● 06.20.18

● Links 20/6/2018: Qt 5.11.1, Oracle Solaris 11.3 SRU 33, HHVM 3.27.0, Microsoft Helping ICE

Posted in News Roundup at 12:35 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Google has added a Guest app to its emergent and currently open source Fuchsia OS to enable Linux apps to run within Fuchsia as a virtual machine (VM). The Guest app makes use of a library called Machina that permits closer integration with the OS than is available with typical emulators, according to a recent 9to5Google story.

• Last month, Google announced a Project Crostini technology that will soon let Chromebook users more easily run mainstream Linux applications within a Chrome OS VM. This week, Acer’s Chromebook Flip C101 joined the short list of Chromebooks that will offer Linux support later this year.

• More than 100 Microsoft employees have protested against the company’s work with US immigration, following a “zero tolerance” policy that resulted in children being separated from their parents.

• The controversy surrounds a $19.4 million contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for the use of Microsoft’s cloud computing software by the US border agency.

• “We believe that Microsoft must take an ethical stand, and put children and families above profits,” states the letter, which is addressed to company CEO Satya Nadella.

Server

• As of last year, the Linux operating system was running 90 percent of public cloud workloads; has 62 percent of the embedded market share and runs all of the supercomputers in the TOP500 list, according to The Linux Foundation Open Mainframe Project’s 2018 State of the Open Mainframe Survey report.

• Despite a perceived bias that mainframes are behemoths that are costly to run and unreliable, the findings also revealed that more than nine in 10 respondents have an overall positive attitude about mainframe computing.

• The project conducted the survey to better understand use of mainframes in general. “If you have this amazing technology, with literally the fastest commercial CPUs on the planet, what are some of the barriers?” said John Mertic, director of program management for the foundation and Open Mainframe Project. “The driver was, there wasn’t any hard data around trends on the mainframe.”

• The race to exascale speed is getting a little more interesting with the introduction of HPE’s Astra — what will be the world’s largest ARM-based supercomputer.

• HPE is building Astra for Sandia National Laboratories and the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The NNSA will use the supercomputer to run advanced modeling and simulation workloads for things like national security, energy, science and health care.

• “ICE’s decision to accelerate IT modernization using Azure Government will help them innovate faster while reducing the burden of legacy IT. The agency is currently implementing transformative technologies for homeland security and public safety, and we’re proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud,” he wrote.

• As outrage grew online, a Microsoft employee quietly removed mention of ICE from the January press release this morning. Social media users noticed that, too. The company has since restored the press release’s original language, and called its removal a “mistake.”

• Microsoft Corp. scrubbed an online reference to its work for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the agency faces criticism for its role in separating families at the U.S.-Mexican border.

• Tech Workers Coalition, a labor group for tech industry employees, urged Microsoft employees to coordinate their opposition. “If you are a worker building these tools or others at Microsoft, decide now that you will not be complicit,” the group tweeted.

• Lew Tucker is a busy man. Aside from his day job as VP and CTO for Cloud Computing at Cisco, Tucker also sits on the board of directors at both the OpenStack Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, giving him a unique perspective on both organizations.

• Some in the industry have positioned Kubernetes as a competitive replacement for OpenStack, but that’s not what Tucker sees. In a video interview, Tucker explains where the intersection currently exists between OpenStack and Kubernetes and why he expects both to be successful.

Kernel Space

• Intel’s Chen Yu has sent out a set of patches providing experimental support for in-kernel encryption support for hibernation.

• In particular, this encryption support is about encrypting the hibernation image that is saved to the disk for the hibernation process. There are third-party ways to encrypt the hibernation image with an encrypted SWAP while this new code thanks to Intel is integrated within the kernel. Besides the kernel bits are also user-space code needed for generating the encryption key.

• Coreboot’s latest development code now supports parsing and booting of FIT payloads. FIT in this context is a Flattened Image Tree that leverages DeviceTree.

• As of Tuesday in Coreboot Git is handling for booting of FIT payloads, which in turn basically means a Linux kernel image as a payload for Coreboot to boot directly upon hardware initialization.

Linux Foundation

• Linux expertise is again in the top spot as the most sought after open source skill, says the latest Open Source Jobs Reportfrom Dice and The Linux Foundation. The seventh annual report shows rapidly growing demand for open source skills, particularly in areas of cloud technology.

Graphics Stack

• KDE Wayland developer Roman Gilg who started contributing to Wayland via last year’s Google Summer of Code is proposing a new Wayland protocol for dealing with desktop session suspension and restoration.

• This protocol extension would allow for more efficient support for client session suspension and restoration such as when you are logging out of your desktop session and want the windows restored at next log-in or if you are suspending your system. While Roman Gilg is working on this protocol with his KDE hat on, he has been talking with Sway and GNOME developers too for ensuring this protocol could work out for their needs.

• Thanks to work done over the past few months by AMD’s Marek Olšák on improving Mesa’s OpenGL compatibility profile support and then today carried over the final mile by Valve’s Timothy Arceri, Mesa 18.2 now exposes OpenGL 3.3 under the compatibility context.

• Hitting Git tonight is the enabling of the OpenGL 3.3 compatibility profile for RadeonSI.

• For coinciding with the start of the Computer Vision and Patern Recognition conference starting this week in Utah, NVIDIA has a slew of new software announcements.

• First up NVIDIA has announced the open-source DALI library for GPU-accelerated data augmentation and image loading that is optimized for data pipelines of deep learning frameworks like ResNET-50, TensorFlow, and PyTorch.

• - The initial list of sponsors have been announced for the annual X.Org Developers’ Conference (XDC2018) where Wayland, Mesa, and the X.Org Server tend to dominate the discussions for improving the open-source/Linux desktop.

• This year’s XDC conference is being hosted in A Coruña, Spain and taking place in September. The call for presentations is currently open for X.Org/mesa developers wishing to participate.

• Intel developers working on the GVT-g graphics virtualization technology have published their latest batch of Linux kernel driver changes.

• Keith Packard’s long in development work for improving the Linux display stack infrastructure for better dealing with VR head-mounted displays is about rounded out with the new Vulkan extension support being merged into Mesa.

• Just over a year ago famed X developer Keith Packard started contract work for Valve to improve the plumbing around the Linux/X.Org support for virtual reality HMDs for better performance and better integration. Within the Linux kernel and the X.Org Server he’s worked and landed the DRM leasing support of outputs to let a VR compositor (Steam VR) have direct access to the output, “non-desktop” quirk handling so VR HMDs don’t become mapped as part of a standard Linux desktop, and related work.

• There hasn’t been a new AMDGPU DC code drop in a while as AMD developers work to improve their internal processes, but hitting the wire today is a set of 51 new patches for this “display code” stack that work on a variety of improvements.

• The release of the Sway 1.0 Wayland compositor is inching closer with the recent third alpha release. Sway for the uninformed is a very promising i3-compatible Wayland compositor.

• Earlier this month Sway 1.0 Alpha 3 was released to succeed the second alpha release from the month prior. Sway 1.0 is succeeding the Sway 0.15 changes with a great deal of improvements. Most notably with the 1.0 series is now requiring the WLROOTS modular Wayland compositor library.

Applications

• The latest Brackets 1.13 release brings new features, like the ability to opening remote files, drag and drop support for the FileTreeFiew, an option to automatically update Brackets, and bug fixes.

• Brackets is a free, open source editor focused on web development / design, created by Adobe. The editor is available on Mac, Windows and Linux, and what makes it special is its live HTML, CSS and JS editing / preview.

• WebArchives is a web archive reader for Linux desktops which provides the ability to browse articles offline from websites such as Wikipedia or Wikisource, in multiple languages.

• The application is useful for those without a permanent Internet connection or those using metered connections – the offline sources can be downloaded at a friend’s house, copied on a USB stick, and imported into WebArchives. Or maybe you want to do some research somewhere up in the mountains where there’s no Internet. No problem, install WebArchives and download the Wikipedia source on your laptop before you go. After downloading a source, no Internet connection is needed to read, search and browse Wikipedia.

• The software supports reading ZIM files, an open file format that stores wiki content for offline usage, and it offers download links for a large number of sources, including Wikipedia, Stack Exchange sites (including Code Review, Super User, AskUbuntu, Bitcoin, etc.), ArchWiki, RationalWiki, TED talks, Vikidia, WikiMed Medical Encyclopedia, Wikinews, Wikisource, and many others.

• KDE Plasma Vault is a wonderful application. It works as advertised and is another killer feature for the KDE Plasma desktop environment. I highly encourage you to give it a try on openSUSE Leap 15.

• Bustle 0.7.1 is out now and supports monitoring the system bus, without requiring any prior system configuration. It also lets you monitor any other bus by providing its address, which I’ve already used to spy on ibus traffic.

• Instant messaging (IM) is a form of real-time communication between two or more individuals based on typed text. The text is conveyed via devices connected over a network such as the Internet.

• There are so many different instant messaging clients available, some software supports multiple protocols, others confine themselves to supporting a single protocol only.

• To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 13 high quality open source Linux IM clients. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants to converse with their family, friends, colleagues, and clients.

