● 06.21.18

● Links 21/6/2018: Microsoft’s ‘Damage Control’ Amid Role in ICE Scandals, 11-Hour Azure Downtime (Again), GNOME 3.29.3, and More GNU/Linux Wins

Posted in News Roundup at 9:16 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Google’s non-Linux-based Fuchsia OS has added an emulator for running Debian Linux apps. Like its upcoming Linux emulator for Chrome OS, Fuchsia’s “Guest” app will offer tighter integration than typical emulators.

• 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.

• The ability to run Linux apps in virtual machines in Chrome is expanding beyond Google’s flagship Pixelbook line of Chromebooks. The feature, for which plans were first discovered in late February, was formally announced by Google at I/O 2018. Unlike the existing solution, Crouton, support for Linux apps does not require enabling developer mode on Chrome OS, allowing users to install Linux apps without needing to sacrifice security protections.

• In addition to the Pixelbook, support for the new Crostini virtual machine feature has also come to the original Samsung Chromebook Plus, the detachable HP Chromebook X2, and the ASUS Chromebook Flip C101. Likewise, according to a report from xda-developers, the feature is coming to the Acer Chromebook Spin 13 and Chromebook 13, as well as 2018-era Chromeboxes, which all share the same board ID “fizz.” Of these, the Acer Chromebox CX13 series and ASUS Chromebox 3 series both have multiple SKUs, maxing out with an Intel Core i7-8550U paired with 16GB RAM and 64GB storage for $750.

• Acer’s Chromebook Flip C101 is now officially the latest Chrome OS device expected to be in-line for virtualized Linux app support, following a new commit pushed to the Chromium Gerrit on June 15. That places the Flip C101 in a very select club alongside Google’s Pixelbook, the HP Chromebook x2, and the first generation Samsung Chromebook Plus. Of course, there’s no official date with regard to when Linux App support will arrive for the Chromebook Flip C101. If previous trends are followed, then it shouldn’t take too long at all for its official arrival in the Canary Channel of the OS. That comes following a commit indicating that support for the new feature has been moved from the Samsung Chromebook Plus to the devices’ shared parent board. Since only the Chromebook Plus and Chromebook Flip C101 share that board, dubbed “Gru,” that suggests that both devices will support Linux apps in a virtual environment.

Server

• The Linux Networking Fund (LNF) is making significant progress toward embracing Kubernetes as a platform for delivering a range of networking services that are expected to be widely embraced by telecommunications carriers and cloud service providers (CSP).

• Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking an orchestration for The Linux Foundation, says the latest Beijing release of the Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP) contains several modules that have been ported to Kubernetes, with more to follow once the Casablanca release of ONAP is released.

• But seriously. The many rivals of the OS/400 platform and its follow-ons since that June 21, 1988, launch of the Application System/400 are now gone or not even on life support. We can all rattle them off, but the important ones that drove innovation for OS/400 and its children through to the current IBM i are DEC’s VMS for the VAX and Alpha systems, Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s MPE for the HP 3000 and HP-UX for the HP 9000s, and Sun Microsystems’ Solaris for the Sparc systems. You could throw in SCO Unix, Novell NetWare, and a slew of proprietary operating systems in Europe and Japan, and while you are at it, you should probably also include the IBM System/38’s CPF operating system and the IBM System/36’s SSP operating system. Even OS/2 and its PS/2 platform actually predate the AS/400 by 10 months – and they are long, long gone.

• No. 2 is the growing popularity of Mac and Linux-based infrastructure. Traditional enterprise workloads are deployed on Windows, so that’s where malicious activity historically occurred. But now more companies are using Mac infrastructure and transitioning new workloads to Linux in the cloud. Companies need to monitor and secure these environments as well, and Uptycs’ security platform covers all of the above.

• Huawei is set to launch the latest server in its KunLun mission critical range with the V5, teaming up once more with Suse, further confirming that the company’s Linux Enterprise Server system is its preferred standard for the range.

• Both Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and president Brad Smith have responded to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement separating migrant children from their parents at the Mexico-US border by issuing strong statements against the practice.

• However, neither has said a word about ending the company’s US$19.4 million contract with ICE.

• US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday cancelling the separation policy for the next 20 days. About 4000 children have already been taken from their parents and there is no sign of their being returned.

• About 100 employees had sent a letter to Nadella, asking for the contract with ICE to be cancelled.

• The official word is that the downtime, which comes just days after Office 365 went titsup, lasted from around 5.45pm on Tuesday until 4.30am on Wednesday morning.

• However, many customers were still reporting issues today, despite Azure Support claiming that its engineers had “mitigated the issue in North Europe and impacted services should be recovered at this time”.

• As Microsoft employees grow increasingly furious that their employer is a key technology provider to ICE, providing, among other things, facial recognition software, the company is responding, conscious of the possibility of a repeat of Google’s showdown with its employees over the provision of AI for drone warfare systems.

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella circulated an internal memo to all employees reassuring them that Microsoft only indirectly contributes to ICE’s child kidnapping system by providing service to the rest of ICE.

• The child kidnapping crisis has prompted Mike Godwin to temporarily suspend Godwin’s law, which allows me to point out that the service technicians IBM dispatched to service the Nazi tabulating machines only helped the Nazis to count the dead — it wasn’t like IBM was servicing gas chambers, just as Microsoft is only supplying adjacent services to an agency that the UN has condemned as “counter to human rights standards and principles.”

Audiocasts/Shows

• It’s another Tuesday and another excuse to sip some red while doing some live Linux and open-source experimentation. Yes, it’s time for Cooking with Linux (without a Net), and on today’s show, I’ll show you how to edit a video using the Kdenlive video editor, how to trim said video, adjust audio, fade between clips and apply all sorts of fun effects. Then, I’ll show you how to turn that masterpiece into a video format suitable for uploading to YouTube! All of it live, on camera, and without the benefit of post video editing—therefore providing a high probability of falling flat on my face. Once we’re done doing art, I’ll try out ArcoLinux, another distribution you’ve probably never heard of, and I’ll go through the installation for you. If it wasn’t already obvious, this is a pre-recorded video of a live show.

Kernel Space

• For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, today I feel like writing down a broad and simplified overview of how modern Linux systems boot. Due to being a sysadmin who has stubbed his toe here repeatedly, I’m going to especially focus on points of failure.

Linux Foundation

• Do you want a tech job? Then, it’s time to move away from Windows and head toward Linux and open source. According to The Linux Foundation and Dice’s 2018 Open Source Jobs Report, 87 percent of hiring managers are having trouble finding open-source talent, while hiring open-source talent is now a priority for 83 percent of employers.

• Automotive Linux Summit – Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open platform for the connected car, today announced that Mercedes-Benz Vans is using AGL as a foundation for a new onboard operating system for its commercial vehicles.

• Green Hills Software now offers INTEGRITY Multivisor secure virtualization and advanced development tools for Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) on 64-bit automotive grade SoCs. For the first time, AGL applications can be added to automotive systems meeting the highest ISO 26262 safety levels through the INTEGRITY real-time operating system (RTOS). As a result, OEMs can confidently run AGL-based infotainment and connected car applications in secure partitions alongside safety-critical and security-critical functions including instrument clusters, rear-view camera, ADAS, OTA, gateway and V2X. The results are lower system costs, more scalable platforms, shorter development times and lower ASIL certification costs.

• The Linux Foundation announced the second software release from the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project, a unified platform for end-to-end, closed-loop network automation

• Announced last week, ONAP Beijing stems from the melding of two different open source networking automation projects under the direction of The Linux Foundation in March 2017. ONAP focuses on automating virtual network functions in software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) implementations.

• The largest blockchain insurance consortium in the world, Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative (B3i), is ditching the open source Hyperledger Fabric for the enterprise solution Corda developed by New York-based technology firm R3. In a Monday announcement, the company revealed that it favors the new platform for better data privacy and scalability.

Graphics Stack

• The AMDGPU DRM driver appears to finally be crossing the milestone of exposing the current GPU load (as a percentage) in a manner that can be easily queried via sysfs.

• For years I’ve been frustrated via the lack of standardization of sysfs/debugfs files among the DRM drivers and some seemingly basic information not being exposed in such a manner that easily benefits various desktop plug-ins, those wanting to script basic monitors/checks/etc around such outputs, and use-cases like with the Phoronix Test Suite for easily querying this information too for its sensor recording. One of the frustrations with the Radeon Linux stack has been that there wasn’t a trivial way to read the GPU load usage as a percentage… There’s been ways if installing third-party utilities like RadeonTool, but no universal solution nor one that doesn’t require root and would be widely available.

• The Radeon Software “AMDGPU-PRO” 18.20 hybrid driver stack is now available with official support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 17.20.

• Two months after the debut of the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS “Bionic Beaver” release, the Q2’2018 Radeon Sotware for Linux driver update has arrived with support for this latest long-term support release. Radeon Software 18.20 was officially released last week but seemingly went under everyone’s radar until now.

• Graphics processors increasingly used as hardware accelerators for deep learning applications are also being deployed with the Kubernetes cluster orchestrator as another way to accelerate the scaling of training and inference for deep learning models.

• The two-front approach includes Nvidia’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) release to developers this week of a Kubernetes on GPU capability aimed at enterprises training models on multi-cloud GPU clusters. Previously, Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) launched a beta version of GPUs on its Kubernetes Engine aimed at accelerating machine learning and image processing workloads.

