge Assange and WikiLeaks as “a serious threat to democracy,” which “relies on a free and fearless press.”

• On June 23, 2012, the ABC’s “Four Corners” broadcast a damning exposure of the politically motivated character of a Swedish investigation into allegations that Assange had committed sexual offences.

• It is a well-established principle of international law—and part of Australian law recognised by its own courts—that if a country’s citizens face improper treatment, persecution, and human rights violations, they may be the subject of diplomatic action, in that sovereign power’s discretion, to protect its citizens abroad. The Australian government must exercise that discretion and request from Britain the safe passage of Assange to Australia, to protect Assange and also Australia’s reputation as a rule-of-law state.

• The General Assembly vote in support of Espinosa was a substantial: 128 votes for 62 votes for the other nominee, Honduras’s UN ambassador, Mary Elizabeth Flores Flake. There were two abstentions. Washington was believed to favor Honduras because its right-wing government supported the provocative relocation of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. After the vote, Espinosa again hinted that Ecuador is working to force Assange out of the embassy into the clutches of waiting police and the prospect of extradition to the United States on charges of espionage. She stated she was in discussion with both British authorities and Assange’s lawyers. “I think all parties are interested in finding an outlet, a solution, to this complex situation,” she declared.

• [...]

• Such “freedom” apparently does not include freedom of speech or freedom of the press, at least as far as WikiLeaks is concerned. “Democracy” apparently does not include the right to expose war crimes and other misdeeds of the U.S. and other Western governments. The “freedom” espoused by Pence means submitting to the world’s wealthiest interests.

• Moreno’s evidently friendly discussion with Pence, and Espinosa’s victory in the UN, follow Moreno’s own attacks on Assange last week.

Finance

• Arron Banks briefed the CIA’s London bureau on his dealings with the Russian ambassador, he is set to claim to a Commons committee tomorrow.

• Links between the multimillionaire founder of Leave.EU, his business associate Andy Wigmore and the Kremlin were revealed yesterday after a cache of emails was handed to The Sunday Times.

• At least five cryptocurrencies have recently been hit with an attack that used to be more theoretical than actual, all in the last month. In each case, attackers have been able to amass enough computing power to compromise these smaller networks, rearrange their transactions and abscond with millions of dollars in an effort that’s perhaps the crypto equivalent of a bank heist.

• More surprising, though, may be that so-called 51% attacks are a well-known and dangerous cryptocurrency attack vector.

• There’s an important series of Brexit votes taking place tomorrow. The UK government will seek to overturn some sensible amendments made in the Lords, allotting just a few hours to consider many important issues.

• If you can, please write to your MPs today urging them to support amendments that will minimise the damage caused by the self-harming hard Brexit.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The 5-4 ruling is a setback for voting rights, but it’s not a signal for states to purge as they wish.

• The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that an Ohio voter purge program can resume, finding that the practice does not violate the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. The decision is a setback for voting rights in America and devastating for the thousands of Ohio voters who will show up at the polls only to learn that they have been purged and barred from casting a ballot — which happened to our client Larry Harmon in 2015.

• The ruling, however, is not a green light for states to initiate wholesale purges of registered voters however they see fit. While the court concluded that Ohio’s practice was permitted under the NVRA, it was unmistakably clear that states cannot purge registered voters without first providing notice and an opportunity to stay on the rolls.

• Along with our partners, the ACLU challenged Ohio’s voter purge process, which targets registered voters who do not vote in a two-year period for removal from the rolls. Here’s what the process looks like: Ohioans who don’t vote for two years are sent a nondescript postcard from the Ohio secretary of state’s office requesting a confirmation of their address. If those voters don’t respond to the notice or vote within the next two federal election cycles (or four years), they are kicked off the rolls without further notice.

• For decades, the Department of Justice, which enforces the NVRA, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, maintained that these kinds of purges are illegal — including in the run up to the 2016 election in this very case. Under Trump, however, the Justice Department flipped sides. It’s a stark reminder of the administration yet again reversing course on civil rights.

• As FAIR has noted before (7/3/16, 12/30/17), centrist and liberal media have a disturbing tendency to rehabilitate some of the most vile, reactionary forces on the American right simply because they say vaguely negative things about Donald Trump—a phenomenon we call “Trumpwashing.” In the understandable service of shoring up forces against a destructive president, producers and editors check their memories at the door and help rebrand a laundry list of war criminals, anti-LGBTQ weirdos and Islamophobic media hustlers simply because they also happen to not like Trump.

• The latest version of this terrible trend is the recent veneration of retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters. A long-time Fox News presence, Peters quit the network in March to much fanfare, calling it a “propaganda machine” in service of Trump. But Peters is a strange arbiter of what is and isn’t propaganda, given his long history of bigoted, warmongering virtrol. From insisting Islam “is not a religion of peace,” to constantly suggesting Black Lives Matter and Obama were Islamists, to calling Yemenis “primitive,” to writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal headlined “Civilian Casualties: No Apology Needed” (7/25/02), Peters has been one of the most bloodthirsty hawks and overtly anti-Muslim trolls in American media. He even lobbied for one of the very things he criticizes Putin for doing, the killing of journalists—calling for “military attacks on the partisan media” in the Journal of International Security Affairs (5/24/09).