• Today I uploaded a new minor release of SysV init – version 2.90. This snapshot mostly fixes typos (in the source and Makefile), cleans up some old files and variables we were not using anymore, and adds some documentation. Basically, this is a house-keeping update.

• It’s been a while since last having anything to report on the SysVinit init system for those wishing to live in a systemd-free world, but a new release is now available.

Proprietary/Google

• Google has launched a new Virtual Reality video editor called VR180 Creator. Surprisingly, it is available for Linux and macOS, not Windows.

• It would appear that Google’s long-anticipated Android Messages for Desktops feature that let you text from the web on your personal computer is finally rolling out to users worldwide.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Seeds of Resilience looks like it could be quite interesting, it’s a village builder that’s turn-based as you battle against the elements.

• Super Cane Magic ZERO is a comedy action-RPG that I’m really quite fond of and the developer recently pushed out a major update. They’re getting close to the final release now, which is quite exciting.

• I’m a big fan of Robocraft, a free game where you build your own vehicle and battle with it. Now even more so, since they’ve removed the last traces of lootboxes.

• Darkest Dungeon: The Color Of Madness DLC brings quite a bit of new content to the gothic roguelike and it’s now officially out.

• For those who want to show their support for the smaller game store itch.io, now might be a good time as they’re doing their own summer sale.

• The Way of Life: DEFINITIVE EDITION officially arrived on Linux yesterday. A story-based game that aims to tackle some serious themes. A game that’s supposed to make you think a little, sometimes we do need to slow down a bit.

• Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! is a challenging and surprisingly good restaurant sim that just had a whopper of an update. Really fantastic to see it continue to have such big updates.

• The “Barista Update” went live this week, which has added in twenty-four new food and drink items. As the update name would suggest, a lot of these are coffee-shop type items including various forms of Lattes, milkshakes, Tea and so on.

• Super Galaxy Squadron EX Turbo is probably one of the most insane shoot ‘em ups I’ve ever played and it’s now on Linux.

• They announced a call for testers only a day ago which was an opt-in beta, but they’ve already pushed the Linux version out officially. I had a chance to try it after speaking to the publisher who joined our Discord to have a little chat about it.

• Remember Yorg? The free and open source racer I showed a little of back in March has a fresh update out with experimental multiplayer.

• This is a bit of a surprise! Someone going by the name ‘GalaXyHaXz’ has put up source code for the original Diablo that was apparently reverse engineered called ‘Devilution’. It doesn’t have the data, so you do need a copy of the original to work it.

• You all love your programming puzzle games right? Prime Mover is a puzzle game about designing circuit boards and it’s now on Linux.

• I have to admit, after basically falling in love with Opus Magnum from Zachtronics, I’m quite keen to try out more games like it. Prime Mover certainly looks the part and it seems users are liking it on Steam.

• - Laminar Research has published their latest usage statistics on the incredible X-Plane flight simulator software.

• Most interesting to us on these stats for this leading flight simulator are the OS usage numbers… These numbers put their Windows market-share at 62.2%, 36.9% for macOS, and just 0.9% for Linux. Their macOS user-base is huge in relation to Windows but the Linux use remains understandably quite low.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I am pleased to announce that Qt 5.11.1 is released today. As a patch release Qt 5.11.1 does not add any new functionality, but provides important bug fixes and other improvements.

• New Qt 5.11.1 is first patch release for Qt 5.11 series. There are fixes for over 150 bugs and it contains more than 700 changes compared to Qt 5.11.0. For details of the most important changes, please check the Change files of Qt 5.11.1. And don’t worry if some fix is missing from new Qt5.11.1 release; we are planning to release Qt 5.11.2 at the beginning of September.

• The KDE Plasma 5.13 desktop environment launched a week ago as the best release of the acclaimed desktop designed for GNU/Linux distributions, introducing new lock and login screens, redesigned system settings, Plasma Browser Integration, Plasma Discover enhancements, and many other improvements and changes.

• Now, users can update their KDE Plasma 5.13 installations to the first point release, KDE Plasma 5.13.1, which brings more than 20 bug fixes across various components, such as Plasma Discover, Plasma Add-ons, Plasma Desktop, Plasma Networkmanager (plasma-nm), KWin, and KDE Hotkeys.

• Several months back LibreOffice developers began working on better integration with KDE Plasma 5 and that has advanced again today with now having a native file picker.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Red Hat / GNOME developer veteran Matthias Clasen has recently begun a series of blog posts going in-depth with Flatpaks for those wondering how this application deployment technology is taking over the Linux desktop.

• Last week Clasen penned the initial piece for explaining bundles, runtimes, and extensions in the Flatpak realm.

• Epiphany 3.29.3 is now available as the latest version of this GNOME Web Browser.

• Being in the middle of the GNOME 3.30 development cycle, the Epiphany 3.29.3 release is made up of many changes. First up, Epiphany now has an experimental reader mode that is inspired by Mozilla’s Firefox reader mode. When viewing page sources in Epiphany, it will also now display within the web browser itself rather than the text editor.

Distributions

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• The past week brought a total of three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots and a bunch of new features and improvements for KDE users.

• Snapshot 20180618 updated just a few packages to include an updated GNU Compiler Collection 7, which fixes support for 32-bit AddressSanitizer with glibc 2.27+. Both perl-File-ShareDir and python-numpy were the other two packages that gave users minor fixes.

• The snapshots earlier in the week were more KDE centric. Snapshot 20180615 delivered KDE Applications 18.04.2. The updated applications focused on bugfixes, improvements and translations for Dolphin, Gwenview, KGpg, Kig, Konsole, Lokalize, Okular and many more. KGpg no longer fails to decrypt messages without a version header and image with Gwenview can now be redone after undoing them. The Linux Kernel jumped from 4.16.12 to 4.17.1 and fixed some btrfs and KVM issues. The newer kernel also ported an arm fix for HDMI output routing and fixed an atomic sequence handling with spi-nor and intel-spi. The hwinfo package tried a more aggressive way to catch all usb platform controllers with the 21.55 version. Libvirt 4.4.0 added support for migration of Virtual Machines with non-shared storage over Thread-Local Storage (TLS) and introduced a new virDomainDetachDevice Alias. Lenovo, HP and Dell tablets gaining greater support with the updated libwacom 0.30 package. Add support for PostgreSQL-style UPSERT were made available with sqlite3 3.24.0. Other tools like mercurial 4.6.1, snapper 0.5.5 were also updated in the snapshot.

• For users of openSUSE’s Tumbleweed rolling-release Linux distribution, it’s been a very busy month on the update front.

• Last week openSUSE Tumbleweed already upgraded to the phenomenal KDE Plasma 5.13 release as its default desktop along with KDE Applications 18.04.2.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced its collaboration with Lord Wandsworth College (LWC), an independent school for girls and boys aged 11 to 18, and the University of Surrey, a public research university specialising in science, engineering, medicine and business, on the Open Schools Coding Competition, designed to inspire the next generation of coders and software developers. In so doing, the competition hopes to contribute to building the UK’s digital talent pool.

• The competition is now in its second year, with 10 schools and approximately 100 students in the UK taking part. The competition aims to engage children ahead of making their subject choices for GCSE, so is open to Key Stage 3 students. It challenges teams of students to use any free visual programming environment to create a gaming app that will help a charity of their choice. The competition enables participants to apply the basic principles of open source software development and open collaboration to solve a real world problem in a fun and competitive environment, with the opportunity to win a prize for their team and recognition for their school. In choosing a charitable cause, each student can gain a sense of how they can use digital skills to make their own contribution to addressing societal challenges and how open source technology and methodology can drive positive change in the world.

• If you saw or heard about the multi-cloud demo at Red Hat Summit 2018, this article details how we ran Red Hat Data Grid in active-active-active mode across three cloud providers. This set up enabled us to show a fail over between cloud providers in real time with no loss of data. In addition to Red Hat Data Grid, we used Vert.x (reactive programming), OpenWhisk (serverless), and Red Hat Gluster Storage (software-defined storage.)

• Starting today, Red Hat announced that “all new Red Hat-initiated open source projects that opt to use GPLv2 or LGPLv2.1 will be expected to supplement the license with the cure commitment language of GPLv3″. The announcement notes that this development is the latest in “an ongoing initiative within the open source community to promote predictability and stability in enforcement of GPL-family licenses”.

• Red Hat today launched Red Hat Process Automation Manager 7, which is “a comprehensive, cloud-native platform for developing business automation services and process-centric applications across hybrid cloud environments”. This new release expands some key capabilities including cloud native application development, dynamic case management and low-code user experience. You can learn more and get started here.

• The books on this year’s open organization reading list crystallize so much of what makes “open” work: Honesty, authenticity, trust, and the courage to question those status quo arrangements that prevent us from achieving our potential by working powerfully together.

• Continuing Red Hat’s promise of 10-year lifecycle support for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 operating system series, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.10 update addresses critical security fixes and other important issues that might have an impact on businesses. Therefore, it is recommended to update to this release as soon as possible.

• “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.10 marks the transition from the Maintenance Support 1 lifecycle phase to the Maintenance Support 2 phase,” says Red Hat. “In order to help provide customers with a stable environment for the remainder of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 lifecycle, only critical security fixes and business-impacting urgent issues have been addressed.”