• Nvidia has released a bunch of new tools for savvy AI developers in time for the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Salt Lake City on Tuesday.

• End of support for Apple’s OpenGL programming interface could pull the plug on molecular modelling software

• Researchers are voicing concerns over a move that may affect many 3D visualisation programs that are commonly used in computational research.

• Apple’s Macintosh operating systems (macOS) is set to end support for OpenGL, the programming interface frequently used to display 3D graphics in medical and scientific visualisation software, which has existed since 1992. Nearly all open source and commercial chemistry visualisation programs that are used to display atoms, molecules, bonds and protein ribbons – such as Mercury, VMD and PyMOL – use the system.

Benchmarks

• Following the news yesterday of OpenBSD disabling Intel Hyper Threading by default within its OS over security concerns and plans to disable Simultaneous Multi Threading for other processors/architectures too, here are some fresh Intel HT benchmarks albeit on Ubuntu Linux. The OpenBSD developer involved characterized HT/SMT as “doesn’t necessarily have a positive effect on performance; it highly depends on the workload. In all likelihood it will actually slow down most workloads if you have a CPU with more than two cores.” So here are some benchmarks using a current-generation Intel Core i7 8700K six-core processor with Hyper Threading.

Applications

• If you run Linux, you’re probably familiar with rsyslog and systemd-journald. However, if you oversee dozens of Linux servers and cloud instances, it’s not realistic to dig into each individual log file. Graylog and Logcheck are two viable open source alternatives.

• When you search for open source log management software, you will see that Graylog is one of the most adopted products. The program can be easily installed on common Linux distributions, including CentOS and Ubuntu, and is available as an appliance.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• While the Linux version of BATTLETECH [Official Site] sadly didn’t release with the latest patch, the developer did give it a clear mention.

• As a huge fan of Xenosis: Alien Infection, the top-down survival adventure game from NerdRage Studios, I’m really happy to see it get funded.

• With around 15 hours left on the Fig campaign, they’re sitting pretty at 148% funded with around $37K. That’s not bad at all and while it doesn’t look like they will hit any interesting stretch-goals, the game itself is great anyway. Check out their latest sneak-peak:

• For League of Legends players on Linux, using GPU pass-through technology means they no longer have to say goodbye to Summoner’s Rift.

• Last week Riot Games implemented new anti-cheat technology for the game. This targets all instances of virtualization, or software that acts as if it’s hardware, in an attempt to stop users from ruining the game experience for others. Through virtualization, players can create accounts run by bots. This generally results in a ruined experience for anyone in a game with such an account due to the bots playing worse than a human teammate would. Unfortunately for some, the anti-cheat technology also inadvertently locks out users on Linux and other open-source software, like Wine.

• Lutris is quite the handy application I’ve discovered, that helps with organization and installation of games on GNU/Linux, even if they come from multiple sources. One of the project’s goals is to support any game that runs on Linux regardless of whether it runs natively, through Wine, or other means.

• The main appeal of Lutris is that it provides an interface to manage all games installed on the machine regardless of source. While it is necessary to integrate the games in the application first, doing so is not super complicated. You may add local games right away by selecting them from the local system or visit the Lutris website to add games this way.

• Lutris simplifies nearly everything. Users can visit the list of support games on the Lutris website, choose to download and install the game (Note: If its a game that must be bought, you must own it first.)

• The website lists supported games and where you can acquire or download them. You can use filters on the site to display only free games, games of a genre, or use the built-in search to find games of interest quickly using it.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In this article, we’ll focus on how to install and use QtPad on Ubuntu 18.04. Qtpad is a unique and highly customizable sticky note application written in Qt5 and Python3 tailored for Unix systems.

• Of course I am using KDE software much longer. My first Linux distribution, SuSE 6.2 (the precursor to openSUSE), came with KDE 1.1.1 and was already released 19 years ago. But this post is not celebrating the years I am using KDE software.

• Exactly ten years ago, dear Albert committed my first contribution to KDE. A simple patch for a problem that looked obvious to fix, but waiting for someone to actually do the work. Not really understanding the consequences, it marks the start of my journey within the amazing KDE community.

• I got some problems during the last weeks of Google Summer of Code which made me deal with some challenges. One of these challenges was caused by a HD physical problem. I haven’t made a backup of some work and had to rework again in some parts of my code. As I already knew how to proceed, it was faster than the first time.

• I had to understand how the device loading process is made in Calamares to load a preview of the new LVM VG during its creation in Partition Page. I need to list it as a new storage device in this page and deal with the revert process. I’ve implemented some basic fixes and tried to improve it.

• About two weeks ago i attended Qt Contributor Summit 2018, i did so wearing my KDAB hat, but given that KDE software is based heavily on Qt I think I’ll give a quick summary of the most important topic that was handled at the Summit: Qt 6

• At the recent Qt Contributors’ Summit as previously covered on Phoronix were some early discussions over plans to release Qt 6.0 in 2020. A few more tidbits of information have come to light on these interesting tool-kit plans.

• Albert Astals Cid of KDAB was at this recent Qt conference and he has now shared his summit notes, particularly around Qt 6. He confirms that Qt 6.0 is planning for a November 2020 release, Qt 6 should be an easy migration path from Qt 5, etc.

• Elisa is a music player developed by the KDE community that strives to be simple and nice to use. We also recognize that we need a flexible product to account for the different workflows and use-cases of our users.

• We focus on a very good integration with the Plasma desktop of the KDE community without compromising the support for other platforms (other Linux desktop environments, Windows and Android).

• KDE’s Elisa music player is just over one year old and with a few months having passed since the Elisa 0.1 inaugural release, succeeding that today is the beta for the upcoming Elisa 0.2.

• Three months after the release of Krita 4.0, we’re releasing the first (and probably only) beta of Krita 4.1, a new feature release!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The first post in this series looked at runtimes and extensions. Here, we’ll look at how flatpak keeps the applications and runtimes on your system organized, with installations, repositories, branches, commits and deployments.

• I’ve been working on Flatpak for almost 4 years now, and 1.0 is getting closer. I think it might be interesting at this point to take a retrospective look at the history of Flatpak.

• Random Wallpaper is an extension for Gnome Shell that can automatically fetch wallpapers from a multitude of online sources and set it as your desktop background.

• The automatic wallpaper changer comes with built-in support for downloading wallpapers from unsplash.com, desktopper.co, wallhaven.cc, as well as support for basic JSON APIs or files.

• The JSON support is in fact my favorite feature in Random Wallpaper. That’s because thanks to it and the examples available on the Random Wallpaper GitHub Wiki, one can easily add Chromecast Images, NASA Picture of the day, Bing Picture of the day, and Google Earth View (Google Earth photos from a selection of around 1500 curated locations) as image sources.

• A new GTK theme brings the luscious look of macOS Mojave to the Linux desktop.

• Not that you should be surprised; we’ve written before about how easy it is to make Ubuntu look like a Mac.

• But thanks to this new macOS Mojave inspired GTK theme that fact is truer, and more faithful, than ever.

• If you’re a Linux user who likes the look of the dark mode coming in macOS Mojave, you’re in luck: there’s a GTK theme just for you.

• The theme is available on Gnome-Look.org alongside several other macOS inspired themes. You’re looking for the one titled McOS-MJV-Dark-mode, but feel free to download more if you think you might want to switch it up later.

• Installing is a little tricky: you need to create a .themes directory in your home folder, then extract the folder in the downloaded archive into that folder. Next you need to install Gnome Tweaks in the Ubuntu Software Store, which you can use to change the theme. You can also use Gnome Tweaks to move the buttons to the left side of the window, where they belong. Fight me.

• GNOME 3.29.3 is now available.

• This release is primarily notable in that all modules are buildable in this release, which is historically very rare for our development releases. This is an accomplishment! I hope we can keep this up going forward.

• GNOME 3.29.3 is out today as the latest development release in the road to this September’s GNOME 3.30 desktop update.

• Highlights of the incorporated GNOME changes over the past few weeks include:

• - Epiphany 3.29.3 and its many notable improvements already covered on Phoronix from a reader mode to disabling NPAPI plugins by default.

Distributions

Reviews

• elementary OS is an open source Ubuntu-based distro and one of the most awesome GNU/Linux distros ever. It has gained a lot of traction over years, coming in at #5 on Distro Watch’s popularity scale with 1,324 hits per day.

• elementary OS is usually mentioned only in light of macOS and sometimes Windows, given that it features a beautiful and consistent UI which makes it an ideal replacement; it deserves to stand out more because its active community of developers has not only successfully delivered a unique distro, all of its apps are custom built and they are lovely!

• It’s excellent for both Linux beginners and pros which is evident in how artistically comprehensive their online documentation. The team succeeded it keeping to the 3 core rules of their design philosophy which are: “concision”, “avoid configuration” and “minimal documentation”.

Red Hat Family

• A significant challenge of moving from a traditional monolithic application design to a microservices-based architecture is the ability to monitor the business transaction flow of events throughout your entire distributed system. Join us for the next online DevNation Live on June 21st at 12pm EDT for Advanced Microservices Tracing with Jaeger, presented by Red Hat software engineers Pavol Loffay and Juraci Paixão Kröehling.

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

• We built Mergify as a free service for open-source projects. The engine powering the service is also open-source.