Censorship/Free Speech

• A new French law to combat so-called “fake news” fits in all too well with the growing establishment campaign to censor dissident opinion by one means or another, argues Jean Bricmont.

• Supporters of longtime, award-winning Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoonist Rob Rogers gathered outside the newspaper’s former Downtown location today to condemn what they’re calling the censorship of his work by the paper’s higher-ups, particularly art that is critical of President Donald Trump.

• “The silencing of Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh’s premier political cartoonist, by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has outraged the paper’s readers and drawn national attention and condemnation,” said a press release from rally organizers, the “Ad Hoc Group to Free Rob Rogers.”

• “The local paper is one of the foundations of American democracy. Its purpose is to inform the citizens and to hold the powerful in the public and private sectors accountable. But who is there to hold the Post-Gazette accountable? We, the people. That’s who. And that is why we’ll be demonstrating…”

• A new French law to combat so-called “fake news” fits in all too well with the growing establishment campaign to censor dissident opinion by one means or another, argues Jean Bricmont.

• The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on Belarusian lawmakers to reject proposed laws that could “further censor” the media in the country.

• The New York-based media watchdog made the call in a statement on June 8, two days after Belarus’s Prosecutor-General Alyaksandr Kanyuk said his office was drafting legislation that would enable the state to prosecute people suspected of spreading “false” information on the Internet.

• Such a bill was “necessary” to prevent libel and curb the spread of false information that “turns public opinion upside down, which leads to big consequences,” Kanyuk told reporters in Minsk on June 6, adding that “the Introduction of a hefty fine or criminal prosecution is not ruled out.”

• The Committee to Protect Journalists today called on the Belarusian parliament to reject proposed laws that could further censor the media in the country. The Prosecutor General’s Office is drafting a bill on “fake news,” and the lower house of parliament separately is considering amendments to the media law.

• The bill being drafted by the Prosecutor General’s Office would allow the state to prosecute persons who spread “fake” information on the Internet, according to the independent Belarusian news site Tut.by and the state-owned BelTA news agency, both of which cited Belarusian Prosecutor General Alyaksandr Kanyuk.

• The court has ordered Open Source Security, Inc, and Bradley Spengler to pay $259,900.50 in legal fees to my attorneys, O’Melveny and Meyers. The court awarded about half what we asked for, courts usually do reduce awards.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Australian Signals Directorate appears to be bending the rulebook when it comes to the granting of Protected cloud status, favouring multinational American companies and knocking back smaller Australian outfits that meet the desired criteria.

• UPDATE: According to Dissent Doe (who runs the essential Databreaches.net), the ridiculous subpoena has apparently been withdrawn by Aaron Rich’s lawyers.

• The brother of murdered DNC employee Seth Rich is suing some right-wing writers and their publishing platforms for defamation. Aaron Rich raises some rather decent libel claims, pointing out he’s been subjected to numerous articles, tweets, podcasts, and livestreams pushing the theory he’s either responsible for his brother’s death or profited from it in some way. The lawsuit [PDF] names America First Media, the Washington Times, and writers Edward Butowsky and Matt Couch as defendants.

• [...]

• This would be concerning enough if that were the end of it. Many of these Twitter accounts have nothing to do with the defendants other than their echoing of allegedly-defamatory claims and their general political persuasion. Wikileaks has nothing to do with this other than its release of DNC emails. Everything tying Aaron Rich to Wikileaks stems from the defendants’ actions and words — not anything Wikileaks has done itself. This is already overbroad and we haven’t even gotten to the really broad part.

• [...]

• To be clear, Twitter has not turned over this info to Rich’s lawyers. His legal team is going to be facing a lot of tough questions from the judge once Twitter submits its challenge. (According to the docket, it doesn’t appear Twitter has done that yet, but then again, it was only served June 1st.) There’s always a small chance the judge will see nothing wrong with Twitter producing information linked to thousands of accounts, but that’s very unlikely. Twitter, fortunately, has a solid legal team. Other outlets that may be served in this case may not.

• Rich’s lawyers should know better than this. Perhaps they’re hoping the absurdity of the request will result in a narrowing that still allows them to access account info they would like to have, but haven’t shown any legal reason to demand. It’s also a reminder that subpoenas are only judicially vetted after they’ve been submitted to recipients and (this is important) after the recipient challenges them. Subpoena power is immense and it’s up to courts and recipients to ensure the power isn’t abused.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A senior White House aide to President Trump is deliberately feeding inaccurate/misinformation stories to White House staffers in an effort to weed out those who are speaking to reporters, this is called a ‘Canary Trap’ in CIA parlance.

• In the ongoing battle with leaks of internal meetings and memos, President Donald Trump is determined to finds out and punish those ‘canarys’ passing information on to the press, the NY-T’s reported..

• President Trump will soon identify the WH leakers and bring the up to the surface.