• Coming about a month after the release of the CentOS Linux 7.5 (1804) operating system for 64-bit (x86_64), 32-bit (i386), ARM64 (AArch64), PowerPC 64-bit (ppc64), PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le), and ARM-hfp (armhfp) compatible machines, CentOS Atomic Host 7.5 (7.1805) is now available to download.

• CentOS Atomic Host 7.5 (7.1805) is built from standard CentOS Linux 7 RPMs and the upstream packages included in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host 7.5 operating system. CentOS Linux is a free and open-source computer operating system for desktops and servers that’s always based on the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases.

• Not to be confused with Fedora Core going back to the early days of Fedora as a Red Hat project, but Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has just announced Fedora CoreOS.

• Fedora CoreOS is going to be the new upstream for CoreOS, which Red Hat acquired Core OS / Container Linux earlier this year. Matthew Miller expects that over the next year, Fedora Atomic Host will be replaced by “a new thing” combining the best of Container Linux and Project Atomic. With that new thing is Fedora CoreOS.

• Red Hat, a leading provider of open source solutions, has announced the launch of Red Hat Process Automation Manager 7, a comprehensive, cloud-native platform for developing business automation services and process-centric applications across hybrid cloud environments.

• Process Automation Manager is the next generation of Red Hat’s business process management (BPM) offering, Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite, and enables organisations to streamline, automate, measure and continuously improve business operations.

• Open source vendor Red Hat has changed its licensing and in future all company projects that choose to use the GNU General Public Licence version 2 or the Lesser General Public Licence version 2 will have to include language from the GPLv3 that provides violators with time to rectify their offence.

• The GPLv2 and the LGPLv2 have language in them that says anyone who violates the terms of the licences immediately becomes non-compliant and does not have any means of redeeming themselves.

• The GPLv3 gives an offender time to come into compliance, with there being mechanisms for licence reinstatement when compliance errors were promptly fixed.

Finance

Fedora

• - Back in early May was the announcement of the Silverblue project as an evolution of Fedora Atomic Workstation and trying to get this atomic OS into shape by Fedora 30. Beginning with Fedora 29, the plan is to officially rename Fedora Atomic Workstation to Fedora Silverblue.

• Silverblue isn’t just a placeholder name, but they are moving ahead with the re-branding initiative around it. The latest Fedora 29 change proposal is to officially change the name of “Fedora Atomic Workstation” to “Fedora Silverblue”.

• The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved on Friday more of the proposed features for this fall’s release of Fedora 29, including two of the more controversial proposals.

Debian Family

• Developed under the Debian Testing umbrella, the forthcoming Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” operating system series just received today the third alpha milestone of its installer, which lets people install the Linux-based operating system on their personal computers, servers, and IoT devices, such as the Raspberry Pi.

• One of the most interesting changes that caught out eyes is the bump of the kernel support from Linux kernel 4.13, which was used in the second alpha build, to Linux kernel 4.16. Of course, this means that there’s better hardware support, so chances are you’ll be able to install the development version of Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” on newer machines or if you have some exotic components on your PC.

• The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the third alpha release of the installer for Debian 10 “Buster”.

• The third alpha release of the Debian Installer to be used by Debian 10 “Buster” is now available for testing.

• There are many changes to this updated Debian Installer with the last alpha release being from last December. This newest Debian Installer for Buster now uses Cryptsetup 2.0, updates to the Linux 4.16 kernel (rather than 4.13), locale choosing improvements, various flash-kernel updates, debootstrap improvements, and other changes.

• In the past month I have been working on my GSoC project in Debian’s Distro Tracker. This project aims at designing and implementing new features in Distro Tracker to better support Debian teams to track the health of their packages and to prioritize their work efforts. In this post, I will describe the current status of my contributions, highlight the main challenges, and point the next steps.

Derivatives

• Released last week on June 11, 2018, the SparkyLinux 5.4 “Nibiru” rolling release operating system was available only as LXQt, MinimalGUI, and MinimalCLI editions. Today, the project launches three more editions, namely GameOver, Multimedia, and Rescue.

• “New live/install ISO images of special editions of SparkyLinux 5.4 “Nibiru”: GameOver, Multimedia & Rescue are out. Sparky 5 follows the rolling release model and is based on Debian testing branch “Buster”,” reads today’s announcement.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The latest Ubuntu Touch update from UBports, OTA-3, was released last year near the Christmas holidays, but it was still based on Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet), so if you though Ubuntu Phones are dead, think again, because the UBports team has been hard at work to bring you the OTA-4, which will be the first to rebase the operating system on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

• “The main reason why the arrival of OTA-4 seemed to take so long is because Ubuntu Touch switched its base to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus. This is a mammoth milestone for the project, because it allowed us to transition from the unsupported Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet to a Long Term Support (LTS) base,” reads today’s announcement.

• Canonical may have stopped developing/supporting a version of Ubuntu for smartphones and tablets. But the folks at UBPorts have kept the idea of a touch-friendly version of Ubuntu alive for the past year.

• Now the team has released Ubuntu Touch RC OTA-4, which is the first version based on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus.

• That’s significant because Xenial is an LTS (Long Term Support) release, which means the underlying operating system will still be supported by Canonical until 2021.

• A couple of weeks ago representatives from across Canonical met in London to talk about ideas to improve the user experience of GNOME Software. We had people from the store team, snap advocacy, snapd, design and from the desktop team. We were also fortunate enough to be joined by Richard Hughes representing upstream GNOME Software.

• The answer has its roots at both an infrastructure level, where legacy technology is being replaced with something more akin to what is seen in challengers banks or in technology leaders from Silicon Valley, and in changing mentalities, where a new mindset can be just as important as the technology that’s adopted.

• Of course, to say that this is simply a technological problem is naive, often, technology implementation is the easy part, with the larger challenge coming with organisational acceptance of the need to change.

• Often, the case is that an organisation isn’t culturally ready for change, resulting in projects that fail and negatively impact the ability to evolve with an increasingly tumultuous market that is being impacted by regulatory changes and a technology revolution.

• Mark Baker, Field Product Manager at Canonical, said: “We tend to find that the technology is the easy part once we’ve got the business aligned around a common goal with common sets of objectives and accepting of the change.”

• However, once an organisation is culturally aligned around a common goal and is accepting of technological change, then it is possible to work with a technology partner like Canonical in order to deploying the technology simple.

• The purpose of this communication is to provide a status update and highlights for any interesting subjects from the Ubuntu Server Team.

• There are many dark themes for GTK with a simple and good color scheme. But, I have been looking for a simple dark theme especially for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver). I tried many Dark themes on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and my mind was set on Qogir Dark theme.

• The simple design and the comfort of the dark colors scheme is quite amazing and gives a relief looking for the desktop environment. Qogir comes with a Dark and Light Theme for GTK 2.0 / GTK 3.0 and Gnome Shell. The Dark or the Light theme integration with the default installed applications such as Nautilus file manager, LibreOffice and Mozilla Firefox are quite good.

• Last month, Zenkit published their project management tool as a snap. For those not familiar with Zenkit, they introduced themselves in a guest blog at the time the snap was published which can be read here. Since then, we caught up with Philipp Beck, Full Stack Developer at Zenkit, to discover his opinion on snaps and the publishing experience.

• Philipp was introduced to snaps via a developer friend of his and could immediately appreciate the potential benefits for Zenkit to pursue and the advantages it would offer their users. For the former, Philipp comments: “The biggest draw for us was the ease at which we could reach a diverse range of Linux users, without having to specifically package Zenkit for each distribution. There are obvious benefits here in terms of time saved in updating multiple Linux packages too.”

Flavours and Variants

• The developers of Endless OS have just announced the release of version 3.4 of the distribution, it is a major update and it focuses mainly on helping users to take advantage of their Internet connection when they suppose to have it.

• Endless OS is a distribution oriented mainly to novice users who want to pay the least attention to the installation and configuration process and instead look for something that is ready with all the basic applications they will need.

• There probably aren’t two Linux distributions more closely related than Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Actually, the two are so close to one another, there’s serious debate about whether or not they are the same distribution.

• Linux Mint takes Ubuntu and adds some extra polish to it. Mint has a different default configuration, some additional packages, and its own desktop environments. Otherwise, it’s the same distribution as Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

• Lanner’s Linux-friendly “V6S” vehicle surveillance NVR computer runs on a Core i7-7600U CPU, and offers 10x PoE-ready GbE ports, 2x mini-PCIe slots, 2x swappable SATA bays, -20 to 60°C support, and shock/vibration resistance.

• We’re a little leery of surveillance systems with video analytics that focus on interior public spaces, such as the buses where Lanner’s V6S will store and process video feeds from Ethernet-connected IP cameras. Yet, we can also see the potential for devices like the V6S to save lives, and we’re always suckers for cool technology running Linux.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Sculpt for The Curious is the second development stage of the Genode-based general-purpose OS used at Genode Labs. Compared to the initial version, which was targeted at early adopters only, the new version invites a broader user base to explore the system. It comes in the form of a ready-to-use disk image for a bootable USB thumb drive.

• Sculpt OS is striving to become a general purpose operating system built off the Genode OS framework. The second release of Sculpt OS is now available and it’s much easier now to try out.