• Hmm, so I noticed every time I started a fresh new Chrome, I logged into my Google account. So, once again clearing things I started Chrome, didn’t login and closed and reopened. I had Chrome running the second time! Alas, not with all the stuff synchronised.

• An issue for Mailspring put me onto the right path. installing gnome-keyring (or the dependencies p11-kit and gnome-keyring-pkcs11) fixed Chrome.

• So if Chrome starts but you get no window, especially if you use cinnamon, try that trick.

• I’m going to DebCamp18!

• OBS supports building Debian packages. To do so, one must properly configure a project so OBS knows it is building a .deb package and to have the packages needed to handle and build debian packages installed.

• During week 5, there were 3 merge requests undergoing review process simultaneously. I learned a lot about how code should be written in order to assist the reader since the code is read more times than the time it is written.

Devices/Embedded

• Omzlo’s open spec “NoCAN” IoT platform for home IoT includes an “Omzlo PiMaster HAT” board for the Raspberry Pi that connects with multiple Arduino compatible CANZERO nodes on a CAN-bus cable that can stretch up to 300 meters.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Driving Formation of a New Supply Chain To support operators’ impending deployment of these Reference Designs, a number of tier-1 vendors have joined the efforts as ONF partners to contribute their skills, expertise and technologies to help realize the RDs. Adtran, Dell/EMC, Edgecore Networks and Juniper Networks are actively participating as supply chain partners in this reference design process. Each brings unique skills and complementary competencies, and by working together the partnership will be able to expedite the production readiness of the various solutions.

• In 2014, C.H. Robinson, a third-party services and logistics firm, faced a roadblock: How do you remove bottlenecks in the technology development pipeline?

• Engineering teams with eight to 10 people aligned with a module or product worked to build out a functionality, such as an order management capability, according to Vanessa Adams, director, architecture and application development at C.H. Robinson. But individual teams were often held up by other product groups whose work they relied on.

• At one point, 12-15 teams were required to meet most development deliverables and milestones, Adams told CIO Dive. In an effort to minimize the number of development dependencies, C.H. Robinson began exploring the idea of allowing people to work in other product areas rather than making them wait in line in the prioritization loop and hope project timelines synced up.

• [...]

• With open source, legal departments have to approve contributions to open source projects, procurement departments have to understand there may not be a place to send an invoice and managers have to learn giving back to the open source framework on work time is part of the process. It’s a long term shift that can take months, if not years, to execute, McCullough said.

• Instaclustr has announced Kafka-as-a-Service in bid to provide an easier route to the real-time data streaming platform

• An open source player from the start, the e-dropping Instaclustr specifies that this release follows an ‘early access programe’ that saw a handful of Instaclustr users deploy the Kafka-as-a-Service solution to manage high volume data streams in real-time.

• Open source and machine learning go together like peanut butter and jelly. But why? In this article, Kayla Matthews explores why many of the best machine learning tools are open source.

Events

• I’ve also spent a lot of time on promoting free and open source software. I’ve spoken at conferences, gone to hackathlons, spoken at the university, and arranged meetups. All this culminated in foss-north which I’ve been organizing for the past three years.

• The conclusion from all of this is that there is an opportunity to focus on this full time. How can free and open source software be leveraged in various industries? How does one actually work with this? How does licensing work? and so on. To do so, I founded my own company – koderize – a while back and from now on I’m focusing fully on it.

Web Browsers

Brave/Mozilla

• As of Firefox 60, the build environment for official Firefox Linux builds switched from CentOS to Debian.

• As part of the transition, we overhauled how the build environment for Firefox is constructed. We now populate the environment from deterministic package snapshots and are much more stringent about dependencies and operations being deterministic and reproducible. The end result is that the build environment for Firefox is deterministic enough to enable Firefox itself to be built deterministically.

• We’ve been busy building our new Basic Attention Token (BAT) platform, which includes a new consent-based digital advertising model that benefits users, publishers, and advertisers. Our first phase started last Fall with the integration of BAT into Brave Payments, and enabled users to anonymously distribute contributions to their favorite publishers and creators.

• Brave, the web browser which garnered a huge fan following, predominantly for its ad blocking feature, and depriving advertisers of confiscating private data by blocking trackers is in the news again. And this time, users can earn some cash.

• In a blog post, Brave announced that it will be conducting voluntary testing of their new ad model in which they will showcase at least 250 pre-packaged ads to users who will sign up for their early access version. Thus, offering a small amount of money in the form of micropayments.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Facebook yesterday announced it is open-sourcing BOLT, its “binary optimization and layout tool that accelerates large-scale applications”. According to the Facebook post, “BOLT optimizes placement of instructions in memory, thereby reducing CPU execution time by 2 percent to 15 percent. Unlike previous tools to address instruction starvation, BOLT works with applications built by any compiler, including GCC or Clang. Today, we are open-sourcing BOLT so that engineers everywhere can use it alongside complementary technologies like AutoFDO to achieve performance gains for their apps.”

• The theory of open source is community-driven development. The reality, however, is usually different. Most open source projects actually attract very little community. As much as a project like Linux or Kubernetes attracts deep developer involvement, most open source projects toil away in obscurity, the labor of love of a single developer. For commercial open source projects that do see significant contributions, like MongoDB or Red Hat’s JBoss, virtually all of those contributions come from developers on a single company’s payroll.

Funding

• Crate.io on Tuesday introduced a commercial Machine Data Platform, along with a new version of its open source SQL database for the Internet of Things and machine data. The company also announced an US$11 M Series A funding round.

• More than 30 per cent of the Fortune 50 have adopted Nginx’s technology to date, fuelling the rise of digital transformation as enterprises rush to keep speed in line with innovation. The platform hopes to use the funding to accelerate adoption of microservices – a modern approach to app development – by enterprises all over the world.

• Telstra-backed open source software developer NGINX has raised $43 million in a Series C funding led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity (GS Growth), a platform within Goldman Sachs’ Merchant Banking Division.

BSD

• The OpenBSD project, which produces an UNIX-like operating system of the same name, has decided to disable support for hyperthreading for Intel processors as it could lead to data leaks in a manner similar to that caused by the Spectre flaws in Intel processors announced earlier this year.

• Kettenis noted that by design hyperthreading opens the gate for timing-based cryptographic attacks as seen with the Spectre bugs that affected ARM, Intel and AMD chips. As such, he said “a new hw.smt sysctl” will give OpenBSD users the ability to shut-off Hyperthreading, given in modern systems it’s difficult to switch-off.

• OpenBSD, an open source operating system that focuses on security, announced that it will disable Intel’s Hyper-Threading (HT) feature so that attackers can no longer employ Spectre-like cache timing attacks.

• The maintainer of open source Unix-like operating system, OpenBSD, has announced that it will disable hyperthreading on Intel CPUs because of security concerns. It claims that simultaneous multithreading creates a potential new attack vector for Spectre-like exploits, and plans to expand its disabling of multithreading technologies to other chip manufacturers in the near future.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Several months ago, I gave the closing keynote address at LibrePlanet 2018. The talk was about the thing that scares me most about the future of free culture, free software, and peer production.

• Bejamin “Mako” Hill (previously) is a free software developer, activist and academic with a long history of shrewd critical insights into the ways that free software, free culture and the wider world interact with each other.

• In his keynote address to the annual Libreplanet conference, Mako traces the history of software freedom and how it changed when it met the forces of relentless commercialization and extraction.

• Early free software advocates assumed that working on free software would be centralized and would be a kind of voluntary ideological project that would result in pay-cuts to programmers who wanted to ensure that users of programs got as much freedom as possible, and were willing to sacrifice to achieve this.

Public Services/Government

• Louisville is sharing what it learned from the initial project with Waze with over 60 governments around the world through the Open Government Coalition, a network of government agencies working together on open source projects.

• The Louisville open source traffic project has four components: putting the Waze data into a database that can be queried and analyzed, replacing traffic studies with data visualizations, building out an application programming interface to allow integration with existing systems, and allowing cities to create real-time and historic online maps of their data.

• Eight cities have already downloaded the city’s code to create a database of traffic data.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Chip makers are starting to catch on to the advantages of open, however. SiFive has released an entirely open RISC-V development board. Its campaign on the Crowd Supply crowd-funding website very quickly raised more than $140,000 USD. The board itself is hailed as a game-changer in the world of hardware. Developments like these will ensure that it won’t be long before the hardware equivalent of LEGO’s bricks will soon be as open as the designs built using them.

• A HackRF SDR and GNU Radio form the receiver, which just captures the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) value for each point as the antenna scans.

Programming/Development

• A couple of weeks ago I attended a meeting of the ISO C++ Standards Committee (also known as WG21) in Rapperswil, Switzerland. This was the second committee meeting in 2018; you can find my reports on preceding meetings here (March 2018, Jacksonville) and here (November 2017, Albuquerque), and earlier ones linked from those. These reports, particularly the Jacksonville one, provide useful context for this post.

• At this meeting, the committee was focused full-steam on C++20, including advancing several significant features — such as Ranges, Modules, Coroutines, and Executors — for possible inclusion in C++20, with a secondary focus on in-flight Technical Specifications such as the Parallelism TS v2, and the Reflection TS.

• I consider Rust’s RFC process one of our great accomplishments, but it’s no secret that it has a few flaws. At its best, the RFC offers an opportunity for collaborative design that is really exciting to be a part of. At its worst, it can devolve into bickering without any real motion towards consensus. If you’ve not done so already, I strongly recommend reading aturon’s excellent blog posts on this topic.