• President Trump has publicly condemned the leaks that have come out of his administration and has reportedly made staffers sign NDAs that extend beyond his Presidency.

• On the morning of June 12, 2016, police officer Omar Delgado pulled his cruiser up to his two-story townhome in Sanford, Florida, and sat in silence for 15 minutes, trying to process what he had seen during 3 1/2 hours inside the Pulse nightclub.

• He stripped his bloody uniform and gear off, put them in a trash bag, and took a shower. Then, he shut the door to his bedroom, locked it and tried to sleep.

• That same morning, firefighter EMT Brian Stilwell walked back to Orlando Fire Department Station 5. Working at the station just 300 feet from Pulse nightclub, Stilwell was one of the first on scene hours earlier.

• In the dawn’s light, he saw a pool of coagulated blood in front of the station. It was from a Pulse patron who had been shot in the stomach and dragged to that spot. Stilwell wondered if the man survived the night. Then, with a bucket of bleach and water, he helped clean the blood off the concrete.

• Down Orange Avenue, Alison Clarke and a fellow Orlando Police officer walked into a McDonald’s to use the bathroom. The restaurant had a TV with the news on, streaming live video of the scene she had just come from. People looked up from their coffee and breakfast, glanced at her and her partner, then back to the food. She used the restroom, washed up and bought two coffees. No one said anything. It was surreal.

• Last September, police woke up Lewis Cain at his house without a warrant and drove away with his car.

• On September 18, 2017, Lewis Cain, a disabled Vietnam veteran living in Nashville, Tennessee, woke to a flashlight shining in his eyes.

• It was officers from the Mount Juliet Police Department, who had arrived at Cain’s home with an arrest warrant for his son. Cain himself had not been accused of any crime, and the police had no warrant to enter his house or remove property from his home.

• Yet the officers later asked for the keys to Cain’s car. Confused but wishing to cooperate, he handed them over. When he objected, police told him that they were allowed to take his car.

• Then they opened his garage door and drove away in his 2009 BMW.

• A reporter at the most influential paper in English-language media appears to not know the difference between a government “tightly editing” and selectively editing video.

• New York Times reporter Herbert Buchsbaum (6/7/18) wrote up a propaganda video posted by the Israeli Defense Force, showing Rouzan al-Najjar–a 21-year-old medic the Israeli Defense Force shot and killed earlier this month—apparently throwing a tear-gas canister, along with a brief clip of her purportedly saying, “I am here on the front line and I act as a human shield.”

• The video seems to suggest that throwing a device spewing caustic gas away from people into an empty field is a sort of violence. (“This medic was incited by Hamas,” the video reads as she grabs the canister.) But the primary problem with the IDF video is that it deceptively edits her comments to distort what she said—a fact not noted by the Buchsbaum until paragraph 20, when he threw in this crucial piece of information…

• The government’s case against Marcus Hutchins, aka MalwareTech, isn’t getting any stronger. After detaining him at a Las Vegas airport following some post-conference partying, the FBI decided to hit the guy who inadvertently shut down WannaCry with charges for allegedly creating the Kronos malware. In essence, the case is about criminalizing security research, and the government’s indictment decided to hang Hutchins out to dry while allowing the people who actually sold the malware to remain unarrested and unindicted.

• The charges were weak and the government appeared to know it. Deployment of malware to cause damage and wreak havoc is one thing, but creating malware — something lots of security researchers do — isn’t a criminal activity in and of itself. Thrown into the mix were wiretap charges based on the very thin premise that the malware was used to intercept communications.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• June 11, 2018 is the day that the FCC’s so-called “Restoring Internet Freedom Order” goes into effect. This represents the FCC’s abdication of authority in upholding the hard-won net neutrality protections of the 2015 Open Internet Order. But this does not mean the fight is over.

• While the FCC ignored the will of the vast majority of Americans and voted not to enforce bans on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization, it doesn’t get the final say. Congress, states, and the courts can all work to restore these protections. As we have seen, net neutrality needs and deserves as many strong protections as possible, be they state or federal. ISPs who control your access to the Internet shouldn’t get to decide how you use it once you get online.

• Three states (Oregon, Washington, and Vermont) have passed state net neutrality laws. Six more (Hawai’i, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont) have executive orders doing the same. Overall, 35 states have some form of net neutrality protections in the works.

• The most immediate battle to save net neutrality is legislation that would effectively force the FCC to bring back the rules the FCC approved in 2015. Under the Congressional Review Act, or CRA, Congress, with the approval of the president, can not only reject regulations issued by a federal agency but effectively bar that agency from taking similar action again.

• Eventually I will get a proper cord-cutting operation in place. Antennae are up. One receiver is in place. I need to get the personal video recorder up and going next.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Legislative changes giving effect to South Africa’s recently published Intellectual Property Policy “Phase 1” will not take place during this term of government, the country’s trade minister has said. Meanwhile, a side-by-side comparison with the 2017 draft legislation shows a series of changes in the final policy, and the pharmaceutical industry is complaining but appears determined to continue investing in the country.

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