• Sculpt OS relies upon Genode’s micro-kernel architecture, sandboxed drivers, and other modern approaches for providing a unique OS on commodity PC hardware.

• Bitfi, a global payments technology company working to enable businesses and consumers to participate in the digital currency economy, today announced Bitfi Wallet – the first unhackable, open source hardware wallet with an accompanying dashboard that features wireless setup and support for many popular cryptocurrencies and crypto assets, including Monero, a fully decentralized private cryptocurrency that has previously never had a hardware wallet solution.

Events

• Today is the first official day of Call for Code, an annual global initiative from creator David Clark Cause, with IBM proudly serving as Founding Partner. Call for Code aims to unleash the collective power of the global open source developer community against the growing threat of natural disasters.

• Even as we prepare to accept submissions from technology teams around the world, the response from the technology community has been overwhelming and today I am thrilled to announce two new partners joining the cause.

• Now in its seventh major release, the Open edX platform is a free and open source course management system that is used all over the world to host Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as well as smaller classes and training modules. To date, Open edX software has powered more than 8,000 original courses and 50 million course enrollments. You can install the platform yourself with on-premise equipment or by leveraging any of the industry-leading cloud infrastructure services providers, but it is also increasingly being made available in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model from several of the project’s growing list of service providers.

• The Open edX platform is used by many of the world’s premier educational institutions as well as private sector companies, public sector institutions, NGOs, non-profits, and educational technology startups, and the project’s global community of service providers continues to make the platform accessible to ever-smaller organizations. If you plan to create and offer educational content to a broad audience, you should consider using the Open edX platform.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• In the last few months, Mozilla has invested in collaboration with other open source project leaders and academics who care about improving diversity & inclusion in Open Source through the CHAOSS D&I working group. Contributors so far include:

• Alexander Serebrenik (Eindhoven University of Technology) , Akshita Gupta (Outreachy), Amy Marrich (OpenStack), Anita Sarma (Oregon State University), Bhagashree Uday (Fedora), Daniel Izquierdo (Bitergia), Emma Irwin (Mozilla), Georg Link (University of Nebraska at Omaha), Gina Helfrich (NumFOCUS), Nicole Huesman (Intel) and Sean Goggins ((University of Missouri).

• Have you ever wanted to make a small web app to share your favorite places with your friends? For example your favorite photographs attached to a hike, or just a view of your favorite peak, or your favorite places downtown, or a suggested itinerary for friends visiting?

• So Mozilla is going all-in on Phabricator and Differential as a code review tool. I have mixed feelings on this, not least because it’s support for patch series is more manual than I’d like. But since this is the choice Mozilla has made I might as well start to get used to it. One of the first things you see when you log into Phabricator is a default view full of information.

• This week’s crate is SIMDNoise, a crate to use modern CPU vector instructions to generate various types of noise really fast. Thanks to gregwtmtno for the suggestion!

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• We’ve just released Oracle Solaris 11.3 SRU 33.

• Oracle Solaris 11.4 is still being prepared for release but in the meantime there is now the thirty-third stable release update for Solaris 11.3.

BSD

• On June 19, 1993 the name FreeBSD was officially agreed on and has been used ever since. Find out more about how to celebrate this important day with us.

• The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce today that June 19 has been declared National FreeBSD Day to celebrate the project’s official name 25th anniversary.

• Exactly 25 years ago on this day, on June 19, 1993, David Greenman sent an email to one of the mailing lists available at that point in time to suggest “FreeBSD” as the name for the Unix-like operating system used by billions of people all over the world, which continues to have a positive impact on us every single day.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• With not being able to deliver a 100% fully free software / libre system, the Librem 5 smartphone will rely upon a secondary processor for dealing with the necessary binary blobs for hardware initialization to keep them out of touch from the U-Boot boot-loader and Linux kernel.

• The first road-block in their effort to make the Librem 5 smartphone as open as possible is the DDR PHY with firmware blobs needed for the DDR4 memory training process at boot time. With it not being realistic for them to rewrite the firmware blob to do the DDR4 PHY training, they are planning to punt the binary-only blobs out to a secondary processor. In doing so, they can also apply for an exclusion with the Free Software Foundation for still having a device that “Respects Your Freedom” while still having necessary binary blobs at play.

• While investigating using the i.MX 8 for the Librem 5 phone we found an issue that would have been problematic for us to obtain the Free Software Foundation’s “Respects Your Freedom” (RYF) hardware endorsement…

Licensing/Legal

• Software Freedom Conservancy proudly welcomes Xapian as Conservancy’s newest member project. Xapian is a probabilistic information retrieval library that allows developers to add advanced indexing and search facilities to their own applications.

• Conservancy, a public charity focused on ethical technology, is the home of over forty member projects dedicated to developing free and open source software. Conservancy acts as a corporate umbrella, allowing member projects to operate as charitable initiatives without having to independently manage their own corporate structure and administrative services.

• “We’ve spent the past 18 years at Xapian developing a technologically mature software package,” said Olly Betts, Xapian’s Project Lead. “We’re excited about how Conservancy can help us extend that maturity to our project governance.”

Programming/Development

• Just over one month after the release of HHVM 3.26 that introduced the new HackC compiler front-end for Hack and PHP languages, HHVM 3.27 is now available.

• HHVM 3.27 is released!

• Programmers are passionate about which development methodology is the best. Is it Agile? Waterfall? Feature Driven Development? Scrum? So everyone took notice when one of the 17 authors of the seminal Agile Manifesto wrote a blog post last month headlined “Developers Should Abandon Agile.”

• Further down in his post, Ron Jeffries made a clear distinction between Manifesto Agile — “the core ideas from the Manifesto, in which I still believe” — and its usurping follower, “Faux Agile” (or, in extreme cases, “Dark Agile”). Jeffries ultimately urged developers to learn useful development methods — including but not limited to Extreme Programming — that are true to the Manifesto’s original principles, while also detaching their thinking from particular methodologies with an Agile name.

• In 1973, Carl Hewitt had an idea inspired by quantum mechanics. He wanted to develop computing machines that were capable of parallel execution of tasks, communicating with each other seamlessly while containing their own local memory and processors.

• Born was the actor model, and with that, a very simple concept: Everything is an actor. This allows for some great benefits: Separating business and other logic is made vastly easier. Security is easily gained because each core component of your application is separate and independent. Prototyping is accelerated due to the nature of actors and their interconnectivity.

• Earlier this year, Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, managing director in the technology division of Morgan Stanley, and a visiting professor of computer science at Columbia University in the US, wrote a letter inviting those overseeing the evolution of the programming language to “Remember the Vasa!”

• Easy for a Dane to understand no doubt, but perhaps more of a stretch for those with a few gaps in their knowledge of 17th century Scandinavian history. The Vasa was a Swedish warship, commissioned by King Gustavus Adolphus. It was the most powerful warship in the Baltic Sea from its maiden voyage on the August 10, 1628, until a few minutes later when it sank.

• Recently, there’s been a lot of turmoil in the systems language community. We have the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce nudging us towards rewriting everything in Rust. We have the C++17 folks who promise the safety and ease of use of modern programming languages with the performance and power of C. And then there’s a long tail of other “systems” programming languages, like Nim, Reason / OCaml, Crystal, Go, and Pony.

• Personally, I’m super excited we’re seeing some interesting work in the programming language theory space. This got me excited to learn more about what’s out there. A lot of the problems I solve are usually solved in C. Recently, Go has begun to encroach on C’s territory. I enjoy C and Go as much as the next person — They’re good languages for getting shit done. Often times, they leave a lot to be desired, and leave me envious of other programmers with tools like Flow, Typescript, and Dialyzer. Coming from developing in Erlang, even with its rudimentary type system, functional programming just came far more easily to me.

• Packt Publishing, publisher of software learning resources, has revealed the results of its 2018 Skill Up survey in a new report.

• From what programming languages, frameworks, and libraries are most used, to job satisfaction, attitudes to management and what it’s like to work in the software industry today, the report offers a snapshot of what matters to software developers in 2018.

Leftovers

• It is understandable that parents are concerned with what their children are up to in their digital bedrooms. But the current one-dimensional focus on the [I]nternet confuses the symptom with the underlying problem. When I interviewed a group of parents recently, they complained that their children spend all their time either texting or online, and rarely engage directly with other children. When I asked about what opportunities they have provided for their children to explore the physical world, and to have direct offline experiences with other children, there was a hesitant silence.

• The main principle behind getting my attention back was making a decision: I’m not going to do any tasks unless I think it’s a good time to do them worth doing in the first place.

• So instead of being reactive to everything that was coming from the outside world, I needed to decide if, why and when I’m going to do anything.

• In order to start as I meant to go on, I cut out all of the distractions that could interfere with my actions.

• The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission launched legal action in April 2017, claiming Apple had misled consumers about their warranty rights by routinely refusing to inspect or fix faulty devices without charge if they had been repaired by a third party.

• The US Supreme Court will scrutinize an antitrust lawsuit against Apple, opening the door for the computing giant to escape censure over its app store policies and potentially millions of dollars in claims.