• The RFC process has also evolved somewhat organically over time. What began as “just open a pull request on GitHub” has moved into a process with a number of formal and informal stages (described below). I think it’s a good time for us to take a step back and see if we can refine those stages into something that works better for everyone.

• This blog post describes a proposal that arose over some discussions at the Mo

• FBGraphics was made to produce fullscreen pixels effects easily with non-accelerated framebuffer by leveraging multi-core processors, it is a bit like a software GPU (much less complex and featured!), the initial target platform is a Raspberry PI 3B and extend to the NanoPI (and many others embedded devices), the library should just work with many others devices with a Linux framebuffer altough there is at the moment some restrictions on the supported framebuffer format (24 bits).

Leftovers

• Divers and an underwater drone on Wednesday joined a fleet of rescue vessels in Indonesia’s search for at least 192 passengers missing two days after an overcrowded wooden ferry sank in one of the world’s deepest volcanic lakes in Sumatra.

Health/Nutrition

• The Swiss litigation is about the validity of Gilead Sciences Inc.’s Swiss SPC C00915894/01 for the combination of tenofovir disoproxil fumarate plus emtricitabine. The SPC was granted by the Swiss Institute of Intellectual Property on 29 August 2008 based on the marketing authorization for TRUVADA®, a medication used to treat (and in some jurisdictions also to prevent) HIV/AIDS. It is a fixed-dose combination of the two antiretroviral medications tenofovir disoproxil fumarate and emtricitabine.

• On 3 January 2017 Mepha Pharma AG, a Swiss subsidiary of Teva, filed a revocation action against Gilead’s Swiss SPC. Mepha essentially argued that the ratio legis of the Swiss law on SPCs requires that the “infringement test”, which had been confirmed in a decision of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court in 1998 (BGE 124 III 375), be set aside, and that this change of practice shall be applicable with immediate effect even for existing SPCs. Mepha was of the opinion that Swiss courts should apply EU case law and if it did, Gilead’s SPC would be invalid in light of the practice of the CJEU for combination products because the two active ingredients were not specified in the claims of the basic patent and did not correspond to the basic patent’s core inventive advance.

• Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) filed a patent challenge at the China State Intellectual Property Office today, asking for the invalidation of a Gilead patent on a hepatitis C medicine.

• In a press release, MSF explains that it requested the invalidation of a patent granted to US pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences for oral hepatitis C medicine velpatasvir. According to the health advocacy group, the patent is unmerited as it involves “well-known technologies.”

• “Without access to affordable DAAs [direct-acting antivirals], people with hepatitis C in China are still forced to take an older, injected drug called interferon, which has low cure rates and causes people severe side effects, such as psychosis,” Gaëlle Krikorian, head of policy for MSF’s Access Campaign, said in the release.

• A major environmental health study that had been suppressed by the Trump administration because of the “public relations nightmare” it might cause the Pentagon and other polluters has been quietly released online.

• The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published the controversial 852-page review of health dangers from a family of chemicals known as perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS — manmade chemicals used in everything from carpets and frying pan coatings to military firefighting foams — on its website this morning, and will publish a notice in the Federal Register tomorrow.

• The study upends federally accepted notions for how much of these chemicals are safe for people — recommending an exposure limit for one of the compounds that is 10 times lower than what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has maintained is the safe threshold, and seven times lower for another compound. The stricter exposure thresholds are similar to those established by state health agencies in New Jersey and Michigan. All told, the report offers the most comprehensive gathering of information on the effects of these chemicals today, and suggests they’re far more dangerous than previously thought.

Security

• The idea behind containers has been around since the 1970s, when the technology was first used to isolate application code on Unix systems. However, the use of containers only became widespread in 2013 with the advent of Docker, and container orchestration tools like Kubernetes are even newer than that.

• Sitting in his Chicago apartment, two blocks from Lake Michigan, Dorsey did what anyone with a newfound hacking skill would: He tried to attack devices he owned. Instead of being blocked at every turn, though, Dorsey quickly discovered that the media streaming and smart home gadgets he used every day were vulnerable to varying degrees to DNS rebinding attacks. He could gather all sorts of data from them that he never would have expected.

• Pros v Joes CTF is a CTF that holds a special place in my heart. Over the years, I’ve moved from playing in the 1st CTF as a day-of pickup player (signing up at the conference) to a Blue Team Pro, to core CTF staff. It’s been an exciting journey, and Red Teaming there is about the only role I haven’t held. (Which is somewhat ironic given that my day job is a red team lead.) As Blue teams have just formed, and I’m not currently attached to any single team, I wanted to share my thoughts on the evolution of Blue teaming in this unique CTF. In many ways, this will resemble the Blue Team player’s guide I wrote about 3 years ago, but will be based on the evolution of the game and of the industry itself. That post remains relevant, and I encourage you to read it as well.

• [...]

• It turns out that a lot of the fundamental knowledge necessary in securing a network are just basically system administration fundamentals. Understanding how the system works and how systems interact with each other provides much of the basics of information security.

• On both Windows and Linux, it is useful to understand:

• How to install & update software and operating system updates How to change permissions of files How to start and stop services How to set up a host-based firewall Basic Shell Commands User administration

Defence/Aggression

• U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced a momentous shift in American global strategic policy in a little noticed statement on May 30.

• From now on, he decreed, the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), which oversees all U.S. military forces in Asia, will be called the Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM). The name change, Mattis explained, reflects “the increasing connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans,” as well as Washington’s determination to remain the dominant power in both.

• Such a name change may not sound like much, but someday you may look back and realize that it couldn’t have been more consequential or ominous. Think of it as a signal that the U.S. military is already setting the stage for eventual confrontation with China.

• If, until now, you hadn’t read about Mattis’s decision anywhere, it’s not surprising as the media gave it virtually no attention — less certainly than would have been accorded the least significant tweet Donald Trump ever dispatched. What coverage it did receive treated the name change as no more than a passing “symbolic” gesture, a Pentagon ploy to encourage India to join Japan, Australia, and other U.S. allies in America’s Pacific alliance system.

• Opinion polls in the United States and the United Kingdom have found that a majority of the public in both countries has a remarkably consistent belief that only about 10,000 Iraqis were killed as a result of the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq in 2003.

• Estimates of deaths in Iraq actually range from 150,000 to 1.2 million. Part of the reason for the seriously misguided perception may come from a serious belief in guided weapons, according to what the government tells people about “precision” bombing. But one must ask how so many people can be killed if these weapons are so “precise,” for instance in one of “the most precise air campaigns in military history,” as a Pentagon spokesman characterized the total destruction last year of Raqqa in Syria.

• The dreadful paradox of “precision weapons” is that the more the media and the public are wrongly persuaded of the near-magical qualities of these weapons, the easier it is for U.S. military and civilian leaders to justify using them to destroy entire villages, towns and cities in country after country: Fallujah, Ramadi and Mosul in Iraq; Sangin and Musa Qala in Afghanistan; Sirte in Libya; Kobane and Raqqa in Syria.

• Then the camera pans upwards to reveal at least £1m of British military hardware: a Watchkeeper drone, still in its test and development phase, flying over a packed primary school sports day attended by about 100 children and a similar number of adults.

• On the same afternoon that the drone flew over Penparc School in west Wales it – or another almost-identical Watchkeeper – crashed just a couple of miles away from the village primary, in the process narrowly missing a 17-year-old boy having his first driving lesson.

• The United States has conducted approximately 550 drone strikes in Libya since 2011, more than in Somalia, Yemen, or Pakistan, according to interviews and an analysis of open-source data by The Intercept.

• The Intercept’s reporting indicates that Libya has been among the most heavily targeted nations in terms of American remotely piloted aircraft and radically revises the number of drone strikes carried out under the Obama administration, doubling some estimates.

• During a four-month span in 2016, for example, there were approximately 300 drone strikes in Libya, according to U.S. officials. That’s seven times more than the 42 confirmed U.S. RPA attacks carried out in Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan combined for all of 2016, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based nonprofit news organization. The Libya attacks have continued under the Trump administration, with the latest U.S. drone strike occurring last week about 50 miles southeast of the town of Bani Walid.

• Years after then President Barack Obama made what he has described as his worst mistake by not adequately planning for the fall of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, Libya remains in chaos. In the past seven years, four nations have conducted air strikes in Libya and hundreds of civilians have died in those strikes. As the protests of the Arab Spring swept through Libya, Gadhafi mounted a war of attrition against his own people describing those who were protesting his rule as “rats.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Sri Lanka held a successful picket in Colombo yesterday afternoon to demand Julian Assange’s freedom. In India, supporters of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) organised a demonstration at Sriperumbudur, 40 kilometres from Chennai, in the state of Tamil Nadu. Both events were live streamed via Facebook.

• Nearly 60 SEP and IYSSE members and supporters participated in the protest held in front of Colombo Fort railway station. A substantial Tamil-speaking delegation from the war-ravaged Jaffna peninsula and also plantation workers from central Sri Lanka took part.

• Outside of the sciences though, Turing is best remembered as a code-breaker who worked with the UK government during the Second World War in cracking highly sophisticated German messages that were intercepted by the Allies in The Atlantic. At the time, Turing was hailed as a hero who played an invaluable role in helping to defeat fascist Germany.

• But Turning’s hero status shifted abruptly after the Second World War when in 1952, he was prosecuted by the same state he once worked for during war time. His offence was committing homosexual acts at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom. In lieu of prison time, Turning underwent a controversial chemical castration procedure which itself led to Turing committing suicide in 1954.

• Six years after entering the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange remains in limbo. The government of Ecuador recently terminated his internet connection, and reports from his legal representatives suggest his medical situation is worsening.

• This week, on the anniversary of his arrival at the embassy in June 2012, Human Rights Watch threw its weight behind the controversial figure, saying he should not be forced to face judgment under the “antiquated” U.S. Espionage Act.

• “The U.K. has the power to resolve concerns over his isolation, health, and confinement by removing the threat of extradition for publishing newsworthy leaks,” wrote the general counsel of Human Rights Watch, Dinah PoKempner, in a blog post on Tuesday. “It should do so before another year passes.”

• Charges against an ex-CIA employee are intended to send a message to potential whistleblowers, warning them that they will have no defense when pursued by the government, the executive editor of 21st Century Wire told RT.

• Former CIA software engineer Joshua Schulte is facing charges over what has been described as the largest information leak in the agency’s history.

• Prosecutors claim that he unlawfully obtained information on the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the CIA during his time at the agency. He is alleged to have provided the information to an organization for it to be disseminated.

• A New York man accused of stealing secrets while working for the Central Intelligence Agency in 2016 and feeding them to WikiLeaks pled not guilty Wednesday to charges of stealing and transmitting national defense information and asked for time to consider if he will consent to proceeding in Manhattan federal court.

• When Schulte was arrested last year, investigators charged him with possession of child pornography, which they allege they found on his seized computer, but they didn’t charge him for the breach and disclosure at the time, even though that was the subject of the initial investigation. The appearance of child pornography charges as a pretext for detention in national security investigations is something we’ve seen before and provides an additional reason for this case to be monitored carefully.

• Several observers have noted that, whatever its merits of his case, Schulte does appear to have adopted some objectively terrible operational security practices, including uploading CIA source code (some of which did indeed appear in the Vault7 leaks) to his public GitHub page. In the light of the second massive loss of US intelligence community hacking tools in a year, questions should be asked about whether it is ever justified to hoard devastating vulnerabilities when their security and use has to be entrusted to fallible humans.

• The two-hour event was held to highlight the deteriorating physical and mental health of the Australian activist, who has not left the embassy in more than five years.

• An international group of lawyers contacted the UN Human Rights Council earlier this week to express concerns that Assange’s protracted confinement is forcing him to choose between asylum and healthcare.

• “The United Kingdom 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,” said human rights barrister Jennifer Robinson. “No-one should ever have to make this choice.

• “We call upon the special rapporteur to give immediate attention to Mr Assange’s case, to plan an official visit to the Ecuador Embassy and to urge the United Kingdom to give the assurances required for him to leave the embassy to obtain the medical treatment he requires.”

• Footage of the event posted on social media showed dozens of demonstrators hoisting banners reading ‘Defend free speech’ and ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’

• A vigil will take place Tuesday evening outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for the health of its longstanding resident Julian Assange.

• The vigil will be held between 6 and 8 p.m. local time and will be attended by Susan Manning, mother of Chelsea Manning, along with Peter Tatchell, Vivienne Westwood and Lauri Love.

• Tuesday marks six years since WikiLeaks founder Assange first entered the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden over sexual assault charges. The charges have since been dropped, but Assange is still wanted in the UK for skipping bail in 2012. He is concerned that if he leaves the embassy the US may also seek to extradite him on espionage charges.

• Wiesje from the Netherlands came to support Assange because he had exposed the lies of governments and the press and was now being treated “vindictively.”

• She noted how the Netherlands government was implementing laws to suppress information under the guise of “fake news.”

• The European Union, which includes the Netherlands, is voting this week on a Copyright Directive, Wiesje explained, “that installs copyright filters to censor information and restrict the sharing of links as had happened with YouTube’s changing of its algorithms. It means information will be even more concentrated in the hands of the big corporations.

• “All the governments of the European Union say they are opposed to ‘fake news’ but the real distributors of fake news are papers like the New York Times and Washington Post. In Holland, the TV we get fed is pure propaganda, a narrative of the government.”

• The International Youth and Students for Social Equality fully supports the fight to free Julian Assange.

• This is a decisive struggle for our generation. We have grown up amid a relentless barrage of pro-war lies and falsifications by the corporate media and all the parliamentary parties.

• Assange’s communications with the outside world were cut off in March after the country accused the Iraq war whistleblower of putting its good ties with London at risk. Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno later ordered to remove extra security at the diplomatic mission.

• WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange is still trapped inside Ecuador’s London embassy, cut off from all communication with the outside world, and in failing health, despite vigils and rallies held internationally this week to demand his freedom.

• Demonstrations organised on Tuesday marked the sixth anniversary of him entering the embassy. There he remains an effective political prisoner, with the British government denying him even the right to seek medical treatment.

• The protests signalled the renewal of the campaign for his defence, and underscored the enduring support for the courageous journalist and publisher among broad layers of the population.

• However, as Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer for Assange, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “AM” radio program yesterday, his situation has become “very difficult.”

• On behalf of the Committee For Public Education, I would like to state our opposition to the malicious and anti-democratic treatment of the courageous whistleblower Julian Assange.

• The attack on Assange is not an isolated incident, but part of a global assault on the most basic and fundamental rights of young people and the international working class.

• I’d like to welcome all of you and commend you for taking the decision to attend this highly significant rally, all the more so because the situation facing Julian Assange, and our efforts to defend him, are being subjected to an ongoing media blackout, not only in Australia but around the world.

• At the outset, I’d like to send the warmest greetings, on behalf of everyone here today, to journalist Julian Assange and his colleagues in WikiLeaks. Our greetings also go to journalists and workers in every country who are fighting government, military-intelligence and corporate efforts to suppress their democratic rights and intimidate them into silence.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

Finance

• Tipping originated in feudal Europe. It disappeared there, though not before arriving in America in the late 1800s. Some employers took advantage of the practice to shortchange employees. The result was a two-tiered pay structure for tipped and non-tipped workers. Under federal law, tips belong to front-of-house staff, such as servers and bartenders. They earn a lower base pay than back-of-house staff, like cooks and dishwashers, with tips covering the difference. So while the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, it is $2.13 an hour for tipped workers. (Employers must fill the gap if tips fail to do so.) Seven states—Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington—have ended the two-tiered system. On Tuesday, residents of Washington, DC, voted to do so as well. Michigan and New York may follow suit.

• “Facebook is taking everything we have … and giving us what? Nothing. Just pain in our lives,” said the pre-school teacher and restaurant worker, seated inside her dimly lit apartment, a mile from the company’s headquarters. “Facebook is just ruining the community.”

• The displacement of working-class and low-income Latino families in the shadow of Facebook’s behemoth campus, which is undergoing a major expansion adjacent to their homes, offers a stark illustration of California’s housing crisis and expanding income inequality. By many measures, the tech industry has in recent years exacerbated the crisis of evictions, homelessness and poverty.

• EzCater, run by a woman, just raised $100 million—but it’s more an exception than the rule.

• His pro-Leave lobby groups raised nearly £12m – but claim they spent less than £1m during the ‘official’ Brexit campaign. So where did the rest go? Andy Wigmore says he has “no idea”

• [...]

• In total, the two groups declared that they were given £11.7 million in the first half of 2016 – with Mr Banks the main donor to both, including making loans worth £6m to Leave.EU. Yet referendum rules only required them to disclose how they spent money during the ten weeks between 15th April 2016 until the day of the vote on 23rd June. In that ‘controlled’ period, strict spending limits apply: each group was only legally allowed to spend up to £700,000.

• From 9th March until polling day, Leave.EU received donations and loans worth £9.2 million. The group claims that it only spent £693,000 of this during the ‘controlled’ campaigning period – although it has since been fined for multiple breaches of the law by the Electoral Commission, which found that Leave.EU “failed to include at least £77,380 in its spending return, thereby exceeding the spending limit”. The Commission also stated that the “unlawful overspend may have been considerably higher”, and that “it has reasonable grounds to suspect that the responsible person for Leave.EU committed criminal offences”. The Commission said it was referring Leave.EU CEO Elizabeth Bilney to the Metropolitan Police.

• The pace of the British government’s Brexit progress seems to be frustrating even the most enthusiastic supporters of life outside the European Union. At an event in Glasgow last week, Shanker Singham, billed by the organisers as “one of the world’s leading trade lawyers”, complained that the UK’s “lack of clarity” over Brexit was causing “confusion”.

• But what he didn’t talk about was his own role in the middle of this muddle: Singham himself has continued to enjoy unrivalled access to Brexit ministers and officials. The trade advisor, whose work for the Legatum Institute has attracted significant media attention, had repeated private meetings with the highest official in the Department for Exiting the European Union (DexEU) according to new information released to openDemocracy.

• Singham, a former Washington lobbyist – who has been said to enjoy “unparalleled access” to senior government figures – left Legatum earlier this year to head up a new trade unit at the Institute of Economic Affairs. Earlier this month, the charity regulator ruled that Legatum’s Brexit work had ‘crossed the line’ and did not meet its charitable objectives.