• The lawsuit claims that Apple – which has had its fair share of legal challenges from alleged wage fixing to defective keyboards – has a monopoly on the app market, partly demonstrated by the fact it is able to claim a 30 per cent commission on all sold applications.

• That monopoly is used to kill off competition, the suit claims, by only allowing apps that are approved by Apple onto the App Store, with Apple insisting on exclusive distribution through its store as a condition of approval.

• In 1985, Atkinson dropped acid and came up with HyperCard, the groundbreaking multimedia authoring program that was really a precursor to the first Web browser. Atkinson recently told Leo Laporte the story of this incredible LSD-fueled eureka moment.

• I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information leading to knowledge leading to wisdom.

• This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard, a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas using new interactive media called HyperCard stacks.

Science

• THREE decades ago Thomas Malone modernised how the business world thought about digital communications in organisations with a seminal paper, “Electronic Markets and Electronic Hierarchies”. It was 1987, before the commercialisation of the [I]nternet, yet he and his co-authors predicted “an overall shift toward proportionately more use of markets—rather than hierarchies—to co-ordinate economic activity”.

• Evidence confirming that thesis is now everywhere. His book “The Future of Work” in 2004 foresaw “hyperspecialisation” in business, which has also come to pass. As a professor of management at MIT, Mr Malone has built on his earlier works to consider how new technologies and people can combine to create new kinds of productive entities, which he calls “superminds”—the title of his latest book.

• According to the Dice survey, more tech professionals experienced or witnessed discrimination due to age compared to gender, political affiliation, or sexual orientation. …In fact, among those 55 or older, 88 percent are worried that their age can hurt their continuing career.

• I got spammed again by SciencePG (“Science Publishing Group”).

• One of many (usually Chinese or Indian) fake publishers, that will publish anything as long as you pay their fees. But, unfortunately, once you published a few papers, you inevitably land on their spam list: they scrape the websites of good journals for email adresses, and you do want your contact email address on your papers.

Health/Nutrition

• And so Attaran is suggesting that Canada take aim at U.S. drug patents.

• The U.S. holds more pharmaceutical patents and other intellectual property licences than any other country. But that strength could become a vulnerability if Canada took action to suspend American patents on Canadian soil. Canadian companies would then be able to produce those drugs.

• “You hit us on tariffs, we hit you on patents,” he said.

• But what makes pharmaceutical patents ripe for retaliation is the vulnerability of America’s pharmaceutical industry. Six of the world’s top ten pharmaceutical companies are American. No industry throws more lobbying dollars around Washington—more than the banking, defence, and automobile industries combined. Any trade retaliation aimed at pharmaceuticals certainly will be felt on Wall Street and heard in the White House.

Security

• Larry Trowell, principal consultant with Synopsys Software Integrity Group, said the government shares some of the blame for the NSA exploit.

• “It’s in every country’s interest to develop systems enabling offensive and defensive strategies to protect individuals and national services,” Trowell wrote via email. “There is no fault in that. If the NSA does have some blame to share in this situation, it is for allowing secrets to be exfiltrated — not in developing them.”

• Jett said although the NSA exploit was stolen, “they didn’t create the vulnerabilities that allow for the malware to exploit devices.”

• “As such, you can’t hold them responsible for the malware that has emerged from the EternalRomance exploit. Vendors whose products are vulnerable to EternalRomance are responsible for resolving the exploit problem,” Jett wrote. “Additionally, it has been more than a year since the NSA exploits were released, and vendors have created patches. It becomes incumbent on the users to make sure they are properly patching their software and reducing the threat surface for these exploits.”

• While both researchers agreed that their colleagues would gain from incorporating hackers’ discoveries into their own work, they diverged when diagnosing the source of the gulf between the two camps and, to a degree, even on the extent of the rift.

• A sneaky and persistent malware has surfaced which spams Windows 10 PCs with ads and takes screenshots to eventually send it to the attackers.

• Security researchers at Bitdefender found this malware named Zacinlo which first appeared in 2012. About 90% of Zacinlo’s victims are from the US running Microsoft Windows 10. There are other victims too from Western Europe, China, and India with a small fraction running Windows 7 or 8.

• Security oriented BSD operating system OpenBSD is making the move to disable Hyper Threading (HT) on Intel CPUs and more broadly moving to disable SMT (Simultanious Multi Threading) on other CPUs too.

• Disabling of Intel HT and to follow with disabling SMT for other architectures is being done in the name of security. “SMT (Simultanious Multi Threading) implementations typically share TLBs and L1 caches between threads. This can make cache timing attacks a lot easier and we strongly suspect that this will make several spectre-class bugs exploitable. Especially on Intel’s SMT implementation which is better known as Hypter-threading. We really should not run different security domains on different processor threads of the same core.”

• OpenBSD could improve their kernel’s scheduler to workaround this, but given that is a large feat, at least for now they have decided to disable Hyper Threading by default.

• Those wishing to toggle the OpenBSD SMT support can use the new hw.smt sysctl setting on OpenBSD/AMD64 and is being extended to cover CPUs from other vendors and architectures.

• Organizations are best served security-wise if they favor and adopt open source technology — especially enterprise open source — over proprietary alternatives, according to Hortonworks. However, not everybody agrees that open source software intrinsically is more secure.

• It’s tough to argue that open source hasn’t brought significant benefits to the IT industry and the tens of thousands of organizations that rely on IT products to automate their operations. Starting with the introduction of Linux in the late 1990s, major swaths of the tech industry have shifted to open source development methodologies. That includes the vast majority of the big data ecosystem, which has been largely bootstrapped by various Apache Software Foundation projects.

Defence/Aggression

• He was born Darrell Lamont Phelps. He grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, moved down to the city, tried his hand at comedy, and later converted to Islam, adopting the name of Bilal Abdul Kareem. Now 46 years old, he lives in the Middle East, where he has a wife, five children, and a controversial freelance-journalism career focused on Islamist fighters in the Syrian civil war.

• In his estimation, the United States government has tried to kill him five times. Last week, he won the ability to proceed with a lawsuit that could save his life. It may also constrain the president’s ability to order other Americans killed.

• The great man and his army of bodyguards would suspect nothing, CIA operatives assured the would-be assassin at a secret meeting in Paris on November 22, 1963. Major Rolando Cubela Secades, a Cuban army officer and revolutionary comrade of Castro who was plotting to replace him, wasn’t too impressed.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• As they prepared to hold a vigil they called for the UN to intervene on his sixth anniversary as an asylum-seeker.

• Mr Assange’s team of lawyers claimed doctors have confirmed his protracted confinement in the Ecuador’s London embassy is having a severe impact on the journalist’s physical and mental health.

• Calling for the intervention of the UN’s Human Rights Council, they argued the UK is forcing Mr Assange, 46, to make an “impossible” choice.

• Human rights barrister Jennifer Robinson of Doughty Street Chambers, representing the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, said: “The UK shows a deliberate disregard for his medical needs by forcing him to choose between his human right to asylum and his human right to medical treatment.

• Today marks the sixth anniversary of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s effective house arrest in London. He cannot move around in public, because he fears he will be arrested and extradited to America — a daunting prospect, since a UN special rapporteur described Chelsea Manning’s treatment by that country’s justice system as torture.

• Assange is divisive. Hawks wish him nothing but misfortune and a stretch in jail. According to journalist John Pilger, a leaked official memo says: “Assange is going to make a nice bride in prison. Screw the terrorist. He’ll be eating cat food forever.”

• If you stand at the other end of the spectrum, Assange is a hero who revealed how our world really works. Consequently, he has been relentlessly targeted. Hilary Clinton has contributed to this process, as Assange highlighted the Clintons’ links with Saudi Arabia and the multimillion donations that kingdom made to their foundation, after she, as secretary of state, sanctioned an $80bn Saudi arms deal.

• The Socialist Equality Party held a powerful rally yesterday at Sydney’s Town Hall Square, demanding that the Australian government of Malcolm Turnbull take immediate action to secure Julian Assange’s freedom and return to Australia, with a guarantee that he will not be extradited to the United States.

• Hundreds of workers and young people attended the event, under conditions of a media blackout of the protest and the growing dangers facing the WikiLeaks editor. Attendees travelled from as far away as Hobart, the Tasmanian capital—a trip of 1,500 kilometres. Contingents came from Victoria’s capital city, Melbourne, as well as Newcastle, a working-class regional centre of New South Wales, and other cities and towns.

• A lawyer for Julian Assange has urged the United Nations to make an official visit to see first hand the impact living inside of the Ecuadorian embassy for six years has had on the WikiLeaks founder. Jennifer Robinson told the UN Human Rights Council that Mr Assange was unable to obtain proper medical attention and was being denied sunlight. British authorities have made it clear to Mr Assange if he were to leave the embassy, even for medical treatment, he would be arrested.

• Pro-Assange rally: Rally outside the British Consulate to support Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is detained at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. 4-6 p.m., 1 Sansome St., San Francisco. More information is here.

• On June 19, thousands of WikiLeaks supporters will hold rallies in Washington, DC, to protest against the conditions to which WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is being subjected to inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

• Kevin Zeese, co-coordinator of Popular Resistance, an activist group based in Maryland that tackles a broad range of social issues, told Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear that the rallies for Assange are a vital fight against big corporations and the US government monopolizing the media.

• A former CIA engineer who was charged with possession of child pornography has also been charged with leaking thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.

• According to the new superseding indictment, which was made public on Monday, Schulte faces numerous charges, including illegal gathering of national defense information, transmission of this information, obstruction of justice, among others.

• On Monday, ex-CIA officer Joshua Schulte was charged by the US Attorney’s Office from the Southern District of New York for child pornography offenses and for stealing classified national defense information from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and sending the material to an organization that disseminates such information publicly.

• If the U.S.-led campaign to extradite and silence Assange is successful, it will invariably become the blueprint used by powerful governments like the U.S. to silence independent journalists the world over, and bludgeon them into submission.

• It has been six years since Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, fled to the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to seek asylum from possible extradition to the United States to face indictment under the US Espionage Act.

• At the time, Assange, an Australian national, was wanted by Sweden for questioning over sexual offense allegations. Assange had also broken the terms of his UK bail. Since then, he has become even more controversial, having published US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails and internal emails from Democratic Party officials.

• While some admire and others despise Assange, no one should be prosecuted under the antiquated Espionage Act for publishing leaked government documents. That 1917 statute was designed to punish people who leaked secrets to a foreign government, not to the media, and allows no defense or mitigation of punishment on the basis that public interest served by some leaks may outweigh any harm to national security.

• As I write this, demonstrations around the world are taking place in protest of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange’s arbitrary detention and silencing by the US-centralized power establishment that has been actively pursuing his destruction for over a decade. The demonstrations will be well-attended, but not a fraction as well-attended as they should be. They will receive international attention, but not a fraction as much attention as they should.

• This is because the manipulators and smear merchants who have made their careers paving the way for oligarchic agendas have been successful in killing off sympathy for the plight of Assange. As we discussed yesterday, sympathy is key for getting narratives to take hold in public consciousness. This is why western corporate media will circulate pictures of dead children all day long when it’s in the interests of advancing longstanding imperialist agendas, but never when those children were killed by western weapons. If you can tug at someone’s heart strings while telling them a story, the story you tell them will slide right in with minimal scrutiny. And it works the other way, too: if you can prevent someone’s heart strings from being plucked while hearing about a legitimately heartbreaking story, you can prevent that story from taking hold. Kill all sympathy for a dissident journalist and you kill all belief in his side of the story.

Finance

• SurveyMonkey on Monday said that it has confidentially filed for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission via its parent company SVMK.

• The company said that it had not yet determined the number of shares nor the price per share that it would offer.

• At the start of this year, there were almost 119 million contactless cards in circulation, – 78 per cent of debit cards and 62 per cent of credit cards in the UK are contactless currently.

• Amongst the surprising card accepting sectors are vicars and buskers.

• The Chinese aren’t stealing money or anything of value from USA by having a trade surplus with USA. That’s a symptom of the wealth of USA, not the greed of China.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• From a new Supreme Court ruling to a census question about citizenship, the campaign against illegal registration is thriving. But when the top proponent was challenged in a Kansas courtroom to prove that such fraud is rampant, the claims went up in smoke.

• [...]

• The trial had a significance that extends far beyond the Jayhawk state. One of the fundamental questions in the debate over alleged voter fraud — whether a substantial number of non-citizens are in fact registering to vote — was one of two issues to be determined in the Kansas proceedings. (The second was whether there was a less burdensome solution than what Kansas had adopted.) That made the trial a telling opportunity to remove the voter fraud claims from the charged, and largely proof-free, realms of political campaigns and cable news shoutfests and examine them under the exacting strictures of the rules of evidence.

• That’s precisely what occurred and according to Robinson, an appointee of George W. Bush, the proof that voter fraud is widespread was utterly lacking. As the judge put it, “the court finds no credible evidence that a substantial number of noncitizens registered to vote” even under the previous law, which Kobach had claimed was weak.

• My grandfather Henry was a lifelong socialist who had no illusions about the British Empire and its role in the World. Yet he was also a patriotic Englishman whose life, like so many of his generation, was largely defined by the struggle against Nazism, in which his only son had been killed. That focus on the Second World War partly explained his fondness for the Soviet Union, in discussing the abuses of which he would always remark “But you have to consider what came before. Given where they started, they are making progress”. He would recite “A man’s a man for a’that” to me as a small child and explain its meaning. Yet Henry would fly his St George’s flag proudly when occasion warranted it. I do not therefore automatically associate that flag with UKIP or with Essex man.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Consider for a moment the range of behaviours that cinema sponsors. Rape, arson and pillage. Defenestration, disembowelment, drawing and quartering, amputation and flaying alive. Hanging, electrocution and crucifixion. Enslavement, political persecution, assassination and genocide. Treachery, betrayal, humiliation and heart-breaking. Wife-beating, serial killing and cannibalism. Incest, castration, and police brutality. Mass slaughter on battle-fields or western frontiers and even in outer space. Stabbing, strangling, poisoning and bludgeoning to a bloody pulp. Oh, but never mind that. Just so long as nobody smokes.

• Accordingly, the young casually assume not only that they’re the cutting-edge, trend-setting arbiters of the acceptable now, but that they always will be. The students running campuses like re-education camps aren’t afraid of being muzzled, because they imagine they will always be the ones doing the muzzling — the ones dictating what words we can use (cis, not heterosexual), what books we can read (Tom Sawyer is out), what practices we can embrace (white people may not wear dreadlocks). These millennials don’t fear censorship because they plan on doing all the censoring.

• Everpress and Amnesty International have joined forces to launch 50/50, a collaborative exploration of a single topic – censorship. Fifty limited-edition t-shirts have been designed and produced by 50 leading artists on this theme, including Liam Hodges, Careaux, Octavian, Thierry Noir, Hetty Douglas – all to encourage discussion and raise crucial funds for the human rights organisation.

• The t-shirts are on display at an exhibition at Protein Studios in Shoreditch and are on sale at everpress.com until 28 June. Each t-shirt costs £25 and half the profits will go to the designers while the remaining will go to Amnesty.

• The Kingston Crown Court gave its ruling on June 15. For three years, each of 1011′s five members must seek permission before creating music. They are prohibited from rapping about violence or death in their lyrics, and “mentioning named postcodes in a gang context.” The group must inform the police 24 hours before releasing new music videos, and 48 hours before any performance or filming, which police must also be present for.

• The five members of 1011 were arrested in November 2017 and charged with conspiracy to commit violent disorder. The group admitted to the charge, leading to the new court order.

• A human rights group has criticised a landmark court decision banning a drill group from making music with violent lyrics, claiming the focus on the genre “highlights the danger that racial bias infects the criminal justice system”.

• Recorder Ann Mulligan on Friday banned Yonas Girma, 21, Micah Bedeau, 19, Isaac Marshall, 18, Jordan Bedeau, 17, and Rhys Herbert, 17, from mentioning death or injury in songs or on social media after a hearing at Kingston Crown Court.

• Recently, controversy and criticism have fallen upon Active Shooter, an early-access tactical first-person shooter in which players can either be a SWAT member or the eponymous “active shooter” during a fictitious school shooting. The game was developed by Ata Berdiyev, who has been disparaged as a known troll and caustic developer. He had previously released other games with inflammatory titles such as White Power: Pure Voltage and Tyde Pod Challenge, used purely for shock value for otherwise benign and simple games. After significant backlash, Active Shooter was pulled by Valve from its digital distribution platform, Steam, and Berdiyev was subsequently barred from doing business with Valve.

• Two subjects were off limits at a major gathering of top Chinese and Hollywood movie producers and financiers in Shanghai this week.

• Journalists covering the Global Film Industry Value Chain Development Forum event were told not to ask questions about tax avoidance or the US trade war. Both issues are topical and present major challenges to the next phase of growth for China’s booming movie industry.

• The request itself highlights another challenge for western movie-makers seeking to profit from the world’s second-largest box office – censorship.

• China’s box office is poised to take over Hollywood as the world’s largest next year as US movie studios increasingly target Chinese audiences. However, that often involves skirting around Beijing’s tough censorship rules, which means plots or characters which are critical of China or touch on sensitive issues such as Tibet are unlikely to be screened in the country. An extreme example of this was casting white Scottish actor Tilda Swinton as a Tibetan monk in Doctor Strange in 2016 to avoid upsetting Beijing.

• The European Parliament will tomorrow vote on a reformed Copyright Directive, which among other things features provisions mandating online platforms to install automated upload filters that many fear could result in significant “over-blocking” of lawful content (censorship) and restrictions on news linking.

• The proposed “content recognition technologies” appear to form part of the proposed Article 13, which makes intermediaries (instead of just end-users) liable for uploads by their users and seems to circumvent the existing E-Commerce Directive. It would essentially require businesses to implement automated filters that scan for and then block copyrighted videos, photos, music, text or code in user submitted content.

• Writing for Dazed, the Warp artist takes aim at the Met Police’s new court order against the genre.

• The Sinclair deal combines unprecedented market control with a pattern of forcing local TV stations to run propaganda.

• The Federal Communications Commission is currently considering a corporate acquisition that would make a single company — Sinclair Broadcasting Group — the largest owner of local TV stations in history.