• Blockchain technologies have been made popular by the creation of bitcoin, but how exactly can a blockchain benefit an enterprise? A blockchain provides an immutable store of facts. This model delivers significant value in the face of regulatory oversight by providing irrevocable proof that transactions occurred. Some even refer to these uses of a blockchain as enterprise resource planning (ERP) 2.0.

• The popular American singer, who made rounds with his famous song “Smack That,” is in the news; it’s not for the release of some new music but for a cryptocurrency. Yes, Akon has announced a new crypto coin called ‘AKoin,’ reports Page Six.

• Senegal-born star Akon — whose Lighting Africa project is bringing solar power to Africa — is at Cannes Lions launching a new cryptocurrency called Akoin that will be available for sale in two weeks with hopes it will help further help the continent.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Eight years after Minnesota’s vague ban on “political” apparel at polling places was first challenged, the Supreme Court has finally struck the ordinance down as unconstitutional. The law allowed election judges to decide whether or not someone’s t-shirt or button or whatever sent a “political” message that might somehow sway the vote.

• The law covered far more than overt messages about political parties or specific candidates. According to the state’s arguments, it could be read as covering anything possibly pertaining to referendum issues and/or issues any political candidate had expressed an opinion on. This lead to a spectacular bit of oral argument [PDF] when the state’s lawyer tried to explain what may or may not be covered by the apparel ban.

Censorship/Free Speech

• As we’ve been writing over the past few weeks, the EU Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) voted earlier today on the EU’s new Copyright Directive. Within that directive were two absolutely horrible ideas that are dangerous to an open internet — a link tax and a mandatory copyright filtering requrement (i.e., the “censorship machines” proposal). While there was a big fight about it, and we heard that some in the EU Parliament were getting nervous about it, this morning they still voted in favor of both proposals and to move the entire Copyright Directive forward.

• The banned videos in China typically show people — well, nearly always young women — whispering into special high-quality binaural microphones that aim to capture audio the same way our ears hear sounds. As well as producing extremely realistic results, the microphones also allow sounds to move from one ear to the other — best experienced with headphones to enhance this effect — as if the person speaking is right next to you, and moving around very close to you.

• The women in the videos whisper, rather than speak, because it has been found to be the most effective way to produce ASMR’s characteristic “tingling” sensation. But ASMR videos also include the sounds of people licking, kissing, and rubbing the microphones in various ways — which may explain that “vulgar use of a microphone controller” the Chinese authorities want to censor. As a representative example, the Abacus News points to a two-hour long YouTube video of one of the ASMR stars in China, Xuanzi Giant 2 Rabbit

• The Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal may have changed the way millions of people perceive the risks to privacy when they go online. But it could have obscured an equally profound digital age debate: widespread resistance to internet companies’ role as the global speech police of the digital age. The future of free speech depends on getting this debate right.

• And yet the most influential corporations in this sphere wield extraordinary power from a distance. They develop rules, standards, and guidelines, often in Silicon Valley, to determine for people around the world the appropriate boundaries of expression. In many places, American companies provide the dominant source of news and information, having an enormous impact on public life.

• Surveillance and censorship are becoming part and parcel of daily life around the world, and yet many citizens seem content to turn a blind eye to it. A new exhibition at Wei-Ling Gallery in Kuala Lumpur called Seen is addressing that issue. Curator Line Dalile brings together ten leading international and Malaysian artists, hoping that through documentary, photography and conceptual practice, the artwork can open people’s eyes to the modern threats encroaching on our privacy

• Comedian John Oliver has been scrubbed from Chinese microblogging site Weibo after satirizing Chinese president Xi Jinping on his HBO show “Last Week Tonight.”

• HBO is part of WarnerMedia, which also operates CNN parent company Turner.

• Oliver spent 20 minutes Sunday criticizing Xi on everything from the removal of term limits, allowing him to rule for life, to China’s economic leverage.

• One of his critiques focused on censorship. “While China has never exactly been known as a haven for free expression, (Xi) has clamped down noticeably on any form of dissent whatsoever,” Oliver said, citing banned phrases online such as “personality cult.”

• True to form, Chinese censors soon wiped posts about Oliver and his show from Weibo.

• Users can still search his name, but all recent content has been deleted, leaving only posts from before June 12.

• Access to information is the right of every citizen of Pakistan – this also includes being able to subscribe to a publication of their choice. However, there is growing censorship in the media, especially as the dates of the general elections are drawing near. One media group which is being targeted at the moment is Dawn, as confirmed in their statement that hawkers are being stopped from distributing the paper in several parts of the country. This is a gross violation of the Article 19 of the Constitution of Pakistan which guarantees the freedom of the press unless there is a special restriction imposed in circumstances that pose a threat to the security of the state. However, that too is a legal course of action and is not initiated without due process. Prohibiting the distribution purely on the personal basis is an act against the constitution of Pakistan and must be looked into because guaranteeing a right offered by the constitution is the duty of all the institutions of the state.

• [...]

• We live in a global digital age where such blanket bans are bound to be noted and create the air of insecurity because it portrays that certain elements are trying to infringe upon the basic rights of the people of the country.

Privacy/Surveillance

• It’s assumed (wrongly) that minors have few, if any, Constitutional rights. The error is easy to make because they’re just kids. They can’t drink, smoke, vote, or even serve their country/secure these own valuable freedoms by [checks sources] aiding in the increase of opium production in foreign countries. “Hundreds of government officials can’t be wrong!” someone is sure to exclaim, being just as wrong as the hundreds half-assedly cited in their stinging rebuttal.

• Minors do have rights. They’re subject to more limitations but they’re far from nonexistent. But that doesn’t stop prosecutors, cops, and school officials from pretending “limited” equals “zero.” A case highlighted by FourthAmendment.com shows a court pushing back against this assumption, which took the form of an overly-invasive probation condition slapped on a minor following a search of the student which uncovered a small knife, rolling papers, and a lighter.

• The incident leading to the search began when the student fell asleep during class, which is possibly one of the most ordinary things a student can do. The student admitted he had smoked marijuana the night before (also possibly one of the most normal things a high school student can do), but hadn’t smoked any that day or on school property. He was asked to consent to a search and he volunteered he had a knife in his possession. The search uncovered the rest of the “contraband.” The 15-year-old was then arrested, detained, and placed on home detention.

• The European Parliament, Council and European Commission on 19 June cut a deal on a new regulation on the free flow of non-personal data. The regulation, which is expected to pass the final votes in Parliament and Council without further issue, is a European answer to concerns over potential data localization obligations, which came into some demand following the Snowden revelations about intelligence services hoovering data from netizens.

• “Data localization restrictions are signs of protectionism for which there is no place in a single market,” EU Vice-President Andrus Ansip said after the agreement.

• This is an exciting time for HR—the use of analytics is predictably changing the conversations and the perception around HR as a function. Most organizations are convinced of the role people analytics can play in making HR a strategic partner to the C-suite, thus firmly involved in the agenda of business transformation. While people analytics has been one of the most crucial tools to usher in this change, the unintended effect is that is has opened up a big debate about transparency vs. privacy in the workplace.

• In 2017, 22 law enforcement employees across California lost or left their jobs after abusing the computer network that grants police access to criminal histories and drivers’ records, according to new data compiled by the California Attorney General’s office. The records obtained by EFF show a total of 143 violations of database rules—the equivalent of an invasion of privacy every two and half days.

• New Data Shows Law Enforcement Abused Network 143 Times in 2017

• San Francisco – Responding to years of investigations and pressure from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the California Attorney General’s Office has overhauled and improved its oversight of law enforcement access to a computer network containing the sensitive personal data of millions of state residents, which police abused 143 times in 2017.

• The new policies and data will be presented at a regular oversight meeting on Thursday, June 21, 2018 at the Folsom City Council Chambers.

• EFF has been investigating abuse of the California Law Enforcement Telecommunication System (CLETS)—the computer network that connects criminal record and DMV data with local and federal agencies across the state—since 2015. Law enforcement personnel access this data more than 2.8 million times daily.

• EFF’s research found that misuse of this system was rampant. Examples include officers accessing confidential data for domestic disputes and running background checks on online dates. One particularly egregious case involved an officer who allegedly planned to hand sensitive information on witnesses to the family member of a convicted murderer.

Civil Rights/Policing

• When Colin Kaepernick wanted to join thousands of other Americans in expressing his outrage and sorrow at the killing of black people by police, the San Francisco 49er spoke with—among others—Nate Boyer, another football player for the Seattle Seahawks, who was a Green Beret. Boyer suggested that rather than sit out the national anthem, Kaepernick take a knee—the way, he said, soldiers take a knee in front of a fallen brother’s grave, as a way to express dissent without disrespect for the military or veterans.

• That critics, including in the press, would describe Kaepernick’s gesture as a refusal to stand, an insolent refusal to act rather than an action consciously chosen, is telling; much as many people still believe Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus because her feet were tired. Like Parks, Kaepernick is in fact engaged in thoughtful, political action—in his case, the particular expression of political action that African-American athletes have engaged for decades, known informally as “the Heritage.”

• That history and its meaning in the present moment is the subject of a new book, The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America and the Politics of Patriotism, out now from Beacon Press. Our next guest is its author. Howard Bryant is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN the Magazine, and sports correspondent for NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday. He’s also author of, among other titles, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston and The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron. He joins us now by phone from Massachusetts.