• Americans watch more local news than cable news or network news, making that medium key for informing the public about important issues. In a public comment submitted Tuesday, we formally urged the FCC to block the deal. This unprecedented concentration of control, which contradicts the FCC’s own policies about how wide a broadcasting company’s reach can be, would stifle the diversity of views in the press that’s essential for a healthy democracy.

• You may have heard of Sinclair before, because it has been exposed for repeatedly injecting politically charged segments into local news, which otherwise typically avoids ideological punditry.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Until now, the year 2018 had been all about the security of user data and its misuse by big tech giants. In the past where advertisers profited from our data through targeted marketing, the recent European Union GDPR regulations and Cambridge Analytica scandal forced the corporations into updating their privacy policies. In short, adding restrictions on advertisers thus prompting more digital data control for users.

• When the Facebook, Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, we noted that however bad you thought that scandal was (and it certainly was bad), it couldn’t hold a candle to the routine privacy abuses that have occurred in the telecom sector for the better part of the last few decades. From charging consumers hundreds of additional dollars annually to opt out of snoopvertising, to the use of private user financial data to justify providing even worse customer service, the broadband industry has long been the poster child for privacy abuses without much in the way of practical public penalty.

• It’s just as bad on the wireless side, where carriers like Verizon have routinely have been caught modifying user data packets to track users around the internet (without telling them or providing opt out tools), and selling user browsing, app-usage and location data to everyone that comes calling. That’s before you even touch on the fact that these companies are practically bone grafted to the NSA and other intelligence services.

• As such, we noted how if you were part of the #DeleteFacebook set but were still rolling around using a stock phone on an incumbent carrier network, you failed to understand that Facebook’s casual treatment of private consumer data was the cross-industry norm, not some errant exception.

• Advertisers who wish to run their ads on the messenger can do so by opting for paid Facebook ad campaigns. As of now, no option has been provided to run ads only on the Messenger.

• Messenger first started selling ads inside Messenger 18 months ago, but they were static ads, not video. The benefit of video ads is that they’re usually more expensive, which means they’re more valuable to Facebook. The company has said in the past that it’s running out of room for ads inside its flagship Facebook app, so we’ve seen Facebook expand ads into more places, like Messenger and Facebook’s Craigslist competitor, Marketplace.

• This week I will continue to integrate pgpainless into Smack. There is also still a significant lack of JUnit tests in both projects. One issue I have is, that during my project I often have to deal with objects, that bundle information together. Those data structures are needed in smack-openpgp, smack-openpgp-bouncycastle, as well as in pgpainless. Since smack-openpgp and pgpainless do not depend on one another, I need to write duplicate code to provide all modules with classes that offer the needed functionality. This is a real bummer and creates a lot of ugly boilerplate code.

• People tend to think of the GDPR as regulation companies must comply with. But thanks to a decision by the Court of Appeals for the EU earlier this month, there’s particular reason to believe that ordinary Internet users will need to worry about complying with it as well.

• In this decision the court found that the administrator of a fan page on Facebook is jointly responsible with Facebook for the processing of its visitors’ data. And, as such, the administrator must comply with applicable data processing regulations – which necessarily include the GDPR.

• Browser fingerprinting is on a collision course with privacy regulations. For almost a decade, EFF has been raising awareness about this tracking technique with projects like Panopticlick. Compared to more well-known tracking “cookies,” browser fingerprinting is trickier for users and browser extensions to combat: websites can do it without detection, and it’s very difficult to modify browsers so that they are less vulnerable to it. As cookies have become more visible and easier to block, companies have been increasingly tempted to turn to sneakier fingerprinting techniques.

• But companies also have to obey the law. And for residents of the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which entered into force on May 25th, is intended to cover exactly this kind of covert data collection. The EU has also begun the process of updating its ePrivacy Directive, best known for its mandate that websites must warn you about any cookies they are using. If you’ve ever seen a message asking you to approve a site’s cookie use, that’s likely based on this earlier Europe-wide law.

• This leads to a key question: Will the GDPR require companies to make fingerprinting as visible to users as the original ePrivacy Directive required them to make cookies?

• The answer, in short, is yes. Where the purpose of fingerprinting is tracking people, it will constitute “personal data processing” and will be covered by the GDPR.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Freedom of movement is the founding value of the European Union. The “four freedoms” are inscribed in the binding EU treaties and directives: free movement of goods, services, capital and persons (labor) among the Member States.

• Of course, the key freedom here is that of capital, the indispensable condition of neoliberal globalization. It enables international finance to go and do whatever promises to be profitable, regardless of national boundaries. The European Union is the kernel of the worldwide “Open Society”, as promoted by financier George Soros.

• However, extended to the phenomenon of mass immigration, the doctrine of “free movement” is disuniting the Union.

• The Trump administration made a policy choice, but doesn’t want to own the consequences. Here’s what you need to know.

• With nearly 2,000 immigrant children separated from their parents in just six weeks alone, there is an unprecedented human rights disaster unfolding at our border. As public outrage mounts, members of Congress demand access to government-run facilities, and the United Nations condemns us, the Trump administration is attempting to shift the blame — fast.

• In the past week, the administration has made several misleading statements, trying to justify the systematic separation of children from their parents. On Monday, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen held a press briefing where she doubled down on family separation, denying that the separation of children from their parents amounts to child abuse because, “We give them medical care. There’s videos; There’s TVs.”

• All the while, horror stories are emerging: among them, Marco Antonio Muñoz, a Honduran father, who killed himself after being separated from his wife and child; three siblings taken from their parents who were told that they couldn’t hug each other in the shelter they were placed in; and parents who were deported four months ago and are still waiting for the U.S. to return their baby.

• The level of cruelty is difficult to comprehend, and that’s how the administration wants it. Here’s what you need to know to understand family separation.

• As the Trump administration continues to defend its “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which, since April, has separated more than 2,300 children from their parents at the border, ProPublica obtained an audio recording from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility. The recording captured the voices of kids as young as 4, crying for “Mami” and “Papá” as if those were the only words they knew.

• Amid a bipartisan backlash, President Trump has tried repeatedly to shift blame to Democrats for his own administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, which has resulted in more than 2,300 migrant children being taken from their families along the U.S.-Mexico border. “The Democrats have to change their law — that’s their law,” Trump told reporters on Friday.

• The president didn’t specify which law he was talking about. But the statute at the center of his administration’s policy is the work of Republicans — with origins dating back all the way to World War I — albeit with substantial Democratic support along the way. Known originally as the “Undesirable Aliens Act,” the statute would not exist without support from, respectively, a eugenicist and a white supremacist.

• The law in question was the foundation of a memo Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued in early April that laid out the administration’s new, zero-tolerance policy. In the memo, Sessions instructed federal prosecutors in the southwestern United States to file criminal charges against any adults caught entering the country illegally. His order stripped officials of discretion over whether to place migrant families seeking asylum into civil proceedings, which allow families to stay together. (Court rulings limit how long the government can detain migrants in civil proceedings. There’s also no guarantee they’ll return for future hearing dates once they’re let out, a phenomenon that has prompted the president’s complaints about “catch and release.”)

• Juneteenth is a celebration of African-Americans’ emancipation and a reminder of the horrors the U.S. can’t afford to forget.

• Even historians find themselves startled by the past.

• My blood ran cold on a recent visit to Montgomery, Alabama. I was there to experience something that didn’t exist anywhere in America just a few months ago, but which deeply resonated with me as a Black man: a museum and memorial site dedicated to recognizing our nation’s grisly history of slavery, lynchings, and mass incarceration.

• The stunning new project spearheaded by NYU Law Professor Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative boldly confronts the legacy of the U.S. carceral state. Upon entering a dark tunnel, holograms of enslaved Africans speak to the museum visitor from behind the bars of an early 19th-century Montgomery jail, where they awaited the auction block. Passing into the light of day, one enters a timeline chronicling U.S. racial terrorism.

• This project fills a critical void given an endemic lack of knowledge in this country of systemic cycles of inequality and the erasure of history surrounding anti-Blackness. Like the Legacy Museum, Juneteenth — the nation’s biggest celebration of Black freedom, marked every year on June 19 — offers an opportunity to remember the brutalities that have been hidden in plain sight from so many Americans.

• A report published earlier this year by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project revealed that only 8 percent of U.S. high school seniors know the Civil War occurred because of slavery. Some textbooks have softened the language about the inhumane institution. So have some of our leaders. In 2017, HUD Secretary Ben Carson publicly referenced Black people who’d been kidnapped and transported to America via the Middle Passage as “immigrants” rather than slaves.

• It is this willful blindness that enables the perpetuation of slavery’s legacy. Some of our nation’s top legal minds — such as Michelle Alexander, Bryan Stevenson, and Jeff Robinson — have revealed how slavery and segregation have evolved into new methods of racial torture and alienation. The racially biased war on drugs and disparate sentencing have led to more Black people being encaged by the criminal justice system today than were ever enslaved in America. Even in liberal cities like New York City, Black people are eight times more likely to be put in handcuffs for marijuana-related charges than white people, despite studies showing that they use the substance at the same rates.

• You may recall that about this time last year, the House of Representatives put together a budget that included funding for a brand new military branch dubbed the Space Force. At the time, our take is that this was always inevitable, as humanity tends to carry its war-making luggage everywhere we go and, since we go to space, we’re going to have a Space Force. More surprising was the pushback from those who have a thing or two to say about military matters, such as Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who noted that setting up a new military branch was hellishly complicated, and required congressional approval.

• I have known Kirstjen Nielsen for nearly 30 years — since we were both incoming freshman at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, or SFS, in Washington. The program is considered to be a training ground for the diplomats, policymakers and global business leaders of tomorrow. As the school’s website says, “SFS undergraduates enter a prestigious program with a legacy of academic excellence combined with a devotion to humanitarian service.”

• [...]

• But Nielsen needs to think this through more than one chess move ahead. If we have learned anything in the past year and a half of the Trump presidency, it is that Donald Trump never takes responsibility or blame for anything. As this crisis at the border grows in scale and magnitude, and as his claims that this is all the “Democrats’ fault” fail to stick anywhere outside of far-right media, Trump will look for a new scapegoat — and there is none more obvious than his arguably underqualified secretary of Homeland Security. That clock is already ticking. If there is but a scintilla of good left in Kirstjen Nielsen’s soul — and we who have known her for several decades think there is — she has only one good option and that is to resign her post as secretary of Homeland Security, a move suggested Monday afternoon by California Sen. Kamala Harris.

• A crime against humanity is still a crime against humanity if it is committed by one trying to please the boss. Neither the boss nor the minion get to deny the harm they do.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Senators Kevin de Leon and Wiener had recently joined forces to push their net neutrality bills through the Assembly Committee on Communications and Conveyance tomorrow as a joint package. Such a unified effort represented the most powerful way to move both S.B. 460 and S.B. 822 together to present Governor Brown the strongest net neutrality bill in the country.

• However, EFF has learned that their effort to move a strong package has been rejected by Communications and Conveyance Chairman Miguel Santiago. In essence, it appears now that the Chair of the Assembly Committee is ready to strike key provisions out of the legislative package on behalf of AT&T and Comcast rather than allow an up or down vote on the bills as they stand.

• More than half the states in the nation now pursuing individual net neutrality rules, either in the form of executive orders (banning state contracts with net-neutrality violating ISPs) or new state laws. And while ISPs have been whining about the unfairness of having to adhere to independent requirements in each state, that’s probably something their lobbyists should have thought more deeply about when they worked to kill what, despite all the prattle about heavy-handed regulation, were probably some of the more modest net neutrality rules worldwide.

• ISPs first tried to stop states from protecting consumers by lobbying the FCC to include language in its “Restoring Internet Freedom” repeal attempting to ban states from doing so. But in the process of gutting their authority over ISPs Ajit Pai’s FCC may have also, amusingly, completely neutered its ability to tell states what to do.

• As such, ISP lobbyists have been forced to run, state to state, trying to convince state lawmakers that giving consumers, small businesses and internet competition a giant middle finger is the smart political play here with midterms looming.

• By now it’s abundantly clear that the Trump FCC’s repeal of net neutrality was based largely on fluff and nonsense. From easily disproved claims that net neutrality protections stifled broadband investment, to claims that the rules would embolden dictators in North Korea and Iran, truth was an early and frequent casualty of the FCC’s blatant effort to pander to some of the least competitive, least-liked companies in America (oh hi Comcast, didn’t see you standing there). In fact throughout the repeal, the FCC’s media relations office frequently just directed reporters to telecom lobbyists should they have any pesky questions.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• It’s the most Melbourne of Mexican stand-offs – a food-court chain staring down a punk rock pub over its temerity to hold a Taco Tuesday.

• A stone’s throw into the city’s wild west sits Footscray’s Reverence Hotel, famed for its live music and cheap Tuesday tacos.

• After six years of dishing up the spicy fare, the landmark corner hotel is suddenly feeling the heat over a claim that it is infringing a trademark held by Mexican food chain Salsas Fresh Mex, which has outlets dotted across Melbourne including a site at Highpoint shopping centre.

• A letter from Salsas Holdings marketing manager Rebecca Woods to The Reverence Hotel demanded it stop using the phrase ”Taco Tuesday” on its website and social media accounts.

• Some of us believe that all the different nations of the world are filled with people that are mostly the same, that share the same values, and the same troubles. If only we could find some unifying issue or force that could fully bring us together, then we could finally live in a kind of Lennon-esque harmony with one another. I submit to you that perhaps stupid trademark stories revolving around “Taco Tuesdays” could well be that thing. In America, for instance, a chain called Taco John’s has spent the past few years waving around the trademark the USPTO stupidly gave it on the both generic and descriptive term “Taco Tuesdays”, insisting that every other business that uses it stop immediately. How this mark was ever granted, given that it describes a good offered on the day it is offered — tacos on a tuesday — is a question that has kept me up many a night. Despite the trouble Taco John’s has caused with this, the trademark remains registered and in place.

• Romance novelist Faleena Hopkins recently turned the rest of the genre against her by deciding — with the USPTO’s blessing — she was the only person who could use the word “cocky” in a book title. Given the nature of romance novels, the striking of the word “cocky” left precious few terms capable of describing a certain blend of bravado and sexual prowess.

• The backlash was not only immediate, but thorough. Authors hit with cease-and-desist notices posted these to social media. One writer filed a petition with the USPTO to have the recently-acquired trademark invalidated. To top everything off, the Authors Guild of America joined forces with two of the authors Hopkins sued. What Hopkins likely felt would be an easy win in a trademark infringement case is turning into another cautionary tale about questionable IP and heavy-handed enforcement.

• As The Guardian reports, Hopkins has already been handed a loss in her lawsuit against author Tara Crescent and publicist Jennifer Watson.

Copyrights

• The draft includes controversial provisions set out in in articles 11 and 13 – also known as the press publishers right and value gap proposal – which were approved by small majorities

• The European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) approved the proposed text for the Copyright in the Digital Single Market directive today.

• On 20 June, the European Parliament will make its decision regarding the Copyright Directive, symbol of a new era of Internet regulation. La Quadrature is calling on you to call the Members of European Parliament and demand they act against automated censorship in the name of copyright protection and, more broadly, against centralisation of the Web.

• To understand the complex ruling which will take place on 20 June, we first need to revisit the basics of the regulation of content distributed over the Internet.

• The Boston Globe recently put together an entire issue about “Big Tech” and what to do about it. I’d link to it, but for some reason when I click on it, the Boston Globe is now telling me it no longer exists — which, maybe, suggests that the Boston Globe should do a little more “tech” work itself. However, a few folks sent in this fun interview with noted Google/Facebook hater Jonathan Taplin. Now, we’ve had our run-ins with Taplin in the past — almost always to correct a whole bunch of factual errors that he makes in attacking internet companies. And, it appears that we need to do this again.

• Of course, you would think that the Boston Globe might have done this for us, seeing as they’re a “newspaper” and all. Rather than just printing the words verbatim of someone who is going to say things that are both false and ridiculous, why not fact check your own damn interview? Instead, it appears that the Globe decided “let’s find someone to say mean things about Google” and turned up Taplin… and then no one at the esteemed Globe decided “gee, maybe we should check to see if he actually knows what he’s talking about or if he’s full of shit.” Instead, they just ran the interview, and people who read it without knowing that Taplin is laughably wrong won’t find out about it unless they come here. But… let’s dig in.

• We’ve pointed this out over and over again with regards to all of the various attempts to “regulate” the internet giants of Google and Facebook: nearly every proposal put forth to date creates a regulatory regime that Google and Facebook can totally handle. Sure, they might find it to be a nuisance, but its well within the resources of both companies to handle whatever is thrown their way. However, most other companies are then totally fucked, because they simply cannot comply in any reasonable manner. And, yet, these proposals keep coming — and people keep celebrating them in the false belief that they will somehow “contain” the two internet giants, when the reality is that it will lock them in as the defacto dominant internet players, making it nearly impossible for upstarts and competitors to enter the market.

• This seems particularly bizarre when we’re talking about the EU’s approach to copyright. As we’ve been discussing over the past few weeks, the EU Parliaments Legal Affairs Committee is about to vote on the EU Copyright Directive, that has some truly awful provisions in it — including Article 11′s link tax and Article 13′s mandatory filters. The rhetoric around both of these tends to focus on just how unfair it is that Google and Facebook have so much power, and are making so much money while legacy companies (news publishers for Article 11 and recording companies for Article 13) aren’t making as much as they used to.

• Today, CC is pleased to announce the appointment of two new members of the Board of Directors, both prominent leaders and advocates in their fields. Congratulations to Amy Brand, Director of the MIT Press, and Delia Browne, National Copyright Director for the Council of Australian Government’s (COAG) Education Council and Copyright Advisory Group.

• BitTorrent Inc, the parent company behind the popular file-sharing client uTorrent, recently made a deal to sell to Justin Sun, the founder of cryptocurrency TRON. According to new information, Sun has agreed to pay $140 million for the company. While no details have yet been confirmed, a shareholder notes that BitTorrent will in part be used to “legitimize” TRON’s business.

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.