• Our criminal justice system has long struggled to accommodate persons with disabilities. So when a state prison reforms how it treats incarcerated people with disabilities, those reforms can have an immediate and vital effect. As a result of a groundbreaking settlement approved yesterday by Judge Jeremiah Lynch in our case, Langford v. Bullock, just such a set of reforms is now underway at the Montana State Prison.

• While life at Montana State Prison is certainly difficult for all prisoners, it is especially hard on those who are disabled. Deaf prisoners have been punished for failing to respond to orders to stand for count issued through an intercom they could not hear. Men with mobility impairments, many of whom are elderly due to the long sentences handed down in the state, were denied access to vocational and educational programs the prison offered on the second floor of one of its buildings and in areas that were otherwise inaccessible.

• With immigration bills scheduled for a vote in Congress this week, here’s a recap on where DACA currently stands.

• The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program turned 6 years old last week. The future of the program, which has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants and injected billions of dollars into the U.S. economy, remains uncertain.

• Last September, President Trump announced he was ending the DACA program, placing hundreds of thousands of recipients who came to this country as children at risk of deportation. Nine months and many twists and turns later, DACA recipients remain in limbo. Immigration bills scheduled for a vote this week do nothing to appropriately address the problem. In the meantime, various courts have weighed in. Below is a recap on where DACA currently stands.

• Vasillios Pistolis, a United States Marine Corps lance corporal who ProPublica and Frontline identified as a neo-Nazi and assailant during last August’s bloody white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, has been convicted at a court martial on charges of disobeying orders and making false statements.

• Pistolis, 19, will be imprisoned for a month, docked pay and reduced in rank to private first class, and then likely forced from the Corps, according to a USMC spokesman.

• Pistolis, a water support technician, was treated as low-level offender by military authorities, who tried him at what is known as a summary court martial, which is akin to a misdemeanor trial.

• The Georgia Department of Corrections is failing its obligations to deaf prisoners at every stage.

• In Georgia, deaf people ensnared in the criminal legal system are routinely denied sign language interpretation and other accommodations, dramatically disadvantaging them while in prison and at every stage of their criminal justice proceedings. The ACLU today filed a motion seeking a class action lawsuit on behalf of currently and formerly imprisoned deaf people in Georgia. The motion highlights gross violations of their constitutional rights.

• The criminal legal system is stacked against many of the most vulnerable Americans, including people with disabilities. At every stage — arrest, interrogation, trial, sentencing, prison, and parole — deaf people are more susceptible to going to prison more often, staying longer, suffering more, and returning to prison faster.

• Deaf people with other marginalized identities — including those who are LGBTQ and come from communities of color — fare even worse. Throughout the country, our system refuses to provide sign language interpreters and other communication access, as required by federal law. Our case against the Georgia Department of Corrections, the Georgia Department of Community Supervision, and the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles — calls out these institutions for violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and the Constitution.

• In the federal courthouse in Brownsville, in the space of 75 minutes, 63 people were read their charges, asked to plead guilty or not guilty, and sentenced. Handcuffed and chained at the waist, they had to stoop to raise their right hands.

• All this for a misdemeanor: entry without inspection.

• The 63 men and women shared the same lone public defender. When they spoke, they spoke in timid whispers, nearly inaudible except to the translators. Eleven said they would happily be deported if they could be reunited with their children. The judge said it is “U.S. policy that once you are finished here, you’ll be reunited with your children.”

• The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois asked a federal judge on Wednesday to take the rare step of appointing a “special master” to resolve disputes and data requests related to statewide child welfare reforms, including providing more appropriate services for children languishing in psychiatric hospitals.

• The ACLU, which has monitored the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services for decades as part of a federal court consent decree, appeared in front of U.S. District Judge Jorge Alonso after writing in court documents that DCFS had repeatedly “failed to honor promises made during negotiations.”

• The most recent dispute centers on how the oft-criticized department is carrying out a reform plan. That plan calls for a total overhaul of the agency, as well as the turnover of relevant data to the ACLU and independent experts named in 2015 to aid and oversee the department’s progress.

• No, I have not gone insane. The reason for the latter is that here in Kansas, the Democrats rarely field candidates for most offices. The real action happens in the Republican primary. So if I can vote in that primary, I can have a voice in keeping the crazy out of office. It’s not much, but it’s something.

• The Trump administration has been paying an intelligence contractor millions of dollars to to fly immigrant children to shelters across the United States.

• MVM, Inc. has a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide “unaccompanied alien children (UAC) transportation services” worth $162 million, according to records reviewed by The Daily Beast. MVM’s recent job postings show it sought to hire people to escort immigrant children from the border on commercial airlines. MVM is one of a number of defense contractors cashing in on the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy of locking up immigrant families.

• After a bruising confirmation fight, one wonders if newly approved Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Gina Haspel will have the political support to put her own stamp on how the agency is structured and operates. Insiders note that, though she was acting director for only two months, she did little more than continue the changes made by her predecessor Mike Pompeo, who had been in charge of the agency for 15 months.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• “What happened today was outrageous,” Sen. Scott Wiener (D) said in a statement Wednesday after an Assembly committee rewrote his legislation. “These hostile amendments eviscerate the bill and leave us with a net neutrality bill in name only.”

• The amended version of the bill still bans broadband providers from blocking or throttling legal content, and from creating “fast lanes.” But critics of the changes worry that they could create loopholes that would allow broadband providers to undermine net neutrality. Perhaps most important is the removal of a prohibition on broadband providers charging access fees to content providers. Depending on how courts interpreted the bill, this could create a loophole that would allow companies like Verizon or Comcast to charge companies like Facebook or Netflix additional fees to make their content available and block access to content from companies that don’t pay.

• In the morning before S.B. 822 was to get its first hearing in front of a California Assembly committee before the cameras were on to catch it, the Chair of the Assembly Committee on Communications and Conveyance introduced and got a vote on amendments that substantially weakened the net neutrality provisions of S.B. 822. EFF received word that was his intent and we were disappointed he would carry out such a bait and switch on behalf of AT&T and Comcast.

• Chair Miguel Santiago, along with seven other Assembly members both Republican and Democratic, voted for those amendments. Amendments proposed at 10 pm the night before the hearing. Amendments voted on before the bill was heard and before the bill’s author, State Sen. Scott Wiener, could argue against them. Amendments voted on before the witnesses and Wiener could argue for the bill as written.

• This comes after the committee chair refused a move to join S.B. 822 and S.B. 460 so that there was a single net neutrality package rather than two bills. That proposal was rejected in favor of new amendments that stripped net neutrality protections right out including provisions that banned discriminatory zero rating that hurt low income Internet users.

• Americans tend to be oddly gullible when it comes to megamerger promises. Especially over in the telecom sector. Time after time we’re told that the latest major deal will provide all manner of amazing synergies, jobs and added competition. And time after time we subsequently realize that the only people that usually benefit from these deals are investors and executives. Shortly after that, we realize that the slow consolidation and steady erosion in competition results in higher rates and even worse service, something AT&T, Comcast and Charter customers are intimately familiar with after decades of M&A mania.

• And yet it’s a historical lesson we refuse to learn much of anything from.

• The latest megadeal du jour in the telecom space is Sprint and T-Mobile’s latest attempt at a $23 billion super-union. The two companies filed their formal sales pitch with the FCC this week, and you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who thinks agency head Ajit Pai and friends won’t rubber stamp the deal.

• [...]

• It’s not entirely clear why America loves to play Charlie Brown and Lucy style football when it comes to megamerger promises. Time and time again we’re promised the world, and time and time again we give companies the benefit of the doubt as they promise an ocean of synergies, jobs and competition that never actually materialize. By every indication the millennials that have bought into T-Mobile’s consumer friendly (except for opposing that whole net neutrality thing) branding schtick are about to learn their first real lesson on this front the hard way.

• I’ve mentioned the idea of the broken windows fallacy — not to be confused with the long debunked broken windows theory of policing — twice in the past in reference to net neutrality, including in my recent post about what Ajit Pai should have said about repealing net neutrality. But both times I talked about it, it was kind of buried in much longer articles, and the more I think about it, the more important I think it is in understanding why Pai and his supporters are so far off in their thinking and understanding on net neutrality. What I find most perplexing about this is that people who often position themselves as doing away with overly burdensome regulations — which is a stance that Pai has staked out pretty clearly — are usually the kind of folks who talk frequently about the broken windows fallacy. And yet, here, those same folks seem to be missing it.

• As background, the broken windows fallacy comes from Frederic Bastiat, the French economist often associated with free market and libertarian thought, and it’s his clever and highly evocative way of explaining why destructive behavior — while it may generate economic activity, is not good for the economy, because it misses all of the other (often hidden) costs, including the opportunity cost of investing that money in more productive activity.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Dr Carlos Maria Correa, an Argentinian economist and lawyer, is globally renowned for his expertise on international trade, intellectual property, health, technology transfer, investment policy and especially their impact on developing countries. He has authored several books and academic articles and been a visiting professor at several universities. Additionally, he has consulted with many United Nations agencies, the World Bank, and other regional and international organisations and has advised several governments on intellectual property, innovation policy and public health. Correa was a member of the UK Commission on Intellectual Property, of the Commission on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Public Health established by the World Health Assembly and of the FAO Panel of Eminent Experts on Ethics in Food and Agriculture.

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• Any simplification about those links may be characterized as a ‘myth’. IP protection does not necessarily lead to more innovation or trade. It may have the opposite effect, for instance, if local companies at an early stage of technological development cannot enter certain markets, they will be prevented to move through the learning curve and upgrade technologically. Historical studies show that today developed countries advanced in their industrialization processes on the basis of lack of IP protection or flexible IP regimes. The US itself provides a good example in this regard.

• File this under: things I missed while going through Xiaomi’s 600-page IPO prospectus. An analysis at Chinese tech news portal Sina points out that the company revealed its IP licensing outlays for the past three years (hat tip to Don Merino for digging this up and sharing on LinkedIn). Here are the figures, converted to present US dollars (the original data can be found on page 447 of this document): Expense 2015 2016 2017 Royalty fees $252m $293m $533m To be specific about what’s being reported, Xiaomi describes these figures as “royalty fees paid to third-party intellectual property holders”.

• According to a press release, WIPO and the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) signed a memorandum of understanding that demonstrates KIPO’s intent to integrate the AI translation tool. The signing occurred during the 23-25 May “Meeting of Intellectual Property Offices on ICT Strategies and Artificial Intelligence for IP Administration.”

• The tool, called WIPO Translate, uses advanced technology to mirror a language to another language without many words getting lost in translation.

• The World Intellectual Property Organization’s main financial resource is from the global patent treaty it manages, allowing inventors to file international patent applications and gain protection in a large number of countries. WIPO members have been debating for some time whether universities should benefit from a fee reduction, in particular those from developing countries to encourage patent filing. A workshop held at WIPO this week pondered whether a fee reduction would lead to more patenting of inventions by universities. The answer is apparently not clear-cut.

• A couple of recent infringement suits involving long-established car manufacturers have shown once again that patent assertion remains a looming threat in an auto industry that is undergoing some very significant changes. Late last week Jaguar Land Rover brought a case against Bentley Motors accusing the luxury carmaker of infringing one of its patents relating to its “terrain response” technologies. The patent-in-suit, RE46,828 entitled “vehicle control” is a re-issue of 7,349,776.

• In July 2017, the Patents Court of Barcelona handed down a decision finding that “Swiss-type” claims were affected by the Reservation made by Spain when it ratified the European Patent Convention (“EPC”), whereby European patents, insofar as they confer protection on chemical or pharmaceutical products “as such“, shall be ineffective in Spain. In particular, the decision lifted a preliminary injunction that had been ordered “ex parte”, based on claim 16 of the patent asserted, and which read as follows:

• “Use according to claim 15, wherein the pharmaceutical composition is for treating hypercholesterolemia, hyperlipoproteinemia and atherosclerosis”.

• This decision caused an earthquake within Spanish patent circles for several reasons.

• In FastShip, LLC v. U.S., the question before the Federal Circuit was whether the infringing Littoral Combat Ships (“LCS”) were “manufactured” by the Government before the patent expiration dates. In particular, the accused LCS-3 ship model was still under construction when the asserted patents expired, but the patentee argued that it should be considered manufactured since it was substantially complete, including the key aspects of the claims at issue that had no non-infringing uses.

• Our timeline for theses appeals probably began with WesternGeco’s infringement lawsuit against its Norwegian competitor PGS. In the S.D.Tex. lawsuit, PGS counterclaimed alleging infringement of its U.S. Patent Nos. 6,906,981 and 6,026,059. WesternGeco then petitioned the PTO to begin Inter Partes Review Proceedings against those patents. Happy to oblige, the PTO partially instituted the IPRs and eventually cancelled a number of claims of each patent. In the midst of the appeal WesternGeco and PGS settled settled their dispute. On appeal, however, the PTO intervened to defend its decision. In its decisions, the Federal Circuit has largely affirmed, I raise a few interesting points from the decisions below.

• In the pending case of Helsinn Healthcare S.A. v. Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc., et al., No. 17-1229 (Supreme Court 2018), the petitioner has asked the Supreme Court to offer its statement on whether Congress altered the “on sale bar” to now apply only to non-confidential sales or offers.

• In 2014, the Alice decision made it much harder to patent software in the USA; in 2016, Congress passed the Defend Trade Secrets Act, creating the first federal trade secrets statute: the result of these two developments is that software companies aggressively switched from patents to trade secrets as a means of controlling competition and limiting inspection and criticism of their products.

• This has wide-ranging effects, but the most vivid and immediate ones were on the criminal justice system, where algorithmic forensic analysis, bail assessment, and sentencing has become the norm. As a result, people facing criminal penalties are frequently told that trade secrecy means that they can’t look at the evidence against them, can’t challenge the basis for their bail, and can’t look at the calculations that went into their sentencing.

• This is absolutely unprecedented: criminal defendants have never had their rights curtailed by the trade secrecy of the technology providers who contract with the courts and police. What’s more, repeated experience tells us that the machine learning systems that accuse, convict and sentence criminal defendants are wildly imperfect, subject to racial bias (and other forms of bias), riddled with errors, and really, just the sort of thing you’d hope to be able to inspect before you were sent to prison.

Trademarks

• It’s always a weird look for companies and IP owners to go after clear expressions of fandom from their customers. And, yet, this sort of thing is done often, with fan get-togethers or festivals regularly being threatened by the IP owners they’re fans of. Often times we hear the usual nonsense trademark law excuse that fans must be served with cease and desist letters, or sued, or else the trademark owner will lose its rights. That, as we’ve discussed repeatedly, is not true, as there are other options available to the trademark holder besides threatening fans.

• This case stems from Royal Crown’s opposition of Coca-Cola’s attempt to register various trademarks with the term ZERO. These include, among others, SPRITE ZERO, FANTA ZERO, COKE ZERO, PIBB ZERO, and my favorite COKE ZERO ENERGY.

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• Coca-Cola argued that no disclaimer was necessary since its use of the ZERO mark was not generic and has acquired distinctiveness under Section 2(f) of the Lanham Act. The TTAB agreed with Coca-Cola and approved the marks for publication without any disclaimer.

Copyrights

• By far the most criticized articles by activists and other EU politicians have been Article 11 and Article 13. Article 11 refers to the so-called “link-tax,” which will require sites that link to news stories to pay the original authors.

• The Copyright Directive includes the controversial Article 13, which mandates the mass monitoring and censorship of internet uploads. The vote comes after widespread criticism of these measures and against the advice of civil society, of leading academics and universities, of research institutions, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression and even the inventors of the internet and of the world wide web.

• The EU’s plans to modernize [sic] copyright law in Europe are moving ahead. The Legal Affairs Committee of the Parliament (JURI) just adopted several proposals, including the controversial “upload filters.” Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda is disappointed but notes that the fight is not over yet.

• MEPs defy warnings from [I]nternet pioneers, civil liberties groups and commercial interests

• Both Article 11 and Article 13 were approved by the JURI committee this morning but won’t become official legislation until passed by the entire European Parliament in a plenary vote. There’s no definite timetable for when such a vote might take place, but it would likely happen sometime between December of this year and the first half of 2019.

• The European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs voted by 15 votes to 10 to adopt Article 13 and by 13 votes to 12 to adopt Article 11.

• It will now go to the wider European Parliament to vote on in July.

• The proposal won’t officially become EU law until passed by the entire European Parliament in a plenary vote, which isn’t expected until the tail end of this year or early 2019. There’s also some potential for improvement during closed-door “trilogue negotiations” between EU legislators and member states—though this process has been derided for being entirely non-transparent.

• The Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs voted 15-10 “to approve the controversial Article 13, which critics warn could put an end to memes, remixes and other user-generated content,” the BBC reported. The full parliament is expected to vote on the measure in July.

• The measure includes two controversial provisions that critics say will have a devastating effect on the [I]nternet.

• One provision includes a “link tax” that would force companies like Facebook and Google to buy licenses from news media companies before they can link to their online stories.

• Another provision, an “upload filter,” would require all online content uploaded from within the EU to be screened for copyright infringement.

• In fact, Article 13 had been removed from the original final draft of the bill, only to reappear on GDPR day – nobody knows why. Truth be told, nobody is entirely sure what the end game is here.

• The European Parliament Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) adopted its report on the European Commission-proposed copyright in the digital single market directive yesterday. The vote, by the lead committee vetting the proposal, sparked a continuation of the acrimonious debate that has raged for many months over several controversial provisions: The creation of a new right for online publishers and a requirement that Internet platforms monitor users’ uploads for copyright infringements. The narrow majority that approved the report by German Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Axel Voss, of the European People’s Party, “suggests that the struggle is still long,” telecom consultant Innocenzo Genna blogged.

• Today, the European Parliament the Legal Affairs Committee voted in favor of the most harmful provisions of the proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market.

• The outcome reflects a disturbing path toward increasing control of the web to benefit powerful rights holders at the expense of the open internet, freedom of expression, and the rights of users and the public interest in the digital environment.

• The committee voted 13-12 in favor of Article 11, the provision known as the “link tax,” which grants an additional right to press publishers requiring anyone using snippets of journalistic content to first get a license or pay a fee to the publisher for its use online. Article 11 is ill-suited to address the challenges in supporting quality journalism, and it will further decrease competition and innovation in news delivery. Similar efforts have already failed miserably in Germany and Spain.

• The Free State Foundation, a think tank founded in 2006 which receives regular donations from the MPAA, is calling on Congress to tackle the threat from streaming piracy. In a new paper, FSF notes that those streaming unlicensed content to the public are currently guilty of a misdemeanor, an offense that should be upgraded to a felony if piracy is to be brought under control.

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